The Reception of Spinoza in Japan

Abstract

The reception of Spinoza in Japan was affected by the problems of rapid modernization from the nineteenth century onwards: the split of the mind into Western and non-Western. We shall look at how Spinoza's ideas were received across the four phases of the assimilation of Western philosophy into Japan. Namely, initiation (1860s-1880s), establishment (1890s-1910s), re-appropriation (1920s-1945) and de-ideologisation (1945-present). Although his pantheistic monism was accepted from the outset fairly easily in the Buddhist cultural climate, his philosophy revealed resistant to appropriation by the language of dialectics such as that of the Kyoto School in wartime, which sought Japanese identity in the dialectical self-denial of the borrowed Westernness in the course of the “historical world”. This could provide a clue to understanding the current younger generation's embrace of Spinoza.