Nishi Amane Research Articles

Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought. By <italic>Thomas R. H. Havens</italic>. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 1970. Pp. viii, 253. $8.50.)

Journal Article Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought. By Thomas R. H. Havens. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 1970. Pp. viii, 253. $8.50.) Get access Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought. By Havens Thomas R. H.. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 1970. Pp. viii, 253. $8.50.) Hugh Borton Hugh Borton Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 75, Issue 7, December 1970, Page 2110, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/75.7.2110 Published: 01 December 1970

Scholars and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Case of Nishi Amane

One of the interesting questions concerning the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is the degree to which the Western-oriented intellectuals of Japan compromised their scholarly curiosity about European civilization by serving the pre-Restoration Tokugawa government and its successor, the Meiji oligarchy. In what ways might their duties as civil servants colour their objectivity in studying the newly found academic disciplines of the West? What tensions did late Tokugawa and early Meiji scholar-bureaucrats perceive between their investigations of European knowledge and their service in a partisan regime? An examination of the career of Nishi Amane (1829–1897), who was an important scholar of Western philosophy as well as a bureaucrat in both the Tokugawa and Meiji governments, casts some light on the problem of the intellectual as public servant in early modern Japan. This study will concentrate on three important events in Nishi's life: his decision to flee his feudal clan in order to study the West in 1854; his refusal to join the Restoration movement in 1868; and his defence of the idea that scholars could serve the new state without compromising their objectivity in 1874.

Comte, Mill, and the Thought of Nishi Amane in Meiji Japan

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”