日本教

「一定の時間的順序で入って来たいろいろな思想が、ただ精神の内面における空間的配置をかえるだけでいわば無時間に並存する傾向をもつことによって、却ってそれらは歴史的な構造性を失ってしまう」（丸山真男）。「日本人は、自分たちがどの方角から来たものでもその最良なところを取り込もうとするというこの態度を好意的な心の広さと捉えることを好む。しかし、謙虚さが日本人の市民生活に特徴的なものであるとは言え、この態度は虚栄心や傲慢ささえも有するものである」（カール・レーヴィット）。

・ Masao Maruyama, Denken in Japan, Frankfurt, 1988, p. 29.

・　ジョセフ・S・オリリー、「新渡戸文献の神学的検討」、『キリスト教をめぐる近代日本の諸相』、オリエンス宗教研究所、20008年所収。


‘That thought does not accumulate into a tradition and that the “traditional” thought re-enters in a scarcely graspable and unsystematic way, are at bottom two sides of the same thing. There is a tendency, faced with the ideas that came to Japan in a determined temporal sequence, to rearrange them merely spatially in the individual’s interior and let them co-exist timelessly so to speak, whereby they lose their historical structuredness’ (Masao Maruyama, Denken in Japan,\[Frankfurt 1988], 29; quoted, Liederbach, 37). ‘The Japanese likes to interpret as benevolent broad-mindedness his readiness to appropriate the best from whatever quarter. Yet despite the modesty that distinguishes the Japanese in civil life, this attitude is not free from vanity and even arrogance’ (Karl Löwith, quoted, Liederbach, 49). Nitobe’s willingness to recognize the best in Europe is what Maruyama calls a ‘selective reception’. The selected European best (chivalry and imperialism) boosts the selected Japanese best (bushido), short-circuiting a true pluralistic and dialectical encounter of cultures. Maruyama gives an example of what he means, from Inoue Tetsujiro, who claimed that the ethics of German Idealism, ‘though people have seen it as a novel foreign teaching, is close to what the school of Zhu Xi [Chu Hsi 1130-1200] have taught from of old’ (Liederbach, 48). Nitobe’s book would provide Maruyama with many more examples of the same hermeneutical vice of ‘dehistoricizing, i.e. decontextualizing the foreign element’ (48) in order to assimilate it to something already present in Japanese tradition.
Joseph S. O'Leary

http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/a_note_on_nitob.html