Resumen de On the Convolutions of Modernity and Confucianism in Japan: Loyalty from Yamaga Sokō’s Shidō to Pre-war Kokutai Ideology
Following the Second World War, inquiries into Japanese Confucian philosophy have been grappling with its unfortunate entanglement with the prewar authoritarian regime, leading to its massive disavowal and more recent accounts about its eradication after the war, both in local and Western scholarship. Most such theories view Confucian moral philosophy as one of the primary enablers of Japanese prewar authoritarianism and point to its (presumably) intrinsic incompatibility with liberal and democratic principles (with its accent on formalism and passé conceptualizations of social existence and morality, enforcing obedience and submission) as a primary cause for it. Starting from a comparison between Yamaga Sokō’s conceptualization of chūkō (忠孝) and its later uses (and abuses) in the Meiji period’s kokutai ideology, my paper proposes an alternative interpretation of this relationship by framing it in the broader context of the logic and mechanisms of modernity
