Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. x, 301 pp. (Illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5851-3.
In his fascinating first book, G. Clinton Godart deftly unpacks the history of intellectual “cross-fertilization” (41) between religion and science in modern Japan. Against the usual view that Darwinism was accepted in Japan wholesale and without objection, Godart shows how religious thinkers were both stimulated by and sharply critical of evolutionary theory, and how evolutionary theorists drew inspiration from religion. As the book tracks Japanese efforts to make room for creative purpose and individual agency within evolutionary theory, it also attests to the creativity and originality of the thinkers it considers.
The book’s first three chapters treat the reception of evolutionary theory during the Meiji. Chapter 1 is focused on Christianity, first describing how both Japanese thinkers and visiting foreign luminaries marshalled evolutionary theory in opposition to Christianity, and then introducing a countercurrent of Protestant missionaries interested in reconciling religion and evolution, like the naturalist John Thomas Gulick, who sought to temper the fatalism of natural selection by fusing it with a Christian vision of revelation. The second chapter treats the “collision” between evolutionary theory and an emergent Shintō nationalism (50), as Shintō-inspired thinkers asserting the transcendent foundation of the national polity struggled to accommodate Darwinian visions of nature as a fight for survival. The centrepiece of the chapter is an account of the argument between social Darwinist Katō Hiroyuki and philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō as to the meaning of the Russo-Japanese War, with Katō arguing that Japan’s victory was proof of its material superiority, and Inoue arguing instead that it must be proof of Japan’s moral superiority. Chapter 3 treats the “fertile interaction” between Buddhism and evolutionary theory (72). Here Inoue Enryō serves as our example of setting scientific vocabulary to work in the service of explaining Buddhism, developing a notion of evolution—or “circular change” (85)—as the phenomenal unfolding of a primordial absolute. Biologists Minakata Kumagusu and Oka Asajirō, meanwhile, set Buddhist vocabulary to work in the service of making sense of evolution, with their studies of slime molds and moss animals shaped by visions of the cosmos as interdependent and impermanent (117).
The second half of the book moves forward in time, through the Taishō to the postwar. Chapter 4 explores the ways evolutionary theory is taken up by leftist thinkers seeking to synthesize Darwin and Marx, or Spencer and Kropotkin; and then by “religious evolutionary utopians” (133) like the Nichiren-inspired Kita Ikki, who imagined evolution as culminating in the transformation of human beings into divine beings, and the establishing of a post-capitalist Pure Land on earth. Chapter 5 describes the religious backlash to this “turn left” (121), with Shintō ideologues rallying against evolution. Godart reads this backlash as symptomatic of the Shōwa concern for overcoming modernity: whereas earlier thinkers had seen in evolutionary theory the possibility of enchanting nature, now it was presented as laying waste to the sanctity of the local, both in the sense of local ecosystems and of local—read, national—communities. Chapter 6 offers a final argument for the co-constitution of religious thought and evolutionary theory in the Japanese context, focusing on the work of biologist Imanishi Kinji. Godart reads Imanishi’s rejection of natural selection, stimulated by his reading of Nishida philosophy, as shaping his influential theory that each species directs its own evolution in concert with other species; the totality of species constitute a “grand mother-body” (221) that we call either nature or Kannon. We end then where we began: with Darwin and the dharma engaged in creative dialogue.
Many of the thinkers discussed in Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine were polymaths who paid little heed to disciplinary boundaries; it is to the reader’s great benefit that Godart imposes order on the material by organizing it in terms of an ongoing encounter between religion and science. Because this encounter is shaped by political questions, this is also, inevitably, a book about politics: Godart writes at length, for example, about the political dimensions of Shintō critiques of evolutionary theory and anarchist appropriations of the same. Nonetheless, at certain key moments, the book seems to retreat from political concerns. On eugenics, Godart tells us that eugenic discourse had little to do “with evolutionary theory per se” and in any case a eugenicist vision of “a biologically pure and superior Japanese race never did become dominant” (188–189). On Kita Ikki’s turn to fascism, he tells us that he believes Kita’s early work on evolutionary theory (in which Kita positions himself as unequivocally opposed to “narrow nationalism” and “ideas of racial purity”) is simply “more significant” than his later work on the nation (144). On Imanishi’s notion of the “species,” he notes that Imanishi was likely influenced by the work of Tanabe Hajime (222), but does not pursue the question of how Tanabe’s logic of species was mobilized during the war. Here I think there is a missed opportunity to engage existing scholarship on the counterintuitive ways humanism and racism can co-operate within the frame of a multi-ethnic empire. To wish that the book pursued these political questions is not to wish that Godart had taken on the role of assessing the ideological innocence or guilt of the thinkers he treats here; it is rather to wish that the book was bolder in articulating the stakes of its argument for contemporary scholars of religion, race, and empire working outside of Japanese studies.
At the same time, in Godart’s expression of his conviction that Kita’s early work is more significant that his later work, I think we see reflected his sustained immersion in the primary sources that are at the heart of this book. Godart writes about both science and religion with great skill; his lucid explanations allow readers to come away with an equally fine understanding of Shingon mandalas and slime molds. Trained closely on its thesis throughout, with each chapter enlivened by the author’s eye for detail, this book will be fruitful reading for scholars in Asian studies, religious studies, science and technology studies, and beyond.
Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA