MINAGAWA KIEN
(1734–1807)

Minagawa Kien, a Japanese Confucianist, painter, and writer, was born in Kyoto. At the age of twenty-eight, having established himself as a Confucianist, he became the official scholar for Lord Matsudaira Nobumine. His literary skill made him an outstanding figure in Kyoto circles; he had a following of three thousand. For a Confucianist his life was unusually dissipated. His era was a time of moral decline, but this was eventually checked by several edicts. The 1790 edict against "heterodox doctrines" affected Minagawa and he reformed his habits, though his ideas did not change.

Minagawa's philosophical reputation has recently grown among Japanese philosophers because of his positivist approach to Confucian studies. He is considered an eclectic because he upheld neither the official Zhu Xi school of Neo-Confucianism nor the rival Wang Yangming school. Minagawa was analytic and positivist, which made him a kind of forerunner of Western philosophy in Japan. This assessment stems largely from two of Minagawa's works, Ekigaku kaibutsu (The learning of the book of changes on the discovery of things) and Meichū rokkan (Six chapters on categories).

Ekigaku kaibutsu starts from the Chinese classic I Ching, the "Book of Changes" or "Book of Divination," which despite its esoteric nature stimulated Minagawa and other Confucianists to make a study of celestial phenomena. Ekigaku kaibutsu clearly manifests his lifetime search for the nature of things. However, for him "things" are mainly human affairs seen from the ethicopolitical point of view, and their "discovery" or investigation is in relation to the ruling of the realm.

Meichū rokkan analyzes the origins of basic concepts or categories. Starting with words, Minagawa shows that they are abstract expressions of reality itself. He believes that we grasp reality objectively through its manifestation in words. This rather naive realist epistemology is an attempt to penetrate the nature of things without employing ri, Zhu Xi's abstract "principle," or the "innate knowledge" of Wang Yangming. Among Minagawa's categories, significant ones are learning or science (gaku ) and wisdom (tetsu ). Although he did not wholly grasp modern science or philosophy, he came very close.

Another topic of interest to Minagawa is the samurai class, which he criticizes in many of his writings. He hoped the samurai would survive as the intellectual and moral leaders of the ordinary people.

See also Chinese Philosophy; Japanese Philosophy; Positivism; Wang Yangming; Wisdom; Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi).

Bibliography

For Minagawa's works see Nihon Tetsugaku Shisō Zensho (Library of Japanese philosophical thought), edited by Saigusa Hiroto (Tokyo, 1957), Vol. I, pp. 109–119, and Saigusa Hiroto, Nihon Yuibutsuronsha (Japanese materialists; Tokyo, 1956), pp. 95–107.

Gino K. Piovesana, S.J. (1967)