Rituals as Utopia: Ogyū Sorai's Theory of Authority

Abstract

Ogyū Sorai's eighteenth-century theory of rituals pushed to an unsettling conclusion the assumption made popular by many contemporary authors that internalization of social norms is better achieved through the subtle control of bodies and gestures than through coercion, threats or argumentation. Because Sorai's rituals aimed at shaping in everyday life, according to pre-determined status, body gestures, utterances, and all the objects surrounding the body, from clothes to houses, furniture and conveyances, they would have transformed life into a performance of a scripted play. They would also have represented the ideal and absolute form of authority, following Hannah Arendt's famous definition of the concept as that which elicits obedience or conformity without need for coercion or argument. The fluidity inherent in the urban life of Tokugawa Japan, however, made sure that Sorai's utopia would remain just that – and probably explains why Arendt found authority so elusive in our modern societies.

Notes

¹Arendt, Between Past and Future.

⁶In his Benmei, 219. These ‘ancient kings’ are the founders of the only perfect regimes supposed to be known to mankind – the three dynasties of ancient China.

²The Tokugawa period extends from 1603 to 1868 and the Meiji restoration; this early modern Japan was ruled by the shogun, first among the warlords, and his vassals, through a quasi-feudal organization (albeit of varying shades of centralization through the period).

³The expression ‘rituals and music’ comes from the ancient Chinese classics concerned with rituals, such as the Liji.

⁴Also know as ‘Neo-Confucianism’, a doctrine articulated by the Chinese philosophers Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), which became in China the official doctrine – in the sense that it had to be learned by candidates to the Imperial examinations. In Japan this was the doctrine of the semi-official school of the Hayashi family (which later would become the official school for all practical purposes).

⁵This doctrine was expounded in pre Han China, most notably by Han Fei (280–233 BC). It stresses the importance of government by laws, against the Confucian teaching of the virtues.

⁷There is no need to assume that authority is the characteristic of an agent able to extract obedience from others – this is only one specific case. More often than not, authority is a characteristic of social norms or traditions that are beyond the control of any agent or agents.

⁸Tokutomi, Shin Nihon no seinen.

⁹This does not mean that we do not find examples of individual and private enjoyment of music. Confucius himself is sometimes portrayed in the Analects as immersed in musical pleasures.

¹⁰Music is typically added when Sorai comments on the classics where the expression is found.

¹¹John Allen Tucker in his superb recent translation of some of Sorai's works, entitled Ogyū Sorai's Philosophical Masterpieces, 44, rightly remarks that works like the Benmei and Bendō should be read inter-textually with the Seidan and the Taiheisaku, but that this has not typically been the case so far.

¹² Seidan, 311.

¹³The subjects of Sorai's rituals, it must be said, are essentially members of the samurai group, because the large majority of the population, the commoners or shomin, constitute for Sorai one huge and largely undifferentiated mass to which one and the same set of rules should apply.

¹⁴ Seidan, 311.

¹⁵Ibid., 340.

¹⁶I am not claiming that in Sorai's rituals every conceivable object of life was invested with social meaning. There are many objects that Sorai ignores in his impressive catalogue of socially meaningful objects. And, just as obviously, not every object is depicted in his multiple rank-related versions.

¹⁷On this, see Seidan, 313–14, 328, 340. As the following sections will show, Sorai saw other objectives also in this allocation of goods.

¹⁸Louis Dumont, who concerned himself with the great divide between modern and non-modern societies in many of his books, treats this subordination of economy as a defining trait of non-modern orders; see especially his Essays. He has characterized modern societies by the independence won in them by the economy, which then in many respects is able to determine social order.

¹⁹ Bendō XVIII; cf also in Rongochō I: 19, 49, 66.

²⁰For a comparison with Xunzi's quite similar approach to rituals, see this author's L'Empire du Rite. Closer to Sorai – in this respect only – was another Tokugawa-period Confucian, Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685). Sokō predates Sorai's obsession with details. Rituals should decide all the minute details of everyday life; in the construction of houses, rituals decide, according to the status of the dweller, the size of the building, the size, material, and shape of the pillars, of the roof, of the beams, of the walls and sliding doors, and of the veranda (Yamaga Sokō Zenshū, V, 59–60). The same attention, obviously, extends to clothes, food, vessels and carts. More importantly, in all those cases objects shaped by rituals according to status shape in turn the feelings: ‘Some are not yet impregnated with the feelings of respect. As soon as they wear the ritual clothes, eat the proper food, sit in the proper places, respect take shape. And when shape is perfected, the feeling is born’ (VI, 54; emphasis added).

²¹There are many conflicting interpretations of Sorai's political thought on this point, fuelled by deep tensions and ambiguities. I believe that Maruyama Masao's classic analysis in his Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū, although much maligned in recent years, was, on the point of the artificial character of the Way and rituals of Sorai, absolutely correct. I lack the space here to defend this view, but see Ansart, L'Empire du Rite, 169–196.

²²This answers a possible objection that performance of rituals by people supposes – thus begging the question – the conformity that is their alleged aim.

²³There is little to say about coercion and laws. In Confucian thinking, because they fail to deeply modify people's mentalities (see Analects II–3), coercion and laws can only be instruments of last resort.

²⁴ Bendō XV.

²⁵Ibid.

²⁶ Bendō XVI.

²⁷ Bendō XV.

²⁸Ibid.: ‘Only people who already trust you can be taught’. Cf. also Rongochō I:86. In one letter Sorai claims that only when the listener has faith in the speaker can she accept the ideas expressed: cf. Soraishū 527.

²⁹ Bendō XVI.

³⁰ Benmei, 219.

³¹Ibid.

³² Rongochō, 82.

³³Perelman, Realm of Rhetoric.

³⁴For Pascal the body –‘the automat’– is the medium of persuasion. See Pensées,§252.

³⁵ Benmei, 219.

³⁶Ibid. ‘Following rites we are transformed. Unconsciously, unknowingly we follow the rules of the Lord. How could this not be good?’

³⁷ Tōmonsho, 206.

³⁸ Taiheisaku, 473. Also see Seidan, 391. For commoners these customs also take the form of what Sorai calls the ‘small virtues’: the virtues of the quotidian, opposed to the virtues of those who devise and engineer social systems and institutions. In the smooth operation of custom, the least cost-efficient way of violence is, of course, immediately rendered obsolete.

³⁹A distinctive character of such authority, carried through the quotidian utensils of life, is its dilution through the many strata of society: such authority is not one that a charismatic ruler would have over a huge mass of passive subjects themselves bereft of authority. Composing a textbook description of pure feudalism, Sorai imagines a system where the bakufu– not the emperor, about whom he had precious little to say – was certainly in the end the repository of all coercive power, but where authority was constantly delegated and subdivided, trickling downwards from bakufu to daimyō, from daimyō to vassals, from vassals to rear vassals, from rear vassals to domestic servants, from family head to children. This fits the observation made much later, by Foucault, and countless students of organizations, that power does not exist as a thing likely to be monopolized, but always in networks where it is diffused and fluid. This is not to say that charismatic authority could have no place in Japan – an interesting point I shall leave aside – but simply that ideal authority is more of the kind envisaged by Sorai. Charismatic authority does not last as long and is never as pervasive.

⁴⁰All conservative thinkers attracted to the concept of authority saw the importance of customs and habits, but few developed, like Sorai did, a program to control and shape them. Usually customs and habits are seen as the results of natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to control.

⁴¹Tokugawa Japan was certainly not lacking sumptuary laws – cf. Shively, ‘Sumptuary Regulation’– and regulations on behaviour, the objectives of which were not purely economic. While they may have been a step in the right direction, Sorai rightly dismissed these regulations as much too crude to even approximate his dream (Seidan, 314, 339).

⁴²Elias, The Civilizing Process.

⁴³Erikson, Childhood and Society.

⁴⁴Bourdieu, Outline; Foucault, History of Sexuality.

⁴⁵James, ‘What Is Emotion?’, 189.

⁴⁶ Seidan, 263.

⁴⁷For example, the forced return of many urban people and samurai to land that they had not received permission to leave.

⁴⁸ Seidan, 275.

⁵⁰ Tōmonsho, 175, 187.

⁴⁹As most of these measures, together with monetary policy measures for mint, coinage, and regulation of paper money, sumptuary legislation, etc., would require some form of laws to be implemented, Sorai is clearly not rejecting or disparaging laws for some problem inherent in their form. As a good Confucian, what he laments in the proliferation of regulations and laws so characteristic of the Tokugawa period is their apparent exclusive concern with appearance. All the specific instances of seido/rei system/rituals, whatever their legal form (written, formalized, sanctioned), should aim rather at transforming their object – humans – into naturally, spontaneously, deeply compliant beings.

⁵¹Cf. Seidan, 293, 299; Tōmonsho, 175, 187.

⁵²The assumption, however, has been made elsewhere as well, in a very different context; Tocqueville says the same things about the eighteenth-century society of the Ancien Régime, in his The Old Regime and the Revolution.

⁵³ Seidan, 283.

⁵⁴Ibid., 284.

⁵⁵Ibid., 314, 332.

⁵⁶Indeed, one can discern in Tokugawa urban literature the same figures who haunt urban literature in the West: the fraud, the conman, and the impostor. True, those figures did not yet have the presence they enjoy in Balzac, and this in itself is probably an excellent testimony to the fact that Tokugawa towns, thanks to deliberate policies, had retained part of the character of village communities.

⁵⁷ Bendōsho, 219.

⁵⁹Pascal, Pensées,§308.

⁵⁸One intriguing reform program, between music and rituals, was offered by Sorai's great rival, Arai Hakuseki. Desiring to enhance the prestige of his master, the shogun Ienobu, over the daimyō (a very small group, obviously), Hakuseki demonstrated a more modest and practical approach to authority, reorganizing a whole array of symbolic devices, mainly borrowed from the traditions of the Imperial court – from clothes to music, including architecture. Kate Wildman Nakai has provided an excellent analysis of those in her Shogunal Politics (I should mention that in this book, in a discussion of Sorai's political proposals, Nakai interestingly uses the concept of ‘Institutional Utopianism’). Of course Hakuseki was acting in his capacity as political advisor and not as a political philosopher.

⁶⁰Watanabe, ‘Go ikō to shōchō’. See also the recent work by Vaporis, Tour of Duty.