Abstract
Religion, Culture, and the Public Sphere in China and Japan examines the influence of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined in this text as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres. This volume presents chapters on China and Japan, balancing the theoretical and conceptual as well as the traditional and modern, covering a period from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day. Focusing on the actors on the fringes of society—those whose contribution to the public sphere has been largely overlooked—this book seeks to determine how such outliers contributed to religious, intellectual, and cultural discourse in the public sphere.
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Notes
- 1.
Jürgen Habermas (Thomas Burger, trans.) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; German edition, 1962), p. 27.
- 2.
Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. Habermas and Religion. (Malden, Mass: Polity Press, 2013), p. 27.
- 3.
The impact of Habermas is described by Weidong Cao, “The Historical Effect of Habermas in the Chinese Context: A Case Study of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 41–50.
- 4.
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). According to Cao, “The Historical Effect of Habermas in the Chinese Context” (p. 44), Chinese scholars also disagreed on how to translate Öffentlichkeit into Chinese. Some thought it should be translated as gonggong lingyu 剬共領域 (public domain/sphere/field/territory/area), some thought that it should be translated as gonggong lunyu 剬共论域 (domain/sphere/field of [critical] public discussion), while others thought it should be translated as gonggong kongjian 剬共空间 (public space). The first alternative became the commonly accepted one. The second one (domain/sphere/field of [critical] public discussion) preserves the polemical nuances that Habermas associated with the “people’s use of reason” (öffentlich Rasonnement) (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 27).
- 5.
Mozi 墨子 Bk. 1, “On the Necessity of Standards” (fayi 法儀), section 4: 莫若法天. China Text Project (http://ctext.org/mozi/on-the-necessity-of-standards), consulted June 28, 2012.
- 6.
The Confucian bureaucracy in pre-modern China approximates Habermas’ description of the world of letters of courtly-noble society, whose influence extended to the public sphere in the world of letters (literarische Öffentlichkeit) (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 29–30).
- 7.
The period is also labeled as the Tokugawa Period after the family name of the Shogun and as the Edo Period for the political capital of Japan.
- 8.
Eiko Ikegami. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
- 9.
Ibid., 43.
- 10.
Watanabe Hiroshi. A History of Japanese Political Thought, 1600–1901 (Tokyo: The International House of Japan, 2012), 51–2.
- 11.
The literal translation of the public sphere is kōteki ryōiki 剬的領域 or kyōkyō ryōiki 剬共領域 but there is no consensus for a translation for the public sphere as there is for civil society or shimin shakai 市民社会.
- 12.
It is important to note that for most of Tokugawa Japan, participation in the public sphere was primarily collective until the late 1700s when activists began voicing their individual opinions in the arena.
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Newmark, J. (2017). Introduction: The East Asian Public Sphere. In: Welter, A., Newmark, J. (eds) Religion, Culture, and the Public Sphere in China and Japan. Religion and Society in Asia Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2437-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2437-5_1
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