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2023 - Volume 7 - Number 1

Plato in East Asia?

Hyun Jin Kim * ORCID: 0009-0009-5261-8746
University of Melbourne, Faculty or Arts, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Niv Horesh * ORCID: 0000-0002-2204-0017
Hebrew University, The Louis Frieberg Center for Asian Studies, Jerusalem, ISRAEL

Open Journal for Studies in Philosophy, 2023, 7(1), 9-18 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsp.0701.02009k
Received: 27 June 2023 ▪ Revised: 7 August 2023 ▪ Accepted: 9 August 2023

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
Shadi Bartsch in her recent publication Plato goes to China (2023) has argued that Plato and the Greek classics have had an out-sized impact on Chinese politics and intelligentsia. This article, while sympathetic to her approach, argues that there is little evidence that Plato and the Greek Classics have exerted any direct influence on Chinese politics. Rather it argues that what influence Plato has had on China is actually indirect via a pre-war national socialist Japanese filter. In pre-World War II Japan Plato was fetishized as the ancient source of western socialist and communist thinking. Radical extremists such as Kita Ikki and Kanokogi Kazunobu created a new ideology that mingled aspects of Platonism with socialism and Japanese nationalism. They hoped thereby to create a modern-day Platonic utopia for the East Asian races (and for the Japanese in particular). This article examines how this modern-day “version” of Platonism with “Asian” characteristics impacted on pre-war Japan and modern East Asia as a whole.

KEY WORDS: Shadi Bartsch, Plato, Chinese intellectual history, Japanese intellectual history, Liang Qichao, Kita Ikki, Kanokogi Kazunobu.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Hyun Jin Kim, University of Melbourne, Faculty or Arts, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA.

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