Ogyū Sorai and Neo-Confucian Rigorism

Sorai detested Neo-Confucians. Their rigorism, he believed, bred narrow-mindedness. As his quip goes — among all the figures appearing in the Tongjian Gangmu, not a single one seems to have won Zhu Xi’s approval — his argument was that Neo-Confucian severity was unworkable from the start. Sorai affirmed natural human desire: so long as the public good is not harmed, anything goes. He held that personal cultivation, beginning with “making the will sincere and rectifying the mind,” was of no help to real politics, and that politics and personal cultivation must be kept separate. Confucianism is nothing but political science! The separation of the public and private spheres as he conceived it looks incomplete to our modern eyes, but it was a great advance for the world of ideas — and, in part, a return to pre-Qin Confucianism.

Thoughts that came to me while reading Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Chapter 1, Section 3, “The Characteristics of Sorai-gaku”