Treating the body politic: The medical metaphor of political rule in late medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan

Review of Politics

Volumn 70, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 77-104

  Shogimen, Takashi ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 57749143589     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670508000181     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109.
3. See Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. C. W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), I, ii, xv, xvii, and Nicholas of Cusa, De concordantia catholica, ed. G. Kallen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1959), iii, c. 41.
4. On the diversity of bodily metaphors in medieval political discourse, see Cary J. Nederman, "Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages," Pensiero politico medievale 2 (2004), 59-87.
5. Serious scholarly interest in the organic metaphors and medical metaphors in medieval political discourse can be traced back toOttoGierke, Political Theories of theMiddleAges, trans. F.W.Maitland (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1900), 22-30.
6. Also of interest is Ewart Lewis, "Organic Tendencies in Medieval Political Thought,"American Political Science Review 32 (1938): 849-876
7. Themost detailed and systematic study of organicmetaphors in medieval political writings is Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1978).
8. For the Renaissance period, see David G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971);
9. Paul Archambault, "The Metaphor of the 'Body' in Renaissance Political Literature," Bibliotheque d'humanisme et renaissance 29 (1967), 21 -53;
10. and Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11. Alfarabi, The Political Writings: "Selected Aphorism" and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 11-13.
12. G. P. Singh, PoliticalThought inAncient India(NewDelhi: D. K. Printworld, 1993), 21-22.
13. A good example of such comparison is Masao Maruyama's classic Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
14. A precis of it can be found in Takashi Shogimen, "Marsilius of Padua and Ogyu Sorai: Community and Language in the Political Discourse in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan," Review of Politics 64 (2002): 497-523. A note on the descriptions of Japanese names: for the names of modern scholars, I followed the Western convention (forename first, surname last), whereas, for the historic personalities, I followed the Japanese convention (surname precedes first name).
15. "National Learning" is an intellectual movement of studying Japanese ancient texts such as Kojiki (Record of Ancient Events) and Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan) with a distinctively historical approach, which shaped a unique language of Japanese identity. This movement was led by such writers as Keichu (1640-1701), Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769), Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), and Hirata Atsutane (1776- 1843 ). For an introduction to the National Learning, see Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
16. For instance, La methode de tracter leys playes faictes par bacquebutes et aultres baston a feu (1545) and Cinq livres de chirurgie (1572).
17. For Yamawaki Toyo and his anatomical studies, see Takashi Okamoto, Kaibo Kotohajime (Tokyo: Doseisha, 1988).
18. Studies on the use of medical knowledge in political writings include: Marie- Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), especially chap. 7;
19. Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);
20. I. Bernard Cohen, ed., The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994 ).
21. Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
22. The literature on cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor is enormous. In addition to some key texts which I cite below, the important works include Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985);
23. Fauconnier, Mappings in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
24. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
25. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
26. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
27. and Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
28. For a useful discussion of new theories of metaphor and their implications for the history of ideas, see Jeffery Zavadil's PhD dissertation "Anatomy of the Body Politic: Organic Metaphors in Ancient and Medieval Political Thought" (Arizona State University, 2006).
29. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 6.
30. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980 Ibid., 83.
31. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980 Ibid., 66-67.
32. Kövecses, Metaphor, 69.
33. Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 231-258
34. Dirk Geeraerts and Stefan Grondelaers, "Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patters," in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 153-179
35. Yu Ning, "Metaphorical Expression of Anger and Happiness in English and Chinese," Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (1995): 223-245
36. What I discuss under the category of "metaphor" in relation to medieval European political writings is, however, labeled by medieval philosophers as analogy (analogia). In medieval philosophy, metaphor is a comparison of concepts or terms, holding that something about one term has a similar property, or exactly the same property, as something about another term, while analogy, particularly as understood by medieval thinkers after Aquinas, is a metaphysical assertion about the referents of the terms, asserting a proportionality in the being holding between the two things the terms describe. The medieval conception of metaphor lacks ontological matching between the two relata when the relation is expressed; hence, metaphor is often associated with fallacious locutions. In the light of the training in Aristotelian logic at medieval universities, therefore, the medieval political thinkers I examine here were actually employing analogies rather than metaphors. However, exploring individual thinker's logical understanding of analogy and its relationship to the use of analogies in political writings is not within the scope of the present study: it pertains to the question of intentionality that does not fall within my methodological scope. Likewise, I shall not comment on Tokugawa Japanese political thinkers' views of analogies or metaphors. As far as I am aware, there is no modern literature on the Tokugawa Japanese understanding of metaphor or analogy.
37. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 160-161
38. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990, Ibid., 163-164
39. Michael McVaugh, "Therapeutic Strategies: Surgery," in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 282.
40. Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, 2-3.
41. Cited in Siraisi, "The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus," Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 382.
42. M. Anthony Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 52-53, 241.
43. George Bingham Fowler, Intellectual Interests of Engelbert of Admont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), chap. 4.
44. Nancy Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto: PIMS, 1973), 163-165
45. C. H. Lohr, "The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann et al., 84-85. It was not only in Paris but also in Louvain and Cologne that all members of the faculty of medicine were required to have first completed their studies in arts.
46. See Pearl Kibre, "Arts and Medicine in the Universities in the Later Middle Ages," in her Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine (London: Hambledon Press, 1984 ), 217-218
47. For instance,William of Ockham, who, as far as we know, had no medical interest or training at all, noted in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics Galen's difference with Aristotle on the importance of head and heart: Aristotle argued that the heart was the most important organ of the body while Galen maintained that the brain and the liver were no less important than the heart. See William of Ockham, Expositio in Libros Physicorum Aristotelis, vii, c. 2, 2, in Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Philosophica 5 (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1985), 610.
48. Y. O'Neill, "Innocent III and the Evolution of Anatomy," Medical History 20 (1976): 429-431
49. Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope's Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 186.
50. Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope's Body, 2000, Ibid., 225.
51. Kiyoshi Yabuuchi, "Chugoku Kagaku no Dento to Tokushoku," in Chugoku no Kagaku, ed. Yabuuchi (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1979), 91.
52. Yasuchika Anzai, Nihon Jui Kenkyu (Tokyo: Seishisha, 1981), 37-70.
53. Yasuchika Anzai, Nihon Jui Kenkyu, 1981, Ibid., 64.
54. See also Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wên: The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, trans. Ilza Veith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
55. Ogyu Sorai, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, ed. Shinsui Usami (Tokyo: Sekibundo Shuppan, 1980).
56. Ogyu Sorai, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, ed. Shinsui Usami, 1980, Ibid., 60-61.
57. Ogyu Sorai, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, ed. Shinsui Usami, 1980, Ibid., 164-189
58. See also Yusuke Tajiri and Keisuke Hikita, Dazai Shundai and Hattori Nankaku (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 1995), 16.
59. Miura Baien, Zeigo, in Miura Baien, ed. Keiji Yamada (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984 ).
60. Kazumasa Kobori, Hiroyuki Yamanaka, Nobuyuki Kaji, and Akihiro Inoue, Nakai Chikuzan and Nakai Riken (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 1980), 204-5, 250-251
61. On the Kaitokudo school, see Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987).
62. Kimata Ohira, Sakuma Shozan (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1959), 153-156
63. Dante, Monarchy, trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 54.
64. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 337.
65. Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon 1285-1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 150.
66. Nicole Oresme, De Moneta, ed. Charles Johnson (London: Thomas Nelson, 1956), 42-46.
67. Cf. Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Politiques d'Aristote, ed. Albert Douglas Menut, Transactions of American Philosophical Society 60 (1970): 252.
68. Jean-Louis Picherit, La métaphore pathologique et thérapeutique a la fin du Moyen Age (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), 40-41.
69. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 320-321
70. Pedro Gil Sotres, "The Regimens of Health," in Grmek, Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 294-302.
71. Cusa, Catholic Concordance, 320.
72. Cusa, Catholic Concordance, Ibid., 321.
73. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 64, a. 2, vol.38: injustice, ed. and trans. Marcus Lefébure (London: Blackfriars, 1975), 22-23.
74. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 64, a. 3, 27.
75. Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, trans. James Blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 180.
76. Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, trans. R. W. Dyson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1986), 7. Similarly, the early-fourteenth-century Dominican theologian Durand de St Pourçain, for example, wrote that the doctor normally cures an individual as a whole; however, when he cannot do this, he amputates the infected part lest the whole body should be infected.
77. Durand de Saint Pourçain, In Petri Lombardi Sententias theologicas commentariorum libri IV (Venice, 1571), lib. IV, fol. 351r-v.
78. John Wyclif, De Ecclesia, ed. J. Loserth (London: Wyclif Society, 1886), 12.
79. Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, II, ix, 125; IV, xi, 246.
80. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, I, xv, 11, 73.
81. See also Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, trans. Alan Gerwirth (New York, 2001), 66.
82. John Wyclif, Sermones, ii, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Wyclif Society, 1888), 269.
83. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111.
84. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.
85. Cicero, On Duties, 32-33.
86. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49-50.
87. Heinrich Schipperges, Die Kranken im Mittelalter (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990), chap. 3.
88. Vivian Nutton, "Medicine in MedievalWestern Europe, 1000-1500," in Lawrence Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ), 161.
89. Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope's Body, 187-188
90. The medical experience of medieval political thinkers, of course, cannot be limited to medical knowledge taught and researched within the universities. Physicians, master surgeons, barber surgeons, and even a number of illicit practitioners were in practice. Marie-Christine Pouchelle notes that the public images of surgeons were associated with "blood and fire." The surgeon was compared with the blacksmith; just as a smith wielded his white-hot pincers, so a surgeon used his cauterizing tools to keep away evil humors. Surgeons were also analogized with butchers and executioners. See Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, 69-74.
91. See Nederman, "Body Politics."
92. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Nederman, V, ii, 67. The modern critical edition of the original Latin text is John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909).
93. On John's organic metaphor, see especially Tilman Struve, "The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury," The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 303-317
94. and Cary J. Nederman, "The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury's Policraticus," History of Political Thought 8 (1987): 211-223
95. reprinted in Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism and its Limits (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).
96. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Nederman, V, ii, 67.
97. Ibid., V, ix, 81.
98. Ibid., V, ii, 67.
99. cf. ibid., VI, xx, 125-126
100. This graphic representation of the political community as the human body proved highly influential; for example, the thirteenthcentury republican Ptolemy of Lucca and the late fourteenth-century female political philosopher Christine de Pisan drew on John's organic metaphors in their political works: Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum; Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. Kate Langdon Forhan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
101. For Christine's use of bodily metaphors, see Kate Langdon Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), especially, chap. 3.
102. Cusa, De concordantia catholica, III, xli, 468-469
103. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 211.
104. Fr X. Kraus, "Die Handschriften-Sammlung des Cardinalis Nicolaus von Cusa," Serapeum 26 (1865): 69-74.
105. Cusa, De concordantia catholica, III, xil, 468 nn. 585-586
106. See also Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, 319 n. 14.
107. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20-21.
108. Ilza Veith ascribes the dearth of surgical practice in China before the arrival of Western medicine to "the Confucian tents of the sacredness of the body, which counteracted any tendency toward the development of anatomical studies and the practice of surgery." Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wên: The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, 3. This may be the case with Tokugawa Japanese medicine.
109. Takeshi Yoro, Nihonjin no Shintaikan no Rekishi (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1996), 208.
110. For the general survey of the history of Japanese medicine, see, for instance, Akira Kajita, Igaku no Rekishi (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003);
111. and Shiro Kira, Nihon no Seiyo-Igaku no Oitachi (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 2000).
112. Okamoto, Kaibo Kotohajime, 9-10.
113. Okamoto, Kaibo Kotohajime, Ibid., 32-40.
114. Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 100.
115. Cf. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 151.
116. Kaibara Ekiken, Yamoto Zokukun, in Kaibara Ekiken, ed. Michio Matsuda (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1983), 109.
117. Yamaga Soko, Yamaga Gorui, in Yamaga Soko, ed. Tsuguo Tahara (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1983), 144.
118. Miura Baien, Zeigo, in Miura Baien, ed. Keiji Yamada (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984 ), 517.
119. Hagakure, ed. Tatsuya Naramoto (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 128.
120. Portions of Hagakure are translated in English: Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of Samurai, trans. William Scott Wilson (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979). The cited part of the text is not included in Wilson's English translation.
121. Hagakure, 129.
122. Ekiken, Yôjô-Kun, in Kaibara Ekiken, 85.
123. Baien, Zeigo, 607.
124. Ibid. Cf. Huan Ti Nei Ching Su Wên, 105.
125. Some scholarly works on Sorai's political thought are available in European languages, including J. R. McEwan, The Political Writings of Ogyu Sorai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962)
126. and Olivier Ansart, L'empire du rite: La pensée politique d'Ogyû Sorai, Japon, 1666-1728 (Geneva: Droz, 1998).
127. Translations of Sorai's political works are Tetsuo Najita (ed), Tokugawa Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
128. Olaf G. Lidin, Ogyu Sorai, Distinguishing the Way (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970);
129. Richard Minear, "Ogyu Sorai's Instructions for Students: A Translation and Commentary," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1977): 5-81;
130. and Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Master Sorai's Responsals: An Annotated Translation of Sorai Sensei Tomonsho (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). None of these works, however, discusses the relationship between Sorai's political thought and his medical learning. Sorai's medical learning, too, has largely been unexplored.
131. Sorai, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, 2.
132. Yamashita, Master Sorai's Responsals, 48.
133. Ibid..
134. Ibid., 70.
135. Ibid..
136. Ibid..
137. Sugita Genpaku, Nosô Dokugo, in Toru Haga ed., Sugita Genpaku, Shiba Kokan, Hiraga Gennnai (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984), 273.
138. Koji Matsumura, "Yojo-ron-teki na Shintai eno Manazashi," Edo no Shiso 6 (1997), 96-117.
139. Ekiken, Yôjô-Kun, in Kaibara Ekiken, 345.
140. Shosuke Sato, ed., Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 354 .
141. For Takano Choei's contributions to Japanese medical learning, see Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 ).
142. Sakuma Shozan, Kobu Ichiwa, in Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, ed. Rei Matsuura (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 289.