Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T08:43:17.184Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Treating the Body Politic: The Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2008

Abstract

The essay examines medical metaphors in the discourse on government from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor, a comparison of medical metaphors in the political writings in late medieval Europe (c. 1250–c. 1450) and Tokugawa Japan (1602–1867) demonstrates that the European notion of medical treatment as the eradication of the causes of diseases magnified the coercive and punitive aspects of government, while the Japanese notion of medical treatment as the art of daily healthcare served to accentuate the government's role of preventing conflicts and maintaining stability. These differing images of medical treatment metaphorically structured contrasting conceptions of government in the two historical worlds.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9Google Scholar.

2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109Google Scholar.

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. On the diversity of bodily metaphors in medieval political discourse, see Nederman, Cary J., “Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages,” Pensiero politico medievale 2 (2004), 59–87Google Scholar.

4 Serious scholarly interest in the organic metaphors and medical metaphors in medieval political discourse can be traced back to Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 22–30. Also of interest is Ewart Lewis, “Organic Tendencies in Medieval Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 32 (1938): 849–76. The most detailed and systematic study of organic metaphors in medieval political writings is Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1978). For the Renaissance period, see Hale, David G., The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971)Google Scholar; Archambault, Paul, “The Metaphor of the ‘Body’ in Renaissance Political Literature,” Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 29 (1967), 2153Google Scholar; and Harris, Jonathan Gil, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

5 Alfarabi, , The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorism” and Other Texts, trans. Butterworth, Charles E. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1113Google Scholar.

6 Singh, G. P., Political Thought in Ancient India (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1993), 2122Google Scholar.

7 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). A precis of it can be found in Shogimen, Takashi, “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): 497523Google Scholar. 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).

8 “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 Nosco, Peter, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For instance, La methode de tracter leys playes faictes par bacquebutes et aultres baston a feu (1545) and Cinq livres de chirurgie (1572).

10 For Yamawaki Toyo and his anatomical studies, see Okamoto, Takashi, Kaibo Kotohajime (Tokyo: Doseisha, 1988)Google Scholar.

11 Studies on the use of medical knowledge in political writings include: Pouchelle, Marie-Christine, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Morris, Rosemary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), especially chap. 7Google Scholar; Parel, Anthony, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Cohen, I. Bernard, ed., The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kövecses, Zoltán, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4Google Scholar. The literature on cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor is enormous. In addition to some key texts which I cite below, the important works include Fauconnier, Gilles, Mental Spaces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Fauconnier, , Mappings in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lakoff, George, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar; and Ortony, Andrew, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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).

13 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 6Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 83.

15 Ibid., 66–67.

16 Kövecses, Metaphor, 69.

17 Kövecses, Zoltán, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 231–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Geeraerts, Dirk and Grondelaers, Stefan, “Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patters,” in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. Taylor, John R. and MacLaury, Robert E. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 153–79Google Scholar.

19 Ning, Yu, “Metaphorical Expression of Anger and Happiness in English and Chinese,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (1995): 223–45Google Scholar.

20 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.

21 Siraisi, Nancy, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 160–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Ibid., 163–64.

23 McVaugh, Michael, “Therapeutic Strategies: Surgery,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Grmek, Mirko D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 282Google Scholar.

24 Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, 2–3.

25 Cited in Siraisi, , “The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus,” Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. Weisheipl, James A. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 382Google Scholar.

26 Hewson, M. Anthony, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 5253, 241Google Scholar.

27 Fowler, George Bingham, Intellectual Interests of Engelbert of Admont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), chap. 4Google Scholar.

28 Siraisi, Nancy, Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto: PIMS, 1973), 163–65Google Scholar.

29 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. See Kibre, Pearl, “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), 217–18Google Scholar.

30 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.

31 O'Neill, Y., “Innocent III and the Evolution of Anatomy,” Medical History 20 (1976): 429–31Google Scholar.

32 Paravicini-Bagliani, Agostino, The Pope's Body, trans. Peterson, David S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 186Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., 225.

34 Yabuuchi, Kiyoshi, “Chugoku Kagaku no Dento to Tokushoku,” in Chugoku no Kagaku, ed. Yabuuchi, (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1979), 91Google Scholar.

35 Anzai, Yasuchika, Nihon Jui Kenkyu (Tokyo: Seishisha, 1981), 3770Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., 64. 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).

37 Sorai, Ogyu, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, ed. Usami, Shinsui (Tokyo: Sekibundo Shuppan, 1980)Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 60–61.

39 Ibid., 164–89. See also Tajiri, Yusuke and Hikita, Keisuke, Dazai Shundai and Hattori Nankaku (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 1995), 16Google Scholar.

40 Baien, Miura, Zeigo, in Miura Baien, ed. Yamada, Keiji (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984)Google Scholar.

41 Kobori, Kazumasa, Yamanaka, Hiroyuki, Kaji, Nobuyuki, and Inoue, Akihiro, Nakai Chikuzan and Nakai Riken (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 1980), 204–5, 250–51Google Scholar. On the Kaitokudo school, see Najita, Tetsuo, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

42 Ohira, Kimata, Sakuma Shozan (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1959), 153–56Google Scholar.

43 Dante, , Monarchy, trans. Shaw, Prue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54Google Scholar.

44 Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 337.

45 McVaugh, Michael R., Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon 1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 150Google Scholar.

46 Oresme, Nicole, De Moneta, ed. Johnson, Charles (London: Thomas Nelson, 1956), 4246Google Scholar. Cf. Oresme, Nicole, Le Livre de Politiques d'Aristote, ed. Menut, Albert Douglas, Transactions of American Philosophical Society 60 (1970): 252Google Scholar.

47 Picherit, Jean-Louis, La métaphore pathologique et thérapeutique à la fin du Moyen Age (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), 4041CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 320–21.

49 Pedro Gil Sotres, “The Regimens of Health,” in Grmek, Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 294–302.

50 Cusa, Catholic Concordance, 320.

51 Ibid., 321.

52 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 64, a. 2, vol. 38: injustice, ed. and trans. Lefébure, Marcus (London: Blackfriars, 1975), 2223Google Scholar.

53 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 64, a. 3, 27.

54 Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, trans. James Blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 180.

55 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. Durand de Saint Pourçain, In Petri Lombardi Sententias theologicas commentariorum libri IV (Venice, 1571), lib. IV, fol. 351r–v.

56 Wyclif, John, De Ecclesia, ed. Loserth, J. (London: Wyclif Society, 1886), 12Google Scholar.

57 Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, II, ix, 125; IV, xi, 246.

58 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, I, xv, 11, 73. See also Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, trans. Alan Gerwirth (New York, 2001), 66.

59 Wyclif, John, Sermones, ii, ed. Loserth, Johann (London: Wyclif Society, 1888), 269Google Scholar.

60 Cicero, , On Duties, ed. Griffin, M. T. and Atkins, E. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111Google Scholar.

61 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Crisp, Roger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Cicero, , On Duties, 3233.Google Scholar

63 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49–50.

64 Schipperges, Heinrich, Die Kranken im Mittelalter (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990), chap. 3Google Scholar.

65 Nutton, Vivian, “Medicine in Medieval Western Europe, 1000–1500,” in Conrad, Lawrence, Neve, Michael, Nutton, Vivian, Porter, Roy, and Wear, Andrew, The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161Google Scholar.

66 Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope's Body, 187–88.

67 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.

68 See Nederman, “Body Politics.”

69 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). On John's organic metaphor, see especially Struve, Tilman, “The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury,” The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, Michael (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 303–17Google Scholar and Nederman, Cary J., “The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury's Policraticus,” History of Political Thought 8 (1987): 211–23Google Scholar, reprinted in Nederman, , Medieval Aristotelianism and its Limits (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997)Google Scholar.

70 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Nederman, V, ii, 67.

71 Ibid., V, ix, 81.

72 Ibid., V, ii, 67. cf. ibid., VI, xx, 125–26. This graphic representation of the political community as the human body proved highly influential; for example, the thirteenth-century 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; de Pizan, Christine, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. Forhan, Kate Langdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For Christine's use of bodily metaphors, see Forhan, Kate Langdon, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), especially, chap. 3Google Scholar.

73 Cusa, De concordantia catholica, III, xli, 468–69.

74 Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 211Google Scholar.

75 Kraus, Fr X., “Die Handschriften-Sammlung des Cardinalis Nicolaus von Cusa,” Serapeum 26 (1865): 6974Google Scholar.

76 Cusa, De concordantia catholica, III, xil, 468 nn. 585–86. See also Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, 319 n. 14.

77 Fortescue, Sir John, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Lockwood, Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2021Google Scholar.

78 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.

79 Yoro, Takeshi, Nihonjin no Shintaikan no Rekishi (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1996), 208Google Scholar.

80 For the general survey of the history of Japanese medicine, see, for instance, Kajita, Akira, Igaku no Rekishi (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003)Google Scholar; and Kira, Shiro, Nihon no Seiyo-Igaku no Oitachi (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 2000Google Scholar).

81 Okamoto, Kaibo Kotohajime, 9–10.

82 Ibid., 32–40.

83 Unschuld, Paul U., Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 100Google Scholar. Cf. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 151.

84 Ekiken, Kaibara, Yamoto Zokukun, in Kaibara Ekiken, ed. Matsuda, Michio (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1983), 109Google Scholar.

85 Soko, Yamaga, Yamaga Gorui, in Yamaga Soko, ed. Tahara, Tsuguo (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1983), 144Google Scholar.

86 Baien, Miura, Zeigo, in Miura Baien, ed. Yamada, Keiji (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 517Google Scholar.

87 Hagakure, ed. Tatsuya Naramoto (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 128. Portions of Hagakure are translated in English: Tsunetomo, Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of Samurai, trans. Wilson, William Scott (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979)Google Scholar. The cited part of the text is not included in Wilson's English translation.

88 Hagakure, 129.

89 Ekiken, Yôjô-Kun, in Kaibara Ekiken, 85.

90 Baien, Zeigo, 607.

91 Ibid. Cf. Huan Ti Nei Ching Su Wên, 105.

92 Some scholarly works on Sorai's political thought are available in European languages, including McEwan, J. R., The Political Writings of Ogyu Sorai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, and Ansart, Olivier, L'empire du rite: La pensée politique d'Ogyû Sorai, Japon, 1666–1728 (Geneva: Droz, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Translations of Sorai's political works are Najita, Tetsuo (ed), Tokugawa Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lidin, Olaf G., Ogyu Sorai, Distinguishing the Way (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970)Google Scholar; Minear, Richard, “Ogyu Sorai's Instructions for Students: A Translation and Commentary,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1977): 581Google Scholar; and Yamashita, Samuel Hideo, Master Sorai's Responsals: An Annotated Translation of Sorai Sensei Tomonsho (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994)Google Scholar. 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.

93 Sorai, Sorai Sensei Somon Hyo, 2.

94 Yamashita, Master Sorai's Responsals, 48.

96 Ibid., 70.

99 Genpaku, Sugita, Nosô Dokugo, in Haga, Toru ed., Sugita Genpaku, Shiba Kokan, Hiraga Gennnai (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984), 273Google Scholar.

100 Matsumura, Koji, “Yojo-ron-teki na Shintai eno Manazashi,” Edo no Shiso 6 (1997), 96117Google Scholar.

101 Ekiken, Yôjô-Kun, in Kaibara Ekiken, 345.

102 Sato, Shosuke, ed., Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 354Google Scholar. For Takano Choei's contributions to Japanese medical learning, see Nakamura, Ellen Gardner, Practical Pursuits: Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

103 Shozan, Sakuma, Kobu Ichiwa, in Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, ed. Matsuura, Rei (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1984), 289Google Scholar.