This article identifies two different traditions of understanding what virtue is, both of which originated in ancient Greece but became global in reach. One tradition is the Socratic understanding of virtue and the other tradition is the Sophist understanding of virtue. After outlining the distinguishing features of these different traditions and their historical, philosophical and economic conditions, the article then turns to 17th century Japan, finding advocates of these understandings of virtue in neo-Confucian philosophers Itō Jinsai (1627-1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728). Arguing that Jinsai’s understanding of virtue was akin to the Socratic tradition and Ogyū’s was in line with the Sophist tradition, the article then raises the possibility of Christian influences on Jinsai and shows how his understanding of virtue was continued on for nearly two centuries in the Osaka merchant academy, the Kaitokudō (1724-1869). This long tradition of privileging Socratic virtue within the Kaitokudō helps explain the conversion of the son of the last head of the Kaitokudō, Nakai Tsugumaro (1855-1943) to Christianity. In a similar vein, one finds both the Socratic and Sophist understandings of virtue in the Christian intellectual Nitobe Inazō’s early 20th century writing on bushido. Finally, the article notes that without some mechanism for reconciling these two opposing understandings of virtue, societies run the risk of disintegration. The author concludes that the best hope for such reconciliation lies in the field of law, since law by its very nature embodies elements of both the Socratic and the Sophist understanding of virtue.
Kevin M. Doak (Sun,) studied this question.