La normalisation du savoir normatif. Autour de Hayashi Razan

About Hayashi Razan. Hayashi Razan has always been held in low esteem for his unscrupulous ambition and opportunistic personality. Thanks to this negative perception, however, when we wiew his work from a philosophical point of view, we see that an even deeper side may have been concealed. Therefore, it is necessary to distance ourselves from this ordinarily negative perception for the time being and apply a Neo-Confucianist anlysis of this work. He unmistakably contibued to shushigaku's (a form a Confucianism) firm rooting in society in the 17th century. The pupose of this chapter is to objectively examine Razan's intellectual past by accentuating his interpretation of li as well as his attitudes toward Christianity and Buddhism. We will see that his brand of Neo-Confucianism formally represented a social need to stabilize and to create a hierarchy of relations between human beings in which he recognized a "natural" link between social norms and the order of things. To him the same timeless norm existed in the structure of a weed as in the society. In this sense, Razan's knowledge is one of the best illustration available of the unacknowledged links which exist between "knowledge" and "power". The desire for social justification was also taken up by a successor, Yamazaki Anzai, an uncompromising and slightly hysterical figure. His school called "kimon" nourished an underground current which was politically and ideologically conservative, one wich would serve as the matrix, though negative for numerous contesting currents of thought in the Edo period.