Book Review: The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Correctly matching names and plants had been a perennial struggle of honzÅgaku specialists. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, scholars have attempted various solutions to this semasiological problem with very concrete implications: in preparing medicines, the correct identification of a medicinal herb was of vital import to prevent unpleasant surprises. Shin, in fact, appeared in older texts like Kaibara Ekiken's Yamato honzÅ and InÅ Jakusui's Shobutsu ruisan, where it referred to the essential properties of natural species, whereas Keisuke and his colleagues used it, according to Fukuoka, to express the actual physical existence of specific objects--the specific plant, herb, or shellfish, etc. they observed on particular occasions. [...]the verification of the actual existence of an object (which, by the way, is already a mediated procedure) does not immediately and directly imply the attribution to it of certain properties (morphological, functional, therapeutic, etc.): the body of a plant, that is, does not reveal in itself those properties. Furthermore, rendering shin simply as "the real" leaves open the question of the relation of species and individuals: if shin once revealed the essential properties of all members of a species, shin as "really existing object" does not solve the problem of subsuming different individual specimens under a unified species--in itself, a purely metaphysical procedure whereby actual objects are sublated under a conceptual unit (for example, species).