Originally published on July 6, 2019.
Based on an essay by Hiroshi Furuta in the August issue of WiLL, this piece ranges widely over his path from Shina history to political science, while reflecting on Epicurus, Parmenides, and Michiko Hasegawa to explore the loneliness, misfortune, and force of the true seer.
It is a vivid and provocative text in which the overwhelming depth of ancient Greek philosophy intersects with Furuta’s own scholarly instincts and lived experience.

2019-07-06
I came from Shina history, but for some reason I was assigned to political science at the University of Tsukuba and became a political scientist.
It seems my paper on North Korea was well received.

The following continues from the previous chapter.
The Misfortune of Epicurus the Seer.
I came from Shina history, but for some reason I was assigned to political science at the University of Tsukuba and became a political scientist.
It seems my paper on North Korea was well received.
I often write about philosophy as well, but I have never once received any training in philosophical research.
So only recently have I finally realized just how extraordinary Greek philosophy is, and I am deeply moved all by myself.
I read a book called Epicurus: Doctrines and Letters (Iwanami Bunko), and he was a man of the fourth century B.C.
“Do not bring myth into the study of nature” (Letter to Pythocles, Principal Doctrine 12), “The gods do not hear human prayers” (Fragment 2, 58), “Dreams do not become prophecy” (Fragment 1, 24), “There is no problem if all things are accidental. For if all things are necessary, then even the existence of those who say things are accidental must also be necessary. Primary necessity is evil” (Principal Doctrine 16, Fragment 1, 9 and 40), “Good and evil are a matter of foreseeing consequences” (Principal Doctrine 34). If I quoted them as they are, it would fill an entire page, so I compressed and abstracted them.
The original wording is slightly different.
But in essence, that is what is written there.
Today every one of these hits the mark, but there is no way a man could have said such things in the ancient world before Christ and remained unharmed.
In antiquity, there were many people who looked at nature and spun myths, who told fortunes from dreams, and who lived by doing so.
Those who frightened people and made them bow down, saying things like today’s thunder is divine wrath or the sea is rough because the sea god has been angered, must surely have clicked their tongues at Epicurus.
Or perhaps they drove him away with whips.
To transcend time in all things means precisely this, and Epicurus was a terrifying seer.
He was even greater than Micah, the prophet of Moresheth-Gath in ancient Israel, who foretold the destruction of Jerusalem a hundred years in advance.
Please look a little more closely at the content.
Does it not strike you as astonishingly cold?
It says that God does not hear human prayers, and has nothing to do with nature.
Rather than looking directly from the present with the head alone, that is, with linear time inside the mind, at records, let us call historical research that synchronizes with the time when the records existed through the body, that is, with bodily time inside the body, lands on that ground, looks around, and smells the air, “landing-ism.”
Since the former surveys the past as though one had remained on this side with one’s head intact and boarded a vehicle, let us call it “panoramic-ism.”
Maruyama Masao would probably belong to this side.
As I could not find the right words, I came up with these as a desperate expedient.
If there are better terms, of course I intend to follow them.
Epicurus was, for his own time, an intolerable existence, and naturally suffered slander, abuse, and oppression, as recorded in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Greek Philosophers.
Because he suffered so greatly, he left behind the maxim, “Live in hiding” (Fragment 2, 86; this is exactly as it appears in the text).
It is somehow a phrase that cuts close to the bone.
The Greatness of Ancient Greek Philosophy.
God abandons human beings, nature behaves cruelly, and the people of the world exclude them.
To fill in such pain and discomfort, and to live on as if nothing were the matter, Epicurus’s philosophy had no choice but to be hedonism.
“If I remove the pleasures of taste, the pleasures of love, the pleasures of hearing, and also the pleasant stirrings in vision aroused by beautiful form, I do not know what I should consider good” (Fragment 2, 10).
By this point, you will have understood that he was not simply gluttonous, lecherous, fond of music, and partial to beautiful women.
God, nature, and society were all harsh to Epicurus, and naturally he was always poor, living on meals of bread and water, and since he had no money, he could not even go to brothels.
And yet one can more or less infer that Epicurus was handsome and surely popular with women.
Just like me when I was young.
I too am a seer, but I did not realize that until much later.
I should have read Epicurus much sooner.
Not in order to tell her such things, but because I wanted to escape the fear of death pressing in on me, I ended up telephoning Professor Hasegawa Michiko in the middle of the night.
She is an extraordinary person, and I think she is probably one of the company of the female prophets Deborah or Huldah from the Old Testament.
In contrast to her kindness in instantly understanding and saying that I should call anytime, I went on at length complaining about how much Epicurus resembled me, and about the pain and discomfort, that is to say the unhappiness, I had lived through until now.
Professor Hasegawa, sounding somewhat exasperated, said, “I am more on the side of Parmenides,” and ended the call.
So, incorrigibly enough, I went to the library the next day, borrowed Parmenides from the complete works of Plato, and read it, and this too was truly tremendous in content.
As I repeat, I have never received any training in philosophical research, so all of this is pure emotion.
First of all, Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato belong to different periods, so what is written there is cast as a “conversation of spirits.”
The logic is completely different from modern logic, so I cannot understand at all what is being argued.
If there were a book or paper something like “The Logic of Conversation Among the Ancient Greeks,” it would serve as a guide, but since this is outside my field, I cannot investigate it.
I was completely at a loss, and read it vaguely while lying down and getting up again, and I found that the concept of time had become the concept of age.
The concept of nature, too, excludes things like hair, mud, and filth as trivial.
Well, from the standpoint of panoramic-ism, both nature and time do not remotely reach the modern age; they are immature.
Even so, I understood the greatness.
What is being discussed is whether “the other side consists of a whole, or is a collection of parts.”
This was something I vaguely noticed when I once again shamelessly wrote a book called Reading European Thought (Chikuma Shinsho), but it was a passage where I sensed that it would be dangerous to delve too deeply, and so I slipped through it.
In this way, intuition always comes to me first, and words descend only afterward.
If one says that one realizes only afterward what one has already done, and that what one has done gathers itself together and arrives as a single sentence, that begins to sound like a prophet.
Many readers probably will not understand what I am talking about, but since I am writing without regard for readers, I ask you simply to slip past this part as well.
In any case, through this, I came to understand.
Why Professor Hasegawa Michiko’s writing is like “how deep the darkness into which one throws a scarab beetle” (Kyoshi).
To be continued.