2020/11/29
It was only six years after that August that I came to know a man named Hiroshi Furuta.
Just as Masayuki Takayama is the only journalist of his kind in the postwar world, Hiroshi Furuta is one of its leading scholars.
The Asahi Shimbun has still not told us that such a person exists.
In this respect alone, the Asahi Shimbun’s cruelty is clearer than ever.
By his own admission, as a scholar he ranks second only to Hidehiro Okada.
After all, Furuta and Takayama hold Okada in the highest esteem, and even Wang Qishan has praised the depth of Okada’s scholarship.
Hiroshi Furuta occasionally displays his distinctive humor, and each time it makes me laugh out loud.
His humor also has a sincerity that could only be genuine.
The following comes from an article he contributed to the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Fighting Epicurus.”
I laughed from the very beginning.
Let us prepare for a new era.
The authority of the University of Tokyo’s humanities has fallen to the ground.
The following dialogue is based on a telephone call from a woman who had once worked as a newspaper reporter.
She asked, “Sir, how do you know so much about Western philosophy?”
“Because, ever since I was young, I have attended lectures at random and read original Western books with them resting on my lap.
After all, intellectuals call Japanese people fools / excellent / natives.”
“Didn’t you read Japanese books?”
“Since intellectuals call Japanese people fools / ignorant / natives, I did not read them. I thought that what they wrote must also be the product of fools / ignorant people / natives.”
“Ha ha, how was university?”
“My academic adviser, Hiroaki Kani of historical anthropology, was the child of a substitute teacher in Gifu Prefecture and a hardened hyperrealist, so he did not lie to me. One day he told me,
‘If I had come from a good home, I would not have majored in China.’ ‘What would you have chosen?’ ‘Europe, of course.’
So I continued studying original European texts on my own.”
“Couldn’t you start with Europe?”
“That is easier if you have a good family background and the cultural capital accumulated by your grandfather and parents. The layers of culture are very thick. Many different and useless things are mixed together, so you have to select what is good to move forward. Without any accumulation of that sort of experience, you end up with only your own interests.”
“East Asia?”
“The culture could be thicker.
Besides, China is full of things that are wrong, so if both are equally useless, Korea is more comfortable.
Chinese is easy to learn.
You can read its texts as a record of people doing wrong things without making any special effort to learn from them.
Then you have time to read Western sources in the original.”
“That doesn’t sound terrible.”
“Yes, it is terrible. But reality is cruel, brutal, and unfair.
You should not assume scholarship is noble simply because medicine is bloody and engineering is greasy.
The humanities are fine as long as the scholars who study them have fine character.”
“There were people who made scholarship seem noble.”
“Germans are terrible.
Their Anglo-French complex is so strong that they pretend to be lofty to compensate for it, but in fact they have fallen into arrogance.”
“For example, …”
“Kant removed an important concept: the Idea.
That gave young people a sense of despair that they could not reach the ‘divine realm = truth.’ This is called the ‘Kant crisis.’
Hegel falsely claimed that ‘the progress of history is inevitable.’
But this reassured German intellectuals with their Anglo-French complex.
After all, it took thirty years to unify Germany.
You can easily see that history does not necessarily progress by remembering that Angkor Wat was not in the Middle Ages but in the darkness of the jungle.
History shows that nations are far more likely to perish without progress.”
“Even backward Japanese intellectuals were relieved to be taken in by it.”
“Marx dressed Hegel’s ‘progressive history’ in the clothing of science, turning it into ‘materialist history.’ He continued to believe it. In 1985, Professor Masao Maruyama realized that ‘history has no laws, only causes and effects.’ Four years later, however, he changed his mind when he realized that saying so would undermine all the achievements on which he depended. He told his students, ‘Stand by the progressive view of history to preserve our orthodoxy,’ leading them into blindness (see Orthodoxy and Heresy, pp. 49, 50, 53, 195).”
“How could it be broken?”
“If you are an empirical scholar, you read the records yourself, identify the causal relationships, and write a paper. In other words, the scholar makes history personally. Scholars write with that awareness. Scholars who hold a progressive view of history lack that awareness, which means they have done no empirical research so far.”
“It has been exposed as unverified.”
“Yes, that is the cold reality. Humanities scholars at the University of Tokyo have built their authority without empirical research. The same applies to the sociologist Professor Sōsuke Mita. In 2006, when sociology faced an uncertain future, he said, ‘Sociology is knowledge that transcends borders.’ Yet, on the contrary, he has tried to make students ignorant and fanatical. (See Collected Works, Vol. VII, ‘Knowledge That Transcends Borders.’)
He wanted to protect the authority of sociology at the University of Tokyo. That was unfortunate for the empiricists there.”
“Have you conducted empirical research?”
“I have practiced social science combining empirical research with intuition and transcendence. I was practicing social science that combined empirical research with intuition and transcendence. I experimented with the records of the Old Testament to see whether they would work.”
“Is that the book you read the other day?”
“Yes, that book. So I was finally able to speak of the ‘hidden qualities’ (qualitas occulta) that I mentioned in the afterword to East Asia’s ‘Anti-Japanese’ Triangle (Bunshun Shinsho, 2005).”
This draft continues.