Originally published on July 6, 2019.
Arguing that ancient Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations did not help open the modern age, while ancient Greek civilization alone played a decisive role, this essay sharply reexamines Epicurus, traces his link to Hobbes, and criticizes Marx’s misreading as well as the negligence of Japan’s social science world.
It is a vivid discussion of ancient philosophy, modern science, materialism, and the limits and possibilities of social science.

2019-07-06
It was of no use at all in opening the modern age, but ancient Greek civilization alone was of immense use.

The following continues from the previous chapter.
Enough Already with Marx Fools.
Thus, the greatness of Greek philosophy had been forgotten until it flowed back into Western Europe through Islam after the thirteenth century, so like ancient Egyptian civilization and ancient Assyrian civilization alike, it was all a “lost ancient civilization.”
And because ancient Egyptian civilization was based on the worship of the dead, not ancestor worship, and ancient Assyrian civilization was based on the worship of the stars, they were of no use at all in opening the modern age, but ancient Greek civilization alone was of immense use.
I forgot to say that I am a social scientist and a political scientist, and so I speak in this cold-blooded manner.
In social science, the better the research, the more time brings cruelty, space spreads desolation, and human beings bring sheer nastiness.
It is a painful discipline, but in order to offer the masses an understanding of the world after the modern age, there is no other path than this discipline.
The humanities, on the other hand, will inevitably decline.
“On this earth, nothing noble or solemn will be born any longer” I wrote this in the Sankei Shimbun’s Seiron column on November 5 of last year.
Therefore, with regard to scholarship motivated by such things, it would be better to select what is useful and leave that behind.
And that is what is beginning to happen.
In fields such as Chinese philosophy and ancient Japanese history, students no longer come.
Now, as for what happened to Epicurus afterward, around the sixteenth century he was grouped together with Democritus and others as an atomist, and in the seventeenth century Gassendi of southern France dressed him up in Christian fashion in the form of the creation of atoms by God, but contrary to his intentions, by the latter half of the seventeenth century he spread as an anti-Christ, and that seems to have reached England.
Atomism is part of the study of nature in ancient Greek philosophy, but seen from the standpoint of panoramic-ism, it cannot be called science at all.
After that, philosophical science was all discarded around the time of Galileo and replaced by modern science, so from the standpoint of social science it is of no importance.
To begin with, if one looks at Epicurus’s understanding of nature, one finds him saying of thunder things like, “It is because the fire that is swept upward contains ever more violent wind, and, driven by this, shatters the clouds,” which shows how utterly trivial it was.
More important than that is what follows it, where he says that in the study of nature, “myth alone must be kept away” (Epicurus: Doctrines and Letters, p. 55).
That part, rather, lived on as a causal story.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, he was understood as anti-religious, but that too was a misreading.
Epicurus believed in God, but he merely said the truth: that even if one prays, God will not help.
And then it reached England just as it was, and there he met good people.
In a passage in Volume Two, “On Man,” of Hobbes’s Elements of Philosophy, where pleasure and pain, good and evil are discussed at length, there is this: “Science or learning is a good, because it is pleasure. … Those who argue about the causes of things on the basis of what others have written … are at times even evil. For by fixing ancient errors, they obstruct the road to truth” (Hakusuisha? actually user said Kashiwa Shobo, 2012, p. 683).
And then what Epicurus encountered in Germany was Marx, and his dissertation, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.”
Marx grafted Epicurus’s ancient errors onto the foundation of his own materialism.
And what was the result?
The two communist translators of the Iwanami Bunko edition of Epicurus: Doctrines and Letters, Izuru Taka of Tokyo Imperial University and Masatane Iwasaki of Hitotsubashi University, translated Epicurus through the story of Marxist materialism.
“Even in this atomistic religion of the gods, Epicurus could be no more than a Feuerbach before Marx” (Commentary).
Today that line is an object of roaring laughter, and the two men brought historical shame upon themselves after death.
To begin with, it is unbelievable, but Japan’s social scientists believed the following one line from Marx’s Capital, “The pure vulgarian Jeremy Bentham, that tedious know-it-all and loquacious oracle of ordinary nineteenth-century bourgeois common sense” (Otsuki Shoten edition, Vol. 1 in two books, p. 795), and after that they did no Bentham studies whatsoever.