November 29, 2020
It was only after August six years ago that I came to know a man named Hiroshi Furuta.
Just as Masayuki Takayama is, in my view, a journalist without equal in the postwar world, Hiroshi Furuta is one of its leading scholars.
The Asahi Shimbun had never told us that such a person existed.
That fact alone shows more clearly than ever how deplorable I find the Asahi Shimbun.
As he himself acknowledges, he is a scholar second only to Hidehiro Okada, and I believe that is entirely right.
I have not read Okada’s books, but both Furuta and Takayama hold him in the highest esteem, and even Wang Qishan has praised the depth of Okada’s learning.
Hiroshi Furuta sometimes displays his distinctive humor, and it makes me laugh aloud every time.
He also has the kind of humor that only a genuine scholar can possess.
The following is taken from his series, “Fighting Epicurus,” published in a monthly magazine.
I began laughing from the very start.
Let us prepare our minds for a new era.
The authority of the University of Tokyo’s humanities has fallen to the ground.
The following dialogue arose from a telephone call by a woman who had formerly worked as a newspaper reporter.
“Professor, how do you know so much about Western philosophy?”
“Because, ever since I was a child, I listened to lessons only casually while reading Western texts in the original on my lap.”
“Didn’t you read books written by Japanese authors?”
“Those intellectuals called Japanese people fools, failures, and natives. Since they themselves were Japanese, I assumed that what they wrote must also be the work of fools, failures, and natives, so I did not read it.”
“Ha! What happened at university?”
“My adviser, Hiroaki Kani, who studied historical anthropology, was the son of a substitute teacher in Gifu. He was a thoroughly realistic man who had made his own way, so he did not lie to me. One day he told me this—”
“Furuta, if I had come from a good family, I would not have studied China.” “Then what would you have studied?” “Europe, of course.”
“I thought that was just as I had expected, and continued studying European works in the original on my own.”
“Couldn’t you have started with Europe?”
“That is easier if you come from a well-established family and have the cultural capital accumulated by your grandparents and parents. Europe’s cultural layers are very deep. They contain mistaken and useless things as well, so you have to select what is good in order to move forward. Without any accumulation of that kind of experience, your research ends up as a matter of personal taste.”
“What about East Asia?”
“Its cultural layers are much thinner. Besides, China is full of mistaken things. If the material is equally useless, studying Korea is easier. Classical Chinese is easy to read, too. Rather than expecting to learn something from it, you can read it as a record of people repeatedly doing the wrong things. That leaves you time to read Western texts in the original.”
“Isn’t that rather harsh?”
“It certainly is. But reality is cold, bleak, and harsh. You must not imagine that scholarship is inherently noble. Medicine is covered in blood, and engineering is covered in grease. The same goes for the humanities: it is enough if the scholar writing about them has a noble character.”
“Some people made scholarship seem noble.”
“The Germans are terrible. Their strong sense of inferiority toward Britain and France led them to put on an air of nobility to make up for it, but in reality they fell into arrogance.”
“For example?”
“Kant discarded the important concept of the Idea. This left young people in despair at their inability to reach ‘the divine realm = truth.’ It is called the ‘Kant crisis.’ Hegel told the lie that ‘historical progress is inevitable.’ Yet that reassured German intellectuals who felt inferior to Britain and France. After all, German unification still took another thirty years. To see that history does not necessarily progress, you need only remember that what followed Angkor Wat was not a medieval age but the darkness of the jungle. Far more nations in history have perished without progressing.”
“Japanese intellectuals, backward as they were, were also deceived by this and felt reassured.”
“Yes. Marx dressed Hegel’s ‘progressive view of history’ up as science, turning it into the ‘materialist view of history,’ and people continued to believe in it. In 1985, Professor Masao Maruyama realized that ‘history has no laws, only causal relationships.’ Four years later, however, he reconsidered: saying so would destroy all the work he had built upon that premise. He told his disciples to ‘stand by the progressive view of history in order to preserve our orthodoxy,’ leading them into ignorance and delusion (see Orthodoxy and Heresy, pp. 49, 50, 53, and 195).”
“Why would his work collapse?”
“An empirical scholar reads the records personally, identifies causal relationships, and then writes a paper. In that sense, the scholar constructs history and writes with an awareness of doing so. Scholars who hold a progressive view of history lack that awareness, which means that they have not conducted empirical research.”
“So their lack of empirical research was exposed.”
“Yes. That is the cold reality. One must say that humanities scholars at the University of Tokyo have concentrated on establishing their authority without conducting empirical research. The sociologist Professor Munesuke Mita is another example. In 2006, when sociology had reached a point at which it could no longer be defined, he declared that ‘sociology is knowledge that crosses boundaries,’ thereby leading students into ignorance and delusion instead (see ‘Knowledge That Crosses Boundaries’ in his collected works). He probably wanted to protect the authority of sociology at the University of Tokyo. I feel sorry for the empiricists within the university.”
“Professor, have you carried out empirical research yourself?”
“Yes. I have pursued social science by adding intuition and transcendence to empirical research. To test whether that approach could be applied elsewhere, I experimented with records from the Old Testament.”
“Was that the book you mentioned the other day?”
“Yes, that book. At last I could speak of the ‘hidden quality’ (qualitas occulta) that I had written about in the afterword to East Asia’s ‘Anti-Japanese’ Triangle (Bunshun Shinsho, 2005).”
To be continued.