After August six years ago, I came to know a man named Hiroshi Furuta.
Just as Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the post-war world, Hiroshi Furuta is one of the leading scholars in the post-war world.
The Asahi Shimbun never informed us of the existence of such a person.
The cruelty of the Asahi Shimbun is more evident than ever in that one aspect alone.
By his admission, he is second only to Hidehiro Okada as a scholar, which is quite right.
I have not read any of Okada's books; after all, not only do both Furuta and Takayama pay the highest respect to him, but even Wang Qishan has praised the depth of Okada's learning.
Hiroshi Furuta sometimes radiates his characteristic humor, making me laugh aloud every time.
He also has a humor that can only be genuine.
The following is from a collection of articles he writes for the monthly magazine WiLL, titled fighting Epicurus.
I was laughing from the very beginning.
Let's get ready for a new era.
The University of Tokyo's humanities authority has fallen to the ground.
The following dialogue is based on a phone call from a confident woman, a former newspaper reporter.
She said, "Sir, how do you know so much about Western philosophy?"
I've been listening to classes at random and reading the original Western textbooks on my lap since I was a kid.
Since intellectuals call the Japanese idiot/no excellent/native
"Didn't you read the Japanese ones?"
Since intellectuals call the Japanese idiot/no sound/native, I didn't read it, thinking that what they wrote was also a product of the idiot/no sound/native.
"Haha, how's college going?"
My advisor was a child of a substitute teacher in Gifu, Mr. Hiroaki Kani (historical anthropology), a hardened hyper-realist, so he didn't lie to me. One day he said to me,
-If I had a good home, I wouldn't have majored in China." "Where did you choose?" "Europe, of course.
I knew it, so I continued to study the original European texts on my own.
"Can't you start with Europe?"
It's hard to do that unless you have a good family background and the cultural capital accumulated by your grandfather and parents. The cultural layer is very thick. There is a mixture of different and useless things, so you have to choose the good ones to move forward. With zero accumulation of such experiences, you end up with your interests.
"East Asia?"
The culture is very boring. Besides, China is full of wrong things, so Korea is more comfortable if it's equally useless. The Chinese language is easy to learn. You can read it as a record of people who kept doing the wrong things without trying to learn anything. Then you will have time to read the original Western sources.
"That's not awful."
Yes, it's terrible. But the reality is that it's cruel, brutal, and unjust. You shouldn't think that academics are noble because medicine is bloody, and engineering is greasy. The humanities are fine as long as the scholars who write about them are high character.
"There were people who made learning seem noble."
"The Germans are terrible. So much of the Anglo-French complex, they play lofty to fill it up, but in fact, they have fallen into arrogance.
"For example, ...."
Kant has removed an important concept, the idea. It caused a sense of despair among young people that they could not reach the 'divine realm = truth.' It is called the 'Kant crisis.' Hegel lied that 'the progress of history is inevitable.' But this relieved the German intellectuals in the Anglo-French complex. After all, it took 30 years to unify Germany. History never progresses efficiently by remembering that Angkor Wat was not in the Middle Ages but of the jungle's darkness. History has shown that nations are far more likely to perish without progress.
"Even backward Japanese intellectuals were relieved to be fooled by it."
Yes, Hegel's 'Progressive History' was window-dressed by Marx as science and became 'materialistic history.' He continued to believe in it. Prof. Maruyama Masao realized in 1985 that 'history has no laws, only cause and effect. However, four years later, he changed his mind when he realized that saying this would destroy all the achievements on which it rested. 'Stand on the progressive view of history to preserve our orthodoxy,' he said, driving his disciples to blindness (see Orthodoxy and Heresy, pp. 49, 50, 53, 195).
"How could it break?"
If you're a positivist scholar, you read the records yourself, find the cause-and-effect relationships, and write a paper. That is, the scholar himself makes history. So they write with that awareness. That means that the Progressive History view scholars do not have that awareness, which means that they have not done any empirical research.
"It's been exposed as being unproven."
Yes, that's the cold reality. It must say that humanities scholars at the University of Tokyo have been building authority without empirical research. So does sociologist Professor Mita Sosuke. In 2006, when sociology was in an undefinable state of affairs, he said, 'Sociology is the knowledge that transcends borders.' Yet, conversely, he has been trying to make students ignorant and avidya. (See Collected Works VII, "Transboundary Knowledge").
He wanted to protect the authority of sociology at Tokyo University. It was a pity for the positivists within the University of Tokyo.
"You've been doing empirical research?"
Yes, I've been doing social science, combining empirical research with intuition and transcendence. I was doing social science with empirical research combined with intuition and transcendence. So I experimented with the Old Testament record to see if it would work for anything.
"That's the book the other day?"
Yes, that book. So, I could finally say 'hidden qualities' (qualitas occulta), which I wrote in the postscript to East Asia 'Anti-Japanese' Triangle (Bunshun Shinsho, 2005).
This draft continues.
