Maruyama Masao and philosophical thought in post-war Japan

1If the names of Nishida and of his disciples of the Kyoto School are well known today in French speaking countries, the recent Japanese philosophical scene remains widely ignored. What do we know about the success of Marxist thought in the post-war period, when the Kyoto School was on the decline? What do we know about the Japanese existentialists of the Sartrian sphere of influence during the 1950ies and 1960ies? What do we know about the huge productiveness of Japanese commentaries in just about all the most innovative Western philosophical currents? …

Maruyama Masao.

2If we want to simplify a situation that is obvioulsy more complex, one could say that after the Kyoto School 京都学派, dominating the philosophical scene before the war, we can observe the influence of the Nihon Tetsugakukai 日本哲学会 (“Philosophical Society of Japan”), mainly around the University of Tokyo, and greatly influenced by a Marxism that was being glorioulsy restored after the persecutions endured during the dark times of militarism, and expressing a total freedom of thought within a new Japan, reconstructing itself on a strong democratic basis. The Japanese Marxist current after 1945, exercising a true fascination on almost all the intellectuals, is then much more open to Sovietic works than is Europe, locked up by the Cold War, or the USA, totally prey to McCarthyism. It’s evolution however proves it to be willing to overcome the ideological rigidity of orthodox Marxism-Leninism and to revalue the humanistic dimension of historical materialism, witnessed by the writings of the younger Marx. It is within such a context that we can observe a reflexion on modernism and the problematic relation that Japan might have had with it during the preceding decades. Among the most original thinkers of this current, one might remember, in order of their growing distance from Marxist orthodoxy: Hiromatsu Wataru, Yoshimi Takeuchi and Mutai Risaku.

3Far behind the Marxist sphere of influence one can mark, starting during the mid 1950ies, an interest for analytic philosophy, mainly American, studies on epistemology, on ethics, as well as a considerable number of specialized works on the history of Western philosophy—particularly on Greek Antiquity and Medieval Europe (Sophia University of Tokyo playing here a decisive role). None of these works has yet seriously interested anybody outside Japan.

4However there has been some positive reception, particularly in the United States, for the researches on the history of religious thought in Asia, by Nakamura Hajime, researches on mysticism and Islam, by Izutsu Toshihiko, on the history of Japanese literature, by Kato Shuichi, the literary criticism of Kobayashi Hideo and also (closer to the modernist movement), the ideological analyzes of Japan bu Maruyama Masao—of which we will say a word further down.

Covers of Maruyama Masao’s Loyalties and Rebellion, German and Japanese editions.

5More recently, some publications on the cultural dimension of psychology or psycho-pathology have aroused some interest outside the archipelago: the works by Yuasa Yasuo in depth psychology, those of the psychoanalyst Doi Takeo concerning the Japanese notion of amae 甘え (infantile attachment) or the conceptual binomial omote-ura 表-裏 (the front and the back of the social facade), the Daseinsanalytical contributions of Kimura Bin on the notion of aida 間 (“betweenness”) or jikaku 自覚 (“self-awareness”)… Two francophile authors, if they are indeed known to the Japanologists, should be better introduced in the philosophical circles: Nakamura Yûjiro, with his original researches on the notion of sensus communis and Sakabe Megumi, who studied the semantic richness of the Japanese classical idiom…

6The fruitfullness of Japanese thought for European philosophical reflexion is obvious, as we can already see, for example, with the works by Augustin Berque, drawing, with equal ease, from the Oriental and Occidental sources of contemporary thought.

7Of this vast picture, we would just like to retain here the figure of Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) and, in the following lines, touch on his exceptional intellectual stature: altogether historian, political analyst and sociologist of contemporary Japan, the depth of his views, the perspicacity and originality of his interpretations convey to their author a calibre that can be considered as authentically philosophical. Compared sometimes to Sartre, for his impact on the political positions of his contemporaries, sometimes to Arendt, or even Habermas for the type of concern that were his in relation to his analyzes of totalitarianism in regard to democracy, Maruyama is probably the most impressive philosophical thinker of the second half of twentieth century Japan. He is moreover an appropriate parallel to the equally exceptional calibre of Nishida Kitarô (1874–1945) who dominated, as for himself, the philosophy of the first half of the same century. If Nishida, the founder of the famous “Kyoto School,” was a deeply original thinker on the level of cognitive, religious and meta-physical research, one knows that he was quite contraversial for his ambiguous political stance during the militaristic regime. What has worsened the regrettable reputation of the philosopher is the participation of some of his disciples of the Kyoto School to the sadly famous symposium of 1942 on “Overcoming modernity” (kindai no chôkuko 近代の超克)—interpreted by some critics as a rallying to the regime. The fact that the most famous philosopher of contemporary Japan, as well as the school he has founded, could have had such a bad reputation weighes heavyly on the reception of Japanese thought in the West, and notably in the countries of French language.

8In front of this state of affaires, the discovery of a way of thinking so ideologically healthy and balanced as that of Maruyama appears to us, in a way, as an occasion to save the lost honour. Indeed, Maruyama isn’t the only intellectual to have regiven some authentic political respectability to post-war Japanese thought—one could also name Nakamura Hajime and Kato Shuichi, as well as, more recently, Karatani Kôjin, Nakamura Yujirô, Kimura Bin, Ueda Shizuteru and a number of others—, but he is the only one to have brought his reflexion in the middle of the most difficult ideological questions of his times and this with an acute sense of the responsability of the intellectual. One of the paradoxes, and not the least, that characterizes the complementarity that we are establishing between Nishida and Maruyama resides in the fact that the former, aiming a universally valid discourse, expressed, to some extend, positions marked by the cultural particularity of Japan, while the latter, spending a great effort studying Japanese intellectual history, has a way of thinking that is more clearly universal. The work of Maruyama, far from being limited to a regional interest, questions us in the fact that it shows what the ideal of democracy and of modernity become when they is taken over within a far-Eastern context. The universal dimension of modernity appears thus more clearly—without yet concealing its problematic character in a time, like ours, when cultural identity and unicity are being underlined in an unprecedented provocative manner all over the globe.