다케우치와 마루야마는 여러 가지 의미에서 서로 대조적이다. 그들의 작업 방식, 사상 자원 및 일본 전후 사상계에서의 역할 등, 어느 것 하나 합치하는 것이 없다. 그러나 역사는 이 둘을 하나의 무대 위에 올려놓았을 뿐더러, 그들로 하여금 전후 일본 사상계의 기초를 다지는 임무를 공동으로 수행하도록 하였다. 이 둘은 일본의 침략 전쟁과 전후 사회 재건이라는 특정 시대를 함께 겪어왔고, 또 이로 인해 위기의 시대 속에서 일본의 현실을 감당해줄 만한 사상 자원을 생산해내는 책임을 떠맡게 되었다. 사상과 현실의 관계를 정리하는 것을 보면 이들은 비교적 일치하는 인식론적 특징을 지니고 있다. 즉, 둘 모두 효과적인 사상과 지식 전통을 세우는 것을 자신의 임무로 여기고 있다는 점이다. 이 두 일본 사상가의 성과를 같이 놓고 논의하는 일을 통해, 우리는 새롭게 학문의 목표를 설정하고, 얄팍하고 간략화 된 ‘비판적 사상 생산’을 지양할 수 있을 것이며, 더 나아가 질적으로 양적으로 우수한 지식 전통과 사상 전통을 세울 수 있을 것이다.
Both Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) and Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) belong to the generation that lived through the wartime and postwar periods and became leaders of the intellectual sphere in postwar Japan. However, in every aspect, the two men differed from one another. One was a literary critic who took Lu Xun as his intellectual mentor, while the other was a scholar in the field of Japanese political intellectual history who derived his thoughts from European liberalism; one was an independent intellectual who made a life-long effort against knowledge production within the academic system, while the other was an outstanding scholar who successfully established the discipline of Japanese political intellectual history within the institution. Their approaches to work, their intellectual resources, and their roles in the intellectual sphere of postwar Japan hardly coincide. However, both were driven by the waves of history onto one stage, and their works have collectively built up the intellectual foundation for postwar Japan.
1. Historical background, shared experiences and its limitations on knowledge production Both Takeuchi Yoshimi and Maruyama Masao witnessed the invasion and the post-war social reconstruction. Several background factors need to be specified in order to contextualize the two intellectual figures. First is the particular nature of the “fifteen years’ war”; the second is the intellectual condition within the particular background of the war; and the third is Japan’s first experience of being defeated and occupied in its modern history.
2. Epistemology of knowledge production: relationship of intellectual (idea) production and reality Through the writing of “Luxun,” Takeuchi not only formed the starting point of his intellectual work, but also set out his own interpretative dimension on the relationship of intellectual work and reality. What he concentrated on is, in fact, a far more profound and general question of how to build a relatively independent dimension for intellectual production. Takeuchi insisted on developing his discussion from a specific practical problem, yet never ended the discussion with specific issues. What Takeuchi was concerned with may not seem “politically correct,” which, as a result, is more or less confusing for later generations to tell whether Takeuchi was a leftist or rightist.
The way Maruyama analyzed was more sophisticated than Takeuchi. To Maruyama, the key difference in how intellectual history differs from the history of facts was that the latter focuses on the analysis of the time links of historical facts itself while the former focuses on granting meaning to historical facts. If the work of intellectual history is to analyze the meaning of a specific event within reality and the analysis itself has to be original, to redefine what has already been granted a certain meaning and then its relationship with real practice is indirect. Like Takeuchi, Maruyama denied the epistemology that tries to evade or directly applies to reality. At the same time, he highly valued the basic condition that “thought cannot cover reality” and emphasized building the layer of “daily narration,” which is different from a macroscopic narration, to effectively adjust theory in the constantly changing reality and directly face unbounded real issues.
3．Intellectual character in a Time of Crisis What Takeuchi and Maruyama had to face was an era filled with crises and uncertain factors. The basic problem with which they dealt, though from almost contradictory approaches, is why Japan had taken the fascist road and how to avoid recommitting the same error.
Starting from the question of subjectivity, Takeuchi adopted an approach that would not be accepted by other disciplines of social sciences. By personifying state and society, he questioned the ethical character of state and society. In contrast to Takeuchi, Maruyama studied humans in motion. Humans in motion, in the view of political science, means to be ever-changing, so it is hard to predict the expression and decisions in various dynamics. Thus, the difficulty of political science is that it has to analyze the relationship of the individual, the group, even the state in consistency and abnormal conditions, and seek some predictive analytical factors. The “state’s ideal” within Takeuchi’s works can be substituted with the “state’s idea” in the discussion of Maruyama. However, the directions of their discussion were exceptionally different: the state’s idea does not necessarily contain “good,” the morally positive value in the sense of ethics; instead, it only means the legitimacy of the existence and the consistency in the inner behavior of the state. If we have to position it in terms of ethics, then the consistency will often be presented as “evil in its minimal scale.”Just as Takeuchi started his work from Lu Xun and finally returned to that point, Maruyama, in his later years, returned to Fukuzawa Yukichi, who was his intellectual starting point. In his later years, he focused on Fukuzawa’s thoughts on intellectual enlightenment to Japanese society, and then spent a lot of time and energy interpreting “Outline of Civilization (bunmeironnogairyaku).” The work of Maruyama’s “Reading Outline of Civilization” is a meaningful masterpiece of intellectual history, for it marked when Maruyama, in his later years, tried to escape his earlier position of wholesale negation towards Japanese modern intellectual tradition to search for intellectual sources within Japanese intellectual tradition with a more sophisticated historical attitude. The interpretation of “Outline of Civilization” revealed Maruyama’s intention of seeking possibilities of equity and anti-hegemony from Fukuzawa and his attempt to seek internal intellectual resources against post-Fascist ideologies from the historical period when the state rationality was founded. This unfinished work showed that Maruyama’s attitude in dealing with Japanese intellectual issues, at last, sided with Takeuchi Yoshimi.
The inheritance Maruyama left for the Japanese intellectual world greatly exceeds what has been discussed above. His works of “Thought and behavior of modern Japanese politics” is worthy of attention, especially in the sense of being complementary to Takeuchi’s work. Takeuchi Yoshimi and Maruyama Masao both left abundant intellectual and knowledge inheritance. In times of discipline fragmentation and soullessness within intellectual production, discussing the works of two Japanese thinkers together will help us reset working goals, avoid producing superficial and simplified “critical thoughts,” and thus truly build up knowledge and intellectual tradition.
