Sartre used to be the center of my philosophical interest. When I was a cliant of his, I was drawn into Marxism, and when I became familiar with the political movements of student power, I needed to have a position of my own.
Sartre also regarded Marx as the last (impossible to climb) philosophy, but whereas Marxism seemed to have a logic in which the subject was automatically required from the theory of objective situations, Sartre's philosophy was based on the freedom of the individual.
It seemed to provide an ideological position. Sartre seemed to be opening up a field in which I could question my own participation and solidarity. In China, participating in demonstrations against the government's coronavirus policies is itself a danger to one's life, and while the situation I was in as a student was not to that extent, I was still in danger.
Therefore, I was afraid that if I had a half-hearted idea, I would be affected. In certain situations, I needed to have a reason to remain silent. Actually, the truth was that I had no choice but to remain silent.
Now, I almost went back to reminiscing about my student days, but what I wanted to think about here was not about Sartre or Marx, but about Hegel's reality, which is really approaching me today.
The essence of this sense of reality is that the true nature of society (modern civil society) can only be seen once I am able to understand Hegel to a certain extent, but in the first place, we have not been able to grasp the structure of society with the weight of reality.
I have a feeling that it wasn't there. It seems that civil society was completely missing from the concepts of economy, individuals, classes, and nations. Therefore, rights, duties, laws, etc. were somehow unfamiliar to me.
I don't think I was familiar with the Japanese Constitution either. It's shocking to think that in such a conscious state, I used to say things that seemed to criticize society, but I can't help it because it seems to be true.
This does not mean, of course, that one cannot criticize society without reading Hegel. However, if you read it, you will become more self-aware and more confident in your own judgment. I plan to continue reading books by Hegel and Hegel scholars until the day I die, but I think I should just make it a hobby, just like learning English.
The book that made me want to study Hegel's philosophy was ``Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit,'' written by Naotake Kato. Or, to be more precise, that book made me feel like I understood Hegel's dialectic. Although I did not understand all of Naotake Kato's explanation, I felt that I was able to grasp the methodology of Hegel's philosophy.
This is because by making self-consciousness a substance (living and creating the foundation of all things), I thought that self-consciousness is the same as my own self-consciousness, and that if I could read and understand it, I would be able to recognize Hegel's absolute knowledge.
Absolute knowledge has become something that has absorbed the achievements of Western philosophy up to that point and the education of Europe since Christianity and Greece, and it is said that a single philosophical book has the content to understand Western culture.
For me, it was especially appealing to gain access to the cultural repository of education. Just as The Tale of Genji is a repository of Japanese culture, in the West it is Hegel's ``phenomenology of the spirit.'' The actual translation of "Phenomenology of Spirit" by Naotake Kato was not available, so I borrowed "Phenomenology of Spirit" translated by Musashi Kaneko and "Phenomenology of Spirit" translated by Hiroshi Hasegawa from the library and read a little.
Afterwards, I read ``Phenomenology of the Spirit, Second Edition'' translated by Noriyuki Makino, and decided to continue reading this book. After that, I read about half of Seitsugu Takeda's ``Conditions of Human Freedom'' as a research book, and realized that it was absolutely necessary for me to learn from Hegel.
Seiji Takeda's book is about how he was saved when he read ``Introduction to Philosophy to Know Yourself'' when he was on the verge of dropping out due to power harassment from his company president when he was an office worker, and I feel that he was guided in the same way by Hegel.
Seiji Takeda is known to have come to understand philosophy through Husserl's phenomenology, but it is clear from ``Conditions of Human Freedom'' that he has learned decisively from Hegel. The reason he is able to criticize even Michel Foucault is because he is deeply aware of Hegel's ``absolute spirit.'' Incidentally, he criticizes Marx for failing to grasp Hegel's ``moral self-consciousness,'' even though he started from the Hegelian left. I suspect that I was able to take this critical position because I was actually influenced by Kohjin Karatani's ``trans critic'' method.
