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Paper short abstract:

The presentation provides a detailed analysis of Maruyama Masao's 1948 introduction of his lectures on Tokugawa intellectual history. I focus on his explanation of the possible approaches to intellectual history that provides unique insight into the philosophical framework of his own thought.

Paper long abstract:

Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 (1914-1996) was one of the most important thinkers of post-war Japan. While his famous analysis of Tokugawa intellectual history (1940-1944) or his essay on Japanese ultra-nationalism (1946) are frequently analysed (substantial examples are Kersten 1996, Karube 2006/2008, Seifert 2016, Stevens 2018), less attention is payed to his university lectures. In my presentation I give a detailed analysis of the methodological introduction ("On the methodology of intellectual history" 「思想史の方法論について」) of Maruyama's first post-war Tokyo University lecture series in which he focused on the topics he investigated in the Tokugawa studies, this time in a completely different historical atmosphere. In this introduction, which has not been examined in detail by Western scholarship yet, Maruyama provides an overview of the possible methodological approaches to intellectual history, using idealism and materialism as symbols of the two extremes of such approaches. He continues with describing what he considers the proper way of analysis, designating this method between the two extremes. He emphasises both the significance of the present in examining intellectual history, and the importance of understanding intellectual history for shaping the future. In my analysis I will (1) give an overview of the structure of Maruyama's concept described in the lecture, focusing on how he uses Western thinkers (e.g. Hegel, Marx, Troeltsch, Meinecke, Freyer) as representatives of certain types of approaches to the history of thought. Following this, (2) I place his own standpoint as expressed in the lecture in the context of his examinations in his war-time and post-war texts, including his position in the shutaisei debate. Based on this comparison, I will argue (3) that while Maruyama placed the proper methodological approach to intellectual history between the extremes of idealism and materialism, his own methodology can most properly be described as a certain compound of the two, that obviously relies on one of them at certain points, however consciously denies or goes beyond them should it be required by the nature of a certain topic.