On The New Intellectuals, by Mishima Yukio
"Ideas that one cannot risk one’s life to defend are undeserving of the name."
On The New Intellectuals
Mishima Yukio
In backward countries, intellectuals live with confidence in their effectiveness. The importation of the techniques and knowledge of advanced countries in order to gain equality with them and compete with foreign countries is founded on an urgent national need, and Japan in the Meiji era was also like that. Mori Ōgai brought back something commensurate with his study abroad at public expense and at least fulfilled the role of a useful intellectual. Sōseki’s nervous breakdown during his study abroad in London is already symbolic, and he became the first example of an intellectual increasingly unable to bear the burden as a useful intellectual in line with state aims. And it is not Ōgai’s type, but from Sōseki’s type that the history of modern Japanese intellectuals begins, and furthermore, ironically, the prototype of “the independence of the intellectuals” also originated here.