I’m not bragging, but I’ve been into “philosophy books” since I was in junior high.
Back then, I was trying to trace the sources behind those insanely intellectual manga artists like Osamu Tezuka and Fujiko Fujio. I was also interested in the thinkers who influenced postwar Japanese writers such as Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima. That naturally led me to people like Nietzsche and Heidegger, the whole existentialist crowd, and then to language-related thinkers such as Chomsky and Wittgenstein.
So I tried reading them.
And of course, I understood absolutely nothing.
Obviously.
I was a junior high school kid.
Still, I kept devouring introductory books. Little by little, I started learning what each philosopher was roughly trying to say, and I memorized their strange technical terms.
As I got older, I began reading the so-called classics themselves. When I didn’t understand something, I looked it up online, checked philosophy dictionaries, and took notes.
And what did I gain from all that?
The conclusion that philosophy is basically useless.
The Death of Philosophy and the Philosopher
What we call “philosophy” is, in the end, just the long history of Western ways of thinking.
From Plato, or Socrates, all the way to the first half of the twentieth century: a long, long story about how the West thought.
And then we reach its final period, the early twentieth century.
At Jean-Paul Sartre’s lectures, people apparently screamed like they were at a rock concert.
Right after World War II, many intellectual students were facing a crisis of existence. An identity crisis, basically. What saved them, or at least seemed to save them, was existentialism and Marxism.
Sartre was the star of that moment. People even put portraits of him in their rooms.
The man rejected the Nobel Prize and rejected God, and still somehow became a celebrity. Very funny. Very human.
But all glory fades.
With Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism, not only Sartre but Western philosophy itself was basically brought to an end.
In fact, people like Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault did not really present themselves as “philosophers.”
One was a cultural anthropologist.
Another called his work an archaeology of knowledge.
And so, after about 2,500 years since ancient Greece, “philosophy” and “the philosopher” died.
Zombie Philosophy, the Weirdest Academic Leftover
If Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant were alive today, they would not be in a university philosophy department.
Not a chance.
They would be doing cognitive science, neuroscience, or something in that direction. Obviously. Their goal was the pursuit of truth. They weren’t trying to play endless word games with no answers.
At most, they might comment on current affairs here and there.
As I said, philosophy is dead.
Maybe that is why I have never studied philosophy professionally. Everything I know, I learned on my own. And I have no intention of studying it professionally in the future.
Because honestly, what would be the point?
I do not have time to play with zombies.
A few years ago, I was staying in a European country. Whenever I met Japanese students there, for some reason many of them said they had come to study philosophy.
All of them were men, by the way.
I asked them:
“Why?”
What I meant was:
“Why would you come all the way here to study such an obsolete subject?”
One of them said something like:
“I studied philosophy at a Japanese university, one of the old imperial universities, and I felt I had to study it in its original European context.”
And I thought:
Really?
People still do this in the Reiwa era?
If this were the Meiji period or the early Showa period, sure. I would understand. But now?
Of course, people are free to study whatever they want.
Still, something about it felt strange to me.
Studying Philosophy Does Not Make You Smarter, lol
In my experience, whether they were studying abroad or in Japanese universities, I rarely found philosophy students particularly impressive.
They did not feel intelligent to me.
It was more like they were not thinking with their own heads.
Schopenhauer once said something along the lines of:
Read too much, and you’ll become stupid.
He was right.
Even if you study philosophy at a prestigious university under a famous professor, it does not mean you will become smart.
According to my highly scientific personal survey.
So Why Do People Buy Philosophy Books?
When I go to large bookstores, there are always philosophy and theory books piled up in prominent displays. Every year, a few of them become bestsellers.
Classics, new releases, expensive hardcovers, difficult books with hundreds of pages.
When I first stepped into the world of philosophy and thought as a junior high school kid, that sight felt like paradise.
“There are so many books I want to read!”
My heart genuinely raced.
But now, I just sigh.
I pick up one of those books and check the colophon. It has already gone through five printings in just three months. The price is almost 5,000 yen. It is a thick hardcover, hundreds of pages long.
I flip through it.
No idea what it is saying.
And yet it has sold 100,000 copies.
Who is buying this?
My guess is that the number of real intellectuals in this country is maybe two million, probably less. There cannot possibly be that many university professors, critics, or professional scholars.
So who is buying these books?
Mostly fashionable pseudo-intellectuals, I think.
People who want to ride the trend. People who want to feel like:
“Look at me, I’m reading this insanely difficult book. I’m so deep.”
In other words, they want to enjoy being snobs.
But did they actually understand the book?
Did they even finish it?
And Yet, Some of Us Still Do Philosophy
I am talking about myself, of course.
Partly because of my work, philosophy and theory books are always piled up around me.
There are still many classics I feel I need to read carefully. Right now, I am working through Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the Japanese Kobunsha paperback edition, which is about 1,000 pages in two volumes. I am taking notes as I go.
It is honestly embarrassing.
We live in the Reiwa era, under the rule of our Lord and Savior AI.
And yet here I am, trying to decipher some brutally difficult text written over 200 years ago by a German man who apparently had no interest in making life easy for anyone.
Why do I have to read this?
And yet.
I still do.
Maybe because, in the end, I am the kind of person who can only think.
Thinking is what I love most.
Thinking is also what I hate most.
What I like doing: thinking.
What I hate doing: overthinking.
That is basically it.
But it is also the only thing I can do.
All I can do is turn that thinking into writing, or into something else.
And as one of my tools for doing that, I have philosophy.
Probably.