As A Father Figure To The New Left
Yoshimoto, who had pursued a theory of war responsibility of the literati, supported the movement against the 1960 ANPO treaty as an expression of the contradictions of the postwar order fifteen years after the end of the war. He was said to be number 2 of the intellectuals in semi-support of the Zengakuren, and gave a lecture at the June 15, 1960 resistance assembly inside the National Diet. Yoshimoto was arrested in the incident which followed, which resulted in deaths from clashes with the police who had arrived to suppress it.
Afterward, Yoshimoto founded the magazine Shikkou with the like-minded Tanigawa Gan and Murakami Ichiro. The journal published articles by Miura Tsutomu, who had been expelled from the Communist Party after the critique of Stalin, his disciple Takimura Ryuichi, Nango Tsugumasa, and others. Edazawa Shunsuke and others made their debuts as critics in Shikkou.
Yoshimoto developed a positive theoretical discourse in the midst of the collapse of the Communist Party's heroic status and splits in the new left. Yoshimoto was widely read and supported by students and intellectuals, for his work in The Decline of a False System (1962), which developed an independent theory of the arts in the face of criticisms of the Communist Party and sectarian literary theories, emphasizing the aesthetics of language and psychological phenomena, and The Common Illusion, which emphasized a theory of the State. This became a refuge for students and intellectuals exasperated by the then-current sectarian and bureaucratic Marxism. Yoshimoto's collected works were published beginning in 1968.
As a result, Yoshimoto's anti-sectarian philosophy of independence became a major influence and theoretical resource in the 1960s and 1970s for the Zengakuren, Zenkyoto, and other 'non-sect' New Leftists, and Yoshimoto came to be seen as an ancestor for some New Left activists. Yoshimoto gave qualified support to the activities of Zenkyoto.
Read more about this topic: Takaaki Yoshimoto
Famous quotes containing the words father, figure and/or left:
“If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It was heady stuff, recognizing ourselves as an oppressed class, but the level of discussion was poor. We explained systemic discrimination, and men looked prettily confused and said: “But, I like women.””
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 2 (1980)