"What image do you have of the university and of knowledge? From these questions flows a set of choices: one can use knowledge as object or means, or choose knowledge for knowledge's sake. Knowledge for knowledge's sake, however, often arrogates to itself the status of religion, clearly revealed by the sciences today. In the other hand, knowledge as a means degenerates into a bourgeois tool for advancement, as a mere route for success as bureaucrat or doctor, in order to live an upper-middle-class life. It is an impoverished choice.
This is the moment when Asada's argument turns, for, as he addresses his university-bound readers, neither alternatives suits the style or the sensibility of the young. In fact, knowledge is a matter of style. The very attempt to reduce knowledge to a choice between alternatives betrays its inadequacy:
'Whatever is said, the matter is a problem of style, and it's to be expected that your sensibility (kansei) would reject both styles. When we say "style" or "sensibility," it has a very frivolous ring. But there are many occasions in which a selection of style according to one's sensibility is much more trustworthy than a subjective decision made according to reason. In that sense, I believe in the sensibility of the times.'
Marilyn Ivy in Consumption of Knowledge on Asada Akira's Structure and Power
"Look up the word [fiction] in the dictionary and you'll see it comes from the Latin word fingere. I'll tell you that it originally meant 'to fashion' or 'to invent.' Then the connotation of the word changed, and it came to mean 'to imagine' or 'to pretend.' In other words, it originally referred, in a broad sense, to a human being having some purpose in mind, and producing something in line with his idea."
J. Victor Koschmann in Incomplete Project of Modernity
Postmodernism and Japan, 1989
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