The Highest Value of Scholarship

As a doctoral student, I spend each day both studying and enjoying life to the fullest. My research explores questions of subjectivity and existence in the thought of the twentieth-century French thinker Georges Bataille, and I am able to pursue it with a great sense of freedom. Bataille’s work spans philosophy, literature, art, politics, religion, and many other fields, making it an endlessly engaging subject of study.

In the Department of French Literature, students in the first year of the master’s course take a wide range of classes in literature, philosophy, linguistics, and related subjects, which greatly broadens their perspective as researchers. After that, the focus shifts primarily to individual research, but it is always stimulating to encounter ideas beyond one’s own specialization through symposia and research workshops. People often say that Keio offers an excellent research environment. That is probably true.

But what, exactly, is my research for? I do not yet know—and if anything, I am the one asking that question. And yet, whether it is philosophy, poetry, fiction, or language, when something captures your interest and makes you want to know more, perhaps the most important thing is simply to pursue it with a spirit of pure intellectual play. Study should not be something painful, it should be a profound joy in itself. Research is not labor performed in service to utility. It is the pursuit of truth through the play between knowledge and the unknown, and it is there that scholarship finds its highest value. To affirm play in its pure form is, perhaps, part of what it means to be human.

And so, writing as the self-proclaimed ambassador of the Graduate School of Letters, let me close with one final thought: if you are interested in literature, philosophy, history, art, library and information science, or related fields, I hope you will consider Keio’s Graduate School of Letters.