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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/

Watsuji Tetsurô
1. Life and Career
2. The Philosophy of Watsuji
3. Ethics
4. Nothingness
5. The State
6. Religion
Bibliography
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960) was one of a small group of philosophers
in Japan during the twentieth century who brought Japanese philosophy
to the world. He wrote important works on both Eastern and Western
philosophy and philosophers, from ancient Greek, to Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and from primitive Buddhism and
ancient Japanese culture, to Dôgen (whose now famous writings
Watsuji single-handedly rediscovered), aesthetics, and Japanese
ethics. His works on Japanese ethics are still regarded as the
definitive studies.

Influenced by Heidegger, Watsuji's Climate and Culture is both an
appreciation of, and a critique of Heidegger. In particular, Watsuji
argues that Heidegger under-emphasizes spatiality, and over-
emphasizes temporality. Watsuji contends that had Heidegger equally
emphasized spatiality, it would have tied him more firmly to the
human world where we interact, both fruitfully and negatively. We are
inextricably social, connected in so many ways, and ethics is the
study of these social connections and positive ways of interacting.

Human beings have a dual-nature, as individuals, and as member of
various social groupings. We face each other in the betweenness
between us, where we can either maintain a safe distance, or enter
into intimate relationships of worth. Fundamental to positive,
intimate relationships is trust, and trustworthiness.


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1. Life and Career
Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960) was one of a small group of philosophers
in Japan during the twentieth century who brought Japanese philosophy
to the attention of the world. In terms of his influence, exemplary
scholarship, and originality he ranks with Nishida Kitarô, Tanabe
Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji. The latter three were all members of the
so-called `Kyoto School,' and while Watsuji is not usually thought
of as being a member of this school, the influence and tone of his
work clearly shows him to be a like-minded thinker.

The Kyoto School, of which Nishida was the pioneering founder, is so
identified because of its common focus; Nishida's important work,
East/West comparative philosophy, and an on-going attempt to give
expression to Japanese ideas and concepts by means of the clarity
afforded by Western philosophical tools and techniques. Whereas the
general emphasis of the Kyoto School is on epistemology, metaphysics
and logic, Watsuji's primary focus came to be ethics, although his
earlier studies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard ranged
far beyond the ethical. And while his impressive output (an original
nineteen volume collected works has been expanded by Yuasa Yasuo, his
former student and now one of Japan's leading contemporary
philosophers, to twenty-seven volumes) includes wide-ranging studies
in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy, his focus was
not on Nishida and Tanabe, but on reconstructing the origins of
Japanese culture more or less from the ground up. Hence, while many
of his ideas, e.g. the centrality of the concept of `nothingness,'
and dialectical contradiction, show the influence of the Kyoto School
thinkers, his own creative approach led him to formulate them
differently, and to apply them to ethical, political, and cultural
issues. Nevertheless, given the overlap of concepts, it would be a
mistake to exclude him from some sort of honorary membership in the
Kyoto School. And given that there never was an actual `school' at
all, it is enough to say that Watsuji was an active force in Japanese
philosophy in the twentieth century, along with Nishida, Tanabe, and
later on, Nishitani.

Watsuji was born in 1889, the second son of a physician, in Himeji
City, in Hyogo Prefecture. He entered the prestigious First Higher
School in Tokyo (now Tokyo University), in 1906, graduating in 1909.
Later that same year, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, where his
specialization was philosophy, in the Faculty of Literature. He
married Takase Teru in 1912, and a daughter, Kyôko was born to them
in 1914.

As a student at Himeji Middle School, he displayed a passion for
literature, especially Western literature, and "is said to have been
fired with the ambition to become a poet like Byron" (Furukawai
1961, 217). He wrote stories and plays, and was coeditor of a
literary magazine. When he entered the First Higher School in Tokyo,
even though he had decided to pursue philosophy seriously, he
remained "as deeply immersed in Byron as ever and attracted chiefly
to things literary and dramatic" (Furukawa 1961, 218). He is said to
have had several excellent teachers at this school, and his interests
were considerably expanded in the arts and in literature. The
Headmaster, Nitobe Inozô, was of particular importance. James Kodera
writes that "Nitobe's book on Bushidô, The Soul of Japan, began to
awaken Tetsurô not only to the Eastern heritage but also to the
study of ethics" (Kodera 1987, 6). Still, while this early glimpse
into the forgotten depths of his own culture may have planted the
seeds of later inquiries and insights, Watsuji gained sustenance and
insight at this time in his academic career from his reading in
Western Romanticism and Individualism.

Without a doubt, the most important influence in Watsuji's early
years was the brilliant novelist Natsume Sôseki, considered the
outstanding interpreter of modern Japan. James Kodera writes that
Watsuji found in Sôseki "a human being struggling with the human
condition in the particularities of early modern Japan, suddenly
exposed to the West and yet struggling to sustain his own identity"
(Kodera 1987, 6). Sôseki was beginning to abandon his unqualified
admiration of Western individualism, and was embarking on a critique
of both individualism and the modern culture of the Western world. It
was not only a move away from the values which he had come to
associate with Western culture, but a move back to the values of his
own Japanese cultural tradition. Watsuji never met Sôseki while at
the University of Tokyo, but did meet him in 1913 and became a member
of a study group that met at Sôseki's home. Sôseki died three years
later, when Watsuji was 27, and upon his death, Watsuji began to
compose a lengthy reminiscence of him. His reflections were published
in 1918 (in his Gûzo saikô), and they marked Watsuji's own
transformation from advocate of Western ways to critic of the West,
turning toward a reconsideration of Japanese and Eastern cultural
resources. It is perhaps telling that in a series that Sôseki wrote
for a popular Tokyo newspaper during 1912-1913, "Sôseki depicted
the plight of the modern individual as one of painful loneliness and
helplessness" (Kodera 1987, 6). He saw egoism as the source of the
plight, and has Ichirô, the hero of the serially appearing novel
Wayfarer, conclude that "there is no bridge leading from one man to
another; loneliness, loneliness, thou [are] mine home" (Kodera 1987,
6). A solution to the modern predicament of estrangement, loneliness
and helplessness came to be found, for Watsuji, in our social
interconnections. What modern Western society was losing with great
rapidity, was still evident in Japanese society, where individuality
was tempered with a strong social consciousness, and this more
balanced sense of self could be found in the earliest of Japanese
cultural documents. Sôseki's proposed solution was to "follow
Heaven, forsake the self" (Kodera 1987, 6), but Watsuji's more
humanistic remedy for an egoism which inevitably led to estrangement,
was to reinvest in one's social interconnectedness. We are not only
by nature social beings, but we inevitably come into the world
already in relationship: with our language and culture, traditions
and expectations, parents, caregivers, and teachers. It a myth of
abstraction that we come into the world as isolated egos.

Watsuji graduated from Tokyo University in 1912, but not without a
frantic effort to write a second thesis in a very short span of time,
because the topic of his first thesis was deemed unacceptable.
Furukawa Tetsushi notes that "at the time the atmosphere in the
Faculty of Philosophy was inimical to the study of a poet-philosopher
like Nietzsche. Consequently, Watsuji's `Nietzschean Studies' was
rejected as a suitable graduation thesis" (Furukawa 1961, 219). In
its place he was obliged to substitute a second thesis on
Schopenhauer, which he entitled "Schopenhauer's Pessimism and Theory
of Salvation." This thesis "was presented only just in time" for
him to graduate (Furukawa 1961, 219). Both theses were eventually
published.

Watsuji enrolled in the graduate school of Tokyo Imperial University
in 1912, the same year that he completed his undergraduate studies.
His studies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in 1912, and of Kierkegaard
in 1915 provide ample evidence of his interest in and competence in
Western philosophy. At the same time, he continued to study the
Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Keats, being torn
between his literary and philosophical interests. In any case,
perhaps because his literary attempts were "complete failures," he
decided to give "up literary creation and devoted all his exertions
to the writing of critical essays and philosophical treatises"
(Furukawa 1961, 218). It was not long before he was in demand as a
teacher, first as a lecturer at Tôyô University in 1920, an
instructor at Hôsei University in 1922, an instructor at Keiô
University in 1922-23, and at the Tsuda Eigaku-juku from 1922-24
(Dilworth et al 1998, 221). But his real break came in 1925, when
Nishida Kitarô and Hatano Seiichi offered him the position of
lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Literature at
Kyoto Imperial University, where he was to take on the responsibility
for the courses in ethics. This put him at the center of the
developing Kyoto School philosophy. As was the custom at the time
with promising young scholars, he was sent to Germany in 1927 on a
three-year scholarship. His reflections on that sojourn in Europe
became the substance of his highly successful book, Fûdo, which has
been translated into English as Climate and Culture. In fact, Watsuji
spent only fourteen months in Europe, being forced to return to Japan
in the summer of 1928 because of the death of his father. In 1929, he
also took on a part-time position at Ryûkoku University, and in
1931, he became a professor at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1934, he
was appointed professor in the Faculty of Literature at Tokyo
Imperial University, and he continued to hold this important post
until his retirement in 1949. Perhaps part of the reason that he is
so often viewed as someone on the periphery of the Kyoto School
philosophic tradition has to do with his work in Tokyo,
geographically removed from the center of discussion and dialogue in
Kyoto.

One cannot help but be impressed by the extent of his published
output, as well as by its remarkable diversity, spanning literature,
the arts, philosophy, cultural theory, as well as Japanese, Chinese,
Indian, and Western traditions. In addition to his studies of
Schopenhauer (1912), Nietzsche (1913), and Kierkegaard (1915), in
1919, he published Koji junrei (A Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples), his
study of the temples and artistic treasures of Nara, a work that
became exceptionally popular. In 1920 came Nihon kodai bunka (Ancient
Japanese Culture), a study of Japanese antiquity, including Japan's
most ancient writings, the Kojiki and Nihongi. In 1925, he published
the first volume of Nihon seishinshi kenkyû (A Study of the History
of the Japanese Spirit), with the second volume appearing in 1935.
This study contained his investigation of Dôgen's work (in Shamon
Dôgen, [The Monk Dôgen ]), and it can be said that it was Watsuji
who single-handedly brought Dôgen's work out of nearly total
obscurity, into the forefront of philosophical discussion. Also, in
1925, he published Kirisutokyô no bunkashiteki igi (The Significance
of Primitive Christianity in Cultural History , followed by Genshi
Bukkyô no jissen tetsugaku (The Practical Philosophy of Primitive
Buddhism) in 1927.

Returning from Europe in 1928, he continued at Kyoto Imperial
University until his appointment as professor at Tokyo Imperial
University in 1934. In 1929, he edited and translated Dôgen's
incomparable Shôbôgenzô. Watsuji received his degree of Doctor of
Letters, based on his The Practical Philosophy of Primitive Buddhism
in 1932. He wrote as well A Critique of Homer at about this time, a
work that was not published until 1946. Also in 1932 he wrote
Porisuteki ningen no rinrigaku (The Ethics of the Man of the Greek
Polis), which was not published until 1948. In 1936, he completed his
Kôshi (Confucius). In 1935, he completed the important Ethics as the
Study of Man (Ningen no gaku to shite no rinrigaku, to be followed by
his three volume expansion of his views on ethics, Rinrigaku (Ethics)
appearing successively in 1937, 1942, and 1949.

In 1938, he published Jinkaku to jinruisei (Personality and
Humanity), and in 1943, he published his two volume Sonnô shisô to
sono dentô (The Idea of Reverence for the Emperor and the Imperial
Tradition). This latter publication is one of the works for which
Watsuji was branded a right-wing, reactionary thinker. In 1944, he
published a volume of two essays, Nihon no shindô (The Way of the
Japanese Subject; The Character of the American People), and in 1948,
The Symbol of National Unity (Kokumin tôgô no shôchô). His last
publications were the best-selling Sakoku — Nihonno higeki (A Closed
Country — The Tragedy of Japan) in 1950, Uzumoreta Nihon (Buried
Japan) in 1951, Nihon rinri shisôshi (History of Japanese Ethical
Thought) in two volumes in 1953, Katsura rikyû: seisaku katei no
kôsatsu (The Katsura Imperial Villa: Reflections on the Process of
Its Construction) in 1955, and Nihon geijutsu Kenkyû (A Study of
Japanese Art), also published in 1955.

By any standard, this is an impressive array of major publications,
several of them extremely influential both with the world of
scholarship, and among the general public as well. One cannot but be
impressed by the breadth of Watsuji's interests, by the depth of his
scholarship, and by his ability as a remarkably clear and graceful
writer. Yet his Climate and Culture, and his studies in ethics,
particularly his Rinrigaku stand out as his two most influential
publications.

2. The Philosophy of Watsuji
The foundations of Watsuji's thought were the extensive studies in
Western philosophy that he engaged in during his earlier years, up
until 1917 or 1918, followed by his extensive studies in Japanese and
Far Eastern philosophy and culture. Upon his return from Europe in
1928, and as a direct result of being among the very first to read
Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, Watsuji began work on Fûdo (Fûdo
ningen-gakuteki kôsatsu), translated into English as Climate and
Culture. `Fûdo' means "wind and earth…the natural environment of
a given land" (Watsuji 1961, 1). We are all inescapably environed by
our land, its geography and topography, its climate and weather
patterns, temperature and humidity, soils and oceans, its flora and
fauna, and so on, in addition to the resultant human styles of
living, related artifacts, architecture, food choices, and clothing.
This is but a partial list, but even this sketchy list makes clear
that Watsuji is calling attention to the many ways in which our
environment, taken in the broad sense, shapes who we are from birth
to death. Heidegger's emphasis was on time and the individual, and
too little, according to Watsuji, on space and the social dimensions
of human beings. When we add to our sense of climate as including not
only the natural geographic setting of a people and the regions's
weather patterns, but also the social environment of family,
community, society at large, lifestyle, and even the technological
apparatus that supports community survival and interaction, then we
begin to glimpse what Watsuji had in mind by climate, and how there
exists a mutuality of influence from human to environment, and
environment to human being which allows for the continued evolution
of both. Climate is the entire interconnected network of influences
that together create an entire people's attitudes and values.
"History and nature," remarks Yuasa Yasuo, "like man's mind and
body, are in an inseparable relationship" (Yuasa 1996, 168). Culture
is that mutuality of influence, recorded over eons of time past,
which continues to effect the cultural present of a people. Who we
are is not simply what we think, or what we choose as individuals in
our aloneness, but is also the result of the climatic space into
which we are born, live, love, and die.

Even before his travels in Europe (1927-28), Watsuji was convinced
that one's environment was central in shaping persons and cultures.
In Guzo Saiku (Revival of Idols), published in 1918, he had concluded
that "all inquiries into the culture of Japan must in their final
reduction go back to the study of her nature" (Furukawa 1961, 214).
From about 1918 on, Watsuji's focus became the articulation of what
it is that constitutes the Japanese spirit. Ancient Japanese Culture,
which he wrote in 1920, is an attempt to revitalize Japan's oldest
Chronicles (the Kojiki and Nihongi) using modern literary techniques
as well as newly available archaeological evidence. He treated these
collections of ancient stories, legends, poems, songs, and myths as
literature, rather than as sacred scripture. Quoting from the Kojiki
the imaginative story of creation, he then glosses this rich account:
"`When the land was still young and as a piece of floating grease,
drifting about as does a jellyfish, there came into existence a god,
issuing from what grew up like a reed-bud…' [is] a superb…image of
a piece of grease floating about without definite form like a thin,
muddy substance far thicker than water, yet not solid, and of the
image of a soft jellyfish with a formless form drifting on the water,
and of the image of exuberant life of a reed-bud sprouting powerfully
out of the muddy water of a swampy marsh. There is no other
description that I know of that so graphically depicts the state of
the world before creation" (Furukawa 1961, 221-22). It is a concrete
and graphic depiction of the formlessness out of which all things
arose, and is perhaps an early attempt at talk of nothingness, a
central idea of the Kyoto School, and later on for Watsuji as well.

Not only can one discern his early interest in the importance of
nothingness in his thinking, but there is also indication that he was
sensitive to the non-dual immediacy of experience, which Nishida
described as `pure experience'. As though discovering the roots of
Nishida's `pure experience,' he writes that "the ancient poets,
whose feelings still retain a virgin simplicity as a single undivided
experience, are not yet troubled by this division of the subjective
and the objective" (as found in Japan's oldest collection of poems,
the Manyoshu) (Furukawa 1961, 224). Natural beauty, for the poet, is
as yet an undivided experience, a pure experience which is prior to
the subject/object dichotomy, a total immersion in the moment without
thought or reflection, in an ecstasy of feeling. In his Preface to
Revival of Idols he warns that he intends not "a mere `revival of
the old,'" but rather what he wished to achieve "is nothing more
or nothing less than to advance such life as lives in the everlasting
New" (Furukawa 1961, 227). To revive the old, then, is to cause it
to shine anew, but in the light of contemporary issues and concerns.
It is to revive its meaning for us, here and now, and not merely to
show that it had meaning in the past. As part of one's cultural
climate, the past inevitably operates still in the present of every
Japanese. It was this still active element that Watsuji sought to
uncover, and to express in such a way as to allow others to share in
the present infused with the past in the consciousness of their own
lives, rather than in some unconscious and only partially developed
way. Similarly, he attempted to reveal the relevance of primitive
Christianity, primitive Buddhism, and Confucianism as cultural
inheritances which continue to shape people in various `climates'
around the world. He made explicit what was implicit, and he sought
to revitalize the active ingredients of cultural traditions for right
`now'.

In the Preface to Climate and Culture, Watsuji states that when we
come to consider both the natural and the human cultural climate in
which we find ourselves, we render both nature and culture as
"already objectified, with the result that we find ourselves
examining the relation between object and object, and there is no
link with subjective human existence" (Watsuji 1961, v). The
phenomena of climate must be seen "as expressions of subjective
human existence and not of natural environment" (Watsuji 1961, v).
He explains this using the example of the phenomenon of cold, a
single climatic feature. Ordinarily, we think of `us' and
`coldness' as objectively distinct and separate from us.
Phenomenologically, however, we only come to know that it is cold
after we actually feel it as cold. Coldness does not press upon us
from the outside; rather, we are already out in the cold. As
Heidegger emphasized, we `ex-istere' outside of ourselves, and in
this case, in the cold. It is not the cold which is outside of us,
but we who are already out in the cold. And we feel this cold in
common with other people. We all talk about the weather. To existere,
then, means that we experience the cold with other `I's.' We
experience coldness within ourselves, with others, and "in relation
to the soil, the topographic and scenic features and so on of a given
land" (Watsuji 1961, 5). In a telling, and poetically adept passage,
he writes that a cold wind may be experienced as a sharp mountain
blast, or a dry wind sweeping through a city at the end of winter, or
"the spring breeze may be one which blows off cherry blossoms or
which caresses the waves" (Watsuji 1961, 5). All weather is as much
`subjective' as it is `objective.'

Because of the cold, we must decide upon sources of heat for our
houses, design and create appropriate clothing (for each of the
seasons and conditions), seek proper ventilation, defend ourselves
and our houses against special conditions (floods, monsoon rains,
typhoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis,
etc.), counteract excessive humidity in some way, and we must learn
how to grow our food and eat in ways compatible with the climatic
conditions, and our capabilities of farming and gathering. We
apprehend ourselves in climate, revealing ourselves to ourselves as
both social and historical beings. Here is the crux of Watsuji's
insight, and of his criticism of Heidegger's Zein und Zeit: to
emphasize our being in time is "to discover human existence on the
level only of individual consciousness " (Watsuji 1961, 9). As
temporal beings, we can exist alone, in isolative reflection. On the
other hand, if we recognize the `dual character' of human beings as
existing in both time and space, as both individuals and social
beings, "then it is immediately clear that space must be regarded as
linked with time" (Watsuji 1961, 9). Space is inextricably linked
with time, and the individual and social aspects of ourselves are
inextricably linked as well, and our history and culture are linked
to our climate. And while change is constant, and hence all
structures are continuously evolving, this evolution is inextricably
linked to our history, traditions, and cultural forms of expression.
We discover ourselves in climate, and it is because of climate that
we have come to express ourselves as we have: "climate…is the agent
by which human life is objectivised" (Watsuji 1961, 14).

Climate serves as the always present background to what becomes the
foreground focus for Watsuji, the study of Japanese ethics in
practice and in theory. Ethics is the study of the ways in which men
and women, adults and children, the rulers and those ruled, have come
to deal with each other in their specific climatic conditions. Ethics
is the pattern of proper and effective social interaction.

3. Ethics
Watsuji's objection to individualistic ethics, which he associated
with virtually all Western thinkers to some degree, is that it loses
touch with the vast network of interconnections that serves to make
us human. We are individuals inescapably immersed in the space/time
world, together with others. Individual persons, if conceived of in
isolation from their various social contexts, do not and cannot exist
except as abstractions. Our way of being in the world is an
expression of countless people and countless actions performed in a
particular `climate,' which together have shaped us as we are.
Indeed a human being is a unified structure of past, present, and
future; each of us is an intersection of past and future, in the
present `now.' There is no possibility of the isolation of the ego,
and yet many write as though there were. They are able to make a case
of it, in part because they ignore the spatiality of ningen (human
being), focussing on ningen's temporality. Watsuji believed that it
was far more difficult to consider a human being as strictly an
individual, when thought of as a being in space. Spatially, we move
in a common field, and that field is cultural in that it is criss-
crossed by roads and paths, and even by forms of communication such
as messenger services, postal routes, newspapers, flyers, broadcasts
over great distances, all in addition to everyday polite
conversation. Watsuji makes a point of the legend of the isolated and
hopelessly marooned Robinson Crusoe, for even Robinson Crusoe
continued to be culturally connected, continuing to speak an
inherited language, and improvising housing, food, and clothing based
on past social experiences, and continuing to hope for rescue at the
hands of unknown others. Watsuji rejects all such `desert island'
constructions as mere abstractions. Thomas Hobbes imagined a state of
nature in which we are radically discrete individuals, at a time
before significant social interconnections have been established.
Watsuji counters that we are inescapably born into social
relationships, beginning with one's mother, and one's caregivers. Our
very beginnings are etched by the relational interconnections which
keep us alive, educate us, and initiate us into the proper ways of
social interaction.

At the center of Watsuji's study of Japanese ethics is his analysis
of the human person, in Japanese, ningen. In his Rinrigaku, he
affirms that ethics is, in the final analysis, the study of human
persons. Offering an etymological analysis, as he does so often, he
displays the important complexity in the meaning of ningen. Ningen is
composed of two characters, nin, meaning `person' or `human
being,' and gen, meaning `space' or `between.' He cautions that
it is imperative to recognize that a human being is not just an
individual, but is also a member of many social groupings. We are
individuals, and yet we are not just individuals, for we are also
social beings; and we are social beings, but we are not just social
beings, for we are also individuals. Many who interpret Watsuji
forget the importance which he gave to this balanced and dual-nature
of a human being. They read the words, but then go on to argue that
he really gives priority to the collectivistic or social aspect of
what it means to be a human being. That such an imbalance often
occurs in Japanese society may be the reason for this conclusion. Yet
it does not fit Watsuji's theoretical position, which is that we are,
at one and the same time, both individual and social. In A Study of
the History of the Japanese Spirit (1935) Watsuji cautions that "…
the communion between man and man does not mean their becoming merely
one. It is only through the fact that men are unique individuals that
a cooperation between `man and man' can be realized" (Watsuji
1935, 112). The tension between one's individual and one's social
nature must not be slackened, or else the one is likely to overwhelm
the other. He makes this point even clearer in discussing the
creation of renga poetry, in the same volume. Renga poems are not
created by a single individual but by a group of poets, with each
individual verse linked to the next, and each verse the creation of a
single individual, and yet each must cohere with the `poetic
sphere' as a whole. Watsuji concludes, "if there are self-centered
persons in the company, a certain `distortion' will be felt and
group spirit itself will not be produced. When there are people, who,
lacking individuality, are influenced only by others' suggestions, a
certain `lack of power' will be felt, and a creative enthusiasm
will not appear. It is by means of attaining to Nothingness while
each remains individual to the last, or in other words, by means of
movements based on the great Void by persons each of whom has
attained his own fulfilment, that the company will be complete and
interest for creativity will be roused" (Watsuji 1935, 113).
Individuality is not, and must not be lost, else the balance is
destroyed, and creativity will not effectively arise. What is
required is that we become selfless, no longer self-centered, and
open to the communal sense of the whole group or society. It is a
sense of individuality that is aware of social, public
interconnections.

One expresses one's individuality by negating the social group or by
rebelling against various social expectations or requirements. To be
an individual demands that one negate the supremacy of the group. On
the other hand, to envision oneself as a member of a group is to
negate one's individuality. But is this an instance of poor logic?
One can remain an individual and as such join as many groups as one
wishes. Or one can think of oneself as an individual and yet as a
parent, a worker, an artist, a theatre goer, and so forth. Watsuji
understood this, but his argument is that it is possible to think in
such ways only if one has already granted logical priority to the
individual qua individual. Whatever group one belongs to, one belongs
to it as an individual, and this individuality is not quenchable,
except through death, or inauthenticity. Nevertheless, Watsuji's
conception of what he calls the `negation of negation' has a quite
different, and perhaps deeper emphasis. To extricate ourselves from
one or another socio-cultural inheritance, perhaps the acceptance of
the Shinto faith, one has to rebel against this socio-cultural form
by affirming one's individuality in such a way as to negate its overt
influence on oneself. This is to negate an aspect of one's history by
affirming one's individuality. But the second negation occurs when
one become a truly ethical human being, and one negates one's
individual separateness by abandoning one's individual independence
from others. What we have now is a forgetting of the self, as Dôgen
urged ("to study the way is to study the self, to study the self is
to forget the self, to forget the self is to become enlightened by
all things"), which yields a `selfless' morality. To be truly
human is not the asserting of one's individuality, but an
annihilation of self-centeredness such that one is now identified
with others in a nondualistic merging of self and others. Benevolence
or compassion results from this selfless identification. This is our
authentic `home ground,' and it rekindles our awareness of our true
and original nature. This home ground he calls `nothingness,' about
which more will be said below.

Watsuji's analysis of gen is of equal interest. He makes much of the
notion of `betweenness,' or `relatedness.' He traces gen (ken)
back to its earlier form, aida or aidagara, which refers to the space
or place in which people are located, and in which the various
crossroads of relational interconnection are established. Watsuji's
now famous former student, Yuasa Yasuo, observes that "this
betweenness consists of the various human relationships of our life-
world. To put it simply, it is the network which provides humanity
with a social meaning, for example, one's being an inhabitant of this
or that town or a member of a certain business firm. To live as a
person means…to exist in such betweenness" (Yuasa 1987, 37). As
individuals, we are private beings, but as social beings we are
public beings. We enter the world already within a network of
relationships and obligations. Each of us is a nexus of pathways and
roads, and our betweenness is already etched by the natural and
cultural climate that we inherit and live our lives within. The
Japanese live their lives within this relational network. It is
imperative, therefore, that one know how to navigate these relational
waters successfully, appropriately, and with relative ease and
assurance. The study of these relational navigational patterns —
between the individual and the family, self and society, as well as
one's relationship to the environment — is the study of ethics.

Watsuji usually writes of ningen sonzai, and sonzai (existence) is
composed of two characters, son (which means to preserve, to sustain
over time), and zai (to stay in place, and in this case, to persevere
in one's relationships). Ningen sonzai, then, refers to human nature
as individual yet social, private as well as public, with our coming
together in relationship occurring in the betweenness between us,
which relationships we preserve and nourish to the fullest. Ethics
has to do with the ways in which we, as human beings, respect,
preserve, and persevere in the vast complexity of interconnections
which etch themselves upon us as individuals, thereby forming our
natures as social selves, and providing the necessary foundation for
the creation of cooperative and workable societies.

The Japanese word for ethics is rinri, which is composed of two
characters, rin and ri. Rin means `fellows,' `company,' and
specifically refers to a system of relations guiding human
association. Ri means `reason,' or `principle,' the rational
ordering of human relationships. These principles are what make it
possible for human beings to live in a cooperative community. Watsuji
refers to the ancient Confucian patterns of human interaction as
between parent and child, lord and vassal, husband and wife, young
and old, and friend and friend. Presumably, one also acquires a sense
of the appropriate and ethical in all other relationships as one
grows to maturity in society. If enacted properly these
relationships, which occur in the betweenness between us, serve as
the oil which lubricates interaction with others in such a way as to
minimize abrasive occurrences, and to maximize smooth and positive
relationships. One can think of the betweenness between each of us as
a basho, an empty space, in which we can either reach out to the
other in order to create a relationship of positive value, or to
shrink back, or to lash out, making a bad situation worse. The space
is pure potential, and what we do with it depends on the degree to
which we can encounter the other in a fruitful and appropriate manner
in that betweenness. Nevertheless, every encounter is already etched
with the cultural traditions of genuine encounter; ideally positive
expectation, good will, open-heartedness, cheerfulness, sincerity,
fellow-feeling, and availability. Ethics "consists of the laws of
social existence" writes Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 11).

4. Nothingness
The annihilation of the self, as the negation of negation
"constitutes the basis of every selfless morality since ancient
times," asserts Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 225). The negating of the
group or society, and the emptying of the individual in Watsuji's
sense of the negation of each by the other pole of ningen, makes
evident that both are ultimately `empty,' causing one to reflect
upon that which is ultimate, and at the base of both one's
individuality and the groups with which one associates. The losing of
self is a returning to one's authenticity, to one's home ground as
that source from which all things derive, and by which they are
sustained. It is the abandonment of the self as independent which
paves the way for the nondual relation between the self and others
that terminates in the activity of benevolence and compassion through
a unification of minds. The ethics of benevolence is the development
of the capacity to embrace others as oneself or, more precisely, to
forget one's self such that the distinction between the self and
other does not arise in this nondualistic awareness. One has now
abandoned one's self, one's individuality, and become the authentic
ground of the self and the other as the realization of absolute
totality. Ethics is now a matter of spontaneous compassion,
spontaneous caring, and concern for the whole. This is the birth of
selfless morality, for which the only counterparts in the West are
the mystical traditions and perhaps some forms of religiosity in
which it is God who moves in us, and not we ourselves. The double
negation referred to earlier whereby the individual is negated by the
group aspect of self, and the group aspect is in turn negated by the
individual aspect, is not to be taken as a complete negation that
obliterates that which is negated. The negated are preserved, else
there would be no true self-contradiction. This robust sense of the
importance of self-contradiction shares much with the more developed
sense of the identity of self-contradiction about which Nishida said
so much. What is stressed by both thinkers is that some judgments of
logical contradiction are at best penultimate judgments, which may
point us in the direction of a more comprehensive and accurate
understanding of our own experience. Watsuji refers to `wakaru '
(to understand), which is derived from `wakeru ' (to divide); and
in order to understand, one must already have presupposed something
whole, that is to say, a system or unity. For example, in self-
reflection, we make our own self, other. Yet the distinction reveals
the original unity, for the self is other as objectified and of
course is divided from the originally unified self. To think of a
thing is to distinguish it from something else, and yet in order to
make such a distinction, the two must already have had something in
common. Thus, to emphasize the contradiction is to plunge into the
world as many; to emphasize the context, or background, or matrix is
to plunge into the world as one. Readers will be familiar with the
logical formulation, often encountered in Zen but ubiquitous in
Buddhism generally, that A is A; and A is not-A; therefore, A is A.
There is a double negation in evidence here: an individual is an
individual, and yet an individual is not individual unless one stands
opposed to other individuals. That an individual stands opposed to
others means that one is related to others as a member of a group or
groups. Because an individual is a member of a group, one is both a
member as an individual, and an otherwise isolated individual as a
member of a group. We are both, in mutual interactive negation, and
as such we are determined by the group or community, and yet we
ourselves determine and shape the group or community. As such we are
living self-contradictions, and, therefore, living identities of self-
contradiction.

Morality, for Watsuji, is a coming back to authentic unity through an
initial opposition between the self and other, and then a re-
establishing of betweenness between self and other, ideally
culminating in a nondualistic connection between the self and others
that actually negates any trace of difference or opposition in the
emptiness of the home ground. This is the negation of negation, and
it occurs in both time and space. It is not simply a matter of
enlightenment as a private, individual experience, calling one to
awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Rather, it is a
spatio-temporal series of interconnected actions, occurring in the
betweenness between us, which leads us to an awareness of betweenness
that ultimately eliminates the self and other, but of course, only
from within a nondualist perspective. Dualistically comprehended,
both the self and other are preserved. What is left is betweenness
itself in which human actions occur. In this sense, betweenness is
nothingness, and nothingness is betweenness. Betweenness is the place
where compassion arises and is acted out selflessly in the spatio-
temporal theatre of the world. It is that which makes possible the
variety of relationships of which human beings are capable.

5. The State
Watsuji's theory of the state, and his vocal support of the Emperor
system, garnered considerable criticism after the Second World War.
La Fleur maintains that Watsuji's detractors were "dominant in
Japanese intellectual life from 1945 to approximately 1975," while
his admirers became "newly articulate since the decade of the
1980's" (LaFleur 1994, 453). The former group considered his
position to be a dangerous one. He argued that the culmination of the
double negation, which he conceived of as a single movement, was the
restoration of the absolute totality. In other words, while the
individual negates the group in order to be an authentic and
independent individual, the second negation is to abandon one's
independence as an individual in the full realization of totality. It
is a `surrender' to totality, moving one beyond the myriad specific
groups to the one total and absolute whole. It would seem natural
that this ultimate wholeness would be the home ground of nothingness,
and in a way it is. But Watsuji argues that it is the state that
takes on the authority of totality. It is the highest and best social
structure thus far. The political implications of this position could
easily result in a totalitarian state ethics. Indeed, Watsuji
extolled the superiority of traditional Japanese culture because of
its emphasis on self-negation, including the making of the ultimate
sacrifice if required by the Emperor. In America's National Character
(1944), he contrasted this willingness to an assumed selfishness or
egocentrism found in the West, together with a utilitarian ethic of
expediency, which he felt was rarely able to commit to self-surrender
in aid of the state. What he saw as most exemplary in the Japanese
way of life was the Bushido ideal of "the absolute negativity of the
subject" (Odin 1996, 67), through which the totality of the whole is
able to be achieved. There is no doubt that Watsuji's position could
easily be interpreted as a totalitarian state ethics. Yet, insofar as
Watsuji's analysis of Japanese ethics is an account of how the
Japanese do actually act in the world, then it is little surprise
that the Japanese errors of excess which culminated in the fascism of
the Second World War period should be found somehow implicit and
possible in Watsuji's acute presentation of Japanese cultural
history. Perhaps the fault to be found lies not in his analysis per
se, but rather in his all too sanguine collapsing of the descriptive
and the prescriptive. That the Japanese way-in-the-world might
include a totalitarian seed is something which demands a normative
warning. Surely this is not what should be applauded as an aspect of
the alleged superiority of Japanese culture, nor should Bushido in
and of itself be taken as a blameless path to the highest of ethical
achievements. The willingness to be loyal, whatever the rights and
wrongs of the situation might be, in order to remain loyal to one's
Lord, however evil or foolhardy he might be, is not an adequate or
rational position, and it is surely not laudable ethically. It is,
perhaps, the way the samurai saw themselves, as martial servants
loyal to death. But the `is' here is clearly not a moral `ought'.

What Watsuji adds to this picture which makes it extremely difficult
to condemn him too harshly, and possibly to condemn him at all, is
his adament insistence in the third volume of Rinrigaku that no one
nation has charted the correct political and cultural path, and that
the diversity of each is to be both encouraged and respected. He
writes of unity in diversity, and rejects the idea that any nation
has the right to culturally assimilate another. Each nation is shaped
by its particular geography, climate, culture and history, and the
resultant diversity is both to be protected and appreciated, and the
notion of a universal state is, therefore, but an unwanted and
dangerous delusion. We must know our own traditions, and to cherish
those, but we must not extol them as superior out of our ignorance of
other ways and cultural traditions. In fact, such ignorance,
resulting from Japan's unwise self-imposed isolationism, Watsuji saw
as the most tragic flaw in Japan's own history, and a cause of the
Second World War. Japan knew so little of the outside world in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that it exaggerated
its own worth and power, and vastly underestimated the importance of
political and diplomatic involvement in the happenings of the rest of
the world. Nationalism must not express itself at the expense of
internationalism, and internationalism must not establish itself at
the expense of nationalism. Here is another pair of seeming
contradictions to be held together by the unity of mutual
interaction; the one modifies the other, and that tension is not to
be resolved. Internationalism must be a unity of independent and
distinctive nations.

Five months before the end of the Second World War, Watsuji organized
a study group to re-think the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), which
resulted in his popular work, Closed Nation: Japan's Tragedy
(Sakoku), published in 1950. Some critics reacted by dubbing this
work "Watsuji's Tragedy" (LaFleur 2001, 1), yet La Fleur insists
that Sakoku, together with a collection of other contemporaneous
writings, provides a serious and important insight into Watsuji's
later philosophical position. His focal thesis was that the tragedy
of the Japanese involvement in the Second World War was a direct
result of Japan's policy of national seclusion. Isolationism took
Japan out of the events of the world's activities for two centuries,
allowing the West to outstrip Japan in terms of science and
technology. But even more important is Watsuji's insistence that the
nationalists and militarists should have seen that Japan was in no
position to win the war since both "men and materiel were in
increasingly short supply" (LaFleur 2001, 3). Not that Watsuji
opposed the war, but the point he was making was that the tragedy
came to be because the earlier isolationist attitude had been revived
from 1940 on. Japan was out of touch with the strengths and
determination of its adversaries, and seemingly convinced that the
character of the Japanese people would ensure success. Furthermore,
coupled with this short-term return to a head-in-the-sand
isolationism of the 1940's, was Watsuji's insistence that throughout
most of Japan's history, the Japanese people had demonstrated an
intense curiosity and a robust desire to learn, and in particular to
learn from cultures quite different from their own: "No matter how
far we go back in Japanese culture we will not find an age in which
evidence of admiration of foreign cultures is not to be found"
(Dilworth et al, 250). Japan was withdrawing inwards at precisely the
time when the West's expansionism and imperialism was gathering
steam. LaFleur goes so far as to suggest that in a 1943 lecture to
Navy officials, Watsuji attempted to warn those in charge of the
dangerous course they continued to pursue. LaFleur speculates that
this is why Watsuji felt no need to recant after the War had ended.
The salient point of all of this is that the instances of
isolationism in Japanese history are exceptions which run counter to
what Watsuji saw as the dominant tendency of the Japanese to both
welcome and encourage outside influence. Japan's national character
throughout the bulk of its history displays a remarkable openness to
and interest in other cultures, and a steadfast desire to learn from
those cultures. He was advocating a return to this more `normal'
attitude towards the outside world, and not a return to Japanese
nationalism or chauvinism. Watsuji presents us with a complex
perspective.

6. Religion
Watsuji's interest in religion was as a social phenomenon, that is,
in religion as an aspect of the cultural environment, nevertheless,
as LaFleur remarks, Watsuji "embraces a religious solution …
philosophically and methodologically" (LaFleur 1978, 238). Watsuji
writes of nothingness as that final place or context in which all
distinctions disappear, or empty, and yet from which they emerge.
LaFleur argues that "it was in the Buddhist notion of emptiness that
Watsuji found the principle that gives his system…coherence"
(LaFleur 1978, 239). The Buddhist notion of pratîtya-samutpâda, or
`dependent co-origination' (or `relationality,' `conditioned co-
production,' `dependent co-arising,' `co-dependent origination')
implies that everything is `empty' that is to say, that everything
is deprived of its substantiality, nothing exists independently,
everything is related to everything else, nothing ranks as a first
cause, and even the self is but a delusory construction" (Abe 1985,
153). The delusion of independent individuality can be overcome by
recognizing our radical relational interconnectedness. At the same
time, even this negation must be emptied or negated, hence our
radical relational interconnectedness is possible only because true
individuals have created a network in the betweenness between them.
The result is a selfless awareness of that totality beyond all
limited, social totalities, namely the emptiness or nothingness at
the bottom of all things, whether individual or group. LaFleur
summarises Watsuji's position: "the social side of human existence
`empties' the individuated side of any possible priority or
autonomy and the individuated side does something exactly the same
and exactly proportionate to and for the social side. There can be no
doubt, I think, that for Watsuji, emptiness is the key to it all"
(LaFleur 1978, 250). Watsuji's emptiness is more a recognition of
underlying relatedness, and manifests as a place, a basho, that is
the dynamic and creative origination of all relationships and all
networks of interactions. Even when Watsuji uses religious language
(as in "it is a religious ecstasy of the great emptiness" (LaFleur
1978, 249), that ecstasy is not a mystical-like insight into one's
union with God or the Absolute or a recognition of floating in
`other-power,' but a relational union of those persons involved in
some communal forms, eventually culminating in the state. It is an
ethical, or political, or communal ecstasy and not a religious
identification with a transcendent Other. Watsuji gives no evidence
of deep religiosity but expresses a profound and sometimes ecstatic
ethical humanism, one which is, nonetheless, heavily Buddhist in
conception.

In denying the reality of the subject/object distinction, and
affirming the emptiness of all things, Watsuji was able to argue that
as the individual negates or rebels against society, thereby emptying
society of an unchanging objective status, and as the second negation
establishes the totality of society by emptying the individual, it
reduces the individual ego to emptiness as well. Neither of the dual
characteristics of ningen are either unchanging or ultimately real.
What is ultimate is the emptiness which is revealed as their basis,
for all things are empty, and yet, once this truth is realized, it is
as individuals and societies that nothingness is expressed and
revealed. Emptiness negates itself, or empties itself as the beings
of this world. And it does this in the emptiness of betweenness, the
empty space within which relations between individuals and societies
form and continue to re-form. The state, as the culminating social
organization thus far achieved, is the form of forms, "transcending
all the other levels of social organization…giving to each of those
protected forms a proper place" (LaFleur 1994, 457). The state is,
ultimately, "the moral systematiser of all those organizations"
(LaFleur, french, 457). However, the problem of the proper relation
of the individual to society emerges, for Watsuji goes on to argue
that "the state subsumes within itself all these forms of private
life and continually turns them into the form of the public domain"
(LaFleur 1994, 457). In attempting to move away from the selfishness
of egoistic action, Watsuji has given primacy to the state over
individual and group rights. As LaFleur states, "by valorizing the
state as that entity that has the moral authority — in fact the
moral obligation — to `turn private things into the public domain,
Watsuji provides a smooth rationale for a totalizing state" (LaFleur
1994, 458). Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that his intent was
not to advocate tyranny or fascism, but to seek out an ethical and
social theory whereby human beings as human beings could interact
easily and fruitfully in the space between them, creating as a result
a society, and a world-wide association of societies which selflessly
recognized the value of the individual and the crucial importance of
the well-being of the whole. His solution may have been inadequate,
and open to unwelcome misuse. His analysis of `betweenness' shows
it to be communality, and communality as a mutuality wherein each
individual may affect every other individual and thereby affect the
community or communities; and the community, as an historical
expression of the whole may affect each individual. Ideally, what
would result would be an enlightened sense of our interconnectedness
with all human beings, regardless of race, color, religion, or creed,
and a selfless, compassionate capacity to identify with others as
though they were oneself. By reintroducing a vivial sense of our
communitarian interconnectedness, and our spatial and bodily place in
the betweenness between us, where we meet, love, and strive to live
ethical lives together, Watsuji provides an ethical and political
theory which might well prove to be helpful both to non-Japanese
societies, and to a modern Japan itself which is torn between what it
was, and what it is becoming.

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Related Entries
Heidegger, Martin | Japanese Philosophy | Japanese Philosophy: Kyoto
School | Nishida Kitarô | nothingness | religion: philosophy of

Copyright © 2004
Robert Carter
Trent University

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/