In the previous chapter, we have discussed the essence of Watsuji’s Ethics and its sys-tematic development. Front and center in Watsuji’s project was the idea of the relational-ity (aidagara) of human existence. In this chapter, I will first recapitulate on the core idea of what Watsuji means by relationality. I will then try to examine what it might contribute to the contemporary discourse on the relational subject, beginning with the relationship of Watsuji’s approach to the ethics of care, which has been suggested by Erin McCarthy.
Then, I will proceed to the question of the limits of relationality and consider to what extent human beings can or cannot share in relationships, focusing particularly on Watsuji’s view of the sharing of death, which was a response to Martin Heidegger. Taking the post-structural responses to Heidegger as a hint, I will explore other ways of combin-ing relationality and scombin-ingularity. Finally, I will see if it is possible to account for both overlapping selves as well as otherness within Watsuji’s own view of relationships.
1 Relational Existence
In the previous chapter, we see Watsuji stress the importance of moving from an “indi-vidualist” view of ethical life to a “relational” view of the human being. We see this in
1 Key ideas leading up to this chapter have been previously published in “Community of No-Self: The Ethical-Existential Structure of Community in Watsuji Tetsurô and Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Ap-plied Ethics: Theories, Methods and Cases, ed. Center for ApAp-plied Ethics and Philosophy (Sapporo: Hok-kaido University, 2012), 48-61.
his definition of rinri and in his usage of the singular/plural word ningen. But Watsuji very interestingly shows how the very methodology of ethics, the act of ethical inquiry, is relational.
Watsuji asserts that when we ask ethical questions—like we are now—something very special is happening. I, the author (and hopefully you, the reader), am asking “What is ethics? What is ningen?” On one hand, this means that, individually, the question of ethics is being raised. But at the same time, the question is raised in a collective space— in the figurative space of a reading (between the author and the reader), in a school (be-tween teacher and student), or amongst friends. Even when I raise this question privately, the question raised is raised in language—we did not make up the words “what” or “is”
or “ethics,” and, in these words, we carry our relationality. Part of these words is the history they carry: When I ask about “ethics,” I carry the issues raised by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Christianity, modern philosophy, and perhaps even influences from non-western sources like Confucius or Buddha. Thus, while the question is undoubtedly raised by the individual, the question is, in a sense, also asked by humankind as a whole, by communities, by relationships. Ningen is asking about ningen—and in ethics, ningen in a sense comes home to itself. And we seek ourselves in our shared expressions—words, literature, paintings, religious practices, political life, and so on. With these, Watsuji paints a thoroughly relational picture of human life and its ethical quest.
In this section, we shall go deeper into the first few sections of Watsuji’s discus-sion on the fundamental structure of ningen sonzai and show the kind of relationality that Watsuji sees as inherent to everyday life.
He begins with an everyday experience of writing. The experience of writing has often, in the history of western thought, been taken as an occasion to demonstrate the
indubitable existence of the ego, even to the point of lapsing into solipsism, as in the image of Descartes, alone in his study, contemplating if anything else is real. But does this really make sense? Watsuji argues:
For writing is an expression of words, and words are what have come to shape them-selves in anticipation of partners who live and talk together. Even though words are written in a foreign language and perhaps with the intention of allowing no one else to read them, this does not mean that these words have come into being without there being partners to talk with, but only that the author is without partners with whom to talk.2
Writing presumes possible readers. The tone, the language used, the set of vocabulary, the level of politeness, even the modes of encryption—all of these aspects of writing are determined in response to possible readers. The same applies to the experience of reading, for reading invariably puts one in relationship with the author of what one is reading.
Even when one is reading about how one can become certain of oneself as an isolated ego in a solipsistic text, one is learning about this solipsistic notion in a very non-solipsistic manner, reading the words and ideas of the author.
Given this, Watsuji concludes: “No matter how much we concern ourselves with the consciousness of I, this concern itself implies our going beyond the consciousness of I and being connected with others.”3 Our everyday experience is not from the point of view of a readerless author nor an authorless reader, but between the author and the reader.
He then defines relationality as follows:
We take our departure not from the intentional consciousness of “I” but from “ be-tweenness.” The essential feature of betweenness lies in this, that the intentionality of
2 WTZ10, 52 (50).
3 Ibid.
the I is from the outset prescribed by its counterpart, which is also conversely pre-scribed by the former.4
This means that the author is always determined by readers, and a reader is always deter-mined by authors in a reciprocal determination and mutual dependency. “This relation-ship is constructed, through and through in the betweenness between an author and his readers. Neither can exist prior to and independent of the other. They exist only by de-pending on one another.”5
The same betweenness holds in the present setting where a teacher and students come together for a class. Watsuji points out that a class is only possible given the rela-tionality between a teacher and his or her students. It presumes certain roles played out by teachers and by students, and these roles will shape the comportment of both teachers and students, allowing for the educational relationship to unfold. This discussion is crucial in that it builds up to Watsuji’s discussion of institutions or totalities beyond the I-thou relationship. For him, an institution (like a school) is no more than the solidification or composite of these relationships:
A school is represented by the existence of a group of buildings and other facilities.
But they are not the school itself. Even when a school is abolished, the buildings that belonged to it can still remain intact. And even without buildings, it could be possible for a school to be established. A school consists of human relationships that are given expression to, by, and within these buildings.6
4 Ibid., 53-54 (51). 々 出発点 志向的意識 間
柄 示 い あ 間柄 本質 志向 初 相手
規定 逆 相手 志向 規定 い いう あ
5 Ibid., 55 (52).
6 Ibid., 56-57 (53-54).
Moreover, there is no temporal priority between the school and the students and teachers.
Without students and teachers, there can be no school. Even when a school is first con-ceived, it operates considering possible students and teachers in a future-oriented rela-tionship with them. Also, teachers become teachers and students become students within the context of the school. Just as the existence of teachers is simultaneous with that of students, schools exist simultaneously with the body of teachers and students. Watsuji shows a similar discussion of this in family life, which we will examine more, later in this chapter.
Looking at the author-reader, teacher-student, and parent-child relationships within the context of school, home, and other spheres of everyday life, Watsuji points out our fundamental relationality vis-à-vis our roles:
We can now confirm an obvious everyday fact, that we always act with a certain capacity (shikaku) and that this capacity is prescribed by something whole, further that this whole is the relationship we construct by means of possessing a certain ca-pacity. Simply speaking, we exist in our daily life in the being in betweenness.7 The idea of “capacity” has a key role in Watsuji’s argument: A capacity/role is the meet-ing point between the individuals and the totality. Relational bemeet-ing (aidagarateki sonzai) means being constantly situated in these capacities, as both a singular member, and as a part of the whole in one’s “plural” existence.
However, it is important to note that in line with Watsuji’s idea of practical inter-connections through acts (jissenteki kôiteki renkan), capacities and the relationships that unfold through them are concrete, and bear the many facets of embodied subjectivity. In
7 Ibid., 61 (57). 々 わ 日常 実 々 常 何 資
格 い 働い い 資格 何 全体的 規定 い
全体的 一定 資格 け 々 作 出 間柄 あ
確定 簡単 言え 々 日常的 間柄的存在 い あ あ
the section entitled “Individual Moments Making up Human Existence,” Watsuji details how we relate with each other through our physical bodies, as seen from things like hand-shakes to sexual relations to maternal care relations. Watsuji concludes, “Bodily connec-tions are always visible wherever betweenness prevails, even though the manner of con-nection may differ.”8
However, because we are embodied subjects, these connections do not end with bodily connections. Through embodied communication, we mutually determine each other in every facet. The emotions of other people affect others—we are saddened when we are with a friend who is grieving, seeing their expressions and postures and hearing their words. But, in the same way, when we join a social gathering where the sounds and movements show that everyone is in a bright mood, our moods are lifted as well. (Watsuji credits Max Scheler for this well-developed analysis of the interpenetration of feeling.)9 Furthermore, our perceptions of phenomena are altered by the way others perceive them—from grosser examples like the immediate sense of urgency at an accident (that one might not have even seen oneself but that one has seen others react to) to more subtle examples like the influence of language, shared through spoken or written words, even on our solitary perceptions of “blue” or “aoi.”
In this way, relational being forms the physical, cognitive, emotive, and volitional parts of each individual. In practical interconnections through acts, we acquire roles or
8 Ibid., 65 (62).
9 Ibid., 74-76 (70-71).
capacities, not merely as theoretical beings nor as mechanical functionaries, but as think-ing, feelthink-ing, willing embodied subjects in emotional systems,10 groups that act together, and so forth.
However, in these relational systems, Watsuji sees the paradox of individuality and totality:
This being in betweenness is, from the common sense standpoint, grasped from two angles. The first is that betweenness is constituted ‘among’ individual persons. Thus, we must say that the individual members who compose it existed prior to this be-tweenness. The second is that the individual members who compose this betweenness are determined by it as its members. From this perspective, we can say that antecedent to there being individual members, the betweenness that determined them existed.11 Relations constitute relata, and relata constitute relationships. Which comes first? How does Watsuji resolve this paradox? We will grapple with these questions in both this chapter and in the next.
Above, we have seen the four main features of Watsuji’s notion of aidagara: First, inten-tionality is always mutually constituted. I exist toward something not in a purely private manner but in a way that is defined by others, and vice-versa. Second, my relational being is always situated within roles/capacities, by which I shape and am shaped by relation-ships. Through roles, relata and relations are mutually constituting, thus forming the
10 “Emotional system” is a term used in psychotherapy, which describes how people interrelate to form an economy of emotions, wherein certain patterns govern the flow of feelings amongst a group of people (particularly in a family or in a therapy group).
11 WTZ10, 61 (57-58). 間柄的存在 常識 立場 い 視点 把捉
い 一 間柄 個々 人々 間 仲 い 形 いう あ
方面 間柄 先立 形 個々 員 間柄
作 個々 員 間柄自身 員 限定 いう あ 方面
見 個々 員 先立 規定 間柄 い
adox of individuality and totality. Third, these relations are concrete and multidimen-sional, and involve not merely rational but emotional, volitional, and corporeal aspects.
And fourth, this mutual determination of concrete relationships occurs within institutions or totalities like schools and families, which are in turn mutually constitutive of these particular relationships.
2 Watsuji and the Ethics of Care
I believe that Watsuji’s idea of aidagara is a key contribution to philosophy. As evidence of this, it is Watsuji’s most warmly received ethical idea, at least in the Anglosphere. We see this in Mayeda’s Time, Space and Ethics in the Philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurô, Kuki Shûzô, and Martin Heidegger. Also, in Odin’s The Social Self in Zen and American Prag-matism, he focuses on this relational model of personhood as the core of Watsuji’s theory, and shows how it was developed by other thinkers like Kimura Bin (in his idea of aida), Hamaguchi Eshun (“context”), and Kumon Shunpei (“kanjin 間人”).12,13 Of all of these positive appraisals of Watsuji’s theory, Erin McCarthy’s Ethics Embodied (2010) stands out as one of the most interesting, attempting to connect Watsuji to another thoroughly relational view of ethics.
2.1 McCarthy’s Watsuji-ron
12 Steve Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 68-77.
13 Some thinkers like Utsunomiya Yoshiaki (in Ningen no aida to rinri, 1980) see Watsuji’s the-ory of relationality as departing from the notion of the “I-Thou” relationship (as found in Levinas or Bu-ber). While this does lead to some weaknesses that I will soon discuss, I do think that this departure al-lows Watsuji to speak more effectively about larger groups like a family, a church, or a nation-state.
These relationships are not reducible to I-Thou relationships or the sum of these. See Nishitani, 39-40.
Here I will briefly introduce McCarthy’s reading of Watsuji. Primarily drawing from Watsuji’s Ethics I, she foregrounds Watsuji’s concern for aidagara, which sees ningen as fundamentally relational and thus integrating both individuality and totality:
Ningen is a dynamic concept of self, on that John Maraldo has suggested be under-stood, not as a metaphysical entity, rather as an interrelation. Ningen is not to be un-derstood as something fixed with a determinate identity; rather, as ningen, one’s iden-tity is found relationally—between persons—and as such continually shifts and changes. Indeed to be ningen means to move freely between the social and the indi-vidual.14
She relates this relational self with Thomas Kasulis’ “intimacy orientation,” where the self is not seen as essentially autonomous (as it is in the “integrity orientation,”) but is seen as fundamentally overlapping with and mutually constituted with others. Thus, self is not rationally definable but rather is objective in a “dark” manner, including non-ra-tional components of relation, like affect and embodiment.15
McCarthy connects relationality and the non-duality of individuality and totality, which I will discuss later in this chapter, to Watsuji’s idea of emptiness:
Ningen transcends dualities and defies what we might normally think of as self. There is no self substance, for example, no idea of “soul” at play here. Ningen has, as part of its structure, a refusal to be a self-containing, self-contained object; its very struc-ture is nondualistic.16
A fundamental aspect of ningen is the movement of transcending dualities; of dissolv-ing of individual into community, of self into other, and back again and somehow all of this at the same time, and has its roots in the Buddhist notion of emptiness or noth-ingness—kû.”17
14 Erin McCarthy, Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), 13.
15 Thomas Kasulis has himself discussed Watsuji as an ethicist of the intimacy orientation. While I agree with this for the most part, Watsuji himself would have some concerns about being portrayed as an “oriental theorist.” My objections for this are detailed in Chapter IV, and I have discussed Kasulis and Watsuji in greater detail in my essay “Gaijin Philosophy and the Problems of Universality and Culture.”
16 McCarthy, 14.
17 Ibid., 15. Diacritics emended.
McCarthy employs Watsuji’s notions of aidagara and non-duality to show the limitations of Martin Heidegger’s and Edmund Husserl’s views of the relationship of the subject and others. In her chapter on “The Embodied Self,” she fully develops the role of the embodiment of relationships, which Watsuji sees as central to epistemology and ethics, as a critique of the western denigration of the body.
Kasulis’ theory of intimacy-oriented cultures originally referred to both the dom-inant culture of Japan, but also the feminist sub-culture of the west. Interestingly, McCar-thy takes up this hint and connects Watsuji’s ethics to feminism and the ethics of care.
Let us examine this in more detail.
Similar to Watsuji’s critique of individualism, the ethics of care was born as a critique against the Kantian view of ethics (which focuses on the rational individual) of-fered by Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development:
[Carol] Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Devel-opment famously suggested that girls approached moral problems from a different perspective than that of boys. . . . Her conclusions suggested that women and girls placed more importance on relationships and context than boys, who, according to Kohlberg’s theory, ended up more frequently at what he alleges is the highest level of moral reasoning—the level that appeals to abstract principles and rules.18
Gilligan thus tried to argue the philosophical/ethical relevance of caring as it occurs within concrete relationships, against a tradition that overwhelmingly focused on abstract duties or individual virtues. This was followed up by Nel Noddings’ Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, which argues for the notion of interdependence.
McCarthy explains, “This interdependence involves seeing oneself not as primarily sep-arate from others, rather, as belonging in a network of relationships that support one’s
18 Ibid., 56.
autonomy.”19 This was philosophically developed by other figures like Virginia Held, and developed as a debate on “justice” vs. “care,” and the appropriate relationship between these two approaches to ethics.
In both Watsuji and the ethics of care, we see a focus on a relational model of self and concrete relationships between actual people as central to the ethical project. Watsuji also uses the mother-child model as a concrete example for human relationality, just as ethics of care stresses. McCarthy frames this model of ethics as the unity of self-care and care for the other:
For an ethics of care and Watsuji’s philosophy, it is this relation, this basic fact of human being-in-the-world that obliges us to care for the other. Due to the interde-pendent nature of being human where the other is a part of the self, self-care becomes other care and other care becomes self-care. We can no longer look at the other as something entirely isolated from ourselves and thus, realizing our deep interconnect-edness, we cannot ignore the other’s pain or suffering as it is also our own.20
Additionally, in her chapter on “Body, Self and Ethics,” McCarthy highlights an-other contribution of Watsuji via his notion of “subjective bodies.” Using Luce Irigaray, she points out that Western philosophy had, in stressing the duality between body and mind and asserting the superiority of the latter, marginalized the position of women (who are associated with the body). Watsuji’s retrieval of the importance of embodiment could be part of a retrieval of the importance of women in ethical life.
Thus, in McCarthy’s Embodied Ethics, Watsuji can be seen as an ally of ethics of care. Both combat the forgetfulness of relationality and embodiment in ethics, the ten-dency to focus on abstract individual duties and virtues, and the overlooking of the very agency of relationships in the good life.
19 Ibid., 57.
20 Ibid., 58.