In this chapter, I would like to begin with the following questions: First, what is the es-sence, the core idea of Watsuji’s systematic ethical period? Second, how is this essence developed across the various publications of this period? In answering these, I wish to lay a foundation for the close reading of the limitations and possibilities for Watsuji’s ethics, as well as its potential uses in comparative philosophy.
However, in order to answer these questions, it is necessary to extensively survey the key insights and flows between the following main works of this systematic period.
He wrote two works that can be considered as preparatory to this period: Milieu: Anthro-pological Considerations (1935) and Ethics as the Study of Ningen (1934). Then of course we have the three volumes of Ethics (1937, 1942/46, 1949). Finally, there are several books that directly aimed to support this project: Kant: Critique of Practical Reason (1935), Person and Humanity (1938), Confucius (1938), The Ethics of Polis-tical Ningen (1948), and The Pioneers of Modern Philosophy of History (1950).
As we see from this list, Watsuji’s systematic ethics is composed of five books with at least five supporting works—ten books spanning around two decades of Watsuji’s career. Thus, knitting together the insights in these books is necessary in order to show
1 An earlier version of this chapter has previously been published as “Concretizing an Ethics of Emptiness: The Succeeding Volumes of Watsuji Tetsurô’s Ethics,” Asian Philosophy: An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East 24:1 (2014), 82-101.
the systematic unity of his ethical project and to show the approach I take to his thought.
Also, this summary is particularly important for an English publication, because among these books, Milieu and Ethics I are the only ones translated into English. As such, most studies on Watsuji in the Anglosphere tend to over-focus on these translated volumes, sometimes to the utter neglect of the other volumes of Ethics and Watsuji’s other works.
In this chapter, I will trace the outlines of Watsuji’s systematic ethical project. I will begin with the two preparatory works, then go rather carefully through Ethics I, II, and III. I will then give a brief summary of the auxiliary works. Finally, I will pull together what I see to be the essential elements of Watsuji’s contribution.
1 Two Preparatory Works (1934, 1935)
The ideas that present themselves in Watsuji’s Ethics had long been incubating. We see traces of it in his Nietzsche Studies (1913) and in his reminiscence of Natsume Sôseki in Revival of Idols (1918). Glimpses of his Buddhist dialectics began to emerge in his work on Dôgen (published in Studies on the History of Japanese Spirit, 1926) and in his dis-sertation on The Practical Philosophy of Primitive Buddhism (1927). But a milestone for Watsuji’s systematic ethics was his trip to Europe in 1927-1928. These travels would occasion his reading of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), which he read shortly after its publication, and would greatly form his approach (at least as a foil to his argu-ments, as we shall see later). These would also inspire his writing of Milieu, which was written over a period of time, from 1929-1935.
1.1 Dualities in Milieu
Milieu is one of Watsuji’s most popular works in Japan and in the Anglosphere. Some English-speaking scholars lament its popularity, calling Milieu a “philosophical light-weight.” Certainly it is a rather freehand travel journal with philosophical ideas liberally sprinkled in. But David Dilworth suggests in “Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960): Cultural Phenomenologist and Ethician” that Fûdo (Milieu) and Ningen form two pillars of Watsuji’s thought. And I concur, for it is in Milieu that Watsuji clearly lays out the various dualities that his ethical project shall struggle to overcome.
The first duality that he tries to overcome is the duality of subject and object. He accomplishes this through his famous “phenomenology of the cold,” where he points out that the cold is not “out there,” an object that exists externally to the human being. For such would be an abstraction, separate from the cold that we experience when we shiver on a cold night. But the cold is not a mere subjective experience either, merely within the structures of consciousness. Watsuji writes:
The usual distinction between subject and object, or more particularly the distinction between “the cold” and “I” independently of each other, involves a certain misunder-standing. When we feel cold, we ourselves are already in the coldness of the outside air. That we come into relation with the cold means that we are outside in the cold. In this sense, our state is characterized by “ex-sistere” as Heidegger emphasizes, or, in our term, by “intentionality.”2
This inseparability of subject and object would remain ever present in Watsuji’s works, where he consistently emphasizes that all subjective, ideal matters are somehow mediated by the material: words, images, goods, architecture, climate, and so on. In the same way,
2 Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo: Ningengakuteki kôsatsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 12 (3). く 見 主観 客観 区別 従 自身単独 存立 々 寒気 区別 一
誤解 あ 寒 を感 々自身 外気 寒冷 宿 い 々自
身 寒 わ いう 々自身 寒 中 出 い いう ほ あ 意味 々自身 有 方 ハイデッガ 力説 う 外 出 い
ex-sistere を 従 志向性を 特徴
the material, objective world always finds its way into human existence through its rela-tionship with meaning, its hermeneutic significance.
From the beginning, Watsuji connected the tethering of subject and object with that of the individual and community. The cold is not something we relate with on our own. Rather, in feeling cold, we exchange (winter) greetings with other people. Entire communities develop material culture (agricultural practices, clothing, architecture) in relation to this cold. Thus, the cold is experienced both by the “I” as well as by the com-munity—extending all the way into the past. Watsuji expresses this non-duality as a
“dual-character” (nijû seikaku): “By ‘ningen’ I mean not the individual (anthrōpos, homo, homme, etc.) but a person both in this individual sense and at the same time people in society, the combination or the community of persons. This dual-character is the essential nature of ningen.”3
Just as the subject is always tied to the object, the individual is always tied to a community. Outside of Watsuji studies, this is usually referred to as “non-duality,” but Watsuji refers to this as a dual-structure or a dual-character, pointing out the tensional unity of these poles. And it is from these dual-structures that he develops the relationship of climate and history, and spirit and matter, which he concretely discusses as three cli-matic types—desert, meadow, and monsoon—whose material character are inseparable from the subjective-historical culture of man (hence the unity of climate and culture in the word “milieu”). The details of these climatic types are not our main concern here. But
3 Ibid., 18 (8). Translation emended. 人間 呼 単 人 anthrōpos,
homo, homme, man, Mensch い 人 あ 同時 人々 結合あ
い 共同態 社会 あ 人間 二重性格 人間 根本的性格 あ
for now let us keep in mind these various dual-structures in Watsuji’s other preparatory work.
1.2 Ethics as the Study of Ningen (1934)
Watsuji’s development of the theoretical/systematic side of his view of the human being and ethics began in earnest in 1931, when he was promoted to the position of Professor of Ethics at Kyoto Imperial University. In that year, he wrote four key essays: “Person and Humanity in Kant,” “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ in Buddhist Philosophy and the Dia-lectics of Emptiness,”“Universal Morality and National Morals,” and “Ethics.”4 All of these essays would eventually become key parts of Watsuji’s systematic project. (We will briefly discuss the Kant essay toward the end of this chapter; the second essay on Bud-dhism will form a major part of our discussion in Chapter V; and the essay on universal and national morality will be analyzed in Chapter IV.)
The last essay, “Ethics,” is of particular importance to us here. It was this essay in 1931 that would be developed in 1934 into the book Ethics as the Study of Ningen (1934), just as Watsuji was moving to a post in Tokyo Imperial University. In a sense, we see in this book the culmination of Watsuji’s entire professorship at Kyoto (and the book is fittingly dedicated to his benefactor, Nishida Kitarô). This book would eventually become one of his most famous books in Japan, as the first full work of his systematic ethics.
Ethics as the Study of Ningen was Watsuji’s direct prolegomena to Ethics. This is where he sought to introduce the key idea and terminology of his project, its position in
4 Kaneko Takezô’s commentary, in WTZ11, 456.
response to the history of western ethics, and its primary methodological concerns. Let us begin with his terminology.
1.3 Etymologies
At the beginning of this work, Watsuji sought to etymologically define various key Jap-anese expressions. I focus on three: rinri, ningen and sonzai. These etymologies creatively express Watsuji’s own vision for what ethics fundamentally is and ought to be.
For the first word: “Rinri, as the basis of the existence of human groups, is that which is realized in various communities. It is the way (michi) of the relationships of people, [its] order; and it is because this exists that relationships are made possible.”5 Here, we see that Watsuji’s approach is focused not on individual Moralität but the order of communities formed by relational human beings. Thus while I will be translating rinri as “ethics,” and its analog, rinrigaku as “the study of ethics” or merely “ethics,” we must remember that it contains a much more social angle similar to the German Sittlichkeit, which the English word lacks.
The second word, ningen, is something that is often discussed in the literature on Watsuji, and it means self, other, a person, and people (plural). Watsuji stresses the char-acter for gen or aida, pointing out that ningen is “between/amongst people” (hito no aida).6 It is treacherous to translate this word, so I will keep it untranslated.
5 WTZ9, 12-13. 倫理 人間共同態 存在根底 種々 共同態 実現
あ 人々 間柄 道 あ 秩序 あ あ ゆえ 間柄 可能
6 Ibid., 16.
The third word, sonzai, can be translated as existence. But I will often leave it un-translated because Watsuji himself takes great pains to distinguish sonzai from Sein, pointing out how sonzai emphasizes being in relationships in both a spatial manner (of dwelling) and a temporal manner (of enduring). Together, ningen sonzai can thus be trans-lated as “human existence”—but with a strong focus on the dual-structures of individual-ity and totalindividual-ity, spatialindividual-ity and temporalindividual-ity, milieuindividual-ity and historicindividual-ity.
These three etymologies seem to highlight the strongly local, “Japanese” character of Watsuji’s supposedly universal ethics. This would become a point of contention for critics like Tosaka Jun, who would argue that this is tantamount to imposing a Japanese worldview (and an etymologically arbitrary one at that) upon the world. (We will examine this problem of universality and particularity further in Chapter IV.) But other scholars took this more positively. For instance, Kumano Sumihiko sees Watsuji as a key figure in supporting the move to do philosophy in everyday Japanese, writing in a style that was much more accessible than most of his contemporaries.7
Regardless of whether or not these etymologies are faithful to the actual Japanese meanings or how they resonated with the Japanese readers at that time, these etymologies express what Watsuji himself perceives ethics to be, and what he sees it as fundamentally concerned with—the study of ningen sonzai and its structures. In ningen sonzai, he sought not only the actuality of what human existence is, but also what it ought to be.
1.4 The History of Western Ethics
7 Kumano Sumihiko, Nihon tetsugaku shôshi: Kindai 100 nen no 20 hen (Tokyo: Chûkôshinsho, 2009), 154-157.
Watsuji situated ethics as a study of ningen sonzai within the tradition of western ethics.
Many western commentators focus on Watsuji’s “hostility” towards western ethics, but this tends to ignore his indebtedness to them. We see a more balanced picture in Watsuji’s own very positive views on Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Karl Marx.
Watsuji’s reading of Aristotle focuses on the unity of ethics and politics, where the virtues of the individual are fundamentally one with political life and citizenship. He sees this as one of his sources for the dual-structure of individuality and totality.8 From Kant, Watsuji takes the idea of Anthropologie (ningengaku), and the interplays of man as phenomenon and man as noumenon, or man as object vs. man as subject.9 While Watsuji has a very positive view of Kant and even reads the categorical imperative as an expression of the dual-structure of ningen sonzai (where a person is both a means and an end), he does see the beginnings of individualism in Kant and tries to use the Neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen as a corrective for this. The third key figure, Hegel, is a star for Watsuji; he had been lecturing on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right in Tokyo Imperial University since 1935.10 He sees in Hegel the return of the ideal of community after a long period of individualism in Western thought. He also discusses Hegel more extensively than any other western philosopher, focusing on Hegel’s ideas of absolute totality, negation, and self-awareness which were to become cornerstones of Watsuji’s own approach.11 (I will discuss this in detail in Chapter V.) He is critical of Hegel’s turn to religion, and his
8 Ibid., 39.
9 Ibid., 50-51.
10 Katsube Mitake, Watsuji rinrigaku nôto (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1979), 1-2.
11 WTZ9, 77-100.
treatment of Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx are largely a corrective of this. Watsuji’s read-ing of Marx is particularly interestread-ing. He sees Marx as one of the greatest champions of Sittlichkeit and communal man. What he particularly highlights in Marx is the latter’s materialism. Not materialistic reductionism, but a materialism that sees ningen sonzai as embedded in practical and embodied relationships.12
Watsuji had mentioned the problem of idealism vs. materialism in Milieu, and he highlighted this in his essay on “Ethics.” We still see him trying to draw the same balance in Ethics as the Study of Ningen—between the idealist components of categorical imper-ative, absolute totality, and self-awareness, and the materialist components of life in the polis, and the embodied, practical life therein. Thus, while he has his criticisms here, we see that Watsuji himself owed a lot to western ethics, and that his ideas of the dual-struc-ture, ningengaku, absolute totality, and practical interconnections through acts (jissenteki kôiteki renkan) are actually inspired by Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
1.5 Methodology
Another key figure that greatly impressed Watsuji is Heidegger. We see that Being and Time casts a very large shadow in the way Watsuji discusses how to study ningen sonzai.
He gives four major qualifications to the method of ningen no gaku: First, on the question of ningen: Questioning (or study, as in gaku) is a practical way of Being. But unlike Heidegger’s conception of such, it is not merely the individual Dasein that questions but
12 Ibid., 120-122.
rather ningen as both communal (the community of questioners) and individual (the indi-vidual questioner).13 Second, on ningen as questioned: In ethics as the study of ningen sonzai, ningen is asking about ningen—the questioner and the questioned, the subject and the object, are one.14 Thus, unlike in Heidegger, the fundamental question, first philoso-phy, is not ontology but ethics. Third, as a science (gaku), ethics (rinrigaku) has to make meaningful statements on what ethical life (rinri) is, and thus “objectively” explicate the ways of being (sonzai no shikata) that allow ningen to be ningen.15 But how does one make objective statements on ningen that is a practical subject, without reducing it to a mere passive object? This leads to the fourth qualification: Watsuji suggests that the only way to ningen is through the expressions of ningen sonzai: tools, material culture, lan-guage, in which subjective ningen becomes objectively manifest. Through an expression of these external articulations of human existence, taken not as mere objective facts but as expressions of the subjective interconnections that comprise our existence as ningen, we can thus understand and make explicit the being that we are.16
His shift from “experiences” to “expressions” has a double importance. Expressions are by their very nature inter-personal: they manifest the relational existence of ningen and the possibility of understanding them show an implicit relation between the one who expresses and the one who perceives the expression.17 This manifestation has the vital importance of externalizing relational ningen and thus allowing ningen to become
13 Ibid., 130-131.
14 Ibid., 136-138.
15 Ibid., 142-143.
16 Ibid., 154-157.
17 Ibid., 143-145.
aware. This indicates a shift from Heidegger’s “phenomenology,” which is largely indi-vidual, to a “hermeneutic” approach that takes into account the social dimension. Further-more, it represents an integration of the two dual-structures of Milieu and their develop-ment: the unity of individuality and totality are expressed not merely subjectively but objectively as well—that is, through external material expressions that are intersubjec-tively meaningful.
These shifts bring Watsuji closer to Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics as well as so-ciologists like Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Gabriel Tarde. Watsuji acknowl-edges that these thinkers shaped his approach to the social dimension of ethical life. How-ever, he does not accept sociology wholesale, because he wishes to take the data of social sciences not as objectified expressions, but as revelatory of subjective ningen sonzai.18
Thus, we see here that Watsuji was influenced by a great range of contemporary German thought and tried to synthesize a diversity of approaches while at the same time maintaining a commitment to his fundamental view of what the project of ethics should be.
Recapitulation
In Milieu, Watsuji first introduces the dual-characteristics of human existence: sub-ject/object and individual/communal. In Ethics as a Study of Ningen, Watsuji picks up on these ideas and combines them with an attempt to retrieve the sense of the communal in ethical life. He thus develops the terminology of ethics (rinrigaku) as a study of ningen sonzai that is individual-communal and spatio-temporal and situates this view within the
18 Ibid., 154-167.
history of western ethical thought, between the traditions of idealism and materialism and individualism and groupism. Finally, he develops a method for ethics that focuses on the subjective-objective expressions of ningen in ningen’s authentic return to itself, combin-ing the insights of German philosophy with social science.
2 Ethics I (1937)
From 1937 to 1949, a twelve-year period spanning Watsuji’s entire stay at Tokyo Imperial University and the drama of wartime Japan, he would pick up this project that he first began in 1931 and develop it in a three-volume magnum opus simply entitled Ethics (Rin-rigaku).
It is important to note that these three volumes form a systematic whole, as Kaneko Takezô suggests. In the introduction of Ethics I, Watsuji announces the structure of his future project: Volume one would examine the fundamental structure of ningen sonzai: individuality/totality, spatiality/temporality and privateness/publicness. These structures would be concretized in a theory of ethical action, trust, and truth. Volume two would examine the stage-wise progression of human relations—what he called sittliche organizations (jinrinteki soshiki): family, local community, economic organization, cul-tural community, and the state. In each of these stages, we would find the various virtues of trust and truth expressed by name. Volume three would examine the development of the spatio-temporality of sonzai as history and milieu. On the basis of this, he would reexamine the idea of national morals that he had written on back in 1931.19 As we will see in this chapter, he was able to stick to this basic plan for the most part.
19 WTZ10, 26-31 (22-27).
2.1 Practical Interconnections through Acts
One idea that Watsuji had been developing since Ethics as the Study of Ningen but was only fully emphasized in Ethics I is that of the “practical interconnection through acts” (jissenteki kôiteki renkan). This concept is the developed form of the unity of subject and object first presented in Milieu. In this interconnection, Watsuji tries to overcome the distinction of a knowing subject and a known object by focusing on the subject as shutai, an acting subject that thus always finds itself already in relation with the object. We find this not only in Kant’s idea of practical reason, but also in Heidegger’s idea of intention-ality, and this explains the “practical” in “practical interconnections through acts.”
However, Watsuji tries to overcome Kant and Heidegger by pointing out that the subject here cannot merely be individual, for our agency is always shaped by other sub-jects and our relationships with them. Thus, the subject is ningen and not merely individ-ual Dasein. Subjects act as shaped by relationships, and these acts in turn shape relation-ships. Thus, subjectivity is always found in an interconnection that is sustained by acts.
Putting it all together, “practical interconnection through acts” refers to the relational ex-istence (aidagarateki sonzai), wherein each acting subject (in unity with objects) is inter-connected with other subjects through objective acts.20
2.2 The Negative Dual-Structure and Ethics of Emptiness
20 See Ibid., 33-37 (31-34) and WTZ9, 134-142.
The above concept shows the complex intermingling of the facets of individuality and totality. On the basis of the hermeneutic approach to ethics, Watsuji shared everyday ex-periences in order to seek out the ground of these two facets. In seeking out the ground of individuality, he points out that most of the things we consider to “define” the individ-ual—the demarcation of the body, the individuality of sensations, consciousness, or feel-ings—cannot sufficiently serve as a barrier between persons. Rather, we see that all of these elements of individuality are influenced by relationships and are actually part of how we relate with others, part of the betweenness (aidagara) that forms our point of departure in everyday life. He points out that individuality is not something that exists on its own but that it is empty (kû), and the only way to apprehend a sense of individuality is to actively negate communal aspects in order to differentiate the individual from the com-munity.21
However, the same is true for totality. Watsuji points out that even while a whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, a community depends on its members—their existence, participation, and commitment. Consequently, Watsuji states that a community has no independent existence either, and, being empty, merely exists by “negating” the separateness of individual members by gathering them into the whole.22
Watsuji sees both individuality and totality as necessary for human existence, but, at the same time, each exists merely as the negation of the other. They thus form a nega-tive dual-structure and are unified by the very principle of absolute negativity (zettai
21 WTZ10, Ch. 1.1 (Everyday Facts as a Point of Departure) and 1.2 (The Individualist Moment in Ningen Sonzai).
22 Ibid., Ch. 1.3 (The Total [Communal] Moment in Ningen Sonzai).