## 1. Life and Career



Watsuji Tetsuro (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 Kitaro, 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
(1925-2005), his former student who became 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' or 'emptiness,' 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 (see the entry on 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, Kyoko 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 Inazo, was of particular importance. James
Kodera writes that "Nitobe's book on *Bushido, The
Soul of Japan*, began to awaken Tetsuro 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 Soseki, considered a
foremost interpreter of modern Japan. James Kodera writes that Watsuji
found in Soseki "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). Soseki 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
Soseki while at the University of Tokyo, but did meet him in 1913
and became a member of a study group that met at Soseki's
home. Soseki 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 *Guzo
saiko*), 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 Soseki wrote for a popular
Tokyo newspaper during 1912-1913, "Soseki 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 Ichiro, 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.
Soseki'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 is 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 Toyo University in 1920, an
instructor at Hosei University in 1922, an instructor at
Keio 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 Kitaro 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,
*Fudo*, 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 Ryukoku 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* (*Pilgrimages to the
Ancient Temples in Nara* ), 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 kenkyu* (*A Study of
the History of the Japanese Spirit*), with the second volume
appearing in 1935. This study contained his investigation of
Dogen's work (in *Shamon Dogen*, [*The Monk
Dogen* ]), and it can be said that it was Watsuji who
single-handedly brought Dogen's work out of nearly total
obscurity, into the forefront of philosophical discussion. Also, in
1925, he published *Kirisutokyo no bunkashiteki igi*
(*The Significance of Primitive Christianity in Cultural
History*), followed by *Genshi Bukkyo 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 Dogen's
*Shobogenzo zuimonki*. 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 *Koshi*
(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
*Sonno shiso to sono dento* (*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 shindo* (The Way of the Japanese [Loyal]
Subject; and *Amerika no kokominsei* (The Character of the
American People), and in 1948, *The Symbol of National Unity*
(*Kokumin togo no shocho*). 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 shisoshi* (*History of Japanese Ethical
Thought*) in two volumes in 1953, *Katsura rikyu: seisaku
katei no kosatsu* (*The Katsura Imperial Villa:
Reflections on the Process of Its Construction*) in 1955, and
*Nihon geijutsu kenkyu* (*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  *Fudo* (*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
*Fudo* (*Fudo ningen-gakuteki kosatsu*),
translated into English as *Climate and Culture*.
'*Fudo*' means "wind and
earth...the natural environment of a given land" (Watsuji
1988 [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 region'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*  (see Section 2.1 of the entry
on
 Nishida Kitaro.
 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
*Man'yoshu*) (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). Watsuji
distinguishes his interpretation of *fudo*,
"literally 'Wind and Earth' in Japanese"
(Watsuji 1961, 1) from what he maintained was its then conventional
understanding simply as a term used for natural environment --
something that is a resource to be used, or an object separate from or
merely alongside our being-in-the-world. 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 *Sein 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). In order to more faithfully
convey Watsuji's notion of *fudo*, Augustin Berque
suggests "milieu" as a more preferable translation than
climate. *Milieu* more accurately captures the mutual
co-constituting at the heart of *fudo*. For Watsuji, the
notion of *fudo* is supposed to suggest that the spatial,
environmental, and collective aspects of human existence are all
intertwined (Berque, 1994, 498).



Climate, or milieu, 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 becomes 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 Dogen 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. With the social aspect of self being more
foregrounded in Japan than in the West (especially at the time Watsuji
was writing), 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
milieu--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. Emptiness



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 (see the entry on
 Nishida Kitaro).
 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. As the Zen saying goes, "not
one, not two." As Taigen Dan Leighton explains,
"nonduality is not about transcending the duality of form and
emptiness. This deeper nonduality is not the opposite of duality, but
the synthesis of duality and nonduality, with both included, and both
seen as ultimately not separate, but as integrated"(Leighton
2004, 35). For Watsuji, emptiness is what makes the subject-object
relation, or better, the relation both inherent in *ningen* and
between *ningen* possible. What is left is betweenness itself
in which human actions occur. In this sense, betweenness is emptiness,
and emptiness 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. Watsuji's
*ningen* views each person's ethical identity as
integrally related to that of others and extends it beyond merely
human relations. Self and other, self and nature, are viewed as
inseparable from ethical identity and are related to, rather than
viewed as opposed to or exclusive of each other. In Watsuji's
*ningen* we find this nondualism lived out in ways that extend
ethical identity beyond relations between human beings to encompass
the world in which we live -- it is part of *milieu* or
*fudo*. 


## 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 1980s" (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 1940s, 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" (Watsuji
1998, 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. And yet in
the Watsuji scholarship there remains disagreement about how religion
-- Buddhism in particular -- is to be read in his work
(Sevilla 2016, 608-609). William LaFleur remarks, for example, that
Watsuji "embraces a religious solution...philosophically
and methodologically" (LaFleur 1978, 238). While David Dilworth
contends that "Watsuji's position was not essentially a
Buddhistic or religious one"(Dilworth 1974, 17). While there is
disagreement on LaFleur's claim that "it was in the
Buddhist notion of emptiness that Watsuji found the principle that
gives his system...coherence" (LaFleur 1978, 239), it
cannot be denied that when Watsuji writes of emptiness as that final
place or context in which all distinctions disappear, or empty, and
yet from which they emerge, that this notion is at least partly rooted
in his study of Buddhist philosophy and culture, and the concept of
emptiness in particular. Watsuji "embraces a religious
solution...philosophically and methodologically" (LaFleur
1978, 238).The Buddhist notion of
*pratitya-samutpada*, 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. However, it is important to keep in mind that 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 - and as much as
we hear the influence of Buddhism, we also hear, for example, echoed
of the Hegelian concept of sublation (Sevilla 2016, 626). Watsuji
gives no evidence of deep religiosity but expresses a profound and
sometimes ecstatic ethical humanism, one which is, nonetheless,
significantly 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.