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Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960) is best known today for his comprehensive analysis of intellectual history and ethical thought. In Japanese intellectual history, he is regarded as a pioneer in existentialism studies, publishing an early secondary resource on Friedrich Nietzsche and the first book on Søren Kierkegaard in Japanese in the 1910s. His investigation into Japanese ethics is also known for its critical engagement with Western philosophers and thought, including G W F Hegel’s dialectic and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and hermeneutics.

An undated portrait of Watsuji Tetsurō. Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan

In 1934, Watsuji laid out the methodological foundation of Japanese ethics with his Ethics as the Study of the Human [ningen], and gave the earliest formulation of Japanese environmental ethics in Fūdo (1935) – translated as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study. He then published his magnum opus, Rinrigaku – translated as Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan – which was originally a series of essays written between 1937 and 1949, during one of the most tumultuous periods for modern Japan (and, indeed, the world).

In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human. How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values. Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject, arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign to the ways in which what it means to be human (ningen, 人間) has been thought about for millennia in East Asian and Japanese philosophy.

First, Watsuji shows that the conception of the Western subject is both individualistic and self-referential, although most ethical systems have tried to paint it as being universal. Take the example of the Cartesian ego, derived from his cogito argument. René Descartes locked himself in a room, then decided to doubt his perception, among other things, concluding that, even when he doubted everything, he could not doubt his activity of thinking as the foundation of his subjectivity. To a Japanese reader, this is a story about a Frenchman who could afford the time to meditate on how his mind works, thereby laying out a reflection on his consciousness in his solitude. But then this Western philosophical model of thinking, which a solitary Frenchman set forth, somehow became the prescriptive model to describe the structure of the mind for all human beings.

Aside from appealing to the conception of divine transcendence that created the universe, nothing in this ego-cogito framework of epistemology suggests that we should think of our minds as working in exactly the same way as Descartes thought about his own mind in the 17th century. The same goes for Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative or Hegel’s dialectic of self-determining reason. The basic methodology of modern, Western philosophy is the same, according to Watsuji: a philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time. (We should also not forget that, in practice, many of these models denied certain demographics access to the universality of reason.) For Watsuji, this is deeply problematic as a foundation for a system of ethical thinking.

What Western philosophy describes as an intelligent modern subject looks more like an unreasonable despot

What makes the modern conception of the subject that commits this ‘self-referential abstraction’ so problematic, according Watsuji, is that it had to come up with a supra-individual self that aims at the happiness of society or the welfare of mankind, in order to cloak the foundational problem of individualistic self-centredness. What is worse, Watsuji argues, is that, despite this move towards intersubjective consciousness, the conception of the modern subject creates conflict between human subject as the source of ethical values, and the objective world or nature as meaningless ‘thereness’. Nature, in this case, is conceived of as a heteronomous other – a threat to human autonomy, an irrational outside entity that needs to be conquered through the self-determining intelligibility of ‘I think.’

At this point, what Western philosophy describes as an intelligent modern subject looks more like an unreasonable despot who believes themselves to be the highest form of conscious existence, or even a delinquent child who claims to be the sole determiner of world intelligibility, yet in truth is just severed from its mother, Nature. This, incidentally, is how Western subjectivity appears to most thinkers from a non-Western philosophical background. Watsuji is just one of many who, out of the same concern, proposed an alternative way of thinking about human existence through the system of ethics particular to his own cultural and intellectual milieu.

The Japanese conception of human being (ningen sonzai, 人間存在) in the larger context of East Asian philosophies is radically different from the Western conception of humanity. What makes us human (ningen) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence. Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that constitute our humanity (ningen-sei, 人間性). And this practice of betweenness always already comes with the practical self-awareness of emptiness. How could we possibly be a human or an ethical being without God,........

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