Watsuji Tetsurō was a Japanese philosopher in the early 20th century who is often described as a Japanese Existentialist. He formulated a uniquely Asian response to Western individualist ethics and the earliest Japanese ethics of environmentalism, and he explored the linguistic argument for natural mutual aid[^1]. This exploration is crucial because our understanding of what is ethical is derived from how we think about what it means to be human.
In the West, ethical systems strive toward a perspective from the inward to the outward. This model builds humanity (as a concept) from the subjectivity of the personal. The self-referential Descartes "cogito" becomes a universal template for all thinking humanity, it is thought to be a reflective single person in the vital sense. In fact, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel all developed Western philosophical methodologies stemming from singular philosophers and then declared that their self-referential abstraction of reality was applicable to people across temporal space, regardless of culture, history, and experiences. From this, Watsuji, argues, we have one of the core anchors for Western intellectual colonialism.
This Western philosophy is grounded in both the dogma of colonial exclusion and the concept of the transcendent, to which they all appeal as a universal first principle of Enlightenment thinking.
Watsuji is not alone in his critiques. Herbert Read, the British anarchist and art critic, noted that this kind of abstraction is dangerous. Read argued that "Modern man has been in search of a new language of form" to end his alienation. He warned against systems imposed from above, stating, "You cannot impose a culture from the top; it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work."
According to Watsuji, the Western obsession with a worldview built on a "self-referential abstraction" forces an alienation of the subject from their surroundings. It places nature in a lower category that operates on different principles than human thought. Thus, the environment becomes an alien nature. It becomes a presence of chaos and hostility that must be tamed by individual will. Western philosophy alienates nature from self as the deadly consequence of fundamental hierarchy. It claims to be the arbiter of all truth yet is severed from circumstance. Thus, a tradition of philosophical colonization is linked into the fabric of Western ethics, for "circumstance" includes culture, history, place, and community.
The East has long built its model differently, basing it on the concept of interrelationship through the space between, or aidagara in the Japanese, a concept which the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would later coin the term "interbeing" to explain.
Within East Asian philosophies, humanity is a matter of being in-between. Where Western thought assembles reality from one or more isolated pathways to God, "in-betweenness" conceptualizes the human being as an "edge state." This state is defined by a practical understanding of its place in the middle of a vast web of interrelationships, a perspective born out from the modern scientific perspective as well.
If there is to be a modern ethics after this tumultuous time in human history, it must be one that disconnects from the traditional Western concept of a fixed self. Instead, it must place the self as a construct of interbeing within a networked reality. Thus, we regain context as selves within our relationships. Relationships to history, culture, time, place, and ecology.
As Read famously said, "Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines." As the world grapples with technological crises of unprecedented scale, it seems clear that we must return to that apprenticeship if we hope to survive and thrive.
I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!
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[^1]: It is also important to note that Watsuji himself experienced a high degree of what I might call "cognitive dissonance" in that he railed against the Imperialism of the West while largely supporting the same in his own country. Regardless, his critique of Western philosophy, and his ethics of interconnection are logically fascinating and remain poignant in their own right.