Biosketch
Born in Nibuno, Japan in 1889, Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎) was a leading twentieth-century Japanese philosopher, cultural theorist, intellectual historian, and critic. While his thought was anchored in and by philosophy, his wider cultural interests in art, literature, religion, and history were apparent early on. He translated Byron and Shaw while he was still a high school student and later joined a study group that met at the home of the novelist Natsume Sōseki. After studying philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University he published, in rapid succession, studies on Nietzsche (1913) and Kierkegaard (1915). The latter was the first full-fledged scholarly study of Kierkegaard’s work published in Japan (Yuasa 1995), which no doubt contributed to Watsuji’s reputation in this period as “Japan’s foremost interpreter of European existentialism” (Kasulis 2018, 479). Cultural, aesthetic, literary, and historical interests remained a mainstay of Watsuji’s thinking throughout his career; by...
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Watsuji at times conceptualizes the meaning of understanding as a moment of disclosedness as a transcendental constitutional power (see Liederbach 2001). A similar kind of confusion can also be seen in Watsuji’s criticisms of phenomenology, which are often made in close proximity to explicit discussions of Heidegger’s work but usually rely on a certain reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. He accuses Heidegger, for instance, of understanding the appearances as phenomena immanent to consciousness (Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū 9, 176–177; hereafter WTZ followed by volume number).
- 2.
Watsuji gives a condensed summary of his hermeneutic method at the end of WTZ 9.
- 3.
Maraldo points out that Watsuji misconstrues Dilthey’s conception of society (Maraldo 2002a), and Liederbach notes that Watsuji has misunderstood Heidegger on the ontological difference (Liederbach 2001). Mine has argued for the necessity of untangling Watsuji’s hermeneutics from his phenomenology (Mine 2021).
- 4.
The ethical phenomenon that exemplifies this for Watsuji is shinrai 信頼, or trust (Maraldo 2002b). Trust makes our common life together possible because it is both always already present and something to continually be achieved again. Only because trust is always already there in society is it possible to betray this trust, as when someone lies to others in order to deceive them. Lying works because the normal and widespread condition in a community of language users is that we take on trust what others say. Hence, the phenomenon of trust is a description of an essential dimension of what is always already present in human relationality. But trust is also prescriptive for human relationality and is a norm implicit in the activity of being human. Since other people are the constitutive setting of human life, the basic activity of human beings is their behavior in relation to one another (the ethos of ningen sonzai 人間存在 or human being). The reciprocal nature of human existence—the mutuality of human life—necessitates that we respond to the trust that is already there by not betraying it and by entrusting ourselves to others. Hence, trusting others and becoming worthy of trust is also normative and prescriptive for human life to become fully what it is. This can be seen especially clearly in the ethos of a community. Any community requires a modicum of trust to be already present, but “ideal communities are those that enable and sustain relationships of trust” (Maraldo 2002b, 190) in a much fuller way. Hence communities with low trust such as “bad” neighborhoods or totalitarian societies can be criticized on these grounds, and its members can aspire to change them.
- 5.
Krueger has also extended Watsuji’s notion of the self as constitutively being-in-relation-to-others (aidagara) and his understanding of intentionality as constitutively social to phenomenological approaches to psychopathology. Together with Krueger, Lucy Osler applies Watsuji’s phenomenological analysis of communication technologies to the way we experience the Internet. They argue against a reductive understanding of online interpersonal encounters either as merely sources for the acquisition and delivery of information or as indirect and fully mediated interactions with symbols and images. Instead, Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara shows that the Internet actually generates new forms of “emotional expression, shared experiences, and modes of betweenness” that come to be incorporated into the relational structure of the self (Osler and Krueger 2022, 78).
- 6.
As Bellah observes, Watsuji “is completely in the group of Westernized intellectuals which Maruyama Masao indicates never gave themselves unreservedly to the fascist and militarist movement” (Bellah 1965).
- 7.
However, Sevilla has pointed out that the possibility of social change can be found in Watsuji’s suggestion that the individual might leave one social body for another or even found an entirely new group him- or herself. See Sevilla 2014.
- 8.
I thank Northwestern University Press for permission to reprint material here from Johnson 2019.
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Johnson, D.W. (2023). Watsuji, Tetsurō (1889–1960). In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_84-1
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