Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960)

Born in Himeji, Watsuji Tetsuro graduated from Tokyo University with a specialization in Western philosophy. While studying philosophy, he wrote several short novels and plays, and his lifelong interest in Japanese history and culture resulted in the publication of three books on the subject: Nihon toon meer Kodai Bunka (Ancient Japanese Culture) (1920) and the two-volume Nihon Seishin-shi Kenkyu (Studies on the History of the Japanese Spirit) (1926). In 1925 he received an appointment at Kyoto University and became de facto a member of the Kyoto School. Yet he was not as directly influenced by Nishida Kitaro as were other, more central figures in the movement. Watsuji spent the years 1927--29 in Europe, following up his earlier works concerning Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as studying the history of Western ethical theory. During that time, he also was profoundly influenced by Martin Heidegger's recently completed book, Being and Time. After returning to Japan, Watsuji became increasingly dissatisfied with Western existentialism, seeing it as too individualistic and overly fixated on temporality to the virtual exclusion of spatiality. He began in earnest to focus on developing his own ethical theory, first in his pioneering 1934 work, Ethics as Philosophical Anthropology (Ningengaku To Shite No Rinrigaku), and then in his monumental three-volume work Ethics (Rinrigaku), published between 1937 and 1949. His basic position was that human existence emerges out of a "betweenness," a middle ground between the poles of individualism and collectivism. His critique was that the West too often had emphasized exclusively the former pole, and East Asian thought (such as Confucianism), the latter. Watsuji argued that ethics is possible only through a "double negation." First, one must break away from the inherited values as established by the group mentality into which one is born in order to establish one's own values. Then, one must voluntarily relinquish some of those individualistic values for the common good. His postwar works, such as History of Japan's Ethical Thought (Nihon Rinri Shiso-shi) (1952), centered on Japanese ethical thinking and social behavior, continuing to reflect this philosophy. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder