- Length
- 384 pagesYamamoto and Carter, Watsuji Tetsurō's Rinrigaku, SUNY, 1996
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Rinrigaku
An ethics that begins from the space between people rather than from the person, built on the observation that the Japanese word for a human being says so. It is the most substantial alternative to individualist moral philosophy produced in the twentieth century, and it was written while its country was at war.
- Date
- 1937-1949
- Author
- Watsuji Tetsurō
- Region
- Kyoto and Tokyo
- Language
- Japanese
- 1996 English, Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert Carter The only complete English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 26 years
The standard work of modern Japanese ethics, written across the war, and read since with a permanent question about what its account of the state was doing in 1942.
What the book says
An ethics built from the observation that the Japanese word for human being means, literally, betweenness among persons. Watsuji takes this seriously as philosophy rather than as etymology: a person is not first an individual who then enters relationships, but a node in a web of relations that is prior to them - child of these parents, member of this household, colleague, neighbour. The self is dual, individual and social at once, and neither pole is more basic; a human being becomes an individual by negating the social whole they belong to, and then negates that negation by returning to it in a new relation. Ethics is therefore not a matter of principles a solitary agent applies but of the ways betweenness is sustained or broken - trust, truthfulness, obligation, all of which have no meaning for one person alone. Around this Watsuji builds an account of climate and place, arguing that a people's way of living is shaped by the environment it must deal with, and a treatment of the household, the community and the state as successive levels of betweenness.
What it argues
That the individual and the community are two moments of one structure, and that any ethics starting from either alone will misdescribe both. Watsuji's method is to take the double negation seriously: a person exists as an individual only by standing apart from the whole they belong to, and only realises themselves fully by returning into relation - so the isolated self of Western moral philosophy is a real moment and not the whole story, and the collective that swallows individuals is equally a failure. The virtues follow from what betweenness requires. Trust is not a psychological attitude but the condition of any joint activity; truthfulness matters because betweenness is sustained through speech; and a betrayal is not a broken rule but a broken relation. The account of climate extends this outward: a people living with monsoons, with desert, or with European seasons develops a different way of receiving the world, and their ethics carries the mark of it.
What it answered
Nishida on the starting point, and Western moral philosophy - Kant especially - on the isolated moral agent. Watsuji had studied in Germany, read Heidegger's Being and Time as it appeared, and reported that its account of temporality left out space and community entirely; Climate and Culture was written in response. His argument is that the whole modern tradition takes the solitary subject as given and then has difficulty getting to other people, and that the difficulty is manufactured by the starting point rather than found in the world.
How it argues
By etymology and phenomenological description, working outward from words. Watsuji's characteristic move is to take a term in ordinary Japanese, unpack what its structure assumes, and show that the assumption is philosophically substantial - and he does the same with German and Greek, so the argument is comparative throughout rather than a claim about Japanese uniqueness. The method has real force and a real weakness: what a language embeds is evidence about how its speakers have thought, and treating it as evidence about how things are requires a further step he does not always make.
The moment
Watsuji held the chair of ethics at Tokyo Imperial University from 1934, and the three volumes appeared in 1937, 1942 and 1949 - which is to say across the whole of Japan's war. The middle volume, containing the account of the state as the highest level of betweenness, was published under a regime making exactly that claim, and Watsuji's wartime writing included work on the national character that he did not repudiate afterwards. He revised the text for the postwar edition. The relation between the philosophy and the politics is not a subsequent controversy but a question the book raises about itself.
How it travelled
Slowly outward and immediately within Japan, where it became the standard university ethics text and remains widely taught. The complete English translation did not appear until 1996, sixty years after the first volume, which is why Watsuji is far less known in the West than Nishida. Recent interest has come from communitarian moral philosophy, from care ethics, and from environmental thought, where the account of climate has been taken up as an early treatment of place.
The strongest objection
That the structure has no brake, and that its author's circumstances show where the absence leads. If the individual realises themselves by returning into relation, and if the levels of betweenness ascend from the household through the community to the state, then the state becomes the widest whole a person is fulfilled by belonging to - and a philosophy of that shape, published in Japan in 1942, is doing work whatever its author intended. Watsuji provides no principle by which a person might stand against the whole, because standing apart is on his account only a moment on the way back in. Defenders reply that the double negation preserves individuality genuinely and that the state chapters can be removed without damage to the ethics. Whether a load-bearing structure can be removed without damage is exactly what is in dispute.
Why read it
The first volume, which contains the analysis of betweenness and the double negation and is the philosophical core; the account of trust and truthfulness is the best part of it. Climate and Culture is shorter and more accessible and is where most readers start. The whole is available in English only in one translation.
- First printed
- 1937
- First in English
- 1996
- Digitised
- No
Watsuji's earlier Climate and Culture (1935) supplies the account of environment and human character that the ethics assumes, and his Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara made him known to a general readership long before the philosophy did.
The Yamamoto and Carter English of 1996 is the only complete version and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Watsuji is read in comparative ethics, in the philosophy of community and increasingly in environmental philosophy, and the account of betweenness is used by philosophers arguing against the individualism of the analytic tradition.
On quoting this book
In copyright in Japanese and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How far the ethics supports the wartime politics is the standing question and answers range from complete separation to structural complicity. Whether Watsuji revised the postwar volume to soften the earlier position is a textual question with a literature of its own. Whether the etymological method establishes anything philosophical, or only reports how a language has organised things, is a fair methodological objection. And whether his account of climate shades into a determinism about national character is argued, particularly given what such arguments were used for in his lifetime.