Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻 哲郎)
1889–1960 · Modern East Asian Thought · Known
Watsuji was the leading moral philosopher of modern Japan, working next door to the Kyoto School. The Japanese word for a person, ningen, carries a sense of betweenness, and he built an ethics on it: you exist in the space between people, never as a sealed-off individual. Against Western individualism, and against Heidegger's focus on time, he held that climate and place also make a human being what he is, and that a self is realised within a community.
Signature
The position Watsuji is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Society
- strongly leans Individualism
- Ethics Basis
- Relational
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Society
- strongly leans Individualism (93 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Watsuji refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Perception
- Embodied Perception
What do we directly perceive? - Ethics Basis
- Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Paradox
- Dialectical Sublation
What is the status of paradox? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed / No-Self
What is human nature?