Takeshi Morisato, a Professor of Philosophy, has an essay in Aeon titled- 'Between being and emptiness'
Which was bridged well enough by Shingon Buddhism.
In Japanese philosophy, unlike the atomised Western self, we are ‘ningen’ (人間),
i.e. the space in which humans are found- the world of men, not gods or demons.
each enmeshed with other humans and nature.
They may be. They may not. The hermit meditating in a mountain cave may transcend the world of men.
In 1934, Watsuji laid out the methodological foundation of Japanese ethics with his Ethics as the Study of the Human [ningen],
Hilarious! Japan had decided to do very evil shit. Some Professor thinks this is a good time to gas on about Ethics!
and gave the earliest formulation of Japanese environmental ethics in Fūdo (1935) – translated as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study.
Japan should invade other climes and extinguish their more ancient cultures. Watsuji's racist shite was used by the regime to justify their horrible claims.
He then published his magnum opus, Rinrigaku – translated as Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan – which was originally a series of essays written between 1937 and 1949, during one of the most tumultuous periods for modern Japan (and, indeed, the world).
He was doing his bit to make the world a lot more evil.
In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human.
Killing, raping and looting Chinese and Vietnamese and Indonesian people?
How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values.
Teach shite at University and you will become a shithead. Watsuji went the extra mile by becoming an evil shithead- like Heidegger.
Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject,
though Japan had decided to imitate the West and 'escape from Asia'.
arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign to the ways in which what it means to be human (ningen, 人間) has been thought about for millennia in East Asian and Japanese philosophy.
It was better. Don't do evil shit even if your country has decided to do evil shit. You don't need to be enmeshed in stinky poo.
First, Watsuji shows that the conception of the Western subject is both individualistic and self-referential,
Because conceptions are held by individuals and their conception of the self must be be self-referential.
although most ethical systems have tried to paint it as being universal.
None have. They all thought there were barbarians and savages who were more like beasts.
Take the example of the Cartesian ego, derived from his cogito argument.
It is stupid. Most things which exist can't think. The fact that you can think doesn't mean you exist. What exists is the body. It does not disappear when you stop thinking. Descartes made a contribution to math. One might say that Math exists because there is a creative subject. It isn't necessarily Platonic.
René Descartes locked himself in a room, then decided to doubt his perception, among other things, concluding that, even when he doubted everything, he could not doubt his activity of thinking as the foundation of his subjectivity.
But Occassionalism might be true. God is efficient cause. You only think you are thinking just as you only think you are free not to think you are free.
To a Japanese reader, this is a story about a Frenchman who could afford the time to meditate on how his mind works,
Plenty of Japanese soldiers had similar stretches of leisure. Buddha too got to sit under a Bodhi tree. He came to the conclusion that existence is empty.
thereby laying out a reflection on his consciousness in his solitude. But then this Western philosophical model of thinking, which a solitary Frenchman set forth, somehow became the prescriptive model to describe the structure of the mind for all human beings.
This simply didn't happen. There were a few Cartesians but there were plenty of Thomists, Empiricists, Platonists and so forth.
Aside from appealing to the conception of divine transcendence that created the universe, nothing in this ego-cogito framework of epistemology suggests that we should think of our minds as working in exactly the same way as Descartes thought about his own mind in the 17th century.
Nobody was doing so. Science had progressed a great deal since then.
The same goes for Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative
criticized by Hegel
or Hegel’s dialectic of self-determining reason.
criticized by Schopenhauer
The basic methodology of modern, Western philosophy is the same, according to Watsuji: a philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background
like Watsuji's or Radhakrishnan's. But they weren't Western even if one of them taught at Oxford.
reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time.
This is the foundation of Buddhism. Japan, sadly, had decided that killing and raping and looting was totes ethical.
(We should also not forget that, in practice, many of these models denied certain demographics access to the universality of reason.) For Watsuji, this is deeply problematic as a foundation for a system of ethical thinking.
But killing lots of Chinese people was cool.
What makes the modern conception of the subject that commits this ‘self-referential abstraction’ so problematic, according Watsuji, is that it had to come up with a supra-individual self that aims at the happiness of society or the welfare of mankind, in order to cloak the foundational problem of individualistic self-centredness.
So, his beef was with Utilitarianism. It might lead to Communism.
What is worse, Watsuji argues, is that, despite this move towards intersubjective consciousness,
e.g. having empathy or compassion for the victims of Japanese Imperialism?
the conception of the modern subject creates conflict between human subject as the source of ethical values, and the objective world or nature as meaningless ‘thereness’.
We should care about trees. Raping and killing innocent Chinese people, however, is perfectly fine.
Nature, in this case, is conceived of as a heteronomous other – a threat to human autonomy, an irrational outside entity that needs to be conquered through the self-determining intelligibility of ‘I think.’
Thinking people figure out that if you keep killing Chinese people and then are stupid enough to attack America, you will get stomped but good even if you keep gassing on about Nature being very nice.
At this point, what Western philosophy describes as an intelligent modern subject looks more like an unreasonable despot
like the Japanese Emperor- or rather the clique controlling him?
who believes themselves to be the highest form of conscious existence, or even a delinquent child who claims to be the sole determiner of world intelligibility, yet in truth is just severed from its mother, Nature.
Please don't nuke us. We are just a naughty child who got separated from Mummy.
This, incidentally, is how Western subjectivity appears to most thinkers from a non-Western philosophical background.
No. Western subjectivity is the same as Eastern subjectivity. Anything in our philosophy, they have in theirs. Sadly, philosophy is useless shite even if Mummy Nature is dandling you in its lap.
Watsuji is just one of many who, out of the same concern, proposed an alternative way of thinking about human existence
there is no need to think about it. Moreover, those who go in for it end up endorsing stupid, evil, shit.
through the system of ethics particular to his own cultural and intellectual milieu.
Japan would regret doing evil shit.
The Japanese conception of human being (ningen sonzai, 人間存在) in the larger context of East Asian philosophies is radically different from the Western conception of humanity.
It really isn't. Every culture has a concept of oikos, oikeosis and oikumene as the habitable world where men live in families and communities to which they feel a 'natural' sense of belonging. This extends to the flora and fauna which make their survival possible. Ancient people saw the need to protect rivers and mountains and forests for ecological reasons.
What makes us human (ningen) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence.
We are welcome to believe in God, the Creator. But what we believe has nothing to do with what makes us human.
Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that constitute our humanity (ningen-sei, 人間性).
Nonsense. We have concrete practices of betweenness with our puppy dog just as much as with out baby. But only the baby has the genes to grow into a human being rather than a woofy dog.
And this practice of betweenness always already comes with the practical self-awareness of emptiness.
There is no such awareness. You may pretend that you are so spiritually advanced that you are aware of fairies or angels or emptiness or plenitude, but this mere pretence.
How could we possibly be a human or an ethical being without God, or reason, or the universal ground of modern subjectivity or of meta-ethics?
We are human if we have human DNA. Imitate good people not the nasty people who do stupid, evil, shit. Japan made a mistake in seeking to imitate the Fascist powers who thought they could grab territory with impunity.
To conceive of the nature of human existence in Japanese philosophy,
you have to accept that Japanese philosophy is just philosophy done by Japanese people. It may be shittier than the philosophy done elsewhere but it is the same type of shit.
Watsuji argues that we must make a double de-/re-constructive movement away from the European conception of humanity as the modern subject.
i.e. lets imitate what the cretin Heidegger is doing.
First, we must deconstruct the fixed notion of the self that we inherited from the history of European philosophy
why inherit useless junk? Oh. Your job is to teach useless junk. You couldn't get a better job because you were as stupid as shit.
– Alexander Douglas made a similar point with regard to an argument with Zhuangzi on the non-substantial nature of the self (or ‘non-self’) in his Aeon essay ‘Essence Is Fluttering’ (2025).
The Universe may be a radical entanglement fluttering in a higher dimensional space.
Second, we must then triangulate the proper understanding of human existence as a dynamic life in the midst of the world.
There is no 'proper' understanding of human existence. T
This is to reconstruct our sense of who we are in our active engagement with each other in our inseparable relation to history, society, culture and climate (including all sentient beings and natural environments therein).
We are easily separated from history, society etc. Why not reinvent the wheel, instead?
Imposing a fixed conception of the human subject as something irreducible to its objective environment is very foreign to most Asian and Buddhist thinkers,
Nonsense! Buddhists from India were happy to go to far away countries to spread their ideas. The Dalai Lama doesn't say you have be Tibetan to be a Tibetan Buddhist. He says his religion is universal.
whether it is conceived as the soul or integrity of human existence as created in the image of the divine in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as the possessor of reason or spirit, in line with a secular understanding of the human subject.
or as inherently possessing Buddha nature (tathaagatagarbha) as in Mahayana Buddhism.
As Douglas’s Daoist essay shows, some Asian thinkers (including Watsuji) even go so far as to say that this fixed, essential conception of subjectivity is delusional
as is the opposite. Everything is delusional. The question is, which delusions (or structural causal models) are useful. Still, I suppose if you are a Professor of useless shite whose name is is Nagasaki Sushi, then you might as well gas on about Watsuji or Wasabe or whatever.
because it suffers from a propensity to view each human as a ‘self-sustaining being’,
this Professor can't feed himself or tie his own shoe-laces.
abstracted or removed from their social, historical and climatic/natural groups.
This dude teaches in Edinburgh. He has been separated from his own Mummy Nature and thus has become a delinquent. He told his parents he was going to Scotland to buy haggis. They are deeply disappointed that he started teaching Philosophy instead.
The world is always in flux and uncompromisingly dynamic.
We aren't. Robustness is evolutionarily adaptive.
If we have a chance to travel to different continents and to different parts of large nations, we quickly learn how vastly different our ways of living, modes of communication, art media, senses of histories and so on can really be.
Fuck off! We discover that economically developed parts of different countries are more similar than different.
But Western philosophers succumb to the temptation to hold on to a fixed notion of the self
because everybody has a fixed notion of the self unless they are mad or get paid to say stupid shite.
that exists independently of that uncompromisingly polyphonic world,
This Professor turned into a cat when he came to Edinburgh. Currently he is in a state of flux between being a penguin and a porpoise.
so that we can somehow construct a universal theory of ethics
e.g. the notion that human rights are universal
through the self-referential universalisation of individual consciousness.
Since human beings are constantly turning into penguins or porpoises, human rights are useless.
And because Western philosophers and those in their thrall prioritise one model that drives towards universal ethics through its self-centred modelling, we endure the problem of colonial thinking that privileges the European way of thinking about what it is to be human above all other alternative conceptions.
The Japanese didn't think the Chinese had human rights. If they don't get nukes, they may be China's next target after Taiwan.
Instead, Watsuji’s understanding of the existence of ningen adopts the dialectical structure of dynamic individuality and polyphonic open totality derived from the Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness.
Which is itself empty. The good thing about Umaswati, Nagarjuna & Sankara is that they render Matam (dogma) otiose because Vigyan (praxis or science) is observationally equivalent.
This concept (which also has a Daoist influence) is meant to break down a fixed conceptualisation of what humans, or anything else, should be across infinite space and time.
We don't have such a conceptualisation. Darwin explained why. The fitness landscape matters.
It means that we cannot ultimately fix any definition of anything because nothing remains what it is forever: every thing is in flux, and nothing is fixed.
What is fixed is that we are attached to physical bodies. Doing stuff which is good for those bodies is useful. Sadly, this may involve teaching stupid shite if you were too stupid to study anything useful.
Everything must ultimately turn to nothing
We don't know that.
and, thanks to this ‘turning into nothing’, everything has a space to be what it is.
It would do so in any case if it actually exists in our world.
The world is made of this endless cycle of what the Heart Sutra calls ‘form and emptiness’, and in Buddhist philosophy, this logic of emptiness also requires an act of detachment, self-negation and compassion (that is, for a self to give room for others to be what they are, or are becoming, as others do the same for the self).
Sadly, the doctrine of emptiness is itself empty. Anyone can gain instantaneous enlightenment at any time.
Watsuji uses this concept of self as emptiness, or what Buddhists call ‘interdependence’, to ground Japanese ethics as the study of the human, a culturally specific grasp of human existence as ningen.
This was at a time when Japan was looting and raping and killing on an industrial scale.
A Buddhist defence of the concept of emptiness (pace Daoism) goes something like this: because there is no fixed essence to human existence (the doctrine of ‘no-self’),
it can't be the cause of anything nor can it logically entail anything. Thus the word 'because' in the above sentence is not justified. In other words, Buddhism has no defence.
each group of individuals in a specific historical, cultural and natural milieu can constitute their sense of humanity
or refuse to do any such thing. We don't have to a common 'sense of humanity'. I am welcome to say that my cat is my fur-baby.
with their self-awareness that this place-specific conception of their inter-relational humanity is both transient and finite.
Everybody knows they will die. It is likely that our planet will be destroyed sooner or later. There is no need to bang about transience. Still, if that is what you are paid to do...
But because they practise self-negation – a detachment from the temptation to essentialise their self-conceived notion of themselves beyond their transient existence – they can be truly aware of themselves.
Not if they negate that self-awareness. The neat thing about Nagarjuna & Dignaga is that apoha goes all the way down.
This is often expressed in Buddhist language as enlightenment or no-self, as a manifestation of existential totality (of the ways the world and the self are) as emptiness.
Which is cool because anyone at all can gain instantaneous 'satori'. You don't have to study this shite in a Monastery or a University.
Unlike the Western ethics that strives for the perennial conception of self as a being with a fixed, unchanging, discoverable essence,
i.e. the fact that I am not Bill Gates which is why I can't access his Bank Accounts.
Japanese ethics strives to become aware of the self as a temporary and finite expression of what it means for it to be a self-emptying human.
Which is why it is cool to kill Chinese people.
Watsuji, then, argues that each language necessarily contains this dialectical structure of the interplay between being and emptiness,
which is itself empty. You can talk nonsense in any language. But you can't really turn into a penguin or a porpoise.
and that the Japanese language (rooted in classical Chinese and other Asian intellectual traditions) has a peculiar way of preserving the speaker’s awareness of this dialectical thinking.
Like Heidegger who thought German was super special. It wasn't. Germans & Japanese savants took to English as it became the common language of the STEM subjects.
Regarding languages, Watsuji argues that:
No one person has the privilege of declaring that she alone has created [words].
Fuck off! Mark Okrand created Klingon.
In spite of this, for everyone, words are one’s own. Words are the furnace by means of which merely subjective connections made by individual human beings are converted into noematic meanings.
Noematic merely means meaning. The meaning of meaning is meaning. How fucking profound!
In other words, words are concerned with the activity whereby preconscious being is turned into consciousness.
Only if we can't think without words. Maybe these guys are mentally damaged in some way and thus have become like that aunt of E.M Forster who didn't know what she thought till she heard what she herself said.
‘Noematic meanings’ are ideas, perceptions and thought contents that we recognise as being a part of our subjective consciousness, apart from the objective world.
Only if we are brain damaged will we think any such thing.
Watsuji is saying that the world is a cluster of practical act-connections
at the Quantum level, maybe.
and, in order for me to express my thought or feeling therein, then, we (including you and I) must engage in the dialectical interrelation of parts and the whole through the praxis of emptiness prior to the rise of noematic meanings.
Which would be fine, if we actually gained super-powers in that way. The Maharishi made a lot of money teaching people to levitate. Religion is a service industry. Some people make a lot of money out of it.
It should be easy for us to understand this self-negating dialectic of emptiness if we compare the relation of self and language with that of author and reader in reading the words of this essay now.
This reader is laughing his ass off at the author.
In order for me to express myself in this article, every reader (you) would have to give me a space to do that in my own terms.
No. You can express yourself even if you have no fucking readers.
There is a sense of self-negation needed from your side as the audience if you are not to impose your understanding of the world or yourself on my explanations of the Japanese worldview.
You have shit for brains. Plenty of Japanese people don't. You can't explain shit about the worldview of Japanese Physicists or Mathematicians.
You must empty your cultural and personal assumptions as much as you can when allowing me to speak about my culture and myself for a few pages.
Only if you want to be brain washed. Otherwise, you should verify that the author is telling stupid lies. This has become easier to do thanks to Google, Grok, etc.
But, at the same time, I must know how you, as the readers, speak this language so that I can anticipate misunderstanding.
No. You merely need to know the standard version of the language. It solves the underlying coordination problem.
In addition to knowing how the English language functions, with its peculiar grammatical rules and unique punctuations, I have to think with the editors about how we can best connect the idea with the target readership,
which is middle-brow. Nothing wrong with that at all.
many of whom will come with a very different set of cultural norms and knowledge from my own. There is a sense of self-negation on our side as writers, in that we do not entirely impose our scholarly understanding of Japanese philosophy in its original form, a form that would make sense only to specialists familiar with Japanese history, philosophy and language.
The problem here is that this cunt does not understand Japanese history or philosophy though he may know the language well enough. This is because Japanese history is just history. The Structural Causal Model is the same.
A good article usually consists of the balance between these two sides of self-emptiness.
No. It is well written or conveys useful information. Zen Buddhists can do both when they aren't trying shit higher than their arsehole.
When the author fails to achieve such a balance, the result is often a highly abstract article
Nothing wrong with abstraction. Math is abstract. It is very useful.
that few can understand, or else one that allows readers to project their opinions and pre-existing prejudices on the article with the result that the authorial intent escapes,
His intention was to defend a shithead who was cool with the stupid evil shit Japan got up to in the Thirties and Forties.
and they interpret the article in an entirely subjective way. Watsuji argues that the same dialectical relation of mutual self-negation as a basis of human communication takes place in the balance between individual speech acts and language.
He was wrong. Communications is about coordination and discoordination games.
Because of that, if we look at how a language functions in relation to its speakers, and vice versa, through this model of dialectical emptiness,
which is itself empty
Watsuji thinks we will better understand how ethics is both practised and theorised in each domain of world philosophies in general and in Japanese philosophy in particular.
We understand that the cunt was for Japan doing evil shit when he thought his country would get richer by doing so. Later, he repented his stupidity and focused on writing meaningless shite just like Heidegger.
If language is a constitutive depository of our experience,
It isn't. We had experiences before we learned to speak. Also, depositories can't constitute what they contain. This guy is as stupid as shit.
as Watsuji argues, paying attention to how a set of philosophical terms in a particular language functions with its symbols and rules can help us understand how we articulate the sense of what it means to be human, and to be ethical, in that culturally specific framework of thinking.
But we all already understand this even if we had no contact with any type of philosophy. I recall writing an essay when I was 5 on 'what I want to be when I grow up.' My answer was 'A cat. Cat's don't have to go to Skool.'
Rinri (倫理, りんり), meaning "ethics" or "morals," was introduced into modern Japanese to translate Western ethical concepts, often attributed to philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō in 1881. It combines the characters 倫 (reason, human relations) and 理 (reason, principle), signifying "the reasonable way to maintain harmonious human relationships" and community order.In this sense, Watsuji invites us to explore the function of Japanese words as rinri (ethics)
and ningen sonzai (human being)
the word Ningen derives from middle Chinese. In other words, both these Japanese words were imports. They functioned in the same way as the thing they were translating or importing from a foreign language or culture.
and to capture distinct ethical concepts in the Japanese intellectual tradition.
Clearly, they were distinctive to Japan. They were imported.
In Japanese ethics, both the conception of ethics as rinri and of human existence as ningen sonzai retain the strong mutual implication of such opposing terms as individuality and totality, singularity and plurality, and self and other.
The Greek word 'ethos' & the Latin word 'mores' refer to the same thing- viz. customary ways in which people behave and relate to each other.
The term rinri, meaning ‘ethics’, consists of two characters: rin (倫) and ri (理).
Used to translate Western ethical concepts.
The Chinese character 倫 (simplified: 伦, pinyin: lún) primarily means human relationships, ethics, morals, order, or coherence. It implies the natural order of relationships (e.g., Confucian "five relationships") and is commonly used in terms related to ethics (倫理) and social order.Rin refers to fellows or nakama, a group of sentient beings that follow a certain set of relational rules, or what Confucianism calls ‘constancies’.
This includes the ways in which we relate to each other as parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, minister and subject, and so on. Once again, these relational roles are not fixed: the ways in which partners relate to each other do not have to follow one model. But they are determinable expressions of human relations that retain some communicable patterns, which are always subject to change. Additionally, the Japanese term nakama, or fellows, signifies both singularity and plurality. We can point to a person to say that he is our nakama (an ally) or describe ourselves as nakama (friends). It retains both meanings of singularity and plurality.
Nakama (仲間) translates to friend, comrade, or companion, but it deeply signifies a close-knit group member, such as a crewmate or teammate sharing an unbreakable, family-like bond. It doesn't mean some stupid shit some shithead pulled out of his arse.
Ri (理) is often translated as principle(s) or reason in the context of philosophy but it also refers to a kind of sensible pattern (kata) or conventional agreement through which we constitute our relations. There are certain expectations or constancies in the ways that we write our essays or relate to each other as friends or families. Once again, these are not fixed rules that have to be permanently observed in the same way but are a relatively stable aggregate of social, cultural and climatic behaviours through which we constitute our sense of belonging and mutual understanding. Thus, ri refers to the patterns of interactions that constitute the sense of what it means for us to be human (ningen).
This is stuff we already understand. Why did it change greatly in Japan after Nagasaki & Hiroshima? The answer is that if the Japanese didn't surrender and change their ways, they would be reduced to a pile of radio-active dust.
The term ningen consists of two characters, nin or hito (人) and gen or aida (間). A combination of these characters is also dialectical, through and through. The term nin or hito usually means a person or a human but also retains some sense of plurality as ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’. As we can imagine from the shape of the Chinese character, 人 indicates two persons supporting each other to constitute a sense of a person or personhood. In other words, in Japanese ethics hito or person is both singular and plural. If we lose the balance between the two, we lose the sense of what it means to be hito or person.
No we don't. On the other hand, if we don't understand 糞 we won't be able to shit.
The second character, aida (間),
of Chinese origin
consists of two parts, 門 and 日. The first character looks like the entrance to a saloon bar in a western movie. When the protagonist pushes through the swing door, the piano stops and everyone looks at him in silence. I think this is a good method of ‘remembering the kanji’, as the philosopher James Heisig put it. Indeed, the character symbolises a Buddhist temple gate,
The 'untouchable' Burakumin weren't allowed into Buddhist temples.
which is usually open, and we should be able to feel the hollow expanse behind it. The second character, 日, symbolises the sun: so, the sense of space is dictated by the temporal movement through the gate of the star (and also, probably, by the shadows it casts).
The original word had the sense of moon-light filtering through a crack- e.g. beneath a door. The moon symbol was changed to the Sun.
Watsuji shows that adding this character symbolising the spatial concept of betweenness (with some implication of temporal space) to the character of person or hito was not accidental. Rather, it indicates the historical fact that ancient Chinese thinkers, and Japanese thinkers as their critical followers, adopted the insight that human individuals cannot exist apart from the social-natural whole of their being in the world.
Who didn't know this? What other great discovery did the shithead make? That people have Mummies and Daddies? They didn't give birth to themselves?
Hence, for them, as much as for contemporary Japanese ethical theorists, what makes human existence is the ‘dialectical unity of those double characteristics that are inherent in a human being’.
or the univocal plurality of the infinite characteristics that are inherent in quarks.
This ‘unity of contradiction’, Watsuji argues, does not remain within the bounds of what we call ‘humanity’ in Western languages, but the ‘concept of [betweenness, or the open totality] already involves the historical, climatic, and social structure of human existence’.
Some stupid Germans thought their 'culture' & 'authenticity' made them the enemies of Western Civilization. Some stupid Japanese who were imitating those stupid Germans believed the same theing about Japan. That's why they were justified in killing and looting China- which was where they had got most of their own civilization from.
He continues:
To see ningen only in the form of hito [ie, an individual human being] is to
show a sense of autonomy & responsibility. This means you don't have to go along with the stupid, evil, shit that your Government is doing.
see a human being merely from the perspective of his individual nature. This view, if it be held alone, and even if it is allowed as a methodological abstraction, cannot come to grips with ningen concretely.
Nobody gets to grips with words concretely. You can't fuck the word fuck nor can you fart the word fart.
We must grasp [the Chinese-Japanese sense of the human] ningen through and through as the unity of the … contradictory characteristics.
We mustn't grasp stupid shit.
This dual structure means that, in order for an individual self to act,
e.g. when you scratch your arse
it always acts in relation to its betweenness,
only in the sense that it always act in relation to its N.D.A with the planet Uranus.
or the form of engagement that covers not only intersubjective relations but also the ways in which human beings interact with each other through their engagement with shared social, cultural, linguistic and natural environments.
Pearl Harbour meant that Japanese people would soon be interacting with Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on them. Cultural environments don't matter in a world of ICBMs and global markets.
The concept of betweenness that characterises the nature of human existence in Japanese ethics
didn't stop them doing stupid, evil, shit. Thus it was useless.
does not designate the sense of the world as a fixed place
Japan was a fixed place. It could be bombed to buggery. That's why it surrendered.
where we can find the sum total of natural objects. Since it is not a fixed place, we cannot give a determinate identity or framework that escapes radical change.
Japan made radical changes because the alternative was being bombed to buggery.
We must instead imagine it as the hollow expanse behind the gate of the Buddhist temple,
there is a courtyard or something similar. So what?
or as the clearing behind the shadowy protagonist in a western film. It implies an infinite possibility of interrelations that ground individuals, which allow them to express these interrelations as their social, cultural and natural belongings.
No. It just means that there's some space behind them.
It is the self-emptying dunamis (ancient Greek for ‘potentiality’ or ‘potency’) of what makes you and me,
I suppose shitting is a type of self-emptying. Kenosis is the Greek word for Christ's 'self-emptying' during the incarnation.
as the reader and the writer of this article, as much as it is the unfixed foundation sustaining our communication as the shared practice of mutual self-negation.
Mutual masturbation maybe. On the other hand, it may be that this dude's colleagues say 'you don't fucking exist' to him and he replies in kind.
The world consists of this pre-ontological space
if there is a space, it has an ontology. This may be the hypokeimenon which undergirds everything.
where we interact with each other to constitute our sense of polyphonic belongings.
Only in the sense that it consists of pre-ontological farts.
Ancient Chinese and Japanese thinkers,
like other ancient thinkers
who emphasise the dynamic interrelation between a single human being and the open totality of such individuals as they live and die in the midst of one another and nature, refer to the dynamic space of social-natural community, where both the world and the individual exist in their contradictory and mutually implicated relation.
Which is what gives rise to Economic and Political theory.
The betweenness of ningen is pure transformation, that is to say, it is, as a concept, empty in and of itself, but it calls for the practical negation of each person’s self-centredness for the realisation of the other and vice versa.
only in the sense that it calls for pre-ontological farts to discursively constitute their own anus.
Like the Buddhist notion of codependent origination
which originated in India
or emptiness, the principle of self-negation is the movement between the zone of being and of non-being, not as a victim of self-determining reason, but as an open community of compassionate beings who allow each other to express themselves in their own terms.
Japanese troops were killing and raping Chinese people so as to allow them to express themselves in their own terms. Sadly, they were beaten before getting to India.
It allows them to be understood fully in relation to each other.
No. We don't 'fully' understand ourselves, let alone any one else.
There are many interesting implications from this Watsujian conception of Japanese ethics
there are none. It was stupid shit.
as rinrigaku. One of the more remarkable implications is that, as early as the 1930s, Watsuji was laying the foundation for decolonial ethics
at a time when his country was colonizing others in a particularly brutal manner. Why not say Heidegger, in the 1930s, was training as a Rabbi while laying the foundations of independent Israel's fiscal policy?
by practising the intellectual genealogy of ethics as the study of human existence in relation to each subfield of world philosophies, rather than taking the more usual Western route of seeking a universal ethic.
Which is what must exist if all human beings, regardless of race, gender, religion, culture are essentially equal in dignity. The West is the good guy here. The East- as represented by some Japanese junior Heidegger- is the bad guy.
This is to say that every philosophy programme that specialises in ethics – ranging from the traditional theoretical exposition to applied fields, such as medical and environmental ethics – should encourage its researchers to gain fluency in different languages and to investigate various historical ways in which ethics has been both conceptualised and lived in different spheres of world philosophies.
Fuck off! If you are doing medical ethics or AI ethics etc. study Medicine or AI by all means. Don't bother with Japanese shitheads gassing on in a Heideggerian style.
If we care to move beyond the colonial, self-referential abstraction of Western universal ethics, Watsuji argues, we should practise ethics based on different cultures and languages, beyond the confines of Anglo-European philosophy.
i.e. the Japs should be allowed to colonize China & Indo-China and so forth.
Unlike the Western anthropocentric formulation of ethics that sets forth a self-subsisting subject apart from nature, Japanese ethics starts
by imitating Chinese, Indian & later Western ethics. One might say there is an animistic layer to it- but that is also true of Europe.
with an assumption that each individual, and each group of such individuals, constitutes their sense of what it means for them to be human always already in their interrelation with their social, historical and natural surroundings.
Humans who are doing stupid shit are always already interrelated with geography and history and so forth.
Japanese ethics, in this sense,
is nonsense when it isn't actively evil.
does not add one subfield to the discipline of ethics but opens up its border to a plethora of world philosophical formulations of ethical thought.
which are shit. Ethics is about promoting better outcomes. If you want to succeed in your Profession, it is wise to at least pretend to have good Professional ethics. Sadly, teaching Philosophy is a shit profession. This cretin thinks he can pass off a dude who approved of Japan's evil Imperialist policies as some sort of Eastern Sage. How stupid do you have to be, to do so?
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