Watsuji Tetsurō's Global Ethics of Emptiness: A Contemporary Look at a Modern Japanese Philosopher by Anton Luis Sevilla (review)

Abstract

As the title of this book indicates, Sevilla is here inviting Anglophone readers to consider Watsuji Tetsurō not just as an exotic Japanese curiosity, but as a philosopher of “global” relevance. Indeed, not only that, but also—given his status as one of Palgrave’s “Global Political Thinkers”— as a figure whose ideas might inform better engagement with the ethical challenges of public and communal life in an increasingly globalized world. What are these challenges? Though mostly implied rather than explicitly spelled out, it is clear that Sevilla sees them as encompassing an individualist, profit-oriented, and profoundly dysfunctional model of capitalism that is environmentally rapacious, socially corrosive, and implicated in the contemporary resurgence of populist nationalism. Today’s landscape of global populism—featuring Brexit, Trump, Modi, Duterte, Xi Jinping, and, yes, Abe Shinzo and the Nippon Kaigi—has prompted numerous comparisons with an earlier era of capitalist crisis and resurgent nationalism: the 1930s. Then, nowhere was more profoundly affected than Japan by the cataclysmic breakdown of the liberal-capitalist global order. And that decade supplied the “milieu” ( fūdo 風土), to use his own term, in which Watsuji embarked on Ethics, his magnum opus. Sevilla argues that Watsuji’s efforts to articulate a coherent ethical worldview offer lessons for us as we grapple with the not entirely dissimilar challenges of the early twenty-first century. In doing so, he is conscious of entering something of a minefield. Watsuji has been seen by many scholars, both Japanese and non-Japanese, as a fellow traveler, if not active cheerleader, for the chauvinistic Japanism that inspired the violent drive for “East Asian Co-Prosperity.” Sevilla does not seek to dodge this charge on Watsuji’s behalf and concedes the totalitarian