Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics is founded on the idea of the dual structure of human beings: that we are both individual and communal at the same time, and that these two elements constantly negate each other. But the interpretation of this structure shifts over the prewar, wartime, and postwar volumes. In the first volume, double negation is ambiguously explained as either an endless cycle that balances individuality and totality or a three-stage dialectic that privileges totality. Also, totality is seen as shaping a largely obedient but self-aware individual, with no real sense of social change worked in. In the second volume, the individual is largely subsumed beneath finite and exclusive totalities, and social change is restricted to advances in culture. But in the third volume, individuality is reinstated as that which guides social change by intuiting how the totality ought to be. Also, double negation is reinterpreted as heading toward unity-in-difference. These changes can be interpreted historically, with the emphasis on totality rising with the wartime pressures, and the emphasis on individuality rising in postwar occupied Japan. Finally, a historically nuanced and balanced interpretation of Watsuji’s ethics can have contemporary relevance, for instance by contributing to the liberal-communitarian debates.
{"title":"Watsuji’s Balancing Act: Changes in his Understanding of Individuality and Totality from 1937 to 1949","authors":"A. Sevilla","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics is founded on the idea of the dual structure of human beings: that we are both individual and communal at the same time, and that these two elements constantly negate each other. But the interpretation of this structure shifts over the prewar, wartime, and postwar volumes. In the first volume, double negation is ambiguously explained as either an endless cycle that balances individuality and totality or a three-stage dialectic that privileges totality. Also, totality is seen as shaping a largely obedient but self-aware individual, with no real sense of social change worked in. In the second volume, the individual is largely subsumed beneath finite and exclusive totalities, and social change is restricted to advances in culture. But in the third volume, individuality is reinstated as that which guides social change by intuiting how the totality ought to be. Also, double negation is reinterpreted as heading toward unity-in-difference. These changes can be interpreted historically, with the emphasis on totality rising with the wartime pressures, and the emphasis on individuality rising in postwar occupied Japan. Finally, a historically nuanced and balanced interpretation of Watsuji’s ethics can have contemporary relevance, for instance by contributing to the liberal-communitarian debates.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Opening Remark: Against the Grain of Reductio ad Japonicum","authors":"T. Yasunari","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66433971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) is well known as a leading representative of the Kyoto School. His main contributions are in the field of religious philosophy based on Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, as his main works Religion and Nothingness (1961) and The Standpoint of Zen (1986) indicate. It may seem incongruous to associate Nishitani’s name with a discussion on science and technology. But it was this relationship to science, that is to say, the relationship between religion and science, to which Nishitani mostly directed his interests which gradually led him to the study of technology itself. In this article, I have relied on Nishitani’s main work Religion and Nothingness to ascertain how he interpreted the conflict between religion and science in relation to nihility and then consider his insights on technology. The appearance of the mechanistic view of modern science connected with mechanical technology and the tendency toward the mechanization of man permeate increasingly not only the social structures but the inner life of man. At the same time, the individual is transformed into a subject in pursuit of his desires with a sense of meaninglessness. The nihility which modern science and technology produced ultimately turns into “emptiness” (空 Śūnyatā). The main concern here is how the problems of science and technology can be understood from the standpoint of “emptiness.” Nishitani’s work that I mentioned above, however, does not necessarily deal with this question directly. Thus, I chose another treatise from the same period, “Science and Zen” (1960), and approached the problem of science from the standpoint of emptiness. Nishitani quotes a Zen Buddhist discussion about the “big fire” of space. It considers the position of the real self in the big fire that extinguishes all things. This reference to the big fire in space seems metaphorical but it is also scientifically plausible. Death is also a scientific actuality in space from a certain perspective. To take this actuality seriously as a problem of existence means, “the existentializing of science” (科学を実存すること). It means to take outer space with its face of death as a place of death in the religious sense. This has been called “the Great Death” (大死) in Zen Buddhism, which is nothing other than conversion in a religious existence. At the same time, in this essay we learn Nishitani’s perspective about nuclear power, which continues to trouble us today. We will also consider “originary imagination” (根源的な構想力) in his last treatise “Kū and Soku” (“Emptiness and Sameness”) (1982) as a possibility for discussing technology in terms of emptiness.
{"title":"On the Possibility of Discussing Technology from the Standpoint of Nishitani Keiji’s Religious Philosophy","authors":"Akitomi Katsuya","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) is well known as a leading representative of the Kyoto School. His main contributions are in the field of religious philosophy based on Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, as his main works Religion and Nothingness (1961) and The Standpoint of Zen (1986) indicate. It may seem incongruous to associate Nishitani’s name with a discussion on science and technology. But it was this relationship to science, that is to say, the relationship between religion and science, to which Nishitani mostly directed his interests which gradually led him to the study of technology itself. In this article, I have relied on Nishitani’s main work Religion and Nothingness to ascertain how he interpreted the conflict between religion and science in relation to nihility and then consider his insights on technology. The appearance of the mechanistic view of modern science connected with mechanical technology and the tendency toward the mechanization of man permeate increasingly not only the social structures but the inner life of man. At the same time, the individual is transformed into a subject in pursuit of his desires with a sense of meaninglessness. The nihility which modern science and technology produced ultimately turns into “emptiness” (空 Śūnyatā). The main concern here is how the problems of science and technology can be understood from the standpoint of “emptiness.” Nishitani’s work that I mentioned above, however, does not necessarily deal with this question directly. Thus, I chose another treatise from the same period, “Science and Zen” (1960), and approached the problem of science from the standpoint of emptiness. Nishitani quotes a Zen Buddhist discussion about the “big fire” of space. It considers the position of the real self in the big fire that extinguishes all things. This reference to the big fire in space seems metaphorical but it is also scientifically plausible. Death is also a scientific actuality in space from a certain perspective. To take this actuality seriously as a problem of existence means, “the existentializing of science” (科学を実存すること). It means to take outer space with its face of death as a place of death in the religious sense. This has been called “the Great Death” (大死) in Zen Buddhism, which is nothing other than conversion in a religious existence. At the same time, in this essay we learn Nishitani’s perspective about nuclear power, which continues to trouble us today. We will also consider “originary imagination” (根源的な構想力) in his last treatise “Kū and Soku” (“Emptiness and Sameness”) (1982) as a possibility for discussing technology in terms of emptiness.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When I deliver an introductory lecture on Japanese Philosophy, I always raise the following question: Is it appropriate to modify the word philosophy with an adjective such as Japanese? Philosophy is, after all, a discipline that addresses universal problems, and so transcends the restrictions implied in geographical descriptors. However, as Kuki Shūzō argues in his essay “Tokyo and Kyoto,” I think that this is only part, and not the whole truth of the matter.One’s thinking takes place within the framework of one’s cultural heritage, and the different nuances of each of the words one uses can influence how one thinks. It is for this reason that every philosophy has its own unique character. As Otto Pöggeler suggests, there is something about the thought of Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji that does not fit easily into the framework of “philosophy” in the Western tradition. This is a consequence of the fact that they did not simply passively adopt, but rather attempted to critically challenge Western philosophy. I suppose that their grounding in Japanese and other Eastern traditions contributed to their critical challenge of Western philosophy. And I submit that there is a strong tendency in traditional East Asian thought to not simply grasp things within a presupposed framework of “knowledge,” but rather, since “knowledge” itself is understood to be a certain kind of restriction, to return to its roots.Needless to say, neither Nishida’s nor Nishitani’s thought is merely a philosophical reiteration of such traditional East Asian teachings. Nevertheless, we can say that the East Asian idea that knowledge is at root something restrictive lives on in their thinking. The radicality of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s thought can be understood to lie in the manner in which they cast light on the limits of the “knowledge” pursued by Western philosophy, problematizing the basis on which this knowledge is established as well as the framework it sets up.I think that the “character” of this or that philosophy arises from such different ways of seeing things and different attitudes toward “knowledge.” It is crucial to point out, however, that the gaps resulting from these differences need not become hindrances for philosophical thinking. Indeed, I think that the existence of such gaps, rather than hindering “dialogues” between different philosophies, is precisely what enables them to be meaningful. This is also what I have in mind when I stress the importance of dialogue in my lectures on Japanese philosophy. It is, after all, the creative dialogue engendered in this manner that enables philosophy to progress along its path of radical inquiry.
{"title":"The Significance of Japanese Philosophy","authors":"M. Fujita, Bret W. Davis","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2013.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2013.0003","url":null,"abstract":"When I deliver an introductory lecture on Japanese Philosophy, I always raise the following question: Is it appropriate to modify the word philosophy with an adjective such as Japanese? Philosophy is, after all, a discipline that addresses universal problems, and so transcends the restrictions implied in geographical descriptors. However, as Kuki Shūzō argues in his essay “Tokyo and Kyoto,” I think that this is only part, and not the whole truth of the matter.One’s thinking takes place within the framework of one’s cultural heritage, and the different nuances of each of the words one uses can influence how one thinks. It is for this reason that every philosophy has its own unique character. As Otto Pöggeler suggests, there is something about the thought of Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji that does not fit easily into the framework of “philosophy” in the Western tradition. This is a consequence of the fact that they did not simply passively adopt, but rather attempted to critically challenge Western philosophy. I suppose that their grounding in Japanese and other Eastern traditions contributed to their critical challenge of Western philosophy. And I submit that there is a strong tendency in traditional East Asian thought to not simply grasp things within a presupposed framework of “knowledge,” but rather, since “knowledge” itself is understood to be a certain kind of restriction, to return to its roots.Needless to say, neither Nishida’s nor Nishitani’s thought is merely a philosophical reiteration of such traditional East Asian teachings. Nevertheless, we can say that the East Asian idea that knowledge is at root something restrictive lives on in their thinking. The radicality of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s thought can be understood to lie in the manner in which they cast light on the limits of the “knowledge” pursued by Western philosophy, problematizing the basis on which this knowledge is established as well as the framework it sets up.I think that the “character” of this or that philosophy arises from such different ways of seeing things and different attitudes toward “knowledge.” It is crucial to point out, however, that the gaps resulting from these differences need not become hindrances for philosophical thinking. Indeed, I think that the existence of such gaps, rather than hindering “dialogues” between different philosophies, is precisely what enables them to be meaningful. This is also what I have in mind when I stress the importance of dialogue in my lectures on Japanese philosophy. It is, after all, the creative dialogue engendered in this manner that enables philosophy to progress along its path of radical inquiry.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2013.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Erin McCarthy introduces her book by saying, “What follows here opens a dialogue and prepares the way for further exploration” (1). Accordingly, I take my review of Ethics Embodied as an opportunity not only to introduce and discuss the book’s main themes, but also to join in the conversation McCarthy has initiated by recommending several fields of research in which I can see her work being implemented. I hope that readers will find, with me, that Ethics Embodied lends itself to a variety of new directions in interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship. McCarthy aims to make her book accessible to anyone who has a background in at least one of the major fields she discusses, including twentieth-century phenomenology, poststructural feminism, care ethics, and Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics of “betweenness.” Her second chapter establishes a theme that recurs throughout the book: Japanese traditions may be of interest to various continental and feminist scholars because they are alternatives to, not reactions against, dominant Western categories. In this chapter, she focuses on the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to the extent that each challenges the conventional picture of subjectivity as reducible to the solitary ego or atomistic individual. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “being-in-the-world” and “being-with” and Husserl’s emphasis on intersubjectivity both indicate the necessarily relational character of personhood. Within this framework, McCarthy is able to effectively show that Watsuji’s perspective on relationality goes a step further, rooted as it is in a tradition that never presupposes a solitary self in the first place. McCarthy moves the reader away from conceiving of the self as “in” relations, or even dependent upon them, but instead as fully constituted by relationality or what Watsuji calls betweenness.
{"title":"Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies by Erin McCarthy (review)","authors":"Leah Kalmanson","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2013.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2013.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Erin McCarthy introduces her book by saying, “What follows here opens a dialogue and prepares the way for further exploration” (1). Accordingly, I take my review of Ethics Embodied as an opportunity not only to introduce and discuss the book’s main themes, but also to join in the conversation McCarthy has initiated by recommending several fields of research in which I can see her work being implemented. I hope that readers will find, with me, that Ethics Embodied lends itself to a variety of new directions in interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship. McCarthy aims to make her book accessible to anyone who has a background in at least one of the major fields she discusses, including twentieth-century phenomenology, poststructural feminism, care ethics, and Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics of “betweenness.” Her second chapter establishes a theme that recurs throughout the book: Japanese traditions may be of interest to various continental and feminist scholars because they are alternatives to, not reactions against, dominant Western categories. In this chapter, she focuses on the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to the extent that each challenges the conventional picture of subjectivity as reducible to the solitary ego or atomistic individual. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “being-in-the-world” and “being-with” and Husserl’s emphasis on intersubjectivity both indicate the necessarily relational character of personhood. Within this framework, McCarthy is able to effectively show that Watsuji’s perspective on relationality goes a step further, rooted as it is in a tradition that never presupposes a solitary self in the first place. McCarthy moves the reader away from conceiving of the self as “in” relations, or even dependent upon them, but instead as fully constituted by relationality or what Watsuji calls betweenness.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2013.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66433928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：