Paper short abstract:

The paper examines what ‘philosophical’ approaches to ‘love’ (ai 愛, koi 恋) can be detected in Japanese thought, and to what extent such notions can be compared with Western concepts of ‘love’. After a general overview I will differentiate between two approaches to ‘love’ in Watsuji Tetsurō’s work.

Paper long abstract:

In the past decades, ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ traditions of thought have been compared from diverse aspects. Such comparisons, however, focus mostly on particular teachings, thinkers or schools, and less on those elements of culture that are difficult to access through reasoning and argumentation. Such are the notions related to ‘love’ in various traditions. In my paper I will present the results of a research project that examined 1) what kind of ‘philosophical’ approaches to ‘love’-like notions can be detected in Japanese thought, and 2) to what extent the notions of ai 愛, koi 恋 and their relatives can be compared with Western concepts of ‘love’.

In the first part of my presentation, I will briefly summarise the difficulties of a comparison between Japanese and European notions of ‘love’: the Confucian understanding of ai as ‘care’, i.e., a rather practical instead of emotional relationship (Itō 2000); the Buddhist rejection of interpersonal longing of any kind (Faure 1998, Reddy 2012); and the Shintō image of Nature in which it is hardly possible to separate discrete categories of affections/sentiments.

In the second part, I will turn to Watsuji Tetsurō’s 和辻哲郎 (1889–1960) interpretation of the Japanese ‘type’ of love as it appears in Fūdo 風土 (1935) and Rinrigaku 倫理学 (1937, 1942, 1949). I will argue that Watsuji’s interpretation of koi 恋/ren’ai 恋愛 and related terms in Fūdo can more easily be regarded as Japanese ‘forms’ of a human feeling/sentiment more or less similar to what is widely called ‘love’/‘Liebe’/‘amour’ in the West, while his references to ai 愛 as it appears in Rinrigaku are much more in line with a top-down ‘care’-relationship than with any emotional or affectionate connection. However, it will be shown that the two notions are strongly connected through Watsuji’s concept of the ‘family’ (kazoku 家族), a central element of his understanding of interpersonality and of his philosophy of aidagara 間柄, ‘being-in-relation-to-others’ (Johnson 2019), a relationship based on a complexity of physical and mental, bodily and emotional connections (Yuasa 1987).