Short Abstract

Izutsu Toshihiko’s philosophical semantics enables intercultural dialogue through a "flexible mind" and reveals latent existential attitudes towards nature in ancient texts. This paper explores its extension to ecological ethics as a non-anthropocentric transformation of language.

Long Abstract

Izutsu Toshihiko (井筒俊彦, 1914-1993) was a major Japanese philosopher, best known for his works on Islamic mysticism and his translation of the Qurʾān. Yet, with philological mastery over more than twenty languages, he also studied many intellectual traditions across East Asia, like Zen, Taoism, and Mahāyāna Buddhism, among others. In his later works, written in Japanese, Izutsu sought to provide a field (場) in which such highly idiosyncratic voices could become mutually intelligible, by means of what he termed "philosophical semantics" (哲学的意味論, tetsugaku-teki imi-ron).

In this regard, Ōno Junichi, in his recent book Izutsu Toshihiko: Philosophy in Dialogue with the World (井筒俊彦　世界と対話する哲学), highlights Izutsu’s "vertical approach", which posits a substructure of unmanifest, fluid meanings akin to a linguistic unconscious, and seeks to disclose the existential conditions subtly shaping texts and their authors from within. This approach grounds intercultural communication as a hermeneutical dialogue between semantic fields, made possible only when interlocutors possess a "flexible mind" (柔軟心, jūnanshin) that allows the other’s field to permeate and transform one’s own.

However, amidst such profound analysis of language, a discussion on the notion of nature seems nowhere to be found. But the omission is only apparent: for Izutsu, I argue, nature constitutes the pre-linguistic ground, the empirical basis of language itself, continuously dynamic and re-arranging its semantic articulation brought about by humans.

As such, this paper asks whether Izutsu’s aforementioned philosophical semantics can be extended likewise to ecological matters. First, I will apply his methodology to uncover some latent existential attitudes towards the natural world (mainly interdependence, respect, and "true reality") that predate its modern mechanistic devaluation. Second, formulate Izutsu’s epistemic–hermeneutic notion of the "flexible mind" as an ecological virtue open towards the more-than-human otherness. The final attempt would be to point to a reconception of ecological responsibility, not as a moral prescription, but as a transformation of meaning grounded in a non-anthropocentric conception of language, one for which Izutsu, from Japan, provided a compelling theoretical foundation with remarkable intercultural value.