Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The tension between individual and society is central to Watsuji’s "Ethics." Relating Watsuji’s critique of Hegel’s concept of the modern family to the discussions on the family in the Civil Code in Meiji Japan opens a path for interpreting that tension in the wider context of Japanese modernity.

Paper long abstract

In the relevant scholarship, characterizing Watsuji Tetsurō as a “communitarian” is widespread. In Watsuji’s ethical thought, so we are told, the individual is subordinate to society. Critics like Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian argue that Watsuji belongs to a group of philosophers in early Shōwa Japan who carried out a “revolt against the West.” For historically contextualizing Watsuji’s communitarianism, some authors go back as far as to Motoori Norinaga (Robert N. Bellah), whereas others relate him to the war-time project of “Overcoming Modernity” (Koyasu Nobukuni). While these attempts of historical contextualization open useful perspectives of Ideologiekritik, they are external to Watsuji’s philosophical thinking. With this qualification, I do not wish to advocate an ahistorical reading of Watsuji—on the contrary.

As I will suggest, in his "Ethics," Watsuji conceptually grasped the tension between individual and society as it was experienced in the modernizing society of Japan. To corroborate my claim, I will relate Watsuji’s elaboration of the family in the "Ethics" to the discussions about the legal status of the family in relation with the drafting of a modern Civil Code in Japan by Inoue Kowashi and Gustave Emile Boissonade de Fontarabie during the second half of the nineteenth century. My aim is to show that Watsuji articulates a mode of self-understanding, the self-contradictory structure of which was characteristic for how, in Japanese modern life, individuals normatively related themselves to society. This contradictory self-understanding is, so I argue, displayed in the Civil Code. Methodologically, I will employ as a heuristic tool Terry Pinkard’s appropriation of Charles Taylor’s notion of humankind as “self-interpreting animal” for his reading of Hegel. Hegel is important for interpreting Watsuji not only because he developed his notion of the family in direct confrontation with Hegel’s "Philosophy of Right," but also, and more importantly, because Hegel’s account of the historical path dependency of human self-understanding provides the conceptual means for situating Watsuji within the history of modern Japan without either suffering the shortcomings of Ideologiekritik, or committing the fallacy of historical determinism.