Murphy Shimamoto

Watsuji and Sōseki

Introduction

One of the most eloquent and thoughtful analyses of Japanese modernization comes from the famed writer Natsumei Sōseki. He described this process as a spiritually and intellectually painful one whose motivations were determined by foreign cultures and resulted in a superficialization of Japanese life. Eventually, Sōseki would propose a solution to this cultural domination and degradation in the form of what he called ethical individualism. Afterwards, one of the great Japanese philosophers of the time, Watsuji Tetsurō, who was himself greatly influenced by Sōseki, would find himself concerned with similar problems and proposing similar solutions. The aim of this paper is to read Sōseki’s essays on Japanese modernization and Watsuji’s brilliant philosophy on climate and ethics side by side in order to demonstrate how Watsuji attempts to resolve the problems of Japanese modernization that Sōseki has identified and furthermore how their solutions to these problems bear a resemblance which indicates a return to a Japanese ethical worldview.

Recentering Japan

The primary problem with Japanese modernization is that, “Western civilization…is internally motivated, whereas Japan’s civilization is externally motivated. Something that is ‘internally motivated’ develops naturally from within…Something is ‘externally motivated’ when it is forced to assume a certain form as the result of pressure applied from the outside.”¹ According to Sōseki, it is this external motivation which has uprooted the Japanese people. The country no longer developed internally along the lines of its pre-existing, autochthonous, and ingrained cultural framework but rather unreflectingly mimics the advances and traditions of the West. Of this Sōseki says, “we suddenly lost our ability to be self-centered.”² Japan came to regard the West as the center of the world and strove to convert itself into a fully modern Western country. This, however, is the cause of Japan’s great spiritual anxiety and intense superficiality during this period as the Japanese people tried tragically to be what they were not and could not become. Instead, they degenerated into depthless imitations. Hence, Sōseki’s urging that Japan and her people must recenter themselves, “before, I had been other-centered, it occured to me now that I must become self-centered.”³ This is precisely what Watsuji attempts to do in his philosophical-historical understanding of climate as an existential aspect inherent to human existence.

Watsuji says, “Here the space-and time-structure of human existence is revealed…In the individual’s eyes, it is a case of an ‘existence for death’, but from the standpoint of society it is an ‘existence for life’. Thus human existence is both individual and social.”⁴ It is extremely important to note that here Watsuji is echoing Heidegger. The great German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his masterwork Being and Time, conceived of human existence fundamentally as a relation of man to time. How man relates to time, whether he does so authentically or inauthentically, is determined by how man relates to his death and then to his birth (the temporal boundaries of his existence). Given that these temporal boundaries are common to all human beings and are what is fundamental to human existence, Heidegger’s philosophy, like much of the canon of Western philosophy, according to Watsuji, conceives of human existence as universal. Therefore, in the most profound sense, human existence should be the same in Germany as Japan. Watsuji rejects this view and says, “for time not linked with space is not time in the true sense and Heidegger stopped short at this point because his Dasein was the Dasein of the individual only…But it is only when human existence is treated in terms of its concrete duality that time and space are linked.”⁵ What Watsuji does here is absolutely essential. By elevating space into a fundamental existential concept inherent to human existence and by conceiving of space as climate, Watsuji justifies the independence of Japanese philosophy against the claim to universality of Western philosophy.

Watsuji will go on to analyze the impact of climate on intellection and claim that the relation of temporal human beings to their climate in a society is what creates the intellectual traditions of a people. It is worth noting that Watsuji’s categorization of climates reveals a deep affinity to the tradition of Japanese particularism. Bellah writes that, “most Japanese scholars use another classification that would divide Asian culture into four areas: Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and…Japanese.”⁶ Watsuji maintains these distinctions exactly as the Desert (Middle East) gives rise to the Abrahamic religions and the Monsoon climate is embodied by India but has two other regions within it that remain distinct, which are Japan and China. What Watsuji has done in his philosophy is argue that climate is an existential factor of human existence thereby rejecting the claims of Western existentialist philosophers to universalism, planting himself firmly in the tradition of Japanese particularism by arguing that Japan has a unique relation to a unique climate and therefore has an original type of existence and philosophy. Here Watsuji takes up Sōseki’s project of recentering Japan against Western modernity.

Civilization and Culture

It is in Sōseki’s outstanding essay The Civilization of Modern-day Japan where he lays out the argument that Japan’s modernization is externally motivated and inescapably shallow. Sōseki’s term appears to be kaika as opposed to bunmei. Either way, what is certain is that Sōseki’s understanding of civilization appears to be total in the sense that it includes both the scientific disciplines such as technology and the cultural arts. This is evidenced by the fact that Sōseki stresses not just that Japan has adopted Western technology but that many Japanese do things such as take pleasure in wearing Western clothes and adopt Western opinions without question. Watsuji intervenes against Sōseki’s total conception of civilization, bifurcating the cultural and the technological. Watsuji attempts to portray modern Western nations, particularly the Anglophone nations, as civilizations, “meaning the mechanical utilitarian control of nature.”⁷ According to this view, Western nations were centered entirely around technological advancements which eased the domination of nature and the proliferation of material comfort. This is further reflected in Watsuji’s contrast between life in Japan and the modern occidental lifestyle embodied by the United States, which is, “between the particularistic Japanese Gemeinschaft community in which all persons and groups are taken up and both included and negated…and the American Gesellschaft society….based only on naked utilitarian self-interest; between Japanese culture (bunka) and American civilization (bunmei).”⁸ This again is another fundamental aspect for understanding how Watsuji copes with the problems outlined by Sōseki. Watsuji tries to demonstrate that Sōseki’s understanding of civilization was flawed. So long as Sōseki conceived of civilization in a total manner, uniting culture and technology, he could not help but adopt an attitude of hopeless despair as it was quite clear Japan would have to, technologically, follow the advances of the West. However, Watsuji wants to sever culture from technology, bunka from bunmei, and in so doing elevate culture. Therefore, despite the technological superiority of the West and the need for Japan to adopt Western methods to innovate in this domain, Watsuji wants to emphasize that Japan has a higher mission, “He argues that Japan’s historical position is precisely to be understood in terms of culture.”⁹ With this understood, Japan need not be condemned to an inescapable state of superficial imitation of the West as it can maintain and reinvigorate its culture and, in so doing, its society internally irrespective of its adoption of Occidental technology. This culminates for Watsuji in ethics.

Ethics

Both Watsuji and Sōseki come to the conclusion that Japan’s essence is an ethical one. Furthermore, the echoes of Sōseki apparent in Watsuji’s work are never more clear than in their conception of ethics which have a parallel structure and intention.

In brief, Sōseki’s conception of individualism provides the opportunity for the Japanese to make modernization belong authentically to Japan rather than allow it to intensify in self-alienation. Sōseki says, “Only when your individuality and your work are in perfect harmony can you claim to have found the place where you belong.”¹⁰ In Sōseki we find an individualism which culminates in a harmonious life where one belongs. Now what is absolutely essential is the clarification of what precisely Sōseki’s individualism means, for he makes a great effort to define it and distinguish it from stereotypical Western views. He writes, “first, that you will be unhappy for life unless you press on to the point where you discover work that suits you perfectly and enables to develop your individuality; second, that if society is going to allow you such regard for your own individuality, it only makes sense for you to recognize the individuality of others and show a similar regard for their inclination.”¹¹ For the purposes of this paper what is absolutely crucial is that Sōseki’s “ethical individualism”¹², involves first an assertion of individuality which is distinct from society and secondly an acknowledgement of one’s duties to society by restraining the excesses of one’s individuality. It is this double action of self-assertion and self-restraint which renders Sōseki’s individualism ethical.

What is so significant about this is that Watsuji takes up this exact view although his philosophical reasoning is much more lengthy and rigorous. Watsuji says, “On the one hand… an acting ‘individual’ comes to be established only in some way as a negation of the totality of ningen…On the other hand, the totality of ningen comes to be established as the negation of individuality…These two negations constitute the dual character of a human being…a single movement.”¹³ Watsuji’s ningen has a dually spatio-temporal (i.e. individual-social) existence. Therefore, it first asserts itself as an individual, its temporality, through a negation of society. However, the negation must not terminate there: for to do so would be to misunderstand one’s human existence. As ningen’s existence is fundamentally an existence of spatio-temporal/individual-social betweenness, both fundamental aspects of one’s existence must be negated. Hence, the further negation of one’s individuality, i.e. temporality, in favor of their spatial-social aspect. Watsuji writes, “The basis of ningen’s sonzai is…absolute negation. The true reality of an individual, as well as of totality, is ‘emptiness’ and this emptiness is the absolute totality…The negation of the negation is the self-returning and self-realizing movement of the absolute totality that is precisely social ethics.”¹⁴ Both Watsuji and Sōseki conceive of social ethics as a dual process where the individual acknowledges and limits both himself and his society. There are, of course, fundamental differences between the two positions as Watsuji’s is overtly existential-philosophical and Sōseki’s is framed in terms of liberties and duties. This, however, does not diminish the uncanny structural similarity between their ethical positions.

The reason for their similarity, this paper argues, is that both thinkers have adopted and are rearticulating a Japanese Buddhist perspective. Watsuji does this explicitly with his account of a double negation resulting in the emptiness of emptiness wherein there is no self only benevolence. About this there is no doubt. Sōseki’s Buddhist perspective, however, is more implicit due to the fact that he does not use those terms. Sōseki clearly adopts the Buddhist double negation and implicitly situates man between himself and society. He even bases the fundamental relationality of existence on his intuition when he says, “I can only believe that so long as others grant us liberty, we must grant equal liberty to them and treat them as equals.”¹⁵ What this appears to be is an implicit, perhaps unconscious, outline for a modern ethic of individualism, derived fundamentally from Buddhism, which both defeats the pitfalls of Western individualism/egoism that Sōseki despised and allows for an authentic ethic to be internally developed in Japan from Japanese roots. Both Watsuji and Sōseki achieve these aims through a return to Buddhist ethics.

Conclusion

This paper has aspired to demonstrate the reverberations of Sōseki’s critiques of Japanese modernization and his ethical individualism within the works of Watsuji. Beginning with a elucidation of Watsuji’s concept of climate and how this allows Japan to recenter itself and prioritize its traditions philosophically, it is hoped that this exhibits how Watsuji may be interpreted as heeding the advice of Sōseki for Japan to reorient itself towards itself. Furthermore, this essay highlights Sōseki’s despairing view of externally motivated Japanese civilization which Watsuji superseded by distinguishing civilization from culture and which both Sōseki and Watsuji try to save Japan from by a redirection towards ethics as, “The grim last novels of Sōseki, which portray the dead end of pure individualism…may have contributed to Watsuji’s own solution.”¹⁶ Finally, this paper concludes by paralleling the structures of Watsuji and Sōseki’s conceptions of ethics and attempting to attribute their alignment back to Buddhist ethics. Throughout, this paper has aimed to read Watsuji and Sōseki together and thereby suggest that Watsuji’s quest to,“to define the special nature of what is Japanese over against comparable phenomena from the West,”¹⁷, took many cues from Sōseki, evidenced in their shared desire to recenter Japan and turn towards a cultural-ethical solution.

Notes

¹ Rimer and Gessel, The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Literature, 318.

² Ibid., 318.

³ Ibid., 323.

⁴ Watsuji, A Climate, 9-10.

⁵ Ibid., v-vi.

⁶ Bellah, Imagining Japan, 114.

⁷ Ibid., 123.

⁸ Ibid., 126.

⁹ Ibid., 128.

¹⁰ Rimer and Gessel, The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Literature, 326.

¹¹ Ibid., 327.

¹² Ibid., 330.

¹³ Watsuji, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku, 22.

¹⁴ Ibid., 23.

¹⁵ Rimer and Gessel, The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Literature, 327.

¹⁶ Bellah, Imagining Japan, 130.

¹⁷ Ibid., 131.

Works Cited

Bellah, Robert N. Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation. U of California P, 2003.

Rimer, J. Thomas, and Van C. Gessel, editors. The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Literature. Vol. 1, From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945. Columbia UP, 2005.

Watsuji, Tetsurō. A Climate: A Philosophical Study. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas, Ministry of Education, Japan, 1961.

---. Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter, State U of New York P, 1996.