“The Japanese Ethics of ‘Ningen’ Dethrones the Western Self”:
The basic methodology of modern, Western philosophy is the same, according to Watsuji: a philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time.
What makes the modern conception of the subject that commits this ‘self-referential abstraction’ so problematic, according Watsuji, is that it had to come up with a supra-individual self that aims at the happiness of society or the welfare of mankind, in order to cloak the foundational problem of individualistic self-centredness. What is worse, Watsuji argues, is that, despite this move towards intersubjective consciousness, the conception of the modern subject creates conflict between human subject as the source of ethical values, and the objective world or nature as meaningless ‘thereness’. Nature, in this case, is conceived of as a heteronomous other – a threat to human autonomy, an irrational outside entity that needs to be conquered through the self-determining intelligibility of ‘I think.’
The Japanese conception of human being (ningen sonzai, 人間存在) in the larger context of East Asian philosophies is radically different from the Western conception of humanity. What makes us human (ningen) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence. Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that constitute our humanity (ningen-sei, 人間性). And this practice of betweenness always already comes with the practical self-awareness of emptiness.
[W]e must then triangulate the proper understanding of human existence as a dynamic life in the midst of the world. This is to reconstruct our sense of who we are in our active engagement with each other in our inseparable relation to history, society, culture and climate (including all sentient beings and natural environments therein).
Everything must ultimately turn to nothing and, thanks to this ‘turning into nothing’, everything has a space to be what it is.
[T]he world is a cluster of practical act-connections and, in order for me to express my thought or feeling therein, then, we (including you and I) must engage in the dialectical interrelation of parts and the whole through the praxis of emptiness prior to the rise of noematic meanings.
[I]n Japanese ethics hito or person is both singular and plural. If we lose the balance between the two, we lose the sense of what it means to be hito or person.
[I]n order for an individual self to act, it always acts in relation to its betweenness, or the form of engagement that covers not only intersubjective relations but also the ways in which human beings interact with each other through their engagement with shared social, cultural, linguistic and natural environments.