Watsuji Tetsurō

Dzieła

• 1935Klimat i kultura (Fūdo)

  Zaczęte po lekturze „Bycia i czasu”: ludzka egzystencja jest równie przestrzenna jak czasowa i kształtuje się w klimatach monsunowych, pustynnych i łąkowych.

Stanowisko

Watsuji’s ethics starts from the word ningen, written with the characters for “person” and “between”: humans always exist in relations, in “betweenness” (aidagara). Ethics is the study of these relational orders, in which individual and community negate each other within an underlying emptiness of Buddhist origin. In Fūdo he objected that Heidegger privileged time over space and described how monsoon, desert and meadow climates shape cultures – a typology criticised as deterministic. He also rediscovered Dōgen as a philosopher. His ethics culminating in the state and wartime writings on reverence for the emperor have been criticised as supporting nationalism; after 1945 he revised but did not abandon these views.

Życie i kontekst

Watsuji Tetsurō, a physician’s son, was born in 1889 near Himeji. He studied philosophy in Tokyo and wrote early books on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard before turning to Japanese culture, as in his Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara. He taught in Kyoto from 1925, read Being and Time while in Germany in 1927–1928, and held the chair of ethics in Tokyo from 1934 to 1949. He died in 1960.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Ethics as the Study of Man (Ningen no gaku to shite no rinrigaku, 1934)
• Climate and Culture (Fūdo, 1935)
• Ethics (Rinrigaku, 3 vols, 1937–1949)