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7 Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other Mediating Watsuji Tetsurō’s Hermeneutics John C. Maraldo The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) pioneered not only the critical reception of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in Japan as well as the philosophical study of early Indian Buddhism and of the medieval Zen master Dōgen but also the discipline of hermeneutics. It was Watsuji’s development of hermeneutics that enabled him to make truly original contributions to the philosophy of climate and culture and to ethical theory. An account of Watsuji’s hermeneutical method will in turn enable us, in an age of deep suspicions , to move beyond the prejudices of his texts.1 Recent critical scholarship has taken Watsuji’s works on ethics and culture to task for their ethnocentrism and contribution to Japanese nationalism. Such critiques read Watsuji as an author of Nihonjin-ron, works that promote the purported uniqueness of “the Japanese.” His appeal to self-negation and his apparent claim of superiority for the Japanese understanding of the human provided certain military factions during the Pacific War with a rationale for Japanese expansionism and for forced submission, both within the country and without, to the Japanese nation-state.2 Whatever the sins of his complicity and the merits of his own postwar conversion ,3 I think it is possible to read Watsuji in a way that avoids the pitfalls of culturalism and racism. He does propose an alternative, if not unique, conception of the human being, one that contrasts with individualistic conceptions of being human. As we will see, however, it would be simplistic to suppose that he takes individualism as the province of “the West” and thus that his alternative speaks for some purported “East.” This essay attempts rather to 76 place Watsuji in a hermeneutical tradition that has become international and to contrast him with his own closest sources, Dilthey and Heidegger, just as Heidegger might be contrasted with Dilthey and Schleiermacher, the founders of that tradition. I will read Watsuji, therefore, not as a “Japanese” thinker in opposition to “Western” philosophers but as an author in a continuing lineage of interpreters. Still, the fact that Watsuji formulated his views in the Japanese language and not, say, in German will not be without significance: It will pose the problem of whether and how a hermeneutics articulated in any specific language can render a theory applicable across linguistic borders. Watsuji calls hermeneutics (kaishakugaku) the method proper to ethics, which in his view is the study of ningen (ningen no gaku), in other words, the study of human being. By using the English term “human being” to translate ningen, I already signal the first challenge faced by any attempt to explicate Watsuji’s hermeneutics in a language other than Japanese. Any translation, of course, insofar as it is an interpretation, poses hermeneutical problems. In the case of Watsuji, however, such problems are doubled by the deliberate linguistic dependency of his theory on the language in which he writes. Watsuji’s hermeneutics is so deeply embedded in the Japanese language that its relevance for cross-cultural hermeneutical theory would seem curtailed from the start. Moreover, by writing of hermeneutics as the method for the study of human being , Watsuji intimates that he will give his readers not a general theory of interpretation at all but rather a way (the way) to present a different theory, a theory of ethics. To discern Watsuji’s own hermeneutical theory, we must look more to his linguistic practices in ethical and cultural theorizing than to the few explicit comments he makes about hermeneutics. From the beginning, then, we face the challenge of explicating a theory that is not formulated as a theory, in a language that is not the language on which its practice depends. I will suggest that these two limitations actually enable rather than handicap the possibility of our critical reflection on Watsuji’s hermeneutics, just as the particular language in which he wrote enabled him to criticize the ethical and hermeneutical presuppositions of European philosophers. The indirect aim of this essay is to suggest how critical understanding is possible not in the form of an overarching hermeneutical theory (such as Gadamer’s) meant to supersede particular languages but rather in a contrast between practices that are embedded in particular languages. More directly, I will suggest how Watsuji’s hermeneutics questions certain binary terms and priorities inherent in the European traditions that he translates...

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