Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger by David W. Johnson (review)

There is a certain irony in Japan's foremost secular philosopher grounding his ontology and ethics in a term so infamously unclear as fūdo 風土, given that the Japanese word for philosophy itself (tetsugaku 哲学) denotes "clear thinking." One might make the case that Watsuji's concept of fūdo cannot but be unclear, since he is responding to Heidegger's Being and Time, which is hardly the model of lucid philosophy. That said, it is the philosopher's responsibility to clarify the unclear, and that is the task David W. Johnson has appointed himself in Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. It is a daunting charge, and Johnson does an admirable job of what those outside academic philosophy might call splitting hairs, and what those of us who study Japanese philosophy will appreciate as a long-awaited exploration of this central term of Watsujian thought.

The book comprises eight short but jam-packed chapters, the first of which presents an overview of the key concepts and terminology. Most important of these is fūdo, which Johnson sums up succinctly as "a geocultural environment, which we both open up and belong to," a concept that "overcomes the duality of nature and culture and returns us to a richer, premodern conception of experience." (pp. 3, 16). Fūdo is Watsuji's response to Heidegger's Dasein and being-toward-death. Watsuji deems these as being too focused on the temporal aspect of human existence, with not enough attention paid to the spatial aspect of our being.

Hand in hand with fūdo is fūdosei 風土性, which Johnson describes as "nature as it is lived through" and "a fūdo as it is encountered in experience, as a part of the world" (pp. 6, 13). A third key term is aidagara, which Johnson translates nicely as "being-in-relationship-to-others." These three, coupled with ningen (the ordinary Japanese word for human being(s), which Watsuji expounds upon in great depth in his Ethics), contain volumes: they capture Watsuji's account of the human condition, time, space, nature, culture, history, metaethics, ethics, and political philosophy.

Importantly, they also show--as Johnson rightly argues--that Watsuji is not committed to the facile climatological determinism that his early interpreters read him to be defending in the later chapters of his 1935 book, Climate: A Philosophical Study. In fact, Watsuji's position is a counterargument against such a view, for fūdo is not an external influence on our subjective experience. It is not deterministic, not an objective state to be studied by the natural sciences, but rather a fundamental, irremovable aspect of our subjectivity.

Or rather, our intersubjectivity. Johnson says the primary task of his book is "to set out--in full--this vision of the deep unity of human beings with the space of nature they inhabit" (p. 48), and this necessarily includes other people. We discover ourselves not simply in a fūdo, but our being-in-relationship-to-others in that fūdo. This is one of the book's most valuable contributions: a fully developed Watsujian account of how human beings understand each other via aidagara as it takes place in a fūdo. Here we find not Watsuji's account, but rather Johnson's, using Watsuji's thought as a springboard. Watsuji works in broad, sweeping, often fascinating ideas, but rarely in real depth. Johnson, on the other hand, has a gift for painstaking focus on the minutiae, identifying subtle differences that might otherwise pass unnoticed. At times this makes for difficult reading--he can devote paragraphs to distinctions so fine they are nearly indiscernible--but it also discloses penetrating new insights. Chief among them is his account of Watsujian intersubjectivity.

Johnson identifies two ways in which ningen is a "social self." The first is well-trodden ground: every individual is a member...