Levinas and Asian Thought

4. The Space between Us

53 FOUR The Space between Us Embodiment and Intersubjectivity in Watsuji and Levinas JoelKrueger This essay brings Emmanuel Levinas and Watsuji Tetsurō into constructive philosophical engagement. Rather than focusing primarily on interpretation—admittedly an important dimension of comparative philosophical inquiry—my intention is to put their respective views to work, in tandem, and address the problem of the embodied social self.1 Both Watsuji and Levinas share important commonalities with respect to the embodied nature of intersubjectivity—commonalities that, moreover, put both thinkers in step with some of the concerns driving current treatments of social cognition in philosophy and cognitive science. They can make a fruitful contribution to this discussion by lending a phenomenologically informed critical perspective. Each in their own way challenges the internalist and cognitivist presuppositions informing the currently dominant “Theory of Mind” paradigm driving much social cognition research. Moreover, their respective views receive empirical support from a number of different sources. I. Why WatsujI and LevInas? Both Watsuji and Levinas share several common philosophical preoccupations that make them productive conversation partners.2 For example, both continually argue for ethics as first philosophy. Watsuji’s most important book, Rinrigaku (倫理学, A Study of Ethics), is a three-volume work in which he argues at length that, as first philosophy , ethical inquiry is logically prior to both humanistic and scientific inquiry.3 Similarly, Levinas insists on the philosophical “primacy of 54 Joel Krueger the ethical, that is, of the relationship of man to man...primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest” (TI 79). Moreover, both Watsuji and Levinas conceive of ethical inquiry as a phenomenologically oriented inquiry into the nature of ethical agency. Neither was concerned with formulating abstract principles divorced from the flux and flow of situated moral life; and neither offers an ethical system in the traditional, philosophical sense (i.e., virtue, utilitarian, or deontological). Rather, both are critical of such approaches for how they abstract from everyday life and unfairly posit the disembodied and isolated ego as the primary unit of analysis. As a result, Watsuji and Levinas instead concern themselves with exploring how ethical practice is enacted within concrete human relationships.4 They assume a firmly situated approach to ethical inquiry—that is, an approach that urges the primacy of action and of our embodied and affectively charged, face-to-face encounter with the other. For instance, Watsuji writes at the beginning of Rinrigaku that any ethical consideration “which abstracts away from the practical connections between person and person” is inadequate in that it overlooks the intercorporeal basis of ethical agency.5 Levinas likewise urges that ethics is fundamentally a responsive and relational phenomenon that arises in the fundamental encounter with the face of another. Finally, given this staunchly embodied and situated approach to ethical inquiry, both Watsuji and Levinas develop original and highly creative phenomenological analyses in their respective efforts to unpack the nature of our sociality. For Watsuji, this entails an extended consideration of the experiential structure of social space: the interpersonal “betweenness” (aidagara, 間柄) that couples self and other in a dialectical relation of activity and passivity. Likewise, Levinas expends considerable attention explicating the basic structures of what he terms “lived affectivity” (sensibility, fraternity, and proximity) in addition to extended treatments of bodily and affective phenomena (pleasure, anticipation, fatigue, nausea, indolence, insomnia, sexuality, parenthood, and the simple joy of eating) in order to better understand the subtle layers of feeling and engagement that bind the self to a shared world. The Space between Us 55 In sum, both Watsuji and Levinas work out a phenomenologically motivated ethics beginning with a careful consideration of the lived body in relation to others. Additionally, both thinkers are united in the claim that the lived encounter with otherness is a constitutive part of the development of the self and subjectivity. Despite these similarities , there are some important differences between them, which will be discussed as we progress. Ultimately, however, my emphasis is on their fruitful points of contact and contemporary relevance. II. WatsujI on embodIed IntersubjectIvIty One of Watsuji’s most important contributions is his repeated insistence that “human relationships are, in truth, the relationships of our carnal interconnections in space.”6 The body and space together form the origin and center of Watsuji’s ethics. Moreover, he repeatedly emphasizes the way that our agency provides the principle of coordination establishing the mutuality of our relationships within shared social space. Watsuji insists...