Watsuji Tetsuro

Watsuji Tetsuro was a Japanese philosopher, born in 1889 and died in 1960, who taught at Kyoto Imperial University and Tokyo Imperial University and is counted among the philosophers associated with the Kyoto School, the influential twentieth century Japanese movement that put Western philosophy into dialogue with Buddhist and East Asian thought. He is best known for developing an ethics grounded in the idea of ningen, a Japanese term he treated as meaning both the individual person and the person's inescapable relatedness to others, arguing against Western individualist ethics that selfhood and moral life are constituted fundamentally through betweenness, or aidagara, the relations that bind people together in community. Watsuji's other major and widely read contribution is his theory of fudo, or climate and milieu, set out in his book of that name, which argues that a people's characteristic ways of thinking and living are shaped by their natural and geographic environment, from monsoon Asia to desert and pastoral landscapes.