Ethics (Rinrigaku)

Watsuji Tetsurō's three-volume system of ethics, built on an analysis of the Japanese word for human being, ningen, written with characters meaning 'human' and 'between'. Watsuji argues that a human being is never simply an individual: we exist in betweenness (aidagara), in relationships such as parent and child, friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Ethics is therefore the study of the patterns that make shared life possible, not of an isolated will, and Watsuji criticises modern Western ethics for starting from the solitary individual. He develops this as a double negation: the individual becomes itself by negating the group, and fulfils itself by negating that independence and returning to the whole. Later volumes extend the analysis to family, community, economy and the state, and his treatment of the nation has been criticised as accommodating wartime nationalism. The available English translation covers only part of the work.

It is the most systematic relational ethics in modern philosophy, and a direct challenge to theories that begin from the isolated individual.