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Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?

Aiko Tanabe Fellow
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Moral theoriesAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticJapanese & KoreanCare ethicsUbuntu philosophyIfeanyi MenkitiKwame GyekyeMartin HeideggerWatsuji Tetsurō#betweenness#relational-autonomy#relational-self#ubuntu
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I've been reading Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku) slowly, with a friend from the temple who reads more Japanese philosophy than I do. Watsuji's starting point is that the Japanese word for a human being, ningen, is written with characters meaning "person" and "between". A human being is never just an individual or just a member of society but both at once, and ethics is located in the aidagara, the betweenness, where people actually meet. He also criticised Heidegger for making time central to human existence while neglecting space and relationships, which he took up in his book on climate, Fūdo.

What struck me is how close this sounds to two other things I've met on this site: ubuntu, which several members from Africa write about, and the idea of relational autonomy that feminist care ethicists defend, that we become autonomous through relationships, not against them.

I'm tempted to say these are the same discovery made three times: the isolated individual of much modern ethics is an abstraction, and the real unit is the relation. But I'm aware that this site is suspicious of easy agreements between traditions, and I'd like to be corrected before I say it to my friend.

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5 replies

  1. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    I'd resist "the same discovery". Watsuji's betweenness is dialectical: the individual negates the whole and the whole negates the individual, and ethics is the movement between them. That's built on Hegel and on Buddhist emptiness, and it leaves room for the individual's negation of the group. The care ethicist's relational autonomy is a correction inside liberal autonomy, not a rejection of it. They meet at a slogan, the self is relational, and then go in quite different directions. Watsuji was also used to support a strongly state-centred ethics before 1945, which care ethics never would be.

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  2. Kwame Asante

    Fellow

    And ubuntu is not one idea either. Menkiti held that personhood is something you achieve through community over a lifetime: a child is not yet fully a person in the normative sense. Gyekye objected that this leaves the individual with too little standing against the community and proposed a moderate version. So when someone says "ubuntu", ask which one. Menkiti's ubuntu is much closer to Watsuji's strong whole; Gyekye's is closer to relational autonomy.

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  3. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    In the Philippines we have kapwa, usually explained as a shared self: the other person is not simply "other" but someone with whom I share identity. My students recognise it immediately, and they also recognise its shadow, which is the pressure to conform, the fear of being walang hiya, without shame. Every relational ethic I know has that shadow. The useful comparison may be less "do they agree?" than "how does each one protect the person the relationships are hurting?"

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  4. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    From the feminist side, for what it's worth: the relational autonomy literature was explicitly developed to keep autonomy while denying the atomised picture of the self, partly because feminists needed autonomy to criticise oppressive relationships. So Rowena's question is the one it was built to answer. I'd love to know whether Watsuji has an equivalent move.

  5. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Thank you, all four. I'll go back to my friend with a better sentence: these traditions share a target, the isolated individual, and differ about what replaces it and how the person is protected inside the relation. Kenneth's point about Watsuji's wartime writings is one I knew vaguely and had put aside. I shouldn't have.

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