Beeing inbetween. Comparative Considration of the phenomen of existence in Heidegger and Watsuji's thinking
Abstract
In the following text, early influences of Martin Heidegger on Watsuji Tetsurô and late Japanese influences on Heidegger's thinking will be considered. In his Ethics as a Science of Man (1934) Watsuji presents a way of thinking about ethics that differs from the Western understanding of ethics.
For him, ethics is not a normative guideline based on a moral value system as an orientation for the moral behaviour of the individual in living together within a community. Much more, the ethical is always already located within the community.
His fundamentally different understanding is based on the premise that man is not to be understood as a subjective individual, but that being human is always already to be thought of in action-oriented contexts as being-between-people (aidagara間柄). Thus, he opens his way of thinking already with the ontological key question of which we speak when we think of ethics as a science of man.
Hermeneutically, he already transforms this into an action-theoretical question. This interest in the nature of being is thus not, as with Heidegger, subject to an analysis of existence, but rather to a hermeneutics of existence, which is also reflected in his text structure.
In the second section of the text, a comparative consideration of the two thinkers takes place. With reference to Watsuji's writing Fûdo, his three main points of criticism of Heidegger's concept of existence are pointed out and discussed in parts.
The following interpretation of Watsuji's analysis from a Japanese perspective is to be understood as an attempt to identify Watsuji's structural and methodological reasoning in fragments and to highlight it as an example of a successful dialogue between cultures.