Ethics as the study of man must be the study of the fundamental structure of human existence.
人間の学としての倫理学は、人間存在の根本構造の学でなくてはならない。
Philosophers
Tetsuro Watsuji
Born in 1889 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, Watsuji Tetsuro was an ethicist who charted an original path by fusing the reception of Western philosophy with a distinctively Japanese theory of climate and culture. He redefined human existence not as isolated individuality but as aidagara (betweenness) — relational being. In Fudo (Climate and Culture) he developed a comparative-civilizational analysis of how climate and landscape shape a people's spiritual structure. He systematized an Eastern challenge to Western modern individualism.
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Tetsuro Watsuji's Other Quotes
Fudo (climate and culture) is the collective term for the climate, air currents, geology, soil quality, topography, and landscape of a given land.
Ethics is the ground of being of human community — the way of aidagara (betweenness) between person and person.
We discover our fudo (climate and culture) as an expression of our own self-understanding.
Ningen (the human being) is the world-between and the person within that world.
Related Quotes
The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.
-- Chrysippus of Soli
Virtue is a kind of mean.
-- Aristotle
The good, in a word, is the realization of personality.
-- Kitarō Nishida
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
-- John Stuart Mill