Ethics is the ground of being of human community — the way of aidagara (betweenness) between person and person.
倫理とは人間共同態の存在根拠であり、人と人との間柄の道である。
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 as the study of man must be the study of the fundamental structure of human existence.
Ningen (the human being) is the world-between and the person within that world.
We discover our fudo (climate and culture) as an expression of our own self-understanding.