Ethics and difference: Time, space and ethics in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro, Kuki Shuzo and Martin Heidegger

Both postmodern philosophy and contemporary Japanese philosophy pose a challenge to ethics in their critique of the Western philosophical tradition. This challenge is to resist the oppression that results from ignoring the differences between individuals and social groups. A response to this challenge involves articulating an ethics based on the concepts of otherness and difference and the contingent nature of concrete interpersonal relationships. Through creative dialogue with three philosophers, Watsuji Tetsuro (1889--1960), Kuki Shuuzo (1888--1941) and Martin Heidegger (1889--1976), I articulate the meaning of ethics in this context of difference. Ethics is the practical process of negotiating the difference between people. It engages the dialectical relationship between ethical ideals and the concrete, lived experience of individuals by means of a constant process of critique.;In addition to articulating the meaning of ethics, I also explain the relationship between Heideggerian phenomenology and the thought of Kuki and Watsuji. Both studied Heidegger's philosophy intently during the 1920s, and their work develops out of the creative tension between acceptance and rejection of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through the negotiation of phenomenology on the part of both Japanese philosophers, we can see the difficulties that are encountered when Japanese philosophical ideas are articulated in a European philosophical vocabulary. The relationship between acceptance and critique in each philosopher's interpretation of Being and Time can be seen as an illustration of the ethical negotiations involved when different cultural paradigms meet.;In addition to illustrating the tension present in an articulation of East Asian philosophy by means of a Western philosophical paradigm, we also see in the works of Watsuji and Kuki the development of various ethical possibilities within Heideggerian thought. Watsuji draws on the Heideggerian concept of existential spatiality as the basis of his ethics (albeit by means of a critique of Heidegger's apparent neglect of spatiality), while Kuki draws on different resources. For Kuki, ethics is not a question of articulating the social nature of human existence, as Watsuji will suggest. Rather, ethics must be based on the problem of negotiating difference---difference between self and other---and the responsibilities that this difference entails. Thus while Watsuji develops the ethical possibilities within Heideggerian philosophy by means of a more traditional phenomenological approach, Kuki develops the ethical possibilities in phenomenology that were later identified by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.