Re-envisioning personhood from the perspective of Japanese philosophy: Watsuji Tetsuro's Aidagara-based ethics

Abstract

This paper re-envisions the personhood of severely disabled children, who are often excluded from the category of human beings in the academic literature due to their perceived lack of mental faculties, based on Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro’s concept of human beings (ningen). It begins with Carl Elliott’s claim that personhood should be used as a thick ethical concept. This concept has two features. First, it represents a fusion of fact (describing someone as a person) and value (taking an ethical attitude toward a person). Second, it is embedded in our rich and culturally specific forms of life. This paper suggests that Watsuji’s concept of ningen also has these features. Watsuji criticizes how Western ethicists take individual consciousness or will as their starting point for determining personhood. Instead, he argues that neither a subject nor a community exists as an entity in itself, but that the relationality between them (aidagara) is essential to their identity and that our communication is embedded within rich and social contexts. Through his etymological study of Japanese word ari, Watsuji points out that in making statements, one both discloses the world and becomes aware of the attitude one should take toward other beings. Some commentators, such as Sakabe Megumi, have suggested that such self-awareness entails the transformation of our sense of relationality. This paper leverages Watsuji’s concept of ningen to re-envision the relationship between caregivers and severely disabled children as relationality-based and therefore open to complex and rich communication.

Keywords:

• Watsuji Tetsurō
• Sakabe Megumi
• thick ethical concept
• severely disabled children
• personhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The lack of engaging conversations between Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, who insist on distributive justice based on rights and benefits, and Eva Kittay, who has a severely disabled daughter and insists that justice should be based on dependence and love, illustrates how philosophers’ technical definitions and uses of personhood differ from those of ordinary people in practical circumstances (Kittay & Carlson, 2010).

2 The Japanese word ari implies the simultaneous occurrence of both the objective existence of a thing and its appearance to the subject. Ari derives from aru, which can mean both ‘arise’ and ‘appear’.

If ‘being’ is seen as objective and substantial, and ‘appearing’ as subjective and transient, the two appear antithetical. But, if ari is taken as the starting point, the very idea of a ‘being’ without ‘appearing’—as a ‘being-in-itself’—becomes dogmatic. (Tani, 2020, pp. 632–633)

The linguistic characteristic of ari, which proposes the ontological character of being itself and appearance of its coexistence, is consistent with the one of koto (Kobayashi, 2020, p. 653).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP17K04546.

Notes on contributors

Hirotaka Sugita

Hirotaka Sugita is an associate professor of Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University, Japan. His research interests are Wittgenstein’s philosophy of other minds and the way to communicate with severely disabled children. His work also relates to ethical persuasion and moral education based on Wittgensteinian approach pursued by John McDowell, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell and so on.