The critical cosmopolitanism of Watsuji Tetsurō

The time and space of self, other and the world

The primary ontological focus of cosmopolitan analysis, for Delanty, is the relationality between self, other and the world. It is the interplay through this encounter, set against the context of an increasingly globalized and reflective world, which initiates a cosmopolitan moment of self and societal transformation (Delanty, 2006: 41). He acknowledges that problems could arise when concepts situated in the European experience are used to describe and evaluate non-Western communities. So the point is to develop a methodological approach which does not rely on European historical or epistemic influences and which is also capable of identifying global sources of critical dialogue (Delanty. 2009: 180; 2014: 11). In order to achieve this, rather than his point of departure being the idea of multiple modernities (see, for examples, Taylor, 1999; Eisenstadt, 2003), Delanty approaches the problem of modernity from the perspective of global history (Delanty, 2009: 186–92). Here he draws on Arnason (2003) who extends the civilizational perspective of Nelson (1981) and Eisenstadt (1986; 2001; 2003) by highlighting the hermeneutical dimension of the ‘entangled’ nature of modernities. In this way, he is able to set aside the teleological account of the civilizational encounter found in classical approaches such as Spengler and Toynbee. Recognition of such interconnectedness makes possible a degree of cultural translation (Delanty, 2014: 9). Therefore, rather than over-pluralize ‘modernity’, Delanty puts forward the thesis that ‘modernity’ should be theorized in terms of ‘self-transformation’ which takes different forms against the background of widening networks and communication. If one argues that the universalizing feature of modernity ‘is the drive to make all of culture translatable’ (Delanty, 2009: 194), then the difficulty of epistemic and historical privilege no longer arises as we can no longer ‘assume that non-Western societies exist’ (Delanty, 2009: 181). It is through the heuristic processes within ‘global history’ and the dialectic between ‘structures of consciousness’, Delanty argues, that a case can be made that all societies have been influenced by Western concepts though these have now lost their Western specificity to transform themselves into civilizational connectors. Through separating the normative, symbolic and cognitive dimensions of culture and in emphasizing the latter (Delanty and Turner, 2011: 640), Delanty allows himself to posit a cognitive universalism with the potential to overcome not only objections of Eurocentrism but also all ethnocentric methods (Delanty, 2014: 10). While most approaches to social theory are concerned with the interplay between the temporal and the spatial changes, neither axis is treated as equally important. Furthermore, in following the ‘tradition’ of Kant and Newton, they fail to account for the fifth dimension of social consciousness that is responsive to individuality and social forces. For Delanty, globalization, the perquisite of cosmopolitanism, indicates a mutual interpenetration of the global and the local, and likewise the universal and the particular. Increasingly over time the local is not created in isolation but with reference to the global. Delanty adopts what Kimberly Hutchings describes, in a different context, as a modernist political time, in principle, a revolutionary time for humanity (Hutchings, 2004: 217). In doing so, he empties time and lifts social relations out of their particular contexts and in doing so downplays tensions as well as opportunities. The dynamics of modernity are not understood as affected by the spaces to which it spreads, the social processes and histories found in these spaces. However, spatial changes need to be examined in their historical context.

Watsuji would welcome the adoption of a relational social ontology. However, he would suggest it would appear an unusual strategy to attempt to overcome the Eurocentric nature of social theory by drawing on the European heritage of the autonomous and distinct self that has been reproduced in accounts as diverse as Hobbes, Kant, as hedonistic, and as the ubiquitous representative agent. This, for him, in terms of global dialogue would result in assimilation. He would also draw our attention to the fact that these accounts are indelibly tied to a Kantian/Newtonian understanding of space and time. In order to provide an account that does not result in assimilation, Watsuji offers a richer account of being human and how this can provide a basis for social analysis that can draw on globalized resources.

In his work Fûdo, ⁵ Watsuji claims that he was inspired to write due to Heidegger’s failure in Sein und Zeit to fully develop the theme of existential spatiality. For Watsuji, Heidegger had placed too much emphasis on time and the individual and too little on space and the social aspects of being human. For him, spatiality and temporality are in ‘mutual relation’ (Watsuji, [1937] 1996: 223) with each other, which means that they are complementary notions for grasping ontologically the structure of existence (sonzai) and of any form of authentic social analysis. His theory of milieu is a deceptively simple though an admittedly unusual one to the Western understanding of reality. While milieu means ‘wind and earth … the natural environment of a given land’ (Watsuji [1935] 1961: 1), it also includes the social environment of school, family, society, customs, and localized practices. In this view the milieu is the relational space in which life unfolds and forms realities. It is absurd, he would argue, in the study of humans and human societies to detach these from their respective milieu or their multi-layered histories. The point is to recognize the dual nature of being human: we are never just individual or temporal beings and we are never just social or spatial beings but we are grounded in the ‘practical interconnections of acts’ which are always individual and social, temporal and spatial. The space in which these acts take place Watsuji refers to as ‘betweenness’ (aidagara 間柄) (Rinrigaku, or ‘study of ethics’, Watsuji, [1937] 1996): ‘Betweenness consists in the fact that self and other are divided from each other … and at the same time that what is thus divided becomes unified’ (Watsuji, [1937] 1996: 35). For Watsuji, the ‘nonduality of self and other’ is the fundamental component of betweenness. Human existence to Watsuji is neither completely individual nor completely communal, but rather a combination of the two. Betweenness is both a boundary that differentiates oneself from another and, at the same time, a connection that binds them together. According to Watsuji’s philosophical anthropology, humans exist only between society and individuality. It is the network which provides humanity with a social meaning. It is within these dynamic act connections that ethics become concretized, embodied within various forms of praxis and through which human relationships are managed.

In stressing the interdependency (spatial and temporal) of being human, Watsuji maintains an ontic and epistemic location. It is not a category between categories, or a geometrical, or third space. This space of betweenness differs from that of ‘between’, ‘the stranger’, the ‘in-between’ and ‘hybridity’ in the work of Simmel, Anzaldúa, Rumford, or liminality (Turner). It refers directly to the structure of the self. It takes us past the linguistic formulation to the pre-objective immediacy, the role of embodiment in human semiotics, and the priority of action that lead to inter-subjectivity and intra-subjectivity. It is a space that transforms the homogeneous Newtonian/Kantian/Parsonian understanding of space and time through which Western social theory has developed its questions and solutions (Domingues, 1995: 236). What Watsuji is arguing for is the inclusion within social theory of the four dimensions of the space-time of nature with a fifth dimension of social consciousness: the space in which we live-betweenness (see also Elias, [1987] 1992: 81, cited in Domingues, 1995: 236). Whereas Delanty’s project emphasizes the separation of normative, symbolic and cognitive dimensions in order to identify a cognitive universalism as civilizational connectors, Watsuji’s account provides connectors on the grounds of a ‘relational universalism’ as embodied, embedded and responsive to the tensions and the practices of life. In integrating these ideas more sufficiently, Watsuji provides us with not only a mechanism to examine the way in which modernity and globalization are not just temporal processes but are shaped and are shaping spatial social relationships.

Beyond self and modernity

For Walter Mignolo, a benign view of the march of progress and modernity containing the germ of cultural translation and transcendence omits an important aspect: its dark side or underside. While ‘a’ European mind may like to reassure itself with its project of autonomy from the strictures of humanity’s primitivism, Mignolo, among others, aims to remind us that someone paid the price for ‘a humanity’s’ strive for autonomy. The cognitive universalism of Delanty is precisely the hegemonic practices that Mignolo is concerned about which are used to justify military and commercial expansion (Halperin, 2013). Rather than draw on the reactions of the postmodernist or the post-colonialist with their excessive contemplation of ‘reason as a reason of terror’ (Dussel, 1995 [1996]: 66), Mignolo, following Dussel, criticizes modern reason because of the irrational myth that it obscures. For Mignolo, drawing on the intellectual legacy of thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Aníbal Quijano, it is only in the overcoming of the dichotomies of modernity by which we can transform the historical cultural and civilizational legacy of modernity. This would require the ‘self-restitution of barbarism as a theoretical locus’, a learning from the ‘exteriority’ of modernity. This epistemological critique links the epistemic location with the subject and challenges the myth about a truthful universal knowledge. In repositioning thought outside of the European projection of modernity, in rethinking critical thought or critical knowledge from other spaces and places, is to represent a development of the emancipatory ethic that could not be achieved within the hegemonic practices of modernity. For Mignolo, this epistemic call to ‘diversality as a universal project’ would be a result of ‘critical border thinking’ and understood as an epistemic intervention from the diverse subalterns (Mignolo, 2000). The aim is not the creation of a universal ideological position. Rather, and the influence of Levinas is clear here, it instead emphasizes the acceptance of different ways of being, not by positing a ‘blueprint of a future and ideal society projected from a single point of view [that of abstract universals] that will return us [again] to the Greek paradigms and European legacies’ (Mignolo, 2000: 744), but by being reflexive about one’s own, and more importantly, the ‘Other’s’ standpoint (Mendieta, [2009] 2011: 252). Border thinking then becomes a ‘tool’ of the project of critical cosmopolitanism (Mignolo, 2002a: 174) and a ‘future planetary epistemological and critical localism’ (Mignolo, 2000: 88, 157). The rationality of Eurocentrism is supplemented and enriched, signifying a radical human transformation of consciousness through its encounter with the Other. Through these processes, new solutions, importantly local solutions, are devised to social and political problems.

Intriguingly, and following on from this epistemic critique of modernity and its ontic effects, Mignolo has pushed the boundaries of the notion of plurality by exploring the idea of decolonial aestheSis instead of decolonial aestheTics (Mignolo and Vázquez, 2013; see also Toscano, 2012; de la Fuente, 2013). ⁶ If ‘Modernity’ was imagined as the house of epistemology (Mignolo, 2000: 93), this has also included the distinguishing and defining of reason from the aesthetic. Rather than rely on the use of the aestheTic as relating to the philosophy of aesthetics or of concerning the appreciation of beauty, the aestheSis option draws our attention to the ‘perceptual abstraction’ or ‘semblance’ whereby through symbolic forms the human actor partakes – physically or imaginatively – in an experience where he or she ‘does not remain a cold spectator’ (Dewey, 1958: 5) but through which the vital dynamics of a life are captured (Sandelands, 1998: 96). As an embodied form, aestheSis springs from the human need to actively give form to things by ‘coordinating inner image with outer reality’ (Sandelands, 1998: 102–3). In the concept of aestheSis, Mignolo and others capture something fundamental about the human experience; how the self, as body and mind, relates and connects to the external world (Nisbet, 2006: 15; Read, 1955: 20; also cited in Toscano, 2012), which is beyond the cognitive but which saturates it with expressive meaning. At its most fundamental, aestheSis is about heightened alertness to the world as experienced through space and time combined; it involves ‘perception’ beyond mere ‘recognition’ or representation.

Mignolo appreciates how space is affected through time, however, Watsuji would point out that in relying on a systemic account that builds on totalities in absolute terms, he misses the relationships in and between. The compassion in Mignolo’s work rightly draws our attention to ‘the other’. However, an unintended consequence of his theoretical ambivalence is to produce a reductivist method which excludes the heterogeneity that his very method is claiming to represent. The irony is that this is due to his reliance on ‘Western’ social theory’s understanding of space and time. In totalizing space and time, in essence, repeating the epistemology of the ‘West’, in terms of absoluteness-ethnic grounds (Mignolo, 2000: 103; see also Alcoff, 2007: 99, on his theoretical ambivalence in terms of identity and difference; and Domingues, 2009: 116) – like the communitarian, he can only ever give a partial account. Mignolo is surely right to champion the idea of ‘other spaces’ providing epistemic locations through which to enunciate opposition to the injustices of the global economic, legal and political system. However, it is an abstract space that has the tendency to disassociate and which fails to provide a site of enunciation in terms of the face-to-face encounter.

For Watsuji, existence is in constant flux, the perspective from which a group of people may be seen as a totality is never fixed. Completeness is never achieved. This stands in contrast to Levinas’s idea of totalization, from which Mignolo draws, which always seeks to impose a static definition upon the other or assimilate the other into an unchanging, non-negotiable relationship that would be visible, as it were, from the outside. As pointed out above, Watsuji’s understanding of being human does not mean merely an individual or merely social but both together in a mutually negating and incessantly on-going negation of one by the other, and this is never reducible to a single factor. Without this dialectical structure in mind, we cannot understand the relational essence of being human (Watsuji, [1937] 1996). This stresses that apparent contradictions may be at best penultimate statements and that more profound insights may be found when we position these contradictions within an underlying system. What is added is the idea that all individual entities are unique and separated and yet are mutually constrained and interdependent, and that the two concepts are needed to give a fuller account of experiential public space.

Of course it could be objected that Mignolo addresses this charge through the notion of double critique in the Zapatista movement (Mignolo, 2002b). However, as Barbara Adam (1994) has pointed out, Marxist approaches associate temporal change with universal abstract exchange value with resources, including social resources, explained in terms of commodification, isolation and control (see also Oke, 2009). As the history of Marxism has demonstrated, this has the effect of subsuming spatial awareness and concrete experience to an eschatological account of ‘Man’. What we end up with in Mignolo’s work, despite his dislike for abstract universals, is an abstract universal, the ‘Ethnic’ double critiquing another abstract universal ‘Marxism’ and vice versa. Mignolo’s account can only provide a reification of the ‘Other’s’ concrete experiences, ethnically bounded identity, and provides no account of my other’s other. Watsuji would stress that this ‘totality’ that Mignolo has created, like the communitarian, can only ever be an illusion. In incorporating time and space with the concrete experience of being human Watsuji’s account brings to the fore what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as the ‘architectures of knowledge, and the distribution and validation of functions and voices’ that are united along the public/private and self/other split (2012: 39). This would lead us to a cosmopolitan view of the world as a plural and as ‘hetero-spatial-temporal.’

And this brings us to the aestheSis in the work of Watsuji. In the concept of aestheSis Mignolo does capture something fundamental about the human experience which is beyond the cognitive and which saturates it with expressive meaning. However, the ambivalence of his theoretical construction undermines the potential of such an aesthesization of social theory and the sites of enunciation that spring from the imagination generated by the tensions between individuality and relationality. Betweenness illuminates the concealed spaces of everyday life, of the act-connections, and, as James Shields notes (2011), the significance of Watsuji’s commitment to the importance of aestheSis emerges through his philosophical anthropology and relational social ontology. For many reasons, the body is largely absent from social theory. ⁷ However, for Watsuji, the body is our contact with the world. For him, if we are anything, we are bodies interconnected with our minds; we are bodies/minds in space-time and not space/time/mind/bodies as separate ontic and analytical categories. The embedded and embodied aestheSis principle contained within betweenness conceptually highlights how we coordinate our inner experience with outer reality through the ‘nervous system of society’ (Watsuji, [1937] 1996: 160). And as Tamsin Lorraine (1999) puts it: ‘A theory of embodied subjectivity can help us map corporeal connections among people and thus indicate how different forms of subjectivity are interdependent and mutually informing.’ But rather than universalizing the body, Watsuji’s thought localizes it, maintaining the ontic and epistemic location. The body itself becomes a site of epistemology that provides imaginative latitude to the critique of the technologization of humanity. ⁸

The cosmopolitan imagination reconsidered

But what is the ‘it’ of the cosmopolitan imagination? If cosmopolitan social theory merely maintains a view from the ‘space and time’ of a social context, whether this is a bounded identity or globalization and the neo-liberal agenda, which maintains a particular assumption of an essential humanity, then is this problematic in terms of what we understand by to imagine? Every now and again a book is written that draws the reader’s attention to what should have been blindingly obvious. Chiara Bottici’s beautifully simple and elegant recent work, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (2014; also see Bottici, 2011a; 2011b) is one such book. Bottici points out that in the Western philosophical tradition there have been two trajectories of the imagination: either as an individually oriented faculty or as being socially oriented. She argues that with the emergence of the socially oriented imaginary, all we have actually done is to replace the problematic metaphysics of the individual with the equally problematic metaphysics of the social. In an argument reminiscent of Watsuji, she asks, if we understand being human not merely as a monadic, as an individual or, on the other hand, as merely a product of society but both together in a mutually negating and incessantly on-going negation of one by the other, then we need a new concept. In order to achieve this, Bottici secularizes and deontologizes the concept of the Imaginal in the work of Henry Corbin (1979) and his exploration of the concept in order to move beyond the philosophical deadlock of the imagination vs the imaginary (also see Fleury, 2006; Mateus, 2013). If we understand imagination as an individual faculty and the imaginary as resulting from social context, then the Imaginal is simply what is made out of images, an adjective denoting something that can be the product of both an individual faculty and a social context. This for, Bottici, emphasizes the imagination as a source of perception and is in contrast to its signification as a product or the production of fantasy (Bottici, 2011a; 2011b; 2014).

Though Watsuji never wrote on the concept of the imagination, his social ontology would suggest that he would reject an understanding that positioned the imagination either as an individual faculty or as a product of social contexts. In terms of cosmopolitanism being an act of the imagination through which to draw on global resources that illuminate the human condition, it seems difficult to understand the transformative possibilities if the medium through which it transforms is bound by either individuality or relationality alone. However, while Watsuji would welcome Bottici’s contribution, he, given his ontology, would move beyond her justifiable focus on the pictorial aspect of the imagination to include the study of our imagination in terms of our carnal interconnections in space. For Watsuji. the body is not merely a contingent aspect of selfhood but is integral to identity. For him, the body cannot be thought of as separate from mind; the body is thus an ethical and epistemological site. If we are not just minds and bodies but mind/bodies that experience our lives through betweenness, then it must follow that the Imaginal plays a role in how we perceive through our bodies: that we have a bodily Imaginal. As Bottici makes clear, the Imaginal takes privilege away from the social context and what is thought to be truth, real or valid. Challenging traditional boundaries among bodies and among minds as well as between bodies and minds allows us to rethink the interdependent nature of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’. As a function of Watsuji’s relational social ontology the Imaginal contributes a space to image other than which gathers multiplicity but not at the cost of individual experience and which does not totalize the boundaries between and within communities and individuals. In recognizing the Imaginal as a function of betweenness that one creates and is created but also as a site of expanding one experience of otherness and self, it is possible to find expressions of openness and transformation: cosmopolitanism.

A new approach to critical cosmopolitanism

The question then is, what would be the form and content of a critical cosmopolitanism that could emerge from the work of Watsuji through which to identify sources of critical dialogue with the potential to engage globally in social and political analysis? There are two intuitions that have motivated this article in terms of the potential of the cosmopolitan imagination. The first is that cosmopolitanism could provide a means of addressing the Eurocentric, detached and narcissistic nature of social and political thought. In doing so, it could represent a means not only to broaden and deepen the resources available to the theorist but also to change the lens completely. The second is that, in order for this to be achieved, the means of thinking that has brought us to this point in the history of our species, together with our consanguineous relationship to other life-forms and the planet, are unlikely to provide the solution. While Gerard Delanty and Walter Mignolo have made significant, important and compassionate contributions to the development of cosmopolitan social theory, of re-imaging the world, they still maintain old ways of seeing the world. Where Watsuji begins with concrete human experience, they both offer an abstract ‘substitutionalist universalism’ that reduces the plurality of being to a singular point of reference. This article identifies an analytical framework that moves beyond individualistic and collectivistic accounts, and the normativity that this has been used to justify dominance, and which moves towards a practice of theorizing about the spaces that we call the international and the national, self and other, not as distinct and autonomous spaces but as deeply interconnected. It also provides a basis through which marginalized groups in terms of relative truth can critique absolute truth (marginalized groups within communities can draw on local resources to challenge the larger community). In this way we can also understand the national and international as being both terms of oppression and emancipatory rather than either/or (Rao, 2012). As a function of Watsuji’s relational social ontology, the Imaginal contributes a space to image other than how we experience ourselves, other and the world. This gathers multiplicity but not at the cost of individual experience and which does not totalize the boundaries between and within communities and individuals.

Watsuji’s primary focus, the interdependence of human beings and the places in which we live, suggests that rather than presenting a theory of immanence that empties time and homogenizes social space, he is providing a tool to transform space both personally and socially. Rather than beginning with a moral claim that moves towards a prior decided normativity, the concepts of betweenness and Fudo refine our perception of cosmopolitanism as a methodological approach to social theory. This represents a radical approach towards accommodating difference that neither excludes nor assimilates other cultures or ways of life as well as embracing the plural concepts of ‘the good’ and ‘reason. Importantly, in terms of conceptions of the good, it provides a theoretical basis to think of the good in a way that can draw on the local and be enriched by relationships beyond the community. This would maintain ontic and epistemic location of the body and accommodate difference. Otherness, in this view, is not a fixed universal artefact open to the gaze of abstract reason but is across and within cultures and ourselves.

This also highlights the nature of cosmopolitanism as a travelling theory. If cosmopolitanism is anything it is a travelling theory concerned with contact but also of recursivity. Every theory has a beginning, a point of origin, which takes place in what Edward Said called simply ‘a set of initial circumstances’. At present, these initial circumstances revolve around the aspirations for a revolutionary time of humanity mobilized through the effects of globalization. In formatting the cosmopolitan project through the prism of detached conceptual universalism, it fails to provide the means for transformation without assimilation. In placing the initial set of circumstances in betweenness, either in terms of the civilizational, cultural, or the individual encounter, this new approach to critical cosmopolitanism cuts through the dualism of bounded and detached conceptions of reason and reasoning and aims to intertwine the local and the universal: cosmopolitanism changes and is enriched as it travels, and must be attuned to the local.

As an example of the elusive form of a non-Western critical form of cosmopolitanism (Rao, 2014), in offering a relational universalism and in not reducing plurality of being to singularity, Watsuji’s work, and its extension into critical cosmopolitan social theory, represent a radical epistemic shift in our understanding of self, other and the world. It dislocates the assumptions of Eurocentric theory, differs from universalist and anti-universalist discourses and pluralizes the contexts within which and the ways we ask questions about various human goods. The critical cosmopolitan account that emerges here provides a more localized account in which varied influences encounter and fuse but which does not ascribe ethnic priority to any one influence. It also suggests that diversity can be found in the world in spite of the homogenizing processes of globalization (Couteau, 2006). This also draws our attention to the fact that in terms of any critiques of globalization and neo-liberalism, it is not only institutions that need to be reformed but the social relationships that provide the praxis of actual existing power. In identifying a cosmopolitan view of the world as a plural and as ‘hetero-spatial-temporal’ place, it provides the grounds to identify connectors on the basis of a ‘relational universalism’ as embodied and embedded, diverse and individual. Whereas both Delanty and Mignolo rely, in varying degrees, on temporal accounts of social change that provide a critique of neo-liberalism and globalization, Watsuji’s social ontology places emphasis on the social, in the relationship between social forces and the individual, rather than on the state or the economy to provide a unique critical perspective. In this view, society, understood in terms of the relationship between individuality and relationships, is at the apex of the conceptual triangle in which the resources of the state and the economy are there to support it. As such, it provides a framework to enunciate a post-neo-liberalism that identifies, first, the societal obstacles to critical self-determinacy and which then leads on to structural changes (Utting, 2014). This suggests a form of cosmopolitan social theory not necessarily practised in a politically centred way but operating through flows of knowledge. This also raises the possibility of grounding politics, not simply on shared experiences and common goals but as being informed through the relational universalism of the multitude of ways that human beings can find the capability to express their understanding of their contingent, diverse, and imperfect lives.