The Ethical and the Trans-Ethical in the Ethics of Emptiness

Beyond Sueki Fumihiko’s Critique of Watsuji Tetsurō

Abstract

In Sueki Fumihiko’s Buddhism vs. Ethics(2013)and Philosophizing in Japan(2012), he provides a novel critique of Watsuji. Despite his fundamental agreement with“relational ethics,”Sueki suggests that Watsuji’s ethics belongs purely in the domain of the human(ningen)and is thus unable to deal with the incomprehensible“other.”For Sueki, a genuine response to the other requires that we go beyond the ethical and into the“trans-ethical.”But does Watsuji’s ethics really lack this trans- ethical moment? In this paper, I argue that while Watsuji set out to construct an ethics of ningen, his introduction of the ideas of emptiness, continuous negation, and other ideas inspired by Buddhism and Nishida brought in a transethical moment that disrupts the closure of his ethical system. Examining Ethics vols. 2 and 3(1943, 1949), we see these concretely expressed in Watsuji’s view of social change and the role the “other” plays in it. However, there are insurmountable limits to Watsuji’s theory, and a careful examination of these limits shows the challenges that any ethics of emptiness/nothingness will need to contend with in order to truly account for the depth of human relations.