David W. Johnson

This paper considers the zoologist Adolf Portmann’s claim that the outward form of the organism first has a presentation value (Darstellungswert) that is prior to and more basic than its adaptive value. Portmann maintains as a consequence that living beings are fundamentally driven by the urge to self-display (Selbstdarstellung). This drive toward self-presentation is directed, above all, to conspecifics because conspecifics can most fully meet this desire to be seen, touched, and heard, i.e., to appear. Merleau-Ponty and Arendt show from different directions that this relation “gives an ontological value back to the notion of species. What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality” (Merleau-Ponty). The conception of the living being that emerges from these considerations suggests a novel way of understanding sociality as ontologically primordial. It also discloses a new conception of what is at stake in environmental devastation: the irrecoverable loss of presentation value.

This book is a reconstructive exposition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Unlike other surveys of this kind, it devotes a substantial amount of attention to the Kantian and Husserlian influences on Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus and the “sub-conscious and subrepresentational system of action projection” (103) that is the body schema (schéma corporel). But Mooney also moves beyond sure-footed summary to show what needs further development, where there have been missteps, and how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception remains relevant for issues ranging from critiques of scientific realism to discussions in disability studies.The first chapter rehearses Merleau-Ponty’s existential... Read More.

One of the most suggestive points of contact between the thought of the Japanese philosopher and psychiatrist Kimura Bin and the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras is the parallel between the way the concepts of life as a movement (of becoming) and as an event (of individuation) function in Barbaras’s work, and the way that Kimura employs the terms bios (the individuated life of the organism) and zoē (life as the shared power in all living things). This conceptual frame enables both thinkers to give an account of life as an event that itself is caught up in the ongoing activity of the world. The article shows that bringing Kimura’s work together with Barbaras’s allows us to apprehend something that neither alone could fully grasp: the character of human life as an unfolding event that, as continuous with the life of the world, can be more fully effectuated as a movement of self-realization.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I would like to begin by thanking the Journal of Japanese Philosophy for making space in these pages for a review of my monograph Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. Although book reviews do not usually receive a reply from the author—much less one as lengthy as the article that follows—one seemed necessary in this instance because my ideas, unfortunately, have been seriously mis-represented here. Moreover, the number and kinds of misreadings, mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are so extensive that even a brief attempt to address the main points at issue is no small task. But the primary problem is that the reviewer contends that I say the opposite of what I actually maintain with regard to some of the central claims of the book. These mistaken assertions are primarily the consequence of a failure to understand crucial philosophical concepts (especially metaphysical nondualism, being-in-the-world, intentionality, and disclosure). But they also stem from a series of errors ranging from the exclusion of some of the fundamental ideas and arguments of the book to the misreading of pivotal claims and the mistranslation of the Japanese-language primary sources.I begin with a single but telling example that is characteristic of the way the reviewer repeatedly portrays me as saying the opposite of what I actually say. Droz states that “For Johnson, while human beings taken collectively as a whole have the capacity to transcend the fūdo, individual human beings apparently do not” (Droz, 133). But what I actually say is that Watsuji “has not shown that this same capacity belongs to the individual human being” (Johnson, 191). I then give a series of examples of individual transcendence: “the forms of transcendence that are evident in, for example, the complex identities of immigrants, of those who have lived in multiple countries, of those who live in multiple milieus at the same time [...] of those who develop a very different character from their compatriots even as they live together in the same place” (Johnson, 191). [End Page 167] I go on to point out that “we also need a subtler account, on a much smaller scale, of the ways the self is both constituted by and is also able to transcend its fūdo. In what follows we will give an indication of some of the issues involved” (Johnson, 191). I then proceed to give such an overview, concluding with the point that “the strong identification with one aspect of one’s milieu rather than another shows that the self is much more than the simple expression of its fūdo. This form of transcendence, I suggest, can be studied with profit as an instance of what Watsuji calls the individual dimension of human beings” (Johnson, 192).Misrepresentations of this sort abound. The most serious instance of this kind concerns one of the central theses of this study. At the beginning of her review, the author purports to recount two criteria that I propose “to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails” (Droz, 129). But in fact, I list four criteria under two distinct categories. First, in order to determine the scope and boundaries of a fūdo, I propose the following two criteria:1. certain regions as articulated wholes found in nature itself, which is what Watsuji attempts to articulate with his taxonomy of basic types of fūdo (Johnson, 34).2. a relational whole of disclosure, self-interpretation, and natural locale (Johnson, 34).But the reviewer takes note of (1) and passes over (2) in silence—this omission is significant and, as we will see shortly, it leads her into later difficulties. Droz instead moves directly to a second topic, namely, what I intend by the term nature, which is a concept found in both of these criteria. Here I follow Mill in thinking that we need some way to distinguish between nature and nonnature if nature is not simply to be equated with everything. I therefore propose two criteria that we might use to distinguish nature from artifice within a fūdo: A. nature as all-encompassing space and place B. the sheerly given self-unfolding of things

[Open access] In this book symposium the author takes up questions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethical theory, and intellectual history raised by a group of scholarly interlocutors from a range of backgrounds. In the course of engaging with these issues, he discusses, inter alia, McDowell’s realism, Jonathon Lear’s work on the end of a world, Michael Oakeshott’s view of selfhood, Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of truth.

This paper attempts to reconcile two ideas that seem fundamentally opposed to one another: the reality of the self and the doctrine of no-self. Buddhism offers a form of spiritual equanimity that turns on the denial of a self. Nonetheless, there seem to be good reasons to hold onto the reality of the self. The existence of a self enables us to account for praise and blame, the hopes for oneself that motivate actions, and attachments to the selves of others in bonds of love and affection. I show how it may be possible to reconcile the reality of the self with a particular interpretation of the no-self doctrine by engaging with the work of thinkers from the phenomenological tradition such as Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Gallagher, and Petitmengin.

Despite the importance of linguistic disclosure for philosophical hermeneutics there has been a conspicuous lack of attention to the question of how linguistic disclosure actually works. I examine the mechanics of disclosure by drawing on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well as Ricoeur’s concept of translation and his theory of metaphor. My claim is that the background horizon of the unsaid that differs between languages enables each to disclose different things. This situation underscores the importance of engaging in East-West comparative philosophy, of philosophizing across what Ricoeur calls the radical “fold” (pli) in what can be thought and experienced.

This paper defends Gadamer’s conception of dialogical truth against the objection that it amounts to no more than the achievement of dialogical consensus. It shows that there is a more radical conception of truth at stake in Gadamer’s analysis of dialogical rationality, one which is grounded in the ontological continuity of subject and object. Such a conception of truth only becomes visible if we hew closely to Gadamer’s account of dialogue as a process in which the individual actions and intentions of the participants are taken up into a movement that has its own dynamic, such that the truth is something that acts on our understanding in an event that happens to us.

Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of fūdo (風土) is intended to capture the way in which nature and culture are interwoven in a setting that is partly constitutive of and partly constituted by a group of people inhabiting a particular place. This essay offers a careful examination of the sense in which the self both constitutes and is constituted by the fūdo, or geo-cultural climate, in which it is emplaced. It concludes with a brief survey of the prospects and problems posed by the interpretation of fūdo that has been presented.

This paper focuses on one of the mainstays of Japanese psychiatrist and philosopher Kimura Bin’s (1931–2021) philosophical approach. Kimura’s work is characterized by the intersection of therapeutic, philosophical, and intercultural dimensions in ways that enable his clinical practice and philosophical investigations to mutually inform one another. I examine how this dialectic comes together with his conversion of ordinary Japanese words into philosophical concepts. Explicating the concepts Kimura deploys in developing a phenomenology of the self allows us to make new sense of phenomena ranging from the process of individuation to the collective subjectivity of group life, from the breakdown of the self to its fuller realization.

Gadamer claims that an essential form of truth is disclosed in the search for, and discovery of, a shared language in and through which the matter at issue between the participants in a conversation can come to presentation. He maintains in this regard that the thing itself is given in language. This contention is grounded in his account of the “belonging together” of word and thing. To help us understand this idea I turn to his discussion of the image, since—in a comparison that Gadamer explicitly makes—here, too, the image “gives” the thing.

This paper is a response to a claim made by Tarjei Larsen that Merleau-Ponty’s own theory of painting undermines the important distinction made in his thought between primordial perception and cultural construction because it requires that perception take different cultural and historical forms in order to account for perspectival painting. I show that this distinction is not so easily collapsed by arguing that Larsen has misconstrued Merleau-Ponty’s account of painting as a phenomenological theory of painting and misinterpreted Merleau-Ponty’s concept of painterly style, and that therefore the conclusion that perception must be malleable is not warranted. What is at stake in this debate is whether Merleau-Ponty’s own account of painting threatens the basis for his phenomenological project as well as his attempt to accord substantial philosophical significance to painting.

This essay critically develops Watsuji’s nondual ontology of the self. Watsuji shows that the self is constituted by its relational contact with others and by its immersion in a wider geo-cultural environment. Yet Watsuji himself had difficulty in smoothly bringing together and integrating these notions. By showing how these domains work together to constitute the self, I bring into view the unity at the ground of Watsuji’s thought and the implications of this account for key ideas in Heidegger’s philosophy and for environmental ethics.

"In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson's "Watsuji on Nature" reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), situating it in relation both to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. Johnson shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called "fūdo". By fully unfolding Watsuji's novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics. In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, "Watsuji on Nature" radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation"--Provided by publisher.