Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan (Suny Series in Modern Japanese Philosophy)

Watsuji's Rinrigaku (literally, the principles that allow us to live in friendly community) has been regarded as the definitive study of Japanese ethics for half a century.

“Robert Carter has produced a wonderfully clear and lucid translation of Watsuji Tetsuro's masterpiece, Rinrigaku. Long known by comparative philosophers as a centerpiece of modern Japanese philosophical tradition, Carter has now made this work accessible to Western students and scholars. For anyone who is a serious student of Heidegger, this work is a must read!”—David Edward Shaner, Furman University

Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku (literally, the principles that allow us to live in friendly community) has been regarded as the definitive study of Japanese ethics for half a century. In Japan, ethics is the study of human being or ningen. As an ethical being, one negates individuality by abandoning one's independence from others. This selflessness is the true meaning of goodness.

“Here we have a major treatise by a sophisticated thinker who self-consciously wished to provide a distinctly 'Asian' alternative to Western ethical systems--systems he and others saw as conceptually flawed and culturally ethnocentric. Long-suppressed questions about the assumed universalizability of some of the West's most privileged moral modes are posed in and through this work. The study both of comparative ethics and of comparative societies will necessarily be much enriched and enlivened by it.”—From the Foreword by William R. LaFleur