Abstract

Watsuji Tetsuro has influenced both intellectuals and educated laypeople in twentieth-century Japan through his many writings on the allegedly unique character of Japanese civilization. His first book, however, explicated the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a metaphysics of will to power. This work, which initially appears anomalous, addressed many of Watsuji's early concerns and foreshadowed major themes in his later thought. ;A provincial Confucian upbringing and the early deaths of several relatives left the adolescent Watsuji rebellious and concerned to overcome death. When he entered the First Higher School in Tokyo , this led him to a neo-idealist valorization of spirit over matter. During most of his period at the school, he opposed modern egoism; by the end, he also began to conceive of spirit--its contrary--as immanent, dynamic, and accessible through intuition. In general, he sought to embrace the dynamism of modernity without its avarice and confusion. ;Although Watsuji had already started to read Nietzsche, his concentrated engagement with Nietzsche's work took place after he entered Tokyo Imperial University . Following a brief period as a hedonist, he began to interpret Nietzsche's will to power as the vital force of the universe, and consequently, the source of all active good, truth, and beauty. The intellect, a sometime instrument of this force, congeals reality, thus rendering it amenable to egoistic manipulation. ;Watsuji elaborated this reading in A Study of Nietzsche : reality was unitary and dynamic and the illusory ego needed to be overcome. At times, he drew a second lesson, namely, that individuals instantiated will to power well or poorly depending on whether they acceded to the outcomes of their struggles with each other. After publishing Study, this lesson as to the spiritual benefits of submission to one's current superiors became central. Starting in the mid-1910s, Watsuji applied this lesson to Japan, which he viewed as having developed in the past through its submission to continental Asian culture, and as needing to develop in the present through a tactical submission to Western culture. In this way, Japan itself became the anti-egoistic alternative to modernity that Watsuji had sought