Offspring of Watsuji's theory of milieu (Fûdo)

Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960), a Japanese philosopher, published in 1935 Fûdo: ningengakuteki kosatsu, an essay on the relationship between the character of human societies and the natural conditions of their environment, mainly climate. This book has generally been understood as an illustration of ge...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:GeoJournal 2004, Vol.60 (4), p.389-396
Main Author: Berque, Augustin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate
Climate models
Concept of being
Culture
Determinism
Environment
Geography
Human existence
Humanities
Humans
Japanese culture
Literature
Natural environment
Natural environments
Offspring
Ontology
Philosophers
Philosophy
Predicates
Society
Space
Theory
Time
Translations
Watsuji, Tetsurô
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Summary:Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960), a Japanese philosopher, published in 1935 Fûdo: ningengakuteki kosatsu, an essay on the relationship between the character of human societies and the natural conditions of their environment, mainly climate. This book has generally been understood as an illustration of geographical determinism, to which belong indeed some of the main supporters of Watsuji's theory. Yet Watsuji himself stated explicitly that his book was not about the influence of the natural environment on human life, but about 'the structural moment of human existence', in which the matter is milieu (fûdo) and mediance (fûdosei), not environment (kankyô), and which has much in common with Heidegger's Dasein, although Watsuji contests the Heideggerian precedence of temporality on spatiality. In this respect, Fûdo is the forerunner of a promising trend in cultural geography: studies on the geographical constitution of Being, opening the way to a recosmization of the human.
ISSN:0343-2521
1572-9893
DOI:10.1023/B:GEJO.0000042975.55513.f1