Ferenc Takó Forms of Love and the Family in Watsuji Tetsurō’s Thought (This is a pre-print version of a paper that is going to be published in a volume of the Thematic Group “East Asia” in the Thematic Excellence Program “Community building: family and nation, tradition and innovation” of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. This version might contain minor errors.) Introduction Watsuji Tetsurō 和辻哲郎 (1889–1960) is considered one of the most important Japanese phi- losophers of the 20 th century, whose works were shaped by his wide knowledge of Western philosophy, the Buddhist and the Confucian teachings, as well as the native Japanese tradition. Watsuji’s ideas in the field of ethics had a profound effect on modern Japanese ethical thought. His philosophy is usually interpreted as modern, especially in terms of his views on interper- sonal relations, while other studies stress the traditionality of his ideas. In the present study I will examine different aspects of Watsuji’s understanding of love (ai 愛, renai 恋愛), focusing on its relation with his concept of the family (kazoku 家族) and the ie 家. I will focus on two works that are of central importance in his oeuvre: Fūdo 風土 1 (1935) and Rinrigaku 倫理学 2 (1937, 1942, 1949). In the first part of the examination, I will briefly elaborate on Watsuji’s widely researched concept of ningen 人間 and aidagara 間柄 as a context of his interpretation of love. In the second part, I will discuss how love appears in Fūdo and plays a special role as a typical manifestation of the uniquely Japanese type of climate, as well as of the respective behaviour and disposition of the Japanese towards their environment, which bear certain unique internal tensions. I will argue that at the time of writing Fūdo, these internal tensions were dominant in Watsuji’s understanding of ai. In part 3, I will examine Watsuji’s Rinrigaku, fo- cusing on his discussions of love and its connection to the family. My thesis of this section is that, while the tensions of love described in Fūdo also appear in the sections on love in Rin- rigaku, here it is much rather the complementarity of the love-relationship, the mutual complet- 1 Fūdo is usually translated as Climate, however, due to the complexity of the Japanese term I will consequently use the original. In more details on the meaning see section 2. 2 Rinrigaku is usually translated as Ethics, and the term itself certainly is the Japanese “equivalent” of the Western term of ‘ethics’. However, it is important to call attention to Watsuji’s explanation of the separate meanings of rin 倫 as ‘fellows’ or ‘fellowship’ and ri 理 as ‘reason’, understood together as “the order or the pattern through which the communal existence of human beings is rendered possible (Watsuji 1996: 10, 11; Watsuji Testurō Zenshū [henceforth: WTZS] 10, 12–13), due to which – the same way as in the case of Fūdo, I will use the original term in the present paper. Also see Maraldo 2019: 27. f.