© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Taguchi Shigeru, A. Altobrando (eds.), Tetsugaku Companion to Phenomenology and Japanese Philosophy, Tetsugaku Companions to Japanese Philosophy 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21942-0_11 Chapter 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application to Psychopathology Joel Krueger Despite increased interest in comparative philosophy within the past few decades- including particular interest in the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy-Watsuji Tetsurō 和辻哲郎 has not received the attention he deserves. This is a shame. Watsuji was an uncommonly broad-ranging and original thinker whose work offers important insights into topics like culture, ethics, religion, embodiment, and self. I here discuss Watsuji's contributions to the latter two themes insofar as they form core parts of his analysis of aidagara, or "betweenness"-one of Watsuji's central philosophical contributions. First, I develop a phenomenological reading of aidagara. I argue that the notion can help illuminate aspects of our embodied subjectivity and its interrelation with the world and others. Along the way, I also indicate how the notion can be fruitfully supplemented by different sources of empirical research. Second, I put aidagara to work in the context of psychopathology. I show how disruptions of aidagara in schizophrenia not only affirm the foundational role it plays in organizing our experience of self and world in everyday life. Additionally, I suggest the notion can, in this context of application, potentially enhance our understanding of and empathy for those living with schizophrenic disorders. 1 Watsuji on Embodiment and the Social Self In contrast to other Kyoto School luminaries like Nishida Kitarō西田幾多郎 and Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治, who focus on philosophical topics like metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and religion, Watsuji's fundamental concerns are culture and morality. His monumental Rinrigaku ("A Study of Ethics") is a three-volume work J. Krueger (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: J.Krueger@exeter.ac.uk 166 in which he argues that moral philosophy is first philosophy. But Watsuji's approach is phenomenological. He's not interested in abstract ethical principles. Instead, he focuses on the dynamics of ethical practices enacted within the embodied, emotional, and cultural spaces of everyday life. As Watsuji puts it, "[t[he locus of ethical problems lies not in the consciousness of the isolated individual but precisely in the in-betweenness of person and person" (Watsuji 1996: 10). It's within the shared space of this in-betweenness-"the cluster of practical act-connections" connecting us-that ethical principles are made concrete as we construct, manage, and negotiate social relationships (ibid., 10). Accordingly, for Watsuji, an investigation of ethics begins with an investigation of self, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. 2 Situating Aidagara These observations help frame Watsuji's central concept of aidagara: the "betweenness" or field of possibilities in which individuals co-exist, communicate, and construct different ways of understanding and relating to one another. Yuasa Yasuo 湯 浅泰雄, Watsuji's student, says that aidagara "consists of the various human relationships of our life-world. To put it simply, it is the network which provides humanity with a social meaning, for example, one's being an inhabitant of this or that town or a member of a certain business firm. To live as a person means...to exist in such betweenness" (Yuasa 1987: 37). Aidagara can thus be thought of as the space of community and interactive potential (Carter 2013: 35). But for Watsuji, aidagara is more than mere potential. It has a material reality; it's embodied. Watsuji argues that culture, for example, is at its core the materialization of aidagara. Culture is the collective effort to establish structures for managing the flow and form of information and communication. The local practices that manage this flow-religious, educational, artistic, political, legal, familial, and medical practices, among others-are, along with the artifacts that support them, tools for organizing aidagara. In other words, they are the material from which we fashion relationships and craft the everyday encounters of betweenness. As Watsuji puts this idea, "All expressions that indicate the interconnection of the acts of human beings-for example, intercourse, fellowship, transportation, communication-can be understood only with a subjective spatiality of this sort", the subjective spatiality of aidagara (Watsuji 1996: 157). An example will help. Consider how the material form of a Catholic confessional booth is crafted to manage religious and interpersonal aidagara (Krueger 2016). Its design shields the penitent from the judging gaze of others, including the priest who can only hear the confession spoken through a lattice dividing the booth in two. This structure minimizes embarrassment and distraction by blocking out the external world; it encourages a feeling of openness and trust by creating an intimate form of betweenness in which sins can be freely confessed and forgiven. For Watsuji, aidagara is thus an organizing principle operating at multiple levels: from the particular way a mother cradles and sings to her newborn infant (Watsuji 1996: 61–62) to the manner by which human beings co-exist as a global community J. Krueger 167 and conceive of their obligations to one another. But there is an important distinction to be made. On one hand, to think about aidagara at the level of global community, local culture, or even between infant and caregiver is to see aidagara as extrinsic to the self-that is, as the space of betweenness in which selves come together to form an interactive community. On the other hand, Watsuji also insists that aidagara is intrinsic to the self. We don't simply exist in aidagara; it exists within us. It is part of the internal structure of the self (Odin 1992: 55). Watsuji's phenomenological analysis of the self (ningen) develops this idea. His discussion here is subtle. It's also the place in Watsuji's thinking where the influence of Zen Buddhism is most keenly felt, particularly with his characterization of the self as a dynamic nothingness or emptiness (kū) (Lafleur 1978). A comprehensive discussion of ningen lies beyond the scope of present concerns.1 My focus in this section and the next is to instead clarify the manner in which aidagara is for Watsuji an intrinsic feature of the bodily self. Simply put, Watsuji argues that the self as ningen is at the same time both individual and social, private and public. Accordingly, our thinking about the self must prioritize the extent to which the self is ultimately constituted by this inner dialectical tension between individuality and sociality. The self for Watsuji is not a fixed substance or thing but rather a dynamic process, a movement-what McCarthy helpfully characterizes as "a shifting network of relations being configured and reconfigured in time and space" (McCarthy 2011: 13). For Watsuji, this decentered, anti-substantialist approach to the self means that the self is not something that stops at the boundaries of the skin. Rather, it loops into the natural and social world via the network of relations and interactions constitutive of its spatially situated existence (Schultz 2013). Watsuji develops this relational way of thinking about the self by engaging in a structural analysis of the Japanese term ningen (self or person), which he suggests highlights how the Japanese "have produced a distinctive conception of human being" (Watsuji 1996: 15).2 Watsuji observes that the two Japanese characters comprising the term ningen are person, 人, and between, 間. For Watsuji, these characters indicate that the self is, simultaneously, both solitary and social, private and public; the poles of singularity and plurality are built into the basic compound structure of ningen. As he tells us: [N]ingen is the public and, at the same time, the individual human beings living within it. Therefore, it refers not merely to an individual "human being" nor merely to "society." What is recognized here as a dialectical unity of those double characteristics that are inherent in human beings. [...] Ningen denotes the unity of the contradictories. Unless we keep this dialectical structure in mind, we cannot understand the essence of ningen. (Watsuji 1996: 15) 1 For discussions of Watsuji's ningen in its Buddhist context, see Odin 1992; Shields 2009; Kalmanson 2010; McCarthy 2011; Sevilla 2016. 2 See Odin 1992 for an extended comparative discussion of why this way of thinking about the self is not necessarily unique to Japan. 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 168 What this means for Watsuji is that the self is not a fixed thing spatially confined to the individual. Instead, it is forged relationally-in betweenness-as one moves through and negotiates continually-shifting social and cultural contexts. But we can bring out the extent to which aidagara is part of the inner nature of self in a more pointed way. As the previous quote indicates, Watsuji argues that ningen simultaneously realizes "the unity of the contradictories", that is, individuality and sociality. Negotiating this "dialectical unity" is the self's fundamental way of being. And what this ultimately means for Watsuji is that the self-in its "betweenness-oriented being" (Watsuji 1996: 117)-is grounded in a fundamental emptiness (kū), or lack of fixed existence, that enables it to exist as betweenness. It is at this point that Watsuji most immediately helps himself to various Zen Buddhist notions such as emptiness, dependent co-origination, and the logic of negation in developing this idea (see McCarthy 2010: 12–20). Without delving into the particulars of these Buddhist ideas, we can nevertheless consider an example to make Watsuji's claim more concrete: experimenting with different self-conceptions in adolescence. Adolescence is when most of us are particularly preoccupied with fashioning our individuality-deciding what sort of person we want to become, how we intend to define our life, what sort of projects and values to prioritize, etc. This self-fashioning is a dialectical process. It involves intentionally creating a separation or betweenness from one's parents, including the beliefs and values we inherit from them, and which have largely defined our identity up to this point. To use the Buddhist language Watsuji favors, we actively "negate" or "empty" our group (i.e, family) membership in order to establish our individuality. On the other hand, within this movement of negation or self-emptying we simultaneously affirm our group (i.e., family) membership-namely, as that which must be negated in the process of fashioning our individuality. And a similar group affirmation happens in another way, too. This is because fashioning our adolescent individuality normally involves appropriating characteristic features of yet another group: our peer group. We listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, adopt the same speech, and engage in the same activities that our peers do. In this process of cultivating and affirming our adolescent individuality, then, we simultaneously negate that individuality both by affirming our reliance on the betweenness of our family group as well as by defining our individuality with reference to the values and practices-the betweenness-of our peers. While this dialectical movement between individuality and sociality is perhaps most vividly felt in adolescence, a similar dynamic is at work throughout our lives. According to Watsuji, this dynamic tension is precisely what it means to be a spatially situated self, to exist as betweenness. Importantly, however, thinking of the socio-relational self as empty of fixed existence is not to affirm a kind of nihilism or eliminativism about the self. Rather, Watsuji conceives of the self-as aidagara-in terms of its creative possibility, as a spatially situated and interdependent process continually in-the-making. This is because an individual, Watsuji tells us, "is an individual only in a whole, and the whole is a whole only in individuals...In other words, an individual is an individual in its connection with multiplicity and totality, and the whole is a whole in its connection with multiplicity and individuality. J. Krueger 169 Human beings possess this dynamic structure of reciprocal transformation" (Watsuji 1996: 124). Within the dynamics of betweenness, then, self and world are continually bound up in a reciprocal process of creative transformation and mutuallysustaining development.3 3 Aidagara Embodied As we've now seen, aidagara is not offered by Watsuji as an abstract principle but rather as a form of relationality that is concretely embodied, both in the practices and things constitutive of our sociocultural communities as well as, more locally, in the various ways we engage with one another in everyday face-to-face contexts. Insofar as aidagara is both external and internal to the self-and the self is fundamentally embodied-aidagara is rooted in our embodied subjectivity. Watsuji describes this embodied dimension of aidagara as a "carnal interconnection". This carnal interconnection, he continues, "is always found wherever there is betweenness, even though the manner of conjunction may differ. We find it not only between a husband and a wife, but it is also clearly visible even between friends... This relation is neither physical nor psychological, nor the conjunction of the two. Generally, it is not an objective relatedness but a subjective relatedness in the carnal body" (quoted in Yuasa 1987: 47, my emphasis). In light of Watsuji's phenomenological orientation, I suggest that there are at least two ways of understanding how aidagara is embodied, both of which are of interest to phenomenology and psychopathology: aidagara as bodily self-intimacy and as intercorporeity. The first conceives of aidagara as internal to our embodied subjectivity; the second, as a feature of our embodied intersubjective engagements. I consider these two notions in turn. 4 Aidagara as Bodily Self-Intimacy As noted earlier, Watsuji's approach to culture and ethics adopts a phenomenological and embodied perspective insofar as it focuses on the ways animate bodies inhabit and negotiate social, cultural, and geographical space. This embodied perspective stems from Watsuji's early critique of Heidegger. Despite his initial enthusiasm for Being and Time, Watsuji was one of the first commentators to offer a substantive criticism of Heidegger's neglect of embodiment. He argues that Heidegger's excessive focus on Dasein's temporal nature leads him to overlook the essential role spatiality plays in constituting Dasein's structure-which means that Heidegger ultimately has little to say about both embodiment and intersubjectivity, 3 This mutual dependence of self and world is a direct appeal to the Buddhist notion of the "codependent origination" of all phenomena. See LaFleur 1978: 244–245. 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 170 insofar as the former is the vehicle for the latter.4 Watsuji expresses this concern when he writes: The limitation [of Heidegger's approach] is due to the fact Heidegger's 'Dasein' is ultimately an 'individual'. He grasped human existence as the existence of a self. But this is merely an abstract aspect within the double structure of our individual-qua-social existence. When we grasp this double structure of human existence concretely, temporality and spatiality are coextensive. We can then show the truth of historicality, which Heidegger fails to develop fully and concretely (quoted in Arisaka 2001: 199). With this context in mind, we can now turn to a consideration of how Watsuji conceives of aidagara as an internal principle of embodied subjectivity. Anticipating approaches to embodiment we find in phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas, Watsuji argues that as embodied beings, we are hybrid entities simultaneously harboring both subjective and objective dimensions (Krueger 2013a; Krueger 2013b). To use orthodox phenomenological language, Watsuji distinguishes two modes of embodiment: first, the body from an internal perspective, or the body-as-subject; second, the body from the perspective of an external observer, or the body-as-object. For Watsuji, this hybrid nature of our embodiment reflects our dialectical nature as beings-in-betweenness. Since we are never wholly subject nor wholly object, we are, rather, simultaneously both; we exist as a "subjective spatiality" perpetually in-between pure subjectivity and objectivity. To begin with the latter mode of embodiment, our bodies clearly have a material dimension. We are physical bodies that, like other objects in the world, have observable properties (size, shape, color, texture, weight, etc.) and take up geometrical space. Other subjects can thus perceive my physical body from their perspective on the world; this aspect of my embodiment is a public affair. Moreover, I can interact with other bodies and the world more generally because my body is an object with causal powers. To conceive of the body-as-object, however, involves more than simply acknowledging the physical nature of our bodies. It's also to understand a particular way subjects can relate to their bodies-that is, a mode of self-intimacy. Although I live in and through my body from the first-person perspective, I can nevertheless adopt a third-person perspective on my body and consider it from the outside: for example, while looking at a mirror and vowing to get more exercise, scrutinizing a strange rash, or becoming hyper-aware of how I appear to my students as I lecture to them. I can also relate to my body as an object conceptually by acquiring scientific or medical knowledge of its parts and functions, or emotionally by adopting an attitude toward my body if I'm pleased with a new haircut or self-conscious of a blemish (Gallagher 2005). In these cases, I reflexively objectify my own body. I enact a new mode of self-intimacy-a reflexive betweenness distinguishing my experience and my body as an object of that experience-qualitatively distinct from the more immediate pragmatic intimacy I enjoy with my body as I spontaneously move and act in the world. 4 For critical discussions of Watsuji's critique of Heidegger, see Arisaka 2001 and Mayeda 2006. J. Krueger 171 This latter form of intimacy is what phenomenologists term the body-as-subject. This notion is meant to characterize the immediate first-person intimacy we have with our own body from the inside, the body experientially inhabited as we do things with it. From this perspective, the body is experientially manifest not as an object or content of my perception, belief, or attitude but rather as the transparent vehicle through which I engage with the world. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, "I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body" (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 151). When functioning optimally, the body-as-subject operates as a prereflective structure organizing experience. This means that it's implicitly present as we perceive the world and act on it, dynamically shaping in subtle ways both what we experience and how we experience it.5 For example, I don't perceive the coffee mug on my desk as a value-neutral object with different properties like size, shape, colour, and texture. Rather, I perceive it as meaningful: as a purpose-built artifact affording a range of interactive possibilities (grasping, picking up, pouring liquid in, throwing, etc.) specified by the structure of the mug, the context in which I encounter it, and my experience of being a bodily subject that can do these different things. The mug shows up this way because I am tacitly (i.e., prereflectively) aware of where my limbs are in space and what sort of bodily actions (e.g., reaching for the mug) are possible within that space. In this way, the body-as-subject grounds our first-person frame of reference through which we are disclosed to ourselves as bodily subjects situated in the world (Legrand et al. 2007). In light of these kinds of considerations, Watsuji argues that conceiving of the body simply as a "mere physiological object" is an abstraction from our more structurally complex form of hybrid embodiment (Watsuji 1996: 61). We must instead acknowledge that our bodies realize a mode of being between pure subjectivity or objectivity. They are simultaneously both-and in this way, our bodies manifest an irreducibly "dual structure" or "contradictory" nature as subject and object, private interiority and public expressivity (ibid., 19: 58). Therefore "[w]hether considered theoretically or practically, a human body is subjective through and through, so long as it is an element in the activity of the subject" (ibid.: 65). For Watsuji, aidagara can thus be thought of as internal to the bodily self in two ways. First, as an ontological principle specifying that we are hybrid subjects whose bodily mode of being is perpetually in-between pure subjectivity or objectivity. Second, as a principle of self-intimacy specifying two modes of betweenness through which we relate to these dimensions of our bodily being: the immediate first-person self-intimacy of the body-as-subject versus the objectifying, thirdperson self-intimacy of the body-as-object. As we'll see, both senses of aidagara, 5 This is what Merleau-Ponty seems to mean when he writes that "To say that my body is always near to me or always there for me is to say that it is never truly in front of me...that it remains on the margins of all my perceptions, and that it is with me" (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 93). Similarly, Sartre tells us that "the body is present in every action though invisible...The body is lived and not known" (Sartre 1956: 427) 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 172 understood as forms of self-intimacy, will be useful for understanding experiential the character of schizophrenia. 5 Aidagara as Intercorporeity Whereas conceiving of aidagara in terms of bodily self-intimacy is to conceive of it from the first-person perspective-that is, as internal to the dynamics of an individual's bodily subjectivity both in terms of its ontology as well as modes of selfrelatedness -there is another way of understanding how aidagara is embodied, according to Watsuji. This reading conceives of aidagara in second-personal terms, as operative in our embodied self-other engagements. From this perspective, embodiment is not confined to the individual but is rather comprised of a dynamic network of mutually-influencing processes that extend beyond individuals and loop into the world, encompassing others. More simply, this perspective sees embodiment as constitutively social. To better understand this idea and its further relevance for psychopathology, we can appropriate a term from Merleau-Ponty and characterize second-personal aidagara in terms of intercorporeity (Tanaka 2015). For Merleau-Ponty (and Watsuji), intercorporeity refers to the bodily resonance at the heart of our social engagements. As Merleau-Ponty puts this idea, "There is, between my consciousness and my body such as I live it, and between this phenomenal body [i.e., body-as-subject] and the other person's phenomenal body as I see it from the outside, an internal relation that makes the other person appear as the completion of the system" (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 368). When we interact with other bodily subjects, their expressive actions-gestures, facial expressions, postural adjustments, intonation patterns, movements and manipulations of shared space, etc.-impact my bodily responses (Krueger 2011). A smile and friendly gesture, for instance, elicits similar responses from me and motivates an array of further friendly responses; a threatening gesture or aggressive movement, on the other hand, will compel me to pull back or tense up and prepare my body for my own aggressive response. My body is in this way affected by-or "coupled" with (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Krueger and Michael 2012)-the other's expression; the kinetics, intensity, and timing of their emotional expressions shape my ongoing responses, which in turn feeds back onto and shape their responses, which return to me and impact my ongoing responses, etc. This backand forth dynamic of intercorporeity-what Froese and Fuchs term "inter-bodily resonance" (Froese and Fuchs 2012)-also characterizes the dynamics of group engagements. When I am drawn into the exuberance and energy of a lively party, for instance, or swept along by the collective rage of a political protest or the euphoria of a live concert with thousands of people, the movements and expressions of others literally take hold of my lived body and pull responsive movements and emotional responses out of me that are in sync with those of the crowd (Slaby 2014). As Merleau-Ponty observes, the dynamics of intercorporeity are already observable in infancy, shaping our earliest forms of social understanding. He offers the J. Krueger 173 following example: "A fifteen-month-old infant opens his mouth when I playfully take one of his fingers in my mouth and pretend to bite it. [...] "Biting" has an immediate intersubjective significance for him. He perceives his intentions in his body, perceives my body with his own, and thereby perceives my intentions in his body" (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 368). At this early stage of development, the infant is too young to have a conceptual or intellectual understanding of others minds. Nevertheless, he immediately perceives the social significance of this playful gesture; the playfulness of the caregiver's gesture is mirrored in the infant's own bodily response (i.e., opening his mouth), and the two together construct a shared experience of mutual understanding via this inter-bodily resonance. In a similar vein, Watsuji argues that "a mother's body and her baby's are somehow connected as though one. To contend that there is no such connection between them, because the link connecting them is not an actual cell is valid for physiological bodies but has nothing to do with subjective bodies" (Watsuji 1996: 62). This characterization of intercorporeity is amply supported by developmental psychology. David Stern's work on "affect attunement", for instance, indicates that from the start of life, emotions are cross-modally expressed, shared, and regulated (Stern 1985). Infants share affective states with others via inter-bodily resonance. These joint affective states are experienced "in terms of dynamic flow patterns, intensities, shapes, and vitality affects (for example, crescendo or decrescendo, fading, bursting, pulsing, effortful or easy) in just the way that music is experienced as affective dynamics" (Fuchs 2013: 223; see also Krueger 2013c). Again, the processes that establish and sustain these exchanges are mimicry and synchronization of each other's facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, movements, and manipulations of interpersonal space. This suite of expressive dynamics establishes a reciprocal bodily link between interactants-intercorporeity-that leads to emotional convergence and feelings of connectedness (Bernieri and Rosenthal 1991; Hatfield et al. 1993; Chartrand and Bargh 1999; Reddy and Trevarthen 2004; Krueger 2013d). Intercorporeity is thus a form of interaffectivity (Fuchs 2013). And these processes don't end at childhood; they continue into adulthood, shaping the form and affective character of our social engagements (see Krueger and Michael 2012 for an overview). In sum, interpreting aidagara as intercorporeity brings out the second-person dimension of the self-as-betweenness. Whereas interpreting aidagara as selfintimacy is to see aidagara as internal to the bodily subject, aidagara as intercorporeity emphasizes the way that my bodily subjectivity is always bound up with that of others. The dynamic processes that sustain and regulate my own experience of embodiment and affect are intertwined with, and partially constituted by, the ongoing input of other embodied subjects within our face-to-face engagements. With this interpretation in place, I want to conclude by briefly putting Watsuji's analysis of aidagara and embodiment to work in helping illuminate disruptions of self-experience in schizophrenia. Reports of individuals with schizophrenia suggest that both forms of the self-as-betweenness-aidagara conceived of both in first and second-personal terms, as bodily self-intimacy and intercorporeity, respectively- can become experientially disrupted. These disruptions have profound consequences 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 174 for how people with schizophrenia experience and relate to themselves, others, and the world more generally. Accordingly, looking at disruptions of aidagara in schizophrenia not only provides an additional line of support for Watsuji's claim that aidagara is the fundamental feature of human reality. Additionally, it offers a heuristic value. By illuminating how different modes of aidagara become disrupted in psychopathology, we can acquire a greater understanding of and empathy towards the experience of individuals living with this disorder-instead of viewing it as bizarre or impenetrable-and via this empathy potentially develop more effective treatment and intervention strategies. 6 Disturbances of aidagara in Schizophrenia Using Watsuji in the context of mental health is not a new endeavor. The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin 木村敏 appeals to Watsuji's conception of the self-asbetweenness in various works exploring the social character of mental disorder (Stevens 2003; Van Duppen 2017). For example, he observes that a cluster of phobias common among Japanese patients but rarely found among non-Japanese patients-phobias that fall under a general "fear of facing others" (taijin kyōfu-shō), including a fear of one's face being red or ugly, fear that one's body exudes offensive odors, or a fear of being looked at or making inappropriate eye contact-are best understood by acknowledging the predominantly other-oriented sense of self distinctive of Japanese culture (Kimura 1972; see also Arisaka 2001). Based on clinical interviews with patients, Kimura also famously argues that schizophrenia cannot be understood simply as a brain disorder. Rather, it is a selfdisorder , a disruption of the individual's relationship with the lived world. And its core disturbance-a disturbance of the sense of "I-ness" as an ongoing subject of experience-simultaneously involves an intersubjective dimension, a disruption of the "interpersonal between" weaving individuals into their sociocultural milieu. These two disruptions, Kimura insists, "represent two different aspects of one and the same basic occurrence of schizophrenic estrangement" (Kimura 1982: 182). For Kimura, schizophrenia thus ultimately manifests as "a striking event of the interhuman world or as a pathology of the 'between' in the most unmediated and unequivocal way" (Kimura 1982: 178–179). Accordingly, Kimura appeals not just to Watsuji but phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty-all of whom emphasize the interrelation of self and world-in developing his descriptive analysis of schizophrenic experience (Phillips 2001). I now want to briefly build on Kimura's use of Watsuji and phenomenology to characterize schizophrenia as a disturbance of in-betweenness. Like Kimura, I agree that aidagara is a useful descriptive tool in this context. However, the interpretation of aidagara and embodiment developed in the previous sections-in particular, the twin notions of aidagara as "bodily self-intimacy" and "intercorporeity"-can, I suggest, help illuminate subtle disturbances of embodied J. Krueger 175 subjectivity and intersubjectivity that, for all its richness and originality, are often underplayed in Kimura's work. 7 "To have a leash on the kite so it doesn't fly away..." Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness involving the disintegration of thought and experience. Many working in phenomenological psychopathology have argued that the generative disorder of schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self. From this perspective, the disturbed self is not a complex linguistically or conceptually mediated self such as the narrative self.6 Rather, the disturbed self is what has been called the "minimal self" (Zahavi 2005), "core self" (Damasio 2010), or "ipseity" (Sass and Parnas 2003) (ipse is Latin for "self" or "itself"). These terms pick out a self conceived of as a fundamental structure of consciousness-the self-as-subject for whom conscious episodes (thoughts, perceptions, memories, emotions, intentions, etc.) are given in a first-personal mode of presentation. The minimal self captures the fact that when we perceive or remember something, for example, we are immediately aware that we are the ones perceiving and remembering. The experience and memory are ours; there is no reflective distance between the experience and ourselves as the subject of that experience. To the contrary, we enjoy an immediate self-intimacy with our experiences. In this sense, the minimal self or ipseity of awareness is not something separate from experience but is rather a feature of the very manifestation of experience in its first-personal mode of givenness (Henry 1973). This minimal self can be disturbed in schizophrenia. Kimura seems to have this kind of minimal self in mind when he says that "[s]chizophrenics are profoundly uncertain about the I-ness of the self or the selfness of the I-aspects of experience that are perfectly self-evident for all non-schizophrenic persons" (Kimura 2001: 334). Much of his work is spent unpacking various dimensions of this selfdisturbance . Within contemporary phenomenological psychopathology, aspects of this self-disturbance have been explored via the so-called "ipseity disturbance model" (IDM) (Sass and Parnas 2003). IDM posits that schizophrenic spectrum disorders are characterized by a disruption or instability of the first-person perspective. This instability becomes apparent in a range of anomalous experiences typically present already in childhood or early adolescence, including depersonalization, diminished sense of existing as a bodily subject, a diminished sense of "mineness" of the field of awareness, a diminished sense of coherence and consistency in basic features of the self (e.g., sense of anonymity, identity confusion, etc.), and disturbed self-other/self-world boundaries (Parnas et al. 2005; Nelson et al. 2014). Patient vignettes supporting IDM indicate that a persistent feature of these anomalous experiences is that individuals lose their first-personal "grip" on their field of 6 Although individuals with schizophrenia often exhibit difficulty constructing and maintaining a narratively structured self (Gallagher 2007). 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 176 awareness. They report feeling estranged from their experience: "I feel like I'm not a natural human being or a proper human being or something like that...I think it has something to do with the fact that I don't feel like I have a core or substance" (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2016: 266). More specifically, they report feeling that the phenomenal vitality or immediacy of their experience is diminished: "My consciousness is not as whole as it should be"; "I am simply unconscious"; "My I-feeling is diminished"; "My I is disappearing for me"; experiences only "appeared a split-second delayed" (Parnas and Handest 2003: 125). This weakening of the first-person perspective is often accompanied by a hyperreflexive distortion of experience (Fuchs 2010a). Sensing the subtle destabilization of their first-person perspective, a compensatory response in some patients is to objectify their actions or the content of their experiences as a means of holding onto them; vigilant attention becomes a means of securing a firmer grip (i.e., selfintimacy ) on actions and experiences they feel slipping away. This compensatory response is accomplished via intense reflection or self-monitoring. But this hyperreflexivity brings about a further mode of self-estrangement. This is because dispositional and habitual aspects of the self that are normally present in the background of awareness-e.g., the way one thinks, listens, speaks, interacts with others and the environment, etc.-are thrust to the foreground of awareness and made into objects of intense scrutiny (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2016). As a result, the spontaneity, fluidity, and naturalness of everyday interactions is lost, and the individual struggles to smoothly connect with others and the surrounding environment. This sort of hyperreflexivity is evident in the way patients report that their thoughts can take on spatial or object-like qualities ("dense and encapsulated thoughts") (Parnas and Handest 2003: 128), for instance, or that normally spontaneous habits, skills, and actions (e.g., gesturing, falling asleep, putting a book on the shelf, sitting in a chair) are impossible to perform due to the patient's excessive focus on every aspect of their performance (Fuchs 2010b). But the self-disorder characteristic of schizophrenia extends beyond a disruption of the minimal self. Many patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders experience problems with their embodiment (Krueger and Aiken 2016; Krueger and Henriksen 2016). In light of the previous discussion, one way these problems can be understood, I suggest, is to see them as a diminishment or gradual loss of aidagara understood as bodily self-intimacy. These disturbances are characterized by the persistent feeling that the individual is not fully present in or integrated with her body "from the inside" as a unified center of agency and experience. To be clear, this is not an out-of-body experience. Rather, it's something more subtle, an attenuated feeling that one is wholly "at home" in or settled into one's body as one engages with the everyday lifeworld. For example, consider the report of "K", a 25 year-old patient. In describing this feeling, she says that her body feels persistently alien to her: It's as if there is a distance between my body and my mind. It's like my mind is a little puppeteer, sitting far away, controlling my body. It's not like I see myself from above or something. But it's like I'm not in my body or not attached to it. It's like my body is an appendix that hangs below me. (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2016: 268) J. Krueger 177 Note that K is quite insistent that hers is not an "out-of-the-body" experience; rather, what she seems to lack is an immediate acquaintance with her body as her own. In other words, K reports feeling that the different parts of her body-as well as her body and mind more generally-fail to cohere into an experientially integrated unity grounding her nature as an embodied subject. This disunity is apparent when she describes how she tries to "merge my thoughts and my body...to have a leash on the kite so it doesn't fly away" (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2016: 268). Again, this is not the feeling that K is somehow outside her body but rather that she fails to seamlessly inhabit and live through it. Reports of this sort are relatively common in the literature, although the character of the diminished embodiment, as well as its qualitative intensity, can vary (Fuchs 2005). Individuals often say things like "the body feels awkward as if it does not really fit" (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2014: 435–441), or "I feel strange, I am no longer in my body, it is somewhere else; I sense my body but it is far away, some other place. Here are my legs, my hands, I can also feel my head, but I cannot find it again (Parnas 2003: 227). Again, what appears to be disrupted in these cases is more than the minimal phenomenal self but, additionally, the individual's sense of bodily self-intimacy. On one hand, patients like K experience an attenuated sense of connectedness with their body as lived from the inside ("the body feels awkward as if it does not really fit"). On the other hand, however, excessive self-monitoring (i.e., hyperreflexivity) leads to an objectification of the individual's actions and compromises their ability to spontaneously inhabit and live through them. K describes this sort of excessive selfmonitoring when she says "I have the experience that there are two of me: the one that interacts with someone and then there is the real me, who sits there behind [...]" (Henriksen and Nordgaard 2016: 271). Recall that, as we've seen, aidagara for Watsuji is internal to the bodily self in two ways: as an ontological principle specifying that we are hybrid subjects whose bodily mode of being is perpetually in-between pure subjectivity or objectivity; and second, as a principle of self-intimacy specifying two modes of betweenness through which we relate to these dimensions of our bodily being: the immediate first-person self-intimacy of the body-as-subject versus the objectifying, thirdperson self-intimacy of the body-as-object. The vignettes above suggest that, in schizophrenic experience, the equilibrium (or betweenness) of these two modes of bodily being is disturbed. The body-as-subject is experientially diminished-this occurs via a loss of bodily self-intimacy-and, as a compensatory response, the individual assumes an excessively objectified self-relation that compromises their ability to comfortably relate to themselves and others, and to connect with their surrounding environment via flexible, context-sensitive actions. As we discussed above, the first and second-personal dimensions of aidagara are, for Watsuji, conceptually distinguishable but ontologically unified, two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, in schizophrenia, weakening or disruptions of bodily self-intimacy have profound consequences for the dynamics of the individual's bodily engagements with others-that is, aidagara understood as intercorporeity. 11 Watsuji's Phenomenology of Aidagara: An Interpretation and Application... 178 There is evidence that various aspects of this second-personal dimension of schizophrenia are similarly disturbed. For example, schizophrenic patients lack bodily empathy-the ability to detect and understand others' facial and gestural expressions (Kington et al. 2000; Edwards et al. 2002; Amminger et al. 2012). As a result, they often perceive others not as embodied subjects whose expressive actions are saturated with social meaning but rather as curious objects: "People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite plain, crushed by pitiless electric light" (Sechehaye 1970: 44). Additionally, patients exhibit diminished facial, gestural, and vocal affective displays (Kring and Moran 2008). Coupled with their lack of bodily empathy, these disturbances lead to an experiential desynchronization with others: what (Fuchs 2007) describes as a disturbance in the "timing" of face-to-face interactions (aspects like gestural synchronization and rhythm) that feed into and reinforce patients' sense of social disconnectedness. Finally, in addition, disturbances of these face-to-face bodily dynamics, schizophrenic patients also show a more general lack of social understanding writ large. In other words, they lack an implicit understanding of the "rules of the game" governing social encounters, a sense of proportion for what is appropriate or relevant in social contexts (Fuchs 2015). They say things like, "I don't really grasp what others are up to. [...] I constantly observe myself while I am together with people, trying to find out what I should say or do. It's easier when I am alone or watching TV" (quoted in Fuchs 2015: 200). The schizophrenic individual feels alienated from the aidagara everyday social environments-and the bodily and material resources that scaffold and regulate social encounters for the rest of us (e.g., other people, social norms and conventions, material culture, etc.) are experienced as closed off and unavailable (Krueger forthcoming). Without access to these resources, patients experience an intersubjective "unworlding" (Sass 1992)-what I've characterized as a disruption of second-personal aidagara-that further animates their autistic withdrawal. To conclude, none of what I've said here contradicts Kimura's use of Watsuji. Instead, it's merely offered as supplementary analysis to bring out aspects of schizophrenic experience-especially those centered around disruptions of embodiment, self-intimacy, and intercorporeity-that don't receive explicit attention in Kimura's work. Additionally, looking at psychopathological disruptions of aidagara helps reinforce Watsuji's main claim that aidagara is a central feature of human reality, animating and regulating our experience of self and world. For Watsuji, we are selves perpetually in-between-socio-relational selves constituted by the vitality and dynamism of our worldly engagements. 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