Abstract

Beginning from a historical survey of how the Japanese concept of kyōsei (which has broader implications than the Western counterpart of “symbiosis”) has been echoed in the Japanese intellectual sphere, this chapter discusses how we should elaborate on this concept in our current planetary crises. Although symbiosis is a fact for all living creatures, human desire is inevitably incompatible with it. To solve the contradiction, Tan Sitong, a Chinese philosopher in the late nineteenth century, reinterpreted the Confucian notion of ren as a methodological concept of re-configurating the world order. Through his reading in Zhuangzi, Yamada Keiji, a Japanese historian of science, developed a tripolar structure theory that suggests the necessity of establishing an institutional structure, into which dynamism of the “edge of chaos” could be embedded. Living together with the “other” is an ethical prerequisite for human beings. This chapter claims that the very existence of the “other” enables us to reshape and reconstruct the world.