Tetsurō Watsuji: A Climate: A Philosophical Study (1935/1961)

“In 1927 the Japanese philosopher and cultural and intellectual historian Tetsurō Watsuji went to Germany and returned the next year much influenced by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Watsuji could not agree with Heidegger’s theories about human existence, so he wrote a book named Fūdo, published in English as A Climate: A Philosophical Study (reprinted as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study). Watsuji explained Fūdo as ‘the natural environment of a given land’. Watsuji thought that Heidegger placed too much influence on the individual and overlooked the importance of social and geographical factors that affect the individual.

Heidegger’s emphasis on the individual was an outcome of centuries of European thought. Descartes said, ‘cogito, ergo sum’, (I think, therefore I am). Watsuji, however, saw the human being as a product of a ‘climate’ including not only natural surroundings but also the social environment of family, society and history. For example, Watsuji explains that ‘cold’ is not a specific temperature, but also the sensation of ‘cold’ which we actually experience in our daily lives. In other words, is the feeling of ‘cold’ a subjective, conscious feeling? Or does the feeling of ‘cold’ come from the independent existence of ‘cold’? Watsuji says that neither is a satisfactory answer because both explanations make a distinction between subject and object, or human and nature. A human being recognizes coldness before any division is made between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. For Watsuji, the relationship between a human and his environment, called aidagara, already exists before any other concepts are understood. This idea is similar to the “pure experience” of Nishida Kitaro.

Watsuji’s philosophical uniqueness is the explanation of human existence, aidagara, in terms of social and geographical phenomena. French scholar Augustin Berque was influenced by Watsuji’s way of thought and understood that Watsuji does not regard nature and nature-human as dual existences. Berque suggests the term trajet to include the subject simultaneously with object, nature with artificiality. In French the term trajet usually means distance of travel, or route. Berque sought to change the fixed meaning of subject and object, nature and culture, individual and society, to include the possibility of inter-changeable relationships.” (from New World Encyclopedia)

The book was reprinted under the title Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study by Greenwood Press, 1961.

Originally published as Fūdo (風土 人間学的考察), 1935
Translated by Geoffrey Bownas
Publisher Printing Bureau, Japanese Government, 1961
235 pages
via golittlebook

Watsuji at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Luigi Russolo: The Art of Noises (1916–) [IT, EN, ES, DE, FR, RU]

The slim volume of essays, presented here for the first time in English translation, is one of the significant documents of musical aesthetics of this century. If the book itself has remained the province of a mere handful of readers, its ideas, passed on through a variety of later musical and literary movements, became the inspiration for some of the most innovative artistic creations of modern times. Luigi Russolo anticipated-indeed, he may have precipitated-a whole range of musical and aesthetic notions that formed the basis of much of the avant-garde thought of the past several decades. His ideas were absorbed, modified, and eventually transmitted to later generations by a number of movements and individuals-among them the futurists, the Dadaists, and a number of composers and writers of the nineteen-twenties. The noise instruments he invented fascinated and infuriated his contemporaries, and he was among the earliest musicians to put the often-discussed microtone to regular practical use in Western music. Russolo’s views looked forward to the time when composers would exercise an absolute choice and control of the sounds that their music employed. He was the precursor of electronic music before electronics had come of age.

Italian edition
Publisher Edizione Futuriste di “Poesia”, Milan, 1916
92 pages

English edition
Translated, and With an Introduction by Barclay Brown
Publisher Pendragon Press, New York, 1987
Monographs in Musicology series, Vol. 6
ISBN 0918728576
87 pages

Russolo at UbuWeb (includes 2 CDs and an edition of the 1967 Robert Filliou’s translation of the manifesto)
Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

L’Arte dei rumori (Italian, 1916)
The Art of Noises (English, trans. Barclay Brown, 1987, no OCR)
El arte de los ruidos. Manifiesto Futurista (Spanish, 1996, the manifesto only)
Die Geräuschkunst (German, trans. Justin Winkler and Albert Mayr, 1999)
L’Art des bruits. Manifeste futuriste (French, 4th Edition, 2003/2013, the manifesto only)
Искусство шумов (Russian, undated, the manifesto only)

See also:
The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo (Barclay Brown, 1981, 18 pp)
Luciano Chessa: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012)

Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955/1962)

First published in 1955, this political reflection seeks to show how noble ideas can slide into the “tyranny of secular religion”. It stresses how political thought has the responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality – in all its imperfections and complexities.

Aron explodes the three “myths” of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.

First published in French L’Opium des intellectuels, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955
First published in 1955
Translated by Terence Kilmartin
Foreword translated by Lucile H. Brockway
Publisher W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1962
324 pages

Review (Rudolf Allers)

Wikipedia (in French)

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