 Watsuji’s objection to individualistic ethics, which he associated with virtually all Western thinkers to some degree, is that it loses touch with the vast network of interconnections that serves to make us human. We are individuals inescapably immersed in the space/time world, together with others. Individual persons, if conceived of in isolation from their various social contexts, do not and cannot exist except as abstractions. Our way of being in the world is an expression of countless people and countless actions performed in a particular ‘climate,’ which together have shaped us as we are. Indeed a human being is a unified structure of past, present, and future; each of us is an intersection of past and future, in the present ‘now.’ There is no possibility of the isolation of the ego, and yet many write as though there were. They are able to make a case of it, in part because they ignore the spatiality of ningen (human being), focussing on ningen’s temporality. Watsuji believed that it was far more difficult to consider a human being as strictly an individual, when thought of as a being in space. Spatially, we move in a common field, and that field is cultural in that it is criss-crossed by roads and paths, and even by forms of communication such as messenger services, postal routes, newspapers, flyers, broadcasts over great distances, all in addition to everyday polite conversation. Watsuji makes a point of the legend of the isolated and hopelessly marooned Robinson Crusoe, for even Robinson Crusoe continued to be culturally connected, continuing to speak an inherited language, and improvising housing, food, and clothing based on past social experiences, and continuing to hope for rescue at the hands of unknown others. Watsuji rejects all such ‘desert island’ constructions as mere abstractions. Thomas Hobbes imagined a state of nature in which we are radically discrete individuals, at a time before significant social interconnections have been established. Watsuji counters that we are inescapably born into social relationships, beginning with one’s mother, and one’s caregivers. Our very beginnings are etched by the relational interconnections which keep us alive, educate us, and initiate us into the proper ways of social interaction. 