David Edward Williams

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David Edward Williams
Born	Los Angeles, USA
💼 Occupation

David Edward Williams, BA, DPhil (Oxford), FRSA, was born in Los Angeles in 1948 to a Welsh-Irish immigrant family. He is a dual national (American and British) and resident of France (Brexit titre de séjour). He is married to Stephen Condon, the contemporary dancer/choreographer and London-competition qualifier at 20 for the Moulin Rouge in Paris, who is now an interior designer and eco-property developer.

They divide their lives, creative, entrepreneurial and political, between Bordeaux and Cardiff Bay.

Williams is a Celtic Writer, Asian Strategist, and Theoretician of Regime Change in the Confucian-Buddhist Orient and the Liberal-Christian Occident.

Celtic Writer

In his approach to words, that is storytelling and the music of thought pursued through the porous border between prose and poetry, Williams has been shaped by the Welsh, Breton and Irish obsession with what Matthew Arnold called ‘Celtic style’.

After meeting at Oxford, Robin Reilly, the British historian, and Wedgwood authority, taught him the art and craft of book writing early in their 33-year-long relationship. The result was a marriage in a single sensibility of the discipline of writing with the literary demands of Celtic style for ‘intensity, elevation and effect’.

Translation

As a professional writer, Williams began as a translator. When addressing the target text, the Celtic translator is a word-worker who must be the habitué of another textual world to work the requisite word magic. As a translator from the Japanese, his Celtic models are Sir William Jones, Ernest Renan, I.A. Richards and Samuel Beckett for whom the translator is an unblinking eye, the model of non-judgmental disinterestedness.

In this way, translation becomes an epistemological method, a dialectic between two epistemic centres: Celtic and Japanese.

For Williams, the Kyoto School provides the paradigmatic case study, confidently comparable to the works of Franz Fanon and the Celtic Awakening, of how indigenous methodologies arise in first-world locations, and thus transform the first world by banishing its more pernicious metropolitan hegemonic attitudes.

East Asian Quest

Williams’s East Asian quest has taken a predictable form, consistent with the Celtic passion for intellectual adventure, that is the tireless pursuit of the unknown, and the absolute need for the concentration of one’s mental powers to answer ‘a single question of singular importance’ to which one gives over the whole of one’s life.

Williams’ long residence of Japan spawned his idea of ‘the social science of experience’, while the research for his philosophic translations metamorphosed these projects into forcing houses of Celtic metaphysical insight and tact, including the indigenous embrace of stories and their telling, that matured his appreciation of his cultural debts to the imperatives of Celtic style.

Thus, he moved from poetry to criticism, and finally to Celtic social science, his version of Renan’s science laïque reconceived as a Welsh-Breton indigenous methodology.

Asian Strategist

As a student of war, revolution, and politics; trade, investment and business, William’s fundamental conception grounded in lived experience, from North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive of 1968 to selling Japanese railway shares in 1990s, from Brexit to the global race to developed lithium batteries today, is strategic: a principled focus on how others triumph in one contest or another, and how one learns to strategize in the pursuit of one’s own ends. Or those of one’s nation. And so, after a dalliance with the Islamic world and the lost cause of Vietnam, Williams abandoned all the rich promise of American life—California, UCLA and preparing for a career at Netflix—for his Japanese adventure in search of Marco Polo’s ‘invisible cities’ (Calvino).

Williams’s suggestion would be that the successful Asian strategist must begin by clearing the forest of Western misconceptions about the East, then master a set of robust insights and research tools to be applied, properly, so that the quester as a practitioner of strategic Orientalism (not liberal area studies) as an indigenous Celtic methodology can make persuasive sense of Confucian political reality. Thus, one builds on the insights and experience that only long residence in the East can provide. His quest thus allowed him to arrive at an answer to two questions: how do Confucian Asians decide who shall rule? And for how long?

Theoretician of Regime Change in the Confucian-Buddhist Orient and the Liberal-Christian Occident

America’s five wars against Confucian Asia (the Pacific War, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam Conflict and our air war against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) have provided the decisive motif for Williams’s vocation to answer the classic question: Orient or Occident?¹¹ Which tradition offers true mastery of political change? The quest is the Celtic approach to solving the central conundrums of modern social and political science, such as the classic choice between Orient and Occident. Indeed, Williams insists that no indigenous methodology in the human sciences, political or social, produces so rich a harvest of insight into our shared humanity because none tries to.

This is not a matter of intellect or technique but intention. It is this disinterested motive that magically calls into being the indigenous conceptual space and methodological field that Williams calls ‘Celtic social science’ of which the ‘social science of experience’ forms the foundational pillar. Confronted with the choice between ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, one submits, according to Williams, to Asia, to the truths of Asian experience via one’s disinterested determination to know Asia ‘better than any European has ever known it’ (Sir William Jones).

Taking ‘Asia as a method’ (Yoshimi Takeuchi), Williams encountered the momentous personal experience of Paul Mus, the great French Orientalist, of the irresistible logic of Confucian Revolution in modern Vietnam.

Williams’s lifelong project has been to take Mus’s insight, theorize it into a social scientific thesis and then apply the resulting theory to understanding regime change across the whole of the Confucian world, traditional and modern, dynastic, and post-dynastic.

Celtic Social Science: How the Indigenous Methodology of a Marginalized People Discovered Confucian

Revolution Driven by the singular Celtic focus on experience, objectivity and listening, with the Celt’s cultivated weakness for ‘elsewhere’ as a spur, Williams has pursued his calling to theorize Confucian regime change by the observation, study, and practice of Asian strategies.

In this way, Japan became Williams’s epistemic centre: the place where reality lives. This centre grounds the best methods (Confucian indigenous methods to play against the Celtic ones) for understanding this epistemic reality; one thing finds the other. In this way, for Williams, the strategizing Orientalist in the Celtic mould aims for a fruitful union of such centres and such methods. And achieves it.

At the heart of this achievement stands a crucial Welsh ontological assumption about what it is to live with other human beings. David Hume, Scotland’s finest mind and modern Europe’s most consequential philosopher, insisted that human beings can never know the mind of another person in the way they understand their own. There are two polar paradigmatic responses to this truth: one abandons the effort to understand other humans because certitude is unachievable, while the alternative approach bends every branch of experience and science to arrive at a convincing appreciation of other humans just short of certitude. The first approach forms a bedrock assumption of Anglo-American ideology, while, according to Williams, the second more inclusive approach animates Celtic Social Science which offers shelter against the dogmatic solipsism of Anglo-American metropolitan hegemonic prejudices.

According to Williams, Celtic style and Celtic social science are grounded in a way of life that modifies central impulses of Western civilization. Thus, the Celtic sense of the reality of the ‘person’ offers a decisive warning and corrective not only to Anglo-American individualism but also to the obsessional pursuit of this truth or another in the Faustian mode. The essence of this article of faith is set out in Williams’s book on Brexit: ‘At root, certainly for the Welsh, solidarity with those we care about is all we care about.’

For the Celtic social scientist, the language-condition stands above and slightly off centre over the otherwise proud claims of third-person plural, objectivist, and determinist science. The Celt is not deaf to these positivist claims, just hard of hearing. One consequence is that Celts have little heart to defend the erstwhile border that the Anglo-American mind has erected and fortified between the humanities and the sciences. Truth’s flow across this frontier in both directions; this is close to another Celtic article of faith. This portal is at once a destination and a destiny.

Finally, there is one feature of Celtic metaphysics and scientific reflection that, according to Williams, may be almost as important as the Celtic response to the challenge of ‘other people’s minds’. This is the Celtic predilection for revisiting one’s most rooted assumptions. Williams holds that all of America’s frustrations and defeats at the hands of Confucian Asia, even the Pacific War victory has been misconceived, were failures of mind because too many Americans refused to revisit their ruling assumptions. It is only by deconstructing these very assumptions that Williams finally discovered Confucian Revolution.

Dissertations using Williams’ work as it’s interpretive framework for their Doctoral theses

• The Kyoto School and Confucianism: a Confucian reading of the philosophy of history and political thought of Masaaki Kosaka.
• The political philosophy of Miki Kiyoshi: A close reading of the philosophical foundations of cooperative communitarianism.

Bibliography

• Reporting the Death of Emperor Shōwa, Nissan Occasional Paper Series, No. 14, 1990. ISSN 0951-2551 (Wiki Book Sources)
• Japan: Beyond the End of History, London & New York: Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-05243-2 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science, London & New York: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-11130-7 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• ‘Yellow Athena: The Japanese Model and the East European Revolution’ in Ian Neary (ed), War, Revolution and Japan, Sandgate, Folkestone, Kent, Japan Library, 1993, ISBN 1-873410-08-5 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• Ozawa Ichirō: The Making of a Japanese Kingmaker, EARC Research Papers, East Asia Research Centre, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, January 1996. ISSN 1361-9152 (Wiki Book Sources)
• Japan Studies: Normal or Revolutionary Science? EARC Research Papers, East Asia Research Centre, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, March 1996. ISSN 1361-9152
• Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power, London & New York: Routledge, 2004. ISBN 0-415-32314-2 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• Rikki Kersten & David Williams (eds), The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy: Essays in Honour of J.AA. Stockwin, London and New York/Leiden: Routledge/Univeristet Leiden, 2006. ISBN 0-415-33434-9 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance: A Reading, with Commentary, of the Complete Texts of the Kyoto School Discussions of ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’, London & New York: Routledge, 2014. ISBN 978-0-415-47646-1 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• Before We Go to War with China and North Korea: The Unmastered Lessons of America’s Wars against Confucian Asia, from Pearl Harbour to the Fall of Saigon, Cardiff: Access Press, 2017. ISBN 9781786153029 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources)
• Better and Stronger Apart: How a New Partition of the British Isles Can Overcome Our Brexit Impasse. ISBN 9781079664263 Search this book on . (Wiki Book Sources

References

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