Donald Richie

Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy defining beauty and the beautiful, how it can be recognized, ascertained, judged.
In the West the term was first used in 1750 to describe a science of sensuous knowledge. Its goal was beauty, in contrast with logic, whose goal was truth. Based upon dichotomies (beauty/truth, aesthetics/ logic) the definition was elaborated into a multifaceted concept assuming that opposites and alternates lead to an aesthetic result. The conjectures and conclusions were those of eighteenth-century Europe but are still common today.
There are, however, different criteria at different times in different culture. Many in Asia, for example, do not subscribe to general dichotomies in expressing thought. Japan makes much less of the body/mind, self/group formation, with often marked consequences. Here we would notice that what we could call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

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  1. shinichi Post author

    DonaldRichieA tractate on Japanese aesthetics

    by Donald Richie

    Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy defining beauty and the beautiful, how it can be recognized, ascertained, judged.

    In the West the term was first used in 1750 to describe a science of sensuous knowledge. Its goal was beauty, in contrast with logic, whose goal was truth. Based upon dichotomies (beauty/truth, aesthetics/ logic) the definition was elaborated into a multifaceted concept assuming that opposites and alternates lead to an aesthetic result. The conjectures and conclusions were those of eighteenth-century Europe but are still common today.

    There are, however, different criteria at different times in different culture. Many in Asia, for example, do not subscribe to general dichotomies in expressing thought. Japan makes much less of the body/mind, self/group formation, with often marked consequences. Here we would notice that what we could call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

    Jean de la Bruyére, the French moralist, early in the 17th century defined the quality: ‘Entre le bon sens and le bon goût il y a la différence de la cause et son effet.‘ Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect, …

    Bruyére’s aperçu is, indeed, so sensible that one would expect it to apply just everywhere. It does not, but it does to Japan. As the aesthetician Ueda Makoto has said: ‘In premodern Japanese aesthetics, the distance between art and nature was considerably shorter than its Western counterparts.’ And the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro has written in that important aesthetic text In Praise of Shadows: ‘The quality that we call beauty…must always grow from the realities of life.”

    Elsewhere – in Europe, even sometimes in China – Nature as guide was there but its role was restricted to mimesis, realistic reproduction. In Japan this was traditionally not enough. It was as though there was an agreement that the nature of Nature could not be presented through literal description. It could only be suggested, and the more subtle the suggestion (think haiku) the more tasteful the work of art.

    Here Japanese arts and crafts (a division that the premodern Japanese did not themselves observe) imitated the means of nature rather than its results. One of these means was simplicity. …

    Tanizaki Jun’Ichiro’s remark that beauty rises from the realities of life forces us to wonder what these realities consist of. …

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