Donald Richie - A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

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 multi-faceted 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 cultures. 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 would 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.

The Western concept finds beauty in something we admire for itself rather than for its uses, something that the philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804) called purposiveness without a purpose. Traditional Japan emphasizes differently. It is closer to such pre-Enlightenment European definitions as Chaucers Beautee apertenant to Grace, where the grace of fitness excites intellectual or moral pleasure and gives rise to the concept of social approval in the form of good taste.

Jean de la Bruyre, the French moralist, early in the seventeenth century defined the quality: Entre le bon sens and le bon got il y a la diffrence de la cause et son effet. Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect, an observation with which Chaucer, as well as the aesthetically traditional Japanese, might have agreed. In matters aesthetic, taste remains an observation of deserved worth, and that should take care of thatexcept that we are not all agreed as to what good sense consists of.

Some countries say one thing, some say another. The Japanese traditionally maintain that we have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy, daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense, reallyNature should be our model, we are to regard it, to learn from it. When Keats upset aesthetic patterning in the West with his notorious assertion that truth is beauty; beauty, truth, he was very close to the Asian notion that these are identical and to the suggestion that dichotomies are tools too dull to delineate the wholeness of observation.

The flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same.

Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long.

So it is with man and all his dwelling places here on earth....

The place itself does not change, nor do the crowds.

...

Even so, of all the many people I once knew only one or two remain.

They are born into dusk and die as the day dawns, like that foam upon the water.

People die and are bornwhence they come and where they go, I do not know....

A house and its master are like the dew that gathers on the morning glory.

Which will be the first to pass?

KAMO-NO-CHOMEI (11531216)

from Hojoki (An Account of My Hut),

translated by Yasuhiko Moriguchi

and David Jenkins

Bruyres aperu 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 in its Western counterparts. And the novelist Tanizaki Junichir 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.

Among the qualities that can be derived from the assumptions of traditional Japanese aesthetics Donald Keene has distinguished suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability. These might indeed be seen as basic ingredients in traditional Japanese taste but, at the same time, Keene notes that exaggeration, uniformity, profusion, and durability are by no means absent.

Western aesthetics is sometimes familiar with simplicity, asymmetry, and suggestion, but the idea that beauty lies in its own vanishing is an idea much less common. Perishability remains, however, what Keene has called the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal. It is certainly among the earliest, being based on the Buddhist concept of mujo , a term usually translated as impermanence: nothing is stable, and our only refuge lies in accepting, even celebrating this.