Anchorage to the World

We are anchored to the world because we are bodies. For us, the world means human society based upon nature. Nature is an essential constituent. For human being is bodily existence: social relationships are basically formed through the contact between these bodily existences, one with another, and the cultural space, that is, the city, is based on matter and surrounded by nature. Hence the possibility and the necessity of anchorage. An inanimate object is simply thrown into the sea of matter. Human bodies, on the contrary, do not only belong to this material texture in a passive way but can also live in it in an active way and constitute it as world. Modern civilization has severed our anchorage to the world. It is expected and very often believed that the aesthetic moderates and even mediates this opposition. I am convinced that all our creative activities in our actual situation of civilization after modernity should originate in and be based on our Being-on-the-Earth

Politics of Beauty

I look back at the history of modern aesthetics to grasp its current situation and to propose its possibilities for the future. The early modern period, during which aesthetics came into being, was a great historical turning point for civilization. Our contemporary period shares this character, and it is worthwhile for us to consult its history in order to reflect on our civilization. Aesthetics began with Baumgarten’s proposal, which consisted in a triple subject: sensibility, beauty, and art. His idea was accepted because it responded to the fundamental problems of the period. Sensibility was the only form of cognition of value in a re-formed world (Pascal). Art existed in three forms: official, social, and solitary and reflective. The first (San Pietro and Versailles) promoted art to the rank of high culture, and it was the third form that presented aesthetics as the philosophy of art. But in the early modern period, aesthetics was first of all the philosophy of beauty because beauty guaranteed the rationality and order of the new world (Shaftesbury, Malebranche). Modern aesthetics, however, was a philosophy of art under the general trends of anthropocentrism. The pursuit of originality led to Duchamp’s Fountain, after which there remains nothing new for art to do. We now confront urgent problems, such as global warming and conflict between different civilizations, etc., which suggest the need for changing the way of managing the world. Under this situation, I think aesthetics holds new and real possibilities for the philosophy of beauty

On the Front: Aesthetics vs. Popular Arts and Mass Culture - I

The popular arts and mass culture represent our environment. The flood of their products reduces high art to minority status. This situation leads us to reconsider the privileged status of high art and the role of aesthetics as its theory, which is my main focus here. I take up three different cultural eras: early modern times, when the notions of art and aesthetics as a philosophical discipline were founded; our own day as the time of mass culture; and, lastly, the popular culture in the Edo period in Japan, the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, which reflected different choices. In early modern Europe, the popular arts were born at the same time as high art. Art for the use of the people became possible because of the increase in productivity and wealth. There was a different notion of popular art as art produced by the people, a notion associated with Herder. Popular art, in this sense, was claimed to be the true art according to the concept of creativity from below and the plant model concretizing that concept. Modern aesthetics adopted the same plant model to insist on individuality as genius, for that was the only way in the commercialized world to win the right of free creative activity backed up by the right of intellectual property. Hence, high art was consecrated thanks to popular art, which in Herder’s sense reserved its own right. By mass culture, I mean the aesthetic and intellectual activities mediated by the systems of mass media or, broadly, those activities in “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Forms of mass culture, such as movies, TV, popular songs, comics, video games, fashion, advertisements, websites, and so on, quantitatively overwhelm high art, and, in its forms of experience, mass culture obscures the sacred border of art. The situation is similar to when art and aesthetics were about to be established. The difference is that art is now firmly recognized as high culture, and the role of aesthetics is not to claim the right of art but only to justify the privilege art is already enjoying. A new aesthetics is to be hoped for, one that looks for a new order in the nebulosity of mass culture. Popular culture in the Edo period in Japan, including ukiyo-e, haikai and kabuki theater, offers a counter example to the Western modern period and a sense of possibility for a new aesthetics. In this period, the people were not only consumers but also producers of culture. Traditional high culture existed but popular culture was segregated from it. Creativity, however, was absolutely on the side of the popular; the three forms of art mentioned above were new inventions of the people. Literature was not separated from the sciences of ethics and still fulfilled a critical function. The Ukiyo-e edition was of a conglomerated character: its subjects or genres were taken from the erotic world, sports, theater and tourism. These suggest the possibility of a different constellation of cultural fields for a new aesthetics

Living the Ageing

Ageing is basically a natural or physical phenomenon. For a human being, it belongs to the body. When this fact is noticed, a drama of oldness and life/death begins: ageing is a problem of experience. There are losses and gains in this experience. Indeed, a particular respect was paid to a rhapsodist/bard and a hermit because of their memory power and deep wisdom respectively. Since we recognize in these cases accumulation and maturation, the core subject in the experience of ageing is memory and the time structure. Vis-à-vis the hard memories such as stone monuments and IC memory, the live memory is characterised by a creativity, which vivifies our past time. I pay a particular attention to friendship, because one of the most painful experiences of ageing consists in the loss of dear friends. Recollecting creatively the time shared with them, we can vivify our past, i.e. our being: that is the appropriation of ourselves

Perspectives East and West

The object of this paper is to elucidate the sense of space peculiar to Japanese sensibility. To accomplish this task I consult not only paintings but also waka, distinctively Japanese poetry. I also compare the structures of Japanese and Western perspective in order to highlight the distinctive features of the Japanese sense of space. In China and Japan, traditional landscape painting was called sansui painting, literally, painting of “mountains and waters,” unlike fūkei painting, which is a modern adaptation of the Western notion of landscape. Landscape as sansui is characterized by its vitalistic conception: the cosmic space is filled with ki, a vital and spiritual element. This view is reflected in the Japanese notion of keshiki (literally, color of ki), another word meaning landscape, to which I pay particular attention because it is a vernacular word and expresses the genuine Japanese sense of space, differentiated even from the Chinese perspective found in Sansui paintings. Such a space as keshiki was to be felt rather than seen. The notion of the picturesque was associated in Japan with a spatial extent. It is a concept closely related to a humid climate that produces much fog or haze. A typical description is found in the Tale of Genji. It is in waka, from the thirteenth century, that we find the first expression of Japanese perspective, which consists the combination of a tactile, sometimes auditory close range with the visual, distant range, yet without a middle range (which is obscured by fog). This is very different from Western geometrical perspective, which is essentially constituted by the middle range relating the close continuously to the distant. In painting, this Japanese perspective was realized for the first time in ukiyo-e, particularly in the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige. I assume that this composition was transplanted to the Western world during the fashion for “japonisme,” and now determines the basic composition of the landscape photograph

A Silent Rhetoric: The Mechanism of Propaganda as Persuasion

Under ongoing globalization the particularity of cultures has become a major topic in contemporary aesthetics. Someone insists on the right of national culture against globalism, others wish to bridge cultures.[1] Apparently opposing one another, they share the same gaze on the individual character of every culture. To confirm or transcend our cultural or national affiliation through art there exists the common dimension of aesthetic persuasion: that is the subject of this paper