Japanese Hermeneutics

JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS CURRENT DEBATES ON AESTHETICS AND INTERPRETATION EDITED BY MICHAEL F. MARRA JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS CURRENT DEBATES ON AESTHETICS AND INTERPRETATION EDITED BY MICHAEL F. MARRA University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2002 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 04 03 02 654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Japanese hermeneutics : current debates on aesthetics and interpretation / edited by Michael F. Marra. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8248-2457-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics, Japanese. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Japanese literature— History and criticism. I. Marra, Michele. BH221.J3 J374 2000 111Ј.85Ј0952—dc21 2001040663 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Carol Colbath Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Volano gli angeli in Paradiso Che adornano con il sorriso Nel ricordo di Gemmina (1960 –2000) CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction Michael F. Marra 1 HERMENEUTICS AND JAPAN 1. Method, Hermeneutics, Truth Gianni Vattimo 9 2. Poetics of Intransitivity Sasaki Ken’ichi 17 3. The Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity: “Art-Way,” “Iki,” and “Cut-Continuance” O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke 25 4. Frame and Link: A Philosophy of Japanese Composition Amagasaki Akira 36 5. The Eloquent Stillness of Stone: Rock in the Dry Landscape Garden Graham Parkes 44 6. Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware: The Link between Ideal and Tradition Mark Meli 60 7. Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other: Mediating Watsuji Tetsuro¯’s Hermeneutics John C. Maraldo 76 JAPAN’S AESTHETIC HERMENEUTICS 8. Nishi Amane on Aesthetics: A Japanese Version of Utilitarian Aesthetics Hamashita Masahiro 89 vii viii Contents 9. Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art J. Thomas Rimer 97 10. O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics Kambayashi Tsunemichi 109 11. Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900: Historiography in Conflict Inaga Shigemi 115 12. Nature—the Naturalization of Experience as National Stefan Tanaka 127 13. Coincidentia Oppositorum: O¯ nishi Yoshinori’s Greek Genealogies of Japan Michael F. Marra 142 14. Representations of “Japaneseness” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason Otabe Tanehisa 153 JAPAN’S LITERARY HERMENEUTICS 15. Constructing “Japanese Literature”: Global and Ethnic Nationalism Haruo Shirane 165 16. What Is Bungaku? The Reformulation of the Concept of “Literature” in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Suzuki Sadami 176 17. Primitive Vision: Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and Man’yo¯shu¯ Thomas LaMarre 189 18. Saito¯Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei Haga To¯ru 206 Notes 215 Contributors 241 Index 245 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the sponsors of the UCLA conference, which was funded by a generous grant from the Japan Foundation. Tsujimoto Isao who, at the time, was the director of the Japan Foundation and Language Center in Los Angeles, was instrumental in promoting this conference and the University of California, Los Angeles, as its setting. Additional funds came from the UCLA Center for Japanese Studies thanks to the interest that its director, Professor Fred Notehelfer, took in the project. Professor Massimo Ciavolella, chair of the Depart- ment of Italian at UCLA, was successful in securing funds from the Italian In- stitute of Culture, which enabled me to invite Professor Paolo Fabbri from the University of Bologna. In addition to Professor Fabbri, my colleagues Michael Bourdaghs, Seiji Lippit, and Herbert Plutschow from the UCLA Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures contributed enlightening discussions of the chapters. The event was part of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Christopher Bush and Michael Dankert made numerous stylistic suggestions on how to improve the chapters’ final versions. To them all, and especially to the speakers who traveled from remote parts of the world to deliver and discuss their work, go my warmest thanks. ix ABBREVIATIONS GNBZ Gendai Nihon Bungaku Zenshu¯ MBZ Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯ MSK Man’yo¯shu¯ no Shizen Kanjo¯ NKST Nihon Kindai Shiso¯Taikei SNKBS Shincho¯Nihon Koten Bungaku Shu¯sei WTZ Watsuji Tetsuro¯Zenshu¯ xi Introduction Michael F. Marra This book contains revised versions of papers originally presented during an international conference that I organized at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Inter- pretation.” The immediate purpose of the December 13 –15, 1998, conference was to introduce to an audience in the United States leading Japanese aestheticians, philosophers, and art and literary historians who were thoroughly familiar with European academic thought (especially German, French, and British) but who had limited or no exposure to the American academic scene. The Japanese scholars included aestheticians Amagasaki Akira, Hamashita Masahiro, Kambayashi Tsunemichi, Otabe Tanehisa, and Sasaki Ken’ichi; phi- losopher O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke; art historians Inaga Shigemi and O¯ ta Takao; and literary historians Haga To¯ru (the only Japanese scholar who was thoroughly familiar with North American universities) and Suzuki Sadami. Counterparts working in the West were also invited: philosophers Paolo Fabbri, John Ma- raldo, Mark Meli, Graham Parkes, and Gianni Vattimo; literary historians Thomas LaMarre, J. Thomas Rimer, Haruo Shirane, and Meera Viswanathan; and intellectual historians Naoki Sakai and Stefan Tanaka. I need to stress the experimental nature of this project, which brought to- gether thinkers from Japan, Europe, and the United States with different back- grounds, interests, and methodologies. That all speakers graciously accepted my invitation attests to their brave willingness to challenge the usual conference format, in which like-minded scholars gather to discuss a narrowly defined area of common expertise. The topic of the conference, however, was broad enough to encourage a meeting of this kind yet was formulated in such a way that certain boundaries were respected. Because most of the speakers—with the exception of Professors Fabbri and Vattimo—were either specialists in Japanese culture or Western culture specialists active in Japan, the conference dealt with the role played by interpretative models in the articulation of cultural discourses on Japan. Why was I interested in discussing issues of interpretation—broadly de- 1 2 Michael F. Marra fined in this volume as “hermeneutics”—in the formation of cultural images of Japan? Mainly for a biographical reason, one that I must share with the reader to explain why a person trained in medieval Japanese literature like my- self would feel the need to enter into a dialogue with philosophers, aestheticians, and historians of consciousness rather than joining other historians of medieval Japan in attempting to reexamine our knowledge of the past. Afew years ago, a reviewer of my Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature (1991) pointed out the fictional nature of schol- arly works—“imagined configurations” that border more with the oneiric than with the real.1 The strong reaction of this reviewer made me wonder whether, rather than writing the history of political discontent of major Japanese poets and literati from the ninth to the fourteenth century, I had written a personal history of discontent—a personal resistance against what I perceived as the “aesthetic” approach to the Japanese classics of which the reviewer was repre- sentative and which is still with us in full strength, though in modified language, in the postmodern age. I was reminded that all histories are essentially personal histories and that, unless one keeps this truth in mind—the Heideg- gerian truth that we are always already thrown into an interpretative circle— one might fall into the trap of confusing facts with interpretations. This does not diminish the importance of facts— or the need for medievalists to gather to discuss premodern Japan. It simply places at the forefront the importance of interpretation in the transformation of fact into knowledge. (Those who want to go one step further and embrace the Nietzschean idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, including the “fact” of the statement itself, might argue that facts are actually a result of interpretation.) No matter where one stands on the issue, and no matter how indebted one remains to a posi- tivist heritage, after Kant and the Enlightenment it would be hard to deny the “fact” that as representations facts only come into being interpretatively (or, to use a better word, hermeneutically). This truth was well known to a giant of literary studies, the Italian Fran- cesco de Sanctis (1817–1883), who in 1869 almost gave up his plan to write what eventually became a monument in the field of Italian studies—his Sto- ria della Letteratura Italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870)—because of the absence, at this time, of any kind of preliminary hermeneutical studies. How is it possible, De Sanctis asked, to choose a language for describing literary texts without knowing the languages used in the past to describe the same texts (interpretative history)

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