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The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan

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The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan THE THEORY OF BEAUTY IN THE CLASSICAL AESTHETICS OF JAPAN The series "Philosophy and World Community" appears under the auspices of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies and of the Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines, with the support of Unesco. General Editor : RAYMOND KLIBANSKY President de la Commission des Textes de l'Institut international de philosophie INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY THE THEORY OF BEAUTY IN THE CLASSICAL AESTHETICS OF JAPAN by TOSHIHIKO and TOYO IZUTSU •1981 SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. This volume is Iisted in the Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data. ISBN 978-90-481-8261-9 ISBN 978-94-017-3481-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3481-3 The cover shows a letter from the Noh thcoretician Zeami to another Noh mastcr. Zenchiku. Copyright © 1981 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1981 Originally published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers bv, The Hague in 1981 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1981 AII rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission ofthe publisher, Springer-Science+Business Media. B. V. CONTENTS Preface IX PART ONE: PRELIMINARY ESSAYS, by Toyo Izutsu I. The aesthetic structure of waka 3 1. The formal structure of waka 3 2. Waka as a poetic-linguistic 'field' 5 3. Kokoro, the creative Ground of waka 6 4. Kokoro, omoi and kotoba 9 5. The ideal waka, the 'excelling exemplar' 11 6. The rectification of kokoro 12 7. The significance of jo 12 8. The aesthetic value of yo-jo 14 9. The supremacy of yo-jo 15 10. The Mode of Ushin 16 11. The role of Nature-description in waka 17 12. Nature-description and yo-jo 19 13. Nature as a cognitive 'field' 21 Notes 24 II. The metaphysical background of the theory of Noh: an analysis of Zeami's 'Nine Stages' 26 1. The concept of yugen 26 VI 2. Subject-object relationship in the Japanese way of thinking 29 3. Dimension of being and dimension of Nothingness in Japanese thinking 30 4. The contemplative field 32 5. 'The Nine Stages' 35 Notes 44 III. The Way of tea: an art of spatial awareness 46 1. Preliminaries 46 2. Metaphysics of wabi 48 3. Spatial awareness and the creative sUbjectivity in the art of tea 55 Notes 61 IV. Haiku: an existential event 62 1. From waka to haiku 62 2. The hai-i or haiku spirit 64 3. The dynamics of the Subject-Object encounter 66 4. Fuga-no-makoto 69 5. Fueki (constancy) and ryako (transiency) 70 6. Yo-haku (blank space) and the poetic 'field' of haiku 73 Notes 75 PART TWO: TEXTS, translated by Toshihiko and Toyo lzutsu 77 I. Maigetsusho, by Fujiwara Teika 79 Notes 95 II. 'The Nine Stages', by Zeami Motokiyo 97 III. 'The Process of Training in the Nine Stages' (Appendix to 'The Nine Stages'), by Zeami Motokiyo 101 vii Notes 104 IV. 'Observations on the Disciplinary Way of Noh', by Zeami Motokiyo 105 Notes 114 V. 'Collecting Gems and Obtaining Flowers', by Zeami Motokiyo 115 Notes l34 VI. 'A Record of Nanba', by Nanba Sokei l35 Notes 158 VII. 'The Red Booklet', by Doha Hattori 159 Notes 167 PREFACE The Japanese sense of beauty as actualized in innumerable works of art, both linguistic and non-linguistic, has often been spoken of as something strange to, and remote from, the Western taste. It is, in fact, so radically different from what in the West is ordinarily associated with aesthetic experience that it even tends to give an impression of being mysterious, enigmatic or esoteric. This state of affairs comes from the fact that there is a peculiar kind of metaphysics, based on a realization of the simultaneous semantic articulation of consciousness and the external reality, dominating the whole functional domain of the Japanese sense of beauty, without an understanding of which the so-called 'mystery' of Japanese aesthetics would remain incomprehensible. The present work primarily purports to clarify the keynotes of the artistic experiences that are typical of Japanese culture, in terms of a special philosophical structure underlying them. It consists of two main parts: (1) Preliminary Essays, in which the major philosophical ideas relating to beauty will be given a theoretical elucidation, and (2) a selection of Classical Texts representative of Japanese aesthetics in widely divergent fields of linguistic and extra-linguistic art such as the theories of waka-poetry, Noh play, the art of tea, and haiku. The second part is related to the first by way of a concrete illustration, providing as it does philological materials on which are based the philosophical considerations of the first part. Thus the book is so arranged that it might make a contribution towards a clear understanding of the Japanese sense of beauty, based on a special type of semantic articulation of reality, structurally x comprising within itself, as an organic whole, the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic experiences of the Japanese. The idea of our writing this book initially came from Professor Raymond Klibansky while we were together at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who kindly suggested to us that we should work on something of this sort. Following his suggestion we set out to work on it in 1973 and finished writing it in spring of 1977. In this sense the book owes its very existence to Professor Klibansky, to whom we are infinitely grateful. Thanks are also due to Professor E.T. Jessop who has taken the trouble of going through the manuscript for stylistic amelioration. No less are we grateful to Professor Alfred Ayer of Oxford for the warm interest he has shown in our work as well as to Professor Paul Ricoeur, President of the Institut International de Philosophie, who has officially promoted the publication of the present work under the auspices of the Institut and Unesco. TOYO IZUTSU and TOSHIHIKO IZUTSU 6 April 1980 Kamakura, Japan PART ONE PRELIMINARY ESSAYS by Toyo IZUTSU ESSAY I THE AESTHETIC STRUCTURE OF WAKA In the tradition of Japanese poetry, there evolved several genres, of which the most representative are waka (or tanka) and haiku, the latter being a development of the former. Both waka and haiku, with their formal structure and inner spirit kept intact and unchanged, are still quite vigorously alive in con­ temporary Japan, not merely exercising a strong influence on literature but serving as a structural basis for the whole of its intellectual and aesthetic culture. l. THE FORMAL STRUCTURE OF WAKA The formal structure ofwaka is rather peculiar in its unusual shortness. A waka is a rhymeless poem consisting of 31 syllables in the form of an alternation of five- and seven-syllable words. Thus a formally independent sentence (or in rare cases, two sentences) composed of 31 syllabic units (5/7/5, 7/7) constitutes an entire waka poem. The only thing which distinguishes the poetic sentence of waka from a prose sentence with the same syllabic quantity is accordingly its internal articulation into this peculiar arrangement of the syllabic units in this peculiar order.l One might, then, naturally imagine that the content of such a diminished linguistic form would hardly go beyond that of an adage or epigram. If the 31 syllables were to be taken merely as a syntactic unit, one would conclude that the formal structure of waka would naturally impose a limitation on its content, whether the latter were descriptive, 4 evocative or expressive. However, waka as a linguistic unit of 31 syllables can be approached from an entirely different aspect, namely the aspect of semantic articulation which consists in a non-temporal expansion of the associative linkage of words or a network of images and ideas. In fact waka may be said to be a poetic art which puts dispropor­ tionately strong emphasis on the semantic rather than syntactic aspect of language, depends heavily upon it, and develops it to the extreme limit of possibility. In connection with this, we may mention as its most conspicuous characteristic, the tendency shown by waka to make full use of such techniques as; joshi (forewords), makura-kotoba (pillow-words or conventional epithets), kake-kotoba (pivot-words), engo (kindred­ words)-these four being based on the principle of word-association­ mitate (liking A to B) which is a kind of image-association, honka-dori (borrowing phrases from another famous waka) which is a direct means of achieving a polyphonic plenitude of meanings, images and ideas. These are in addition, of course, to various types of metaphors, similies and allegories. The waka-poet is supposed to have recourse inevitably to at least one of these techniques, and in most cases to more than one, up to several of them together, in composing one single poetic sentence of 31 syllables. It is to be remarked, furthermore, that all these techniques of word­ association (whether phonetic or semantic) and image-association are necesarily made to function in such a way that they have no immediate contextual relevance to the syntactic structure of the sentence itself. Thus these intertwining modifiers admitted into the sentence of 31 syllables might seem to render the syntactic coagulation ofthe sentence almost impossible or, supposing it to be possible, lead the sentence to confusion, and hinder it from forming a completed linguistic unit of 31 syllables which is both syntactically meaningful and properly grammatical. In this sense, besides the unusual shortness of its form, these rhetorical techniques-as we might call them-for which waka is notorious for using in profusion, would seem to add another limitation to the information-quantity of waka in its syntactic aspect.
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