Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to three fundamental atmospheric notions deployed by Japanese culture, observing them both in their original context and through a neophenomenological frame. The three concepts are that of 空 ku- “sky”, 風 fu- “wind” and 気 ki “air” or “breath”. Each of them, however, shows an impressive complexity and a wide array of meanings, many of which, despite the puzzling effect on a non-Asian reader, are highly coherent. Why is the character for “sky” also the signifier for the Buddhist notion of emptiness and imagination? Why is “wind” both the chief element of “landscapes”, a signifier for the aesthetic in general and having even the sense of “culture”? Is ki, with its impressive use for phenomena both bodily and psychic, external and internal, an actual phenomenon in the world? Despite the risk of exoticizing the cultural difference of non-European sources or the opposite refusal of these notions as “totally other”, the potential of a cross-cultural phenomenology of atmospheres is made evident, also presenting the work of modern Japanese philosophers who have already retraced the heritage of these concepts in a philosophical perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
We can think of how universally diffused is the belief in “spirits” aerial presences atmospherically perceived and exerting their effects on the body through influence or “possession”. Far from being an empty superstition, such “hauntology” is well rooted in primary mode of presence and is characteristic of what the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino referred to “presence at risk”, viz. human existence, which has not historically and existentially established itself as self-closed and independent from the world (De Martino 2007). Already close to early phenomenology in his studies, De Martino is, in this sense, another very viable interlocutor for a cross-cultural expansion of neophenomenology.
- 2.
Interestingly, it is not that European art thoroughly lacks mists and hazes: they rather arose with Sturm und Drang and Romantic sensibilities. In Europe, the aesthetic category most connected to this kind of views, rather than simple beauty, is that of the sublime, itself characteristic of the liminal situation in which extreme distance or vastness make impossible to form an objective picture of one’s surroundings. The Japanese aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori highlighted in the 1939 volume Yūgen and Aware how the classical Sino-Japanese aesthetic ideal of 幽玄 yūgen, “vague and indistinct” also recognizes the aesthetic effect of what lies on the fringe between manifest and non-manifest.
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Marinucci, L. (2019). Japanese Atmospheres: Of Sky, Wind and Breathing. In: Griffero, T., Tedeschini, M. (eds) Atmosphere and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24942-7_5
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