Abstract
Traditional Japanese art-making aims at grasping and presenting what are considered to be the defining characteristics of the object, whether used as the subject matter or raw material. Successful articulation of such characteristics is made possible by the artist who lets the object lead the art-making process. The beauty of Japanese art is appreciated when art paradoxically appears artless, as if it spontaneously “became” rather than having been “made,” despite the arduous work and meticulous artifice that are necessarily involved in its creation.
This art-making process requires respect for the other-than-self and the discipline of transcending oneself. This mode of being is inspired by Zen Buddhism, the spiritual tradition embraced by many past Japanese art masters and their disciples. As such, the aesthetic experience of beauty in creating and appreciating Japanese art is inseparable from the moral, spiritual, and existential dimensions of human life: cultivating an ethical stance toward the world and engaging in the practice toward an enlightened life.
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Notes
- 1.
“Not saying that life becomes death is an established custom in Buddhism – therefore it is called unborn. That death does not become life is an established teaching of the Buddha; therefore we say imperishable. Life is an individual temporal state, death is an individual temporal state. It is like winter and spring – we don’t think winter becomes spring, we don’t say spring becomes summer” (Dōgen 1988, 33).
- 2.
These instructions are culled from Nanbōroku o Yomu (Reading Nanbōroku) (Kumakura 1989). Nanbōroku is a compilation of Sen no Rikyū’s teachings recorded by one of his disciples, Monk Nanbō, who allegedly wrote part of the document while the master was still alive and the rest after his death.
- 3.
For Kant, the judgment of taste regarding beauty requires that the formal elements of the object fit together as if they are organized under a concept or purpose without attributing any definite concept or purpose, so as to allow free play of the imagination and to distinguish the judgment of taste from a cognitive judgment. He summarizes this point at the end of sec. 17: “Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose” (Kant 1974, 73).
- 4.
We find that, in recent Western aesthetics, too, this notion of artlessness is invoked as an aesthetic merit. Sometimes it appears predictably in discussion regarding sports or cosmetics, but some other times in an unexpected arena such as the art of home-making. For sports, see David Best’s “The Aesthetic in Sport” and Ted Cohen’s “Sport and Art: Beginning Questions.” I thank Cheryl Foster for these two references regarding sports. For cosmetics, see Curt Ducasse’s Art, the Critics and You. As for the art of home-making, see Kevin Melchionne’s “Living in Glass Houses.”
- 5.
This is why Kant stresses that we must be aware in our appreciation of art that it is art, not a product of nature. “In a product of beautiful art, we must become conscious that it is art and not nature …”; “Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature” (Kant 1974, 149, emphasis added).
- 6.
I explored the aesthetics of imperfection in “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency” (Saito 1997).
- 7.
The earlier and much different version of this piece appeared as “Representing the Essence of Objects: Art in the Japanese Aesthetic Tradition” (Saito 2003).
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Saito, Y. (2017). Letting Objects Speak: Beauty in the Japanese Artistic Tradition. In: Higgins, K., Maira, S., Sikka, S. (eds) Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43893-1_14
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