Japanese Philosophy

Our starting point is a remark made by an art historian, Charles Carman, to the theorist of art Norman Bryson regarding his interpretation of the Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji's standpoint of emptiness. Bryson claims that Nishitani's standpoint supports his contrast between Western and non-Western gaze. On the contrary, Carman sees Nishitani's standpoint closer to the Renaissance theory of vision as found in Alberti and Nicholas von Cues and so not as opposite to Western tradition as a whole but to a (...) major trend of it. Our suggestion here is that while Nishitani's standpoint illustrates an Asian way of thinking, at the same time it sheds light upon Western assumptions. Therefore, it constitutes a demonstration of how much it can be significant to integrate non-European cultures into the philosophical and art theory discussions in order to broaden our understanding of the discipline of aesthetics. (shrink)

A palavra japonesa geidō 芸道 é formada por dois caracteres: o primeiro remete à “habilidade” ou “capacidade” de executar algo e o segundo a uma “via” ou “caminho”, de maneira que poderia ser traduzida por “via da arte”. Como observou Hisamatsu Shin’ichi em um diálogo com Martin Heidegger, “via”, aqui, não significa simplesmente “método”, mas mantém uma profunda relação com a vida. No entanto, para nomear a “arte” no sentido moderno “ocidental estético”,emprega-se, em japonês, o neologismo geijutsu 芸術. O segundo (...) caráter, neste caso, contém mais claramente o significado de “método” ou “técnica”, além de “êxito/realização” e “destreza”. Partindo das distintas conotações que os dois termos evocam, propomo-nos a examinar a concepção tradicional e moderna da arte, no Japão, à luz das reflexões dos filósofos da Escola de Kioto sobre o “lugar do nada” (mu no basho 無の場所) como “campo expressivo”(hyōgenteki sekai表現的世界). Com isso, tentaremos mostrar a correspondência existente entre a concepção de arte como poiesis, ou autoexpressão criativa, de alguns desses filósofos e a compreensão tradicional japonesa da arte como via. (shrink)

Cross-cultural dialogue between the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy and the classical pragmatist tradition in American philosophy can help educators to clarify aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. This dialogue can contribute to meeting an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the way in which ecological perception becomes relevant to moral deliberation. The first section of this chapter explores relational thinking in the Kyoto School and American (...) pragmatism to help develop, in the second section, a concept of ecological imagination. A fine-tuned ecological imagination is a capacity we already count on in our best environmental writers, educators, scientists, and policy analysts. Moral deliberation enlists imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” The final section draws from the foregoing to clarify some appropriate aims for contemporary moral education. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue about the relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded, a finely aware ecological imagination can make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy. (shrink)

Japanese philosophy can be viewed as consisting of three historical phases. In the first and classical phase, theoretical speculation in Japan is usually seen as a variation of East Asian intellectual tradition, which basically consists of Confucianism and Sinicized Buddhism. Some thinkers nevertheless start to depart from this framework by drawing either on the indigenous culture or on the knowledge of occidental civilization, which eventually leads to the Westernization of Japanese society. In the second, or modern, phase of Japanese philosophy, (...) there arises a theoretical task to synthesize Eastern and Western frameworks, and many pioneering works of modern East Asian philosophy are produced in the first half of the 20th century. The third and contemporary phase of Japanese philosophy spans from the postwar reconstruction of Japan to the present, when eminent researchers lead philosophical studies under the framework either of analytic or continental context. Recent philosophical research in Japan is increasingly getting free from such academic frameworks, producing some remarkable results-- although most of these contemporary works remain unknown overseas. (shrink)

: Most discussions of Yamaga Soko's philosophical development as a Confucian scholar in Tokugawa Japan suggest that in his later years he moved away from Confucianism and toward a religio-philosophical celebration of Japan's supposed uniqueness. It is shown here, however, that Soko's nativism, set forth in his Chucho jijitsu, was later eclipsed by his final philosophical work, the Gengen hakki, wherein he articulated a kind of naturalistic numerology, based vaguely on the Yijing. This shift in Soko's thought can be viewed (...) as a return to Neo-Confucianism, the earliest philosophical paradigm that he had embraced. Moreover, the successive shifts in his thinking can be understood in terms of the vicissitudes of his life, first in his exile to the Kansai area, near the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto, and then later in his pardon and return to Edo, the shogun's capital. Perhaps most importantly, this final shift in Soko's thought reveals that this prominent early modern thinker did reach his philosophical climax not in defiant opposition to Neo-Confucianism, nor in a sustained celebration of Japan's political traditions and their superlative nature, but instead in a return to modes of metaphysics akin to those typically deployed by Neo- Confucians themselves in their attempts to understand the changing nature of the cosmos and their political place within its flux. (shrink)