Abstract
This chapter explores a non-intellectualist approach to skilled expertise by comparing modern phenomenological philosopher Hubert Dreyfus’ account of absorbed coping with fifteenth-century Japanese dramatist Zeami Motokiyo’s account of Noh performance. It begins by presenting Dreyfus’ account of skilled performance and skill development, which envisages “conceptual mindedness” as the enemy of expertise. It then moves on to introduce Zeami’s account of skilled expertise in Noh by focusing on three key concepts, namely mushin (無心, the no-mind), shoshin (初心, the beginner’s mindset), and hana (花, the flower). By comparing these two similarly non-intellectualist approaches, it argues that Zeami offers a helpful perspective in supplementing Dreyfus’s account by illuminating the role of conceptual knowledge, the open-ended character of skill development, and the cooperative relationship between the actor and the environment. At the same time, it suggests that the phenomenologist’s account of skilled expertise is unjustifiably biased towards young, healthy, able agents, overlooking the inescapable vulnerability of human embodiment.
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Notes
- 1.
Recent debates on skill also keep everyday skills, like walking and talking, within their range. This chapter, however, restricts its scope to expert skills or skilled expertise.
- 2.
A brief introductory video to Noh with snippets of actual performance can be viewed at the official website of Japan Arts Council. See https://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/noh/en/introduction/.
- 3.
For an extensive account of Zeami’s biography, see Hare (1996, chapter 1).
- 4.
References to both Fūshikaden and Kakyō are cited according to the English translation by J. Thomas Rimer and Masakazu Yamazaki (1984). Yet all English translations of Zeami’s writings in the present chapter are my own, although I have heavily consulted existing translations by Rimer and Yamazaki (1984), William Scott Wilson (2006), and Tom Hare (2008). For the Japanese texts, I have consulted edited collections by Konishi Jin-ichi 小西甚一 (1970) and Omote Akira 表章 and Kato Shūichi 加藤周一 (1974).
- 5.
- 6.
Note that actors were all male in Zeami’s time, which is not the case in contemporary Noh.
- 7.
In line with this popular interpretation, Rimer and Yamazaki translates shoshin as “fresh experience” (Rimer and Yamazaki, 107).
- 8.
“A flower, you see, is particularly appreciated for its rarity when its time comes, since it among all the trees and grasses blooms in response to the change of seasons. In sarugaku [i.e., Noh dramas] as well, the mind [of the audience] perceives as interesting what it knows to be rare. The flower, what is interesting, and what is rare, these all mean the same thing” (Fūshikaden, 110).
- 9.
Zeami also applies the same approach to ethics, suggesting that the goodness or badness of an action is ultimately determined relative to the situation (Fūshikaden, 124).
- 10.
For discussions on riken no ken, see Yusa (1987) and Miyahara and Segundo-Ortin (ms).
- 11.
Tribble (2005) similarly argues that the actor’s cognition was scaffolded by the material setting of the environment in classical English theatrical performance.
- 12.
- 13.
However, Aranyosi (2018) denies that bodybuilding is a skilled performance at all.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Haruka Okui for an insightful conversation on the topic during the preparation stage. I also thank my colleagues at Hokkaido University, Kengo Miyazono, and Uku Tooming for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this chapter. This work was supported by the ARC Discovery Project “Minds in skilled performance: Explanatory framework and comparative study” (DP170102987) and the JSPS KAKENHI Project “Developing a habit-centred paradigm of philosophy and science of mind” (20K00001).
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Miyahara, K. (2022). Dreyfus and Zeami on Embodied Expertise. In: Lai, K.L. (eds) Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_15
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