A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

AESTHETICS IS THAT branch of philosophy defining beauty and the beautiful, how it can be recognized, ascertained, judged. In the West the term was first used in 1750 to describe a science of sensuous knowledge. Its goal was beauty, in contrast with logic, whose goal was truth. Based upon dichotomies (beauty/truth, aesthetics/logic) the definition was elaborated into a multi-faceted concept assuming that opposites and alternates lead to an aesthetic result. The conjectures and conclusions were those of eighteenth-century Europe but are still common today.

There are, however, different criteria at different times in different cultures. Many in Asia, for example, do not subscribe to general dichotomies in expressing thought. Japan makes much less of the body/mind, self/group formation, with often marked consequences. Here we would notice that what we would call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

Hiroshi Yoshida, Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1920

The Western concept finds beauty in something we admire for itself rather than for its uses, something that the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) called “purposiveness without a purpose.” Traditional Japan emphasizes differently. It is closer to such pre- Enlightenment European definitions as Chaucer’s “Beautee apertenant to Grace,” where the grace of fitness excites intellectual or moral pleasure and gives rise to the concept of social approval in the form of good taste.

Jean de la Bruyère, the French moralist, early in the seventeenth century defined the quality: “Entre le bon sens and le bon goût il y a la différence de la cause et son effet.” Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect, an observation with which Chaucer, as well as the aesthetically traditional Japanese, might have agreed. In matters aesthetic, taste remains an observation of deserved worth, and that should take care of that—except that we are not all agreed as to what good sense consists of.

Some countries say one thing, some say another. The Japanese traditionally maintain that we have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy, daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense, really—Nature should be our model, we are to regard it, to learn from it. When Keats upset aesthetic patterning in the West with his notorious assertion that “truth is beauty; beauty, truth,” he was very close to the Asian notion that these are identical and to the suggestion that dichotomies are tools too dull to delineate the wholeness of observation.

Bruyère’s aperçu is, indeed, so sensible that one would expect it to apply just everywhere. It does not, but it does to Japan. As the aesthetician Ueda Makoto has said: “In premodern Japanese aesthetics, the distance between art and nature was considerably shorter than in its Western counterparts.” And the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichir has written in that important aesthetic text In Praise of Shadows: “The quality that we call beauty . . . must always grow from the realities of life.” Among the qualities that can be derived from the assumptions of traditional Japanese aesthetics Donald Keene has distinguished suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability. These might indeed be seen as basic ingredients in traditional Japanese taste but, at the same time, Keene notes that “exaggeration, uniformity, profusion, and durability are by no means absent.”

Western aesthetics is sometimes familiar with simplicity, asymmetry, and suggestion, but the idea that beauty lies in its own vanishing is an idea much less common. Perishability remains, however, what Keene has called “the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal.” It is certainly among the earliest, being based on the Buddhist concept of mujo, a term usually translated as “impermanence”: nothing is stable, and our only refuge lies in accepting, even celebrating this. Elsewhere—in Europe, even sometimes in China—Nature as guide was there but its role was restricted to mimesis, realistic reproduction. In Japan this was traditionally not enough. It was as though there was an agreement that the nature of Nature could not be presented through literal description. It could only be suggested, and the more subtle the suggestion (think haiku) the more tasteful the work of art.

Here Japanese arts and crafts (a division that the premodern Japanese did not themselves observe) imitated the means of nature rather than its results. One of these means was simplicity. There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts. Showing structure, emphasizing texture—even boldly displaying an almost ostentatious lack of artifice—this was what the Japanese learned to do. Such simplicity was to be delineated by a number of categories—for example, wabi and sabi, those conjoined twins of Japanese aesthetics that we will later visit. One result was that, as a prerequisite for taste, this simplicity was found beautiful