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13 Coincidentia Oppositorum Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Greek Genealogies of Japan Michael F. Marra When we look at the history of Japanese aesthetics beginning from the early writings of Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), we are faced with the presence of a hermeneutical technique that became a widespread “leitmotif” among aestheticians building up a distinctive “Japanese” subjectivity. We might call this technique “comparison and reduction” because it implies a comparison of local realities with the West and a consequent reduction of the “otherness” of such realities to a foreign “Other.” The move is paradoxical inasmuch as it claims to establish notions of “distinctness” by creating images of Japan that are actually a miniaturized version of what Japan is supposed to be distinguished from. The contemporary reader becomes immediately aware of the basic flaw of such an argument—a flaw of which the authors themselves might well have been aware. What is less known, however, are the reasons behind the use of such techniques, reasons we might want to start searching for in the political arena. We might want to begin by asking how a Third World country—as it could be argued Japan was until recent times—could stand up economically and culturally to the giants of the technologically advanced world. Because this essay is concerned mainly with cultural questions, I could answer by emphasizing the idea of eclecticism that allows the incorporation of the advanced “Other” into the explanation of the backward “self.” One method would be the use in Japan of Hegel’s synthetic process, in which opposites are overcome for the sake of a third, more “universal” alternative. Another method—the one with which I am mainly concerned in this essay—is the erasure of substantive differences between the two opposite terms by making them coincide in the end, a technique known in philosophy as coincidentia oppositorum (the sameness of opposites). Both the Hegelian dialectic and coincidentia oppositorum aim at ac142 commodating “difference” by somehow harmonizing the conflicting elements of reality, either through a process of ingestion and digestion, as in the Hegelian case, or through a movement of negation and erasure, as in the second case. For a country in search of international recognition, “the sameness of opposites ” was not simply an intellectual game. It implied a concerted effort to demonstrate the cultural advances of Japan by arguing that, after all, differences between opposites ( Japan and the West) could not only be reconciled but actually erased, thus leaving the two adversaries on an absolutely equal footing. We find this kind of argument at work in the images of ancient Japan formulated by Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), a professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo during the 1930s and 1940s. The present-day successor to Ōnishi’s post, Sasaki Ken’ichi (b. 1943), has recently explained Ōnishi’s obsession with harmonizing conflicts and his arguments about the merely apparent nature of contradictions by reminding us of the fundamental role that the method of coincidentia oppositorum played in the aesthetics of Romantic thinkers , especially G. W. F. Hegel (1770 –1831), F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), and K. W. F. Solger (1780 –1819). Before the development of their systems, he argues, the split between body and soul (the animal/human and the intellectual /divine sides of a human being) was felt as a contradiction that could hardly be healed without the intervention of a redemptive figure from the outside , such as God. With the Romantic movement, however, art was called on to mediate the conflict and to bring harmony to the conflictual moments of human experience that the intervention of aesthetic consciousness would prove to be only apparently contradictory. While acknowledging that Ōnishi inherited from the metalanguage of his field of expertise (aesthetics) a drive to bring opposites into an orderly dialogue , Sasaki contends that Ōnishi’s motivations were, however, different from the Western desire to find in this method a means to reconcile the animal side of man with his more spiritual, divine aspects. Desire, in Ōnishi’s case, should rather be sought in what Sasaki calls the “ethnic dimension” (esunikku no jigen) —that is, a need for intellectual syncretism on the part of a thinker belonging to a “backward” country who struggles to make/create/forge the subjectivity of his own land into a form acceptable to a more powerful “Other” (the West). According to Sasaki, this academic posture, which was intrinsic to the method of...

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