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ONE The Introduction of Aesthetics Nishi Amane The introduction to Japan of the field of aesthetics in the 1870s entailed a subtle and complex reorganization of local epistemological systems . At the same time, Japanese intellectuals were challenged with the creation of a technical vocabulary that was sensitive to the newly imported ideas. Alien concepts, such as the Western distinction between mechanical and liberal arts, had to be assimilated during what Yamamoto Masao has called “the enlightenment period” of Japanese aesthetics.1 A major challenge came when the purposiveness and practicality of craftsmanship (gijutsu) had to be differentiated from the ideality of artistic creation (geijutsu). The basic difficulty—to find Japanese counterparts to the meanings that the Greek expression “techne” had come to assume in the West during the centuries—was further compounded by the idealistic argument that justified grouping under the same category different activities such as architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry: the argument that each particular “fine art” (bijutsu) partook of an alleged universal element.2 It was not simply a linguistic problem. Behind the vocabulary of aesthetics stood a thick layer of Western philosophy that extended from Pla17 1. The contemporary aesthetician Yamamoto Masao distinguishes three moments in the history of Japanese aesthetics. The first is the period of enlightenment (1868–1878), which is characterized by the translation and adaptation of Western works on aesthetics on the part of Nishi Amane (1829–1897), Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901), and Kikuchi Dairoku (1855–1917). This is also the time when the American scholar Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908) was touring Japan and delivering lectures on aesthetics and the arts. The second moment is the period of criticism (1878–1888) as represented by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859– 1935), Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), Toyama Masakazu (1848–1900), Ōnishi Hajime (1864–1900), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), and Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902). The third is the period of reflection (1888– 1910), which coincides with the institutionalization of aesthetics in Japanese academia. In 1899 Ōtsuka Yasuji (1868–1931) was asked to fill the first permanent chair of aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University, followed in 1910 by Fukada Yasukazu (1878–1927) at Kyoto University. See Yamamoto Masao, Tōzai Geijutsu Seishin no Dentō to Kōryū (Tokyo: Risōsha, 1965), pp. 15–115. 2. See Chapter 3, note 16. to’s notion of Idea to the Hegelian system of Absolute Spirit. The importation of aesthetics required Japanese scholars to explain and justify the new “science” in the light of Western epistemology. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Japan was faced with the introduction, study, and digestion—or indigestion—of more than two thousand years of Western thought. In addition to the problem of mastering in a brief period of time the secrets of the political other, Japanese intellectuals were also faced with the delicate task of linking their traditional thought to the newly imported philosophical systems. In the field of aesthetics, the major challenge was to explain a basic paradox: how to make sense of fields of knowledge such as literature, for example, that for centuries had been justified by Neo-Confucian scholars in terms of ethical principles—“to promote good and chastise evil” (kanzen chōaku)—according to the Kantian notion of “purposiveness without a purpose.” How could the dependence (either religious or political) to which art had been submitted in Japan, on practical grounds, be transformed to a moment of autonomy and freedom?3 Nishi Amane (1829–1897) faced this challenge when, back from a few years of study at the University of Leiden in Holland, he translated “aesthetics ” as “the science of good and beauty” (zenbigaku).4 The basic premise behind Nishi’s choice was a belief in a strong relationship between the ethical and aesthetic moments—with the obvious implications that only the person versed in the fine arts is good and that only an ethically good person understands beauty.5 Nishi could count on solid sources from both the Eastern and Western traditions: a combination of the Confucian “theory of good, beauty, capability, and refinement” (shan mei liang ueng) and the Greek “theory of goodness and beauty” (kalosk’ agathos).6 18 The Subject of Aesthetics 3. Although, as Thomas Havens has argued, “it is doubtful that Nishi ever read Kant at all” (Thomas R. H. Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], p. 55), we know from a letter that he sent in 1863 to Johann Joseph Hoffman...

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