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THREE Hegelian Reversal Okakura Kakuzō The image of Japan as a site of Eastern spirituality, to be distinguished from a materialistically oriented West, is very much indebted to the Japanese adaptation of Hegel’s philosophy. The explanation of reality as the journey of spirit in time until its ultimate realization provided potent arguments to Hegelian thinkers such as Ernest Fenollosa, who reversed the trajectory of spiritual fulfillment toward the place from where the spirit had originated: namely the East.1 While introducing Hegel to Japan, Fenollosa was also suggesting a way of appropriating his philosophy for the creation of an Eastern subjectivity. He was actually indicating how to challenge the Western notion of dialectics , which was at the core of Hegel’s explanation of the superiority of European civilization. The language of harmonious wholeness—reminiscent of Augustinian, Thomistic, and Hegelian hermeneutics—was paradoxically used by Fenollosa’s Japanese audience to construct the identity of their nation whose spirit was perceived in its alleged harmony and universality . Japan, in a sense, was made into a work of art: a part of a system called “Asia,” whose distinctive characteristics were made into images that the West had reserved for centuries to representations of its God. The language of Western metaphysics came to be used to reverse the Hegelian argument of the Teutonic fulfillment of the ideality of art in favor of an alleged myth of Asian spiritualism. 65 1. “Using the Hegelian model Fenollosa argued that at the core of Japanese art lay the universal spiritual ideals of Asia. These stood in stark contrast to the technical facility and materialism of the West. Fenollosa ’s simplistic thesis-antithesis logic counterposed Asia’s (read Japan’s) spirituality and idealism with the West’s preoccupation with realism, materialism, and technical facility. By the 1890s he had advanced his argument to the point where he clearly saw a new synthesis emerging out of the global confrontation between East and West. Eastern spiritualism, which he identified with the traditional Japanese arts, would be combined with Western technical achievements to create a higher culture in both East and West.” See F. G. Notehelfer, “On Idealism and Realism in the Thought of Okakura Tenshin,” Journal of Japanese Studies 16(2) (1990):321–322. Fenollosa mediated the process through which Okakura Kakuzō (1862– 1913)—or Tenshin—appropriated Hegelianism in order to stress the eternal nature of what he called “the Eastern spirit,” which was shared by all nations of Asia.2 Okakura simply subverted Hegel’s Eurocentrism and attacked the Hegelian notion of dialectics, locating in the nondualism (advaita ) of Indian Buddhism the “universality” of the East. He took issue with the Western brand of universality that was propelled by the violence of dialectics : the struggle of historical processes. If the spirit could be explained in terms of its being contained spatially in its area of origin (the East)— his argument goes—then there was no reason to employ dialectics to trace the journey of the development of the spirit from ancient Egypt to Germany , as Hegel had suggested. The dialectical adventure that put Germany at the end of the spirit’s journey—and identified the Teutonic spirit with the fulfillment on earth of the Absolute Spirit—could easily be replaced by a philosophy of “sameness” that would explain reality as something which was constantly present to itself without any need for spatial or temporal articulation.3 Okakura conceived Japan as the lasting museum of the metaphysicalization of Asia. Or as he wrote in 1903 in his Ideals of the East: “The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture.”4 66 The Subject of Aesthetics 2. “Yet Okakura could not be satisfied with the idea of ‘oneness’ as the destiny of an Asia that was disintegrating under the onslaught of colonialism. For Okakura, ‘the East’ or Asia is not simply that which was imagined and defined by the West, nor can it refer to a unity created by the common destiny of colonialization . Okakura sought historically for principles of unity internal to Asia. To this end he tried to overturn Hegel’s philosophy of history and art, trying not only to subvert Hegel’s Eurocentrism but to attack the concept of dialectics itself. The notion of contradiction is crucial to Hegelian thought as that which...

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