Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics by Steve Odin (review)

Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics evolved from a paper Steve Odin delivered at the 1984 Conference for the International Society of Process Philosophy at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. This book will be intriguing and stimulating not only to those scholars who engage in Whitehead studies but also to those who are concerned with the development of an East–West dialogue on aesthetics and aesthetic education. In this volume, Odin compares Alfred North Whitehead's axiological process metaphysics, including his concept of aesthetic experience and a doctrine of beauty, with the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism and offers readers a fresh cross-cultural understanding of Whitehead's process philosophy.

In such an East-–West comparison, the major notions of traditional Japanese aesthetics, such as yugen and aware, are scrutinized, along with specific Japanese arts such as a "way of tea" and haiku poetry in relation to Zen Buddhist philosophy. Yugen and aware are both critical notions in creating and appreciating art, poetry, and literature and were most frequently used in medieval Japan. It is said that, although their meanings have changed over time, their basic meanings express a uniquely Japanese sense of beauty. According to the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, volume 3 (Japanese Great Dictionary), the primary meaning of yugen is subtle mysterious profundity beyond human knowledge. The term originated in China; in ancient China, it meant the netherworld and later indicated the depth and subtlety of the philosophical doctrines of Taoism and the state of enlightenment. Aware, used interchangeably with the term monono aware, means, according to the Japanese classical scholar Motoori Norinaga, a harmonious world of sentiment arising in the region where the outer world meets the inner world and forms pathos, along with the fineness, delicacy, and sorrow that are induced when one comes in contact with various phases of nature and life.

A distinctive contribution of Odin's study lies in his illumination of a crosslinkage between Whitehead's aesthetics developed out of the Western tradition and the Japanese aesthetics of the Eastern tradition, by showing functional equivalents between them. This study is very informative to readers who want to think about universal aspects of the nature and structure of aesthetic experience and, thus, to develop an East–West dialogue about the way aesthetics is to be taught in a globalized world.

The main theme of the first part of the book is the fundamental role of aesthetics in the entire body of Whitehead's process metaphysics, which is aimed at overturning the Western tradition of scientific materialism based on the mechanical Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Odin identifies the essential task of process metaphysics as overcoming the problem of "vacuous actuality" or valuelessness in everyday life under the influence of the prevailing paradigm. He therefore argues that a kind of aesthetics and aesthetic education that cherishes the qualitative flow of concrete, aesthetically immediate experience plays an essential role in his axiological philosophy, with its aim of recovering a sense of value in everyday experience.

Whitehead's scheme of the world contrasts with Plato's. In Plato's scheme, one can appreciate the ideal form of absolute beauty only through contemplation beyond the particulars of the material world of flux. However, Whitehead believes that one enjoys the ideal form of beauty that is embodied in particular concrete events as directly felt aesthetic quality. Such a felt aesthetic quality is not a substance simply located either in the subject or the object, but emerges in a situation and develops in and through a situation arising through organism–environment interactions deriving from one's aesthetic perspective. Odin finds that such an interactive and immediate nature of the aesthetic quality is fundamental in traditional Japanese aesthetics, which places much value on the realization of wisdom in a concrete everyday situation.

The second part of Odin's book provides a review of the major studies by Whiteheadian process thinkers who explored and further developed Whitehead's metaphysics and aesthetics of qualitative immediacy. These thinkers include...