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SIX Ōnishi Yoshinori and the Category of the Aesthetic Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) taught aesthetics at the University of Tokyo from 1922 until his retirement in 1949. In addition to his voluminous work on Western aesthetics in general and Kant in particular, Ōnishi applied his knowledge of Western philosophy to the elucidation of key concepts of Japanese aesthetics and poetics that had been used for centuries by Japanese poets and theorists. His efforts led to the publication of such books as Yūgen and Aware (Yūgen to Aware, 1939), On Refinement: A Study on Sabi (Fūga Ron: Sabi no Kenkyū, 1940), Feelings Toward Nature in the Man’yōshū (Man’yōshū no Shizen Kanjō, 1943), and a series of articles on the aesthetics of the Far East recently collected in the volume The Artistic Spirit of the East (Tōyōteki Geijutsu Seishin, 1988). His Aesthetics (Bigaku) in two volumes dedicates the first volume (1959) to the history of Western aesthetics while reserving the second (published posthumously in 1960) for the analysis and construction of Japanese aesthetic “categories” such as yūgen, yūen, aware, kokkei, and sabi. According to Ōnishi, it was the responsibility of the aesthetician to deal in terms of “aesthetic categories” (biteki hanchū) when addressing traditional aesthetic terms, rather than confining them to the esoteric discourse of Japanese medieval poetics (shigaku).1 Ōnishi followed this approach in his Aesthetics in an attempt to explain the notion of aware beyond the stages of linguistic and psychological analysis. As we can see from the excerpt translated here, Ōnishi felt that a psychologization of the term along the lines of Motoori Norinaga’s (1730–1801) analysis of aware was only the first step in the process of grasping the objective potential of aware as the result of an aesthetic experience. Following a state of “contemplation” (Betrachtung), such experience is, first of all, an intellectual as well as an emotional response to an aesthetic object—a product of a process known 115 1. Ōnishi Yoshinori, Bigaku, vol. 2: Biteki Hanchū Ron (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1960), pp. 176–177. as “aesthetic consciousness.” Motoori, according to Ōnishi, had already started to describe this process, for he was quite sensible of the universal power of aware in engendering a common experience of what modern aesthetics would call “empathy.” Yet the “sorrow” of aware cannot be explained simply as a psychological movement of a subject that is involved in a situation of shareable experience. Ōnishi stressed the importance of an independent external reality—the mono (thing) of mono no aware (the pathos of things)—in the production of a “sorrow” which is already present in the external world (nature) and which the mind recovers as a sort of “worldweariness ” (Weltschmertz). The moving experience of aware is part of a metaphysical enterprise that recovers the presence of nature within the perceiving subject by letting the latter dip into the cosmic grief of “the ground of Being” (Seinsgrund). Thus, a communication is created in which the subject (or “moment of artistic feeling”) and the object (or “moment of natural feeling”) come together. Ōnishi’s long essay on aware continues well beyond the excerpt translated here by addressing, first of all, the affinities that he argues are present between the notion of sorrow and “the aesthetic” (das ästhetisch). He justifies his argument by mentioning the privileged status that sorrow and melancholy have in the romantic poetry of John Keats (1795–1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), as well as in the satanic verses of Baudelaire. The sadness sung in poetry, however , elicits an aesthetic pleasure, as we see in the expressions “pleasure of grief” used by the French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839– 1916) and the Spenserian “luxury of pitty.” The oxymoron implies a positivity of the aesthetic experience that overcomes both the positive meaning of pleasure and the negative meaning of sorrow—in the same way that “will to life” (seimei ishiki) encompasses the positive side of health and growth as well as the negative side of illness and death. This positive vitality of the aesthetic experience requires, however, a “motivation” (motivieren) which is grounded in the presence of an objective reality of metaphysical sorrow that liberates the subject from the subjective immediacy of positive (joy) and negative (grief) passions. Aesthetic “excitement” is nothing but the realization of this mental state that is brought about by...

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