Kuki Shuzo
Kuki Shuzo

Author: Michael F. Marra

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2004-04-30

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780824827557

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Kuki Shûzô (1888–1941), one of Japan’s most original thinkers of the twentieth century, is best known for his interpretations of Western Continental philosophy. His works on and of poetry are less well known but equally illuminating. During his eight years studying in Europe in the 1920s, Kuki spent time in Paris, where he wrote several collections of poetry and many short poems in the tanka style. Included in this volume are these Paris poems as well as other verses that Kuki appended to a long essay on poetry, "Rhymes in Japanese Poetry," written in 1931. Included as well are translations of two of Kuki’s major critical essays on poetry, "The Genealogy of Feelings: A Guide to Poetry" (1938) and "The Metaphysics of Literature" (1940). Michael Marra, one of the West’s foremost authorities on modern Japanese aesthetics, prefaces his translations with an important essay that gives an account of the current state of Kuki studies in English and presents an intriguing and original interpretation of Kuki’s writings. Marra argues that there is an unresolved tension in Kuki’s thought between a desire to overcome the rigid schemes of metaphysics, garnered from his knowledge of French and German philosophy, on the one hand, and a constant hesitation to let those schemes go, which is expressed in his verse.

The Structure of Detachment
The Structure of Detachment

Author: Hiroshi Nara

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780824827359

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The philosopher's controversial link with Heidegger is explored by Jon Mark Mikkelsen in the final essay, which concludes that, although Heidegger's view of art is consistent, both historically and conceptually, with his political involvement with fascism, the same cannot be said of Kuki."

Reflections on Japanese Taste
Reflections on Japanese Taste

Author: 九鬼周造

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13:

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This is the first English translation of a text outlining a distinctively plebian Japanese aesthetic based on a unique category of taste, "iki"

Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan
Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan

Author: Leslie Pincus

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-12-22

Total Pages: 582

ISBN-13: 0520916484

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During the interwar years in Japan, discourse on culture turned sharply inward after generations of openness to Western ideas. The characterizations that arose—that Japanese culture is unique, essential, and enduring—came to be accepted both inside and outside Japan. Leslie Pincus focuses on the work of Kuki Shuzo, a philosopher and the author of the classic "Iki" no Kozo, to explore culture and theory in Japan during the interwar years. She shows how Japanese intellectual culture ultimately became complicit, even instrumental, in an increasingly repressive and militaristic regime that ultimately brought the world to war. Pincus provides an extensive critical study of Kuki's intellectual lineage and shows how it intersects with a number of central figures in both European and Japanese philosophy. The discussion moves between Germany, France, and Japan, providing a guide to the development of culture in a number of national settings from the turn of the century to the 1930s. Inspired by the work of Foucault, the Marxist culturalists, and the Frankfurt School, Pincus reads against the grain of traditional interpretation. Her theoretically informed approach situates culture in a historical perspective and charts the ideological dimensions of cultural aesthetics in Japan. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan makes an important contribution to our understanding of modernity, nationalism, and fascism in the early twentieth century.

Modern Japanese Aesthetics
Modern Japanese Aesthetics

Author: Michael F. Marra

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-09-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780824820770

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Modern Japanese Aesthetics is the first work in English on the history of the Japanese philosophy of art, from its inception in the 1870s to the present. In addition to the historical information and discussion of aesthetic issues that appear in the introductions to each of the chapters, the book presents English translations of otherwise inaccessible major works on Japanese aesthetics, beginning with a complete and annotated translation of the first work in the field, Nishi Amane's Bimyogaku Setsu (The Theory of Aesthetics). In its four sections (The Subject of Aesthetics, Aesthetic Categories, Poetic Expression, Postmodernism and Aesthetics), Modern Japanese Aesthetics discusses the momentous efforts made by Japanese thinkers to master, assimilate, and transform Western philosophical systems to discuss their own literary and artistic heritage. Readers are introduced to debates between the unconditional supporters of Western ideas (Onishi Hajime) and more cautious approaches to the literary and artistic past (Okakura Kakuzo, Tsubouchi Shoyo). The institutionalization of aesthetics as an academic subject is discussed and the work of some of Japan's most distinguished professional aestheticians (Onishi Yoshimori, Imamichi Tomonobu), philosophers (Kusanagi Masao, Nishitani Keiji, Sakabe Megumi), and literary critics (Karatani Kojin) is included. Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a sophisticated and energetic volume on the process that led to the construction of aesthetic categories used by Japanese and, later, Western scholars in discussing Japanese literature and arts. This important work will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the formation of a critical vocabulary in Japan. Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader is a companion volume to A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (UH Press, 2001).

Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture
Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture

Author: Graham Mayeda

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 149857209X

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In every part of the world and in every era, philosophers have reflected on the meaning of culture and its philosophical significance. Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture:Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō explores how three of Japan's preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century—Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō—defined culture and analyzed what it tells us about social relations. Graham Mayeda also explores little-known aspects of the work of each philosopher, including a philosophical analysis of Watsuji's travel diary, Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara, the place of intuition in Kuki's ethics of otherness, and the role of culture in realizing Nishida's concept of reality as the historical world. Each of these three philosophers adapted philosophical methodologies such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical logic to studying the traditional sources of Japanese culture: Confucianism, Buddhism, Bushidō and Shintō. This book focuses on the way that Nishida, Watsuji and Kuki critiqued the methodologies that they adopted from European philosophy and modified them to reflect the values that form the basis of their own cultural tradition. Finally, Mayeda engages with the problem of cultural essentialism by identifying the progressive and conservative elements of each philosopher's characterization of Japanese culture.

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West
Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West

Author: Steve Odin

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-04-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780824823740

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Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern (primarily Japanese) aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, the author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies.

Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre
Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre

Author: Stephen Light

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13:

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For two and a half months in 1928, the Japanese philosopher Shûzô Kuki had weekly talks with a young French student of philosophy—Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1928, Kuki had just come to Paris after having studied with Heidegger and Husserl. Freshly ac­quainted with the new phenomenology, Kuki in­troduced Sartre to this emerging movement in philosophy. In a well-researched introductory essay, Stephen Light details the eight years Kuki spent in Europe in the 1920s, a period during which Kuki came to know Henri Bergson, Heinrich Rickert, and Emile Brehier, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. Light includes translations of two of Kuki’s essays on time and often of his short essays on matters Japanese, culminating in the insightful “General Characteristics of French Philosophy.” None of the Kuki essays were previously available in English. The final section of the book is a facsimile of the never before published notebook Kuki used during his discussions with Sartre.

Before the Nation
Before the Nation

Author: Susan L Burns

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-12-02

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0822384906

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Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity. Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.