JAPANESE AESTHETICS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING

· 期刊原文

JAPANESE AESTHETICS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING

By Michele Marra

Philosophy East and West

Volume 45, Number 3 July 1995 P.367-386

(C) by University of Hawai'i Press

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P.367

Recently, much has been made in the West of
poststructuralist modes of interpretation that
challenge the comforting stability of hermeneutical
practices grounded in metaphysical explanations of
reality. The great debate between the French and
German inheritors of the Enlightenment has polarized
the European and American fields of interpretation
between a staunch opposition to the acceptance of
definable meanings and a stern resistance to the
dismantling of the concept of "presence" that for
centuries has been at the core of Western
epistemology. The twentieth-century rhetorical
attack on the alleged rationality of the
Platonic-Aristotelian-Cartesian-Hegelian scheme of
things has vehemently resurrected the powerful
antirationalist bent of the Sophist movement that,
in the fifth century B.C., was reduced to a silence
that thereafter led to its neglect. Although to the
contemporary Western observer this mostly French
renewal of nondialectical thinking might have come
as a surprising phenomenon, it is my contention that
the Japanese response to the postmodern debate has
been softened by an inscription of the same conflict
within the boundaries of its premodern culture. It
is the purpose of this essay to show the role played
in medieval Japan(1) by self-contradictory modes of
interpretation that privilege both the fluidity of
Becoming and the metaphysical presence of Being.

Void and Nothingness

When we observe the map of the contemporary
process of capital accumulation, we cannot fail to
notice a concerted effort by unpretentious
structures of economic/political manipulation to
draw a chart of dispersal in which the consumer is
led to believe in his/her own personal empowerment.
Individuals are needed as potential buyers at a time
when monarchs, states, and national boundaries
obstruct the free flow of exchange that make markets
the undisputed lawmakers of the late twentieth
century. This rising to "power" of consumers from
different cultural backgrounds makes any concept of
authority that is not directly invested in the
alleged "choice" of the individual problematic. The
truth is with the consumer, and there are as many
truths as there are consumers. In fact, truth seems
to reside more with the variety of constantly
changing products that challenge consumers by
confronting their "bourgeois integrity" with an
alleged freedom to choose whatever they desire.
Rather than being alienated, the subject is
fragmented, like the frenetic buyer in a mall whose
main anxiety derives from the puzzlement of
selecting which brand from which store on which
occasion. The commodity's disposable nature
justifies consumers' lack of commitment and

P.368

the unsteadiness of their convictions, which, far
from being a source of continuing concern that still
remains for the people of modernity, are the marks
of updatedness, sophistication, and "liberation."(2)

In spite of the bleak potential for its writing a
new page of false consciousness, what we today call
postmodernism cannot be denied the merit of
continuing the unfinished business of modernism: to
reject the transparency of a master history in which
truth unfolds along the lines of Platonic and
Aristotelian philosophy, and which a Cartesian
subject constructs in binary opposition and Hegelian
synthetic processes. The demise of grand narratives
challenges the unitarian view of history that has
made the masters of the written word the
undisputable makers of human destiny. The
pluralization of histories has made societies less
transparent and less willing to accept the notion
of an objective reality whose frame of reference is
grounded in the unverifiable fable of the
metaphysical world.(3) The Nietzschean Ubermensch is
finally finding a concretization in the person of
postmodernity, who, by accepting the tragedy of the
demise of "truth" and by resuming the anti-Socratic
philosophy of belittled Sophists, denies the
existence of permanent, stable, "metaphysical"
truths and essences.

In spite of a multiplicity of interpretative
strategies, the current debate on the postmodern
focuses on how to dismantle epistemological
categories that restrict the human mind within the
closed boundaries of a metalanguage that fails to
explain itself, let alone the object of its
speculation. Nietzsche's murder of the reassuring
myth of stability and meaning, as well as
Heidegger's concept of the human fluctuation between
belonging and loss, deprives humanity of a
"scientific" apparatus that might provide
legitimation to the process of thinking. If the main
target of postmodernism is the dismantling of
Western epistemology, non-Western cultures whose
premodern world has developed independent of Western
influences should well be positioned to claim their
status of postmodernity ante-litteram. This is
exactly what is currently occurring among Japanese
intellectuals, for whom postmodernism is as new as
the beginning of their civilization.

For example, Karatani Kojin (b. 1941), a leading
voice in contemporary Japan, argues that in his
country the postmodern questioning of modernity was
contemporaneous with the importation from the West
of modernity in the second half of the nineteenth
century. The invocation of traditional practices
resisting the country's "blind" acceptance of
modernism, modernity, and modernization can
reasonably open the doors to postmodernity, provided
that premodern conditions satisfy the postmodern
requirement of deliverance from metaphysics. Given
the impact that Buddhism had on medieval Japanese
culture, Karatani is free to argue that the
rejection of the dualities of one and many, inner
and outer, subject and object, and mind and body has
been at the core of

P.369

Japan's philosophical tradition since time
immemorial. Quoting from the distinguished writer
Mori Ogai (1862-1922), he points out the postmodern
nature of the Japanese subject, "a bundle of
subjectivities" determined more by circumstances
than by an appropriation of the Cartesian mind.
Karatani argues that the lack of an original
metaphysical apparatus explains the preeminence in
Japan of the process of becoming (naru) over an
absent presence of Being. The Japanese cultural
tradition, he continues, has unfolded "naturally"
and free of any metaphysical rationalism, from the
time Buddhist thinkers developed the theory of
impermanence (mujo) until the dismissal of rational
categories on the part of the eighteenth-century
philosopher Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801).(4)

Although Karatnni's characterization of the
Buddhist strategy of decentering, which reads a
major stream of premodern Japanese thought in a
postmodern light, is undoubtedly accurate, the
presence of Motoori among the beacons of
postmodernity is at best suspicious, given his
leaning toward the reinstatement in Japanese
epistemology of a metaphysical world that was part
of a tradition no less prominent than its more
postmodern counterpart. The presence in the Japanese
philosophical tradition of what has been called
"weak thought"(5)--the relativism of a continuously
decentered philosophy of absence--implies rather
than denies a "stronger" philosophy of Being that
already made its apparently contradictory appearance
within the Buddhist deconstructive stream. This
metaphysics of presence reappeared during the
Tokugawa period (1600-1868), when Japanese scholars
were faced with a redifinition of representation as
the linkage between ontology and its metaphysical
ground--what has come to be known as "the spirit of
representation" (kotodama). Before dealing with the
hermeneutics of presence, however, let me examine a
few features of Japanese antirationalism.

"Weak Thought": Poetic Representations. There is
some sort of commensurability between Nietzsche's
proclamation of the death of God and the Zen
patriarch's exhortation to kill the Buddha.(6) Both
imply that if the construction of external authority
(myth) does not die of natural causes, it is
imperative for humankind to bring its life to a
quick end. In both Nictzsche's nihilism and the East
Asian monistic philosophy, ultimate values are
superfluous inasmuch as they block the march toward
knowledge by introducing a comforting and gratuitous
end to the potential of change. Reality is a fable
whose "appearance" is by no means any less real or
unreal than the ontos on of what we take to be
"scientifically" true. Nietzsche spelled it out
clearly in the Twilight of the Idols: "The
characteristics which have been assigned to the
'real being' of things are the characteristics of
non-being, of nothingness--the 'real

P.370

world' has been constructed out of the contradiction
to the actual world: an apparent world indeed,
insofar as it is no more than a moral-optical
illusion."(7)

As long as people insist upon reading the
fabulistic experience of reality as "truth," they
cannot be freed from the metaphysics of theology/
teleology, whose ground Heidegger exhorted to
discard in order to be able to "jump into the
abyss." Once the foundation of Being has been
ungrounded, Being starts making sense as the
constitutive possibility of not-being any longer.
Heidegger, who strenuously searched for a method to
get rid of metaphysics--without, however, sacrificing
Being on the Nietzschean altar of the
anti-Christ--argued that Being cannot be thought of
as presence, since the only organ that can actualize
it--thought---remembers Being as what has already
disappeared (an-denken), a void moment of absence.
Being is a trace of past words, a message
transmitted (Uberlieferung) from generation to
generation of mortal entities; it is contained in
the process of becoming, and identifies with the
fleeting rhythm of existence, nothingness.(8)

Gianni Vattimo calls this exit from the
metaphysical dimension "weak ontology, " an
acceptance-convalescence-distortion in which "the
metaphysical concepts of subject and object, or more
correctly reality and truth-ground, lose their
weight." In this lightened version of postmodernity,
the split between truth and
fiction/information/image is in some way reconciled
by a human swinging (schwingend) in a lightened/
enlightened reality.(9)

No one in the West has been more sensible to the
distortions of metalanguage than the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose essays "Force and
Signification" and "Structure, Sign, and Play" are
devoted to showing the metaphoricity and circularity
of all structural discourses. The logic/rationalism
of metaphysics that informs all predetermined
interpretative practices introduces into
metalanguage the "truth" that one wants to find in a
text already, before approaching the object of
interpretation. The use of metalanguage is, then,
reduced to a series of metaphorical and
self-reflexive props without which the mind loses
its ability to conceptualize. The Derridean process
of deconstruction challenges the interpreter to
pause on the opacity of metalanguage and meditate on
the metaphoricaI/metaphysical plays characterizing
interpretative practices. Derrida is indebted to
Nietzsche when he moves from logic to rhetoric by
subjecting to rhetorical analysis the metaphorical
movement from image to concept.(10)

The deconstructive practice that suspends the
metaphysical correspondence among mind, meaning, and
the method allegedly uniting them was not unknown to
the Buddhist philosophical tradition, which
characterized truth as an insight into a
nondifferentiating and non-objectifying wisdom
(praj~naa) that frees the interpreter from the
danger of

P.371

thinking of categories as absolutes. This nameless
and formless reality stretching beyond the
well-known boundaries of conceptualization has
engaged the sharpest minds of Asia in the definition
of what language can hardly name and concepts can
hardly describe: Naagaarjuna (ca. A.D. 100-200)
calls it `suunyataa (emptiness), Chuang Tzu (between
399 and 295 B.C.) refers to it as wu (nonbeing), and
Lao Tzu (sixth century B.C.) calls it the tao (way).

The American scholar Thomas Kasulis challenger
this defiance of conceptualization by using the
image of the hollow interior of a bell. Once the
bell is struck, the observer expects a sound to come
from it, but, Kasulis inquires, does the sound come
"from the metal casting or from the emptiness
inside"? He argues that no sound would be possible
without either the hollow interior or the casting,
so that "for the bell to resound, both the Being and
the Nonbeing of the bell are necessary."(11)

The grasping of the interrelatedness of
opposites requires in Zen meditational practices a
particular training of the mind called mushin, or
no-mind, which introduces the practitioner to a
mental stage preceding the formation of meaning. The
medieval Japanese philosopher Dogen (1200-1253)
called this privileged access to enlightenment
"without thinking" (hishiryo) , which he
distinguished from both "thinking" (shiryo) and
"not-thinking" (fushiryo) . The peculiarity of
"without thinking" is its nonconceptual and
prereflective mode of consciousness, which makes the
individual perceive reality as it is (genjokoan),
without letting consciousness and the construction
of categories intervene in the modification and
distortion of reality. Experience then precedes the
conceptual categorization of reality, which the mind
scrutinizes as the coming into consciousness of past
conditions. Prereflective experience avoids the
distortion operated by the reflection of reality on
the mirror of the mind.(12) Reality is then
perceived in its phenomenological aspect of constant
transformation (mujo), which resists reduction to
the grammatical rules of logic and rejects the
grammaticalization of conceptual categories. Let me
use another eloquent example taken from Thomas
Kasulis:

Even if thought A (a flower) occurs to you, as
long as it is not followed by thought B (is
beautiful) no significance such as A is B (a
flower is beautiful) is formed. Neither is it
something which could be taken in the sense of A
which is B (beautiful flower). Then, even if
thought A does occur in your head, as long as
you don't continue the thought, A stands before
the formation of meaning. It is meaningless, and
in that condition will disappear as
consciousness flows on.(13)

The logical links of the chain of existence are
broken and nothing exists but experience before the
stage of consciousness--the flower or the sound of
the bell uncontaminated by the presence of a viewer
or a

P.372

listener. Language reconstructs experience by
putting in grammatical form the results of
retrospective analysis. Therefore, by reducing
experience to conceptual categories, language fails
to represent reality, whose portrayal falls prey to
distortion and error, since language cannot catch
the immediacy of experience. This reminds us of
Nietrsche's theory of metaphorization, which results
from the fact that things cannot be known in
themselves since "the chemical analysis of the
process of knowledge reveals that this is nothing
but a series of metaphors."(14) If language must
freeze on the page the absence of a fleeting and
nonconceptualizable moment, error becomes the
inevitable necessity in order for one to escape the
burden of metaphysics (i.e., "thinking/not
thinking").

East Asian philosophies have paid unusual
attention to the problem of naming and the
arbitrariness of all signifiers. We may recall the
famous beginning of Lao Tzu's Tao-te ching: "the way
is not the way people think of; names are not what
people take names to be."(15) As a product of human
consciousness, reality cannot ground itself in the
stability of meaning, which, on the contrary, is
relative and illusory. This perception of reality,
which was shared by Taoists and Buddhists alike,
further discredits linguistic activity as a
temporary means to represent what in reality fails
to prove its own existence. In Japan, philosophers
of a major Buddhist school known as Tendai called
the arbitrary linkage between sign and object
"temporary specification" (kemyo), the fabrication
of an imaginary relationship between the object and
its naming as a tool for the organization of
knowledge. Buddhists argued that since there is no
truth in representation, what we take as reality is
nothing but the product of "a worldly logic"
(zokutai), while Buddhist truth (shintai) cannot
become an object of representation. This explains
the resistance that language encountered among many
Buddhist practitioners--mainly members of the Zen
school--whose teachings were transmitted
experientially from mind to mind (master to
disciple) rather than entrusted to the written page.
The Buddhist justification of language occurred at
the metaphorical level, where a privileged kind of
language--namely poetic--came to be accepted as a
"skillful device" (hoben) to supplement the
contingent, illusory logic of ordinary language.

The medieval poet Fujiwara Shunzei (1114-1204)
stated that reality was the product of poetry and
textualization. The perception of external reality
was not informed by the impression of nature on the
viewer's mind; it was rather the result of poetic
representation. According to Shunzei, colors and
fragrances were not located in nature, but in the
poet's words. As he stated in his poetic treatise,
the Korai Fuuteisho, "without poetry, although we
might be able to pay our respects to the cherry
blossoms in spring and admire the maples in autumn,
no one would be able to distinguish [i.e., to
understand] their color and fragrance."(16)

Far from considering the perception of external
reality to be the

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result of a passive reception of the natural world,
Shunzei explained it as the active product of the
poet's creative power, which becomes an experiential
form of knowledge at the time of textual reception.
The movement of the poet's heart (kokoro)
corresponds to this moment of authorial creation,
which the Japanese aesthetician Amagasaki Akira (b.
1947) calls "poetic subjectivity" (shiteki
shukan).(17) According to Amagasaki, the reception
of poetry is a transfer to the reader of "poetic
subjectivity," whose reiteration Shunzei calls "the
way of poetry" (uta no michi). It would be a
mistake, however, to visualize such a "way" as a
material structure of presence: we must, in fact,
remember that the eye (or common subjectivity)
cannot see it, since Shunzei's "way" is a process
resulting from overexposure to poetic subjectivity
rather than a localizable activity. Borrowing from
the language of a major scripture of the Tendai
school, the Mo-ho chi-kuan (Jpn Makashikan, Great
Concentration and Insight) by the Chinese
philosopher Chih-i (538-597), Shunzei described this
process as a bracketing or stopping (shi) of the
daily practice of conceptualization, expression, and
language (gengo dodan) in favor of envisioning (kan)
a reality that nothing shares with the illusory,
temporary, ordinary world as perceived by the common
subject.

Shunzei's association of the "way of poetry"
with the "Buddhist way" (hotoke no michi) freed
poetic activity from the presence of a metaphysical
ground, inscribing the production and reception of
poetry within a spiral of emptiness and void. The
title of his major theoretical work, Korai fuuteisho
(Excerpts from the Poetic Body from the Past to the
Present Time), refers to the role played by poetry
as the textual reproduction of the three bodies of
void, temporariness, and the middle (kukechu no
santai). Shunzei was quoting from the Tendai theory
of the "Three Truths" (santai), also known as the
"Three Views" (sankan).(18)

The first truth, known as the truth of void
(kuutai) introduces what today we would call a
poststructural model of representation inasmuch as
everything is posited as a relative existence open
to an uninterrupted process of deconstruction, the
product of an arbitrary sign whose meaning results
from a deferring movement of difference. The fallacy
of naming is a fiction that promotes aberrant forms
of communication that are discredited by the
decentered truth that "everything is void, matter is
void, void is matter." The simplistic or mimetic
view that takes the sign to be the represented
object corresponds to the second truth, or temporary
truth (ketai), according to which everything is
posited as presence in spife of its simply temporary
existence. The potential for the specification of
reality precedes what we take to be definitively
specified on account of our faulty senses. The third
and median truth (chuutai) mediates the rupture
between absence (kuu) and presence (ke), ungrounding
them both and presenting them as the supreme moment
of undecidability.

As in the process of Buddhist enlightenment, the
poetic act entails

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the potentiality for the ideation of a
deconstructible reality that denies the presence of
what appears to be. Shunzei gives the example of
utamakura or "pillow-poems"--foundation verses that
established the language and imagery expected to be
employed by poets while representing famous scenic
spots--as producers of a textual reality much more
powerful than the immediate result of the poet's
direct experience. Poets were expected to have their
experiences molded by the poetic tradition and were
strongly forbidden to inject into their descriptions
the details of the "real"--that is, temporary--view.
Each viewer became a poet when confronted by the
"actual" scene, inasmuch as his perception was
immediately modified by textual knowledge. If
required to write another poem on his vision, he
would have to avoid the illusion of temporariness,
concentrating instead on quoting from the autonomous
sphere of textuality that was sharply removed from
the world as commonly experienced. Similar to
Buddhist experience, in this textual world, cherry
blossoms do not scatter like snow, nor does snow
fall like cherry blossoms. Instead, the poet creates
a reality in which the reader is reminded that
cherry blossoms are snow, and vice versa.

The poem's form (sugata) produces, justifies,
and treasures the para doxes of a decentered truth
that refuses to accept the idea that flowers cannot
dissolve into snow, or that snow cannot solidify
into flowers. Rather than represent "beautiful
flowers" as poets had done in the past, Shunzei
creates a reality in which "beautiful flowers" speak
the impossibility of representation. If we feel
that, in spite of his claims to the need of
overcoming the structural and linguistic limits of
poetry, Shunzei was still tied to the conventions of
poetic diction and rules of composition, his son
Teika (1162-1241) delivered the final blow to the
concept of poetic structure.

Teika's erasure of linguistic rationality from
the poetic act made him a very controversial figure
in the cultural world of medieval Japan. His concept
of poetry as an activity independent of the
contextual reality of court life put him in open
conflict with Retired Emperor Go-Toba (r.
1183-1198), for whom the poetic act was essentially
a means of political legitimation. The charge of
intellectual arrogance that Go-Toba moved against
Teika in his Go-Toba in gokuuden (Ex-Emperor
Go-Toba's Secret Teachigs) was mainly motivated by
Teika's resistance to acknowledging the dependence
of good poetry on the poet's social status. The
emperor knew that high social credentials were
paramount to the success of a poem, whose popularity
was bound to be guaranteed by the author's political
power. Teika's opposition to the concept of popular
judgment resulted from his conviction that only a
person versed in the "way of poetry" was qualified
to formulate a judgment, no matter what may have
been his or her social standing. As a matter of
fact, Teika's approach to poetry was no less
political than the one privileged by his

P.375

imperial patron inasmuch as Teika supported the idea
that monopolistic rights must be detained by private
families whose major business was, as in the case of
his own Mikohidari house, the legitimation of poetic
lineages.

Teika himself, however, challenged the idea of
transmission by working on the creation of a poetic
style known as the "Mysterious Style of Depth"
(yuugentai), which Go-Toba warned young poets to
stay away from because of its being inimitable.
While relying on "ancient expressions" (furuki
kotoba), by which he meant the words used in the
first three imperial collections--the Kokinshuu
(905) , the Gosenshuu (956), and the Shuuishuu
(1055)--Teika stressed the need "to search for a new
heart" (atarashiki kokoro)(19) in order to create
the ecart (mezurashiki, metomaru) or surplus of
meaning required of poetic language. Teika achieved
this "new heart" by breaking the logical order of
words and by creating ambiguity in the poem's
syntactical patterns so as to interrupt the flow of
signification. We can see this from the following
poem:

Samushiro ya The narrow mat, how cold!
Matsu yo no aki no The waiting night autumnal
Kaze fukete Wind wearing on/blowing
Tsuki o katashiku Spreading one fold of the moon
Uji no Hashihime The Bridge Princess of uji.(20)

It would be hard to start detecting a
preliminary meaning without first referring to the
source of Teika's variation (honkadori), a poem by
Teika himself that says:

Samushiro ni On a narrow mat
Koromo katashiki One fold of her dress spread
Koyoi mo ya Tonight again:
Ware o matsuran She'll be waiting for me
Uji no Hashihime The Bridge Princess of Uji.(21)

By going back and forth between source and
variation, several images can be visualized, such as
the night wearing on while the woman is waiting for
her lover, the setting moon, the cold wind blowing
on the Uji river, and the white moon shining on the
robe of Hashihime--only half of which she has
spread, since she knows that her beloved will fail
again to appear. However, the peculiarity of the
variation consists in the dispersal of signification
that Teika achieves either by taking full advantage
of the denotative richness of the Japanese language,
or by creating grammatical mistakes that deprive
interpretation on a logical grounding. In the first
case the word samushiro indicates both the "cold
season" and the "straw mat," without any need on the
poet's part for linguistic specification. In the
second, the expression kaze fukete (wind wearing on)
is grammatically incorrect since kaze (wind) usually
accompanies fukite (to

P.376

blow), while fukete (to wear on) rather indicates
the night (yo fukete), which is thus silently
implied by Teika's purposeful mistake.

Teika cuts his poems off from the process of
interpretation by insisting on the impossibility of
hermeneutical practices that claim to reconstruct an
alleged original meaning. His poems are built to
resist interpretative closure, as Amagasaki Akira
has demonstrated by focusing on the following poem:

Aki sugite The fall is over
Nao urameshiki And here I am feeling bitter
Asaborake In the early morning light:
Sera yuku kumo mo Even the clouds streaming the sky
Uchishiguretsutsu Turn into the rain of wintery storms.

The hermeneutic task is made desperate by the
proliferation of meaning that defers all potential
interpretations, and makes the poem unintelligible.
On a first reading, the poem above could easily be
interpreted as a simple scenic description
announcing the end of autumn and the arrival of
winter. The metaphoricity of the storm would then
refer to the tears of the narrator, who, for some
unexplained reason, falls victim to bitterness. To
stress the metaphorical aspect of the poem at the
expense of the literal would also determine a shift
in interpretation inasmuch as Teika's poem could
then be taken as a human response to nature: the
sudden disappearance of the lovely colors under the
heavy storms provokes the narrator's depression at
the sight of the intimidating clouds. The validity
of these two superficial interpretations, however,
is immediately called into question as the reader
realizes that the poem's second and third verses are
variations of a well-known poem from the
Goshuuishuu, an imperial collection completed in
1086:

Akenureba Since the day has broken off
Kururu mono to wa It will become dark again,
Shirinagara I know it, and yet
Nao urameshiki This early morning light
Asaborake ka na That makes me feel so bitter!(22)

In this poem the narrator expresses his
bitterness at the early light of morning that
reminds him/her of the time when lovers must
separate. The interpretation of Teika's poem,
therefore, must be reviewed in the light of this
variation to mean that finally the morning--a sad
time for lovers--has come to remind the narrator
that, no matter how temporary it might be, the
present separation is the cause of her deep sadness.
Far from providing any consolation, the natural
setting contributes to an aggravation of the poet's
depression at the sight of the winter storms, tears,
announcing the end of autumn. A further
interpretative displacement, however, follows the
fact that the original poem from the Goshuuishuu

P.377

includes a reference to a legend made famous by the
Chinese poet Li Po (772-846.). According to this
legend, King Hsiang saw himself in a dream
exchanging amorous vows with the goddess of
Sorceress Mountain (Mount Wu). When the time came to
say farewell, the goddess confessed that she dwelled
on a hill south of the mountain, where she used to
transmogrify into a cloud each morning and into rain
every evening. When the king woke up, he realized
that the woman had told him the truth, and, as a
result, he ordered that a shrine be built for the
goddess.

This reference opens a further possibility in
the hermeneutics of Teika's poem, since the allusion
to the Chinese legend points at an unfulfillable
love, a love that has ended forever. This would also
explain the first word in the poem, aki; besides
indicating "autumn," it can also be taken to mean
"to get tired of someone," with particular regard to
romantic occasions. Then we could attempt the
following provisional interpretation: "It is early
morning, and although I have just been abandoned by
my lover, who has finally gotten tired of me, I
cannot forget the night spent with him. The clouds
in the sky keep reminding me of him, and bitter
tears stream down my cheeks." However, this is bound
to remain a temporary interpretation whose
displacement is guaranteed by the hermeneutical
process itself, should we decide to continue
searching for further deferrals and ruptures.(23)

While Fujiwara Shunzei considered reality the
textual product of poetry, Teika denied the
existence of any relationship between the poetic act
and external reality, whether the Buddhist realm of
enlightened absence or the presence of the
historical world. His style was strongly opposed by
members of more conservative poetic schools, who
labeled Teika's poems "Zen-like mad verses"
(darumashuu) because of their resistance to
interpretation The medieval poet and theorist Kamo
no Chomei (1153-1216) applauded Teika's poetry as an
example of surplus of signification deriving from an
outburst of the poet's heart (yojo), whose wordless
articulation (kotoba ni arawarenu yojo) catches a
form of reality that the eye cannot see (sugata ni
mienu keiki).(24) According to Chomei, with Teika's
poetic performance, the silence of absence is more
powerful than the presence of rationally explicable
concepts, and leads the reader to an experience of
yuugen, the ability to be moved by "the view of a
late autumn sky where no color can be seen and no
voice can be heard."(25) This style Teika called
"Body with Heart" (ushintai) in a poetic treatise,
the Maigetsusho, in which Teika strongly opposed the
practice followed by poets in the past of
privileging the arid logic of representation
(kotowari).

The Disclosure of Being

"Strong Thought": The Spirit of Representation
(Kotodama). The Western epistemological tradition of
legitimizing knowledge by grounding it in

P.378

transcendence has been strongly resisted by
exponents of "weak thought" through the centuries.
Although it might be difficult for the postmodern
person to imagine the shocking impact that Gorgia's
argument--"that nothing exists, that even if
anything does exist it is inapprehensible by man,
and even if it were apprehensible it would be
impossible to communicate"(26)--had on a culture
that hardly welcomed the appearance of a treatise
titled On the Nonexistent, Or On Nature, we are all
too well aware of the not always benign reaction of
intellectuals, not to mention the "common" reader,
to the antirational challenge of a Jacques Derrida.
We can easily define the Western philosophical
tradition as a variation on the theme of reality and
other, visible and invisible, speakable and
unspeakable, with the first term firmly grounded in
the second and a single, clear mirror dividing the
two.

We might think, for example, of Plotinus' (A.D.
204/5-270) aesthetic concept of beauty as the
mirroring of the invisible that is revealed--and not
represented, as Plato had argued, with a patent
reference to the imperfection of all imitations--by
the artist's ability to capture the original form.
Plotinus' theory implied the concept of emanation
(tolma) of reality from a transcendental being that
is made of the One (to hen) beyond all conception of
knowledge, the mind (nous), the divine knower who is
one with the object of his knowledge (noeta), and
all-soul (psyche), the principle of life. Plotinus
argued that since reality attempts to recapture its
primal source and, at the same time, its emanation,
beauty is the mirror reflecting the One onto
reality. Art, therefore, acquired a revelatory
purpose.(27)

The empathy with nature of mystics such as St.
Francis and St. Bonaventure is another instance of
the aesthetic relationship between reality and
transcendence. The specular philosophy of St.
Bonaventure likens the world to a mirror whose
brightness derives from the reflection of divine
wisdom. The degree of brightness, however, differs
according to the distance from its source of the
reflected object. The American aesthetician Monroe
C. Beardsley describes these three degrees as
follows:

A "shadow" is a distant and confused
representation of God, by means of certain
properties but without specifying the type of
causal relationship God has to it. A "vestige"
is a distant but distinct representation of God;
the vestige is a property of the created being
that is related to God as its efficient,
exemplary, or final cause. An "image" is a
representation that is both distant and close;
it is a property that acknowledges God not only
as its cause but also as its object.(28)

Far from being unknown in Japan, the
metaphysical explanation of reality occupied the
mind of many intellectuals during both the premodern
and postmodern eras. A good example is provided by
the seventeenth-century theoreticians who developed
the concept of what

P.379

is known today as "the spirit of things" (kotodama),
an attempt to recapture the primal power of language
to unveil the source of signification. A comparison
between Japanese aesthetic theories developed before
and after this time reveals a deep transformation in
the meaning of one of the key concepts of the
Japanese philosophy of art, the idea of the "way"
(michi) . The beginning of the Tokugawa period
witnessed an erosion of multidimensionality that
reshaped the "way" into a unidimensional structure
grounded in the human body, whose main function was
thought to be the disclosure of metaphysical truth.

Rather than being a source of epistemological
strength as had been the case in previous centuries,
the slippage or ecart between the sign and the
object of representation became a source of deep
anxiety as a result of the bifurcation between
reality (what is) and ideal (what ought to be), that
is, between what Japanese philosophers in 1600
referred to as the "way of daily life" and "the way
of the heart." We may think of Motoori Norinaga, who
diagnosed the cause of this illness in the Japanese
importation from India, China, and Europe of alien
epistemologies such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Christianity. As a treatment, Motoori recommended
the recapturing of the transparency of the "way of
the past" (inishie no michi), the ideal time of
mythical coexistence when the sign, he argued,
corresponded to the object in a univocal and
unquestionable relationship. Motoori's thirty-year
struggle to decipher the most ancient Japanese
written document, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient
Matters, A.D. 712), and to make it readable again,
aimed at disclosing a primordial language whose
aesthetic dimension (adagoto) left no room far any
practical connotation (jitsuyo).

The experience of such linguistic revelation
Motoori called "the moving power of things" (mono no
aware), the ability inherent in language to be moved
by the scriptive trace of a cherry blossom, rather
than to conceive of the cherry tree in its material
aspect of firewood. The latter, Motoori noted, was
the result of the representation of what he called
"common words" (tada no kotoba), the signs conveying
"reason" (kotowari), and "the meaning of things"
(koto no i). Mono no aware, on the other hand, was
the domain of "pattern words" (aya) that dressed the
elegance of poetic forms, leading to the disclosure
of the "heart of things." The study of the classics,
particularly the linguistic patterns of the Tale of
Genji (Genji monogatari), became with Motoori a
shortcut to the actual experience of mono no aware
that, far from being limited to a textual event, was
asked to disclose the truth of external reality by
restoring to humanity the transparency of nature.
Textual experience was simply a door to the
realization of mono no aware, mainly related to the
awesome moment of "experiencing" (kansuru tokoro)
what the philosopher Onishi Yoshinori (1888-1959)
called the "excitement" (kando), G verehren) of the
aesthetic adventure.

P.380

However, in Motoori's philosophy, experience
requires the presence of the rational understanding
(wakimaeshiru) of external reality (mono no kokoro,
koto no kokoro), what Onishi has labeled "intuition"
(chokkan, G schauen).(29) The aesthetic awesomeness
of aware cannot take place without the physiological
intervention of the eye, whose vision makes the
"excitement" possible. It also requires the life of
the external object, whose presence, Motoori reminds
his readers, was erroneously discarded by the
aestheticians of the Kamakura (1192-1333) and
Muromachi (1334-1573) periods. He stressed the need
to be deeply acquainted with external reality, so as
to become "experts" (tsujin) of the world, the
knowledge of which takes place through the
physicality of the human body. Motoori recorded in
his Iso no Kami Sasamegoto that, "unless you get in
touch (furezareba) with all elements of external
reality, you will not know the heart of things."(30)
The same thing he repeated in the Shibun yoryo,
where he warned his readers "to get well acquainted
with the things of this world (seken no koto o yoku
shiri)."(31)

Although the body was essential to the
experience of aware, there was more than simple
physicality to the knowledge of the "heart of
things." A judgment of taste was required that
screens the objects fit for such an experience, a
kind of culinary knowledge that is more than
conceptual inasmuch as it goes well beyond the
horizon of epistemology. This privileged knowledge,
or aesthetic knowledge--the taste of things--is
accessed through the surplus of signification
conveyed by "pattern words" that Motoori believed
would bring humanity back to the Being of existence.

Despite his publicized aversion to Buddhist
philosophy, Motoori's theory of language is
profoundly indebted to the work of philosophers
belonging to a Buddhist school known as Shingon
("True Word"). Shingon philosophy constructs the
universe as a symbolic expression (monji) and
embodiment (samayashin) of the indestructible and
timeless Absolute known in Buddhism as the
"Dharma-body" (dharmakaaya) and represented by
Dainichi Nyorai (Skt Mahaavairocana). A series of
mental, verbal, and physical practices unites the
cosmic level of Dainichi Nyorai to the microcosmic
level of reality. This linkage was provided by the
mental envisioning of reality (mandala), the verbal
expression of sacred words (mantra) , and the
enacting of sacred gestures (mudraa). Language,
therefore, was the phonetic link to the Absolute
Buddha as a potential vehicle for conveying the
"true words" of the Absolute. Sacred words were
thought to be pointers to the root of language,
which was the root of reality as emanated from the
body of the Buddha.(32)

A similar hermeneutical path was followed by the
thinker Fujitani Mitsue (1768-1822), for whom also
poetry was a means to the disclosure of Being. Like
Motoori he considered the human patterns of
individuation--self, will, desires, and
passions--privileged components of

P.381

human beings that Fujitani argued were known in
ancient Japan as "the sacred" (kami). Rather than
associating the senses with the potential production
of evil, as Confucian thinkers had consistently
argued, Fujitani described them as spiritual
elements, hidden in the innermost part of the body
(yuu), that made up what he called the "godly way"
(shinto). Their power was confirmed by the fact
that, if overregulated, the senses could destroy the
body by causing illness, madness, or suicide.
Fujitani distinguished the psychological aspect of
the self from its bodily and physical expression
(jindo), which was instead dominated by reason
(kotowari). The "sacred" was contrasted to the
"bodily" (hito), which Fujitani conceived as an
external manifestation of the self (ken) regulated
by social, ethical, and religious rules. The latter
was responsible for the performance of the good and
evil that resulted from the body's tendency either
to observe or to break social conventions.

Communication between the external, physical
components of human beings occurred through daily
language and daily actions that, by being unable to
convey spiritual experiences of the self, Fujitani
argued, ended up "killing god/the sacred" (koto to
iu mono wa kami o korosu). A privileged language was
required to disclose the inner self that he called
"true words" (makoto) and "true acts" (mawaza), and
whose location was to be found in the "way of
poetry" (kado). This special language was alleged to
heal the fracture between internal and external
elements of human reality, and restore the "way of
humanity" to the godliness of the "way of
gods/senses." Fujitani referred to this special
feature of poetic language as "reversed words" (togo
or sakashimagoto) , which he explained in his
Essentials of the Way of Poetry (Kado kyoyo) (1817)
in the following terms: "Reversed words are like
saying 'I do not go' when I actually go, and 'I do
not see' when I actually see. Reversals are
applicable to events as well as to feelings (jo).
You do not reveal your thoughts; instead you build
with words what you do not think. On purpose you
invert the signification of words."(33)

The power of poetic language, thus, resides in
its ability to say something by not saying it, or to
say it by pointing at something else, or even by its
indicating the opposite of what the poet intends to
say. In this respect Fujitani found two major
rhetorical figures in metaphor and metonymy. In the
first case, the metaphorical use of the word
"flower" to indicate a person's life was expected to
make the reader experience the transience of time
that ordinary language could only catch as rational
connotation. Likewise, metonymy was expected to
highlight the "spiritual" side of experience, which
would otherwise be confined to a dry, denotative
linguistic pattern. Fujitani gives the example of
the powerful eloquence of an expression like "I want
to visit your house," which conveys much more
strongly the desire to meet with someone than the
more simple "I want to see you."(34)

P.382

According to Fujitani, reversed words are the
"spirit of things" (kotodama) hiding the presence of
Being (kami); they are "true words" (makoto, written
with the same characters as shingon) incorporating a
spiritual presence (tama). Poetic language explodes
conventional vocabularies beyond the constrictive
field of denotation, informing the word with the
formlessness of the noumenal/experiential. Kotodama
is a language without words (fugen) that only a
poet, a child, or a sage possesses. Poetry contains
the hidden voice of Being (kakurimi) whose secrecy
only the hermeneutical act can disclose.(35)

Fujitani explained his method of hermeneutical
recovery in what he called the
"surface/underside/border theory" (omote ura sakai),
according to which each word is made up of three
meanings: (1) the apparent meaning that, in the case
of the word for "pine tree, " for example,
distinguishes that plant from the oak; (2) the
excluded meaning of "oak" from which the pine tree
is differentiated; and (3) the intended, symbolic
meaning that, in the case of a pine tree in the East
Asian tradition, would most certainly be the idea of
"old age." The same scheme can easily be applied to
sentences, in which case, according to Fujitani, the
command "close the door!" would mean: (1) An order
to close the door and not the window, (2) the fact
that the door is open, and (3) the fact that the
person issuing the order might be concerned with the
cold or the noise coming from the outside. The third
meaning--the "border meaning"--is the most
problematic since it is the result of fallible
conjecture.

Once applied to the interpretation of poetry,
Fujitani's theory argues that a poem (waka) includes
three interpretative levels, culminating in the
disclosure of Being. The first level is the
expression of the poet's feelings at a particular
time. The second indicates the undisclosed "other"
of the poem, or what has been excluded from it. This
is a key moment for the third and final disclosure
of the internal conflict between the poet's
innermost self and external reality. Fujitani
provides several examples in the Light on the One
Poem by a Hundred Poets (Hyakunin isshu tomoshibi),
his reading of Fujiwara Teika's Hyakunin isshu.
Following the lead of Amagasaki Akira, I will
concentrate on the following poem by Sugawara no
Michizane (845-903):

Kono tabi wa For this travel
Nusa mo toriaezu I could not offer the deity
Tamukeyama The purifying paper:
Momiji no nishiki Instead I will be presenting him
Kami no manimani With the brocade of maples.(36)

In addition to the literal meaning--the first
level of interpretation--Fujitani reminds the reader
of the extraordinary circumstances in which the poem
was composed, as the reader can surmise from the
fact that, had the poet planned his travel, he would
have had plenty of time for the

P.383

preparation of the customary offerings. The poet's
inner desire to provide the deity with proper
donations was thwarted by the fact that the travel
in question is Michizane's trip into exile, and this
prevents him from discharging his duties--the second
interpretative level. The "border meaning" is the
poet's profound resentment against the government at
the thought that he has been deprived of his only
chance to assure himself with divine protection
during the dangerous trip to Dazaifu, on the island
of Kyushu.

According to Fujitani, the poet's anxiety
results from the subjugation of the guts--the
aesthetic sacred dimension--to the political rules
of the body, or external reality. The poet
penetrates and communicates with the inner self
(kami) of the reader by dwelling within the "spirit
of words" (kotodama), which awakens the reader to
the truth of his real, "unidimensional" Being.

Although they shared the common goal of engaging
the Other and articulating a discourse on the topic
of the invisible, the interpreters of yuugen and
kotodama proceeded along different paths that are of
cogent actuality to the contemporary debaters of
postmodernity. While the theorists of the "deep and
dark" (yuugen) undertook the challenging task of
debunking metaphysics, the commentators of the
"spirit of things" (kotodama) followed a hermeneutic
strategy that, in spite of Heidegger's acrobatics of
denial, never completely succeeded in silencing a
resistant metaphysical ground. The struggle on the
part of contemporary Japanese philosophers to
"harmonize" the inconsistencies of the two systems
into a native post-postmodern epistemology is far
from complete.(37) "Weak thought" and "strong
thought," however, continue to coexist in the works
of contemporary thinkers while the possessing demon
of metaphysical hermeneutics refuses to die in the
postmodern land of the groundless Buddha.

NOTES

This essay was written under the auspices of a Japan
Foundation grant that allowed me to do reseach in
the Department of Aesthetics (Bigakka) of the
University of Osaka from May to August 1993. I wish
to thank Professor Kanbayashi Tsunemichi for his
invaluable suggestions and for steering my research
in the direction taken in the present essay.

1 - My use of the word "medieval" when applied to
Japan follows the extended meaning provided by
William R. LaFleur in his Karma of Words:
Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University
of California Press, 1983),

P.384

where "medieval" includes the Tokugawa period
(1600-1868) have discussed this topic in my
Representations of Power: The Literary Politics
of Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1993), pp. 154-155.

2 - For a critique of postmodernism see Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991).

3 - In response to the Marxist critique of
postmodernism, the Italian philosopher Gianni
Vattimo sees in the "chaos" of a fragmented
subjectivity the seed of emancipation from the
simplistic view of reality grounded in Creek
metaphysics. See his La Societa Trasparente
(Milan: Garzanti, 1989).

4 - Karatani Kojin, Hihyii to posuto modan (Tokyo:
Fukutake Shoten, 1985), pp. 9-49.

5 - G. Vattimo and P. A. Rovatti, II Pensiero Debole
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983).

6 - "You kill the Buddha if you meet him; you kill
the ancient Masters if you meet them" (Zenkei
Shibayama, ed., Zen Comments on the Mumonkan
[San Francisco: Harper and Row, 19741), p. 29.

7 - Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and
The Anti-Christ (1889; London: Penguin Books,
1990), p. 49.

8 - See Gianni Vattimo, La Fine della Modernita
(Milan: Garzanti, 1985), pp. 27-38, 121-136.

9 - Ibid., p. 189.

10 - Both articles mentioned above appear in Jacques
Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978). See also
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and
Practice (1982; London and New York: Routledge,
1991), pp. 78-83.

11 - T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action Zen Person (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1981), pp. 34-35.

12 - See also the analogous concept of "pure
experience" developed by Nishida Kitaro
(1870-1945) in the attempt to define the stage
of nonreflective consciousness (Nishida Kitaro,
An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and
Christopher Ives [New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1990]).

13 - Kasulis, Zen Action Zen Person, p. 45.

14 - Vattimo, La Fine della Modernita, p. 175.

15 - Abe Yoshio et al., eds., Roshi, Soshi,
Shinshaku kanbun taikei 7 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin,
1966), p. 11.

P.385

16 - Hashimoto Fumio et al., eds., Karonshuu, NKBZ
50 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1975), p. 273.

17 - Amagasaki Akira, Kacho no tsukai: Uta no michi
no shigaku, Gendal bigaku sosho 7 (Tokyo: Keiso
Shobd, 1983), p. 81.

18 - See the informed discussion by William R.
LaFleur in his Karma of Words, pp. 80-106.

19 - See Teika's treatise, Eiga taigai, in Hashimoto
et al., Karonshuu, pp. 493-494.

20 - Shinkokinshuu 420 (Kubota Jun, ed., Shin kokin
wakashuu: Jo, SNKS 24 [Tokyo: Shinchosha,
1979], p. 150).

21 - Matsushita Daisaburd, ed., Zoku kokka taikan:
Kashuu (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1958), p. 540,
N. 33,836. See also Amagasaki, Kacho no tsukai,
pp. 135-136.

22 - Goshuuishuu 672 (Fujimoto Kazue, ed., Goshuui
Wakashuu 3, Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko 586 [Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1983], p. 98).

23 - See Amagasaki, Kacho no tsukai, pp. 136-138.

24 - Yanase Kazuo, Mumyosho zenko (Tokyo: Kato
Chuudokan, 1980), p. 388. See also Hilda Kato,
"The Mumyosho of Kamo no Chomei and Its
Significance in Japanese Literature," Monumenta
Nipponica 23(3-4) (1968): 408.

25 - Yanase, Mumyosho zenko, p. 388. See also Kato,
"The Mumyosho of Kamo no Chomei," p. 408.

26 - George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its
Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to
Modern Times (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 30-31.

27 - Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical
Greece to the Present: A Short History(1966;
University, Alabama: The University of Alabama
Press, 1982), pp. 84-85.

28 - Ibid., p. 113.

29 - Onishi Yoshinori, Yuugen to aware (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1939), pp. 125-134; see also
Amagasaki, Kacho no tsukai, pp. 222-241.

30 - Hino Tatsuo, ed., Motoori Norinaga shuu, SNKS
60 (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1983), p. 445.

31 - Ibid., p. 87.

32 - See Thomas P. Kasulis, "The Origins of the
Question: Four Traditional Japanese
Philosophies of Language," in Eliot Deutsch,
ed., Culture and Modernity: East-West
Philosophical Perspectives (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 213-226.

P.386

33 - Miyake Kiyoshi, ed., Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue
zenshuu, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shibunkaku, 1986), p.
766.

34 - Ibid., p. 768.

35 - See the discussion on Fujitani by Isobe
Tadamasa, Mujo no kozo: Kami no sekai, Kodansha
gendai shinsho 450 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1976), pp.
61-82.

36 - Miyake, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue zenshuu, vol.
4, pp. 249-250; Amagasaki, Kacho no tsukai, pp.
260-261.

37 - See, for example, the interesting work of
Sakabe Megumi (b. 1936) on language as a link
between the transcendental and the
intersubjective in the definition of a Japanese
subject that is free of Cartesian dualities
(Sakabe Megumi, Kamen no kaishakugaku (Tokyo:
Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1976), and Kagami no
naka no Nihongo: sono shiko no shujuso, Chikuma
Library 22 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1989).