Sure to be a classic, Donald Richie offers concise, profound insights into Japanese art in A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics.
This provocative book is a tractate, a treatise, on beauty in Japanese art, written in the manner of a zuihitsu, a free-ranging assortment of ideas that follow the brush wherever it leads. Donald Richie looks at how perceptual values in Japan were drawn from raw nature and then modified by elegant expressions of class and taste. He explains aesthetic concepts like wabi, sabi, aware, and yugen, and ponders their relevance in art and cinema today.
A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie is available in both print and digital everywhere now. Order your copy here.
Read a sample of A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics below.
aesthetics is that branch of philosophy defining beauty and the beautiful, how it can be recognized, ascertained, judged.
In the West the term was first used in 1750 to describe a science of sensuous knowledge. Its goal was beauty, in contrast with logic, whose goal was truth. Based upon dichotomies (beauty/truth, aesthetics/logic) the definition was elaborated into a multi-faceted concept assuming that opposites and alternates lead to an aesthetic result. The conjectures and conclusions were those of eighteenth-century Europe but are still common today.
There are, however, different criteria at different times in different cultures. Many in Asia, for example, do not subscribe to general dichotomies in expressing thought. Japan makes much less of the body/mind, self/group formation, with often marked consequences. Here we would notice that what we would call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.
The Western concept finds beauty in something we admire for itself rather than for its uses, something that the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) called “purposiveness without a purpose.” Traditional Japan emphasizes differently. It is closer to such pre-Enlightenment European definitions as Chaucer’s “Beautee apertenant to Grace,” where the grace of fitness excites intellectual or moral pleasure and gives rise to the concept of social approval in the form of good taste.
Jean de la Bruyère, the French moralist, early in the seventeenth century defined the quality: “Entre le bon sens and le bon goût il y a la différence de la cause et son effet.” Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect, an observation with which Chaucer, as well as the aesthetically traditional Japanese, might have agreed. In matters aesthetic, taste remains an observation of deserved worth, and that should take care of that—except that we are not all agreed as to what good sense consists of.
Some countries say one thing, some say another. The Japanese traditionally maintain that we have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy, daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense, really—Nature should be our model, we are to regard it, to learn from it. When Keats upset aesthetic patterning in the West with his notorious assertion that “truth is beauty; beauty, truth,” he was very close to the Asian notion that these are identical and to the suggestion that dichotomies are tools too dull to delineate the wholeness of observation.
Bruyère’s aperçu is, indeed, so sensible that one would expect it to apply just everywhere. It does not, but it does to Japan. As the aesthetician Ueda Makoto has said: “In premodern Japanese aesthetics, the distance between art and nature was considerably shorter than in its Western counterparts.” And the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō has written in that important aesthetic text In Praise of Shadows: “The quality that we call beauty . . . must always grow from the realities of life.”
Elsewhere—in Europe, even sometimes in China—Nature as guide was there but its role was restricted to mimesis, realistic reproduction. In Japan this was traditionally not enough. It was as though there was an agreement that the nature of Nature could not be presented through literal description. It could only be suggested, and the more subtle the suggestion (think haiku) the more tasteful the work of art.
Here Japanese arts and crafts (a division that the premodern Japanese did not themselves observe) imitated the means of nature rather than its results. One of these means was simplicity. There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts. Showing structure, emphasizing texture—even boldly displaying an almost ostentatious lack of artifice—this was what the Japanese learned to do. Such simplicity was to be delineated by a number of categories—for example, wabi and sabi, those conjoined twins of Japanese aesthetics that we will later visit. One result was that, as a prerequisite for taste, this simplicity was found beautiful.
in the west, the word “aesthetic” has many uses. The most widely applied distinguishes the beautiful from the merely pleasing, or the merely moral or (in particular) the merely useful. In its assumptions of a sensuous knowledge the goal of which is beauty (in contrast with logic always in search of truth), it further elaborates into a doctrine insisting that, whatever the principles of beauty are, they are basic since all other principles (the good, the right) are derived from them.
The above assumption is thought truthful because it is presumed that actual knowledge comes from an immediate presentation of reality rather than from analytical thought itself—“aesthetic” derives from the Greek aesthesis, which means perception/ sensation. From such assumptions grew that branch of philosophy called Aesthetics—dealing with the beautiful, with theories of beauty, with its essential character, with the emotions stimulated by the beautiful, and with that general agreement manifested in “taste.”
In the East, however, there was no word corresponding to “aesthetic.” Japan coined its presumed equivalent (bigaku) only in 1883, and this was because a term became necessary in order to refer to what foreigners meant when they spoke of ästhetik, the German philosopher Hegel’s term for the “science of the fine arts.”
Once the word was in place, however, the University of Tokyo could then offer (1886) a course in Aesthetics. These classes were naturally devoted to Western (particularly German) ideas and little attention was paid to the native tradition even though a considerable amount of traditional writing on the nature of art already existed.
One reason for this was that there was no rubric under which these “premodern” aesthetic ideas could be subsumed. If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.
(This was back then, not now. Foreigners now seeking a traditional aesthetic climate in Japan are disappointed. Though there are attempts to bridge the gulf—Pokémon is really just like Hokusai, etc.—the erosion of the traditional is enormous. On the other hand, Japan’s traditional culture is centuries deep and prior patterns can still be found. These occur in the many cultural fossilizations (modern tea ceremony, the Kabuki, and so on) and also in those formations not much noticed: the structure of the language, the nature of religion in the country.)
Traditional Japanese aesthetics still lacks a definition. There were and are, however, plenty of terms in Japanese (wabi, sabi, aware, and more, most of which we will become acquainted with in later pages), but these all refer to qualities, to parts of an assumed but unnamed whole. Indeed, elements of aesthetic import and matters of taste were once so common in traditional Japanese life that any central assumption must indeed have seemed unnecessary.
A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie is available in both print and digital everywhere now. Order your copy here.