The article examines a new trend in Japanese aesthetic science at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, represented by such scholars as Sasaki Kenichi, Amagasaki Akira, Iwaki Kenichi and Sakabe Megumi, which the author characterizes as “national separatism”. At the center of the discourse of this trend is the problem of the applicability of the tools of Western philosophical aesthetics, as well as the term “aesthetics” itself, to the Japanese spiritual tradition before the Meiji period, raised by the American aesthetician and historian of Japanese thought M. Marra. This group of scholars, while asserting the autonomy and uniqueness of Japanese aesthetic consciousness, criticised their predecessors Onishi Yoshinori, Imamichi Tomonobu, Izutsu Toshihiko, Karaki Junzo, Kawano Hiroshi who sought to isolate and systematise Japanese aesthetic ideas on the basis of Western scientific apparatus, and accused them of artificial construction of aesthetic categories and arbitrary interpretations based on later philosophical foundations, in particular Nishida Kitaro’s philosophy of “nothingness”. The author examines the arguments of the representatives of the new trend and offers her own solution to the problem, which allows avoiding extremes – Westernization and rationalization of Japanese aesthetics on the one hand and its complete denial on the other. Japanese aesthetics is defined by the author as “implicit” (Viktor V. Bychkov’s term), i.e. representing a semi-theoretical free understanding of aesthetic experience within other disciplines, and operating not with abstract categories, but with concepts of artistic culture.
Elena Skvortsova (Wed,) studied this question.