Nakai Masakazu, Martin Heidegger, and aesthetic “perspicuity:” developing a philosophy of art from Being and Time and anticipating “The Origin of the Work of Art”

This paper examines the Heideggerian aesthetic philosophy of Nakai Masakazu—an understudied Kyoto School philosopher, media theorist, and social activist in prewar and postwar Japan. It begins by reconstructing Nakai’s aesthetic consideration of Martin Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time across several manuscripts and articles in the early 1930s. The paper next examines how Nakai’s subsequent writings in the early 1930s extended this Heideggerian theory of art in ways that anticipated Heidegger’s later historical ‘turn’ in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, written in 1935 but first published in 1950. Taken together, this paper offers the first extensive reconstruction of Nakai’s Heideggerian theory of art (in any language) while advancing a case for Nakai’s consideration by scholars of continental aesthetics.