Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) 1498514774, 9781498514774

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Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics

Contemporary Whitehead Studies Series Editors: Roland Faber (Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University) and Brian G. Henning (Gonzaga University) Contemporary Whitehead Studies, co-sponsored by the Whitehead Research Project, is an interdisciplinary book series that publishes manuscripts from scholars with contemporary and innovative approaches to Whitehead studies by giving special focus to projects that: • explore the connections between Whitehead and contemporary Continental philosophy, especially sources, like Heidegger, or contemporary streams like poststructuralism, • reconnect Whitehead to pragmatism, analytical philosophy and philosophy of language, • explore creative East/West dialogues facilitated by Whitehead’s work, • explore the interconnections of the mathematician with the philosopher and the contemporary importance of these parts of Whitehead’s work for the dialogue between sciences and humanities, • reconnect Whitehead to the wider field of philosophy, the humanities, the sciences and academic research with Whitehead’s pluralistic impulses in the context of a pluralistic world, • address Whitehead’s philosophy in the midst of contemporary problems facing humanity, such as climate change, war and peace, race, and the future development of civilization. Titles in the Series Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion, edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena Lin Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature, by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris The Divine Manifold, by Roland Faber Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation, by Brianne Donaldson Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics, by Steve Odin

Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics Steve Odin

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Odin, Steve, 1953- author. Title: Tragic beauty in Whitehead and Japanese aesthetics / Steve Odin. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Series: Contemporary whitehead studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:LCCN 2016011892| ISBN 9781498514774 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498514781 (electronic) Subjects: Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861-1947. | Aesthetics, Modern--20th century. | Aesthetics, Japanese. | Tragic, The, in art. Classification: LCC B1674.W354 O35 2016 | DDC 111/.85092--dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2016011892 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

About the Cover List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction

ix xi xiii xv

Part I: Primacy of Aesthetics

1

1

Primacy of Aesthetics in Japanese Culture

2

Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Early Works

11

3

Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Process and Reality

31

4

Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Later Works

59

5

Whitehead’s Retrieval of Beauty

67

6

The Problem of Aestheticism

75

Part II: Beauty as Aesthetic Quality

3

97

7

Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Aesthetic Quality

8

Aesthetic Quality in East-West Perspective

109

99

9

Whitehead’s Doctrine of Aesthetic Qualities as Eternal Objects

141

10 Beauty as Synaesthesia in Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Japanese Aesthetics

147

Part III: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen and Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

169

11 The “Penumbral Beauty” of Darkness and Shadows in Whitehead’s Process Aesthetics

175

12 Yūgen as the Beauty of Darkness in Japanese Aesthetics

211

13 A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen in Japanese Aesthetics

219

14 Time as Discontinuous Continuity in Whitehead, Dōgen, and Nishida

237

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Contents

Part IV: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen and Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

251

15 Tragic Beauty in Whitehead’s Process Aesthetics

253

16 Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

261

17 A Whiteheadian Perspective on Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

289

18 Tragic Beauty and Peace in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics

301

Bibliography Glossary of Sino-Japanese Characters Index Index of Names

313 323 325 331

About the Cover

Whitehead (MT 36) depicts his notion of transitory aesthetic events with the image of a stone thrown into the water such that its ripples affect the entire surface of the pond. Thus, for Whitehead each aesthetic event realizes evanescent beauty for itself, for others, and for the whole. The original cover design for this volume by Tanaka Mareka uses the motif of a nighttime “cherry blossom storm” (sakura fubuki, 桜吹雪) to illustrate the Japanese aesthetics of evanescent beauty. This cover picture also illustrates how for Whitehead, as for Japanese tradition, the ephemeral beauty of each vanishing moment of aesthetic experience is like a fragile cherry blossom that perishes at the zenith of its glory. But like fragile cherry blossoms falling into a dark pond with hidden depths, the ripples of each interconnected moment of pervasive aesthetic experience spread in ever-expanding circles throughout the environment, thereby to share its evanescent beauty with every other event in the aesthetic continuum of nature. Tanaka Mareka can be contacted at: [email protected].

ix

List of Abbreviations

AE

The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929)

AI

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

CN

The Concept of Nature (1920)

D

Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead as Recorded by Lucien Price (1954)

ESP

Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947)

FR

The Function of Reason (1929)

Imm

“Immortality” (1941)

IM

Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

IS

The Interpretation of Science: Selected Essays (1961)

MG

Mathematics and the Good (1951)

MT

Modes of Thought (1938)

NL

Nature and Life (1934)

PM

Principia Mathematica (1910–1913)

PNK

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)

PR

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

R

The Principle of Relativity (1922)

RM

Religion in the Making (1926)

S

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927) xi

xii

List of Abbreviations

SMW

Science and the Modern World (1925)

SP

Science and Philosophy (1948)

UA

Universal Algebra (1898)

Preface

The blueprint for this work began with a paper I delivered at the 1984 Conference for the International Society of Process Philosophy, held at the Institute for the Study of Japanese Religion and Culture at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. 1 This paper resulted in the publication of an article where I first developed Whitehead’s mysterious beauty of penumbral shadow and the tragic beauty of perishability as functional equivalents to the Japanese aesthetic ideals of yûgen and aware (Odin: 1985, 1987). 2 At this conference the preeminent Whiteheadian process philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) responded to my paper. The eightyseven-year-old Professor Hartshorne said that although he had studied Whitehead his whole life, somehow he had completely missed or forgotten about Whitehead’s notion of beauty as the penumbral shadow. Hartshorne commented that he had finally come to appreciate this notion only after hearing my paper relating Whitehead’s concept of beauty as penumbral shadow to traditional Japanese aesthetics. Thus, in the present volume I have now endeavored to crystallize my argument, whereupon both Whitehead and Japanese tradition have set forth an aesthetics of evanescent beauty culminating in a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty. First, I would like to acknowledge the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Hawaii for a generous UH Japan Endowment Award to fund research for this manuscript in Japan. Also, I am grateful to Professor Saito Naoko for arranging my stay at Kyoto University during my spring 2012 sabbatical, at which time I wrote the core of the present volume. I must express my sincere gratitude to Professor Tanaka Yutaka of Sophia University, who translated my 1985 paper on Whitehead and yûgen aesthetics into Japanese, and who has continued to encourage my comparative research on Whitehead and Japanese philosophy. I would like to thank my colleagues on the canonical aesthetic exam committee in the UH Philosophy Department, Arindam Chakrabarti and Joseph Tanke, for our many conversations on aesthetics and philosophy of art. I want to thank Ben Hoffman, who with his great expertise in computers, professional editing, and comparative philosophy, did a superb job editing the manuscript, while also giving valuable suggestions about both the form and content of the work. I’m grateful to Carl Johnson for turning my diagrams into computer graphics. Roland Faber and Brian Henning, the co-editors for the Contemporary Whitehead Studies series, xiii

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Preface

must be acknowledged for their helpful comments on early versions of the manuscript. John Cobb Jr. and David A. Griffin have been a great source of encouragement for my research on Whitehead. I would like to thank Eric Cunningham, an “anonymous” reviewer of the manuscript for Lexington Books who later agreed to identify himself, for his insightful comments. A special dept of gratitude is owed to Robert C. Neville, with whom I first studied both A. N. Whitehead and Asian philosophy during my first year as an undergraduate student at SUNY Purchase. I would like to express my deep appreciation to Tanaka Mareka for creating the original book cover design. I dedicate this book to my amazing wife Megumi, who inspired me with the world’s finest vegan meals during the period I wrote this work from beginning to end. Quotes from Whitehead, Process and Reality: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from PROCESS AND REALITY by Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright © 1929 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1957 by Evelyn Whitehead. Copyright © 1978 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Quotes from Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD by Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright © 1925 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1953 by Evelyn Whitehead. All rights reserved. Quotes from Whitehead, Modes of Thought: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from MODES OF THOUGHT by Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright © 1938 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1966 by T. North Whitehead. All rights reserved. Quotes from Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from ADVENTURES OF IDEAS by Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1961 by Evelyn Whitehead. All rights reserved. NOTES 1. The report on this conference is in the Newsletter of the Center for Process Studies, Summer 1984, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 5-6. 2. My conference paper resulted in the publication of “The Penumbral Shadow: A Whiteheadian Perspective on the Yûgen Style of Art and Literature in Japanese Aesthetics.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. V. 12, N. 1, March 1985. This paper was translated into Japanese by Professor Tanaka Yutaka, and published in the Japanese philosophical journal Shisô (思想), No. 762, 1987.

Introduction

The present volume endeavors to make a contribution to contemporary Whitehead studies by clarifying his axiological process metaphysics, including his theory of values, concept of aesthetic experience, and doctrine of beauty, along with his philosophy of art, literature, and poetry. Moreover, I establish an East-West dialogue focusing on how Whitehead’s aesthetics can be clarified by the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. After a distinguished career teaching mathematics, symbolic logic, and physics in England, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1924 at the age of sixty-three. 1 During his Harvard years Whitehead formulated a new system of thought grounded in the scientific paradigm shift from mechanism to organism known as process philosophy, process metaphysics, and process theology. In this volume I endeavor to clarify how the primary task of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is to overcome the problem that he terms the fallacy of vacuous actuality, or the concept of substance devoid of value. Furthermore it is shown that Whitehead’s process metaphysics counters the fallacy of vacuous actuality through an aesthetic concept of nature as a creative advance toward novelty aimed at maximum production of beauty. My thesis is that Whitehead’s process metaphysics attains to its consummation in an aesthetics of beauty as perishability summed up by his vision of tragic beauty. At the level of East-West dialogue, I claim that Whitehead and Japanese tradition have both converged upon a poetics of evanescence that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. The present volume underscores the axiological dimension of Whitehead’s process metaphysics of nature. “Axiology” is that branch of philosophy focusing on an inquiry into values. For Whitehead, the primary value presupposed by all others is aesthetic value as that which is admirable in itself and therefore intrinsically valuable for its own sake. According to Whitehead’s radical empiricism, a phenomenology of concrete immediate experience discloses all creative events in nature as having intrinsic value due to their ephemeral beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Thus, in his effort to counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality, Whitehead develops an axiological process metaphysics of nature as a dynamic continuum wherein each creative event realizes aesthetic value of ephemeral beauty for itself, for others, and for the whole. A significant outcome of Whitehead’s axiological view of nature as a continuum xv

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Introduction

of interconnected events with the intrinsic value of beauty is to establish the groundwork for a new ecological ethics and environmental aesthetics that warrants moral extension of care to the entire biotic community. In the field of Whiteheadian scholarship, however, there has been a tendency to overlook the axiological basis for Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic values. Brian Henning states: Although scholars such as Ivor Leclerc, William Christian, Lewis S. Ford, Donald Sherburne, Joseph Bracken, and Jorge Nobo have extensively analyzed various elements of Whitehead’s metaphysics of process, none of them devotes more than an occasional line or paragraph to the importance of axiology in Whitehead’s system. For instance, even though Leclerc devotes a number of pages to Whitehead’s repudiation of vacuous actuality, he fails to significantly examine the axiological foundation of this repudiation. (2005, 198, n.64)

Yet, there have been several important contributions to various aspects of Whitehead’s axiology, including those by Charles Hartshorne (1970), Brian G. Henning (2005), and others. My own contribution will be to present an overview of Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics of aesthetic values, and then to establish an East-West dialogue between Whitehead and the traditional Japanese aesthetics of ephemeral beauty. It is my claim that Whitehead’s poetic vision of tragic beauty can be illuminated through the lens of the Japanese aesthetics of perishability based upon a feeling of pathos as the joy and sadness of eternally vanishing beauty. What emerges from this dialogical encounter between Whitehead and Japanese tradition is ultimately a new religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its resolution in the supreme ecstasy of peace. In my presentation of Whitehead’s poetic vision of tragic beauty and its relation to the Japanese aesthetics of beauty as perishability, I focus especially on his “later” speculative writings. As argued by Roland Faber and Brian G. Henning, according to the chronology adopted by his primary biographer Victor Lowe, Whitehead’s works are divided into three periods, corresponding roughly to his time in Cambridge (1884-1910), London (1910-24), and Harvard (1924-1947). By this account, the “late works” include all the works written after his arrival in America. Faber, Henning, and Combs assert: In refuting such a perspective, we also contest the thesis that his 1929 magnum opus Process and Reality is, indeed, the “end” (aim) of his work thus leaving his “late” thought, especially Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938) in the shadow of a virtually indiscernible repetition of its earlier paradigm. (2010, 3)

In accordance with the alternative chronology worked out by Faber and Henning, I underscore the aesthetic vision of beauty as articulated in Whitehead’s later works published after Process and Reality (1929), especially Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938).

Introduction

xvii

In his illuminating essay “De-ontologizing God: Levinas, Deleuze, and Whitehead,” Roland Faber uses the French deconstructionism of Gilles Deleuze to argue that the dipolar God of Whitehead’s process theology must be de-ontologized: “The ‘reality’ of [Whitehead’s] God does not consist in an ontological reality; that is, it does not claim a judgment regarding the ‘existence’ of God. Rather, it expresses an aesthetic reality” (2002, 210). Faber continues: “By using the term de-ontologizing, I claim the following transformation: from God as an ontological reality to God as an aesthetic . . . and eschatological reality” (2002, 210). In Process and Reality Whitehead develops a strikingly original process theology based on his notion of a dipolar God as the poet of the world, who in his primordial nature as a divine lure functions to envisage all aesthetic value possibilities available for occasions, and who in his consequent nature functions as the divine memory that saves and enjoys all aesthetic value qualities actualized by occasions. However, in PR Whitehead also recognizes the need to secularize the aesthetic function of God, such that it now becomes an emergent spontaneous function of nature itself as a dynamic process of creative advance into novelty: “The secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements of experience” (PR 207). Thus, in his next major work titled Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead goes on to expound a secularized and naturalized account of value, beauty, and aesthetic experience, such that the theological framework, as well as the terminology of “God” has been mostly eliminated. The concept of God is now deontologized, secularized, and naturalized, so that the primordial nature of God becomes “the Eros of the Universe” (AI 253); whereas the consequent nature of God becomes “the Unity of Adventure” (AI 295), the “Supreme Adventure” (AI 295), “the Adventure of the Universe” (AI 296), or “the Adventure of the Universe as One” (AI 295). In the present work, I seek to elucidate this fully naturalistic metaphysics of aesthetic values that Whitehead develops in his later vision of pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability (AI 296). For Whitehead tragedy is the loss, perishing, or destruction of beauty. The problem must be raised whether the dipolar God in Whitehead’s process theology articulated at the end of PR eliminates tragedy as the loss of beauty. He states that in his consequent nature, God as the storehouse of divine memory is the “fellow sufferer” (PR 351), who functions to save the world by a “tender care that nothing be lost” (PR 346). If this is so there is no tragedy as loss of beauty, since all aesthetic events are saved as they pass into the immediacy of God’s everlasting life. Judith Butler questions whether existential loss and grieving are possible in Whitehead’s process philosophy (Butler: 2012, 14). The solution to this problem is best clarified by Faber:

xviii

Introduction I will answer Butler’s question—whether Whitehead allows for eternal loss—with a contrast. In Process and Reality, loss is an ultimate evil of becoming in time–countered with divine care that nothing be lost. In Adventures of Ideas, the eternal process of loss is the condition for becoming—countered with the care of every becoming for the lost past that it reenacts. (2012, 245-246).

It is this shift from the theism of PR to the naturalism of AI that allows for genuine tragedy as loss of beauty. Thus, it is at the conclusion of AI that Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in a notion of pathos as tragic beauty. In this volume I establish an East-West intercultural dialogue that explores many points of convergence between Whitehead and traditional Japanese Buddhist aesthetics. Yet, as the dialogue progresses it will focus especially on parallels between Whitehead and two key aesthetic categories which have emerged in the traditional Japanese canons of taste, yūgen and aware. Whereas yūgen (幽玄) signifies the mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows, aware (哀れ) denotes the sad or tragic beauty of perishability. As emphasized by Izutsu Toshihiku: “Aware and yūgen . . . are unanimously recognized to be the most important of the key aesthetic ideas in the field of [Japanese] literature and art . . .” (1981, 16). Scholars committed to the tradition of nihonjinron (日本人論) or “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” have claimed that the aesthetic categories of yūgen and aware are culture-bound notions that are unique to the Japanese tradition of art and literature with no counterparts in Western aesthetics. Yet, in what follows I attempt to show that functional equivalents to these two key Japanese aesthetic values of yūgen and aware are to be found in the process philosophy of Whitehead. It can be said that Whitehead’s process aesthetics discriminates two highly refined modes of beauty: (1) the “penumbral beauty” of darkness and shadows; and (2) the “tragic beauty” of perishability. For Whitehead, the beauty of penumbral shadow is the beauty of “depth” achieved by perception of a clear foreground shading into a dark background. Moreover, in Whitehead’s poetics of tragic beauty the notion of “tragedy” always means the loss, perishing, or destruction of beauty. Against the cultural bias of nihonjinron or “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” I argue that there are convincing parallels between Whitehead’s notion of evanescent aesthetic occasions with the pathos of tragic beauty, and the Japanese aesthetic ideal of aware or pathos as the beauty and sadness of perishability. Just as the early Japanese poetics of evanescent beauty is summed up by the notion of mono no aware as the “pathos of things,” so Whitehead articulates an explicit notion of “pathos” as the feelings of pity or sadness that arises through the fading of beauty with the passage of time. Like Japanese Buddhist poetics, Whitehead develops an aesthetics of beauty as perishability, ephemerality, and fragility. It is further shown that there is a striking similarity between Whitehead’s concept of

Introduction

xix

the beauty of “penumbral shadow,” and the Japanese poetic ideal of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of twilight darkness. The Japanese sense of beauty as yûgen is further clarified in terms of the more recent Japanese aesthetic design principle of nôtan (濃淡) or the beauty of contrast between light and darkness. Here it is argued that both Whitehead’s concept of beauty as penumbral shadow and the Japanese concept of beauty as yūgen can be phenomenologically described through a Foreground/ Background or Focus/Field model of aesthetic experience, whereby nonsubstantial phenomena clearly discriminated in the foreground focus of attention shade into an undiscriminated background field of darkness and shadows. Whitehead’s Foreground/Background model of aesthetic experience depicted by a clear background against a dark background elucidates the Japanese artistic ideal of yûgen as well as its exemplification through nôtan or the light-darkness principle of Japanese design. Moreover, it is shown how the tragic beauty of evanescence and the penumbral beauty of faint darkness are alike derived from the primordial aesthetic value of yojō (余情) or “overtones of feeling” in Japanese poetics, and primordial perception of affective “feeling-tone” in Whitehead’s process aesthetics. I suggest that the traditional Japanese sense of beauty as yūgen and aware functions to open up a new dimension to our understanding of beauty in Whitehead’s process aesthetics, including its two notions of mysterious beauty as penumbral shadow and the tragic beauty of perishability. This striking convergence between the Whiteheadian process aesthetics of tragic beauty with the traditional Japanese Buddhist aesthetics of beauty as perishability is not based on Whitehead’s study of Asian thought. Rather, this deep proximity with Japanese Buddhist aestheticism is due to Whitehead’s use of William James’ method of radical empiricism, with its rigorous phenomenological description of the invariant “Focus/Fringe” or “Foreground/Background” structure of transient events as directly felt in qualitative flow as the “stream of experience.” James’s literary flow metaphors such as the “stream of experience,” which comes incrementally by “drops of experience,” are based on his phenomenological description of the radically empirical datum of felt transitions, just as his organic metaphors such as the vague “penumbra,” “aura,” “horizon,” “margin,” or “fringe” disclosed at the periphery of consciousness, are based on his description of the radically empirical datum of felt wholeness, as dimly prehended through the felt background of experiential immediacy. In terms of Whitehead’s Jamesian method of radical empiricism, the tragic beauty of perishability is based on the datum of felt transitions, whereas the penumbral beauty of faint darkness is based on the datum of the felt background that constitutes each moment of immediate experience as a felt whole. Thus, in Whitehead’s radical empiricism both the mysterious beauty of penumbral shadow and the tragic beauty of

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Introduction

perishability are based on a phenomenological description of concrete feeling states of lived experience in their qualitative immediacy. My view is that in Whitehead’s process metaphysics the aesthetic category of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296) is the nearest Western equivalent to the Japanese aesthetic category of aware as the tragic beauty of perishability. Onishi Yoshinori describes aware as a kind of “Beauty,” adding, “we must think of this experience [aware] as something that gives us a special aesthetic satisfaction or pleasure, such as the ‘Tragic’ and the ‘Melancholic’” (1999, 139). In Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture, J. Rimer further clarifies how the complex and multinuanced aesthetic notion of aware (哀 れ) or pathos has been defined as the sad or tragic beauty of evanescence: [A] key concept in the vocabulary of Japanese arts, is aware (prononunced ah-wah-ray), often referred to as mono no aware. The term is a difficult one to match in English. Some have suggested “the ahness of things,” meant to suggest a sudden deep and intuitive understanding of life and its transience that can come on someone unawares and move him or her tremendously. In the Heian period, aware sometimes includes a sense of joy, but in the medieval period, it came to represent a sudden consciousness of the sad, even tragic nature of one’s feelings and of the world itself. (Addiss: 2006, 86-7)

As stated by Rimer, during the medieval period of Japanese art and literature the aesthetic notion of aware came to designate “the sad, even tragic nature of one’s feelings and of the world itself” (Addiss: 2006, 86-87). It is this later medieval sense of the Japanese aesthetic term that justifies aware being understood as “tragic beauty,” and mono no aware as the “tragic beauty of things.” Hence, it is claimed that like the Japanese poetics of evanescent beauty as summed up by the notion of aware, Whitehead’s process thought develops an aesthetics of beauty as perishability, finally culminating in his notion of tragic beauty. At the conclusion of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead proclaims: “The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty” (AI 294). I suggest that Whitehead’s process metaphysics of becoming and perishing occasions with the pathos of tragic beauty is reminiscent of the traditional Japanese poetics of ephemerality with its aesthetic appreciation for the evanescent beauty and sadness of transitory existence. In the The Tale of Genji (eleventh century) this traditional Japanese sense of beauty as perishability is expressed through a Buddhist poetic vision of life as an evanescent dream with both astonishing beauty and overwhelming sadness. This link between beauty and sadness has become the hallmark of the traditional Japanese aesthetics of perishability and its underlying Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence. Leading interpreters of Japanese culture such as Lafcadio Hearn (1972), Donald Keene (1981), and Donald Richie (2007) have argued that the aesthetic appreciation of beauty as perishability is “the genius of Japanese civilization.” It is

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argued that traditional Japanese aesthetics not only acknowledges the impermanence of life, but also recognizes how perishability is a precondition for enjoyment of beauty. For the Japanese aesthetics of perishability, the condition for beauty lies in its own vanishing. Likewise, it is shown how for Whitehead the process of perpetual perishing is a necessary condition for the becoming of beauty, such that all aesthetic experience is transient and all beauty is tragic. From the standpoint of comparative aesthetics it can thus be said that an appreciation of beauty as perishability is the genius of both Japanese culture in the East and Whitehead’s process metaphysics of tragic beauty in the West. THE WORK IN OUTLINE Part I explores the primacy of aesthetics in both Whitehead and Japanese culture. It is shown that while an emphasis on the aesthetic experience of beauty has characterized Japanese thought and culture throughout its history, Whitehead endeavors to establish a dramatic reversal of values in Western philosophy, such that his new process metaphysics of evanescent beauty has its foundations in aesthetic values, whereupon religious, cognitive, and moral values are ultimately based on aesthetic values. In this context it is argued that Whitehead has undertaken a major retrieval of beauty in twentieth century aesthetics. This is followed by an inquiry into the problem of aestheticism. The question is asked whether both Whitehead and Japanese tradition have fallen into a narrow aestheticism, whereupon there is a reduction of ethics to aesthetics, morality to art, and goodness to beauty. Part II examines Whitehead’s radically empirical metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, wherein beauty is the directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality of events. For Whitehead’s process aesthetics the criterion of beauty is the vividness, intensity, and richness of aesthetic qualities. I then elaborate the views of American process philosophers who have applied Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality to Asian modes of thought, including Stephen C. Pepper, F. S. C. Northrop, Robert M. Pirsig, Henry N. Weiman, and Susanne K. Langer. The next chapter undertakes a critical inquiry into Whitehead’s problematic concept of aesthetic qualities as “eternal objects,” or Platonic forms that ingress into interactive situations. The question is asked whether or not Whitehead’s concept of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects falls into the extreme view that Buddhist philosophy calls eternalism. Here it is shown how Charles Hartshorne rejects Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects for C. S. Peirce’s notion of aesthetic qualities that emerge in the evolutionary process. This section concludes with a chapter analyzing beauty as intersensory synaesthesia or fusion of diverse sense qualities in Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Japanese aesthetics.

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Part III develops an East-West dialogue focusing on remarkable parallels between Whitehead and traditional Japanese aesthetics. Whitehead’s notions of beauty as penumbral shadow and the tragic beauty of perishability are both grounded in affective feeling-tones, just as in Japanese aesthetics the beauty of yūgen and aware are based on the category of yojō or overtones of feeling. First the category of yūgen in Japanese aesthetics is analyzed in terms of the beauty of penumbral darkness and shadows in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Here it is argued that for both Whitehead and Japanese aesthetics, a function of art is to disclose the mysterious beauty of hidden depths, by raising into clarity the vague and indistinct overtones of feeling which emerge from a dark background that always haunts those vivid sense-objects illuminated in a clear foreground. Second, the Japanese aesthetic category of aware is analyzed in relation to the tragic beauty of perishability in Whitehead’s process metaphysics. Here it is argued that for both Whitehead and Japanese tradition a function of art is to evoke the pathos or feeling of beauty and sadness that emerges with the ceaseless flow of time. Thus, for both Whitehead and Japanese tradition a primary function of art, literature, and poetry reveals the aesthetic law of eternally vanishing beauty. Finally, it is shown how both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist aesthetics endeavor to overcome the pathos, suffering, and tragedy of evanescent beauty in the supreme ecstasy of peace or nirvana. NOTE 1. For a comprehensive intellectual biography of A. N. Whitehead, see Victor Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead: The man and his work, Volume I: 1861-1910. Baltimore: John Hopkin’s University Press, 1985); and Alfred North Whitehead: The man and his work, Volume II. 1920-1947. Baltimore: John Hopkin’s University Press, 1990.

Part I

Primacy of Aesthetics

Scholars of Asian thought have often pointed out that aesthetics is the outstanding positive characteristic of Japanese culture. This emphasis on aesthetics has been a pervasive trait in Japanese history running through the early Heian period cult of beauty to Zen aestheticism and its flowering in Tea to its expressions in modern Japanese art and literature. Whitehead’s process metaphysics endeavors to overturn the tradition of Western rationalism and moralism by establishing the primacy of aesthetic values. The basic task of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is to counter the problem of “vacuous actuality” or valuelessness by recovering the aesthetic value of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. In his philosophy of culture he further argues that the aesthetic experience of beauty in art is a defining quality of civilization. The present section will examine the primacy of aesthetics in both Whitehead’s process philosophy and traditional Japanese culture. This will be followed by an inquiry into the problem of aestheticism, wherein other values and especially moral values are reducible to aesthetic values.

ONE Primacy of Aesthetics in Japanese Culture

Scholars of Asian civilization have often pointed to the primacy of aesthetic experience as the distinguishing feature of traditional Japanese thought and culture. In his anthology entitled The Japanese Mind, Charles Moore summarizes the conclusions of several renowned Japanese and Asian scholars as follows: 1 Tagore has called aesthetics Japan’s unique Dharma. Kishimoto, here, speaks of the aesthetic as being so significant as to be identical with the religious in Japan, in what is surely a unique emphasis on the aesthetic. Kōsaka, here, points to the essential aesthetic emphasis in Japanese culture throughout its history—such that Japanese culture is an aesthetic culture. And Nakamura, here and elsewhere, stresses what he calls the primacy of the aesthetic, the intuitive and the emotional…. So important is the aesthetic in Japanese culture that it has been accepted by many scholars of Japan as the outstanding positive characteristic of Japanese culture as a whole. (1976, 296)

Thus, in the view of many leading scholars, there has been a primacy of aesthetics throughout the history of Japanese culture, such that Japanese culture is the paradigm case of an aesthetic culture. Also, religion and aesthetics became so identified in Japan so as to become a Way of art and a religion of beauty. Moreover, there has been a privileging of the aesthetic over the ethical and logical sides of Japanese culture, thus to become an aestheticism wherein artistic values are accorded primacy over moral, rational, and other values. The very first explicitly stated primacy of aesthetic experience and centrality of art in Japanese Buddhism, if not in the entire history of Buddhism, was set forth during the early Heian period by Kūkai (空海 774-835), the founder of the Japanese Shingon school of mikkyō (密教) or 3

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esoteric Buddhism. In a remarkable passage, Kūkai proclaims that instant buddhahood can be most rapidly attained through meditation on the beauty of art: In truth, the esoteric doctrines are so profound as to defy their enunciation in writing. With the help of painting, however, their obscurities may be understood. The various attitudes and mudras of the holy images all have their source in Buddha’s love, and one may attain Buddhahood at the sight of them. Thus, the secret of the sutras and commentaries can be depicted in art…. Art is what reveals to us the state of perfection. (Tsunada et al. 1958, 138)

For Kūkai, the highest stage of exoteric Japanese Buddhism is that of the Kegon (華厳、C: Huayan; Skt. Avatamsaka) teachings based on the metaphysical principle of riji muge (理事無礙), the “unhindered harmonious interpenetration of part and universal-whole.” The interpenetration of part and whole is illustrated by the Kegon metaphor of “Indras’s Net” (Indaramō, 因陀羅網), whereby each object is likened to a brilliant jewel in the interconnected web of nature, such that all phenomena mirror totality from their own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Yet Kūkai holds that the exoteric teaching of unimpeded harmonious interfusion of many into one is itself only revealed through the embodied secret practices of meditation on the beauty of art taught in esoteric Shingon Mikkyō Buddhism, especially contemplation of mandala paintings. The symbolic mandala paintings of Shingon Buddhism typically depict enlightened buddhas such as Dainichi Nyorai (大日如来) or Great Sun Buddha surrounded by radiant auras of light radiating throughout the universe, thus to show the interfusion between parts and the whole. During the Shingon “expansion technique” (kakudai hō, 拡大法), one visualizes a mandala painting of a moon disk expanding to the size of the universe and then contracting back to normal size, thereby to realize how each instant is a microcosm of the macrocosm. By contemplating the beauty of symbolic mandala paintings and other esoteric artworks of Shingon Buddhism, one can attain supreme enlightenment by producing ecstatic visions of totality. This emphasis on aesthetic experience of art developed in Shingon Buddhism would become a formative element in the Heian period “cult of beauty.” During the Heian (平安 794-1186) period of Japanese culture flourishing in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyōto, or Heian-Kyō, an aesthetic civilization emerged wherein the aristocratic class related to the imperial family and became preoccupied with enjoyment of evanescent beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. The aesthetic culture of Heian period Japan is especially revealed in the early eleventh century masterpiece of literature entitled The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 源氏物語り), composed by the aristocratic court lady Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-1014). William J. Puette asserts:

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Perhaps the most alien aspect of The Tale of Genji is the tremendous preoccupation of its characters with artistic pursuits. It is, in fact, impossible to exaggerate the importance of aesthetics in general, and poetry in particular, to the plot, theme, and character development of the novel. (1983, 42)

As emphasized by Puette, there is a central importance given to aesthetics in The Tale of Genji. The aristocratic nobility of the imperial court were preoccupied with artistic pursuits such as poetry, calligraphy, music, dancing, painting, fashion, crafts, the production of fragrant incense and perfumes, as well as appreciation of the evanescent beauty of nature through festive maple-viewing, moon-viewing, and flower-viewing ceremonies. Moreover, these aesthetic pursuits were associated with romantic love relations between noble men and women of the imperial court. The Tale of Genji especially thematizes the pathos of sorrow-tinged transitory beauty (aware, 哀れ) emerging due to the evanescence (hakanasa, 儚 さ) of life in both its joy and its sadness. Poetic images used to depict the evanescence and sorrow of life included cherry blossoms, maple leaves, autumn grasses, dewdrops, fireflies, rivers, and dreams. Ivan Morris explains how during the Heian period of Japanese culture as portrayed by The Tale of Genji, aesthetics, connoisseurship, style, fashion, and refined canons of taste, as well as the aesthetic appreciation of poetry, literature, and the arts, altogether culminated in a “cult of beauty” (1994, 170-198). According to Morris: “What makes the world of the shining prince an engaging and important study is the central role of style and art in the lives of its inhabitants” (1994, 17). He explains how during this period the nobility cultivated refined aesthetic judgments of taste in the beauty of nature as well as in a wide variety of arts and crafts, including poetry, calligraphy, painting, music, dancing, fashion, textiles, and perfumes, while also being highly accomplished in the skillful performance of these arts. Morris continues: If Murasaki’s period did little for the intellectual progress of mankind . . . it will always be remembered for the way in which its people pursued that cult of beauty in art and in nature which has played so important a part in Japan’s cultural history and which is perhaps the country’s greatest contribution to the world. The ‘rule of taste’ applied not only to the formal arts but to nearly every aspects of the lives of the upper classes in the capital. It was central to Heian Buddhism, making . . . religion into an art and art into a religion. (1994, 194)

Morris concludes his study of aestheticism in the ancient Heian period cult of beauty, stating: The cult of beauty helped to produce a society of great elegance and charm . . . men like Genji and Niou, with their profound sensibility, their wide connoisseurship of the arts, and their skill in performance,

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Chapter 1 their exquisite manner combined with easy nonchalance, were the ideals of a class and of an age. (1994, 198)

The primacy of aesthetic experience is especially associated with the Zen (禅) tradition of Japanese Buddhist aestheticism which emerged during the Kamakura period (1185-1333). The Zen schools became a religion of beauty, often referred to as the religio-aesthetic tradition of geidō ( 芸道), the “Way of arts.” Among the various Ways to enlightenment in the Zen religio-aesthetic tradition are sadō (茶道) or the “Way of tea,” shodō（書 道）or the “Way of calligraphy,” kadō (華道) or the “Way of flowers,” kendō (剣道) or the “Way of the sword,” kyūdō (弓道) or the “Way of archery,” and bushidō (武士道) or the “Way of the samurai warrior.” Zen Buddhism in particular has been known for the magnificent beauty of its literary and artistic expressions in sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry, calligraphy, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, nō theater, music, folkcrafts, gardening, interior decorating, vegetarian temple cuisine, and other aesthetic forms. It can be said that all of these Zen-influenced paths of art in traditional Japanese culture are paradigms of what in the American pragmatist aesthetics of Richard Shusterman (2008) is termed “somaesthetics,” or bodymind practices that cultivate heightened aesthetic appreciation and spiritual ecstasy. In Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki highlights the profound influence of Zen on everyday life in traditional Japanese culture. Moreover, in his exposition of “Japanese art culture” Suzuki describes the Zen Buddhism of Japan as a “Zen aestheticism” (1993, 27). Throughout this work Suzuki focuses on the signature teaching of Zen/Chan Buddhism, which proclaims “Ordinary mind is Dao,” or “Everyday mind is the Way” (heijōshin kore dō, 平常心是道). Zen aestheticism holds that satori (悟り) or “sudden enlightenment” can be achieved by detached aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful in art, nature, and everyday life. According to Suzuki, the traditional Japanese arts of inkwash painting, calligraphy, flower arrangement, haiku poetry, tea ceremony, and samurai martial arts, are all a function of mushin (無心) or “no-mind” (1993, 94). Moreover, Suzuki clarifies that in Zen aestheticism “no-mind” is not a nihilistic state, but is to be understood in positive terms as “everyday mind” (heijōshin, 平常心) (1993, 147). In the Zen state of no-mind the perception of “emptiness” (kū, 空) is not a nihilistic void, but is grasped in positive terms as the “suchness” (nyojitsu, 女実) of things in their concrete particularity: Zen declares: “´sūnyatâ (“emptiness”) is tathatâ (“suchness”), and tathatâ is ´sūnyatâ” (1993, 36). Suzuki illustrates the notion that emptiness is suchness by a well-known expression of Zen aestheticism: “Willows are green and flowers are red” (1993, 36). Thus, for Suzuki, “Zen is not nihilistic” (1993, 36). Suzuki further holds that wabi (侘び) or rustic poverty, sabi (寂び) or impersonal loneliness, yūgen (幽玄) or profound mystery, shibumi (渋み) or graceful understatement, fūryū (風流) or wind-

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blown elegance, and other Japanese poetic ideals of beauty that emerged under the influence of Zen aestheticism, are all rooted in mushin or nomind, understood in its positive sense as heijōshin or everyday mind. Zen celebrates the evanescent beauty of ordinary things in everyday life. Especially in the folkcrafts of Japan there is an aesthetic preference for the atmosphere of wabi (侘び) or the antique beauty displayed by faded tea bowls and other tarnished artifacts used in the tea ceremony, whereby common rustic objects acquire a sheen of antiquity through the aging effects of time. In the nondual framework of Zen aestheticism there is no split between beauty and pragmatic utility, insofar as the aesthetic value of wabi is the beauty of use in everyday life. Zen aestheticism views satori or “sudden enlightenment” as direct spiritual insight into the ephemeral beauty of commonplace events. Through detached aesthetic contemplation of beauty in ordinary experience there is a transfiguration of everyday life into art, whereupon the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes ordinary. It is this profound insight into the immediately felt pervasive aesthetic quality of events in everyday life that has become the hallmark of Zen as a religion of beauty. Suzuki underscores the Japanese Kegon (華厳 , C: Huayan; Skt: Avatamsaka) teachings underlying the poetic vision of nature in Zen aestheticism, wherein beauty is envisaged as a function of the Kegon Buddhist metaphysical principle of “unobstructed harmonious interpenetration between the parts and the universal-whole” (riji muge, 理事無礙). 2 Suzuki writes: The balancing of unity and multiplicity or, better, the merging of self with others in the philosophy of Avatamsaka (Kegon) is absolutely necessary to the aesthetic understanding of Nature. (2010, 354)

The basic metaphor illustrating the Kegon Buddhist metaphysics of harmonious unhindered interpenetration between many and one underlying the Zen aesthetic vision of nature, is that everything in the interconnected web of nature is like a shining jewel of Indras Net, whereupon each jewel reflects all the other jewels and the whole network of relations from its own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Suzuki therefore asserts above that harmonious interpenetration of many into one in Japanese Kegon (Avatamsaka) philosophy is the key to understanding the Zen aesthetic appreciation of beauty in nature and everyday life as well as its creative expression in art. Nearly all aspects of everyday life in traditional Japanese culture have been aestheticized by the mechanism of kata (方), ritualized pattern, or form. The Japanese notion of kata has itself been influenced by Confucian ethics based on the principle of li (J. rei, 礼), ritual action. The word kata is related to the term shikata (仕方) or “way of doing things.” Among the common uses of kata in the Japanese language include tabe-kata or “way of eating,” kaki-kata or “way of writing,” “yomi-kata or “way of reading,”

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kangae-kata or “way of thinking,” and iki-kata or “way of living.” A kata is the right, correct, or appropriate way of performing an action that establishes “harmony” (wa, 和). It is by conforming to the prescribed ritual patterns of kata that an action is made beautiful, harmonious, stylized, elegant, and graceful. The term kata is often associated with the ritualized combat routines of the martial arts in bushidō or the Way of the samurai warrior. However, in traditional Japanese culture all of the Ways of art such as poetry, painting, calligraphy, flowers, and tea have been kataized. The Japanese tea ceremony is the paradigm case of an ordinary action in everyday life transformed by the ritualized procedures of kata into an aesthetic experience of exquisite beauty. De Mente explains how it is this “kata-ization” of everyday life that led to the emergence of Japanese aestheticism as a religion of beauty: These arts and ceremonies were soon institutionalized into kata with their own aesthetic vocabulary. . . . It seems that Japan is the only country in the world in which there was a concerted effort on almost every level of society to make the study and appreciation of beauty a basic part of the lifestyle of the entire population. . . . aestheticism in Japan took on the appearance and tone of a state religion. (2003, 37)

According to De Mente, it is this kata-ization of Japanese culture that underlies the aesthetic recreation of ordinary experience whereby there is in a transformation of everyday life into art. The Structure of Iki (Iki no kōzō, いきの構造、1930) by Kuki Shūzō gives philosophical expression to a hedonistic mode of Japanese aestheticism: namely the decadent aestheticism that emerged in the Edo period (16001868) of Japan occurring in the nightlife of the red light quarters in Tokyo and Osaka (1979). The seventeenth century literary works of Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) describe the ephemeral beauty of romantic and erotic love in the “floating world” (ukiyo, 浮世) of Edo period Japan. The fleeting beauty and sadness of love has also been vividly depicted in Japanese prints by Edo period ukiyo-e (浮世 絵 ) or “pictures of the floating world.” Hence in Edo period art and literature the “floating world” of the geisha entertainment quarters became a symbol of transient beauty and the ephemerality of life. Kuki Shūzō sums up this Edo period aesthetics of the floating world in terms of iki （いき、粋), “chic,” “fashion,” or “style.” According to Kuki, the aesthetic ideal of iki defines the Edo period stylish urban aesthetic value constituted by three cultural streams: (i) “eroticism” (bitai, 媚態) of the female geisha entertainer; (ii) “brave composure” (ikiji, 意気 地) of the Samurai warrior; and (iii) “detached resignation” (akirame, 諦 め) or calm disinterested aesthetic contemplation of evanescent beauty cultivated through meditation by the Zen Buddhist priest. Also, the refined aesthetic taste of iki or chic is analyzed in terms of dyadic tension between amami (甘み) or “sweetness” of amorous passion, and shibumi (渋み) or “astringency” as elegant restraint. For Kuki, akirame was the Edo

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period connoisseur’s response to the gentle sorrow of evanescent beauty in the floating world. As said by Kuki, it is the detached resignation of akirame which adds depth to the aesthetic lifestyle of iki or chic. The artistic detachment to transient beauty in the dreamlike floating world inhabited by the geisha was cultivated not by austere Zen meditation on impermanence, but as a stoic indifference or cool nonchalance developed in reaction to the evanescence of romantic and erotic love in the pleasure districts of Japan. Kuki’s account of iki or “chic” as an artistic ideal of everyday life is not the Zen aestheticism of daily existence in monastic solitude, but a form of Japanese decadent aestheticism in the urban nightlife of Tokyo. Thus, while traditional Zen aestheticism contemplates the faded beauty of wabi in a rustic tearoom, or the mysterious beauty of yūgen in the forest surrounding a remote mountain temple on a moonlit night, the decadent aestheticism of Kuki is instead exemplified by the hedonistic connoisseur, aesthete, or dandy who cultivates disinterested artistic appreciation for the ephemeral beauty of iki or chic which arose in the transitory dreamlike floating world of erotic pleasure flourishing in the bordello society of Edo period Japan. NOTES 1. Charles Moore cites the view of leading scholars that aesthetics is the outstanding characteristic of the “Japanese mind,” just as he regards ethics to be a fundamental trait of the “Chinese mind” and religion to be the preoccupation of the “Indian mind.” Although Moore has made a significant contribution to East-West comparative philosophy, today these claims would be regarded as over-generalizations. 2. The notion of “unobstructed harmonious interpenetration between particulars and the universal-whole” (J. riji muge, 理事無礙) is the key doctrinal formula of the Kegon (C. Huayan) school of Japanese Buddhism, which is rooted in the Indian Sanskrit text known as Avatamsaka Sūtra or “Flower Garland Scripture.” For a study of Kegon/Huayan teachings of interpenetration between many and one in relation to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, see my work Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism (Odin: 1982).

TWO Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Early Works

A. N. Whitehead endeavors to articulate an axiological process metaphysics based the notion of reality as a creative advance into novelty which aims toward maximum production of beauty. It will be seen that Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in an aesthetics of ephemeral beauty as summed up by his vision of pathos as tragic beauty. The fundamental task of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is to overcome the problem that he terms the fallacy of vacuous actuality (PR viii, 29, 167, 309; FR 30-31; AI 219; MT 158), or the erroneous belief in substance devoid of value. For Whitehead, the abstract notion of vacuous substance is itself based on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (SMW 58), or the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. In Whitehead’s critique of vacuous actuality and its underlying fallacy of misplaced concreteness he thus initiates a return to the qualitative flow of concrete aesthetically immediate experience as the source of all values. The fallacy of vacuous actuality is traced by Whitehead to seventeenth century scientific materialism based on the mechanistic Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, wherein the basic ontological units are lifeless atomic “substances” devoid of intrinsic value. For Whitehead, intrinsic value always means aesthetic value as that which is admirable in itself and therefore important for its own sake. Whitehead’s process metaphysics thus endeavors to overcome the fallacy of vacuous actuality through a paradigm shift from the mechanistic worldview of scientific materialism to an organic process model of nature as a dynamic continuum of aesthetic values. I suggest that Whitehead’s effort to counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality is analogous to Nietzsche’s task of overcoming nihilism through a transvaluation of values. In his metaphysics of art, Nietzsche presents an aesthetic solution to the existential problem of nihilism with his proc11

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lamation that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that nature is justified, that art is the great stimulant to life, and that the Dionysian value of beauty as intoxicating rapture or ecstasy is the distinctive countermovement to nihilism. Likewise, in his effort to overcome the notion of vacuous existence as substance devoid of value, Whitehead argues that the aesthetic value of beauty is the only self-justifying aim in nature. Zen Buddhism, as for all Buddhism, teaches that enlightenment is achieved through the middle way of interdependent origination between the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism or substantialism and voidism. As emphasized in the writings of D. T. Suzuki, the Zen aestheticism of Japan counters nihilism in that “emptiness” is grasped not only in negative terms as voidness of substance, but also in positive terms as “suchness” (1993, 36). According to Nishitani Keiji (1961/2010; 1982) and others in the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, the task of Zen is to overcome not only eternalism, but also “nihilism” as analyzed especially by Buddhism, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. In the modern Zen philosophy of the Kyoto School, there is an effort to overcome nihilism by shifting from negative or relative nothingness wherein all phenomena are dissolved into a void, to a positive or absolute nothingness, conceived as a boundless openness wherein emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness so that all events are affirmed just as they are in their concrete particular suchness. It is my claim that in Western philosophy, an alternative path to overcoming nihilism has been opened up by Whitehead’s axiological process metaphysics, which abandons the reified abstraction of substance with vacuous actuality for a doctrine of concrete occasions of experience with the directly felt aesthetic value quality of ephemeral beauty. What follows is a brief overview of Whitehead’s philosophical works focusing on the development of his process metaphysics of aesthetic values. This will function as a summary of Whitehead’s aesthetics, starting with the formation of an axiological cosmology of aesthetic values in the early works to a full metaphysics of beauty in his later works. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge The first statement of Whitehead’s axiological process cosmology of values is already to be found in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919). It can be said that the signature theme expressed in Process and Reality is that "The universe is . . . a creative advance into novelty" (PR 222). Yet, the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity is already articulated in this earlier text as “the creative advance of nature” (PNK 80-81). In this early work there are as yet no fully explicit discussions of art, aesthetic experience, and beauty that would become the hallmark of his later writings. Yet the nascent expression of Whitehead’s axiological cos-

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mology is expressed in terms of his key notion of intrinsic value as “significance.” It is therefore asserted that “‘significance’ is an essential element in concrete experience” (PNK 11). Defining his notion of significance, he writes: “Significance is the relatedness of things . . . natural knowledge is exclusively concerned with relatedness” (PNK 12). The significance or intrinsic value of events is a function of their relatedness. Here Whitehead articulates his doctrine of internal relations. An event is ontologically constituted by its internal relations to every other event, so that all events in the continuum of nature have significance or intrinsic value. The full axiological purport of this notion of value as “significance” in Whitehead’s early philosophical treatise can be seen in his final book Modes of Thought (1938), wherein intrinsic value arising from events of relatedness is now expressed in terms of their “aesthetic significance” (MT 120-121). He further describes the aesthetic significance of events in terms of their “aesthetic importance” or “aesthetic worth” (MT 120-121). In this final work he then goes on to argue that by virtue of their relatedness, all events in nature have the “aesthetic significance” of beauty (MT 120). Elsewhere in the text Whitehead gives a phenomenological description of percipient events in their temporal duration as further characterized in terms of the foreground/background or part/whole structure of the perceptual field that runs throughout his entire corpus of writings: Perception is an awareness of events, or happenings, forming a partially discerned complex within the background of a simultaneous whole of nature. . . . This event is called the percipient event. The simultaneity of the whole of nature comprising the discerned events is the special relation of that background of nature to the percipient event. This background is that complete event which is the whole of nature simultaneous with the percipient event, which is itself part of that whole. Such a complete whole of nature is called a “duration.” . . . There are also differences in attention and in consequent clearness of awareness, shading off into a dim knowledge of events barely on the threshold of consciousness. (PNK 68-69)

Whitehead here provides his first phenomenological description of percipient events in terms of a foreground/background pattern, characterized by a clearly articulated focal center discriminated by acts of selective attention governed by pragmatic aims, that gradually shade off into the non-articulated whole of a dim background of relationships. In his later writings, this description of the perceptual field as a clear foreground shading into a vague penumbral background of darkness and shadows itself becomes central to his accounts of value, beauty, and aesthetic experience, along with their imaginative expressions in art, literature, and poetry.

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The Concept of Nature In his 1920 work The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead moves further toward developing an axiological metaphysics of nature as a dynamic continuum of aesthetic values. This work endeavors to find in “metaphysics the synthesis of the knower and the known” (CN 28). Moreover, he seeks in “values of nature . . . the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence” (CN 5). In chapter two of CN, Whitehead characterizes the dualistic and atomistic basis of scientific materialism underlying the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm of substance metaphysics as the "bifurcation of Nature into two systems of reality" (CN 152). The fallacy of bifurcated nature involves a dualistic split into the objective reality of “primary qualities” characterizing matter including extension, motion, and configuration on one side, with the subjective appearance of “secondary qualities” in the mind such as color, sound, sight, scent, and touch on the other side. Whitehead states: “What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality” (CN 31). He argues against bifurcation of nature into two divisions, the nature apprehended in awareness and the cause of awareness: The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness hold within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of the awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. (CN 31)

Above he protests against the bifurcation of nature into two systems, with the so-called secondary qualities such as the greenness of the trees or the song of the birds located in the subjective mind, and the so-called primary qualities of postulated scientific entities such as molecules, atoms, and electrons located in objective nature, which affects the mind so as to produce the illusory qualities of color and sound. According to theories of the bifurcation of nature, the aesthetically enjoyed secondary qualities such as greenness of the grass are a result of a theory of “psychic additions,” or “artistic additions of color, warmth and sound” (CN 43). In his revolt against dualism, however, Whitehead rejects the theory of “psychic additions” in favor of a nondualistic theory where colors, sounds, scents, and other aesthetic sense qualities of art and literature are as much a part of nature as are the electrons, atoms, and molecules of scientific discourse (CN 29-30). At the axiological level of discourse this bifurcation of nature results in the problem of nihilism, or what in Whitehead’s vocabulary is termed the fallacy of vacuous actuality based on the mechanistic worldview of scientific materialism. The fallacy of vacuous existence involves an un-

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warranted belief in facts devoid of values wherein nature is divested of its pervasive aesthetic qualities—the blueness of the lake, the fragrance of the blossoms, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun. For Whitehead, this bifurcation of nature into two systems compels one to ask: Where is the locus of aesthetic quality? Is aesthetic quality simply located in the mind or matter? Subject or object? The audience or the artwork? Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of nature holds that aesthetic quality cannot be simply located only in the mind or only in matter, insofar as colors, sounds, scents, tastes, and tactile sensations are pervasive aesthetic qualities located in a “situation,” thus to be diffused throughout the whole field of organism/environment interactions by which they are constituted. The locus of aesthetic value qualities such as colors, sounds, and scents is neither in the subject or the object, but in more holistic units called interactive situations, contextual events or relational fields. In his critique of vacuous existence. Whitehead thus holds that nature is a plenum of situational events with pervasive aesthetic value qualities and that these aesthetic qualities are a function of relatedness. According to F. S. C. Northrop (1961, xxiv), chapter seven of The Concept of Nature is the key to Whitehead’s metaphysics of nature as an aesthetic continuum of interpenetrating pervasive value qualities. In chapter two Whitehead protests against the bifurcation of nature into two systems with its dualism of primary qualities of science versus secondary qualities of art. In chapter seven he endeavors to provide his own nondualistic account, whereby the aesthetic qualities in the mind such as colors, sounds, and scents are themselves the qualities of nature. He argues that an aesthetic sense quality like the color blue is not simply located in the subject or the object, matter or mind, inner experience or outer nature, but is located in an organic interactive “situation.” Aesthetic sense qualities cannot be simply localized, because like an earthquake, an echo, and an explosion, or like the magnetism which causes the sensitized needle of a compass to point north, pervasive qualities have an epicenter, yet are distributed and spread through an extensive field of causal interactions. In the context of refuting the simple location of aesthetic qualities, Whitehead asserts: As long ago as 1847 Faraday in a paper in the Philosophical Magazine remarked that his theory of tubes of force implies that in a sense an electric charge is everywhere. The modification of the electromagnetic field at every point of space at each instant owing to the past history of each electron is another way of stating the same fact. (CN 146)

At one level of analysis the basic facts are not solid material substances, but vibrating electromagnetic fields. Just as an electrical charge is everywhere, a percipient event with pervasive aesthetic quality spreads everywhere throughout the continuum of nature insofar as it both contains and

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permeates the total field of interactions whereby it is constituted. The fragrance of a rose, the radiance of the sun, and the melody of the songbird permeate each situation arising through organism/environment interaction. In his revolt against dualism he thus rejects the bifurcated subject-object ontology of scientific materialism, whereby aesthetic qualities are simply located in the mind of the subject, and instead develops a nondualistic ontology of “situations,” whereby a color, scent, or sound is present both in the subject and the object, thus to be distributed throughout the whole situation as its pervasive aesthetic quality. Science and the Modern World In his 1925 work Science and the Modern World, the signature theme of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is set forth when he claims: “Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process” (SMW 72). As he further goes on to clarify, reality is a process of “organic synthesis” (SMW 57) that aims toward production of events having intrinsically important aesthetic values. Whitehead’s theme in SMW is the recovery of values in the processes of nature. More specifically, he seeks the recovery of intrinsic values, understood as aesthetic values to be enjoyed for their own sake—“an actual event is an achievement for its own sake, a grasping of diverse entities into a value by reason of their real togetherness in that pattern, to the exclusion of other entities” (SMW 104). An event thus achieves intrinsic value due to a process of organic synthesis, a grasping of diverse elements into a new value as a function of their novel togetherness in a single harmonic pattern. Throughout SMW Whitehead endeavors to overturn the dualistic seventeenth century Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic paradigm of scientific materialism for a new holistic model based on such key notions as process, relatedness, organism, event, and aesthetic value. He argues that in the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, the dualistic, mechanistic, deterministic, atomistic, and reductionistic view of scientific materialism functions to divest nature of all its beauty, intrinsic value, and aesthetic quality, reducing it to a meaningless flux of lifeless substances with no importance. Whitehead again takes up his revolt against dualism as the bifurcation of nature into “primary qualities” of science having measurable properties such as extension, mass, weight, and velocity, as over against the socalled secondary qualities of art such as sight, sound, and scent. As a result of this dualistic concept of nature, the primary qualities are simply located in the objective reality of matter, while the aesthetic value of secondary qualities such as colors, flavors, sounds, and fragrances are relegated to mere subjective appearances simply located in the mind. According to scientific materialism there is a bifurcation of nature into two systems, wherein objective reality is analyzable into abstract scientif-

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ic entities such as atoms, molecules, and electric waves, while subjective appearance consists of aesthetic sense qualities in the mind produced through atomic material substances impinging on the nervous system. Whitehead describes this bifurcation of nature into two systems as follows: Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. . . . Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless: merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. (SMW 54)

In opposition to scientific materialism, Whitehead’s paradigm shift to a new organic process model holds that sense qualities do not have “simply location” either in the subject or the object, in the mind or in matter, but are instead located in situations, events, or fields as their pervasive aesthetic value qualities. An aesthetic sense quality arises through a vast field of multiple relations so as to both contain and permeate the whole aesthetic continuum of nature as grasped from the unifying standpoint of a perspective. Whitehead articulates a revised Leibnizian monadology wherein an event is likened to a living mirror that reflects the entire universe from its own perspective. 1 In Whitehead’s organic process metaphysics the Leibnizian idea of a perspective, monad, or metaphysical point is described as an activity of prehensive unification (SMW 69). For Whitehead, the monad is no longer a closed windowless substance devoid of relationships as for Leibniz, but is now conceived as an open interactive event arising by prehensive unification as an act of organic synthesis that unifies the total field of internal relationships from its own given standpoint into a novel aesthetic perspective of the cosmos. He emphasizes that his Leibnizian perspectivism completely abandons the concept of “simple location.” As an example he writes that the castle grasped into a unity here and now is not the castle over there, but the castle from the perspective in space and time of their prehensive unification: “it is the perspective of the castle over there from the standpoint of the unification here” (SMW 70). Whitehead traces his idea of perspectives back to G. W. F. Leibniz’s concept of monads, each of which is a living mirror reflecting totality from its own perspective. 2 You will remember that the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events in space and time. (SMW 70)

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Whitehead goes on to clarify how his reformulation of Leibniz’s doctrine of monads as perspectives of the universe thereby involves the abandonment of the fallacy of simple location: My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world. (SMW 91)

Thus, according to Whitehead’s revised Leibnizian monadology, the fallacy of simple location is abandoned for a doctrine of perspectivism, such that each event arising by prehensive unification is like a mirror reflecting the universe from its own perspective, whereupon everything is everywhere at all times. Whitehead’s process metaphysics reformulates Leibniz’s monadology so that each space-time event arising through organic synthesis of many into one both contains and pervades the continuum of nature from its own standpoint as a new aesthetic perspective of the universe. For Whitehead, each monad realizes aesthetic value by grasping diverse events into the unity of a new perspective. Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1983) by Stephen D. Ross makes a noteworthy contribution insofar as it highlights the key notion of “perspective” in Whitehead’s process metaphysics. But Ross’s work fails to clarify the axiological basis of Whitehead’s perspectivism whereby an event constitutes a novel aesthetic perspective of the cosmos. This aesthetic dimension of Whitehead’s Leibnizian perspectivism is especially worked out in Modes of Thought, wherein each occasion is a perspective of nature realizing aesthetic significance as beauty. 3 Thus, according to Whitehead’s revised Leibnizian monadology, the aesthetic value of each occasion is mirrored from the perspective of every other occasion in the cosmos so that its beauty is multiplied ad infinitum. According to Whitehead, the basic error underlying the substance ontology of scientific materialism is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (SMW 58). The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the error of mistaking reified abstractions for the concrete events from which they are derived. For Whitehead, the fallacies of vacuous actuality, simple location, and bifurcation of nature are all based on the underlying fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Whitehead asserts that the idea of material substance with vacuous actuality and simple location is an abstraction from the concreteness of immediate experience, the paradigm case of which is aesthetic experience. Thus, in order to recover values in nature, Whitehead appeals to descriptions of concrete, aesthetically immediate experience provided by romantic nature poetry. In chapter five of SMW titled “The Romantic Reaction,” Whitehead argues that the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Shelly provide

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radically empirical testimony that aesthetic value quality is pervasive throughout the continuum of nature: Remembering the poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we see at once that element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something. “Value” is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. Value is an element which permeates through and through the poetic view of nature. . . . This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of nature. (SMW 94).

The romantic poets thereby reveal that all events in nature realize intrinsic value of aesthetic quality: “Aesthetic attainment is interwoven in the texture of realization” (SMW 94). For Whitehead, the romantic nature poets such as Shelly and Wordsworth testify that in concrete immediate experience, facts cannot be separated from aesthetic values: Both Shelly and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot be divorced from aesthetic values; and that these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts. (SMW 88)

It is thus clarified how for the romantic nature poets, nature is a dynamic continuum of aesthetic values. Moreover, it is explained how the aesthetic values of events in nature emerge through a process of organic interaction between the parts and the whole in each situation. The point in this lecture I have endeavored to make clear is that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact. . . . The romantic reaction was a protest on behalf of value. (SMW 94)

Whitehead counters the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by returning to the field of experiential immediacy. In this context there is an appeal to the concrete aesthetically immediate experience depicted by romantic poets as providing empirical testimony that all events in the continuum of nature have intrinsic value as pervasive aesthetic quality. For Whitehead, then, romantic poetry is a celebration of the beauty, value, and aesthetic quality of events in nature. In the final chapter of SMW Whitehead underscores how the abstract worldview of scientific materialism has neglected the aesthetic values of concrete experience: “In regard to the aesthetic needs of civilised society the reactions of science have so far been unfortunate. Its materialistic basis has directed attention to things as opposed to values” (SMW 202). He then illustrates the neglect of aesthetic values by scientific materialism with an example having special relevance for environmental ethics:

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Chapter 2 Also the assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty. . . . In the most advanced industrial countries, art was treated as a frivolity. A striking example of this state of mind in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be seen in London where the marvelous beauty of the estuary of the Thames, as it curves through the city, is wantonly defaced by the Charing Cross railway bridge, constructed apart from any reference to aesthetic values. (SMW 196)

Hence, for Whitehead scientific materialism resulted in a concept of vacuous existence as lifeless substance devoid of aesthetic value, thereby to ignore the beauty of the natural environment. In his critique of the abstract substance ontology underlying the seventeenth century Cartesian-Newtonian dualistic paradigm of scientific materialism, Whitehead calls for a return to the concrete aesthetically immediate experience of living nature as testified by the romantic nature poets. Hence, in the final chapter of SMW he argues for the need of an aesthetic education that cultivates enhanced appreciation of values, especially aesthetic values, including both the aesthetic values of natural and artistic beauty. The type of generality, which above is wanted, is the appreciation of variety of value. I mean an aesthetic growth. . . . What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment. When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. . . . What I mean is art and aesthetic education. . . . What we want is to draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension. (SMW 199)

For Whitehead, aesthetic education systematically cultivates heightened appreciation of aesthetic values emerging through interaction between an organism with its social and natural environment in a situation unified by pervasive quality. Whitehead goes on to provide a definition of art as arrangement of facts into a new aesthetic whole through selective attention: Thus “art” in the general sense which I require is any selection by which the concrete facts are so arranged as to elicit attention to particular values which are realizable by them. For example, the mere disposing of the human body and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a sunset is a simple form of artistic selection. The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values. (SMW 200)

When he later adds, “Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient values” (SMW 202), art is here defined as a selective act whereby the environment is reorganized into a new pattern so as to elicit attention to aesthetic values. Moreover, it is clarified that art provides vivid but transient aesthetic values. White-

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head thus expresses in nascent form the basis for his mature aesthetics of beauty as perishability, wherein reality is a process of creative advance into novelty aimed toward optimum production of evanescent beauty. It has been seen how in SMW Whitehead formulates an ecological concept of nature based on the poetic account wherein each event has aesthetic value by reason that the whole is in each part and each part reveals the whole (SMW 88). In his critique of scientific materialism he undercuts the notion of vacuous actuality and argues that all events in nature have aesthetic value. Moreover, he argues that it is the aesthetic value of events and the beauty of nature that warrants our reverence for nature (SMW 196). Whitehead’s ecological view of nature as a continuum of aesthetic values indeed has much in common with the land ethics and conservation aesthetics of Aldo Leopold. In A Sand County Almanac Leopold argued that ethics must now be extended beyond human interactions to include relationships between humans and nature. Environmental ethics presupposes that nature and all living organisms have intrinsic or inherent value, and not only instrumental value as a resource for human use. Leopold’s claim is that the intrinsic value of the biotic community of nature is based on its aesthetic value as beauty. For Leopold, it is the intrinsic value of beauty in nature which requires our moral concern for the biotic community of soil, plants, and animals of the land. Leopold asserts, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (1966, 263). The environmental philosopher Eugene Hargrove has suggested that Aldo Leopold’s land ethics and conservation aesthetics might have been inspired by Science and the Modern World and other works by A. N. Whitehead (Hargrove: 1979, 239). Thus, one of the most lasting contributions of Whitehead’s SMW is its paradigm shift from scientific materialism to an organic model of nature as a dynamic continuum of aesthetic values, which in turn can function as the theoretical basis for a new ecological ethics and environmental aesthetics. Religion in the Making In his 1926 book Religion in the Making, Whitehead develops his radically temporal process metaphysics of atomic, discontinuous, or epochal occasions of aesthetic experience arising as a microcosm of the macrocosm through novel creative synthesis of many into one. Defining metaphysics, he writes: “By ‘metaphysics’ I mean the science which seeks to discover the general ideas which are indispensably relevant to the analysis of everything that happens” (RM 84, fn. 1). Whitehead here endeavors to set forth a new metaphysics as a descriptive generalization of concrete immediate experience, especially aesthetic experience, which he further

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connects with religious experience. He identifies the three formative elements of aesthetically immediate experience as creativity, ideal forms, and God (RM 90). The primary units arising from creativity as the metaphysical principle of creative synthesis of multiplicity into unity are termed occasions, or “epochal occasions”: The actual temporal world can be analyzed into a multiplicity of occasions of actualization. . . . The epochal occasions are the primary units of the actual community, and the community is composed of the units. But each unit has in its nature a reference to every other member of the community so that each unity is a microcosm representing in itself the entire all-inclusive universe. (RM 91)

In this passage Whitehead clearly articulates a basic notion underlying his organic process metaphysics, whereby each occasion arising through creative synthesis of many into one is internally related to all other occasions in the undivided continuum of nature as a microcosm of the macrocosm. According to his reformulated Leibnizian theory of perspectives, each vibrating energy event is akin to a mirror that reflects the entire cosmos from the unique standpoint of its own emergent aesthetic perspective of totality. Whitehead goes on to argue that each epochal occasion arising through creative synthesis of multiplicity into unity realizes aesthetic value through a process of inclusion and exclusion: The creative process is a process of exclusion to the same extent as it is a process of inclusion. In this connection “to exclude” means to relegate to irrelevance in the aesthetic unity, and “to include” means to elicit relevance to that unity. (RM 113)

Each occasion arising through a process of creative synthesis unifies a multiplicity of occasions into the pattern of a new aesthetic whole with intrinsic value quality. During creative synthesis there is a process of selection whereby the data are graded into degrees of importance, so that the most relevant data are included in the foreground while the less relevant data recede into a remote background. The tradition of Western philosophy has long established a primacy of cognitive and moral over aesthetic experience. In RM Whitehead sets forth a new axiological process metaphysics of creative events based on a reversal of values that explicitly asserts the primacy of aesthetic experience over moral and cognitive experience. Not only are logical and ethical experience grounded in aesthetic experience, but aesthetic experience is coextensive with religious experience. In the passage below, as elsewhere in his writings, Whitehead establishes his metaphysics in contrast to, and through a reversal of, Kant’s metaphysical system:

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The metaphysical doctrine here expounded finds the foundation of the world in the aesthetic experience, rather than—as with Kant—in the cognitive and conceptive experience. All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral order is merely certain aspects of the aesthetic order, and the aesthetic order is derived from the immanence of God. (RM 104-105)

Whitehead thus outlines the theoretical basis for what is the most systematic, comprehensive, and explicit metaphysics of aesthetic value experience in the tradition of Western philosophy. Whitehead’s doctrine that logic and ethics are based on aesthetics as vividness of felt quality (RM 115), is at once reminiscent of C. S. Peirce's phenomenological categories of firstness (aesthetic quality), secondness (force), and thirdness (cognition), which is itself the basis for his value theory expressed through a hierarchy of the normative sciences. In Peirce’s words: Normative science has three widely separated divisions: i. Esthetics; ii. Ethics; iii. Logic. Esthetics is the science of ideals, or of what is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason . . . it ought to repose on phenomenology. Ethics, or the science of right and wrong, must appeal to Esthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum. It is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, conduct. Logic is the theory of selfcontrolled, or deliberate, thought. (1955, 62)

For Peirce there is a hierarchy of the normative sciences based on the descriptive method of phenomenology, so that logic (thirdness), depends on ethics (secondness), which in turn depends on aesthetics (firstness). Aesthetics is the primary normative science as an inquiry into that which is admirable in itself: “Esthetics is the science of ideals, or what is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason” (1955, 62). It can therefore be said that for Peirce and Whitehead, as well as their creative synthesis in Hartshorne, aesthetic value is the basic value underlying all others as that which is intrinsically valuable for its own sake. In a chapter titled “The Aesthetic Matrix of Value” from Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method (1970), Charles Hartshorne discusses this primacy of aesthetic value experience in Whitehead’s axiological process metaphysics in relation to C. S. Peirce. As noted by Hartshorne, Peirce develops a hierarchy of the normative sciences wherein logic depends on ethics and ethics depends on aesthetics, which itself corresponds to Whitehead’s view that the conceptual order depends on the moral order, and the moral order depends on the aesthetic order: Thinking, Peirce held, is one form of acting, and hence logic as a normative science is a branch of ethics. Both presuppose aesthetics in a generalized sense: the study of what makes experiences good in themselves. . . . Remarkably, Whitehead independently arrives at nearly the

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Chapter 2 same conclusion. He does have much more to say about what a generalized aesthetics comes to. (1970, 303)

Explaining Whitehead’s idea of beauty, he continues: Beauty (as an intrinsic value) is, in his words, the “mutual adaptation of elements of experience” . . . Mutual adaptation or harmony is not, however, a sufficient condition of great value. There must also be intensity. And intensity depends upon contrast, the amount of diversity integrated into an experience. Thus aesthetic value is found in diversified, harmonious experiences. This agrees with the old formula, beauty is unity in variety. (1970, 303)

Hartshorne’s process metaphysics, as a creative synthesis of both Peirce and Whitehead, likewise comes to hold that there is a hierarchy of normative values whereby logic rests on ethics and ethics rests on aesthetics, the field of “aesthetics” being understood as the study of beauty or intrinsically valuable aesthetic quality as that which is important for its own sake. 4 Moreover, in agreement with Whitehead’s aesthetics, Hartshorne analyzes beauty in terms of harmony, intensity, and contrast, as altogether summed up by his key aesthetic principle of “unity in variety” (1970, 303). Elsewhere, Hartshorne further clarifies his Whiteheadian view that the primary values are aesthetic values, so that moral and cognitive values are rooted in aesthetic values: That the most fundamental and universal values are aesthetic can be seen in a number of ways. Ethical values cannot be the universal ones; for infants and the lower animals cannot exhibit them. But infants and the lower animals can enjoy harmonious experiences. . . . Cognitive values can hardly be universal; for how much can an infant realize them? It is the artist who is concerned with the universal values, not the scientist and not the moralist. (1987, 51-52)

For Hartshorne, as for Whitehead and Peirce, the fundamental values are aesthetic values expressed by the artist, such as the poet, the painter, or the musician, whereas the ethical values of the moralist and the cognitive values of the scientist are themselves dependent on aesthetic value as beauty comprehended as that which is an end in itself and enjoyed for its own sake. Elsewhere in RM, Whitehead explains aesthetic experience as a descriptive generalization of the aesthetic law of identity and contrast, which underlies the vibratory nature of reality in modern quantum physics: [A]n actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity. . . . In the physical world, this principle of contrast under an identity expresses itself in the physical law that vibration enters into the ultimate na-

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ture of atomic organisms. . . . physical vibrations are the expression among the abstractions of physical science of the fundamental principle of aesthetic experience. (RM 115-116)

Whitehead here argues from the standpoint of his scientific cosmology that the aesthetic character of actual facts, otherwise termed “epochal occasions,” are descriptive generalizations of the vibrating events, electromagnetic occasions, photons, or quanta of light in modern quantum physics, which in turn express the fundamental aesthetic law of vibration as identity and contrast. The process metaphysics of Whitehead thereby posits an aesthetic vision of the cosmos which dissolves the apparent solidity of vacuous material substances into multiple patterns of energy vibrations forever oscillating between rhythm and novelty. Indeed, Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic experience as a function of energy vibrations is at once resonant with the “doctrine of vibrations” in the classical Indian tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, whereby all aesthetic events are creative expression of spanda or “vibrations” springing from the divine “bliss” (Skt. ananda) of Brahman in its dynamic play of divine energy as kundalini-shakti. 5 Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect In his 1927 book Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead further elaborates his concept of aesthetic experience in terms of a doctrine of perception. He now develops a theory of perception in three modes, including (i) perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy; (ii) perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, or sense perception; and (iii) perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference. The primordial mode of perception is causal efficacy whereby an occasion arises out of its prehensions or dim feelings of the surrounding environment. Sense perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is a clear and vivid yet superficial layer of experience arising as an overlay upon the primordial mode of causal efficacy. Perception in the mode of symbolic reference is the intersection of the other two modes. For Whitehead, there are various kinds of symbolism, such as discursive symbols including scientific, mathematical, and logical symbolism, as well as nondiscursive symbols such as artistic, poetic, and religious symbolism. The primary mode of symbolism, however, is the use of vivid sense data such as colors, sounds, and scents of presentational immediacy, to operate as aesthetic symbols referring to perception of dimly felt relationships in the primordial mode of causal efficacy: “In fact symbolism is very largely concerned with the use of pure sense-perceptions in the character of symbols for more primitive elements in our experience” (S 5). The atomic sense qualities of presentational immediacy appear to be vacuous, empty, and barren, thus devoid of value. But when sense qualities such as colors, sounds, or fragrances operate as symbols for the more primordial percep-

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tion of causal efficacy, they become laden with the intensity, fullness, and depth of aesthetic feeling-tone. One of the most profound insights of Whitehead’s theory of perception is that beneath the level of sense perception with its vivid sense qualities of sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch, there lies a deeper, more primordial level of perception in the mode of causal efficacy. It is at the level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy that one directly feels or “prehends” the wholeness, depth, and relatedness of occasions. Also, it is in the primordial mode of causal efficacy that one directly feels the evanescence of fleeting occasions arising and perishing in the stream of immediate experience. Moreover, it is in this primordial mode of causal efficacy that one directly feels the pervasive aesthetic quality realized by each creative novel occasion emerging by interpenetration of many into one. Yet, it is only at the level of perception in the mode of symbolic reference that the clear sense data of presentational immediacy and the depth of feeling-tone in causal efficacy are fused in a single intensity of emotion. One of the most philosophically significant aspects of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy is that it represents Whitehead’s counter to the problem of skepticism, or what Santayana calls “solipcism of the present moment” (1995 28-29). A primary concern of Whitehead’s counter of skepticism is to show how occasions arise through a concrescence of causal relationships into a novel unity of feeling with aesthetic quality. Thus, for Whitehead a fundamental problem in philosophy is the status of causal efficacy in the constitution of human experience. He rejects Hume’s empiricism, which claims that experience is a mere temporal succession of discrete impressions or isolated sense data with no causal connections. Also, he repudiates Humes’ skeptical view that the idea of causal relationships is only a habit of thought developed through association. At the same time, Whitehead rejects Kant’s transcendental idealism, which holds that although the idea of causal relationships is not discoverable in experience, it is an a priori category of thought imposed on the manifold of sensations as a condition for the possibility of experience. For Whitehead, causal relations are neither a “habit of thought” as said by Hume (S 39), nor an a priori “category of thought” as said by Kant (S 40), but are directly felt relationships disclosed by perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. Insofar as the clear data of sense perception appear to lack causal relatedness they give rise to the attitude of skepticism. It is perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy which counters skepticism as solipsism of the present moment, and returns us to directly felt causal relationships between events disclosed in concrete, aesthetically immediate experience. Whitehead argues that beneath the clearly articulated sense perception recognized by the empiricism of Hume, there is a deeper perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy, disclosed by a vague feeling of

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relationships in the nonarticulated background at the fringe of awareness: “Our primitive perception is that of ‘conformation’ vaguely, and of the yet vaguer relata . . . in the undiscriminated background” (S 43). While the vivid sensations of presentational immediacy are discriminated in the foreground, the vague feelings of causal efficacy are in the undiscriminated background of immediate experience. In Symbolism, as elsewhere in his writings, Whitehead argues that while sense data appear to be simply located atomic sensations in the foreground at the level of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, they arise through a background field of complex multitermed relationships at the more primordial level of perception in the mode of causal efficacy (S 53). There is a third mode of perception realized at the higher levels of experience characterizing human consciousness termed perception in the mode of symbolic reference. It is this mixed mode of symbolic perception that directly links the two pure modes of sense data and causal feelingtone, thereby producing intensity of aesthetic experience. Here it is argued that clearly discriminated sense qualities like sounds and colors in the foreground can function as aesthetic symbols making reference to the vague, obscure, and dim feelings of causal relationships in the undiscriminated background as disclosed by perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. When otherwise barren sensations of color or sound act as symbols referring to the felt background of the perceptual field they reveal the depth, wholeness, relatedness, and aesthetic meaning of sense qualities in aesthetic experience. Throughout Symbolism there are numerous discussions on how symbolic reference or symbolic transference of feelings operates in various kinds of aesthetic experience. At the conclusion Whitehead underscores the aesthetic character of symbolism operating in art, poetry, and literature: In every effective symbolism there are certain aesthetic features shared in common. The meaning acquires emotion and feeling directly excited by the symbol. This is the whole basis of the art of literature, namely that emotions and feelings directly excited by the words should fitly intensify our emotions and feelings arising from the contemplation of meaning. (S 83-4)

Whitehead concludes his discussion of symbolic reference in aesthetic experience, stating: “This whole question of the symbolic transfer of emotion lies at the base of any theory of the aesthetics of art” (S 85). Of special importance to Whitehead’s process aesthetics of beauty as perishability is his doctrine of “pathos” as the aesthetic feeling of sadness and pity arising through lapses of time and its expression in poetry. Whitehead explains that although the mere succession of barren sense data are empty of meaning at the level of presentational immediacy, the aesthetic meaning of the sense data are disclosed at the level of symbolic

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reference. It is the symbolic reference from sense data in the foreground to the primitive experience of vaguely felt relationships in the background through the perceptual mode of causal efficacy that reveals the haunting beauty of pathos emerging through lapse of time. To illustrate the deep emotional pathos of temporal passage he cites verses from the poetry of Keats, Shakespeare, and others. For Whitehead, the poetry of Keats demonstrate how poetic images can be used as aesthetic symbols resulting in “the imagined fusion of the two perceptive modes by one intensity of emotion” (S 48). The contrast between the comparative emptiness of Presentational Immediacy and the deep significance disclosed by Causal Efficacy is at the root of the pathos which haunts the world. “Pereunt et imputantur” is the inscription on old sundials in “religious” houses: “The hours perish and are laid to account” (S 47)

He then goes on to assert: “Almost all pathos includes a reference to lapse of time” (S 47). From the perspective of Whitehead's process aesthetics, then, a primary symbolic function of poetry, literature, and art is to depict the haunting “pathos” of the fleeting world, thereby evoking that aesthetic feeling of sadness and pity referred to in his later writings as the tragic beauty of perishability. Aims of Education In his 1929 pedagogical work The Aims of Education, Whitehead further espouses the importance of aesthetic education. He maintains that a primary aim of education is to cultivate a sense of values, including aesthetic, moral, and religious values, as well as cognitive and scientific values. The educational process is especially directed toward cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for the supreme value of beauty. Chapter II entitled “The Rhythm of Education” describes the rhythmic character of the educational process: Lack of attention to the rhythm and character of mental growth is a main source of wooden futility in education. I think that Hegel was right when he analysed progress into three stages, which he called Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis . . . In relation to intellectual progress I would term them, the stages of romance, the stage of precision, and the stage of generalization. (AE 17)

For Whitehead, there is a rhythmic, cyclic, and periodic character of mental progress in the temporal process of education. He agrees with Hegel that the progressive development of consciousness takes place by means of three dialectical moments: (i) thesis, (ii) antithesis, and (iii) synthesis. Next he names these three dialectical moments in the rhythm of education: (i) romance, (ii) precision, and (iii) generalization. Moreover, for

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Whitehead this threefold rhythmic educational process of romance, precision, and generalization, is itself unified, directed, and normatively governed throughout its various developing stages by a single “pervasive quality” (AE 28). It is further clarified: “Education should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles” (AE 19). The three stages in the rhythm of education are characterized as follows: [i] Romance. The stage of romance is the awakening to directly felt qualitative aesthetic value experience, which involves “chance flashes of insight” (AI 36), “immediate experience” (AI 37), “vividness of novelty” (AE 17), “unexplored connexions with possibilities” (AE 17), “Romantic emotion” (AE 18), “vivid freshness” (AE 22), “imagination” (AE 21), “freedom” (AE 31), “the creative impulse to create something” (AE 119), “aesthetic appreciation” (AE 48), and so forth. [ii] Precision. The second dialectical moment in the rhythm of education is termed the stage of “precision,” which cultivates detailed knowledge of science, logic, mathematics, language, and the literary classics through rigorous discipline. (AE 34). [iii] Generalization. The third dialectical moment of progressive education is termed generalization: “The final stage of generalisation is Hegel’s synthesis. It is a return to romanticism with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique” (AE 19). As the Hegelian dialectical moment of synthesis, the stage of generalization is an integration of the moments of romance and precision. Hence the third stage designates the method of speculative philosophy, which provides a generalized description of nature based on a cyclical return to the aesthetically immediate experience of romantic feeling, creativity, and imagination, now enriched by the stage of logical precision. Whitehead especially underscores the function of aesthetic education (AE 40-41). Aesthetic education aims toward practical realization of wisdom as an “artistic sense” (AE 39), including the “sense of value,” the “sense of importance,” and the “sense of beauty” (AE 40). In a statement that sums up his view of the central importance of aesthetic education, he writes: The ultimate motive power, alike in science, in morality, and in religion, is the sense of value, the sense of importance. . . . The most penetrating exhibition of this force is the sense of beauty, the aesthetic sense of realised perfection. This thought leads me to ask whether in our modern education we emphasize sufficiently the functions of art. . . . You cannot, without loss, ignore in the life of the spirit so great a factor as art. Our aesthetic emotions provide us with vivid apprehensions of value. (AE 40; italics added)

According to Whitehead, the aim of aesthetic education is mental cultivation of what he calls the sense of values, including aesthetic, moral, religious, and scientific values, as summed up by the supreme aesthetic value of beauty. He thus writes: “Education is a discipline for the adventure of

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life. . . . It is the function of the teacher to evoke into life wisdom and beauty” (AE 98). Whitehead discusses how through aesthetic education one develops an “aesthetic sense,” or what he otherwise terms the “sense of style” (AE 12). For Whitehead, a basic aim of aesthetic education is the acquisition of style through skillful technique and expert specialization, along with cultivation of habits of art appreciation, a sense of aesthetic values, and a heightened awareness of beauty as exemplified by the artisan, the painter, and the poet (AE 13). Indeed, Whitehead’s notion of an aesthetic sense of “style” is reminiscent of Nietzsche, who proclaims: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art!” (1974, 232). For Nietzsche, “style” is developed when all aspects of one’s character and life are fit “into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art” (1974, 232). Whitehead’s notion of style invites further comparisons with Kuki Shūzō’s notion of iki (粋) or “chic,” also translated as “style.” It can be said that for Whitehead, as for Nietzsche and Kuki, “style” is acquired by cultivating a refined aesthetic sensibility that transforms everyday life into a work of art. NOTES 1. In Leibniz’s Monadology each monad is a living mirror that reflects the totality from its own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm (1973). Whitehead’s process metaphysics reformulates Leibniz’s monadology so that each occasion arising through creative synthesis of many into one both includes and pervades the cosmos from its own standpoint as a new aesthetic perspective of the universe. 2. Elsewhere I show how Whitehead’s Leibnizian doctrine of “perspectives” is adopted by G. H. Mead as the basis for his theory of the social self as a mirror of society, and through Mead developed by Jürgen Habermas as the source for communicative discourse ethics based on “perspective-taking” (Odin: 1996). 3. In this volume I use the terms “occasion” and “event” interchangeably. While in his earlier writings Whitehead employs the term “event” for the fundamental unit of actuality, in Process and Reality he distinguishes between an “event” and an “occasion”: “I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member” (PR 73). 4. In the 1920s, Charles Hartshorne was Whitehead’s research and teaching assistant at Harvard University, while at the same time editing the collective works of C. S. Peirce, thereby coming to recognize the remarkable points of convergence between these two philosopher-mathematicians. 5. For an account of aesthetic experience of beauty as a function of bliss expressed by energy vibrations in Kashmir Shaivism, see The Doctrine of Vibration: An Account of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, by Mark S. G. Dyezkowski. New York: SUNY Press, 1987.

THREE Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Process and Reality

Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic value experience is formally articulated in the categoreal scheme of his 1929 magnum opus titled Process and Reality. He here provides a descriptive generalization of nature as an evolving continuum of novel emergent occasions of experience realizing intrinsic value as pervasive aesthetic quality, each of which arises through a creative synthesis of disjunctive multiplicity into conjunctive unity, thereby producing optimal intensity of feeling by patterned harmonic contrasts. In PR, Whitehead sets forth the most ambitious, comprehensive, and systematic metaphysical scheme since G. W. F. Hegel. He defines metaphysics or speculative philosophy as follows, “Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical and necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). His process metaphysics is now formally articulated through the “categoreal scheme,” constituted by forty-nine categories elucidating the most generalized notions characterizing all particular occasions of immediate experience (PR chapter 2, 18-30). Whitehead’s metaphysics is an extension of American pragmatism as a mode of nonfoundationalism, fallibilism, and experimentalism. Speculative philosophy, or metaphysics, which endeavors to discover the most general notions underlying all experience, is to be conceived as an “imaginative experiment” (PR 5). Again, speculative metaphysics has the status of “an experimental adventure” (PR 9). The metaphysical categories or generic traits of existence are not fixed a priori categories as in Kant’s transcendental idealism, nor are they axioms from which all knowledge can be deduced as for the geometric method of Descartes and Spinoza. Whitehead endeavors to create a new metaphysical system in which the catego31

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ries are not dogmatic certainties or eternal truths providing an absolute foundation for knowledge: “Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious: they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (PR 8). Elsewhere he states: “Thus speculative philosophy embodies the method of ‘working hypotheses’” (AI 222). Speculative philosophy is framed in terms of the nonfoundationalism, experimentalism, or fallibilism of classical American pragmatism, conceived as an experimental adventure wherein each metaphysical category is a tentative formulation of the ultimate generalities, a working hypothesis that must be tested through experiments by an intersubjective community of inquirers. In the Preface to PR Whitehead asserts: “This whole metaphysical position is an implicit repudiation of the doctrine of ‘vacuous actuality’” (PR xiii). The fallacy of vacuous actuality is the erroneous notion, based on scientific materialism, that reality consists of lifeless material substances devoid of intrinsic value. To counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality he elaborates a new organic process metaphysics of creativity wherein the basic units are emergent novel occasions of experience arising through creative synthesis of many into one with the aim of realizing consummatory satisfaction in directly felt aesthetic value quality. The primacy of aesthetic experience in Whitehead’s metaphysics is the outcome of his vision of reality as a process of creative advance into novelty. In Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the Category of the Ultimate (PR 21-22) is creativity. It can be said that Whitehead’s notion of creativity represents a paradigm shift in the history of Western metaphysics. The Category of the Ultimate (creativity, many, one) states that the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity is an act of unifying the many into a new one with patterned harmonic contrast toward the aim at realizing a novel occasion of experience with aesthetic value. The Whiteheadian metaphysical ultimate of creativity is to be understood as a constructive act of “creative synthesis” (RM 93) which unifies diverse multiplicity into novel unity directed toward achieving maximum intensity of directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. An alternate term for creative synthesis in Whitehead’s process metaphysics is that of “concrescence,” the creative process whereby the past many are unified into a new one. The constructive activity through which an occasion arises by unifying its felt relations (prehensions) to other occasions is elsewhere termed an act of “organic synthesis” (SMW 157). Creativity as the underlying constructive activity of synthesis, understood as “organic synthesis” (SMW 57) or “creative synthesis” (RM 93), is otherwise termed “aesthetic synthesis” (PR 212). The fact that the operation of creative synthesis is alternatively called aesthetic synthesis reveals the profoundly aesthetic character of Whitehead’s entire metaphysical scheme. Reality is thus conceived as a process of creative synthesis whereby there is a coalescence of many into one with the aim at producing vivid and intense

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yet transient aesthetic values. In later writings after PR he goes on to clarify that the creative synthesis whereby each occasion emerges results in aesthetic experience of evanescent beauty. In his essay “Whitehead’s ‘Actual Occasion’” (1961b), S. C. Pepper argues that Whitehead’s metaphysics of actual occasions with directly felt aesthetic quality is based on a new root metaphor, that of creativity, or the creative act. According to Pepper, the new root metaphor or primary analogate of Whitehead’s actual occasion is “a creative purposive act such as that of an artist, inventor or imaginative scientist” (1961b, 86). Each occasion is an original act of artistic creativity in that it creates itself as a novel, emergent, and transitory occasion of experience with the consummatory satisfaction of directly felt aesthetic quality. Hence, Whitehead’s aesthetic vision of nature and the cosmos is itself entailed by his ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity whereby each actual occasion creates itself anew as an aesthetic experience with intrinsic value. As clarified by Charles Hartshorne, throughout the history of Western philosophy there have been various ultimate metaphysical principles, such as being, flux, matter, substance, atoms, forms, monads, spirit, mind, deity, the absolute, and so forth (1970, 1). Yet Whitehead posits a new ultimate metaphysical principle: “creativity.” Whitehead is the first philosopher to systematically and explicitly posit “creativity” as the ultimate metaphysical category, understood as an act of creative synthesis combining diverse multiplicity into novel unity with the aim at production of optimal aesthetic value quality. In a burst of metaphysical insight, Whitehead thus declares: “Creativity . . . is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality” (PR 31). As the ultimate metaphysical category, creativity is the most general notion presupposed by every other principle in the categoreal scheme. For Whitehead, creativity is not what in Christian theology is termed creatio ex nihilo, or “creation out of nothingness” by divine fiat of a transcendent supernatural God, but is instead the “self-creativity” of actual occasions. 1 According to the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity all occasions are self-creative in that they create themselves through an emergent act of creative synthesis whereby the previous many are unified into a new one with novel aesthetic value quality. Whitehead’s panpsychic metaphysics of creativity argues that occasions of experience arise from a multiplicity of prehensions or directly felt causal relationships to all past occasions. No occasion can be reductively factored into its causal relationships or exhaustively analyzed into its antecedent conditions without remainder. For even if all the contents of an event are causally inherited, there is still at least one aspect which cannot be inherited, namely, the unity of them all in a single, unified occasion of aesthetically immediate experience, and for this, a novel emergent creative synthesis is required. Even if all the elements of an arising event are given for synthesis, including the ideal form or pattern of synthesis itself, the crea-

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tive act of synthesis must still be new, an emergent creation of the present moment. The manifold of antecedent causal relations at best “condition” an aesthetic event, but the ultimate determining factor in the process of experiential synthesis is always a free creative act, a novel emergent creative response to the vast multiplicity of causal stimuli. Explaining Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical category of creativity as an act of self-creativity, Hartshorne states: “To be is to create. . . . In every moment each of us accomplishes a remarkable creative act. What do we create? Our own experience at that moment” (1979, 5). Hartshorne describes Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity as a spontaneous free act of novel emergent synthesis unifying diverse multiplicity into a new unity: Let me restate the basic argument: the stimuli moulding an experience are many: the five or more senses are operating, memory is relating us, at least unconsciously, to thousands of incidents of the past: but all this multiplicity of influence is to produce a single unitary experience, yours or mine right now, let us say. The effect is one; the causes, however, are many. . . . This vast multitude of factors must flow together to produce a single new entity, the experience of the moment. That many stimuli are given, and certainly they tell us much about the response. But it is a logical impossibility that they should tell us all. An emergent synthesis is needed, to decide just how each item is to blend in a single complex sensory-emotional-intellectual whole. . . . To experience is a free act or nothing intelligible. (1970, 5)

According to the ultimate metaphysical category of creativity in its basic meaning as self-creation, all self-actualizing events create themselves as novel occasions of aesthetic experience arising through a free emergent synthesis of multiplicity into unity. In one of his greatest achievements of metaphysical generalization, Whitehead thus describes the ultimate category of creativity as the creative synthesis that unifies an antecedent many into a new one: Creativity, many, one are the ultimate notions . . . “Creativity” is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. “Creativity” is the principle of novelty. . . . The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities give in disjunction. (PR 21)

The ultimate metaphysical category of creativity states that each occasion arises through harmonious interpenetration of many into one. Moreover, time’s arrow as the forward-moving structure of historical reality as a creative advance into novelty is asymmetrical, cumulative, and irreversible, since each occasion synthesizes the past many, which is the disjunc-

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tive universe, into a new one, which is the conjunctive universe, thereby introducing novelty into the many which it unifies. In Whitehead’s formulation: “The many become one and are increased by one” (PR 21). Summing up his process metaphysics of aesthetic experience based on the ultimate category of creativity, he propounds: “The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty” (PR 222). Whitehead’s notion of creativity as a concrescence, prehensive unification, or creative synthesis of multiplicity into unity in the production of novelty thus establishes a new paradigm of metaphysics. For Whitehead, creativity as creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity does not simple repeat the old Huayan Buddhist formula that one is many and many is one. Rather, Whitehead’s doctrine of creativity as an asymmetrical creative advance into novelty propounds a new model of emergent creative evolution, whereby each aesthetically immediate pulsation of experience is an emergent occasion that produces a cumulative increase in the sum total of the universe. Whitehead’s category of the ultimate provides an answer to one of the ancient problems in the history of metaphysics, both East and West: namely, what is the relation between the many and the one? For Whitehead, the ultimate metaphysical principle is creativity as an emergent novel act of creative synthesis that unifies the past many into a new one with an aim at achieving intrinsic value of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Moreover, the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity is a response to yet another ancient problem in the history of philosophy: What is the relation between freedom and determinism? Whitehead’s philosophy of organism posits a relational metaphysics whereby each self-actualizing occasion arises through creative synthesis of many into one, so that while an occasion is causally determined by the vast multiplicity of felt relationships to past occasions, it exhibits freedom in the creative synthesis of those inherited causal relations into a novel emergent occasion of qualitative aesthetic value experience. The primacy accorded to creative freedom over causal determination in Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic experience is lucidly expressed by Hartshorne: “The causal drift itself is merely the mass of data formed by acts of freedom already enacted on different levels. . . . Causality is crystallized freedom, freedom is causality in the making” (1973, 233). Again, Process is creative synthesis, the many into a new one producing a new many—and so on forever. The synthesis is creative, for how could a plurality dictate its own increase? . . . The causal conditions for each free act are previous acts of freedom: creativity feeds upon its own products and upon nothing else. (Hartshorne: 1965, xviii)

A significant aspect of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is its response to and critique of Kant’s transcendental idealist metaphysics of human experience. Whitehead states that his own process metaphysics is a reversal

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of Kant’s metaphysics of human experience, wherein the cognitive and moral orders have primacy over the aesthetic order, so that now the aesthetic order is the basis of the moral and conceptual orders, and the aesthetic order is coextensive with the religious order (RM 104-105). Again, he maintains that his organic process metaphysics aspires to construct a “critique of pure aesthetic feeling,” in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason (PR 113). Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity as an act of creative synthesis is itself a reformulation of Kant’s doctrine of imaginative experiential synthesis articulated in The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s metaphysics of human experience as a constructive activity of imaginative synthesis is regarded as having initiated a “Copernican Revolution” in the history of Western philosophy. While for traditional empiricism human experience arises when the subject passively receives sense data from the objective world, Kant instead holds that the human mind is a constructive activity that constitutes experience by an imaginative synthesis. For Kant, human experience arises through a synthesis in imagination that unifies the subjective manifold of sensations with the objective a priori categories of the understanding, a constructive operation grounded in the transcendental unity of apperception as the whole presupposed by a combination of the parts. Whitehead fully acknowledges the landmark achievement of Kant’s notion of human experience as a constructive activity of imaginative experiential synthesis. But in opposition to Kant’s idea that experiential synthesis is only the constructive activity of the cognitive human subject, Whitehead strives for metaphysical generality, adopting a panpsychism whereby creative synthesis is applicable to all events in nature, conceived as self-creative occasions of experience. Moreover, he reverses the order of synthesis, in that for Kant, constructive acts of imaginative synthesis performed by the human mind unify subjectivity into objectivity, whereas for Whitehead, the constructive activity of creative synthesis performed by occasions of experience unify objectivity into subjectivity. In the passage below, Whitehead acknowledges the “Copernican Revolution” initiated by Kant’s notion of human experience as the result of construction, so that experience is not merely passive reception of data, but involves the constitution of experience through an act of synthesis (PR 156). Yet at the same time, Whitehead reformulates Kant’s metaphysics of human experience as imaginative synthesis transforming subjectivity into objectivity, so that it is now comprehended as a creative synthesis transforming objectivity into subjectivity: The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satis-

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faction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction. For Kant, the world emerges from the subject, for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world . . . (PR 88)

For Kant, an act of imaginative synthesis converts pure subjective experience into universally valid knowledge by superimposition of objective a priori categories of the understanding onto the manifold of subjectively received sensations. For Whitehead, each occasion of experience is a creative synthesis of multiple objects brought into the novel aesthetic unity of an emergent subject. While for Kant the world emerges from the subject, for Whitehead the subject emerges from the world of objects. Hence for Kant there is an appearance/reality dualism between phenomena and noumena, the end result being that one cannot have knowledge of “things in themselves” (noumena), but only of “appearances” (phenomena). By contrast, for Whitehead there is a reversal of the constructive process, so that each occasion of experience arises through creative synthesis of objective multiplicity into novel subjective unity, thus providing an immediate experience of things in themselves, just as they are in their directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. In The Reconstruction of Thinking, Robert C. Neville develops an original Whiteheadian axiological process cosmology of values based on a theory of imaginative experiential synthesis (1981). Neville clarifies how Whitehead appropriates yet criticizes Kant’s notion of experience as imaginative synthesis of subjectivity into objectivity by reversing the order of synthesis whereby objectivity passes into subjectivity. Moreover, he clarifies how imaginative synthesis is ultimately directed toward the production of beauty as novel togetherness. According to Neville’s axiological cosmology of values, imaginative synthesis is an act whereby the many are gathered into a background field for the foreground focus of attention, such that the contrast between foreground and background constitutes the elementary structure of beauty (1981, 18). In PR Whitehead further develops his Leibnizian theory of perspectives, monads, or metaphysical points, each of which is a living mirror of totality. An occasion aims to achieve intrinsic value by framing a new aesthetic perspective of the universe. Every perspectival occasion atomizes the universe so as to both contain and pervade the whole aesthetic continuum of nature from its own standpoint of unification. Whitehead’s perspectivism is itself the outcome of his ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity, whereby each occasion arises through creative synthesis of many into one so as to produce an emergent aesthetic perspective of totality from its own unique standpoint as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Insofar as each self-creative occasion of experience is an aesthetic perspective of the cosmos, the idea of substance with “simple location” is

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abandoned for a nonlocal view of relational events such that everything is everywhere at all times. According to the categoreal scheme articulated in PR an occasion of experience arises by a process of “concrescence,” or creative synthesis of many into one, so as to unify the whole aesthetic continuum of nature from its own perspectival standpoint. During the process of creative synthesis, alternate possibilities and irrelevant data are eliminated by negative prehensions from the illuminated foreground and dismissed into the dark background so as constitute a near-far perspective of the universe: “This fact of the elimination by reason of synthesis is sometimes termed the perspective of the actual world from the standpoint of that concrescence” (PR 219). Through a creative process of valuation, gradation, selection, and elimination, each occasion determines what is articulated in the clear foreground and what fades out into the dark background, and it is this foreground/background pattern of immediate experience that constitutes an emergent novel aesthetic perspective of nature. Through a valuation process an occasion emerges as a perspective of the universe by selective acts of inclusion (positive prehension) and exclusion (negative prehension), wherein the most relevant data are discriminated in the foreground focus of attention, while the less relevant or irrelevant data are dismissed into the undiscriminated penumbral background. In PR Whitehead argues that the basic ontological units of existence are not “substances” with simple location and vacuous actuality, but “actual occasions” (PR 73). Based on modern quantum physics, Whitehead calls these quantum units “electromagnetic occasions” arising through vector transmissions of electromagnetic radiation from all other occasions in the universe (PR 73). Whitehead thus develops a scientific cosmology of light (electromagnetic radiation) that approximates the holographic model of reality as a holoflux in which each hologram or three-dimensional light image enfolds and unfolds the implicit order of undivided wholeness. However, Whitehead develops a panpsychic metaphysics, wherein the vibrating energy events, quanta of light, or electromagnetic occasions in modern quantum physics are ultimately to be conceived as “occasion[s] of experience” (PR 189). As he elsewhere states: “The key notion . . . is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life” (MT 168). Whitehead’s panpsychism declares that the final facts are all alike, actual occasions, and each occasion is a complex and interdependent “drop of experience” (PR 18). Similar to Leibniz’ monadology, Whitehead’s process metaphysics of experiential occasions is therefore a fully explicit panpsychism. While for Leibniz each monad is a living mirror that reflects the universe from its own standpoint, for Whitehead every event in nature is an occasion of experience, each of which feels the universe from its own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm:

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This is a theory of monads: but it differs from Leibniz’s in that monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. (PR 80)

According to Whitehead’s revised Leibnizian monadology, each occasion of experience arises through concrescence of many into one from its own standpoint, thereby to frame a novel aesthetic perspective of the universe. Thus for Whitehead, each occasion of aesthetic experience views totality from its own perspective, thereby to multiply the beauty, value, and splendor of the universe as many times as possible. One of Whitehead’s great achievements was to have framed a new ecological vision of nature as an undivided aesthetic continuum of occasions arising through harmonious interpenetration of many into one. Already it has been shown how Whitehead develops his critique of the fallacy of simple location in SMW stating: “My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times” (SMW 91). In PR Whitehead further develops his critique of simple location, now arguing for a holistic account of novel aesthetic occasions emerging through a creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity, thereby to both pervade and contain the undivided aesthetic continuum of nature as a microcosm of the macrocosm: Each actual entity . . . repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm. (PR 325) Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. (PR 190) In a sense, every entity pervades the whole world. (PR 28) No two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. (PR 348) For Whitehead’s organic process metaphysics of creativity, the locus for this harmonious interpenetration of many into one within each novel occasion of experience as a microcosm of the macrocosm is expressed by his concept of nature as an extensive continuum of spatiotemporal relationships: “This extensive continuum is one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche” (PR 66). He continues: Every entity in its relationship to other actual entities is in this sense somewhere in the continuum, and arises out of the data provided by this standpoint. But in another sense it is everywhere throughout the continuum; for its constitution includes the objectifications of the actual world and thereby includes the continuum. . . . Thus the continuum is present in each actual entity, and each actual entity pervades the continuum. (PR 67)

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Whitehead’s concept of a spatiotemporal continuum designates the idea of an all-embracing web, net, or matrix of interrelationships. The directly felt qualitative occasions arising through interpenetration of many into one both emerge from and are constitutive of this processive-relational matrix of experience, comprehended as the extensive continuum of nature. Whitehead’s revised Leibnizian monadology is a pluralistic vision of multiple occasions, each of which is a novel aesthetic perspective of totality. At the same time the extensive continuum is the locus of harmonious interpenetration of many into one that underlies the solidarity, wholeness, and continuity of the universe. It can be said that Whitehead’s notion of an extensive continuum of relationships in which the continuum is present in each occasion and each occasion pervades the continuum, is itself a Western counterpart to the Kegon/Huayan Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net and its underlying principle of “unobstructed interpenetration between particular and the universal-whole” (riji muge, 理事 無礙). F. S. C. Northrop sums up Whitehead’s organic process view of nature as an aesthetic continuum of interpenetrating sense qualities, including both the “differentiated aesthetic continuum” of sense qualities in the foreground, and the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” in the vaguely felt background. It should be remembered that according to Northrop, the key to Whitehead’s organic process metaphysics is to be found in chapter 7 from The Concept of Nature, wherein aesthetic qualities such as the color “blue” of a lake or sky are not attributes that inhere in an underlying material substance through two-term relationships, but ingress into “situations” through complex multiterm relationships. Northrop describes Whitehead’s organic process concept of nature as “a panoramic continuum of diversified colors and sensuous forms, never twice the same, which is breath-taking in its immediately experienced natural beauty” (1961, xvii), and as “all-embracing” (xix). He then applies Whitehead’s organic concept of nature as a panoramic aesthetic continuum of interpenetrating pervasive aesthetic value qualities immediately apprehended by intuition toward an understanding of Daoist and Zen/Chan Buddhist concepts of nature, as well as their imaginative artistic expression in East Asian landscape paintings. Brian G. Henning develops Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics of nature as a multidimensional continuum of beauty and value as the theoretical basis for a new environmental ethics (2005, 109-110). Judith Jones has underscored the central importance of the Category of Subjective Intensity in Whitehead’s categoreal scheme (1998). According to the categoreal scheme (PR 26-28), there are nine categoreal conditions, requirements, or obligations which must be fulfilled in order to actualize an emerging occasion’s aim toward “satisfaction” as heightened consummatory aesthetic experience through enjoyment of maximum intensity of value feeling. Especially relevant is the obligation of the eighth

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category, that of subjective intensity, which states: “The subjective aim . . . is at intensity of feeling” (PR 27). Whitehead further clarifies how the concrescence of each occasion aims at maximum intensity of aesthetic feeling through satisfying the condition of “balanced complexity” (PR 278). 2 The first categoreal requirement that must be fulfilled for an occasion to realize minimum intensity of aesthetic value experience is harmony, as specified by the “category of subjective harmony,” otherwise termed the “category of aesthetic harmony” (PR 255). To achieve deeper levels of aesthetic value experience, however, the category of subjective intensity stipulates a further categoreal demand to realize contrasts as diverse entities combined into the unity of a pattern (PR 22). During the process of concrescence there is an aim toward realization of directly felt aesthetic quality through both harmony and contrasts. It is the principle of contrasts that enables diverse feelings to be incorporated into the value pattern unifying an occasion of aesthetic experience without being dismissed through “negative prehensions” as data incompatible for synthesis. The richer the contrasts that are integrated into harmonious experience, the greater the intensity of aesthetic value quality. Creative process is therefore directed toward achievement of aesthetic value experience by fulfillment of at least three categoreal conditions: harmony, contrasts, and intensity. Thus, according to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the process of concrescence is directed by an aim toward maximum intensity of aesthetic value feeling through creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity entered as patterned harmonic contrasts. The creative process of becoming an occasion through creative synthesis of many into one is governed by a “subjective aim,” and that aim is directed toward achieving maximum intensity of aesthetic value experience. While elucidating the aesthetic character of an occasion of experience, Whitehead repeats almost verbatim his words from RM (RM 115), now stating: “An intense experience is an aesthetic fact. . . . An actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out the realization of contrast under identity” (PR 279-280). The category of subjective intensity thus stipulates that each occasion of experience arising through creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into a novel unity as patterned harmonic contrasts aims at satisfaction through realizing intensity of aesthetic feeling. In this context, Whitehead further explains the category of subjective intensity as follows: “An intense experience is an aesthetic fact, and the categoreal conditions are to be generalized from aesthetic laws in particular arts” (PR 279). Insofar as the concrete facts are occasions of aesthetic experience, and the categoreal conditions for occasions of aesthetic experience are to be derived from the aesthetic laws of art, it can thus be said that Whitehead’s entire categoreal scheme designates a process metaphysics of aesthetic experience.

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Another key element in Whitehead’s doctrine of aesthetic experience is his theory of perception developed in chapter VIII of Process and Reality (PR 168-183) titled “Symbolic Reference,” which is an expansion of ideas expressed in his earlier book Symbolism. Here he further develops the doctrine of perception in three modes, including (i) perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy; (ii) perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, or sense-perception; and (iii) perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference. One of Whitehead’s most valuable achievements is to have worked out a comprehensive doctrine of perception in three modes. Both Hume and Kant mistakenly accept the “sensationalist doctrine of perception” (PR xiii), whereby the primary mode of perception is that of presentational immediacy, or the clear and vivid qualities of sense perception. In addition to sense experience of vivid colors, sounds, tastes, scents, and tactile sensations of presentational immediacy, he further argues for a more fundamental level of nonsensory experience, or perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. This primordial mode of nonsensory perception is constituted by dim feelings of causal relationships to the surrounding environment at the vague penumbral fringe of immediate experience. For Whitehead, all organisms exhibit perception in this generic primordial mode of causal feeling, even plants and jellyfish, as shown by their ability to respond to stimuli from the environment (176177). At the level of perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference characteristic of higher orders of experience, the sense data in the clearly discriminated foreground now operate as aesthetic symbols for those dimly felt causal relationships to the surrounding environment in the undiscriminated penumbral background. The requisites for symbolism are that there be two species of percepta, and that a perception of one species has some ground in common with a perception of the other species, so that a mutual correlation between the pairs of percepta are established (PR 168). Whitehead argues that while symbolic reference can work either way so as to be reciprocal between the two pure modes of perception, in human experience symbolic reference usually acts so that the vivid sense data of presentational immediacy in the clear foreground operate as aesthetic symbols for the dimly felt background of relationships in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. A sound or color seems empty of meaning at the level of sense perception, but when used as symbols for causal efficacy they evoke depth of aesthetic feeling-tone. In such a manner symbolic reference is said to produce a concrescence whereby percepta in the two modes are brought into a unity of feeling. This reciprocity of symbolic reference between the orders of sense perception and causal perception can be illustrated with the following schematic diagram in Figure 3.1.

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In his account of how the vivid sense data of presentational immediacy can function as aesthetic symbols for the dimly felt relations of causal efficacy, Whitehead gives a phenomenological description of the flow of time. He states that although symbolic reference in human experience works both ways, it usually operates from sense perception of presentational immediacy to primordial perception of causal efficacy (PR 178). In his phenomenology of the stream of immediate experience, Whitehead describes the radically empirical datum of felt transitions, whereby there is a direct feeling of the past flowing into the present and the present flowing into the future within a temporally extended duration as revealed through perception in the primordial mode of causally efficacious feeling-tone. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is thus the outcome of this phenomenology of perception in three modes, whereby vivid sense qualities such as colors, sounds, or fragrances of presentational immediacy function as aesthetic symbols making reference to dim feelings of causal relationships arising from perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. Whitehead provides an example of how vivid sense percepts illuminated in the clear focus operate as aesthetic symbols for primitive feelings of causation in the remote background: It is easier to smell incense than to produce certain religious emotions; so, if the two can be correlated, incense is a suitable symbol for such emotions. Indeed, for many purposes, certain aesthetic experiences which are easy to produce make better symbols than do words, written or spoken. (PR 183)

Here it is argued that clearly discriminated sense data of presentational immediacy in the foreground can act as aesthetic symbols making reference to the vaguely felt value relationships presented by the undiscriminated

Figure 3.1.

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background as disclosed by perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. The intoxicating fragrance of burning incense may operate as an aesthetic symbol for the deep emotional intensity of religious and mystical experience as a dim feeling of the wholeness, relatedness, and depth of existence disclosed through perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. The vivid sense qualities in the foreground such as sights, sounds, and scents can thereby function as aesthetic symbols making reference to the vague awareness of causal relationships in the felt background of experiential immediacy. According to the categoreal scheme of Process and Reality, there are two modes of process: nontemporal concrescence and temporal transition, or microprocess and macroprocess (PR 210-215). These two modes of process are analyzed in terms of genetic and coordinate division, respectively. The genetic analysis of the microprocess of concrescence examines the emergence of a drop of experience through creative synthesis of many into one. The coordinate analysis of the macroprocess of transition examines the perpetual perishing of actual occasions in the stream of experience. Again, concrescence is the microprocess whereby many become one within a single occasion of experience governed by the value pattern of a subjective aim, finally terminating in the aesthetic feeling of satisfaction. Transition is the inheritance of causal feeling from one occasion to another in the flow of time. Each occasion emerges through concrescence as prehensive unification of diverse multiplicity into novel unity culminating in a “satisfaction” as the consummatory enjoyment of intensity of aesthetic value feeling, while transition is the perpetual perishing of a succession of aesthetic occasions which gives rise to a feeling of evanescence. The microscopic process or concrescence involves a creative synthesis of the many into a new one: “‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one’” (PR 211). It can be said that Whitehead’s notion of microprocess as concrescence of many into one is reminiscent of the Buddhist principle of pratîtya-samutpâda (J. engi, 縁起) or “interdependent origination.” Likewise, Whitehead’s notion of macroprocess as transition corresponds to the Buddhist principle of anitya (J. mujō, 無常) or “impermanence.” Concrescence is the process of creative synthesis whereby an occasion of experience arises through the genesis from the past world of objective multiplicity into a new perspectival subjective unity of aesthetic feeling. Transition refers to an occasion’s functioning as a causally efficacious object conditioning all subsequent occasions. The process of concrescence whereby an occasion becomes actual is divided into three major phases: (i) the receptive phase, (ii) the supplemental stage, and (iii) the aesthetic satisfaction (PR 212).

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To sum up Section III of chapter 10 entitled “Process” from Process and Reality, the microprocess of concrescence occurs through various successive phases of growth, starting with the receptive, or “conformal phase,” where past actualities are causally reproduced in the immediate occasion through prehension, sympathy, or physical feelings. This is followed by a supplemental phase characterized by an inrush of originative and conceptual feelings, including an “aesthetic stage” (involving valuation and purposive feelings), and in the higher phases of experience, an “intellectual stage” (involving comparative, conscious, propositional, and imaginative feelings). Concrescence is governed by an aim directed toward intensity of novel aesthetic value experience arising from harmonization of diversity. According to Whitehead’s process theology, the subjective aim toward intensity of aesthetic feeling in an occasion is itself a “lure for feeling” supplied by the dipolar God in his primordial nature as the reservoir of aesthetic ideals. The concrescence for each occasion of experience aims to realize maximum intensity of aesthetic feeling in a terminal “satisfaction,” thus to close up the event in its consummatory phase, in which the event becomes an object conditioning all future occasions in the process of transition as creative advance to novelty. The aesthetic satisfaction at the consummatory stage of concrescence is then felt by the dipolar God in his consequent nature, the divine storehouse of all aesthetic value qualities realized through the emergent creative evolutionary process. Each occasion of experience is thus dipolar, having both a physical pole and a mental pole. In the conformal phase the physical feelings of past occasions are reenacted by the newly arising occasion. It is characterized by pure reception or inheritance of objective data such that the past events are replicated in the present occasion. In the supplemental phase, there is a movement from stubborn fact to creative advance. The “aesthetic stage” of the supplementary phase is characterized by subjective forms whereby there is an original response to causal stimuli of the conformal stage, resulting in the creative emergence of novelty. During the aesthetic phase of an emerging occasion of experience in the process of concrescence, there is valuation of the relative importance of the felt data in accordance with its aesthetic aim toward satisfaction, so that the most relevant data is articulated in the foreground, while the less relevant data fade into a vague background, and irrelevant data are negatively prehended into the darkness of the beyond. It is this creative reorganization of data into a foreground/background pattern that constitutes a new aesthetic perspective of the universe. The intellectual stage of supplementation characterizes the higher grades of experience, introducing more complex experiential syntheses such as contrasts and comparative feelings whereby consciousness emerges. Finally, the process of concrescence fusing diverse multiplicity into novel unity culminates in the consumma-

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tory phase of aesthetic satisfaction. This aesthetic satisfaction designates a contentment of the creative urge by fulfillment of its categoreal demands. Here I would like to further highlight the profoundly aesthetic character of this microprocess of concrescence whereby an occasion of experience arises through creative synthesis of many into one with an aim toward achieving intensity of aesthetic value feeling. In his essay “The Art-Process and the Aesthetic Fact in Whitehead’s Philosophy,” Bertram Morris explains Whitehead’s analysis of concrescence as a genetic process advancing in three phases of beginning, middle, and end, termed the receptive phase, the supplemental phase and satisfaction (1951, 466). Whitehead’s microprocess of concrescence is further described as analogous to the creative art-process (1951, 463-486): For aesthetic purposes, it is wise to distinguish as clearly as possible the process from the end at which it is aimed: the achievement resulting in “satisfaction.” There is some warrant for distinguishing between the process as art, conceived fundamentally as an activity, and the end as beauty, the satisfaction aimed at. The two together constitute what we may call the aesthetic situation. Analysis of the situation, by which the process of art issues into beauty, is the task of aesthetics, to which Whitehead has greatly contributed. (1951, 465).

Thus, in Whitehead’s process metaphysics, the concrescence of many into one from which an occasion arises is to be understood as a creative artprocess arising in three successive phases and culminating in “satisfaction” as an aesthetic experience of beauty. Explaining the receptive phase of concrescence, Whitehead asserts: “The first phase is the phase of pure reception of the actual world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis” (PR 212). During the emergence of an occasion of experience through the creative art-process of concrescence, the first phase of reception is here said to provide initial data for what is called “aesthetic synthesis.” This aesthetic synthesis is an alternative expression for what is otherwise termed “creative synthesis” as concrescence of many into one. The second phase in the creative art-process of concrescence is termed the phase of supplementation, which includes both an aesthetic supplement and an intellectual supplement (PR 212): In the aesthetic supplement there is an emotional appreciation of the contrasts and rhythms inherent in the unification of the objective content in the concrescence of one actual occasion. In this phase perception is heightened by its assumption of pain and pleasure, beauty and distaste. . . . It is the phase in which blue becomes more intense by reason of its contrasts, and shape acquires dominance by reason of its loveliness. (PR 212)

The third and final phase in the creative art-process of concrescence is termed satisfaction: “This final unity is termed the ‘satisfaction.’ The

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‘satisfaction’ is the culmination of the concrescence into a completely determinate matter of fact” (PR 212). The concrescence of many into one results in “satisfaction” as the consummatory phase of an occasion of experience, whereupon by fulfillment of its categoreal obligations it realizes the maximum intensity of aesthetic feeling possible in that situation. The aesthetic character of satisfaction through concrescence of many into one in an actual occasion is analyzed by Stephen C. Pepper. Whitehead’s concept of “satisfaction” is identified by Pepper as the enjoyment of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality emerging from the purposive act of self-creativity: “Beauty,” says Pepper, is “positive aesthetic value in the enjoyment of quality for itself or satisfaction in felt quality” (1961a, 585). Similar to Whitehead’s idea of satisfaction, John Dewey’s pragmatism holds that an event is not only “instrumental” as a means toward some aim, but also consummatory as an end in itself funded by immediately enjoyed pervasive aesthetic quality. The realization of directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality in the climactic phase of an occasion is therefore described by Pepper in terms of both Whitehead’s satisfaction and Dewey’s consummatory experience when he asserts: “On the basis of the consummatory act we may set up a descriptive definition of positive aesthetic experience as satisfaction in felt quality” (1961a, 566). He adds, “Its aim is to increase the satisfaction in felt quality to the maximum” (1961a, 566). The consummatory stage of aesthetic experience culminates in satisfaction as “optimum vividness of quality” (1961a, 568). Again, “both satisfaction and vividness of felt quality are thus constitutive of aesthetic experience and value” (1961a, 588). Pepper thus elucidates how in Whitehead’s doctrine of actual occasions, the process of concrescence as creative fusion of many into one aims toward realization of “aesthetic experience” as “consummatory satisfaction of felt quality” (1961a, 600). Whitehead develops his view of aesthetic value experience in terms of Aristotle’s principle of the golden mean. Describing how some periods of European art degenerated into dull repetition of order, Whitehead comments: “Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty” (PR 339). In this context Whitehead explains achievement of aesthetic value in an artwork by invoking Aristotle’s principle of the “golden mean” as an ideal of balanced complexity arising between order and novelty: “This is only an application of Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘golden mean’” (PR 339). Hartshorne develops his Whiteheadian theory of aesthetic, moral, and religious values as a via media between extremes in relation to Buddhist notions of wisdom as the “middle path.” It is in this context that Hartshorne’s process aesthetics further develops Whitehead’s use of Aristotle’s “golden mean” between extremes of excess and deficit to clarify the notion of beauty.

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Beauty in the emphatic sense is a balance of unity and variety. . . . This is the old Aristotelian principle of the golden mean: in the middle is the desirable quality, undesirable are the two extremes—e.g. rashness and timidity, compared to courage. So in aesthetic value. . . . What we spontaneously call beauty exhibits this balance. (1970, 304)

As Hartshorne points out, in Aristotle’s virtue ethics the notion of “virtue” is conceived as a golden mean between two vices of excess and deficit, for instance, when he defines the moral virtue of “courage” as a via media between cowardliness and recklessness. According to Hartshorne, moral virtue as the wisdom of moderation is itself based on the aesthetic principle of the golden mean. As an aesthetic principle, the golden mean is a balance of “just right” between “too little” and “too much.” Thus, for Hartshorne the ethical criterion of the golden mean is explanatory of Whitehead’s own aesthetic principle of balanced complexity, whereby beauty is a via media between two extremes, such as monotony and chaos, rhythm and novelty, harmony and contrast, simplicity and complexity, or unity and variety. In the Whiteheadian aesthetics of Hartshorne, nature is a continuum of aesthetic qualities wherein beauty can be more or less but never zero. Each occasion attains some degree of beauty as harmonious intensity. Moreover, each occasion achieves a degree of beauty to the extent that it realizes the aesthetic ideal of the golden mean as a balanced complexity of unity and diversity. Hartshorne argues that beauty as a golden mean between extremes can be achieved on different levels of balanced complexity as harmonious intensity of aesthetic experience. The richer the contrasts that are integrated into harmonious experience, the greater the intensity of aesthetic value feeling. In Hartshorne’s words: Here, too, beauty is a mean. For we use the term “pretty” for the less intense forms of harmony, those not drawing upon our full capacities to integrate wide contrasts. Also, where contrasts are very great . . . we are more likely to use terms like “sublime” or “magnificent” than “beautiful.” I seem to be the first philosopher to discover that beauty is a mean. Aristotle said this of virtue, not of beauty. Virtue itself, so far as it is a mean, contributes to the beauty of experience . . . (1987, 52)

Hartshorne clarifies and makes fully explicit how beauty is a golden mean. Yet it is an overstatement when Hartshorne declares, “I seem to be the first philosopher to discover that beauty is a [golden] mean” (1987, 52). For as shown previously, in a discussion of art as balanced complexity between order and novelty, Whitehead had already pointed out: “This is only an application of Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘golden mean’” (PR 339). The axiological process metaphysics of Whitehead, and its further development by Hartshorne, thus establishes the Aristotelian principle of the “golden mean” between extremes as constituting not only the moral ideal of virtue in ethics, but also the poetic ideal of beauty in aesthetics.

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Another key doctrine in Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic experience articulated in PR is how an imaginative work of art and literature functions as a proposition, or a “lure for feeling” (PR 184), which by the magnetic force of suggestion lures a self-creative occasion toward realizing optimal intensity of aesthetic value feeling. For Whitehead, an artwork is a suggestive lure or proposition objectified through actual performances in a play, a poem, a painting, or a musical concert. As an example he cites Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet as a lure for feeling to be entertained for inducing aesthetic delight (PR 184-185). Each theatrical performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an actualization of a novel possibility realized by objectifying the proposition as a lure for feeling. Understood as an objectified proposition or lure for feeling, an artwork such as a play, poem, painting, or concert, is an invitation to contemplate the beauty of art. According to Whitehead, the primary role of an artwork as a lure for feeling is as a theoretical proposition for the entertainment of novel possibilities resulting in higher phases of creative emergent aesthetic value experience. He argues that propositions have been narrowly understood by logicians who maintain that their one function is to be judged as to their truth or falsehood (PR 184). For Whitehead, however, the primary function of propositions is that of a lure for feeling, with an aim toward eliciting depth of aesthetic feeling-tone: The existence of imaginative literature should have warned logicians that their narrow doctrine is absurd. It is difficult to believe that all logicians as they read Hamlet’s speech, “To be or not to be: . . .” commence by judging whether the initial proposition be true or false. . . . Surely, at some point in the reading, judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight. The speech, for the theater audience, is purely theoretical, a mere lure for feeling. (PR 184-185)

As Donald Sherburne clarifies in A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, from the standpoint of Whitehead’s process metaphysics, a work of art has the ontological status of an objectified proposition, or a “lure for feeling.” Summing up his interpretation of Whitehead’s aesthetics and philosophy of art, Sherburne writes: [A]n experience is aesthetic when it is experience of an objectified proposition which lures the subjective aim of that occasion of experience into re-creating in its own process of self-creation the proposition objectified in the prehended performance. (1961, 140-142)

Sherburne’s thesis is that for Whitehead, aesthetic experience induced by enjoyment of art, is entertainment of an objectified proposition that lures an emerging occasion of experience into suspending its usual aims, and substituting a deeper aim toward aesthetic recreation of beauty in an artwork. In the context of explaining how art operates as a lure for feeling, Whitehead states:

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The primary function of theories is as a lure for feeling, thereby providing immediacy of enjoyment and purpose. . . . The “lure for feeling” is the final cause guiding the concrescence of feelings. By this concrescence the multifold datum of the primary phase is gathered into the unity of the final satisfaction of feeling. (PR 185)

An imaginative work of literature and art such as poem, a painting, or a play thereby functions as a lure for feeling which aims toward evocation of aesthetic delight. Whitehead’s conception of an artwork as a lure for feeling makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of art. One of the fundamental problems in Western aesthetics is raised by the question: What is art? In the history of Western aesthetics, various definitions of an artwork have been suggested, including representationalism (Plato, Aristotle), whereby through mimesis or imitation, an artwork is a mirror that reflects the external world; expressionism (romanticism), whereby an artwork expresses an overflow of inner feelings; formalism (Kant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry), which holds that the beauty of an artwork is found in elements of its formal presentation rather than its content, including significant forms, designs, patterns, lines, and shapes; institutionalism, wherein artworks are contextually dependent on an “artworld” constituted by art institutions, art theories, and art critics (Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie); antiessentialism (Morris Weitz), wherein the term art is an “open concept” resisting fixed definitions, such that artworks do not share a common universal essence, but are instead linked by what Ludwig Wittenstein terms “family resemblances”; and postmodernism, which holds that an artwork functions to induce a multiplicity of interpretations. Each of the above definitions of art have been criticized as failing to cover all artworks, therefore to be lacking in adequacy. Whitehead, however, proposes a comprehensive definition of art that strives for maximum adequacy, applicability, and generality. According to Whitehead, an artwork is now defined in its most general terms as a “lure for feeling” that elicits aesthetic delight. Whitehead’s concept of art as a lure for feeling has also been understood to account for the disinterestedness, detachment, or distance in aesthetic experience of an artwork. In his 1790 masterwork The Critique of Judgment, Kant inaugurated a revolution in Western aesthetics with the idea that aesthetic judgments of taste in the beautiful and the sublime are a function of an attitude of disinterested contemplation. Edward Bullough reformulated Kant’s aesthetic attitude theory of beauty as disinterested delight in psychological terms, arguing that beauty, art, and aesthetic experience are a function of inserting “Psychical Distance” (1912). Through an act of Psychical Distance the phenomenon is put out of gear with our practical interests so as to achieve Distance between the self and its emotions. He illustrates the act of Distancing with an example of a fog

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at sea. Sailors often experience fear of shipwreck with the onset of heavy fog, but through insertion of Psychical Distance, otherwise called “transformation by Distance,” the event is transformed into an aesthetic experience of beauty or sublimity. Psychical Distance is flexible insofar as it admits of “variability of Distance,” as well as “degrees of Distance.” According to Bullough, the fundamental error in aesthetic judgments of beauty in art and nature is the “loss of Distance,” the two major aspects of which are under-Distancing to the extreme of emotional involvement, or over-Distancing to the extreme of dehumanization. The most common error is that of under-Distancing. Bullough illustrates this by reference to an historical event where a spectator in the audience at a theatrical performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, due to under-Distancing, became so angry at Desdamona for her infidelity, that he leaped onto the stage and murdered the actress. For Bullough the aesthetic ideal is a midDistance between the extremes of low-Distancing and high-Distancing. The result is an “antinomy of Distance,” where intensity of emotion is felt with just enough Distance to take delight in it as an aesthetic experience. Above it has been seen how in A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, Donald Sherburne underscores Whitehead’s concept of art as an “objectified proposition,” or a lure for feeling. According to Sherburne it is this ontological status of the artwork as an emotional lure to be entertained by a selfcreative occasion that provides what Edward Bullough termed “Psychical Distance” in aesthetic experience. Sherburne writes: Edward Bullough’s theory of Psychical Distance has become a classic doctrine of aesthetic theory that must be taken into account by all aesthetic thinking. Indicating the manner in which the present theory provides a foundation for his insights will constitute an initial explication of the doctrine that the work of art has the ontological status of a Whiteheadian proposition. (1961, 108-109)

Whitehead illustrates his notion of the artwork as an objectified proposition by citing Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, now comprehended as a lure for feeling that operates to elicit aesthetic delight (PR 184-185). Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a lure for feeling that evokes intense aesthetic enjoyment through objectification with each reading of the work, as well as by objectification in theatrical performances, films, operas, poems, paintings, and other artistic or literary media. To clarify how the status of an artwork as a lure for feeling supports the notion of Psychical Distance as a factor in aesthetic experience, Sherburne makes reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar. There is a difference between a street-knifing in Chicago and what happens in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. One does not run onto the stage of a theater and rescue the heroine from the villain. Of course there is something actual about a performance of a play; the proposition which is the play is objectified by a concrete performal medium, which is

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actual. But the crucial point made by the doctrine of Psychical Distance is that it is catastrophic for aesthetic experience to identify the performal medium with the aesthetic object. This identification constitutes loss of Distance. It is the propositional character of art [in Whitehead’s aesthetics] that renders it “distant” in Bullough’s sense of the word. (1961, 109)

Thus, Whitehead’s idea of art as a “lure for feeling” not only provides a general definition of an artwork, but also establishes the basis for Psychical Distance as a factor in art, beauty, and aesthetic experience. Already in RM Whitehead had argued that his metaphysics is grounded upon the primacy of aesthetic experience, whereupon the logical and moral orders are based on the aesthetic order and the aesthetic order is derived from the immanence of God (RM 105). He further claimed that the basic function of God is the attainment of aesthetic value in the creative process (RM 99-104). In PR Whitehead goes on to formulate a systematic process theology whereby the evolutionary process of creative advance to novelty is guided by the divine persuasive agency of God. As will be seen, the basic function of God is to lure all self-creative events toward realization of aesthetic experience as maximum intensity of feeling-tone. The aesthetic basis for Whitehead’s process theology involves what Roland Faber calls the “theopoetic” operation of God (Faber, 2008). This theopoetic function of God is explained by Whitehead as follows: “He does not create the world, he saves it: or more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness” (PR 346). Thus, God does not create the world ex nihilo, but is the divine poet who guides the creative process toward achieving ever-new value, beauty, and aesthetic quality. Whitehead’s process theology is based on his profoundly original notion of a dipolar God with two natures, a primordial nature and a consequent nature. In his primordial nature God is the “poet of the world” (PR 346) who lures all self-creative occasions to realize aesthetic experience by providing ideal patterns that harmonize multiplicity into unity with maximum value. The primordial nature of God envisions all eternal objects, the Platonic forms, normative measures, or abstract value patterns functioning in the occasions as aims toward realization of aesthetic experience. In his primordial nature the dipolar God functions as a divine “lure for feeling” (PR 344), thereby to elicit maximum intensity of aesthetic value feeling in an occasion of experience. In his consequent nature God is the divine memory that preserves and enjoys all aesthetic experience actualized by occasions in the process of creative evolution. Just as the function of God in his primordial nature is that of providing eternal objects or Platonic forms that “lure” occasions to realize satisfaction as consummatory aesthetic value experience, the function of occasions is to provide God with enjoyment of novel aesthetic

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value experience as divine beauty in his consequent nature. As clarified by Daniel A. Dombrowski, Whitehead’s process theism is radicalized by Charles Hartshorne, so that the primary function of occasions is to contribute to the divine life of God, thereby leading to the creative evolution and transformation of deity, who is the universal subject enjoying all aesthetic value experience of divine beauty (2004, 132). It is significant that Whitehead characterizes the primordial nature of God (PR 344) in the same way that he describes the function of a work of art (PR 184-185): namely, as a “lure for feeling” that aims to elicit aesthetic delight. Thus for Whitehead, the universe is a creative artistic process that aims toward maximum production of beauty, such that the dipolar God as poet of the world lures all self-actualizing occasions to realize optimal aesthetic experience in his primordial nature, and saves all aesthetic experience in his consequent nature. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity and Asian Traditions “Creativity” is identified as the ultimate metaphysical principle in Whitehead’s metaphysics as follows: In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed “creativity.” (PR 7)

Whitehead recognizes that his ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity is nearer to certain Asian modes of thought than to the tradition of Western substance philosophy: In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate. (PR 7)

In the passage cited above, Whitehead acknowledges the similarity between his process metaphysics of creativity and Indian thought, probably referring to the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence based on the ultimate principle of interdependent origination. He also points out the resemblance of his process metaphysics to Chinese philosophy. Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity at once bears resemblances to aspects of the Chinese philosophical tradition based on principles of relationality, including the Book of Changes (Yijing) as well as Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Whitehead seems to have little or no knowledge about the Japanese philosophical tradition. Yet there are also parallels between Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativ-

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ity and Japanese modes of thought, including the Zen philosophy of emptiness as interdependent origination along with its reformulation by Nishida Kitarō and the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. There is especially a strong resemblance between Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativity and Japanese Buddhism in that they both set forth a process view of nature that culminates in an aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Contemporary process theologians John B. Cobb Jr. and David A. Griffin have argued that Whitehead’s process metaphysics and theology is the basis for a “deep religious pluralism” that includes at least two religious ultimates: creativity and God. 3 While God is the personal ultimate with determinate form, creativity is the impersonal formless ultimate. From the standpoint of Whiteheadian process metaphysics the impersonal formless ultimate of creativity is the generic principle of creative synthesis that unifies diverse multiplicity into novel unity in each new aesthetic occasion of experience. According to Cobb, the personal ultimate of Whitehead’s dipolar God corresponds to the theistic notion of Amida Buddha (Sambogakaya) in the Japanese Pure Land Buddhism of Shinran, while the impersonal formless ultimate of creativity corresponds to the nontheistic principle of ´sūnyatâ or emptiness (Dharmakaya) in Zen Buddhism, itself defined as a process of pratitya-samutpâda or “interdependent origination.” 4 Explaining Cobb’s interpretation of creativity as the formless ultimate in relation to Buddhist emptiness, Griffin writes: The connection with Whitehead’s distinction between God and creativity is the idea that the term “creativity” points to the same reality to which some Buddhists point with the term “emptying” or “emptiness.” More generally, Cobb’s hypothesis, which involves “a pluralistic metaphysics,” is that there are at least two ultimates. One of these, corresponding with what Whitehead calls “creativity,” has been called “Emptiness” (“Sunyata”) or “Dharmakaya” by Buddhists . . . It is the formless ultimate reality.” (Griffin 2005, 47)

Whitehead’s category of the ultimate, or creativity (PR 21), is understood to be an indeterminate formless ultimate without any character of its own, but conditioned by its particular expressions in concrete occasions of aesthetically immediate experience. As Whitehead puts it: “Creativity” is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian “matter” is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality. It cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself. But creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned. (PR 31)

According to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the ultimate metaphysical principle of “creativity” does not signify a substantialized, hypostasized, or absolutized reality with a transcendent existence of its own beyond the

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interdependence of everything in nature, but is only manifested by selfactualizing occasions in the process of creative advance to novelty. Likewise, Buddhist “emptiness” or “nothingness” is not to be reified as a transcendent substantial reality with preeminent existence, but is the spontaneous natural process of interdependent origination by means of which dharmas appear and disappear within the ceaseless flux of impermanence. Closely related to Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical category of creativity is his principle of “universal relativity,” based on his generalization of notions derived from Einstein’s relativity physics. According to Whitehead’s principle of universal relativity, “every item of the universe, including all the other actual entities, are constituents in the constitution of any one actual entity” (PR 148). Elsewhere, the principle of relativity asserts that “every item in the universe is involved in each concrescence” (PR 22). Again, The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum that “A substance is not present in a subject.” On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities . . . we must state that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the talks of making clear the notion of “being present in another entity.” (PR 50)

Like the Buddhist notion of emptiness as interdependent origination, Whitehead’s formless ultimate of creativity signifies the relatedness between all events arising through concrescence of many into one. Whitehead’s principle of universal relativity, which is a correlate to his ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity, is at once reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of ´sūnyatâ or emptiness, which has been translated as “relativity,” and even “universal relativity,” by the pioneering Russian Buddhologist Th. Stcherbatsky. As Stcherbatsky writes in his 1927 work The Conception of Buddhist Nirvâna: The central conception of Mahâyâna was their relativity (´sūnyatâ). Since we use the term “relative” to describe the fact that a thing can be identified only by mentioning its relations to something else, and because meaningless without these relations . . . we safely, for want of a better solution, can translate the word ´sūnya by relative or contingent, and the term ´sūnyatâ, by relativity or contingency. (1927, 42)

For Stcherbatsky, then, the Buddhist conception of ´sūnyatâ, or emptiness, is to be translated as universal relativity, insofar as events can only be defined through their relationships to all other events in the temporal flux of impermanence. Stcherbatsky’s translation of ´sūnyatâ (emptiness) as relativity or universal relativity, thereby comes to demonstrate the profound similarity to Whitehead’s ultimate category of creativity as expressed by the principle of universal relativity, whereby an event is to be

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comprehended in terms of its causal relationships to all other events in the continuum of nature. Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity can further be understood in terms of the ancient Chinese principle of Dao (道) in the Daoist philosophy of nature as a creative aesthetic process of change and transformation. Although the Daoist teachings of China did not thrive in Japan as a distinctive school, it nonetheless fused with the Zen/Chan Buddhist tradition of art, religion, and philosophy. The Whiteheadian ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity is used to interpret the ancient Chinese notion of Dao in Creativity and Taoism by Chang Chungyuan. His thesis is that Whitehead’s category of the ultimate and the Dao of Daoism both signify the primordial root-source of creativity in nature as a process of harmonious interpenetration of many into one. Quoting the words of Laozi in the Daodejing (道得経), he writes—“Lao Tzu says: ‘Tao never acts, yet through it nothing is undone. . . . All things create themselves’” (chapter 37) (1963, 66). Again: “‘All things,’ the Taoist says, ‘are created by themselves’ “ (1963, 71). Chang Chung-yuan goes on to connect the above understanding of Dao to Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity (1963, 66-67). He concludes that both the Dao of Daoism and the creativity of Whitehead have converged on the ultimate metaphysical principle: all events create themselves. According to Chang Chung-yuan, the insight of both Daoism and Whitehead is that all events spontaneously arise in nature through a dynamic process of “selfcreativity” (1963, 67). For Whitehead, to be is to create oneself through an emergent creative synthesis of disjunctive multiplicity into conjunctive unity, thereby to produce a novel occasion of aesthetic experience. Like Whitehead’s category of the ultimate, the supreme Daoist principle of Dao envisions nature as the primordial root-source of creativity, such that all events create themselves through harmonious unobstructed interpenetration of many into one. NOTES 1. For an alternative to Whitehead’s dipolar God, see Robert C. Neville’s Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1980). Neville accepts much of Whitehead’s process cosmology, but argues that God is to be understood in terms of the Christian idea of creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothingness.” Neville holds that there are two levels of creativity, the cosmological and the ontological. At the cosmological level formulated by Whitehead’s process theology, the principle of creativity is the act of synthesizing many into one to produce value. But at the ontological level there is God’s divine act of creatio ex nihilo which creates out of nothingness the many and the one that are then synthesized into novel occasions at the cosmological level of creativity. 2. The central role of the category of subjective intensity (PR 27) in Whitehead’s categoreal scheme has been clarified especially by Judith A. Jones in Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (1998).

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3. David Ray Griffin and John B. Cobb develop a “deep religious pluralism” based on Whitehead’s process metaphysics and process theology. See Deep Religious Pluralism edited by David R. Griffin (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). 4. John B. Cobb Jr. establishes a Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue between the primordial nature of God as Logos/Christ in Whitehead’s process theology and Amida Buddha in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in his book Beyond Dialogue: Toward A Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).

FOUR Whitehead’s Aesthetics: Later Works

ADVENTURES OF IDEAS Whitehead scholarship has up to this point focused on the categoreal scheme of Process and Reality (1929) as the definitive expression of his speculative metaphysics. I would argue, however, that Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in the naturalistic account of evanescent beauty articulated in his most visionary work, Adventures of Ideas (1933). The fundamental task of Whitehead’s axiological process metaphysics in PR is to counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality (PR xiii, 29, 167, 309). In AI he once again takes up his critique of vacuous actuality: “Here the term ‘vacuous’ means . . . devoid of self-enjoyment, that is to say, devoid of intrinsic worth” (AI 219). Against the fallacy of vacuous actuality, however, Whitehead argues that all self-creative occasions of experience have intrinsic worth by virtue of the fact that they enjoy the aesthetic value of beauty. Whitehead enumerates the five qualities of beauty, art, truth, adventure, and peace as requirements for an ideal civilization (AI 285). It is in the process of articulating his concept of civilization that he develops an explicit and systematic doctrine of beauty together with a theory of art. He asserts that the divine Eros from which each self-creative occasion of experience springs is directed toward realization of aesthetic value as beauty. In this context he describes the “Beauty realized in actual occasions which are the completely real things in the Universe” (AI 255). Having posited beauty as the ultimate value arising through creative process, he then goes on to argue for the aesthetic justification of existence. In a key chapter titled “Beauty” he now proclaims: “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty. Thus any system of things which in any wide sense is beautiful is to that extent justified in 59

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its existence” (AI 265). Again, he states: “Beauty is left as the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying” (AI 266). Whitehead’s effort to counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality suggests a parallel with Nietzsche’s task of overcoming “nihilism” through a transvaluation of all values. Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of Western philosophy identifies the advent of nihilism as tracing back to the dualistic Platonic-Christian paradigm of a transcendent supersensory realm that devalues existence in this world. Whitehead’s own genealogical analysis locates the source for the fallacy of vacuous existence in the mechanistic paradigm of seventeenth century scientific materialism. Although one can discover many similarities as well as differences between Nietzsche and Whitehead, here I would like to clarify how both identify the fundamental crisis of modern Western civilization as loss of values, and endeavor to counter this problem by a recovery of values. In The Birth of Tragedy (2006), Nietzsche describes ancient Greek tragedy as a fusion of two art-impulses, the first symbolized by Apollo as the beauty of dream images, and the second symbolized by Dionysius as the ecstasy of intoxication. Whereas the Apollonian art-impulse to create the illusion of beautiful appearances through dream images is exhibited by the dialogue of tragic drama, the Dionysian art-impulse toward ecstasy arises out of primal music through the frenzied singing and dancing of the chorus. At this point, Nietzsche articulates a “metaphysics of art” that argues for an aesthetic justification of existence in response to what he later terms the problem of nihilism. In Nietzsche’s words: Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a metaphysics of Art. I repeat, therefore, my former proposition, that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified. (2006, 104)

At the outset of The Will to Power, Nietzsche announces “the advent of nihilism” (1968, 3). Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer that life is misery and that the function of ancient Greek tragedy is to reveal the suffering and tragedy of existence. According to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the response to tragedy is mystical “resignation” of the saints, an exalted state of tranquility that can also be momentarily glimpsed by disinterested aesthetic contemplation. However, Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s pessimism as a form of passive nihilism, instead holding that the authentic response to tragedy is a joyful Dionysian affirmation of life. It is through the life-affirmation of art that the Dionysian superman overcomes the life-denying attitude of nihilism. For Nietzsche, the tragic art of ancient Greek theater is not a sedative teaching renunciation as said by Schopenhauer, or catharsis of fear and pity as held by Aristotle, but the great stimulant to overflowing superabundant life. In a section of The Will to Power titled “Art in ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’” Nietzsche writes:

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Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making possible the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life. . . . Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge—of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge. . . . Art as the redemption of the sufferer—as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight. (1968, 452)

Nietzsche holds that life is redeemed by art. The creation of art results in life-affirmation, and to affirm life is to adopt an aesthetic perspective of the world that sees it as beautiful. Since it is only the beauty of art that affirms existence, it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that life is justifiable. According to Nietzsche’s metaphysics of art, nihilism is overturned with the tragic insight leading to Dionysian affirmation of life through the intoxication, rapture, and ecstasy of aesthetic experience. Nietzsche’s metaphysics of art endeavors to overcome nihilism by proclaiming how solace is found in the tragic wisdom that despite all suffering and tragedy, life is still joyful. In his overcoming of nihilism, Nietzsche thus justifies existence through the aesthetic transfiguration of life into the beauty of art. For Whitehead, “Beauty is left as the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying” (AI 266). Likewise, Nietzsche claims: “[I]t is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified” (2006, 104). Both Whitehead and Nietzsche identify the basic philosophical problem as the loss of values in modern Western civilization, what the former terms vacuous existence, and what the latter terms nihilism. Moreover, both Whitehead and Nietzsche attempt to overcome the problem of meaninglessness in life with arguments for the aesthetic justification of existence. Yet, there is at the same time a profound difference between these two viewpoints. For Nietzsche, existence is devoid of value, meaning, or purpose. For Nietzsche overcoming nihilism through life-affirmation of art is accomplished by aesthetic transfiguration. Nietzsche holds that it is only through aesthetic transfiguration whereby the otherwise meaningless chaotic flux of existence becomes worthy of affirmation. In ancient Greek tragedy it is the beautiful veil of illusion created by dream images in Apollonian art that makes bearable the terrifying Dionysian insight into the meaningless tragedy and suffering of existence. Through force of will to power the Dionysian overman as creative artist imposes his perspective on nature, thereby to achieve aesthetic transfiguration of life into art. For Whitehead, however, nature is not meaningless flux, but a process of creative advance to novelty directed toward maximum production of beauty. Thus for Whitehead, each and every occasion in nature arises through a creative art-process as a novel aesthetic perspective of the universe realizing intrinsic value as beauty, apart from any perspective superimposed by human will to power.

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Throughout AI Whitehead provides a series of definitions of beauty. Whitehead’s analysis of beauty is divided into what he refers to as “minor” and “major” forms of beauty (AI 252). His initial definition reads: “Beauty is the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience” (AI 252). Adaptation is then said to involve a twofold aim. He adds, “When this aim is secured, there is the minor form of beauty, the absence of painful clash . . . In the second place, there is the major form of Beauty” (AI 252). Whereas minor forms of beauty require harmony or mutual adaptation as absence of mutual inhibition among prehensions in an occasion, major forms of beauty place a further requirement upon occasions to produce intensity through novel contrasts. In Whitehead’s words, the major form of beauty presupposes the first form, and adds to it the condition that the conjunction in one synthesis of the various prehensions introduces new contrasts...These contrasts introduce new conformal intensities of feelings. (AI 252)

He further elucidates this major form of beauty in terms of prehensions as felt relationships between the parts and the whole interwoven in patterned harmonic contrasts: Thus, the parts contribute to the massive feeling of the whole, and the whole contributes to the intensity of feeling of the parts. Thus the subjective forms of these prehensions are severally and jointly interwoven in patterned contrasts. In other words, the perfection of Beauty is defined as being the perfection of Harmony… (AI 252)

In AI Whitehead underscores the importance of “harmony” to an aesthetic experience of beauty in nature and art. At the same time he also emphasizes the function of discord in the creative process of intensifying aesthetic experience of beauty through contrasts. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord—in itself destructive and evil—is the positive feeling of a quick shift of aim from the tameness of out-worn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. (AI 257)

While harmony is sufficient for the minor form of beauty, elements of discord, dissonance, and disharmony can result in the major form of beauty when entered as patterned harmonic contrasts, instead of being dismissed through negative prehensions as incompatible for creative synthesis in an aesthetic occasion of experience. For the richer the contrasts that are integrated into harmonious experience, the greater the intensity of aesthetic feeling. In the final section of AI, Whitehead gives a phenomenological description of two highly refined modes of beauty disclosed by occasions of aesthetically immediate experience. These modes of beauty include what I term penumbral beauty, whereby the term “penumbra of feeling” (AI

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260), or “penumbra of consciousness” (AI 249) is now explicitly used to articulate the beauty of depth in the felt background of immediate experience disclosed in art, nature and life. Also, it is in this same work that Whitehead develops his vision of “tragic Beauty” (AI 294). In his doctrine of the tragic beauty of perishability he articulates the “sense of tragedy” (AI 294), defined as loss of beauty. Moreover, he argues that the suffering of tragic beauty is reconciled in the “sense of Peace” (AI 295). The directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of penumbral beauty and tragic beauty, along with their relation to the supreme ecstasy of peace, will be analyzed in subsequent chapters of this volume. MODES OF THOUGHT Whitehead’s last work titled Modes of Thought (1938) further develops his axiological metaphysics of aesthetic experience as beauty. Section III titled “Nature and Life” in MT includes two chapters: chapter 7 titled “Nature Lifeless,” which critiques the view pictured by scientific materialism of nature as vacuous substance devoid of value, and chapter 8 titled “Nature Alive,” which develops an organic process model of living nature as an aesthetic continuum of perspectival occasions of experience aiming to realize intrinsic value as beauty. Whitehead’s concept of nature further explains his panpsychism, or panexperientialism, which holds that all occasions of experience in nature are sentient as living organisms responding to their environment. Moreover, the aesthetic value of beauty arises through organism-environment interactions and part-whole relationships in the biotic community of nature. It is this ecological vision of nature as an aesthetic continuum of interrelated occasions with the intrinsic value of beauty that warrants our moral concern for all organisms, thereby establishing the metaphysical basis for an environmental ethics and aesthetics. At one point in MT Whitehead enters into a discussion on aesthetics, stating: “In the history of European thought, the discussion of aesthetics has been almost ruined by the emphasis upon the harmony of the details” (MT 62). Aesthetics requires not only an analysis of the harmony of details, but also an appreciation of the whole. Whitehead here posits a fundamental distinction between two poles of experience: “logic” and “aesthetics.” Logic emphasizes the abstract details of the parts, whereas aesthetics instead underscores the directly felt whole in its concreteness: The distinction between logic and aesthetics consists in the degree of abstraction involved. Logic concentrates attention upon high abstraction, and aesthetics keeps as close to the concrete as the necessities of finite understanding permit. Thus logic and aesthetics are at the two extremes of the dilemma of the finite mentality in its partial penetration of the infinite. (MT 60-61)

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Whitehead, himself an esteemed logician, nevertheless argues that logic as analysis of abstract details must be supplemented by and grounded in aesthetics as enjoyment of the felt whole: “The doctrine of understanding as developed in this lecture applies beyond logic. The aesthetic experience is another mode of the enjoyment of self-evidence” (MT 60). Whereas for logic an analysis of abstract details precedes the concrete whole, for aesthetics, the beauty of the whole precedes the discrimination of its details. In an illuminating description of aesthetic experience, Whitehead states: The movement of aesthetic enjoyment is in the opposite direction [of logic]. We are overwhelmed by the beauty of the building, by the delight of the picture, by the exquisite balance of the sentence. The whole precedes the details. We then pass to discrimination. As in a moment, the details force themselves upon us as the reasons for the totality of the effect. In aesthetics there is a totality disclosing its component parts. (MT 61-62)

The two poles of logic and aesthetics therefore designate two alternate modes of experience. Observing a beautiful artwork, one can either analyze its abstract details through the mode of logical discrimination, or enjoy the concrete whole in its pervasive aesthetic quality through perception in the primordial mode of affective feeling. It is the balance achieved through parts and the whole that constitutes the beauty of an artwork: In the greatest examples of any form of art, a miraculous balance is achieved. The whole displays its component parts, each with its own value enhanced; and the parts lead up to a whole, which is beyond themselves, and yet not destructive of themselves. (MT 62)

For Whitehead the beauty of art is achieved through balanced complexity as harmony between the whole and its parts. Through this balance an artwork is a harmonious whole that at the same time enhances the significance of its components. According to Whitehead’s concept of beauty in an artwork, there is a harmonious balance between part-whole relationships, so the each part discloses the beauty of the whole and the whole reveals the aesthetic value of each of its constituent parts. Elsewhere in MT Whitehead explicates his notion of intrinsic value in terms of the category of “importance” (MT 1-19), or “worth” (MT 116). “The generic aim of process is the attainment of importance” (MT 12). It is subsequently clarified that his concept of intrinsic value as importance, itself refers to “aesthetic importance” (MT 121). Hence, for Whitehead reality is creative process of advance to novelty, and the aim of creative process is attainment of aesthetic importance. This notion of intrinsic value as aesthetic importance or aesthetic worth is further elucidated as follows: “The sense of importance is a function of the analysis of experienced quality. . . . Here the phrase ‘intrinsic importance’ means ‘impor-

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tance for itself’” (MT 118). In Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy the notion of importance thus designates an experience of occasions with self-enjoyment of intrinsic value as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. He then discusses his metaphysical notion of “power” as the force of efficient causation producing actual occasions with aesthetic worth: “The essence of power is the drive towards aesthetic worth for its own sake” (MT 119). Nietzsche is well-known for his view of existence as will to power, wherein art, beauty, creative production, and aesthetic experience are all expressions of will to power. For Whitehead, power is the force of causal efficacy generating occasions with the intrinsic value of ephemeral beauty as aesthetic worth, aesthetic significance, or aesthetic importance for its own sake. Each occasion aims toward self-enjoyment of aesthetic importance for its own sake. Insofar as an occasion with intrinsically valuable aesthetic importance arises through its relationships to all other occasions in the continuum of nature from the standpoint of its own unique perspective, it has an ecstatic existence that openly spreads out and extends beyond itself. Whitehead thus clarifies the threefold structure of aesthetic value experience, whereby “the dim meaning of fact—or actuality—is intrinsic importance for itself, for the others, and for the whole” (MT 116-117). Again, The fundamental basis of this description is that our experience is a value experience. . . . Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. . . . By reason of this character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises. (MT 111).

For Whitehead each occasion of experience is an aesthetic perspective that arises through a creative fusion of all other occasions in nature as unified from its own standpoint. Whitehead here develops his Leibnizian perspectivism (MT 65-85), wherein each occasion of experience is an aesthetic perspective of totality as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Moreover, this work proceeds to explicate the intrinsic value, importance, significance, or worth realized by each occasion of experience in terms of the aesthetic categories of “Clarity and Vagueness” (MT 75). An occasion of experience grades the data felt or prehended for creative synthesis into novel unity of feeling by degrees of relevance, such that each perspectival experience is characterized by a clear foreground, which recedes into a vaguely felt background, finally shading into utter darkness: “The finite focus of clarity fades into an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond” (MT 83). This idea of occasions of experience realizing intrinsic value, importance, significance, or worth, by framing a focus/field perspective with a clear foreground and dark background, itself functions as the basis for Whitehead’s generalized descriptive account of aesthetic experience of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life.

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In his earliest philosophical work The Principles of Natural Knowledge, Whitehead already argues that “‘significance’ is an essential element in concrete experience” (PNK 11). He adds, “‘Significance’ is the relatedness of things” (PNK 12). Now in his final work he further specifies that each occasion of experience has aesthetic significance. Whitehead here develops his idea of perspectival occasions as creative pulsations realizing “aesthetic significance” (MT 120-121), “aesthetic importance” (MT 121), or “aesthetic worth” (MT 119). He then declares that “beauty is a grand fact in the universe” (MT 120). Hence, in MT Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics of aesthetic value experience culminates in his notion of beauty. Whitehead explains that aesthetic experience of beauty at its deepest levels become an intuition of the holy: This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religion. In every advancing civilization this sense of sacredness has found vigorous expression. (MT 120)

The enjoyment of beauty as directly felt aesthetic quality thus deepens into the intuition of holiness. At the conclusion of Modes of Thought, Whitehead explains the function of philosophy in terms of mysticism and poetry: “[P]hilosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism” (MT 174). Moreover, “philosophy is akin to poetry” (MT 174). In the same text he asserts: “The aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure” (MT 49). Whitehead’s speculative philosophy thus has a mystical-poetic or religio-aesthetic function of bringing to disclosure the wholeness, relatedness, and fullness of events in their beauty as depth of feeling.

FIVE Whitehead’s Retrieval of Beauty

For Whitehead, the fundamental problem to be overcome is the fallacy of vacuous actuality, or the abstract notion of reality as lifeless material substance devoid of intrinsic value. In Nietzschean terms, for Whitehead the basic task of philosophy is to overcome the crisis of nihilism through a transvaluation of values. I have attempted to clarify how throughout his major philosophical texts, Whitehead counters vacuous actuality with an axiological process metaphysics of aesthetic value based on his ultimate principle of creativity, or emergent creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity. In his later writings he comes to increasingly emphasize the notion of reality as a dynamic process of creative evolution aimed toward beauty. Yet for Whitehead, the beauty achieved through creative process is always evanescent beauty. Moreover, since all beauty perishes as soon as it becomes, it always has the pathos of tragic beauty. In The Retrieval of Beauty: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics, Galen A. Johnson argues that there has been “an eclipse of beauty” in twentieth century philosophy of art, citing the explicit rejection of “beauty” as an aesthetic principle by John Dewey, R. G. Collingwood, Mikel Dufrenne, Jean-Francois Leotard, and many others (2010, 7-9). To counter this eclipse of beauty, Johnson undertakes a “retrieval of beauty” by thinking through the phenomenological aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty. For Johnson, the four great philosophers of beauty are Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Santayana. He also holds that among these four, Kant and Hegel argue that aesthetic judgments of beauty must be disinterested, or free of selfish desire, while only Plato emphasizes the link between desire and beauty (2010, xviii). Johnson further argues that the twentieth century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has made a retrieval of the beautiful. He asserts 67

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that for Merleau-Ponty, “The beautiful is the depth, rhythm and radiance of Being itself” (2010, xvii). Also, it is claimed that in his phenomenology of embodied perception and ontology of Flesh, Merleau-Ponty describes the connection between erotic desire and beauty. But in fact, MerleauPonty only on rare occasions actually uses the terms beauty or the beautiful in his writings: We find no direct aesthetic of the beautiful in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, only glimpses here and there nested within his broader phenomenology and ontology of perception (aesthesis). This leaves to us the retrieval of the beautiful from his philosophy of aesthesis . . . (2010, 13)

Johnson’s theme of “the eclipse and retrieval of beauty” in modern aesthetics is illuminating. Yet by his own admission, there is no direct aesthetic of the beautiful in Merleau-Ponty’s texts. Johnson’s work thus signifies his own retrieval of beauty by thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. As I discuss elsewhere in this volume there are many striking points of convergence between the philosophical writings of Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, in part due to their common phenomenological method of describing intersensory primordial perception of embodied situations. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty was profoundly influenced by Whitehead and discusses the latter’s organic view of nature. Yet in contrast to Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead provides a direct aesthetic of the beautiful. It is my contention that Whitehead’s organic process aesthetics represents the most significant recovery of beauty in twentieth century philosophy. Especially in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead systematically and explicitly articulates his concept of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life, including his climactic notion of tragic beauty. For Whitehead, the telos of the universe strives toward creation of beauty, just as the aim of each occasion is realization of intrinsic value as beauty. He counters the fallacy of vacuous actuality with his argument that each self-creative occasion achieves the aesthetic value of beauty for itself, others, and the whole. Moreover, it is claimed that beauty is the sole justification for existence. According to Whitehead’s revised Leibnizian monadology, each occasion of experience is an aesthetic perspective of totality reflecting all the other occasions from its own standpoint, thereby to multiply the beauty and splendor of the universe ad infinitum. He develops an ecological vision of nature as a multidimensional aesthetic continuum of beauty wherein each intrinsically valuable organism in the biotic community warrants our moral concern, thus providing the basis for an environmental ethic. For Whitehead, then, the world-process is a creative advance toward novelty that aims toward maximum production of beauty. Due to his notion of beauty as realization of an eternal object or Platonic form, Whitehead is regarded as a modern Platonist. The most often quoted statement by Whitehead reads: “The safest general characteriza-

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tion of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists to a series of footnotes to Plato” (PR 39). As the French philosopher Deleuze has noted: Whitehead is the successor, or diadoche, as the Platonic philosophers used to say, of the school’s leader. The school is somewhat like a secret society. With Whitehead’s name comes for the third time the question, What is an event? (1993, 76)

Deleuze further discussed the importance of Whitehead as the successor to Plato insofar as he addresses the ultimate metaphysical question: “How can the many become one?” (1993, 76). Moreover, Deleuze judges Whitehead’s significance for contemporary philosophy as follows: “He [Whitehead] stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher . . .” (1993, 76). Whitehead’s process aesthetics incorporates Plato’s cosmology wherein events strive to achieve value through the divine impulse of Eros as primordial appetition, desire or love of ideal beauty, conceived in Pythagorean mathematical terms as abstract geometrical patterns, musical harmonies, or ideal forms. Plato’s dialogue in the Symposium recounts a drinking party where famous ancient Greek thinkers make odes to Eros the goddess of love, while also attempting to explain the relation between love and beauty. The poet Agathon holds that love is beauty and beauty is love. Socrates then argues that love and beauty are not identical, because Eros is the desire for and love of ideal beauty. At the conclusion of the Symposium, Socrates gives an exalted discourse wherein he explains how the priestess Diotima revealed to him the higher mysteries of divine Eros as the love of ideal beauty, which itself finally brings the philosopher to contemplate the supreme aesthetic ideal of absolute beauty: He who from there ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only. . . . This, my dear Socrates . . . ‘is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute. . .’ (Plato: 1964, 76)

In PR Whitehead describes God’s theopoetic function, stating that he is the poet of the world leading it with his Platonic vision of truth, goodness, and beauty (PR 346). In AI, Whitehead further develops his revised Platonic view of nature as a process of creative advance that springs from divine Eros (AI 253) aiming toward realization of ideal beauty in the adventure of the universe. He maintains that the creative process of nature is driven by the primordial force of Eros as the desire or love of the beautiful. Thus, like Plato, Whitehead’s process philosophy emphasizes the link between beauty and Eros as desire or love of perfection, which is

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the primordial appetition seeking to actualize ideal beauty through particular qualitative aesthetic events arising in the flux of nature. Following Plato, Whitehead agrees that the philosophical life should be directed toward contemplation of ideal beauty. As seen in Whitehead’s pedagogical writings, aesthetic education should cultivate habits for heightened appreciation of values, especially the aesthetic value of beauty in nature, art, and everyday life. For Plato, the philosopher first enjoys the beauty of particular objects, from there ascending beyond particulars in the material world of flux through contemplation of abstract forms of ideal beauty, at last mounting upward to contemplate the ideal form of absolute beauty. By contrast, for Whitehead one delights in the beauty of ideal abstract forms only when embodied in concrete particular events as directly felt aesthetic quality. Nonetheless, Whitehead’s process aesthetics is based on Plato’s cosmological vision of a divine Eros that forever strives to realize ideal beauty. It has been seen how there is much in common between Whitehead’s process aesthetics and Dewey’s philosophy of art. Both Whitehead and Dewey argue that directly felt aesthetic qualities of immediate experience in its consummatory phase of satisfaction arise through an organismenvironment interaction in a holistic situation. For both Dewey and Whitehead, aesthetic quality cannot be simply located in either the subject or the object, but spreads throughout a situation as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. Also, for both thinkers the pervasive aesthetic quality of an artwork is characterized by a foreground/background structure, whereby objects in the clearly articulated foreground gradually shade into the nonarticulated whole of a dimly felt background. An important difference between these two thinkers, however, is that while Dewey abandons the notion of “beauty” as an unwarranted reification of aesthetic emotions, Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality culminates in a vision of beauty. As clarified by Galen A. Johnson, Dewey contributes to the “eclipse of beauty” in modern aesthetics. In Art as Experience, Dewey writes: “Beauty is properly an emotional term,” which has “unfortunately been hardened into a peculiar object; emotional rapture has been subjected to what philosophy calls hypostatization, and the concept of beauty as an essence of intuition has resulted . . . it is surely better to deal with the experience itself and show whence and how the quality proceeds” (cited by Johnson: 2010, 9). Dewey thereby banishes the concept of beauty from aesthetics with his charge that the concept of the beautiful is the result of “hypostatization,” or reification of an emotional rapture in directly lived consummatory aesthetic experience of felt quality. By contrast I maintain that Whitehead’s organic process aesthetics is the most systematic and explicitly articulated “retrieval of beauty” in recent philosophical thought. Although he shares many points in common with the radically empirical aesthetics of Dewey, and the phenomenological aesthetics of Merleau-

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Ponty, it is Whitehead who has most revived the concept of beauty in twentieth century aesthetics. Steven Shaviro sums up the notion of beauty in Whitehead’s aesthetics as follows: “For Whitehead, the aim of the world—which is to say, the ‘subjective aim’ of every entity within the world, God included—is Beauty . . . Whitehead thus proposes an aesthetics of the Beautiful, rather than one of the Sublime” (2009, 152). Further discussing Whitehead’s aesthetics of beauty, Shaviro adds: Who today would dare to assert that “the teleology of the Universe is dedicated [sic] to the production of Beauty” [Whitehead: AI, 265]. In sharp contrast with Whitehead, most aesthetic theorists and innovative artists of the twentieth century tend to disparage the very idea of beauty. Modernism shows a marked preference, instead, for the sublime. (2009, 152)

Whitehead’s nondualistic concept of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality can be further elucidated in sharp contrast to George Santayana’s dualistic theory of beauty. According to Santayana’s hedonistic model of aesthetic experience, beauty is to be defined as objectified pleasure, or the interior subjective feeling of pleasure that is projected outward through empathy as if it were the quality of an exterior object. Like Peirce, James, Dewey, Whitehead, and others in the tradition of American philosophy, Santayana develops a theory of qualitative immediacy, wherein aesthetic experience of beauty in art and nature is defined in terms of its quality. In The Sense of Beauty (1896), Santayana argues that the differentia of aesthetic pleasure is neither its “disinterestedness” (1955, 24) nor its “universality” (1955, 26), but its objectification (1955, 33). He writes: “Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified” (1955, 33). Santayana provides a psychological analysis of beauty as “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” His concept of beauty as pleasure objectified is based on a psychology of “empathy” (G. Einfühlung) which was introduced into aesthetics by Robert Vischer, but made famous by Theodor Lipps and Vernon Lee. Empathy, or “feeling into,” explains how subjective human feelings, emotions, and sensations are projected and transformed into the qualities of objects. This means that beauty is not really a quality of objects, but is a subjective feeling projected outward through empathy into nature and art as if it were an aesthetic quality of these objects. In Santayana’s reformulation of this idea, he writes: “There is the expression of a curious but well-known psychologized phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing” (1955, 28-29). Santayana argues that in fact these aesthetic qualities thought to be in the object are really subjective, not objective qualities (1955, 29). Based on his psychology of empathetic projection, he goes on to describe beauty in psychologistic terms as an interior emotion projected outward as aesthetic quality: “Beauty is

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an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which nevertheless we regard as a quality of things” (1955, 30). Most of the pleasures which objects cause are easily distinguished from the perception of the object, and so are at once recognized as an effect and not as a quality of the object (1955, 31). While for Santayana the aesthetic quality of beauty always involves pleasure, not all pleasures are aesthetic, the differentia of beauty here being defined as that of pleasures which are objectified, projected, and transformed into an aesthetic quality. Aesthetic pleasure, therefore, becomes “a quality of the object, which we distinguish from pleasures not so incorporated in the perception of things by giving it the name of beauty” (1955, 31). Santayana contends that beauty is a value, an intrinsic value, that it is positive in the sense of the presence of something good, that it is not in the consequence of the utility of the object in its immediate enjoyment (1955, 31-32). “Finally, the pleasures of sense are disintinguished from the perception of beauty . . . by the objectification of the elements and their appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness” (1955, 32). Having argued thus, he at last defines the beautiful as follows: “We have now reached our definition of beauty. . . . Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing” (1955, 31). Santayana’s definition of beauty as pleasure of the subject projected through empathy as if it were the aesthetic quality of an object is itself a reformulation of Kant’s view of the beautiful. Both Kant and Santayana connect beauty with pleasure and affirm its subjectivity, although it appears to be objective. Beauty is defined by Santayana as “pleasure regarded as the quality of the thing” (1955, 31). Similarly, in The Critique of Judgment, Kant remarks that everybody speaks “as if beauty were a quality of the object . . . although it is only aesthetic, and involves merely a representation of the object of the subject” (1952, 51-52). Kant adds that the beholder is not aware of the subjective basis of aesthetic quality, “and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things” (1952, 51-2). In contrast to Santayana’s dualistic concept of beauty, Whitehead holds that aesthetic qualities cannot be “simply located” either in the subject or the object, since they ingress through complex multiterm relations into an event, occasion, or situation, thus to permeate the whole interactive field of relationships by which they are constituted. While Santayana’s hedonism defines beauty as a function of objectification, whereby the pleasure of a subject is projected as if it were the aesthetic quality of an object, Whitehead instead defines beauty as a function of relatedness, so that a directly felt aesthetic quality emerging by ingression through multiterm relationships saturates the whole field of relations from which it has arisen. According to Whitehead, beauty is neither subjective nor objective but interactive. For Whitehead, as for Dewey, a situation arising through organism-environment interactions is phenomenologically characterized by its directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. The pervasive aesthetic quality of events are to be described as hav-

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ing such traits as change, fusion, and spread. Furthermore, it will be seen how for the Japanese tradition, as for Whitehead, beauty is an atmospheric feeling-tone that saturates the whole interactive situation or relational event as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality, thus to be present in both subject and object at once. One of the greatest achievements of Whitehead’s process aesthetics is its recovery of the beautiful through his modern Platonic vision of reality as a dynamic process of actualizing ideal beauty through the primordial appetition of divine Eros as love of beauty. Yet since an occasion perishes as soon as it becomes, the aim toward beauty always results in pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability. In such a manner Whitehead not only undertakes a retrieval of beauty in twentieth century Western aesthetics, but also sets forth a new concept of the beautiful as “tragic Beauty” (AI 296).

SIX The Problem of Aestheticism

Aestheticism is generally defined as devotion to the beautiful or pursuit of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. Moreover, aestheticism is the doctrine that beauty is the fundamental value from which other values, especially moral values, are derived. Critiques of aestheticism hold that it is a narrow worldview that reduces ethics to aesthetics, morality to art, and goodness to beauty. More extreme versions of aestheticism glorify beauty to the degree that all other values, including logical, spiritual, and moral values, are all collapsed into or identified with aesthetic values. In both the Whiteheadian and Japanese traditions, the primacy accorded to the aesthetic experience of beauty raises the possible objection that both have fallen into a narrow aestheticism that reduces ethics to aesthetics. Thus, in what follows I will critically examine the problem of aestheticism in both Whitehead’s process metaphysics of beauty and the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition, including the Heian period cult of beauty and Zen aestheticism as well as their consummation in Teaism as a religion of beauty. (i) Whitehead’s Aestheticism Whitehead explicitly and systematically develops an aestheticism wherein concrete reality as exemplified by the actual occasion is to be identified with aesthetic experience: “An actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience” (PR 279-80). Also, beauty is the ultimate value and sole aim of the creative process: “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). In his effort to overturn the fallacy of vacuous actuality, it is claimed that beauty is the only justification of existence (AI 266). Moreover, the aesthetic value of beauty is the fundamental value underlying all other values, including moral values (RM 104-105). Expressing the dependence of ethics on aesthetics he states: “the 75

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real world is good when it is beautiful” (AI 268). My position here is that although Whitehead elaborates a kind of aestheticism grounded upon a metaphysics of beauty, it is not a narrow aestheticism. Although for Whitehead the moral order is an aspect of the aesthetic order, it is not collapsible into the aesthetic order. While other values such as religious, cognitive, and ethical values are based on the aesthetic value of beauty as that which has intrinsic worth for its own sake, they are not reducible to aesthetic value. In “The Art-Process and the Aesthetic Fact in Whitehead’s Philosophy” (1951, 463-486), Morris explains how Whitehead’s process metaphysics is derived from a descriptive generalization of the creative artprocess aimed toward production of beauty, while also making reference to the problem of aestheticism: Few philosophies are as congenial to an understanding of art as that of Alfred North Whitehead. This is not sheer accident, for Professor Whitehead definitely approaches philosophy from the aesthetic point of view. Some commentators have even called his philosophy an aestheticism. (1941, 463)

Paul A. Schilpp’s essay “Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy” (1951, 561-618), is important in that it problematizes and criticizes Whitehead’s aesthetic worldview. While most accounts of Whitehead’s metaphysics have entirely neglected the role of aesthetics, Schilpp by contrast argues that Whitehead’s metaphysics reduces ethics to aesthetics, thus to arrive at a narrow aestheticism devoid of a genuine moral philosophy: Professor Whitehead’s theory of the close connection between morality and beauty, so that at times it looks like an actual identification, does not seem to be able to stand up under critical analysis. . . . A reduction of ethics to aesthetics would appear to be just as disastrous as would be a reduction of aesthetics to ethics. (195l, 614)

Schilpp sums up his critique of Whitehead’s aestheticism, stating: “Professor Whitehead’s position in the field of moral philosophy is largely determined . . . by his taking ‘aesthetic experience’ as an ultimate category (and ‘foundation of the world’)” (1951, 618). The most impressive and thorough defense of Whitehead’s metaphysics against Schilpp’s charge of aestheticism is to be found in The Ethics of Creativity by Brian Henning. In this work he argues against Schilpp’s charge that Whitehead’s metaphysics falls into a “vicious aestheticism” by “reducing ethics to aesthetics” (2005, 126-135). Building on the work of Judith Jones and others, Henning develops an “ecstatic interpretation” of Whitehead, thereby to correct the mistaken view that Whitehead’s idea of aesthetic experience as attainment of subjective feeling intensity is a mode of “subjectivism” resulting in a “vicious and aestheticist moral solipcism” (2005, 131). 1 Henning writes:

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The ecstatic interpretation of Whitehead’s aesthetic metaphysics, which requires that beauty, importance, and value be extended to the entire life of the actual occasion—as both subject and superject—makes it possible to affirm that Whitehead’s ethics is a species of his aesthetics in a nonreductive sense. (2005, 134-135)

For Henning, the conceptual bridge leading from Whitehead’s aesthetics into morality is found especially in Modes of Thought. Whitehead asserts: “Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. . . . By reason of this character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises.” (MT 111). Henning regards this passage as the key to Whitehead’s ethics in that it expresses the axiological triad of self, other, and whole (2005, 63). This axiological triad clarifies the “ecstatic existence” of an actual occasion as subject-superject, in that the aesthetic value of beauty achieved through creative process is not confined to the actual occasion as subject, but is extended into its superject role as an object contributing aesthetic value to all future occasions as well as the whole. It is this axiological triad of self, other and whole in Whitehead’s value theory that overcomes subjectivism and the danger of aestheticist moral solipcism. Borrowing Frederick Ferré’s term, 2 Henning refers to Whitehead’s view as a kalogenic or “beauty-producing” model of nature. 3 He argues that this kalogenic dimension of Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics provides the basis for a comprehensive moral philosophy, including an environmental ethics that directs moral concern to all living organisms in nature. Henning puts Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics in dialogue with the Western tradition of ethics in general and environmental ethics in particular (2005, 173-190). He discusses how Whitehead’s philosophy of organism at some points converges with Aristotelian virtue ethics insofar as it emphasizes moral education and the character of a moral agent built up through cultivation of positive habits for appreciating values. It resembles utilitarianism or consequentialism of Bentham and Mill in its view that occasions aim toward maximization of value for itself, others, and the whole. Whitehead’s view thus accords with the rule of consequentialism known as the Principle of Utility, which aims toward “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” The process theory that all occasions are unique autonomous individuals, each of which is an end in themselves and not just a means, also has elements of a Kantian deontological ethics. According to Henning, Whitehead develops an axiological metaphysics of nature as “a multi-dimensional continuum of beauty and value, ranging from the exceedingly trivial and simple to the profoundly complex” (2005, 110). In the multidimensional continuum of nature there are no gaps, so that beauty may be more or less, but never zero (2005, 109). For Henning, the Whiteheadian view of nature as a multidimensional continuum of value and beauty establishes the basis for a comprehensive

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environmental ethics. He further clarifies how Whitehead’s ecological view of nature is consonant with recent developments in environmental ethics. The Whiteheadian position of extending moral concern to all living organisms in the continuum of nature approximates Albert Schweitzer’s ethic of reverence for all life. Like the animal liberation of Peter Singer, Whitehead extends moral concern to all human as well as nonhuman animals, even insects. The process view also shares much in common with Aldo Leopold’s land ethics and conservation aesthetics, since it acknowledges the beauty and aesthetic value of collective units, including ecosystems, species, and biospheres. For Whitehead, as for Leopold’s land ethics, it is the aesthetic value of beauty that places a moral requirement upon us to respect the surrounding environment composed of soil, plants, and animals, understood as the biotic community of living nature. Whitehead’s concept of nature further has many parallels with the deep ecology of Arnae Naess, in that it underscores the relatedness and intrinsic value of all events in the interconnected web of nature, as well as the capacity of all living organisms to unfold, blossom, and flourish in their aim toward achieving self-realization. Similar to deep ecology, Whitehead’s organic process view of nature is biocentric and nonanthropocentric. Unlike deep ecology, however, Whitehead does not adopt biocentric equality, but recognizes a hierararchy of degrees of aesthetic values achieved in nature. All occasions are equal in that they have intrinsic value, yet they differ in their degree of value. At the same time, Henning points out how Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics is a unique position based on the creative principle of kalogenesis or beauty-production that cannot be classified under any single doctrine of morality or environmental ethics. He concludes: “Ultimately, the [Whiteheadian] ethics of creativity is neither biocentric nor anthropocentric. It is kalocentric” (2005, 190). Henning goes on to develop an original ethics of creativity, including a comprehensive environmental ethics, based upon Whitehead’s vision of nature as a kalogenic or “beauty-creating” process. The first and primary aesthetic-moral obligation for the kalocentric ethics of creativity is stipulated by Henning as follows: 1. the obligation always to act in such a way as to bring about the greatest possible universe of beauty, value and importance that in each instance is possible (beauty). (2005, 146)

At the very outset of his work Henning cites the following passage from Whitehead’s MT: There is no one behavior system belonging to the essential character of the universe, as the universal moral ideal. . . . The destruction of a man, or of an insect, or of a tree, or of the Parthenon, may be moral or immoral. Whether we destroy or whether we preserve, our action is moral if we have thereby safeguarded the importance of experience so

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far as it depends on that concrete instance in the world’s history. (MT 14-15)

For Henning, this passage suggests that it is not only humans, but also insects, trees, and even inanimate artworks that warrant our moral concern. Also, it clarifies Whitehead’s views that there is no one absolute moral system and that ethical behavior is not determined by universal moral rules. Moreover, it holds that one’s actions in relation to such entities as humans, insects, or trees are moral if one has safeguarded the value, beauty, and importance which in that instance is possible (2005, 12). Elsewhere he cites another passage from Whitehead: “Morality is always the aim at the union of harmony, intensity, and vividness which involves the perfection of importance for that occasion” (MT 13-14; emphasis added). Again, “The generic aim of process is the attainment of importance, in that species and to that extent which in that instance is possible” (MT, 12; emphasis added). As Henning reads these passages, for Whitehead moral philosophy aims to realize aesthetic importance of beauty through optimal harmony, intensity, and vividness which is possible for that occasion, in that instance, and in that particular situation. Following Whitehead, Henning’s ethics of creativity rejects any absolute moral codes or universal rules of conduct, and instead formulates a contextdependent situated ethics: “it is situated in that what is morally appropriate will always be relative to the value and beauty present in and achievable through a given situation” (2005, 140). Thus, in Henning’s Whiteheadian situated ethics of creativity, including its expansion into an environmental ethics based on Whitehead’s ecological concept of nature as a multidimensional continuum of beauty, the primary obligation for any autonomous moral agent is this: to maximize the beauty, aesthetic importance, and intrinsic value possible in any situation—for itself, for others, and for the whole. It must be further clarified how Whitehead endeavors to widen the scope of moral considerability so that each aesthetic occasion of experience arises out of its moral concern for other occasions. For Whitehead, each occasion arises through an act of prehensive unification that synthesizes multiplicity into unity or objectivity into subjectivity with the aim toward production of beauty. But the very act of prehensive unification whereby the multiplicity of objects are incorporated into the emerging subject is itself an act of moral concern for others: “The occasion as a subject has a ‘concern’ for the object. And the ‘concern’ at once places the object as a component in the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it” (AI 176). He further describes perception in the primordial mode as “non-sensuous perception” characterized through an activity of “concern” whereby the object is felt as entering the subject: “Concernedness is the essence of perception” (AI 180).

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For Whitehead, the creative process of prehensive unification whereby each occasion arises, is both moral and aesthetic in character. To begin with, Whitehead describes perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as “sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR 162). At the level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy, prehension, or sympathy is the act whereby the emerging subject feels the aesthetic qualities of the antecedent objects and includes them as elements for creative synthesis. The act of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy through prehension, sympathy, or feeling, is otherwise described in moral terms as the “concern” structure of experience (MT 167). At the level of primordial perception the act of prehension, sympathy, or causal feeling whereby an emerging occasion includes all other occasions in nature as elements into its own real internal constitution, is to be regarded as an activity of sympathy with or moral concern for others. In Whitehead’s process ethics an occasion of experience arises by prehension as sympathetic feeling or concern for all other occasions in the aesthetic continuum of living nature: Each occasion is an activity of concern, in the Quaker sense of that term. . . . The occasion is concerned, in the way of feeling and aim, with things that in their own essence lie beyond it; although these things in their present function as factors in the concern of that occasion. Thus each occasion, although engaged in its own immediate self-realization, is concerned with the universe. (MT 167; italics added)

Whitehead here relates the act of prehension or sympathetic feeling by which an aesthetic event arises through its relationships to other events to the moral idea of “concern” in the Quaker denomination of Christianity. Yet his notion of “concern” is also reminiscent of Buddhist “compassion.” For the universal sympathy and concern of Whitehead’s aestheticism, as for the universal compassion of Buddhist ethics, moral concern is directed toward all sentient beings in nature. The charge of aestheticism leveled against Whitehead can be further defended through what Peirce calls a hierarchy of the normative sciences (1955, 62). As pointed out by Hartshorne, for both Whitehead and Peirce there is a hierarchy of the normative sciences whereby logic depends on ethics and ethics depends on aesthetics (1970, 303). For both Whitehead and Peirce as well as their creative synthesis in Hartshorne, the aesthetic value of beauty is the fundamental value as that which is admirable in itself for its own sake. Peirce thus argues that ethics must appeal to aesthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum, or highest good (1955, 62). In his comprehensive study of Hartshorne’s process aesthetics of divine beauty, Dombrowski writes: “Hartshorne does not want to open too wide the gap between aesthetic value, on the one hand, and ethical or

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cognitive value, on the other, in that ethical and cognitive value ultimately rest on aesthetic value” (2004, 46). He adds, “Likewise, religious values are ultimately aesthetic” (2004, 48). Moreover, “the intrinsic (aesthetic) values appreciated by human beings provide a basis for further ethical, political, scientific, and religious values” (2004, 48). At the same time Dombrowki points out that for Hartshorne, “aesthetic value is presupposed by ethical value, and . . . nonetheless ethics is not to be reduced to aesthetics” (2004, 44). Again, “the point here is not to reduce ethics to aesthetics . . . but to emphasize that ethical values nonetheless presuppose aesthetic ones” (2004, 48). Or stated otherwise, “ethics presupposes, but is not reducible to, aesthetics” (2004, 47). Thus, in the process philosophy of Whitehead, Peirce, and Hartshorne, the aesthetic experience of beauty is the core value presupposed by all other values, such that moral, logical, and spiritual values are ultimately based on the intrinsic value of directly felt aesthetic experience. Yet their position does not fall into narrow aestheticism because logic and ethics are not reducible to aesthetics, nor are science and morality reducible to art, just as truth and goodness are not reducible to beauty. (ii) Japanese Aestheticism Kōsaka Masaaki argues that aestheticism is the outstanding trait of Japanese thought and culture: “I will treat the history of Japanese culture and society by dividing it into four periods. The characteristic which runs topographically through all the periods is aestheticism” (1967, 245). He adds, The definition of the term “aestheticism”: There are many kinds of values, for example, utility, pleasure, happiness, freedom, truth, and so on. If there is a culture or society wherein beauty stands at the top of the value system, such a culture is aesthetic. This is what I mean by the term “aestheticism.” (1967, 257)

Thus, for Kōsaka, “aestheticism” (shinbishugi, 審美主義) is the general characteristic of Japanese cultural history throughout its various periods insofar as beauty functions as the core value in Japanese society. As argued by Kōsaka, the current of aestheticism can be seen running throughout the history of Japanese culture. However, it must be further clarified that in both the Japanese and Western traditions there are two modes of aestheticism, including: (1) a “narrow aestheticism” in its negative connotation, whereby all other values are reduced to aesthetic ones; and (2) a “profound aestheticism” in its positive connotation, whereby all values presuppose aesthetic value as that which is intrinsically valuable for its own sake. After examining several paradigm cases of “narrow aestheticism” in Japan as exemplified by the Heian cult of beauty, the Zen aestheticism of D. T. Suzuki, and a modern Japanese novel by Sōseki

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Natsume, I then consider the “profound aestheticism” articulated in the modern Japanese philosophy of Nishida Kitarō and Watsuji Tetsurō along with the modern Teaism of Okakura Kakuzō. According to Ivan Morris, the Japanese preoccupation with aesthetics during the Heian period of Japanese culture flourishing in the imperial court of Kyoto developed into a “cult of beauty” (1994, 170-198). Although Morris expresses greatest admiration for the aesthetic worldview of the Heian period as glorified by The Tale of Genji, at the same time he raises the problem of “rampant aestheticism” (1994, 194), or the reduction of religious, intellectual, and moral values to aesthetic values: Artistic sensibility was more highly valued than ethical goodness. Despite the influence of Buddhism, Heian society was on the whole governed by style rather than by any moral principles, and good looks tended to take the place of virtue. The word yoki (“good”) referred primarily to birth but it also applied to a person’s beauty or to his aesthetic sensibility; the one implication it lacked was ethical rectitude. For all their talk about “heart” and “feeling,” this stress on the cult of the beautiful, to the virtual exclusion of any concern with charity, sometimes lends a rather chilling impression to the people of Genji’s world. (1994, 195)

As stated by Morris, during the Heian period of Japanese culture, beauty was valued more than goodness, just as aesthetics was privileged over ethics, and art was prioritized over morality. Furthermore, in Heian aestheticism, artistic values were privileged over cognitive values: “Sensibility also preceded profundity, aesthetic experience invariably being more prized than abstract speculation” (1994, 195). Thus, while the Heian period cult of beauty achieved its full splendor by according primacy to aesthetic experience, it invites the criticism of having declined into a narrow aestheticism lacking in moral sympathy as well as intellectual rigor. In Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki describes the emergence of “Japanese art culture” (2010, 19-37), culminating in a “Zen aestheticism” (2010, 27): The doctrine of [moral asceticism] . . . is not so fundamental as that of Zen aestheticism. Art impulses are more primitive or more innate than those of morality. The appeal of art goes more directly into human nature. Morality is regulative, art is creative. One is an imposition from without, the other is an irrepressible expression from within. Zen finds its inevitable association with art but not with morality. Zen may remain unmoral but not without art. (2010, 27)

Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Suzuki uncritically embraces the privileging of beauty over morality and rationality in the Zen aestheticism of Japan. According to Suzuki, in the Zen aestheticism that flourished in Japanese art culture of the Kamakura period, aesthetics is accorded primacy over ethics and logic. The Zen aestheticism of Japanese culture is

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highlighted when Suzuki asserts: “Zen may remain unmoral but not without art” (2010, 27). What Suzuki calls “Zen aestheticism” (2010, 27), is in some respects continuous with the “rampant aestheticism” characterizing what Morris refers to as the “cult of beauty” (1994, 194) that flourished during the Heian period. Hence, like the early Heian period aestheticism recorded in The Tale of Genji, the Zen aestheticism extolled by D. T. Suzuki raises the same problem of reducing ethics to aesthetics, such that the artistic enjoyment of “beauty” (bi, 美) comes to be valued over Buddhist “compassion” (jihi, 慈悲) or moral sympathy for all living creatures. For Suzuki, the Japanese tradition of Zen aestheticism includes the religio-aesthetic Way of the samurai warrior, wherein the sword becomes the soul of the samurai and is wielded in the egoless Zen state of no-mind as a free creative aesthetic act springing from the deep Unconscious. An example of the dangers of Zen aestheticism can be seen in Suzuki’s glorification of the Way of the samurai, whereby swordsmanship becomes elevated to an art that transcends moral responsibility: “Without the sense of an ego, there is no moral responsibility, but the divine transcends morality. So does art. Art lives where absolute freedom is, because where it is not, there can be no creativity. . . . The art of swordsmanship belongs in this category” (2010, 144-155). Suzuki next raises the question of whether the act of killing in the Zen art of swordsmanship is in conflict with the Buddhist morality of compassion for all sentient beings: “The sword is generally associated with killing, and most of us wonder how it can come into connection with Zen, which is a school of Buddhism teaching the gospel of love and mercy” (2010, 145). Making a fantastic claim he goes on to provide his justification for killing in the Zen art of swordsmanship as follows: “For it is really not he [the samurai] but the sword itself that does the killing. He has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy” (2010, 145). The total collapse of ethics into aesthetics in the Zen art of swordsmanship is then expressed as follows: “When the sword is expected to play this sort of role in human life, it is no more a weapon of self-defense or an instrument of killing, and the swordsman turns into an artist of the first grade, engaged in producing a work of genuine originality” (2010, 145). According to Suzuki, the act of killing performed by the samurai does not stand in contradiction to the Buddhist ethics of compassion, mercy, and nonviolence, since it is now transformed by the Zen art of swordsmanship into a spontaneous aesthetic act of creativity, originality, and freedom from convention. In traditional Japanese literature the life of the samurai warrior has often been compared to the fleeting cherry blossoms that perish at the peak of their beauty and glory. But as demonstrated by Emiko OhnukiTierney (2002), both in traditional Japanese bushidō and its reinvention in

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World War II, the poetic image of fleeting cherry blossoms was applied toward an aestheticization of war and a militarization of aesthetics. The aestheticization of combat, suicide, and death became an effective instrument for wartime propaganda based on subterfuge that camouflaged dangerous political ideologies such as militarism, imperialism, ethnic chauvinism, and ultranationalism. Likewise, Suzuki’s beautification of violence to legitimize killing in the Zen art of swordsmanship and its implicit justification of Japanese militarism, is a prime example of how Zen aestheticism can slip almost without notice into a vicious aestheticism where logic and ethics are collapsed into aesthetics. The problem of aestheticism is thematized in Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 haiku-novel Grass Pillow (Kusamakura, 草枕)(1972). 4 In this remarkable work of fiction, Sōseki develops a modern Zen aestheticism focusing on the traditional Japanese sense of beauty along with the tension between artistic detachment（hininjō, 非人情) versus moral compassion (aware, 憐 れ). The basic motif of the novel is the role of psychic distance in the aesthetic experience of beauty in art, nature, and life. In particular, he describes how the Japanese sense of beauty as yūgen or mysterious darkness requires cultivation of a disinterested aesthetic attitude which he terms hininjō, “detachment from human feeling.” While Sōseki is concerned to depict the traditional Japanese sense of beauty, at the same time he draws inspiration from both Western and Eastern traditions of literary aestheticism in order to show how art requires distance from life. Yet the danger of artistic detachment is always that of over-distancing to the point of dehumanization. The conflict between artistic detachment versus moral sympathy thus becomes the fundamental problem in Sōseki’s novel. Soseki’s haiku novel narrates the poetic journey of a young artist from Tokyo into the solitude of nature on his way to a hot spring resort in the mountains. The title of the work, Kusamakura, means “Grass Pillow,” which by poetic convention signifies a haiku journey into nature, sleeping under the stars at night with only the grass as one’s pillow. The novel is modeled after the classic haiku travel diaries of Matsuo Bashō (16441694), especially the record of his nine month journey through the wilderness of northern Japan in 1689 called Narrow Road to the Deep North. The travel diary is written in a prose style that creates an atmosphere for haiku poems that record fleeting moments of ephemeral beauty. Similar to Bashō, the protagonist of the novel adopts a Zen aestheticism that elevates art into a religion of beauty though a fusion of aesthetic and mystical experience of oneness with nature. The Zen aestheticism of the artist-hero is clearly indicated when he declares: “To become a poet is one way to achieve enlightenment (satori, 悟り)” (Natsume 1972, 35). The aesthetic atmosphere pervading Sōseki’s portrait of the artist novel is yūgen (幽玄), the haunting mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows. The artist-hero of the novel exclaims: “The shadow I had just seen,

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considered just as a shadow, was charged with poetic beauty. . . . A hot spring in a secluded mountain village, the shadow of flowers on a spring night, a voice singing softly in the moonlight, a figure on a misty moonlit evening, are all good themes for an artist” (1972, 34). Yet in continuation with the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition, Sōseki clarifies that the aesthetic experience of yūgen as an epiphany of depth requires insertion of psychical distance between the artist and his or her emotions. The key aesthetic doctrine of Sōseki’s novel is that the traditional Japanese sense of beauty as yūgen is itself a function of hininjō, detachment from human emotions. The artist thus describes his sojourn into the mountains as a “journey of hininjō” (hininjō no tabi, 非人情の旅) (1972, 25). Scene after scene in the novel the artist-hero transforms a mundane event into an aesthetic experience of mysterious beauty by adopting the tranquil poetic attitude of artistic detachment from human emotions. Hence, by inserting psychical distance and entering the elevated state of hininjō, the scenery of nature is imaginatively constituted and reconstituted into a sumie inkwash landscape painting by Sesshū, a nō drama of Zeami, or a haiku poem by Bashō. On other occasions he takes up the aesthetic attitude of artistic detachment and visualizes the landscape now metamorphosed into a Neo-Raphaelite painting by Millais, a romantic nature poem by Shelly, or a tragic drama by Shakespeare, resulting in the aesthetic recreation of nature into an art gallery. For three years from 1900 to 1903 Sōseki lived in England studying English literature with a specialty in nineteenth century British aestheticism. In the tradition of British aestheticism in general and the portraitof-the-artist genre in particular, the mechanism of transmuting life into art is that of cultivating a Kantian aesthetic attitude of disinterested contemplation by insertion of psychic distance. 5 A motif from British aestheticism used to illustrate the function of artistic detachment in Sōseki’s novel is the tragic image of drowned Ophelia floating downstream in an elegant gown with an expression of tranquility on her face. The motif of “Ophelia drowning” has its origins in Shakespeare’s tragic drama Hamlet, wherein Ophelia drowns herself when Hamlet murders her father (Hamlet 1.3). The English painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896), a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and precursor to the British movement of aestheticism, depicted this tragic event in his most famous painting titled Ophelia (1852). Inspired by Shakespeare’s tragic play and Millais’s painting, Algernon Swinburne composed a well-known poem on the death of Ophelia. Through a sequence of creative transmutations in a dreamlike surrealistic reverie the artist-hero visualizes the heroine Nami as a composite image of Ophelia drowning and then imagines her in the form of a Japanese geisha. He writes: “From such a point of view even the idea of drowning has refinement and elegance. . . . When observed in this way, Millais’s Ophelia, which had always been troubling to me, comes a thing of great beauty. . . . The vision of a woman floating along with the current

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is indeed aesthetic” (1972, 77-78). In Sōseki’s novel the artist-hero realizes that even the deep sorrow and tragedy of death can be transformed into an aesthetic experience of tranquil beauty when viewed from the disinterested standpoint of hininjō, the calm, peaceful, and serene attitude of artistic detachment from human emotions. The artist-hero of Sōseki’s Grass Pillow strives to view nature from the exalted poetic state of hininjō as a tranquil aesthetic attitude of artistic detachment from emotions so as to recreate the landscape into a painting, a poem, or a play, thereby to imaginatively transform life into art, whereupon each moment becomes permeated with the mysterious atmospheric beauty of yūgen. However, the extreme aestheticism of Sōseki’s novel is in fact written with a spirit of critical irony. In a letter to Suzuki Miekichi dated October 26, 1906, Sōseki’s ironic critical attitude toward the narrow aestheticism of his artist-hero is explicitly stated: “To live aesthetically, that is, to live poetically, may be a part of life but I still think it is a small part. It is therefore not good to be like the hero of Grass Pillow” (1925: XIV, 429). An internal critique of narrow aestheticism is already implicit in the overall narrative structure of Sōseki’s haiku-novel, as it concludes with the realization that the artist’s one-sided devotion to a life of pure aesthetic delight through disinterested enjoyment of ethereal beauty is incomplete. While the artist recognizes that art requires distance from life, he also examines the dangers of under-distancing and over-distancing. The problem of narrow aestheticism arises through over-distancing to the point of dehumanization, alienation from life, and exile from society. It is by total detachment from human emotions that the artist falls into moral bankruptcy. At the conclusion of the first chapter the protagonist says: “It seems that I had carried detachment from human emotions a little too far” (1972, 17). The painter-poet thereby anticipates the final epiphany of the novel: the realization that total detachment from life without moral sympathy is antithetical to art. The artist-hero becomes interested in painting the heroine called Nami when he sees her floating in a pond filled with camellia blossoms. Although Nami is otherwise the perfect subject for a painting, the artist feels that something is missing. Finally, he comes to realize that her face is lacking an essential factor in art: the emotion of aware (憐れ), compassion. Although the Sino-Japanese character in Sōseki’s novel for aware means compassion, pity, or moral sympathy, it is also a cognate of aware (哀れ), which in traditional Japanese aesthetics signifies pathos, or the feeling of sadness and pity that arises through deep emotional sympathy with ephemeral beauty. The protagonist thinks to himself: “I had forgotten that among the many human emotions there is one known as aware (憐れ), compassion. . . . Yet there was not even the slightest hint of compassion in Nami’s facial expression” (1972, 109). Hence, the epiphany which comes at the end of Grass Pillow is that while artistic detachment from emotions is a necessary condition for the aesthetic experience of beauty, it is not a sufficient con-

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dition, in that beauty also requires compassion, just as art requires moral sympathy. 6 Although in Western philosophy the interpretation of art, literature and beauty goes back to ancient Greece, “aesthetics” was first established as a separate discipline in Aesthetica (1750) and other works by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762). At the outset of the Meiji period (18681912) the discipline of modern aesthetics was introduced into Japan by Nishi Amane (1829-1897). In his Theory of Aesthetics (1877) Nishi Amane still used birei (美麗) for the term “beauty.” Another term for beauty was utsukushisa (美しさ). Moreover, new words were coined in Japanese for the notions of “beauty” (bi, 美), “art” (geijutsu, 芸術), and “fine arts” (bijutsu, 美術). To render the word “aesthetics” into Japanese various terms were created, including zenbigaku (善美学) or “the science of good and beauty,” kashuron (佳趣論) or “the discipline of good taste,” and bimyōgaku (美妙学 ) or “the science of the beautiful and mysterious.” The word currently used for “aesthetics,” bigaku (美学 ), was coined by Nakae Chōmin (1847-1901). 7 Nonetheless, preoccupation with the aesthetic experience of beauty has characterized Japanese thought and culture throughout its history. In Japanese culture there emerged a religio-aesthetic tradition of geidō (芸道) as the “Way of the arts,” or the “Dao of aesthetics.” In the religio-aesthetic tradition of geidō, aesthetic and religious experience fused to the point that artistic and spiritual values became co-extensive. The Japanese sense of beauty was defined by Nishida Kitarō (18701945), founder of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, as an ecstatic feeling of losing oneself in a selfless moment of aesthetic experience. Nishida’s essay “An Explanation of Beauty” (Bi no setsumei, 1987), which I have elsewhere translated in full, is an original essay on the Japanese sense of beauty that synthesizes elements from both Eastern and Western aesthetics. Nishida begins the essay with an effort to formulate an adequate definition of “beauty” (bi, 美). In Western aesthetics he turns to the explanation developed by the tradition of German aesthetics inspired by Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1952), wherein the sense of beauty was defined as consisting in a “disinterested pleasure”: Then what are the characteristics of the type of pleasure that makes up the sense of beauty? . . . According to the explanation of German Idealism since Kant, the sense of beauty is pleasure detached from the ego. It is a pleasure of the moment, when one forgets one’s own interest such as advantage and disadvantage, gain and loss. Only this muga is the essential element of beauty . . . (1987, 216)

Nishida here defines the disinterested pleasure of beauty as losing oneself in aesthetic experience, “a pleasure of the moment, when one forgets one’s own interest such as advantage and disadvantage, gain and loss”

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(isshin no rigai tokushitsu o wasuretaru toki no kairaku, 一身の利害得失 を忘 れたる時の快楽). It is significant how in the above passage Nishida goes on to reformulate the Kantian sense of beauty as a disinterested pleasure, or artistic detachment from egoistic desires, in terms of a key philosophical notion of Zen Buddhism in Japan: namely, muga 無我 (Skt: anâtman), which can be translated as “no-self,” “non-ego,” “self-effacement,” or “ecstasy” (1987, 216). In Nishida’s words: “Only this muga is the essential element of beauty…” (1987, 216). This Zen-colored notion of beauty as muga or ecstasy is at once simple, elegant, and profound. In the context of Japanese aesthetics, it is vital that the Zen concept of muga is not conceived only in negative terms as “no-self” or “self-effacement,” thus to suggest nihilism, but also in positive terms as “ecstasy,” thus to elicit the intoxicating rapture of an aesthetic experience of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. As we know from Nishida’s journals and correspondence, Bi no sestumei was written during that period of his early years, extending from around 1896 to 1902, when he was most actively engaged in the intensive practice of Zen meditation. 8 Although he makes no direct reference to Zen in this brief essay, his use of the signature Zen term muga is nonetheless laden with traditional Zen associations. While Nishida’s essay Bi no setsumei begins with an effort to define beauty, it ends by attempting to clarify the interrelationships between art (bijutsu, 美術), religion (shūkyō, 宗教), and morality (dōtoku, 道徳). Nishida argues that since beauty is rooted in the experience of muga as no-self or ecstasy, it is ultimately of the same kind as religion, differing only in the degree of shallowness and depth. He then asserts that morality also ultimately derives from the experience of muga. This follows since another definition of muga is “altruism,” which is the moral implication of the term as selflessness. Here I will quote the concluding paragraph of Nishida’s essay: If I may summarize what has been said above, the feeling of beauty is the feeling of muga. . . . As regards this point, beauty can be explained as the discarding of the world of discrimination and the being one with the Great Way of muga; it therefore is really of the same kind as religion. They only differ in the sense of deep and shallow, great and small. The muga of beauty is the muga of the moment, whereas the muga of religion is eternal muga. Although morality also originally derives from the Great Way of muga, it still belongs to the world of discrimination, because the idea of duty that is the essential condition of morality is built on the distinction between self and other, good and evil. It does not yet reach the sublime realms of religion and art. However . . . when morality advances and enters into religion, there is no difference between morality and religion. (Nishida: 1987, 217)

The basic insight of Nishida’s Bi no setsumei is that while the standpoints of art, religion, and morality differ in degrees of shallowness and depth,

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thereby establishing a hierarchy of values, they all ultimately originate from the same fundamental experience of muga in its meaning of selfeffacement, nonego, or ecstasy. 9 It can now be seen that Nishida’s concept of beauty as ecstasy does not fall into a narrow aestheticism whereby religious and moral values are reduced to aesthetic values. Although aesthetic, moral, and spiritual values are all modes of ecstasy, at the same time Nishida emphasizes that both art and morality culminate in the supreme ecstasy of religion. The premier original work on ethics in modern Japanese philosophy is Rinrigaku (Ethics, 1937) by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960). In this and other works he develops not only an ethics, but also an aesthetics based on the Japanese intersubjective model of personhood as ningen, which is itself ultimately grounded in a Zen Buddhist metaphysics of emptiness as interdependent origination. Watsuji’s philosophy thus presents an important response to the problem of Japanese aestheticism, which in some versions has been seen to collapse into a narrow aestheticism by the reduction of ethics into aesthetics. For Watsuji, the Japanese word ningen (人間) or “person” reveals the double structure of human selfhood as both individual and social in nature. While the first of the two Sino-Japanese characters forming the word ningen signifies the individual, the second designates the relational, contextual, and social aspects of human existence. Watsuji further analyzes this double structure of the person as ningen through his category of aidagara (間柄), “betweenness.” Based on the meaning of the second SinoJapanese character of ningen, also pronounced aida (間), the person is now conceived to exist in the aidagara or betweenness of its interpersonal relations with others in society and the environing spatial “climate” (fūdo, 風 土) of nature. Hence, for Watsuji the doctrinal formula underlying his ethical system based on the ningen concept of selfhood is “the betweenness of person and person” (hito to hito to no aidagara, 人と人との間柄). Watsuji criticizes the individualistic notion of selfhood in Western philosophy as unable to support an ethical system. By contrast, he argues that the Japanese intersubjective concept of the person as ningen signifying a twofold social self constituted by individual-society relationships functions as the basis for a strong communitarian ethical philosophy. In this context Watsuji criticizes the existential phenomenology of Heidegger, which overemphasizes individual human existence as a being-in-time, while neglecting the social dimensions of human existence as a being-inspace, which is itself the enveloping spatial field of interpersonal relationships which constitute authentic personhood as ningen. Watsuji maintains that the double structure of the person as ningen also entails a profoundly aesthetic view of existence. Like an artist, the authentic Japanese self as ningen is an ongoing aesthetic process of crafting the self through interpersonal relations with others in the family, society, and nature. The second of the Sino-Japanese characters forming

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the word ningen or person is itself one of the key terms in the religioaesthetic tradition of Japan. The character for gen (間), which as a religioaesthetic ideal in the Japanese canons of taste is pronounced ma, denotes the beauty of “negative space,” the beauty of emptiness, voidness, nothingness, or openness. Ma (間) refers to the opening wherein comes to manifestation the empty space between all persons, things, and events. The religio-aesthetic principle of ma is concretely embodied in a wide variety of Zen-influenced arts and crafts in traditional Japanese geidō, the Way of the arts. Richard Pilgrim (1986) relates the religio-aesthetic principle of ma in Zen Buddhist literature and art to Watsuji Tetsurō’s ningen concept of personhood. He describes how the religio-aesthetic principle of ma is a cultural paradigm manifested in a wide range of Japanese artistic and literary forms developed under the aegis of Zen, including nō drama, haiku poetry, sumie inkwash painting, calligraphy, gardening, architecture, interior decorating, flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and modern Japanese cinema, all of which function to create a plenary void expressing the fullness of Zen emptiness through a strategic display of the “space between.” In traditional Zen inkwash landscape painting, ma is the surplus void (yohaku, 余白) of enveloping pictorial space in the background field of emptiness which always surrounds the objects presented in the foreground. The background voids of ma are also found in the swirling patterns of white sand that encircle the stones of the famous Zen rock garden at Ryōanji, thereby disclosing the inseparability of form and emptiness in the spatial locus of nothingness. The ma principle of beauty is further seen in chanoyu or the tea ceremony, particularly in the empty blank spaces of the tea hut, thereby reflecting the Japanese aesthetic preference for simplicity, understatement, and rustic poverty, expressed by such traditional aesthetic notions as wabi, sabi, and shibui. In nō theater ma is displayed through silent moments of nonaction which give the actor his aura of charismatic stage presence. Similarly, the modern cinematic expression of ma can be found in the characteristic silences and voids of an Ozu film. The religio-aesthetic principle of ma is also basic to the Japanese martial arts of bushidō or the Way of the samurai warrior, as expressed by the Aikidō of Ueshiba Morihei, where it becomes the spiraling energy field of space in-between the practitioner and his or her opponent. 10 For Watsuji, both the aesthetic and moral dimensions of authentic human existence are a function of aidagara as the betweenness of person and person. In essays such as “Japanese Literary Arts and Buddhist Philosophy,” Watsuji examines various Zen-influenced styles of art and literature, especially the tea ceremony (chanoyu, 茶の湯) and linked verse (renga, 連歌), because of the special way that they express the betweenness of person and person (1971). Neither the tea ceremony nor linked verse are produced by individuals acting alone, but are instead paradigm cases of a social art form wherein pervasive atmospheric beauty is co-

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created by several persons interacting together in a community, thereby resulting in the joy of shared aesthetic experience. As emphasized by LaFleur (1978), there is a systematic character underlying Watsuji’s thought in that aesthetics and ethics are both developed in relation to his idea of personhood as ningen, which in turn is formulated in the context of the Zen Buddhist principle of kū or emptiness as interrelational existence. In his essay “Japanese Literary Arts and Buddhist Philosophy,” Watsuji asserts that Japanese literature and art influenced by Zen Buddhism is always characterized by a “moment of negation.” In Watsuji’s own words: “as arts under [Zen’s] influence we can cite the Noh drama, gardening, tea ceremony, sumie painting, and so forth. Every one of these arts has a common point that the moment of negation lies at its core” (1971, 111). LaFleur clarifies that the moment of negation at the core of all Zen arts is not just the “negative expression” of prolonged silences and empty blank spaces, but a deeper ontological negation concerned with the Zen Buddhist notion of “emptiness” (kū, 空), itself defined as “interdependent origination” (engi, 縁起). Understood as emptiness and interdependent origination, the moment of negation characterizing beauty in Zen aesthetics is therefore ultimately to be seen as expressing the underlying relatedness between all persons, things, and events (1978, 248). Watsuji stands in the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition and is deeply influenced by the literary and artistic heritage of Zen aestheticism. But Watsuji does not fall into a narrow aestheticism, insofar as he develops both an ethical and aesthetic theory based on the concept of personhood as ningen, along with its underlying Zen metaphysics of emptiness as interrelational existence. According to Watsuji, then, both aesthetics and ethics are an irreducible function of the relatedness of authentic human existence. 11 Another pivotal figure in the emergence of modern Japanese aestheticism was Okakura Kakuzō (1862-1913), also known by his pen name Tenshin. In his study of Okakura’s influence on modern Japanese aestheticism, Karatani Kōjin writes: Even before anyone had speculated what “Japanese art” was about, Japan itself came to be perceived as an aesthetic object domestically and abroad. In a sense, the nationalistic trend of privileging the aesthetic side of Japan over the logical and ethical sides (which derived from India and China) had begun with the National learning movement of the Edo period. (2001, 44-45)

Thus, as said by Karatani above, modern Japanese aestheticism was a continuation of the nationalistic trend that privileged the aesthetic over the logical and ethical dimensions of Japan idealized as an aesthetic object.

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In response to the Western threat to Eastern ideals that arose during the Meiji period, Okakura attempted to reclaim the aesthetic and spiritual values of Japanese art culture. Okakura acted to salvage and preserve Japan’s artistic heritage, and together with his teacher Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) he established the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Society for the Appreciation of Japanese Painting as well as a fine arts museum. According to Karatani Kōjin, the modern Japanese aestheticism of Okakura is based on his romantic view of Japan as an art museum and aesthetic object for contemplation of beauty (2001). As Okakura asserts in his 1904 work The Ideals of the East: “Thus Japan is a museum of Asian civilization” (1970, 169). Okakura sums up the primacy of beauty in Japanese aestheticism and the Zenist tradition of art when he declares: Beauty was the vital principle that pervaded the universe—sparkling in the light of the stars, in the glow of the flowers, in the motion of a passing cloud, or the movements of the flowing water. (1970, 169)

Describing enlightenment through Zenist meditation on the pervasive beauty of nature and the cosmos, Okakura writes; “Freedom, once attained, left all men to revel and glory in the beauties of the whole universe. They were then one with nature, whose pulse they felt beating simultaneously within themselves. . . . Life was microcosmic and macrocosmic at once” (1970, 174). Yet it must be further pointed out that Okakura Kakuzō endeavored to set forth a more inclusive and balanced conception of Japanese aestheticism. In his treatise The Book of Tea, Okakura explains the Zenist tradition of sadō (茶道) or the “Way of tea” as the apex of Japanese aestheticism: Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. . . . The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday life. (2012, 4)

According to Okakura, the tea ceremony of Teaism was deeply influenced by Zenism as well as Shintoism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Teaism developed into a distinctive religion of aestheticism devoted to the worship of beauty in everyday life, thus to establish a continuity between art and ordinary experience. For those artist-priests cultivating enlightenment through the path of Teaism as the supreme Japanese religion of beauty, the tea hut is like the meditation hall of a Zen temple, wherein and tokonoma (床の間) or “picture alcove” is likened to a Zen altar for the worship of the beautiful in art and nature. He writes: “The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary. . . . There and there alone one can consecrate himself to undisturbed adoration of the beautiful” (2012, 32).

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Okakura then goes on to distinguish the profound aestheticism underlying the philosophy of Tea from that which is usually referred to as “aestheticism” in its negative connotation: The Philosophy of Tea is not aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. (2012, 4)

Although Okakura describes Tea as a “religion of aestheticism” which is “founded on the adoration of the beautiful” (2012, 4), it is nonetheless a perspective that also includes medical, economic, and political values, as well as spiritual, logical, and moral values. Describing the ultimacy of beauty in Japanese aestheticism and the Zenist tradition of art, Okakura Kakuzō exclaims: “Beauty was the vital principle that pervaded the universe” (1970, 169). Likewise, for Whitehead: “beauty is a grand fact in the universe” (MT 120). For Okakura as for Whitehead, the vital principle of beauty is conceived as a disclosure of the whole universe pulsating in each moment of life as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Both Whitehead and Okakura have thus developed culture-specific versions of aestheticism insofar as it is declared that beauty permeates the universe. However, it has also been argued that Whiteheadian process metaphysics and the Tea philosophy of Okakura Kakuzō have not fallen into a shallow aestheticism which collapses ethics into aesthetic, morality into art, and goodness into beauty. One can therefore posit a basic distinction between a “narrow aestheticism” whereby all values are reduced to aesthetic ones, and a “profound aestheticism” in its positive sense, whereby all values presuppose aesthetic value as that which is admirable in itself and therefore to be esteemed for its own sake. NOTES 1. In his Ethics of Creativity (2005), Brian Henning formulates an “ecstatic interpretation” of Whitehead’s value theory, whereby due to the “ecstatic existence” of an actual occasion as subject-superject the aesthetic value achieved is not limited to the actual occasion as subject, but is extended into its superject function as an object contributing aesthetic value to all future occasions. Henning writes: “Borrowing a phrase from Jones, I refer to their collective interpretations of Whitehead’s system as the ecstatic interpretation, or an interpretation that is willing to challenge the sharp ontological distinction between past and present. . . . This term [ecstasy], familiar in existentialism and phenomenology, appropriately describes those interpretations of Whitehead that emphasize the unity of the subject-superject and therefore insist that the past in some sense plays an active role in causing subsequent occasions” (2005, 5051). For Henning, this ecstatic interpretation of the occasion as subject-superject overcomes subjectivism and the correlate problem of what Jones calls a “vicious and aestheticist moral solipcism” (2005, 131).

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2. Frederick Ferré explains his term kalogenic as follows: “Actuality is inherently kalogenic (from the Greek kalós, ‘beauty,’ added to the familiar ‘birth or coming to be’ stem genesis)” (Being and Value. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. p. 340). Cited by Brian Henning (2005, 210 fn.1). Henning adopts Ferré’s term to clarify Whitehead’s metaphysical notion of creative process as kalogenic, or “beauty-producing.” 3. The modern Japanese philosopher Imamichi Tomonobu (b. 1922), professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo from 1968 until his retirement in 1983, established a metaphysics of beauty which he termed “calonology.” The word calonology combines the four Greek words kalon ,on, nous, and logos, as the discourse on the logos of beauty, being, and mind. Thus similar to Brian Henning’s use of the term kalogenic or beauty-producing (from the Greek kalós, ‘beauty,’ added to the ‘birth or coming to be’ stem genesis) to signify Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics of beauty, Imamichi Tomonobu coins the word calonology to denote a new Japanese metaphysics of beauty. See “The Calonology of Imamichi Tomonobu,” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics by Michele Marra. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 4. The modern Japanese haiku-novel Kusamakura (草枕, 1906) or “Grass Pillow” by Sōseki Natsume (1867-1916), has been translated in English as Unhuman Tour (1927) by Takahashi Kazutomo, and later retranslated as The Three-Cornered World (1965) by Alan Turney. 5. In his work A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams explains the literary term Aestheticism as follows: “Aestheticism , or ‘the Aesthetic Movement,’ was a European phenomenon during the later nineteenth century. . . . Its roots lie in the German theory, proposed by Kant (1790), that pure aesthetic experience consists of a ‘disinterested’ contemplation of an aesthetic object” (New York: Holt. 1981, 2). In his haiku novel Grass Pillow, Sōseki develops a modern Japanese aestheticism where delight in beauty requires a disinterested attitude of hininjō, artistic detachment from human emotions. 6. In my book Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (2001), I develop the problem of Zen aestheticism in the modern Japanese fiction of Sōseki Natsume. At the conclusion of this work I examine the problem of aestheticism in Sōseki’s 1906 haiku-novel Grass Pillow (Kusamakura, 草枕), which thematizes the Japanese sense of beauty along with the tension between artistic detachment (非人情) versus moral sympathy or compassion (aware, 憐れ). I further analyze the influence of British aestheticism on Sōseki’s novel. See especially the final section titled “Artistic Detachment in Natsume Sōseki” (2001, pp. 240-280). 7. For a summary of the development of modern Japanese aesthetics, see Marra, Michael, F., editor and translator, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Also, A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. 8. For a detailed account of Nishida’s practice of Zen meditation from about 1896 to 1902 as recorded in his diary and correspondence, see Valdo H. Viglielmo (1971), pp. 535-60. 9. Valdo H. Viglielmo explains how Bi no setsumei is a blueprint for Nishida’s later writings on aesthetics such as Geijutsu to dōtoku (Art and Morality, 1923), wherein aesthetic experience as muga or ecstasy as well as morality or selfless action both culminate in the ecstatic rapture of sainthood (1971, 555-556). 10. In his autobiography Sadaharu Oh (1984), the greatest homerun hitter in the history of Japanese baseball, provides an account of his study of the aesthetic principle of ma (間) or the empty space in-between person and person through a study of Aikidō (合気道) with the legendary martial artist Ueshiba Morihei. See Oh Sadaharu, Sadaharu Oh, New York: Times Books/Random House, 1884. Also see Sadaharu Oh, “A Zen Way of Baseball,” pp. 99-113, in Aikidō and the New Warrior, ed. R. S. Heckler. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. 11. In my book The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism (1996), I analyze Watsuji Tetsurō’s twofold Japanese self as ningen constituted by I-Thou relationships from the standpoint of American pragmatism, focusing especially on George Herbert

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Mead’s intersubjective model of the social self as an I-Me relation. Furthermore, I show how Mead’s social self and I-Me dialectic is grounded in A. N. Whitehead’s process metaphysics of creativity. It is argued that in the communitarian ethics of Watsuji’s twofold ningen model of Japanese personhood the individual dissolves into the nation state so as to end in a one-sided collectivism, whereas Mead’s social self and I-Me dialectic based on a Whiteheadian metaphysics of creativity establishes a via media between individualism and collectivism, liberalism and communitarianism, freedom and determinism.

Part II

Beauty as Aesthetic Quality

Whitehead’s doctrine of aesthetic experience, concept of beauty and philosophy of art are developed in the context of his process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, wherein beauty is the directly felt aesthetic quality of events in their suchness. 1 In what follows I would like to clarify how Whitehead’s metaphysics and aesthetics of qualitative immediacy has been developed by subsequent Whiteheadian process thinkers and applied to Asian modes of thought. NOTE 1. Here the term “qualitative immediacy” refers to the directly felt pervasive aesthetic value qualities of events in the stream of immediate experience. The term qualitative immediacy should not be confused with Whitehead’s notion of “presentational immediacy,” or sense perception.

SEVEN Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Aesthetic Quality

Whitehead develops a process metaphysics of aesthetic quality continuous with the American philosophical tradition of radical empiricism running through C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and others. According to Whitehead, the fundamental units of reality are not vacuous material substances, but events or actual occasions, and events have two aspects—relations and qualities. An actual occasion is constituted as a field of relationships which is immediately enjoyed as a quality. Each occasion arising through creative synthesis of many into one is a felt whole, the immediate experience of which is its aesthetic quality. According to Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, beauty is the directly felt aesthetic quality of events. In Whitehead’s radical empiricism the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of events are the most concrete facts disclosed by immediate experience. For Whitehead, the beauty of art, nature, and everyday life is always to be analyzed as a function of aesthetic quality. Each occasion arises through concrescence as a creative art-process terminating in consummatory satisfaction of beauty as aesthetic quality. The primacy of aesthetic experience, the centrality of intrinsic value, and the ultimacy of beauty in Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy are thus derived by descriptive generalization of the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of events. 1 S. C. Pepper gives a detailed account of “Whitehead’s qualitative metaphysics” (1961a, 46), based on the new root metaphor of “an immediate qualitative act” (1961a, 24). Likewise, Richard J. Bernstein (1966, 8999) has emphasized that “qualitative immediacy” is one of the leitmotifs defining the tradition of classical American philosophy running through Peirce, James, Santayana, Dewey, and Whitehead: 99

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Chapter 7 One of the most notable features of American philosophy has been the struggle to give proper due to [qualitative] immediacy. The theme is to be found in Peirce’s claim that Firstness, the category of immediacy, is all-pervasive. It is echoed in James’s emphasis on the “immediate perceptual flow” from which we carve out our concepts and to which we apply the concepts in novel ways. The theme runs through the work of Santayana in his concern with esthetic and tertiary qualities. It is found again in Whitehead’s claims about the concreteness of experience and the universal presence of esthetic quality. Finally, it is the backbone of Dewey’s theory of experience and nature. (1966, 92)

Of special relevance here is Bernstein’s reference to “Whitehead’s claims about the . . . universal presence of esthetic quality” (1966, 92). Citing Richard Bernstein’s analysis of qualitative immediacy, Nolan Pliny Jacobson asserts that the notion of quality is “culturally encapsulating” of the American philosophical tradition (1984, 41). The notion of quality in Whitehead’s metaphysics and aesthetics of qualitative immediacy differs from the conventional account of qualities developed by Western substance metaphysics. While qualities have been conventionally understood as objects of knowledge, Whitehead argues that qualities are felt prior to being “known.” In contrast to substanceattribute metaphysics, for Whitehead qualities are termini of dynamic natural interactions between organism and environment in a situation. Also, while for substance metaphysics qualities have been simply located in either subjects or objects, Whitehead claims that qualities belong to situations, fields, or events. This means that the locus of qualities such as colors or sounds are neither in subjects nor in objects but in interactive situations. Again, while substance philosophy views qualities as static, Whitehead holds to a process notion of dynamic qualities that are impermanent, transient, and evanescent. Whitehead thus overcomes the fallacy of vacuous actuality with his view that all self-actualizing events in nature have the intrinsic value of ephemeral beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. In his early writings, Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality is developed through a critique of the “bifurcation of Nature into two systems of reality” (CN 152) underlying the dualistic worldview of scientific materialism, which divides reality into an interior subjective world of “secondary” qualities (flavor, scent, color, sound, touch) and an exterior objective world of “primary” qualities (extension, motion, size, weight, configuration). Whitehead recognizes Locke’s empiricist dictum that phenomena are experienced only in terms of qualities. But in his revolt against dualism Whitehead abandons the distinction between primary and secondary qualities for a concept of pervasive aesthetic value qualities located in interactive situations. Like Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and other American philosophers therefore, Whitehead adopts a radical empiricism whereby the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of im-

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mediate experience are the qualities of nature. The basic problem for Whitehead is to counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality in the seventeenth century scientific materialism of Locke, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Descartes, and others, whereby so-called secondary qualities such as colors, fragrances, and flavors are not in the object but only illusory appearances in the mind of the subject. Yet for Whitehead, an aesthetically valuable sense quality such as the green of the grass, the song of the bird, the warmth of the sun, the fragrance of the rose, or the touch of velvet cannot be simply located in the subject or the object, but “ingresses” into a situation through multiterm relations, thereby to spread throughout the total event as its pervasive aesthetic quality. He thus cites the romantic nature poets as providing empirical testimony that all events in the continuum of nature are endowed with intrinsically valuable aesthetic quality. Whitehead sets forth a metaphysics of qualitative immediacy grounded in the primacy of aesthetic experience: “The metaphysical doctrine, there expounded, finds the foundations of the world in the aesthetic experience” (RM 104-105). As he further clarifies, an aesthetic experience is a function of “quality” (RM 115). Each vibrating occasion exhibiting harmonic contrast between rhythm and novelty aims “to obtain vividness and quality” (RM 115). In his later writings, Whitehead further develops his aesthetic concept of nature as a creative process wherein each self-creative occasion of experience attains some measure of aesthetic value quality as beauty or depth of feeling. He now proclaims, “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). It is further explained that “Beauty is a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions” (AI 252). Whitehead articulates the stages of concrescence whereby an occasion realizes aesthetic value quality: The intermediate phase of self-formation is a ferment of qualitative valuation. These qualitative feelings are either derived directly from qualities illustrated in the primary phase, or are indirectly derived from their relevance to them. (AI 210)

For Whitehead, concrescence is a creative art-process whereby an actual occasion emerges through a novel act of creative synthesis governed by purposive aims which passes through successive phases, including: (i) a primary phase wherein the initial data are prehensions or qualitative feelings which causally reproduce the directly felt aesthetic qualities of prior events; (ii) an intermediary phase of qualitative valuations which order the qualitative feelings into the “perspective” of a focus/field pattern based on degrees of relevance with important data in the foreground and trivial data in the background; (iii) a third phase resulting in consummatory satisfaction of immediately felt aesthetic quality with the intrinsic value of ephemeral beauty.

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Whitehead develops a phenomenological profile of the focus/field or foreground/background pattern of beauty in the perceptual field, wherein clear and distinct sense qualities articulated in the foreground focus of attention are encompassed by a dim horizon in the nonarticulated wholeness of the background field: “Harmony is an Appearance with a foreground . . . with a background providing the requisite connection. . . . The Harmony is finally a Harmony of qualitative feelings” (AI 281-382). Thus, in Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, the concept of an actual occasion directed toward consummatory satisfaction as enjoyment of beauty is itself based on a phenomenological description of foreground/background situations pervaded by directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. For Whitehead, the generic aim of creative process is the realization of “aesthetic importance” (MT 121). This character of aesthetic importance as enjoyment of felt quality is further clarified when he writes, “The sense of importance is a function of the analysis of experienced quality” (MT 118). The aesthetic importance of an event is thus a function of directly felt pervasive quality with the intrinsic value of beauty. In his analysis of an occasion of aesthetic experience Whitehead frequently uses such terms as “quality” (RM 115; PR 290), “pervasive quality” (AE 28), “quality of feeling” (PR 285), “experienced quality” (MT 118), “primary and secondary qualities” (PR 113), “qualitative succession” (MT 164), “qualitative energies” (MT 165), “qualitative patterns” (PR 233-234), “qualitative feelings” (AI 281-282), and “aesthetic qualities” (AE 12). However, in the categoreal scheme of Process and Reality he also uses the technical term subjective form to signify the directly felt aesthetic quality of occasions. In PR, he thus argues that aesthetic qualities like colors are abstract eternal objects which ingress into actual occasions through multiterm relationships, and are felt in their subjective form as concrete “qualitative patterns” (PR 233-234). Elsewhere, he describes how “eternal objects” functioning as harmonic value patterns for organizing diverse multiplicity into novel unity in their public aspect, are enjoyed in their private aspect as a directly felt aesthetic quality: “An eternal object considered in reference to the privacy of things is a ‘quality’ . . .” (PR 290). Whitehead explicitly links “quality of feeling” to “subjective forms” (PR 85). According to Nancy Frankenberry (1987, 177), Whitehead’s technical notion of “subjective form” is a functional equivalent to felt quality (1987, 177). When an aesthetic quality of feeling is understood as subjective form, it describes the way that an occasion of experience includes both the felt quality of the object and how it is felt by the subject. Judith A. Jones clarifies that Whitehead’s metaphysics is a philosophy of values, and that his word for intrinsic value is “quality” (RM ix). Elsewhere, she explained how Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic experience as “quality of feeling” is expressed in his categoreal scheme through The Category of Subjective Intensity. In his categoreal scheme, the category of

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subjective intensity is the eighth of the nine “categoreal obligations” that must be fulfilled to achieve consummatory satisfaction as immediate enjoyment of intrinsically valuable aesthetic quality. Whitehead explains this categoreal obligation as follows: “The subjective aim . . . is at intensity of feeling” (PR 27). Further clarifying Whitehead’s category of subjective intensity as the felt quality of an occasion, Jones writes: “‘Intensity’ [for Whitehead] generally describes the quality and form of feeling involved in subjective experience . . .” (1998, x). According to Jones, then, Whitehead’s idea of intrinsic value as aesthetic quality is expressed by his category of subjective intensity, whereby each occasion aims toward maximum intensity of aesthetic feeling. Just as Frankenberry emphasizes that Whitehead’s concept of an event as “felt quality” is articulated by his technical notion of subjective form, so Jones clarifies how Whitehead’s concept of intrinsic value as “quality of feeling” is expressed by his category of subjective intensity. The interpretations of Frankenberry and Jones thus provides us with keys for decoding some of the technical vocabulary used in the lexicon of Whitehead’s radically empirical metaphysics of aesthetic quality. In a passage from Process and Reality, Whitehead indicates some of the philosophers who influenced his concept of immediate experience as feeling or felt quality, when he asserts: “I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey” (PR xii-xiii). He further acknowledges the similarity of his notion of qualitative feeling to the thought of Samuel Alexander (PR 41). One of the most profound influences on Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy as a creative advance into novelty in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1983). Whitehead’s prehension or feeling of aesthetic quality is influenced by Bergsons’s sympathetic intuition of unique qualities of events grasped in a duration arising from the vital life-impulse (élan vital) in the ever-changing temporal flow of creative evolution. As Bergson states: “From our first glance at the world . . . we distinguish qualities . . . every quality is change” (1983, 301). Among the American philosophers, Whitehead’s notion of self-creative qualitative occasions of immediate experience realizing the intrinsic value of directly felt aesthetic quality is partly influenced by the phenomenological description of qualitative flow in William James’s radical empiricism and the idea of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality in John Dewey’s idea of consummatory experience arising through organismenvironment transactions in foreground/background situations. There is no evidence that Whitehead ever read C. S. Peirce, although he was indirectly affected by Peirce’s phenomenological category of firstness as directly felt aesthetic quality insofar as it comes from James and Dewey. Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) is regarded as the founder of classical American philosophy. The thematization of aesthetic value quality in the American philosophical tradition itself traces back to Peirce’s phenomen-

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ological description of qualitative immediacy. Peirce holds that a phenomenological description of immediate experience discloses three modes of being: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, or Quality, Force, and Representation (1955, 75). Firstness is a description of aesthetic qualities of feeling in immediate experience and their expression in the beauty of art: “The first consist of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art” (1955, 42). Firstness or pure quale-consciousnesss is futher described as “suchness,” whereby the phenomenon in its felt quality is “positively such as it is regardless of all else” (1955, 75). Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality was influenced by William James’ phenomenological description of pure experience in his essay “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience” from Essays in Radical Empiricism. In this essay James identifies “pure experience” as the materia prima of everything (1967, 138). James rejects the dualism between primary-secondary qualities, arguing that the aesthetic quality of beauty pervades the entire continuum of pure experience, which is itself prior to bifurcation into subject and object: “Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of the gem? or is it a feeling in our mind? Practically we treat it as both or as either, according to the temporary direction of our thought” (1967, 148). Thus for James, the beauty of a diamond is not just a quality of the gem nor is it just a quality in our mind, insofar as the real locus of aesthetic quality is always an event of pure experience. Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality was also influenced by John Dewey and vice versa. 2 Dewey articulates his own radically empirical metaphysics of qualitative immediacy in his later works such as Experience and Nature (first published in 1925), which itself echoes Whitehead’s view of interactive situations with pervasive aesthetic qualities articulated in The Concept of Nature (1920). At seventy-five years of age, Dewey published Art as Experience in 1934, regarded by many as the greatest work on aesthetics and philosophy of art in the English language. All transactional situations are both instrumental and consummatory in an ends-means continuum, both “instrumental” as a means toward some pragmatic goal, and an end as a “consummatory” event with directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. The consummatory aesthetic experience is marked off by the fact that “each has its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout” (1980, 36). He continues, “An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts” (1980, 37). Dewey holds that aesthetic enjoyment of felt quality pervading a work of art involves a “rhythm of surrender and reflection,” otherwise described as a rhythmic interplay between quality and relation, intuition

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and discrimination, or fusion and analysis (1980, 144). When first encountering a great work of art one becomes spellbound by “the hypnotic effect of its total qualitative impression” (1980. 144). At first there is an aesthetic seizure whereby there is fusion of details into the felt wholeness of permeative quality in a consummatory work of art as an unanalyzed totality: “The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in seizure by a sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse in one indistinguishable whole” (1980, 148). Since total absorption in a work of art cannot long be sustained, rhythm shifts from quality to analysis. When enjoying the pervasive aesthetic quality in an artwork, if quality, intuition, and fusion are relaxed, then analysis, discrimination, and reflection emerge to articulate the details which make up the total aesthetic qualitative impression. It is when the original felt wholeness of pervasive quality in an artwork gives way to reflection that the germ of art criticism, aesthetic doctrine, and a general theory of valuation appears. The life of art is constituted by this rhythmic interplay between the initial felt wholeness of aesthetic quality through intuition, and subsequent critical reflection through analysis. Dewey’s analysis of heightened consummatory experience as immediately felt pervasive aesthetic quality in art, nature, and everyday life is echoed in Whitehead’s discussion of aesthetic experience: The movement of aesthetics is in the opposite direction [of logic]. We are overwhelmed by the beauty of the building, by the delight of the picture, by the exquisite balance of the sentence. The whole precedes the details. We then pass to discrimination. As in a moment, the details force themselves upon us as the reasons for the totality of the effect. In aesthetics there is a totality disclosing its component parts. (MT 62)

Dewey’s consummatory experience of a transactional situation unified by fusion of details into a single dominant aesthetic quality thus converges with Whitehead’s occasions of experience realizing satisfaction as directly felt aesthetic quality. Moreover, Dewey’s view of the artwork is consonant with Whitehead’s notion of art as a foreground/background pattern suffused by a single unifying aesthetic quality that pervades and conditions the whole despite the variation of its parts. Both hold that art, nature, and everyday life are permeated by heightened consummatory satisfaction of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality with intrinsic value. Dewey’s description of evanescent aesthetic qualities of consummatory experience arising through a variety of conditioning events in Experience and Nature is at once reminiscent of A. N. Whitehead’s description of how aesthetic qualities “ingress” into situations through complex multiterm relations in chapter 7 from The Concept of Nature. Whitehead’s process metaphysics overcomes nihilism and refutes the fallacy of vacuous

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actuality by arguing that all occasions have the intrinsic value of directly felt aesthetic quality. According to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, because sense qualities such as colors ingress into a situation through complex multiterm relations they cannot be simply located in subjects or objects but permeate the total situation as their pervasive aesthetic quality. Furthermore, by virtue of this process of ingression through multiple relationships these qualities are impermanent, perishable, unsubstantial, transitory, and ever-changing. Similarly, Dewey asserts: “The realm of immediate qualities contains everything of worth and significance. But it is uncertain, unstable and precarious” (1958, 114). Again, “temporal quality is an immediate trait of every occurence” (1958, 110). Since the transient nature of aesthetic quality is based on their emergence through complex relationships in the flux of nature, Dewey writes: “Such immediate qualities as red and blue, sweet and sour, tone, the pleasant and unpleasant, depend upon an extraordinary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence they are evanescent” (1958, 115). Like Whitehead, Dewey thus formulates a process theory of immediately felt aesthetic qualities which are constituted by a complexity of diverse conditioning events so that they are not only “pervasive” insofar as they are spread throughout the whole spatial field of relations by which they are constituted, but also temporal, dynamic, insubstantial, unpredictable, nonrepeatable, precarious, momentary, unstable, changing, shifting, impermanent, transitory, and evanescent. Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic quality is further influenced by the British philosopher Samuel Alexander’s doctrine of emergent qualitative patterns (PR 28, 41). The idea of emergent value quality arising in the evolutionary process is articulated by Alexander in the second volume of his work Space, Time and Deity (1920), especially in a section titled “The Order of Qualities” (1920, vol II, 42-72). According to Alexander, “in the course of Time new complexity of motion comes into existence, a new quality emerges, that is, a new complex possesses as a matter of observed empirical fact a new or emergent quality” (1920, II, 45). For Alexander, the notion of emergent quality depends on the unifying pattern of space-time events, or point-instants. Quality is not a subjective mental phenomenon but exists as a function of the patterning of space-time events in the objective world. Primary qualities like motion, configuration, and extension, as well as secondary qualities like color, sound, and scent, are both functions of patterns. Moreover, Alexander holds that “The tertiary qualities are as real as the primary or secondary” (1920, II, 245). The point-instants are an activity distributed through space and spread over time organized by a unifying value pattern, such that empirical qualities like blue or red are a function of this pattern. Tertiary qualities such as the sadness or happiness of a situation, are also a function of patterns of distributive space-time events. New value qualities arise from the space-time continuum in the process of emergent

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evolution as it ascends from matter to life to mind, and onward to a future emergent value quality called “deity.” As emphasized by R. G. Collingwood (1960), Whitehead’s concept of aesthetic qualitative patterns of space-time events in nature is influenced by Samuel Alexander’s evolutionary doctrine of emergent quality as the organizational pattern for point-instants arising through the process of emergent evolution. For Whitehead as for Alexander, qualities are patterns of distributive space-time events, and the primary/secondary qualities are both functions of these patterns. Both thinkers hold that primary and secondary as well as tertiary qualities are all functions of organizational value patterns so as to have objective status in nature as well as subjective status in mind. In his analysis of emergent value qualities as patterns for space-time events in Alexander’s philosophy of nature, Collingwood states: The fundamental conception here implied is the conception that quality depends on pattern. . . . Alexander is careful to point out that quality is not a mere phenomenon, it does not exist merely because it appears to a mind; it exists as a function of the structure in the objective world. This applies not only to chemical qualities but to the so-called secondary qualities of matter, colour and the like, which are functions of patterns. (1960, 160; italics added)

Collingwood goes on to clarify how Whitehead’s concept of nature as a multiplicity of space-time events organized by qualitative value patterns is similar to Alexander’s idea of nature (1960, 165). For Whitehead, as for Alexander, secondary qualities like colors, flavors, and sounds, no less than primary qualities like motion and configuration, or tertiary qualities whereby situations feel happy, sad, or tragic, are all alike dynamic functions of distributive value patterns organizing space-time events. Although both Whitehead and Alexander analyze quality in terms of pattern, it is Whitehead who explicitly develops this into an aesthetics whereby the qualitative patterns organizing space-time events are directly felt pervasive aesthetic value qualities. Whitehead asserts that vivid aesthetic qualities like colors, sounds, or fragrances ingress into occasions of experience through multiple relations and are directly felt as “qualitative patterns” (PR 233-234). For Whitehead, space-time events arise through an emergent act of creative synthesis whereby the many become one in a novel occasion with aesthetic quality exhibiting beauty as patterned harmonic contrasts. Aesthetic value qualities are thus a function of pattern in space-time events, just as beauty is enjoyment of pattern. NOTES 1. Justus Buchler (1990; 1969) has argued that Whitehead, Dewey, and others in the American philosophical tradition have illicitly assigned “ontological priority” to the

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felt qualities of events, so that relationships, forms, and other components are relegated to lesser ontological status. Buchler proposes that events should be understood as “natural complexes” wherein qualities, relations, and all other discriminanda have ontological parity. In “Quining Qualia” (1988) Daniel C. Dennett argues for a radical skepticism which completely denies the existence of qualities. 2. In Process and Reality (PR xii-xiii), Whitehead acknowledges his debt to John Dewey. Likewise, Dewey’s thorough familiarity with all of Whitehead’s major philosophical works is evidenced by his essay “The Philosophy of Whitehead,” contained in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead edited by Paul A. Schilpp (1951, 641-700).

EIGHT Aesthetic Quality in East-West Perspective

The motif of aesthetic quality as enjoyment of events in their qualitative immediacy is also to be found in the Asian tradition of Buddhist philosophy. Chögyam Trungpa explains how the key principle of shunyata, or emptiness/openness in both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, signifies the directly felt aesthetic quality of events just as they are in their isness or suchness. Trungpa cites the famous words of the Heart Sutra, wherein it is declared: “Form is empty, emptiness is form; form is no other than emptiness, emptiness in no other than form” (1987, 187). He then provides an insightful exegesis of this passage whereby realizing inseparability of form and emptiness now becomes understood, not in negative terms as lack of substance, but in positive terms as phenomena shining out into radiant openness as the directly felt aesthetic qualities of situations just as they are in their isness or suchness: Cutting through our conceptualized versions of the world with the sword of prajna, we discover shunyata—nothingness, emptiness, voidness, the absence of duality and conceptualization. The best known of the Buddha’s teachings on this subject are presented in the Prajnaparamita-hridaya, also called the Heart Sutra. (1987, 187)

Trungpa goes on to articulate the key Buddhist doctrine of shunyata or emptiness in terms of its positive meaning as “suchness” or isness, understood as the directly felt aesthetic qualities of situations just as they are: Form is that which is before we project our concepts on to it. It is the original state of “what is here,” the colorful, vivid, impressive, dramatic, aesthetic qualities that exist in every situation. Form could be a maple leaf falling from a tree and landing on a mountain river; it could be full

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Chapter 8 moonlight, a gutter in the street, or a garbage pile. The things are “what is.” (1987, 188; italics added)

According to Trungpa, the effort to see things as empty can itself become just another, more subtle form of conceptualization (1987, 188). Rather than just saying that events are empty, the aesthetic qualities of events must be directly felt just as they are in their suchness: We have to actually feel things as they are, the qualities of the garbage heapness and the qualities of the maple leafness, the isness of things. We have to feel them properly, not just trying to put a veil of emptiness over them. That does not help at all. We have to see the “isness “ of what is there, the raw and rugged qualities of things precisely as they are. (1987, 189)

Trungpa further emphasizes that the essence of the Buddhist teaching of shunyata as emptiness culminates in an insight into the suchness of events whereby “things are seen as they are, in their own qualities” (1987, 190). Trungpa at once illuminates the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist teaching of shunyata or emptiness-suchness when he describes it above as an immediate experience of “the colorful, vivid, impressive, dramatic, aesthetic qualities that exist in every situation” (1987, 188). Moreover, Trungpa underscores the point that the particular aesthetic qualities of situations must be directly felt prior to being snapped into generalized concepts through intellectual analysis: “We have to actually feel . . . the raw and rugged qualities of things precisely as they are” (1987, 189). The Buddhist teaching that form is emptiness in its negative aspect means that forms are empty of our preconceptions, whereas in its positive aspect it refers to the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of interactive situations just as they are in their isness or suchness. Indeed, Trungpa’s interpretation of Buddhist emptiness as the isness or suchness of situations in their directly felt aesthetic quality signifies a deep resonance with the radically empirical American tradition of qualitative immediacy and its extension into Whitehead’s process metaphysics of pervasive aesthetic value quality. The Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther emphasizes the relation between ´sūnyatâ or “openness” and the “Buddhist idea of the gestalt quality “ (1987, 9-13; 113 fn). Donald Keene describes how the Zen influence on Japanese art resulted in a “preference for . . . the natural qualities of things” (1969, 304). Minamoto Toyomune defines the sad beauty of mono no aware characterizing the Japanese aesthetic of perishability and its underlying Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence as “the ‘sympathetic’ beauty found in emotional identification with ephemeral qualities of the perceived object” (1982, 56). Ken Yasuda (1973, 20-25) describes the American contextualist model as found in Langer, Dewey, and Pepper, then applies this toward interpretation of Japanese haiku poetry as intuition-expression of aesthetic quality.

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The Zen doctrine that emptiness is suchness was reformulated as a doctrine of quality by Nishida Kitarō, the founder of modern Japanese philosophy—first in terms of a metaphysics of qualitative immediacy articulated through his early Jamesian idea of “pure experience” (junsui keiken), where qualia-like colors or sounds are perceived “just as they are” (1966: 1, 9); and then in terms of Zen mu or nothingness as the basho (locus) or field of “pure qualities” (junsui seishitsu, 純粋性質) (1966: 4, 246251). According to the Zen philosophy of nothingness espoused by Nishida and the Kyoto School, substantialized phenomena at the eternalistic level of being (u), are dissolved into a void at the nihilistic level of relative nothingness (sōtaiteki mu ), but reaffirmed as pure qualities presented just as they are in suchness at the middle way of absolute nothingness (zettai mu). For Nishida, the idea of absolute nothingness as the locus of pure qualities manifesting just as they are in suchness is illustrated by the Zen expression: “flowers are red, willows are green.” At the comparative level of analysis various scholars have recognized how the idea of qualitative immediacy in its meaning as directly felt aesthetic quality might function as an intercultural theme for East-West comparative philosophy. According to N. P. Jacobson, the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō’s early Jamesian idea of pure experience represents concrete feeling states of qualitative immediacy: “The notion of ‘pure experience’ was the centerpiece of Kitarō Nishida’s (1870-1945) interpretation of the culture of Japan. . . . It is the feel of life’s qualitative flow “ (1984, 41; italics added). Jacobson states that the feeling of qualitative flow characterizing “pure experience” by Nishida Kitarō in the East and American process philosophers in the West signifies “the global shift from the form to the qualitative fullness of experience” (1984, 41). Nancy Frankenberry asserts: “according to the radical empiricisms common to both Whitehead and Buddhism, there is nothing actual in the world but felt qualities” (1987, 177-178). She identifies Whitehead’s category of “subjective form” with the felt qualities of experience (1987, 180-181). Moreover, she holds that in early Buddhism, “dharmas [events] are best viewed as felt qualities” (1987, 185). For both Whitehead and Buddhism the world is permeated by “aesthetic qualities” (1987, 177). According to Frankenberry, then, the facts disclosed by the stream of immediate experience are felt qualities, and it is these directly felt aesthetic qualities which are the content of religious experience within the Whiteheadian-Buddhist process traditions of radical empiricism. In what follows I discuss the theme of aesthetic quality explored by five American philosophers who have been deeply influenced by Whitehead’s metaphysics of qualitative immediacy: (i) S. C. Pepper, (ii) F. S. C. Northrop, (iii) R. M. Pirsig, (iv), H. N. Wieman, (v) S. K. Langer. Moreover, it will be shown how all of the above thinkers have applied Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic quality to Asian modes of

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thought, including Daoism, Buddhism, and Zen as well as their imaginative expression in East Asian landscape painting and other arts. (i) S. C. Pepper Stephen C Pepper has provided an extensive analysis of Whitehead’s radically empirical process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy based on his new root metaphor of an actual occasion as a creative event with directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. In his book World Hypotheses and Philosophical Method (1942), Pepper argues that in the history of Western metaphysics there are four world hypotheses with their underlying root metaphors: (i) Formism based on the root metaphor of ideal forms or patterns, exemplified by Plato and Aristotle; (2) Mechanism based on the root metaphor of a machine, exemplified by Descartes and Newton; (3) Absolutism or Organicism based on the root metaphor of a single organismic whole, exemplified by Hegel; and (4) Contextualism based on the root metaphor of relational events with felt qualities, illustrated especially by American philosophy: “Contextualism is commonly called ‘pragmatism.’ It is associated with Pierce, James, Bergson, Dewey, Mead” (1942, 141). According to contextualism, “Every given event . . . has its quality” (1942, 244). In his early writings, Pepper holds that although Whitehead’s process metaphysics of relational events with felt qualities fits with American contextualism, it also overlaps with formism due his doctrine of eternal objects as Platonic forms. In The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (1945) Pepper develops a taxonomy or meta-theoretical classification scheme of the arts, including the four aesthetic paradigms of (i) formalism, (ii) hedonism, (iii) organicism, and (iv) contextualism, and their underlying criteria of beauty, including (i) conformity to type, (ii) degree of pleasure, (iii) organic unity, and (iv) vividness of quality. The aesthetic paradigm of contextualism exemplified by American pragmatism views beauty as relational events immediately enjoyed as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Whitehead’s concept of the beautiful fits with the American contextualist model of art based on the criterion of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality, but is conflated with formism exemplified by Plato based on the ancient Greek criterion of beauty as imitation of ideal forms or patterns. In his later work Concept and Quality, (1961a), Pepper holds that Whitehead’s radically empirical process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy has much in common with American contextualism, wherein the basic ontological unit is a relational event with directly felt aesthetic value quality. Yet he now asserts that Whitehead has formulated a new world hypothesis of selectivism or creativism based on the new root metaphor of a creative act aiming toward realization of consummatory satisfaction in vivid aesthetic quality.

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In Concept and Quality (1961a) Pepper states that “Whitehead’s qualitative metaphysics” (1961a, 46) is grounded in the new root metaphor of “an immediate qualitative act” (1961a, 24). Throughout this work Pepper correlates his own fundamental concepts with the categories of Whitehead. First of all, Pepper’s categories of “concept” and “quality” function to designate the two poles of Whitehead’s actual occasions, the “mental pole” and the “physical pole,” or the logical pole and the aesthetic pole. An occasion of experience can either be analyzed through logic into its constituent relationships, or directly felt in its wholeness as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. The root metaphor of an actual occasion “is intrinsically qualitative feeling and yet can be conceptually analyzed in retrospect” (1961a, 5-6). Hence the new root metaphor of an actual occasion governing Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic quality is that of “an immediate qualitative act” (1961a, 23), or a “qualitative activity” (1961b, 24). Pepper’s use of the term “felt quality” is correlated to Whitehead’s “feelings” (1961a, 31). He therefore states that “actual occasions are felt qualities” (1961a, 142). What is termed an “actual occasion” in Whitehead’s process metaphysics, or a vibrating “quantum of energy” in his scientific cosmology, is otherwise a felt quality in his radical empiricism with its phenomenological account of aesthetically immediate experience. In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. According to Pepper, the category of “fusion,” whereby relationships are fused into a new pervasive aesthetic quality, is only grasped by the contextualist paradigm of American pragmatism and its extension into the organic process metaphysics of Whitehead. Pepper thus states: “Fusion will be found among the categories of Whitehead’s qualitative metaphysics also, presented under the name of ‘transmutation’” (1961a, 45). Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified by Pepper as the enjoyment of immediately felt aesthetic quality emerging from the purposive act of self-creativity. An actual occasion is therefore a creative event of aesthetic experience with felt quality: In Whitehead’s philosophy, as this was developed in Process and Reality and his later works, the“actual occasion” is presented as the pivotal actuality in the world and in human experience. . . . The experiencing of it Whitehead calls “feeling” and means the full qualitative immediacy of the experience. (1961b, 71)

An actual occasion as directly felt or prehended is called the “qualitative immediacy” of an aesthetic experience as it emerges through a creative process of fusing a previous many into a new one. Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy is thus based on a phenomenological description of actual occasions of experience as enjoyed in their direct-

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ly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. In Pepper’s analysis of Whitehead’s qualitative metaphysics, “actual occasions are felt qualities” (1961a, 142). Moreover, “‘prehension’ is the concept by which Whitehead accounts for the felt qualities present in any actual occasion” (1961a, 400 fn). Each occasion prehends or feels the qualities of past qualitative occasions and then fuses them into a new aesthetic quality through the process of transmutation. In each creative act of novel synthesis there is thus a transmutation or fusion of data whereby the many are felt as one in a new emergent qualitative occasion. An actual occasion has the following basic temporal features: “It is a process qualitatively felt over a duration and through successive phases” (1961b, 75). Pepper states, “An actual occasion is apparently conceived by Whitehead as embraced in a specious present. Moreover, the felt quality of it is finally identified with its integrated terminal satisfaction” (1961b, 87). The evanescent actual occasion arises through a qualitative act spread over a duration, goes through successive phases of organizing data into the perspective of a focus/field pattern by qualitative evaluation of degrees of relevance, and then closes up in a satisfaction as consummatory aesthetic experience with the beauty of immediately felt aesthetic quality. Pepper analyzes beauty as delight in the felt quality of an actual occasion. “Beauty,” says Pepper, is “positive aesthetic value in the enjoyment of quality for itself or satisfaction in felt quality” (1961a, 585). The beauty emerging from the enjoyment of directly felt aesthetic quality is described by Pepper both in terms of Whitehead’s satisfaction of actual occasions arising through creative synthesis of data into a new unity, and Dewey’s consummatory experience of transactional situations arising through fusion of details into a felt whole: “On the basis of the consummatory act we may set up a descriptive definition of positive aesthetic experience as satisfaction in felt quality” (1961a, 566). He adds, “Its aim is to increase the satisfaction in felt quality to the maximum” (1961a, 566). Positive aesthetic experience aims toward creating “optimum vividness of quality” (1961a, 568). Again, “Both satisfaction and vividness of felt quality are thus constitutive of aesthetic experience and value” (1961a, 588). Pepper here reiterates Whitehead’s own view of aesthetic experience as vividness of quality (RM 111). He further explains that for Whitehead an “aesthetic experience” is “consummatory satisfaction of felt quality” (1961a, 600). Pepper then relates his use of the term “felt quality” to Whitehead’s technical term prehension, meaning sympathy or feeling of feeling: “‘prehension’ is the concept by which Whitehead accounts for the felt qualities present in any actual occasion” (1961a, 400fn.). An occasion arises by prehending the felt qualities of past occasions and fusing them into the emergent aesthetic quality of the new occasion. Pepper’s metatheoretical analysis thereby brings to light how Whitehead’s root metaphor of an actual occasion is the basis for a new metaphysics of qualita-

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tive immediacy based on a description of creative events with consummatory satisfaction of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. Pepper develops his own American process model of beauty as qualitative immediacy in Aesthetic Quality: A Contextualist Theory of Beauty (1937). At the outset Pepper writes: “The aesthetic field is that of the quality of events. Great beauty is great enhancement of quality” (1937, 19). Summarizing the contextualist paradigm of art, Pepper asserts, “Quality is the life of art, organization the body” (1937, 56). Again, “A great work of art is an organization of intense qualities” (1937, 116). Pepper’s contextualist paradigm of aesthetic quality is itself influenced by C. S. Peirce’s phenomenological description of firstness as pure qualitative insight into beauty as directly felt aesthetic quality or suchness, William James’s radically empirical account of pure experience as qualitative flow characterizing the focus/field pattern of lived experience in the everchanging stream of consciousness, John Dewey’s account of pervasive aesthetic quality with change, fusion, and spread arising through dynamic organism-environment transactions in a foreground-background situation, and Whitehead’s process metaphysics of actual occasions terminating with satisfaction of directly felt aesthetic quality. For Pepper (1937, 372), the American contextualist model of beauty as relational events directly felt in their pervasive aesthetic quality has been given its paradigmatic expression in Dewey’s Art as Experience. Also, Pepper (1961, 358) finds the best psychological and phenomenological description of qualitative immediacy in the radical empiricism of William James. Moreover, in Concept and Quality (1961a), and in his essay titled “Whitehead’s ‘Actual Occasion’” (1961b), Pepper emphasizes that it is especially A. N. Whitehead who has developed the greatest systematic metaphysics of aesthetic quality. Pepper thus refers to “Whitehead’s qualitative metaphysics” (1961a, 46) based upon the new root metaphor of “an immediate qualitative act” (1961a, 24). Yet the central role of pervasive aesthetic quality in American contextualism has perhaps been given its clearest articulation by Pepper himself as elucidated from the meta-theoretical standpoint of his philosophical taxonomy with its pluralistic scheme of world hypotheses and root metaphors. To clarify the idea of “aesthetic quality” in the American process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, Pepper examines a famous Japanese woodcut print called The Shono Station from Hiroshige’s Tokaidō series, one of the great masterpieces of ukiyo-e (浮世絵) or “pictures of the floating world” from the Edo period in Japan (1600-1868). At the outset of Aesthetic Quality, Pepper gazes at the famous Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige which hangs above his desk, and sees it as an exemplary work of art displaying the contextualist notion of beauty as immediately felt pervasive aesthetic quality exhibiting change, fusion, and spread. He phenomenologically describes how in this Japanese print there is a mix-

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ture of quality and relations, intuition and analysis, or fusion and discrimination. By relaxing his gaze he reduces analysis, discrimination, and relations, and increases quality, intuition, and fusion, so that the multiple details are fused by transmutation into a single underlying pervasive aesthetic quality dispersed throughout the whole field of pictorial space. For Pepper this immediate experience of beauty as directly felt aesthetic quality results in artistic rapture and ecstasy. Analyzing the Japanese print hanging above his desk, Pepper writes: “Now there are two ways of considering this event. One is to analyze its structure, to enumerate the details and to show how these are related to one another and to other objects outside the event. The emphasis here is on relations. The other way is to feel the event as a totality. And this is the way that yields quality” (1937, 21). He further explains: There are two aspects of a given event, the relational and the qualitative. The method of knowing the relational aspect is called analysis. The method of knowing the qualitative aspect is called intuition. They are complementary. . . . Unless there were some intuition of the whole to be analyzed, there could be no analysis; and unless there were some details in relation, there could be no whole intuited. (1937, 22-23)

Returning to his reflections on the Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige: “It was an intuition, of course, of the details, but not detail by detail. It was an intuition of the details in the totality” (1937, 24). He continues, “Moreover, the details were to a high degree fused, so as to produce a total quality which, to speak truly, both was and was not a combination of the details itemized” (1937, 24). “These details come together and interpenetrate in a swift perception. There seems no better symbol to express this fact than the word ‘fusion’” (1937, 24). Moreover, “Such an intuition of quality . . . is an aesthetic fact” (1937, 25). Elsewhere, “The actual quality is the unique fusion of all the items that enter into it. . . . The quality can be had only through the intuition of it” (1937, 26). He thus concludes: “The field of such intuitional qualities is the aesthetic field” (1937, 26). Pepper continues his analysis of the Japanese print by Hiroshige: “Let us return to my perception of the Shono print. That perceptive event was vivid in quality and rather highly fused but it was also fairly discriminating of details” (1937, 27). In a remarkable passage he goes on to describe how his experience of the fusion of details into an unanalyzed totality exhibited by Hiroshige’s print, thus culminating in a moment described by Pepper as a consummatory event with pervasive aesthetic quality resulting in ecstasy, rapture, or, in Dewey's term, seizure: Now, let us increase fusion, intuition, and quality, and decrease discrimination, analysis and relations. Let us carry this to a maximum where all details vanish and a rich quality takes full possession of the event. Here we have pure intuition. If the quality is very intense, it is

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sometimes called ecstasy. A better term is Dewey’s “seizure.” It is obviously indescribable precisely because it is pure quality. (1937, 27-28)

Next, he reverses the process of aesthetic appreciation so as to relax fusion, intuition, and quality, while increasing the texture of discrimination, analysis, and relations: “When pure fusion is relaxed we are let down into the details of the event, whereupon discriminations unfold, and relations spread out, till we reach the balanced perception I had of the print” (1937, 28). Pepper’s discussion of Hiroshige’s woodblock print in its two aspects of discrimination, analysis and relations on the one side and fusion, intuition, and quality on the other, is itself a clarification of Whitehead’s explanation of art. As Whitehead asserts in MT there are two ways to encounter the work of art: the logical and the aesthetic modes of experience. In aesthetics, the beauty of pervasive quality as the felt whole precedes the details, whereas in logical analysis the whole is discriminated into details that function to produce the totality of the effect. Thus, in aesthetics there is an enjoyment of beauty as a directly felt totality disclosing its component parts (MT 61-2). Pepper’s use of a Japanese print to illustrate beauty as directly felt aesthetic quality is significant for our East-West comparative analysis of qualitative immediacy in American and Japanese aesthetics. Although Pepper could have selected a painting from the tradition of Western art, he instead chooses a Japanese print to illustrate the creative process of fusion, transmutation, and simplification of complex details into a single pervasive aesthetic quality unifying the compositional design of an artwork. Pepper might have alternatively used the Zen monochrome sumie inkwash landscape paintings by Zen artist-priest Sesshū to illustrate his notion of beauty as pervasive aesthetic quality with change, fusion, and spread. Instead, Pepper uses a colorful Edo period Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige. In Zen inkwash landscape paintings, the multiplicity of details are fused into the atmospheric beauty of yūgen or faint darkness as the single pervasive aesthetic quality diffused throughout a scene in nature. A Zen monochrome inkwash picture creates an atmospheric sense of beauty as yūgen with the spread of black ink to establish continuity, wholeness, and fusion in a landscape that clearly exemplifies the directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality described by Pepper. However, instead of a Zen monochrome landscape painting, Pepper illustrates pervasive quality of an artwork with a technique of compositional design used in the colorful Japanese prints of Hiroshige: namely, the use of diagonal streaks of rain depicted by countless slanting parallel black lines, which altogether act to fuse or “transmute” the multitude of diverse elements constituting nature into an organic whole with the atmospheric beauty of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. An exam-

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ination of Hiroshige’s famous woodblock print reveals how finely engraved diagonal streaks of rain are used to create a fusion of multiple elements into a directly felt whole with pervasive aesthetic quality, just as the sudden torrential downpour of rain discloses the perpetual change of evanescent aesthetic quality. Finally, the extension of Pepper’s American process model of beauty as intuition of pervasive aesthetic quality into an East-West transcultural framework is adumbrated in his essay, “On Donald Keene’s ‘Japanese Aesthetics’” (1969). Keene’s essay “Japanese Aesthetics” (1969) argues that there are four traits characterizing traditional Japanese aesthetics, including: (1) Irregularity, (2) Suggestiveness, (3) Naturalness, and (4) Perishability. In his response to this essay, Pepper holds that Japanese aesthetics with its appreciation of the simple beauty of natural quality fits best with the American contextualist paradigm of relational events as directly felt in their qualitative immediacy. Traditional Japanese aesthetics celebrates the directly felt natural aesthetic qualities of events, such as the blueness of a lake, the fragrance of blossoms, the sound of a waterfall, the unpainted rustic wood of an ancient Shinto shrine, or the simple, plain, and faded quality of a tea bowl used in everyday life. Pepper’s classification scheme thus establishes a transcultural method for relating Zen aestheticism to American contextualism and its extension into Whitehead’s process metaphysics, as variants of a global paradigm based on consummatory situations with the atmospheric beauty of pervasive aesthetic quality. (ii) F. S. C. Northrop F. S. C. Northrop (1893-1992) studied under Whitehead first in England and then at Harvard University. 1 In his foreword to Donald Sherburne’s A Whiteheadian Aesthetic (1961), Northrop argues that Chapter VII of The Concept of Nature is the key point of entry into Whitehead’s metaphysical vision of nature as an aesthetic continuum. Northrop writes: This is the point of the thesis of chapter 7 in The Concept of Nature which, more than any other, is, in this writer’s judgment, the key to Whitehead’s philosophy. This key thesis is that sense objects [aesthetic sense qualities] such as blueness of the lake or sky ‘ingress’ into the continuum of nature in many-termed relations. (1961, xxiv)

In this illuminating essay, Northrop describes Whitehead’s concept of nature as an immediately apprehended panoramic continuum of interpenetrating aesthetic qualities which ingress into situations or events through multiterm relationships. During his period as Whitehead’s student at Harvard University, Northrop relates private conversations at which time Whitehead explained his use of the word “ingression” to describe this many-termed relation, in the hope that “its unfamiliarity

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would shock the reader out of his habit of supposing that the qualities we directly sense are related to other facts of concrete experience by the twotermed relation of a predicate of a substance” (1961, xxv). For Northrop, Whitehead’s metaphysics of nature as an undivided aesthetic continuum of pervasive value qualities that “ingress” through complex multi-termed relationships is encapsulated in the following passage from chapter 7 in The Concept of Nature (1920): The sense-awareness of the blue as situated in a certain event which I call the situation, is . . . exhibited as the sense-awareness of a relation between the blue, the percipient event of the observer, the situation, and intervening events (CN 152; cited by Northrop: 1961, xxiv)

Northrop’s foreword begins with an explanation of Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” defined as “the confusion of an entity of thought with a concrete factor of fact” (1961, xiii). Other fallacies elucidated by Whitehead, including the fallacy of simple location and the fallacy of vacuous actuality, are aspects of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, wherein reified abstract entities of thought are mistaken for the concrete aesthetic events of immediate experience from which they are derived. The erroneously inferred notion of vacuous material substance with permanence, simple location, independent existence, and absence of values, is to be regarded as an abstraction from the concrete, aesthetically immediate continuum of directly felt qualitative events. In Northrop’s words: The confusion of erroneously inferred entities of thought with the concrete colorful events and aesthetically moving impressionistic qualities and continuum of one’s immediate experience would not be so prevalent were there not some unconscious, previously conditioned habit of thought in us which has been corrupting both our thinking and our conduct. (1961, xvi)

He further discusses how for Whitehead the substance-quality metaphysics is rooted in the subject-predicate logic and grammar of our English prose: “The very grammar of the sentences we use to give a more correct description of the aesthetically vivid emotively moving qualities of events of our concrete experience is itself the product of old, erroneously inferred entities of thought” (1961, xvi). Northrop endeavors to illustrate Whitehead’s analysis of how an aesthetic sense quality like the color “blue” characterizing a blue lake ingresses into situational events through multiple relations in the all-embracing aesthetic continuum of nature. While contemplating the panoramic landscape of a blue lake from his summer cottage on a hilltop in New Hampshire, he goes on to provide a striking phenomenological description of nature as an ever-changing panoramic continuum of pervasive aesthetic qualities:

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After describing how the pervasive aesthetic sense quality of the color blue saturates the whole undivided aesthetic continuum as immediately apprehended through intuition, he then considers how it is reduced to an erroneously inferred dead entity of thought derived through concepts by postulation. It is precisely at this point, when I move in thought beyond the bare concrete impressionistic qualities and images of the concrete panoramic continuum that is immediate experience to what they signify, that the subject-predicate grammar of my English prose, or of any other Aryan language, can lead me, as it has led countless scientists, philosophers and people of common sense, into the most serious errors. . . . I am likely to describe the “blue” part of my breath-taking panoramic New Hampshire experience by thinking and saying, “The water in Squam Lake is blue.” Note what has happened. I have torn the “blue” portion of the all-embracing breath-taking panoramic continuum of concrete aesthetic immediacy away from this continuum, to fasten it to an entity of thought, “The water of Squam Lake,” which I infer the “blue” signifies. (1961, xix)

The substance-quality metaphysics together with its correlate subjectpredicate logic and grammar of English prose, compels one to impute the aesthetic quality “blue” to an underlying vacuous substance, either an external objective material substance, or an internal subjective mental substance. Naive realism assumes at first glance that the quality blue must be a fixed attribute which inheres through a two-term relation in the material substance of water. Through the cognitive process of extensive abstraction one thereby rips out or tears away the pervasive aesthetic quality of blue saturating the panoramic continuum, in order to simply locate it in the watery substance of the lake. But on cupping the water in his hands, he sees that the lake only appeared to be blue, but that it is really colorless, thus to be devoid of aesthetic value quality. Hence, “the concrete, colorful, breath-taking aesthetic qualities of my concrete experience are torn away from supposedly real things to be assigned to the phantasmic limbo of appearances” (1961, xix). The substance-quality metaphysics and subject-predicate strait jacket of English prose leads him to conclude that if the quality blue is not an attribute of the watery physical substance in the lake, it must instead be attached to a mental substance. The pervasive aesthetic quality of the vivid color blue is now once again ripped out of the all-embracing panoramic continuum to be simply located in the

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mental substance of the Cartesian subject. This subject-predicate logic and grammar now forces one to say, “My conscious substantial self is blue . . . the blue is the phantasmically projected effect of the action of the material substances upon my private mental substance. Now the conscious self is stripped of all aesthetic qualities also” (1961, xxi). Northrop next explains that Whitehead’s solution is to demonstrate how aesthetic qualities like blue are not to be analyzed as inhering in an underlying vacuous substance through simple two-term relations of substance-attribute, but as ingressing through complex multiterm relations into a contextual field, event, or situation. As further clarified by Northrop, expressed mathematically in terms of the logic of relations, aesthetic qualities such as blue, hot, loud, or soft are a function of many variables, and not, as Aristotelian subject-predicate logic and Cartesian substance-quality metaphysics supposes, the function of a single variable, namely, the substance of which it is supposed to be an attribute. Northrop sums up the main point of Whitehead’s relational theory of aesthetic qualities presented in chapter 7 of The Concept of Nature as follows: The blue which I directly sense is a function of many variables, that is, whether the sun is shining, whether there are clouds in the sky, where I am located when I sense it and many other factors. The answer and this is the answer which Whitehead gives, is by making the subject of the English sentence not a substance, but a many termed relation of which the blue is but one of the terms. This has the effect of stating in English prose that the blue is not the property of a substance, that is, it is not a function of only one variable, but is instead a function of many variables . . .” (1961, xxiv)

As F. Seddon further explains in his book on Northrop’s Whiteheadian metaphysics of nature as a panoramic all-embracing aesthetic continuum, the pervasive aesthetic quality “blue” as a concept by intuition is a multivalued relation which in the notation of symbolic logic, can be designated as follows: Babcd . . . where B = blue; a = light; b = intervening medium; c = percipient; d = concept by postulation blue, that is, the angstrom number, etc. The immediately felt aesthetic quality of blue is a multivalued relation derived through “concepts by intuition,” while the angstrom number currently assigned to blue is a quantitative “concept by postulation,” the two being connected by “an epistemic correlation” (Seddon: 1995, 45). In his foreword to Sherburne’s A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, Northrop explains that in his own 1946 work The Meeting of East and West, words referring to the concrete, immediately apprehended panoramic continuum of directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities are what he terms “concepts by intuition.” By contrast, words referring to simply located substances with attributes, the abstract, erroneously inferred entities of

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thought derived by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, are called “concepts by postulation” (1961, xviii). Throughout The Meeting of East and West, Northrop cites his indebtedness to chapter 7 of The Concept of Nature, wherein A. N. Whitehead sets forth his doctrine of nature as a panoramic continuum of pervasive aesthetic value qualities that ingress into situations or percipient events by multitermed relations as a function of many variables (1979, 451- 452). Speaking of the aesthetic quality of a red rose, for example, it is not sensed by a person with color blindness: “In this instance the quality which one sees upon the rose cannot be regarded as an intrinsic property of the rose. It is a function also of the rods and cones in the observer’s eyes” (1979, 452). The pervasive aesthetic quality of the red rose “is not a two-termed relation . . . but a many-termed relation in which the color is one term, the aesthetically-theoretically known rose is another term, the aesthetically-theoretically known observer is the third term, and the aesthetically-theoretically known continuum in which all are embedded is a fourth term” (1979, 452). Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West develops Whitehead’s concept of nature as a panoramic continuum of aesthetic qualities with both a differentiated foreground and an undifferentiated background to interpret the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. According to Northrop, the West has focused on the differentiated aspect of the aesthetic continuum in the foreground as grasped through “concepts by postulation,” thereby to develop science and technology, whereas the East focuses more on the undifferentiated aspect of the aesthetic continuum in the background as directly apprehended by “intuition,” thereby to develop its aesthetic tradition exemplified by the art of landscape painting. Northrop writes: “Consider the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. Actually, we never experience it by itself. We always experience it as at least partially differentiated” (1979, 335). Furthermore, Northrop uses the “focus/field” structure of pure experience in William James, and the “foreground/background” structure of immediate experience in A. N. Whitehead to elucidate our perception of the panoramic all-embracing aesthetic continuum of nature in its differentiated and undifferentiated aspects: “First, the whole of the immediately experienced continuum is not differentiated. As William James pointed out, and as Alfred Whitehead has recently re-emphasized, its periphery is undifferentiated and indeterminate” (1979, 341). Whereas our immediate experience of this allembracing panoramic aesthetic continuum of nature is differentiated by sense objects articulated at the foreground focus of attention, it is indeterminate and undifferentiated in the non-articulated whole of the background field. In The Meeting of East and West, Northrop develops a comparative methodology relating Eastern and Western philosophic perspectives based on Whitehead’s view that our immediate experience of the contin-

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uum of nature has an aesthetic pole and a conceptual pole. For Northrop the fundamental distinction between the two systems of thought is to be found in the “concepts of intuition” underlying Eastern traditions and the “concepts by postulation” emphasized by Western philosophy. In accord with Whitehead’s view that each occasion of experience is dipolar, Northrop holds that the West has focused on the “theoretical” component so as to develop logic, science, and technology, while the East has focused on the “aesthetic” component in the panoramic continuum of nature. Northrop uses his Whiteheadian concept of nature as an undivided aesthetic continuum of interpenetrating pervasive aesthetic qualities to interpret the aesthetic worldviews of Daoism and Zen/Chan Buddhism, as well as their creative expression in East Asian landscape painting: “What Taoism did was to pursue this all-embracing, immediately experienced, aesthetically vivid, emotionally moving aesthetic continuum with respect to its manifestations in the differentiated sense qualities of immediately apprehended objects in nature” (1979, 334). Explaining Zen/Chan Buddhist art, he writes: “Put positively, the symbolic reference of Buddhist Oriental art is from the formalized, determinate, differentiated aesthetic qualities in their sensed immediacy to the equally immediately apprehended indeterminate aesthetic continuum” (1979, 351). Whitehead’s theory of perception in the mode of “symbolic reference” is here used by Northrop to explain Daoist and Zen/Chan Buddhist landscape painting, where symbolic reference operates from vivid sense qualities articulated in the foreground focus to the vague nonarticulated background field. It is in such a manner that Northrop applies Whitehead’s concept of nature as a continuum of aesthetic qualities as the basis for a new East-West comparative philosophy. (iii) Robert M. Pirsig A. N. Whitehead’s process philosophy was an inspiration for the “metaphysics of Quality” developed by Robert M. Pirsig in his bestselling novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1979), and its sequel titled Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). In Lila Pirsig explains that his metaphysics of Quality is based on Whitehead’s idea of process as “Dynamic Quality” (1991, 115, 119). Throughout both of these novels Pirsig develops Whitehead’s theme of overcoming the vacuous concept of nature in scientific materialism by recovering the Quality or intrinsic value of events. Moreover, Pirsig builds on F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (1979), wherein Whitehead’s concept of nature as a panoramic continuum of qualities with both an aesthetic and theoretical component is expanded into a framework for unifying Eastern and Western modes of thought (1979, 122-124). The plot and narrative structure of Pirsig’s novel involves a crosscountry motorcycle trip from Minnesota to San Francisco, thus belonging

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to that distinctly American literary subgenre of introspective autobiographical travelogue influenced by New England transcendentalism, with elements of spiritual adventure, religious pilgrimage, vision quest, the hero’s journey, and a psychological voyage of self-discovery. This autobiographical travelogue has a psychological theme of self-realization by resolving the split psyche through reintegration of the narrator’s conscious self with his repressed unconscious self called “Phaedrus,” who only exists as fragmentary memories since having electroshock treatments after a mental breakdown, thereby leading to recovery of psychical wholeness. At the philosophical level it is an inquiry into Quality or Value as the solution to all metaphysical dualisms. The philosopher-hero of Pirsig’s novel is “Phaedrus.” Citing Whitehead, Pirsig traces the history of philosophical reflection on Quality back to Plato in ancient Greece: “Whitehead’s statement that all philosophy is nothing but ‘footnotes to Plato’ can be well supported” (1979, 335). As discussed in Pirsig’s novel (1979, 383), Phaedrus is the name of a dialogue by Plato which describes eros or love as the highest form of madness leading to the truth, goodness, and beauty of the soul. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates depicts the tripartite soul in metaphorical terms as a charioteer who must control a pair of winged horses struggling in opposite directions. Naming his character “Phaedrus” therefore symbolizes the novel’s theme of reuniting the divided self while overcoming dualisms at every level signified by the split of Quality into two halves, the romantic and the classic, or the aesthetic and the logical. Pirsig’s novels develop the theme of uniting romantic and classic aspects of pure Quality to reconcile philosophical dualisms between subject and object, mind and matter, self and nature, fact and value; the psychological dualism of conscious and unconscious; the cultural dichotomy between art and science-technology; the countercultural bifurcation into hip and square; and finally the transcultural split between East and West. It is only in his Pirsig’s sequel volume entitled Lila (1991, 324) that Phaedrus now openly discloses that his metaphysics of Quality is an extension of mainstream twentieth century golden age American philosophy, including both the systems of pragmatism and radical empiricism worked out by William James, and their extension into the organic process metaphysics of Quality articulated by A. N. Whitehead. At one point in the narrative, Phaedrus states that Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance develops a “Metaphysics of Quality” which is “an offshoot of James” (1991, 324). He further reveals: The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism. . . .Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the Metaphysics of Quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of

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anomalies that traditional empiricism had not been able to cope with. (1991, 366)

Pirsig further clarifies that Phaedrus’ metaphysics of Quality is a form of radical empiricism which identifies intrinsic value with the pure experience of Quality: “The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value” (1991, 365). Pirsig finally reveals that Phaedrus’s new vision of Quality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics: When A. N. Whitehead wrote that “mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language,” he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. (1991, 115)

Again, he states: “Whitehead’s ‘dim apprehension,’ is Dynamic Quality” (1991, 119). Hence, the doctrine of Quality articulated by Phaedrus has its basis in Whitehead’s metaphysics of qualitative immediacy with its dim apprehension of Dynamic Quality. Pirsig discusses how aesthetics as an inquiry into the beautiful is that specialized area of philosophy focusing on Quality: “There is an entire branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of Quality, known as esthetics. Its question, What is meant by beautiful? goes back to antiquity” (1979, 212). According to Pirsig, beauty is to be defined as the Quality of events in pure experience prior to subject-object dualism. He states that aesthetic experience of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life is always enjoyment of Quality. Whitehead’s idea of Dynamic Quality grasped by dim apprension in immediate experience is then applied by Pirsig to explain how Quality can be used as a norm governing all creative processes, including both the romantic modes of art and literature as well as the classic modes of science and technology, whereupon all life is transformed into art suffused by the beauty of pervasive aesthetic value quality. A fundamental problem for Phaedrus is the locus of aesthetic value Quality. Does “Quality” exist in the subject or the object? In mind or matter? (1979, 228): “Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn’t reside in the material world. . . . Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn’t reside merely in the mind. . . . Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two” (1979, 237). Phaedrus rejects the idea that Quality is just a property of material objects as stated by the substance-attribute metaphysics of Aristotle, while at the same time he rejects the opposite view that “secondary qualities” of sounds, colors, and tastes are exclusively in the mind as held by the dualistic seventeenth century Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm of modern philosophy: “The world now, according to Phaedrus, was composed of three things: mind, matter, and Quality” (1979, 238).

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Throughout the novel Phaedrus reflects upon a single Zenlike kōan, “What is Quality?” (1979, 184, 204, 210). At the instant of awakening he realizes that the locus of Quality is not in the subject or in the object, but in a “Quality event,” which is itself a terminus of the interaction between subject and object. Quality events are the original concrete whole from which subject and object are later derived by abstraction. Here the novel attains to a grand epiphany, or a “mystical wave of crystallization” (1979, 247), which after a long buildup explodes into a breakthrough satori-like moment of insight into Quality as fusion of subject and object in an event of pure experience: Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet. That sounded warm. Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the events at which the subject becomes aware of the object. . . . Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Hot. Now he knew it was coming. This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. . . . And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long period of time. (1979, 239-40)

Phaedrus then uses his new metaphysics of Quality to overcome another dualism, the “romantic-classic Quality split” (1979, 248). 2 Phaedrus describes the split into two modes, the romantic mode of art and literature as over against the classic mode of science and technology: I want to divide human understanding into two kinds—classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . . The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. . . . It proceeds by feeling, intuition, and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity. . . . The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws. . . . And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture. (1979, 73-74; italics added)

The bifurcation of culture into the romantic versus classic modes as aesthetic qualities of art and literature versus the mental concepts of science and technology, is related to the hip-square contrast: “Clichés and stereotypes such as ‘beatnik’ or ‘hippie’ have been invented for the antitechnologists” (1979, 25). Hence, unlike the hip countercultural movement of Beat Zen and Hippie Zen based on the one-sided intuition of romantic quality, the Zen of Pirsig is based on pure Quality which includes both romantic and classic poles as the basis for a system to unite hip and

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square, art and technology, poetry and science, aesthetics and logic. Phaedrus’s metaphysics of Quality is not a return to mere romanticism, but a synthesis which integrates pragmatism or the scientific experimental method based on the classic mode of logic, and the method of radical empiricism based on the romantic mode of aesthetically immediate, direct or pure experience. Phaedrus holds that while riding a motorcycle across American highways is aesthetic enjoyment of romantic Quality, the repair and maintenance of a motorcycle instead requires the scientific-technological knowledge of classic Quality. In this context, he describes the classic Quality required to repair a broken motorcycle in terms of the experimental method of pragmatism, wherein a provisional hypothesis is formed to solve a problematic situation and the hypothesis is then tested by predictions in an experiment. The whole process of inquiry is itself governed at the tacit dimension of subliminal awareness by an underlying pervasive Quality which joins art and technology in pure Quality. Phaedrus underscores the role of prereflective Quality in selecting which hypothesis best solves a problem in a scientific experiment. It is preintellectual, immediately felt Quality pervading the situation as a whole that intuitively guides the selection of a problem-solving hypothesis by a scientist or inventor in an experiment just as it guides selection of materials by an artist or poet in the process of aesthetic creation. Describing the epiphany of his Zen insight into the synthesis of romantic and classic elements in the holistic vision of pure Quality, Pirsig/Phaedrus now proclaims: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower” (1979, 26). Quality is therefore present in both the classical mode of scientific technology and the romantic mode as aesthetic experience of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. Phaedrus holds that the practice of Zen meditation results in cultivation of a heightened “Quality awareness” (1979, 286), or “pure Quality perception” (1979, 290). Through Zen meditation one achieves enlightenment as vision of pure Quality beyond the subject-object dichotomy (1979, 290). Phaedrus asserts, “Zen Buddhists talk about ‘just sitting,’ a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one’s consciousness” (1979, 296-297). For Phaedrus, the practice of Zen meditation is constant “attention to Quality” (1979, 282). By returning attention to qualitative flow the subject and object interfuse in a nondual Quality event of pure experience. Moreover, the Zen cultivation of Quality awareness requires as its necessary precondition an “inner peace of mind” (1979, 295). As Phaedrus puts it, “peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic quality and classic Quality and which unites the two…” (1979, 294). Phaedrus teaches that it is through the practice of Zen meditation as constant attention to Quality with peace of mind in all of one’s activities

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that the intrinsic value, aesthetic delight, and beauty of pure Quality comes to pervade each and every moment of everyday life, including both creativity in the romantic mode of artistic craftsmanship and industrial production in the classic mode of technological manufacturing. While on a boat returning from Korea, Phaedrus reads a book which signals the major “turning point” of his life: Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, (1979, 123). Already it has been discussed how Northrop was a student of A. N. Whitehead at Harvard University, and that in The Meeting of East and West he develops a Whiteheadian vision of nature as an aesthetic continuum of qualities. Following Whitehead, Northrop emphasizes that the continuum of nature includes both the “theoretical component” of the differentiated continuum in the foreground, as well as the “aesthetic component” of the undifferentiated continuum in the background, and that the theoretical component is derived by abstraction from the concrete aesthetic component of the continuum. For Northrop, the West has focused on the theoretic component so as to develop a scientific-technological culture while the East has instead focused on the aesthetic component of nature as an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum apprehended by intuition, thereby to develop an artistic culture. In Phaedus’s vocabulary, what Northrop calls the “theoretical component” of the west corresponds to classical Quality while the “aesthetic component” emphasized by the east corresponds to romantic Quality. It is after reading Northrop’s book that Pirsig’s philosopher-hero Phaedrus endeavors to formulate his new metaphysics of pure Quality that synthesizes the classic mode of scientific technological culture in the West and the romantic mode of aesthetic culture in the East. In the afterword to a later edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Pirsig explains the great popularity of his book with the suggestion that it is a “culture-bearing” American novel (1979, 414). It can be said that at one level the culture-bearing function of Pirsig’s work is that it thematizes the recurrent motif of Quality running throughout the American philosophical tradition while also showing its convergence with the Japanese tradition of Zen aestheticism. Pirsig’s literary imagination thus presents the nondualistic vision of American philosophy and its extension into Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, wherein the beauty of Quality not only pervades the romantic mode of artistic creativity, but also the classical mode of scientific inquiry and technological production, so that each Quality event arising through a dynamic field of interactions is funded with consummatory aesthetic value and all life is transformed into art. (iv) H. N. Wieman One of the most profound reformulations of Whitehead’s metaphysics of aesthetic quality has been developed by the American process theolo-

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gian Henry Nelson Wieman, especially in The Source of Human Good (1946) and Man’s Ultimate Commitment (1958). Wieman has been called “the most comprehensive and most distinctively American theologian of our century” (Weiman: 1963, X). Along with Charles Hartshorne, Wieman is regarded as one of the founders of Whiteheadian process theology. 3 Wieman articulates a radically empirical process theology and process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy underscoring how the numinous dimension of life as the divine, holy, or sacred is revealed in human experience as a creative process that leads to the ever-greater good, the “good” being defined as the intensity, fullness, and depth of vivid aesthetic quality. From the standpoint of East-West comparative philosophy it will further be shown how Wieman’s process theology and metaphysics of quality has been described as an American counterpart to Zen Buddhism by such thinkers as David Lee Miller and the Japanese Buddhist scholar Ichiro Hori (Miller: 1984, 103). Wieman’s idea of intrinsic value as directly felt aesthetic quality is continuous with the American religious tradition of radical empiricism running throughout C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, A. N. Whitehead, and others. His theology of “creative events” with the aesthetic quality of beauty is especially influenced by Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy based on his ultimate category of creativity. Although expressing his profound indebtedness to Whitehead, at the same time Wieman sharply distinguishes his own view from Whitehead’s process theology (1946, 192-194). He especially distances himself from Whitehead’s dipolar God, stating that he does not accept Whitehead’s reified notion of the primordial nature of God, the primordial order of eternal objects supplied by God, and the saving function of the consequent nature of God. Instead, for Wieman the soteriological function of God is to be seen in the creative transformation of process by the emergence of the good as ever-increasing richness of aesthetic value quality. The sacred, holy, or numinous dimension of life is to be found in the vivid pervasive aesthetic qualities of creative events as directly enjoyed in their concrete qualitative immediacy. Wieman’s process theology of qualitative immediacy has been strongly influenced by the naturalistic account of religion articulated by Dewey. In his philosophy of religious experience, Dewey rejects dualistic, transcendent, and supernatural ideas of institutionalized religion based on dogmatism while underscoring a liberal pluralistic attitude of openness to relational, aesthetic value qualities of transactional events that inspire a “natural piety,” or religious attitude of awe, reverence, wonder, and gratitude. For Dewey, religion is not dogmatic belief in a supernatural deity or membership in a religious institution, but a celebration of the intense aesthetic qualities pervading situations arising through organism-environment transactions in experience and nature. In John Dewey’s 1934 work called A Common Faith, a book written and published at the

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same time as Art as Experience, he formulates his idea of a “natural faith” in which the religious quality of mystical experience is identical to the aesthetic quality of consummatory experience. According to Dewey’s naturalism, both religious and aesthetic experience are constituted by the pervasive value qualities of transactional events in their felt wholeness. As Dewey writes in Art as Experience, “A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, allinclusive whole. . . . It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies intense esthetic perception” (1980, 195). In A Common Faith it now becomes clear that for Dewey, the religious experience is continuous with aesthetic experience, both understood as a mode of consummatory experience with depth of pervasive quality. It can thus be said that for Wieman, as for Dewey, religious and aesthetic experience are both celebrations of the natural qualities of events in everyday life. Wieman’s process theology provides a key to grasping the shift to a more naturalistic approach in Whitehead’s later writings. The process theism of Process and Reality develops God as poet of the world that elicits actualization of emergent aesthetic quality in creative events through its primordial nature as a lure for feeling, while saving all aesthetic qualities realized by creative events in its consequent nature as the storehouse of divine memory. Yet in his later writings, such as Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought, Whitehead develops a more secularized, naturalized, and deontologized approach whereby creative events with the aesthetic value quality of beauty are explicated as a function of nature itself as an emergent evolutionary process of creative advance toward novelty in the adventure of the universe. Likewise, for the process theology of Wieman, the sacred reality of God is disclosed only in and through the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of creative events in the qualitative flow of immediate experience. What creates, transforms, and saves in human life are the directly felt aesthetic qualities of creative events. The notion of aesthetically immediate quality is central to Wieman’s radically empirical process theology and process metaphysics. He writes, “the place of quality in this metaphysics must be further clarified. Every event accessible to human experience is a quality or a complex of qualities; also every event is an instance of energy. Wherever energy is experienced by the human organism, is a quality or a complex of qualities” (1946, 301). Again, “Therefore, relative to human experience, all energy is quality, and every event is quality. Quality, then, is the ultimate substance of the world out of which all else is made. Hard, soft, bright, red, odorous, painful, miserable, joyous, sorrowful—all are qualities experienced as events” (1946, 301-302). For Wieman, “Quality is the substance of events” (1946, 136). Moreover, “Qualities and events are identical when experienced by man” (1946, 302). He adds, “The concrete events are qualities immediately apprehended by feeling” (1946, 306). According to Wieman, then, actuality consists not of vacuous matter or sub-

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stance, but creative events, and creative events are empirically presented as a flux of directly felt aesthetic qualities. From the perspective of a radically empirical approach to theology, which is itself not a theology from above, but a theology from below, the source of divine revelation is the beauty, aesthetic value, moral goodness, cognitive meaning, and spiritual joy of directly enjoyed qualities presented in the stream of experiential immediacy. Wieman, like Whitehead, Dewey, and others in the American tradition of radical empiricism, formulates a religious view of life as appreciation of the immediate, concrete, relational, pervasive, holistic, rich, full, intense, directly felt aesthetic value qualities of consummatory experience. Furthermore, like Whitehead and Dewey, Wieman understands pervasive aesthetic quality as located in neither subjects nor objects, but in interactive situations or events: “A quality is always intrinsic to the total situation” (1946, 302). The quality is not simply located in the subject or in the object, in the mind or in matter, but permeates the total situation arising through organism-environment transactions as its pervasive quality: “Analysis reveals that the total situation, which is always a complex, total event, bears the quality and not merely the particular object which may seem the bearer of it” (1946, 302). Again, “This complex inexhaustible event is the bearer of the qualities; or rather, we should say that the event is the quality” (1946, 303). He adds: “Quality, then, is objective fact. It is ultimate reality. . . . The world is essentially and substantively quality” (1946, 303). In Wieman’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, ultimate reality is directly felt aesthetic value quality, so that the aim of life is enhancement of aesthetic quality, maximum increase in realization of aesthetic quality, and deeper appreciation of the richness of aesthetic quality: “In this metaphysic the goal of life (the conservation or increase of value) is to structure the world so that qualities will be more appreciable” (1946, 304). Wieman articulates his naturalistic process theology and process metaphysics of creative events with the aesthetic quality of beauty in The Source of Human Good, especially chapter 6 titled “Beauty” (1946, 133-163). In this chapter, Wieman’s view coincides with Whitehead’s concept of beauty as the directly felt aesthetic quality of creative events. Emphasizing the novelty and uniqueness of aesthetic value quality through its emergence in creative events arising through intercommunication, Wieman states: “Each moment, even the simplest of moments, is a new event defined by uniqueness of quality” (1946, 135). In his concept of beauty as aesthetic quality, Wieman asserts, “It is only in the experience of beauty that we are actually aware of the full [aesthetic] quality of events” (1946, 135). Again: “Qualitative meaning, as we have interpreted it, is closely akin to beauty” (1946, 134). Similarly, “True beauty . . . is aesthetic form releasing the freedom of human action, the range and keenness of human

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appreciation, the fulness of intercommunication, and the creative transformations that unfold the depth of quality of the world” (1946, 139). Wieman goes on to develop a notion consonant with Whitehead’s visionary aesthetic ideal of tragic beauty. For Wieman, it is only the experience of tragedy that discloses the fullness of beauty as aesthetic value quality in immediate experience: “Hence tragedy opens the way for man to find the meanings most rich in quality” (1946, 155). Wieman’s view that tragedy reveals maximum depth of aesthetic value quality in creative events is thus in accord with Whitehead’s process aesthetics of ephemeral beauty summed up by his culminating notion of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296). For Wieman, human joy is rooted in “creative interchange,” or joyful intercommunication between qualitative events. Explaining his Whiteheadian idea of a creative event with the beauty of aesthetic value quality, he writes: “The creative event is so basic to all our further interpretation of value that we must examine it with care” (1946, 57-58). Each creative event with the beauty of aesthetic quality is made up of four subevents: (1) emergence of new aesthetic qualitative meaning through communication; (2) integration with other aesthetic qualities; (3) expanding the aesthetic richness and variety of aesthetic quality; (4) and mutual deepening of community through creative events of intercommunication and deepening of aesthetic value quality in community (1946, 58). Wieman’s book Man’s Ultimate Commitment (1958) further develops his religious metaphysics and philosophical theology of creative events with aesthetic quality: “The ultimate commitment of faith in the religion of creativity is the only way to escape spiritual death when ‘spiritual death’ means failure to live with the vivid qualities of original experience . . . and with a deep sense of the worthfulness of life” (1958, 22; italics added). His Whiteheadian process theology of creative events with aesthetic value qualities thus aims to overcome nihilism and spiritual death as the loss of qualitative values in immediate experience: All this shows that there is no way to live richly except in the presence of the dark realities. . . . The fulness of reality with all the richness of felt quality which it yields can enter consciousness only when we face it openly with our full capacity for apprehending it. (1958, 57)

In Wieman’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, the answer to the problem of overcoming nihilism and despair as the dark realities of life, is to be found in direct experience of creative events with aesthetic quality. At the same time, it is only through the encounter with the suffering and tragedy of the dark realities of life that opens one to the full intensity, depth, and fullness of directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. Both Japanese and Western scholars have noted the close proximity between Wieman’s radically empirical process theology of aesthetic quality and Zen Buddhism. Hence, by means of the religious empiricism of H.

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N. Wieman, the idea of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality has been expanded into an intercultural theme for East-West comparative philosophy and Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue. It was the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō who first introduced the kenōsis/´sūnyatâ motif of self-emptying compassion as a theme for Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue (1987). For Nishida, God’s kenosis or self-emptying out of agapic love in Christian theology functions like Zen Buddhist ´sūnyatâ (J. kū, 空) or self-emptying to nothingness out of compassion. Nishida also discusses the salvation through faith and grace in the Pure Land Buddhism of Shinran in relation to the Protestant Lutheran theology of Kierkegaard. For Nishida, Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism hold that salvation comes by faith in Jesus Christ/Amida Buddha as the Word/Logos. Yet there is another dimension to the Christian-Buddhist dialogue opened up by Wieman’s neo-Whiteheadian process theology of creative events with aesthetic quality in relation to Nishida’s concept of pure experience as qualitative flow. Citing Richard Bernstein’s analysis of qualitative immediacy as a central motif in Peirce, Santayana, James, Dewey, Whitehead, and other American thinkers, Nolan Pliny Jacobson asserts that the notion of “quality” is culturally encapsulating of the American philosophical tradition (1984, 41). It can be said that for Nishida, kenōsis or self-emptying results in dialectical interfusion between transcendence and immanence, sacred and profane or nirvana and samsara, in the field (basho, 場所) or “locus” of absolute nothingness, where everything is affirmed just as it is in its suchness as pure quality of feeling. In terms of what John B. Cobb and David Griffin call the “deep religious pluralism” of Whitehead’s process theology (Griffin: 2005), Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue has three levels based on Whitehead’s three metaphysical ultimates: (i) dialogue focusing on Christian kenosis (Phil. 2: 5-11) and Buddhist shunyata (J. kū, 空) or self-emptying into nothingness, is based on the nontheistic, impersonal, and formless ultimate of emptiness/creativity; (ii) the theistic model of salvation by faith in a deity such as Christ/Amida or Logos/Word is based on God as the personal ultimate with form; and (iii) a third level of dialogue based on the ultimate of “events” or “occasions” in the continuum of nature. 4 The Whiteheadian-Wieman/Zen radically empirical process theology of the divine underscores the third ultimate of events, which are the actual occasions constituting temporal process in its qualitative immediacy. Like Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good (1990), the Whiteheadian process theology of creative events with aesthetic quality developed in Wieman’s The Source of Human Good, also finds the source of value as “the good” in the qualitative immediacy of direct, immediate, or pure experience. Both Nishida and Wieman hold that every increase in aesthetic value quality has its source in God—what for Nishida is God as the

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ultimate source for the unification of each qualitative event, and which for Wieman is God as the source for aesthetic quality in creative events. Wieman’s metaphysics and theology of quality is at once reminiscent of the modern Zen doctrine of quality formulated by Nishida Kitarō. In the chapter titled Basho (場所) of his 1927 work From the Acting to the Seeing (1965: 4, 250) Nishida argues that absolute nothingness is a locus, matrix, field, or place (basho) of “pure qualities” (junsui seishitsu, 純粋性 質), wherein pure quality is the source from which all energies and objects are derived by abstraction. For Nishida, the basho of true nothingness is the field of qualitative immediacy. Nishida therefore asserts that “we ought to regard immediate existence in the basho of true nothing as pure quality” (2012, 78). Again, Nishida writes: What is is something we ought to call simply pure quality. It is not that a thing is behind the quality but rather that the quality is behind the thing. Nor is it that force is behind the quality but that force is one attribute. . . . There may be many objections to considering pure quality as the root of reality. But what is truly immediate to us would have to be a pure quality. (2012, 74)

He adds: Quality that is immanent and yet transcendent is neither an attribute of things nor the consequence of forces. Rather, force and thing must be attributes of quality. Neither thing nor force is the substance of qualities. Rather, quality must be the substance of things and forces. (2012, 77)

Wieman’s neo-Whiteheadian metaphysics of qualitative immediacy approximates Nishida’s view when he states: “The place of quality in this metaphysics must be further clarified . . . all energy is quality and every event is quality. Quality, then, is the ultimate substance of the world out of which all else is made” (1946, 301-302). Again, “Quality is the substance of events” (1946, 136). And elsewhere: “Quality, then, is objective fact. It is ultimate reality. . . . The world is essentially and substantively quality” (1946, 303). Moreover, in an effort to determine the locus of quality they agree that qualities do not exclusively belong to either subjects or objects, but to the spatial locus of a field, what Nishida terms the basho or field of nothingness, and what Wieman terms a situation. Nishida writes, “If we thoroughly pursue the idea that takes the universal concept as basho, and when that basho accordingly becomes absolutely nothing, what are implaced therein would have to be pure qualities” (2012, 74). Wieman likewise states: “Quality is always intrinsic to the total situation” (1946, 302). He adds: “Analysis reveals that the total situation . . . bears the quality and not merely the particular object which may seem the bearer of it” (1946, 303). Hence, for Wieman, the locus of aesthetic quality is an interactive situation, field, or event, just as for Nishida the locus of pure quality is a basho or field.

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From the standpoint of East-West philosophical theology and comparative religion, Wieman discusses how his own radically empirical American theology of qualitative events has been related to Zen Buddhism by Ichiro Hori, an eminent scholar of Zen and Japanese religions: Ichiro Hori, a Zen Buddhist and scholar on the faculty of the University of Tokyo, judged me to be a Buddhist after reading The Source of Human Good. After reading my latest book [Man’s Ultimate Commitment ], he writes that he joins me in religious fellowship. (Wieman: 1963, 388; also, see Miller: 1984, 103)

Wieman recognizes that the reason for this similarity of his views with Zen Buddhism is due to the fact that he undertakes a radically empirical descriptive analysis of religious experience as the flux of directly felt aesthetic value qualities in the stream of immediate experience. In Wieman’s radically empirical theology, “God” is another word for creativity, creative transformation, or creative events of intercommunication. As opposed to the dualistic Christian theologies of transcendence, Wieman’s radical empiricism attempts to discover the immanence of God through his operation in the stream of immediate experience: “The Christian tradition . . . is my chief resource. Yet I strongly resent the current practice of appealing to the Christian and Jewish tradition as being the guide of life and identifying this tradition with God rather than seeking what operates in all human life to create, save, and transform” (Wieman: 1963, 388; Miller: 1984, 103). Influenced by Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy based on the ultimate principle of creativity, Wieman develops a religion of creativity wherein that which creates, saves, and transforms are creative events with beauty as vividness of aesthetic value quality. In “Buddhism and Wieman on Suffering and Joy” (1984, 90-110), David Lee Miller remarks that “Wieman has attracted the serious attention of one [Ichiro Hori], and probably many more serious thinkers within the Buddhist tradition” (1984, 103). Miller underscores creativity, sociality, aesthetic qualitative meaning, and the connection between joy and suffering as basic points of similarity in the Wieman-Buddhist perspective, while locating the source of these similarities in a radically empirical approach to religious experience as qualitative flux. He cites Wieman’s view that one cannot enjoy the fullness of reality in all the richness of felt quality without facing the dark realities of life (Wieman: 1958, 57). Miller stresses that for Wieman, the joy of creative intercommunication and immediate enjoyment of felt aesthetic value quality is inseparable from the dark realities of sorrow, tragedy, and suffering. To sum up the above discussion, the radically empirical process theology of H. N. Wieman provides a basis for interfaith dialogue between the tradition of Whiteheadian process metaphysics and Zen Buddhist aestheticism by discovering the source of religious meaning not in a

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transcendent, otherworldly, or supernatural realm, but in the directly felt aesthetic value qualities of creative events in concrete immediate experience as most fully realized in the consummatory enjoyment of beauty. Values such as beauty, goodness, and truth, as well as divinity or holiness, are only to be found in the directly felt aesthetic qualities of everyday life. It is only through the aesthetic qualities of creative events that one overcomes nihilism, despair, and vacuous actuality. Yet the deeper Zen Buddhist dimensions of Wieman’s radically empirical process theology is seen through his insight that the ecstasy and joy of aesthetic quality is inseparable from the tragedy and suffering of life as qualitative flow. Both Wieman and Zen share a radically empirical view of the divine which articulates religious experience in terms of beauty as directly felt aesthetic quality of relational creative events in the qualitative flow of concrete immediate experience. Moreover, Wieman and Japanese Buddhism realize how qualitative flow includes both enjoyment of quality in its beauty as well as the grief, suffering, and tragedy of aesthetic quality in its perishability. An evasion of the dark realities of suffering and tragedy functions only to reduce or eliminate the enjoyment of directly felt aesthetic quality. It is the encounter with the dark realities of tragic suffering that opens one to the richness of aesthetic quality most fully revealed in beauty. Like Whitehead’s analysis of perpetually perishing creative events with the pathos of tragic beauty, and the Japanese Zen Buddhist idea of mujō or impermanence of being-time as characterized in aesthetic terms as mono no aware or pathos of things as the sad beauty of perishability, Weiman’s empirical process metaphysics of aesthetic quality underscores the dialectic of joy and sorrow. The Whiteheadian-Wieman/Zen Buddhist process view thus clarifies that heightened awareness of the dark realities of life as tragic suffering rooted in impermanence itself maximizes the ecstatic joy of life arising through directly felt aesthetic quality of beauty as perishability. (v) S. K. Langer Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985), a student of Whitehead at Harvard University, is among the premier women thinkers to have emerged in the tradition of American philosophy. 5 Langer develops a Whiteheadian theory of art as a symbol of feeling conveyed by its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. This Whiteheadian notion of pervasive quality as the total feeling presented by an artwork is then applied by Langer toward an interpretation of Japanese painting and Indian rasa aesthetics. Langer’s work Philosophy in a New Key (1982) is dedicated to her teacher A. N. Whitehead. In this work Langer abandons the Cartesian idea of man as an animal rationale, for Ernst Cassirer’s idea of the human as an animal symbolicum who constitutes sense experience using “symbolic forms,” including both discursive symbols of logic, math, and science, as

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well as nondiscursive symbols of art, myth, and religion. Furthermore, her theory of symbolism incorporates Whitehead’s symbolic reference theory where the primordial mode of perception is feeling, and human experience is characterized by symbolic perception, where sense data function as symbols for aesthetic feeling. In her book Feeling and Form (1953) Langer applies her Whiteheadian doctrine of symbolism to develop a theory of art as defined by its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Langer defines art as follows: “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling” (1953, 40). According to Langer: “The import of an art symbol . . . must be seen in total first; that is, the ‘understanding’ of a work of art begins with an intuition of the whole presented feeling” (1953, 379). It is this intuition of the whole presented feeling conveyed by an art symbol that is described as its pervasive quality. Next, she clarifies her notion of the art symbol in terms of Clive Bell’s idea of an artwork as a “significant form.” Langer explains the artwork as an articulate but nondiscursive symbol in the sense of a “‘significant form,’ in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality” (1953, 32: italics added). She goes on to point out that Clive Bell “identified ‘significant form’ . . . with ‘aesthetic quality’” (1953, 50). Thus, according to Langer an artwork is a significant form acting as a symbol for affective feeling-tone that is grasped by its directly felt aesthetic quality. Langer describes the work of art as Schein, or semblance, thus to underscore the “virtual” character of art as a simulation or mimetic illusion. The primary illusion of plastic arts is virtual space (1953, 72), the three modes of which are the virtual scene of painting (1953, 86), the virtual kinetic volume of sculpture (1953, 89), and the virtual place of architecture (1953, 95). Likewise, music is virtual time or virtual duration (1953, 147-148), dance is virtual gesture (1953, 187), poetry is virtual life (1953, 212), literature is virtual memory (1953, 277), drama is virtual destiny (1953, 311) or virtual future (1953, 306), film is the virtual present (1953, 412) or creative imagination of virtual experience (1953, 412-415). The semblance or aura of illusion constituting the virtual character of art is then identified with the immediately felt pervasive aesthetic quality of an artwork: “The semblance of a thing, thus thrown into relief, is its direct aesthetic quality” (1953, 50). Langer further develops her Whiteheadian philosophy of art based on the notion of aesthetic qualities of feeling in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967). According to Langer, “Art is the objectification of feeling” (1967, 87). In words at once reminiscent of Santayana, Langer then writes: “Feeling is projected in art as quality; where has that been heard before? . . . Beauty is pleasure objectified. Beauty was the quality, and pleasure the feeling this projected. Santayana of course” (1967, 107). As opposed to Santayana’s dualistic view of beauty as subjective pleasure pro-

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jected through empathy as if it were the quality of an artwork, Langer holds to a doctrine of art as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality developed in the American tradition of radical empiricism running through Peirce, James, Dewey, and Whitehead: “It is quality, above all, that pervades a work of art . . .” (1967, 106). For Langer, emotion is conveyed by the artwork as a whole, presented as “the perceptual quality of the created image” (1967, 116-17). Moreover, “This quality is the projected feeling; artists refer to it as the ‘feeling’ of the work as often as they call it ‘quality’” (1967, 106). Again, she writes: “When competent artists or critics speak of the ultimate values they find in finished works, they speak of quality, feeling, expressiveness, significance and of beauty, apparently meaning essentially the same thing by all these words” (1967, 157). Hence, for Langer, the sole aim of the artist is the creation of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality: “The achievement of artistic quality is the first, last and only aim of the artist’s work” (1967, 121). Langer goes on to describe the total feeling of an artwork in terms of its directly felt pervasive felt quality within the context of a Whiteheadian philosophy of mind as a continuum of feeling: “Whitehead, in Process and Reality, speaks of ‘vague feeling’ pervading all operations of all entities whatever” (1967, 5). Feeling or directly felt pervasive quality is the basic phenomenon, while “subjective” and “objective” are derivative notions (1967, 32). Following Whitehead, she writes: “I make feeling the startingpoint of my philosophy of mind” (1967, 32). Langer’s Whiteheadian doctrine of the art symbol also affirms Bullough’s notion that “Psychical Distance” is a factor in art, beauty, and aesthetic experience. But in opposition to Bullough’s view, Langer insists: “Artists . . . do not assume and cultivate the ‘aesthetic attitude’” (1953, 45). For Langer it is the virtual character of an artwork as a symbol, or as a “significant form” symbolic of feeling, that accounts for the detachment, disinterestedness, or distance characteristic of our response to it. It is Langer’s view that the Psychical Distance characteristic of art is not the function of an aesthetic attitude cultivated by the audience, but the symbolic nature of the painting, the poem, or the play. It is not the artist who inserts Psychical Distance, but the symbolism of the artwork which establishes “otherness” and detaches itself from the world (1953, 45). Langer’s emphasis upon the role of symbolism in the artwork is further developed in terms of her Whiteheadian concept of art as a “lure for feeling” (1953, 184-185): “In art, it is the impact of the whole, immediate revelation of vital import that acts as the psychological lure to long contemplation. . . . The ‘lure for feeling’ (to borrow a phrase from Whitehead) is established almost at once” (1953, 397). According to Langer’s Whiteheadian theory of aesthetic experience, then, the artwork is a symbolic form that operates as a “lure for feeling.” Langer thus holds that Psychical Distance in aesthetic experience is based on the symbolic character of an artwork as explained by Whitehead’s symbolic reference theory, just

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as the art symbol as a significant form enjoyed as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality functions as a Whiteheadian lure for feeling, an invitation to contemplate the beauty of art. Langer goes on to illustrate pervasive quality of feeling in art through examples from both Japanese and Indian aesthetics. For Langer, the visual art of painting is characterized by the semblance or illusion of “virtual space.” In her discussion of virtual space in visual art she asserts, “the singleness of quality that pervades any good work—is space resolution” (1953, 370). In this context Langer refers to Japanese painting as an example of space-resolution where there is not just an assemblage of juxtaposed parts, but an organic interaction of elements controlled by the total organization of an image having a single pervasive quality (1953, 370). Langer also defines the Indian rasa theory of aesthetic experience in drama and other arts in terms of pervasive aesthetic quality, understood as the total feeling presented by the artwork. For Langer, rasa is “the feeling that shines through the play itself—the vital feeling of the piece. This last they call rasa” (1953, 323). 6 According to Langer’s Whiteheadian concept of art, as for Japanese painting and Indian rasa theory, beauty cannot be simply located in the subject or in the object, but is spread throughout the total situation as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. NOTES 1. Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (1893-1992) received his PhD from Harvard University in 1924 under the supervision of Whitehead. 2. Although Pirsig’s book Lila discusses the Metaphysics of Quality as an offshoot of the radical empiricism and pragmatism of William James in American philosophy and its extension into the organic process metaphysics of Dynamic Quality by A. N. Whitehead, there is no reference to the work of John Dewey. Yet Dewey explicitly develops a metaphysics of quality in Experience and Nature (1958). Furthermore, Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics elucidates this same division of quality into the romantic and classic or aesthetic and logical aspects (1958, 117-118). 3. For a discussion of H. N. Wieman as a founder of Whiteheadian process theology see Roland Faber (2008, 25-28) 4. A pluralistic model for Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue based on Whitehead’s process metaphysics has been developed by John B. Cobb and David Griffin in their co-edited anthology Deep Religious Pluralism (2005). According to this deep religious pluralism, Whitehead’s process theology acknowledges a multiplicity of ultimates, thereby opening up three levels of Christian-Buddhist dialogue: (i) Buddhist dharmakaya of emptiness or nothingness can be interpreted in terms of Whitehead’s impersonal formless ultimate of creativity; (ii) Buddhist sambhogakaya realm of Amida Buddha can be analyzed in terms of Whitehead’s dipolar God as the personal ultimate with form: and (iii) Buddhist nirmanakaya as the historical world of dharmas can be understood in terms of Whitehead’s occasions as relational events with felt qualities. Cobb and Griffin do not develop this third level of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. 5. Susanne K. Langer’s received her doctorate in Philosophy in 1926 with Whitehead acting as her PhD dissertation advisor. As a result, Langer’s doctrine of the art as

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a form symbolic of feeling-tone has also been influenced by Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference. 6. S. K. Langer’s interpretation of rasa as the total feeling that shines out from an artwork as a whole as well as the similarity between Langer’s philosophy of art and classical Indian rasa theory has been analyzed by V. K. Chari in his work Sanskrit Criticism (1990, 239-242). Both Langer’s theory of felt quality in art and the rasa theory of aesthetic experience worked out by the tenth century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta clarify how beauty is not simply located just in the audience or the artwork but permeates the whole event as its pervasive quality.

NINE Whitehead’s Doctrine of Aesthetic Qualities as Eternal Objects

One of the most problematic aspects of Whitehead’s process metaphysics is his view of aesthetic qualities as “eternal objects,” which function as Platonic forms or patterns that ingress into situations through interrelationships. The problem is compounded in that the notion of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects is related to Whitehead’s concept of a dipolar God who functions as the source of eternal objects. From the standpoint of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme it can be objected that the notion of eternal objects violates his own principle of process. From the standpoint of Japanese Buddhism it can be objected that Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects falls into the extreme view of eternalism. Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects thus becomes especially problematic when comparing it to the Japanese Buddhist poetics of evanescent beauty. Explaining the principle of process underlying his process metaphysics, Whitehead writes: The doctrine is founded upon three metaphysical principles: One principle is that the very essence of real actuality—that is, the completely real—is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. (AI 274)

It must therefore be asked if certain notions in Whitehead’s process metaphysics and theology violate his own principle of process, such as the dipolar God and the eternal objects or Platonic forms envisaged by the primordial nature of God. Whitehead claims: “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification” (PR 343). Yet critics might argue that Whitehead’s dipolar God is an illicit exception to his principle of 141

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process, whereby reality is a dynamic creative process of becoming and perishing events. In the intercultural encounter between Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism, the Buddhist will no doubt complain that Whitehead’s process metaphysics is inconsistent, insofar as the dynamic process of creative advance requires the operation of an eternal and everlasting God, including the “eternal objects” envisaged by the primordial nature of God, as well as the preservation of all aesthetic value qualities actualized by occasions of experience in the consequent nature of God. Thus, in the following, I will briefly address these concerns. A Buddhist can object that Whitehead’s notion of “eternal objects” as Platonic forms is an exception to the metaphysical principle of process, whereby reality is to be conceived only in terms of the becoming and perishing of occasions. Buddhist philosophy is based on the middle way of interdependent origination between two extremes of nihilism and eternalism. Although Whitehead counters nihilism with his affirmation of the aesthetic value quality achieved by all relational events arising through the process of concrescence, he might still be charged with having fallen into eternalism due to his doctrine of eternal objects. This is in turn related to Whitehead’s process theology based on his notion of a dipolar God, especially as articulated in the final chapter of Process and Reality titled “God and the World.” In God as the Poet of the World, Roland Faber (2004) has provided a comprehensive overview of what he terms the “theopoetic” function of the dipolar God in Whitehead’s process theology. Whitehead describes the theopoetic function of God, stating, “he is the poet of the world . . . leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (PR 346). Deity in Whitehead’s process theism is a dipolar God with two natures. The primordial nature of God envisions the eternal objects or Platonic forms, including the three Platonic ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty, thereby to function as a divine “lure” for actual occasions striving to realize maximum intensity of aesthetic value experience as harmonized diversity. Whitehead explains that “the primordial nature of God . . . is his complete envisagement of eternal objects” (PR 44). One of the major innovations of Whitehead’s concept of the primordial nature as a lure, is that God is not viewed as coercive force, but as a persuasive agency that gently “lures” all creative, emergent, and novel events toward realization of aesthetic value experience. The consequent nature of God is “everlasting” (PR 346) as the divine memory that functions to save, preserve, and enjoy all aesthetic value qualities achieved by occasions of experience. A striking innovation of Whitehead’s notion of the consequent nature is that God is not just transcendent and eternal, but also immanent and changing, thus to be enriched by all aesthetic value qualities produced in the creative evolutionary process. According to Whitehead’s process theology, then, the cosmological function of God is not to create the world ex nihilo, since all events create themselves through an emergent creative synthesis of past multiplicity into present

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unity. Instead, the cosmological role of the transcendent God in his primordial function as a divine lure is to elicit maximum intensity of aesthetic value feeling in every self-creative occasion of experience through harmonization of diversity. The role of the immanent God in his consequent nature as the divine storehouse of memory is to preserve everlastingly all aesthetic values actualized by each self-creative occasion of experience. Both Whitehead’s doctrine of aesthetic qualities arising by ingression of eternal objects and the notion of a dipolar God might be regarded as inconsistent with his overall process metaphysics of perpetually perishing occasions. Moreover, these points of inconsistency could be thought of as serious roadblocks to an intercultural dialogue between Whitehead and Buddhist philosophy in general and the Japanese poetics of evanescent beauty in particular. The Japanese Buddhist philosopher might object that the primordial nature of God as envisagement of eternal objects or Platonic forms is an exception to the principle of process, whereby each occasion is in the process of becoming and perishing. This decreases the intensity of tragic beauty, in that although the particular instances of aesthetic value qualities ingressing into events are said to become and perish through flux, the ideal forms or patterns envisaged by the primordial God are eternal, immutable, and unchangeable. Moreover, the consequent nature of the dipolar God operates as the cosmic memory that saves all aesthetic value experience arising through creative process with a divine care that nothing be lost, thereby again diminishing the intensity of the experience of tragedy as loss of beauty. In response it must first be pointed out that for Whitehead it is only actualities, or actual occasions, that are subject to the metaphysical principle of process, whereupon the “eternal objects,” or Platonic forms visualized by God’s primordial nature, are potentialities for becoming. Thus, in the categoreal scheme he defines “Eternal Objects” as “Pure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Fact, or Forms of Definiteness” (PR 22). For Whitehead, eternal objects are patterns, forms, or normative measures, whereby the antecedent many are combined into a new one with maximum intensity of aesthetic value feeling as patterned harmonic contrasts. For Whitehead one experiences Platonic forms or abstract value patterns only as embodied in concrete particular occasions as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. It must be further clarified how Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects has been abandoned by the two main founders of Whiteheadian process theology, H. N. Wieman and Charles Hartshorne. As discussed earlier, Wieman articulates a Whiteheadian process theology and metaphysics of qualitative immediacy that abandons Whitehead’s notion of concept of a dipolar God, including the primordial nature of God, eternal objects provided by the primordial nature of God, and the saving operation of the consequent nature of God (1946). According to

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Wieman, what operates in human life to create, save, and transform, are the directly felt aesthetic qualities of creative events (1946, 134-35). There is no need for an ontological commitment to a dipolar God with a transcendent primordial nature and an everlasting consequent nature, or a doctrine of eternal objects derived from the primordial nature, since the divine only reveals itself through directly felt aesthetic value qualities of creative events in the flow of immediate experience. Whitehead’s understanding of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects or Platonic forms has also been challenged by the process philosophy and theology of Charles Hartshorne. Dombrowski expresses the difference between Whitehead and Hartshorne on this matter as follows: One of the most important differences between Whitehead and Hartshorne concerns their respective concepts of eternal objects (Whitehead) or universals (Hartshorne). Whitehead’s eternal objects are much more like Plato’s eternal forms than Hartshorne’s universals, the latter of which are emergent possibilities. Hence, in one sense Hartshorne is more of a process philosopher than Whitehead. (2004, 16)

In his process metaphysics and theology Hartshorne abandons Whitehead’s reified notion of “eternal objects,” for C. S. Peirce’s more fluid notion of the cosmos as an affective continuum of aesthetic feeling qualities that spontaneously emerge through the creative evolutionary process. In Hartshorne’s words: In spite of much dogmatism to the contrary—in which Whitehead himself has sometimes indulged—there is no reason why characters may not have a certain degree of universality without possessing the absolute degree of it which is eternity. . . . To use the current term, “essences” may perfectly well emerge in the universe. . . . (1972, 32)

Hartshorne’s reformulation of Whitehead’s eternal objects as emergent aesthetic value qualities is further clarified as follows: The means that in their eternal aspect they will be completely general, i.e., categories that all such specific characters as robin’s-egg blue are emergents at a certain date, created rather than “selected” out of the primordial potentiality. (1972, 59)

For Whitehead, aesthetic value qualities are “eternal objects” which ingress into transitory events or situations through complex multiterm relationships. As noted by Hartshorne, “In Science and the Modern World we learn that ‘a color is eternal’” (1972, 32). Whitehead himself writes: “A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour” (SMW 87). According to Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects, the blueness of a lake, a sky, or a robin’s egg, are similar to Platonic forms as universals that are instantiated in particulars. For Hartshorne, the color blue is not an eternal object, but is rather

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an aesthetic quality of feeling which emerges from out of the primordial affective continuum in the creative evolutionary process. While Hartshorne’s idea of an affective continuum of feeling qualities is a synthesis of Peirce and Whitehead, he rejects the latter’s doctrine of aesthetic qualities as Platonic forms or eternal objects for a Peircean concept of emergent qualities. Hartshorne undermines what he regards to be the eternalism, essentialism, and substantialism of Whitehead’s Platonic theory of qualities as eternal objects, and instead supports the Peircean view that all aesthetic qualities are emergent in the evolutionary process. For Hartshorne, the Whiteheadian doctrine of aesthetic qualities as eternal objects is an illicit exception to the otherwise consistent process theory of becoming and perishing events. He thus asserts that much opposition of Whitehead’s system loses its ground if the doctrine of qualities as eternal objects is abandoned for a Peircean idea of emergent aesthetic qualities. Following Hartshorne’s suggestion to abandon eternal objects for a Peircean doctrine of emergent aesthetic qualities brings Whiteheadian process metaphysics closer to the Japanese aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Likewise, Wieman’s position that what functions to create, transform, and save are the directly felt aesthetic qualities of creative events further establishes the resonance between Whiteheadian process metaphysics and Japanese aestheticism. By replacing the doctrine of eternal objects with Peirce’s notion of emergent aesthetic qualities, Whiteheadian process metaphysics becomes more internally consistent, while also avoiding what in Japanese Buddhist philosophy is the extreme view of eternalism. Whitehead’s process vision of the tragic beauty of perishability is thus brought into deeper accord with the Japanese poetics of evanescence which celebrates the transitoriness of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty.

TEN Beauty as Synaesthesia in Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Japanese Aesthetics

In this chapter I examine Whitehead’s concept of synaesthesia or fusion of sense qualities, followed by an account of Charles Hartshorne’s aesthetic principle of beauty as synaesthesia based on his creative synthesis of Whitehead and C. S. Peirce. 1 The concept of synaesthesia is further clarified by reference to John Dewey’s philosophy of art and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics. It will then be demonstrated that synaesthesia is a recurrent motif in Japanese aesthetics, including traditional Japanese kabuki theater, haiku poetry, inkwash painting, and the tea ceremony, as well as modern Japanese cinema, modern Japanese literature, and the modern Japanese philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. What is synaesthesia? In The Foundations of Aesthetics, I. A. Richards has asserted that synaesthesis is “an explanation of the aesthetic experience described by many of the greatest and most sensitive artists and critics of the past,” and that “it may be regarded as the theory of Beauty par excellence” (1925, 7). Inspired by his study of Chinese philosophy, Richards defines his key principle of synaesthesis as the harmony of diverse sense-impulses produced by a work of art. 2 There are degrees of synaesthesia ranging from a mild unity of the senses, to full interpenetration of sense qualities in an aesthetic experience of beauty. At its most intense the aesthetic experience of synaesthesia becomes a mystical experience of ecstasy. The higher levels of synaesthesia represent a degree of unified sensibility so profound that the boundaries of the senses merge and the multivariate sense qualities blend into a continuum of affective feeling. The notion of synaesthesia designates the beauty of intersensory perception along with its imaginative expression in art and literature. Synaesthesia can also be termed cross-modal perception, insofar as it 147

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involves a transposition of sensory attributes from one modality to another, for instance, when sound takes on the accoutrements of sight, so that musical tones are translated into a polyphony of luminous colors— an intersensory phenomenon known as “auditory vision” or “visual hearing.” In the aesthetic experience of beauty as synaesthesia one is said to hear colors, see musical sounds, taste shapes, and smell tactile sensations. The phenomenon of synaesthesia was popularized by Dr. Richard Cytowic in his books Synesthesia (2002) and The Man Who Tasted Shapes (1993). His works include a brief history of synaesthesia, including its operation in aesthetic, psychedelic, mystical, and Zen contemplative experience. Some of the examples of multisensory synaesthesia in the arts discussed by Cytowic are the abstract paintings of Kandinsky, the French symbolist poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the novels of Nabokov, and the musical color symphonies of Scriabin. Cytoic sums up his research: I believe that synesthesia is actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but that its workings reach conscious awareness in only a handful. . . . In synesthesia, a brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness, so that synesthetes know they are synesthetic while the rest of us do not. (1993, 166)

Cytowic thus concludes that synaesthesia is not a mental disorder from short circuiting neurons or cross-wiring sensory channels, but is a normal unconscious brain function that occasionally surfaces into consciousness In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead develops a view of nature as a panoramic continuum of interpenetrating aesthetic qualities, wherein an aesthetic sense quality such as the color “blue” ingresses into a situation through complex multiterm relationships (CN 152). Insofar as the color “blue” ingresses into a situation through multiple relations, it cannot be simply located in the subject or the object, but is fused and spread throughout the whole situation as its immediately enjoyed pervasive aesthetic quality. Whitehead goes on to develop his idea that an aesthetic sense quality such as “blue” ingresses into an embodied situation through multiterm relations as the basis for a doctrine of synaesthesia or intersensory perception. Although Whitehead does not employ the term “synaesthesia,” he nonetheless clearly describes the “interplay” and systematic “correlation” between diverse sense qualities such as sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch in an interactive situation, thus resulting in the “the ‘conveyance’ of one sense-object [sense quality] by another” (CN 154). In the following passage Whitehead gives a phenomenological description of an aesthetic experience characterized by synaesthesia or interfusion of sense qualities (sense-objects): It is a law of nature that in general the situation of a sense-object is not only the situation of that sense-object for one definite percipient event,

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but is the situation of a variety of sense-objects for a variety of percipient events. For example, for any one percipient event, the situation of a sense-object of sight is apt also to be the situations of sense-objects of sight, of touch, of smell, and of sound. Furthermore this concurrence in the situations of sense-objects has led to the body—i.e. the percipient event—so adapting itself that the perception of one sense-object in a certain situation leads to a subconscious sense-awareness of other sense objects in the same situation. This interplay is especially the case between touch and sight. There is a certain correlation between the ingressions of sense-objects of touch and sense-objects of sight into nature, and in a slighter degree between the ingressions of other pairs of sense-objects. I call this sort of correlation the “conveyance” of one sense-object by another. (CN 154-155)

Due to the ingression of an aesthetic sense quality such as “blue” into a situation through multiple relationships, the color blue is at the same time correlated with other aesthetic sense qualities in the situation, so that there is a dynamic “interplay” between diverse sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations in the percipient event. As an example Whitehead describes seeing a blue coat accompanied by subconscious feelings, touch sensations, and aromas so that there is a “sense-awareness of the concurrence of subconscious sense-objects with one or more senseobjects of the same situation” (CN 155). Although one can focus consciousness on the sense quality “blue” in a percipient event, there is at the same time a sense-awareness of other subconscious sense qualities in the same situation, thereby resulting in the aesthetic experience of multisensory synaesthesia. Whitehead’s analysis of intersensory perception thus agrees with Dr. Cytowic’s conclusion, whereby “synesthesia is actually a normal brain function,” and that “In synesthesia, a brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness” (1993, 166). After studying phenomenology under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Germany, Charles Hartshorne (1897-2001) went on to receive his PhD from Harvard University in 1923. From 1925 to 1928 Hartshorne served as a member of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, at which time he studied under A. N. Whitehead, who joined the Harvard faculty in 1924. While serving as Whitehead’s teaching assistant at Harvard, he also began to co-edit with Paul Weiss the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Hartshorne was amazed to discover that Whitehead and Peirce were two renaissance philosopher-mathematicians who somehow independently arrived at a process metaphysics based on a primacy of aesthetic experience as perception of events in their directly felt qualitative immediacy. As a result, Hartshorne’s own panpsychic process metaphysics of nature as an affective continuum of aesthetic feeling-qualities represents a creative synthesis of Whitehead and Peirce. In previous sections of this work I have discussed various aspects of Hartshorne’s process metaphysics, including his idea of nature as a pro-

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cess of aesthetic creativity that aims toward production of beauty, his idea of beauty as creative synthesis of many into one, his notion of beauty as harmonious intensity through integration of contrasts, his concept of beauty as a “golden mean” between opposites, his axiomatic principle of beauty as unity-in-diversity, his doctrine of the primacy of beauty according to which the logical and moral orders are dependent on the aesthetic order, and his process theism wherein the beauty of creative events contribute to the divine life of God as the universal subject of aesthetic experience. Yet here I will focus on Hartshorne’s notion of beauty as synaesthesia or fusion of diverse sense modes based on his process metaphysics of immediate experience as an affective continuum of aesthetic feeling-qualities. Hartshorne articulates an explicit doctrine of aesthetic experience as synaesthesia in his first book entitled The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1968). From the standpoint of panpsychism he argues that the contents of immediate experience form an affective continuum of interpenetrating aesthetic sense qualities. The five theses posited by Hartshorne are that sense qualities exhibit continuity, aesthetic meaning or affective tone, social character, biological adaptiveness, and evolution from a common origin in a primordial affective continuum of feeling. Dombrowski sums up the five basic theses as follows: 3 Five theses are prominent in Hartshorne’s approach: (1) there is continuity within and between sensory modalities; (2) affective tone is integral to sensory quality; (3) experience is social in the sense that “feeling of feeling” accounts for communication between and within experiencing systems; (4) sensation is closely related to adaptive behavior; and (5) sensory qualities have an evolutionary history from a common origin. (2004, 89)

The first thesis concerns Hartshorne’s idea of intersensory continuity whereby sensations do not operate separately, but interpenetrate in an affective continuum of qualities. The second thesis holds that sense qualities are modes of feeling-tone and therefore are always suffused with affect, valuation, and aesthetic meaning. The third is that sensations are modes of social feeling that interact and communicate in the affective continuum. The fourth is that shapes, colors, odors, sounds, tactile sensations, and tastes, as well as the aesthetic feeling-tones they contain, are incitements to adaptive action. The fifth is that in the creative evolutionary process determinate sensory qualities emerge from out of a primal affective continuum of feeling-tone. Dombrowski further clarifies the first thesis of Hartshorne’s book as designating the principle of intersensory continuity: Hartshorne’s defense of intersensory continuity helps us to understand what we notice in ordinary experience and what we say in ordinary

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language: that sounds may be sweet, colorful, or flat; that colors can be loud or warm; that pain can be sharp or dull; and that wine can be tasted as dry or light. (2004, 84)

Dombrowski presents Hartshorne’s notion of an intersensory continuum to explain the aesthetic phenomenon of synaesthesia as follows: To greater or lesser degrees we are all “synesthetic” in the sense that the aesthetic or emotional content of the given can be described in terms of different senses, as in “bitter smells.” The phenomenon of synaesthesia further supports the interpenetration of sensation and feeling and makes even more implausible the separation of the traditional secondary and tertiary qualities from the primary ones. (2004, 79)

On the critical side, Hartshorne develops the idea of synaesthesia in opposition to the doctrine of sensory atomism. He especially levels his criticisms against Hermann von Helmholtz doctrine of discrete sensory modes as presented in the latter’s Handbook of Physiological Optics. According to Helmoltz the idea of discrete sensory modes requires total discontinuity between diverse sense qualities. In this context Hartshorne undermines “the almost universally accepted Helmholtzian dictum that qualities from different sensory ‘modes’ cannot be compared, but are irreducibly heterogeneous” (1968, 6). Against the Helmholtizan theory of discrete sense modes, Hartshorne develops a doctrine of synaesthesia as cross-modal perception or intersensory experience based on the principle of continuity, wherein different sensory qualities fuse in an affective continuum of aesthetic feeling. Citing empirical evidence, Hartshorne argues that immediate experience at the level of affective feeling is characterized by interfusion of sense qualities. In Hartshorne’s words, “all experience involves such a fusion of elements from different senses; for several of the senses are invariably felt as qualifying the same general portion of space-time” (1968, 76). He adds, “This fusion is not even an exceptional phenomena, but in a sense the universal rule” (1968, 76). As an example of intersensory synaesthesia Hartshorne phenomenologically describes the cross-modal perception of “auditory seeing” or “visual hearing” induced at a concert where aesthetic qualities of sound and color interfuse in a plenum of music and light. In hearing a musical concert the whole mind is filled with the glow of electric light, which render visual space something like a plenum of color qualities; but the auditory space, which is well occupied with sounds, is felt not as a quite different portion of reality but distinctly as about the same portion. . . . This can only mean that there is a considerable degree of fusion. (1968, 76)

Although different sense qualities “fuse” in an affective continuum they do not lose their distinctive characteristics. In synaesthesia the multivari-

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ate sense qualities of color, sound, scent, shape, flavor, and touch along with thermal sensations of cool and warm, all interpenetrate in an affective continuum of feeling while simultaneously retaining their uniquely individualized qualitative natures. For Hartshorne, the beauty of synaesthesia thus manifests the universal aesthetic principle of unity-in-diversity. The fundamental concept underlying Hartshorne’s doctrine of synaesthesia is what he calls the affective continuum of aesthetic sense qualities: This may be summarily designated as the theory of the contents of sensation as forming an affective continuum of aesthetically meaningful, socially expressive, organically adaptive and evolving experience functions. (1968, 9)

As specified by Hartshorne, sensations are not atomic but are felt as interrelating, interacting, and interpenetrating in an experiential affective continuum. These felt qualities in the affective continuum are intrinsically important as having the aesthetic value of beauty. Moreover, the directly felt, interpenetrating aesthetic value qualities are organically adaptive in that they have evolved through organism-environment interactions in nature as an emergent evolutionary process. Andrew J. Reck sums up Hartshornes idea of the affective continuum as follows: The immediate data of consciousness comprise an ever-changing field of interpenetrating qualities, the qualities differentiated against a background of feelings socially involved with the feelings of others. . . . Affection, or feeling, then, forms a continuum. (Reck: 1968, 296)

Hartshorne clarifies that his notion of interpenetrating aesthetic qualities in a continuum of affective feeling is partly derived from A. N. Whitehead’s idea of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy characterized by affective feeling-tone: “Affective tone (Whitehead’s ‘feeling value’) is the stuff of which the entire content of consciousness is composed” (1968, 7). It should be recalled that for Whitehead there are three levels of perception: (1) perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as prehension, sympathy, or vague feeling-tone; (2) presentational immediacy or sense perception of qualities like touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste; and (3) symbolic reference, wherein clear and distinct sense qualities in the foreground operate as symbols making reference to vague feeling-tones in the background field. Whitehead (PR 174) maintains that the sensory atomism of Hume and others is due to the “primacy of presentational immediacy” dominant in Western philosophy which privileges clear and distinct percepta of sense qualities in the foreground while neglecting the dim and vague percepta of feeling-tones in the background. Although sense qualities are atomic or discrete at the level of presentational immediacy, the organic interconnections and continuities between them are revealed by affective feeling-tones in the background

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at the primordial level of causal efficacy. As Whitehead states in Process and Reality: The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is inheritance. And what is inherited is feeling-tone. . . . In the higher grades of perception vague feeling-tone differentiates itself into various types of sensa— those of touch, sight, smell, etc. (PR 119)

According to Whitehead, during the evolutionary process the continuum of vague affective feeling-tone was differentiated into various sense modes, such as photosensitive organs of vision, the chemosensitive organs of taste and smell, and the mechanosensitive organs of touch and hearing. Yet this differentiation into diverse sense qualities remains only partial, insofar as they are all grounded in a common phylogenetic heritage of affective feeling-tone. The other source for Hartshorne’s idea of an affective continuum of feeling-qualities is C. S. Peirce’s phenomenology. Peirce formulates an explicit doctrine of synaesthesia in “The Similarity of Feelings of Different Sensory Modes,” which appears in the first volume, entitled Phenomenology, of his Collected Papers (1931, Vol. 1, Section 7). In this section Peirce illustrates the similarity of feelings between the different sense modes in an affective continuum of qualities such as cross-modal perception between sight and sound or the phenomenon of auditory vision. An early reference to the phenomenon of synaesthesia is to be found in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , where the British empiricist John Locke relates the anecdote of “a studious bind man who . . . bragged one day, that he now understood what scarlet was—upon which his friend, demanding to know what scarlet was? The blind man answered, it was like the sound of a trumpet” (1984, 2.38). Peirce likewise declares that anyone who cultivates aesthetic feeling, “will recognize at once so decided a likeness between a luminous and extremely chromatic scarlet . . . and the blare of a trumpet that I would almost hazard a guess that the form of the chemical oscillations set up by this color in the observer will be found to resemble the acoustical waves of the trumpet’s blare” (1931, 1.55). Hartshorne, following Peirce and Whitehead, argues that there is an evolution of emergent sensory qualities from a common origin so that a continuum of undifferentiated, indeterminate, vague feeling-tone becomes determinate and specified into particular sensory qualities (1968, 207-208). Just as for Whitehead aesthetic qualities arise in creative advance through the impulse of Eros as desire or love of beauty, for Peirce the emergence of aesthetic qualities is accounted for by Agape or the impulse of divine love. In Peirce’s phenomenology the category of “firstness” is the directly felt aesthetic qualities of events just as they are in suchness. According to Peirce’s phenomenology the most immediately given data of experience are aesthetic qualities of feeling which merge in

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an affective continuum. As Peirce asserts, “wherever there is a phenomenon there is a quality. . . . The qualities merge into one another” (1931, 1.418). In his evolutionary process cosmology Peirce suggests that from the original chaos of nothingness there emerged an affective continuum of determinate feeling-qualities which through chance-spontaneity further developed into particular sense qualities: “We can hardly but suppose that those sense-qualities that we now experience, colors, odors, sounds, feelings of every description . . . are but the relics of an ancient ruined continuum of qualities” (1931, 1.418). Elsewhere he asserts that “we must not assume that the qualities arose separate and came into relation afterward. It was just the reverse” (1931, 6.199). Peirce’s evolutionary account of how particular colors, sounds, and tastes emerged from a primordial affective continuum of feeling-qualities is therefore similar to Whitehead’s view that in the higher grades of perception vague feeling-tone differentiates itself into various types of sensa including touch, sight, sound, and smell (PR 119). Hartshorne, like Whitehead, argues the case for multisensory synaesthesia based on the organic structure of events as a function of part-whole relations wherein the whole is contained in each part and each part reveals the whole. For Hartshorne, as for Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, events are felt wholes emerging through creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity with an aim toward realizing aesthetic value quality. It can be said that synaesthesia as interfusion of diverse sense qualities in an aesthetic continuum can be analyzed from the standpoint of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism as a special case of this more general notion of harmonious interfusion of many into one, thus to exhibit the aesthetic principle of diversity-in-unity. According to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, the primordial unity of the senses disclosed by synaesthetic perception of beauty is caused by a total response of the whole organism to sensory stimuli, thus establishing interpenetration between sounds, colors, and other sense qualities. For Whitehead and Hartshorne, aesthetic experience of synaesthesia is therefore a natural function of the organismic structure of immediate experience. Hartshorne further argues for synaesthesia based on the Gestalt model of perception as a figure/ground whole developed by Von Ehrenfelds, Wolfgang Koehler, Karl Zietz, and others. Experimental research of Gestalt psychology demonstrates that sensations are not a “mosaic” of atomic elements independent of context, but are inseparable from the holistic figure/ground Gestalt structure of the perceptual field spontaneously organized by selective attention. Hartshorne cites the argument for synaesthesia formulated by Gestalt psychology (1968, 83-84). Experimental research by Gestalt psychology shows that sense qualities cannot be abstracted from their background horizon in the value-laden figure/ground Gestalt pattern of the perceptual field. In Gestalt psychology a Gestalt is defined as “a whole not equal to the sum of its parts.” By this view

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synaesthesia is a function of the total Gestalt pattern of experience wherein sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, and other sense qualities interpenetrate into a whole richer than the combination of its elements. In Gestalt psychology the term “Gestalt quality” (Gestaltqualitäten) is used to describe the emergent character of this configuration or pattern in an intersensory perceptual whole which cannot be reduced to or built up from a mere combination of simple atomic sensations. At each moment the qualities of sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, and temperature are fused into a new qualitative whole beyond the sum of its parts, and this is the aesthetically valuable Gestalt quality, the immediate experience of which is called synaesthesia. John Dewey In chapter 6 of Art as Experience Dewey explains how the doctrine of pervasive aesthetic quality entails a theory of synaesthesia or fusion of sense qualities. According to Dewey, all of the multivariate sense qualities of sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch sensations fuse into the felt wholeness of a transactional situation unified by a single pervasive quality. An aesthetic experience is constituted by a single dominant quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts (1980, 37). Since aesthetic experience has pervasive quality, the sights, sounds, scents, tastes, tactile, and other sensations merge together due to the felt presence of the same qualitative unity in all of them (1980, 192). An aesthetic experience includes different sensory qualities like colors, scents, flavors, and sounds, but all are fused in the dominant pervasive quality underlying the situation as a whole. Dewey writes: Qualities of sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight and hearing, have esthetic quality. But they have it not in isolation but in their connections; as interacting, not as simple and separate entities. (1980, 121)

For Dewey, as for Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, the idea of synaesthesia or fusion of sense qualities is based on an organic process metaphysics underscoring the relatedness, wholeness, continuity, fusion, and spread of directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities in contextual situations arising through organism-environment transactions. Merleau-Ponty Similar to Hartshorne, Whitehead, Peirce, and Dewey in American process philosophy, the synaesthetic character of perception is described in the phenomenological aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty. It is argued by Merleau-Ponty that anterior to the act intentionality developed by Husserl, which constitutes the noematic content of experience through noetic

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acts of mental reflection, there lies a prereflective level of operative motor intentionality, which is the physically embodied aesthetic field of intersensory perception (1962, 429). Merleau-Ponty holds that although the colors, sounds, tastes, and other sensations are separate at the reflective level of act intentionality, in primordial perception at the prereflective level of operative intentionality the senses are fused as aesthetic experience of synaesthesia. Likewise, Whitehead argues that although sensory qualities are presented as atomic at the level of sense perception, they interpenetrate in affective feeling at the level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. For Merleau-Ponty, the synaesthetic structure of primordial perception is revealed by a phenomenology of the “lived body” which embodies or incarnates the total situation as a global sensorium of intersensory experience. Like Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead argues that synaesthetic perception is a function of the body as the unity of the perceptual field (CN 154-155). Thus, both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead claim that at the level of primordial perception one does not experience a mere aggregate of discrete atomic sensations, but grasps the total embodied situation wherein all of the sense qualities are fused together as an intersensory whole. 4 In his description of synaesthesia, Hartshorne asserts that “all experience involves such a fusion of elements from different senses. . . . This fusion is not even an exceptional phenomena, but in a sense the universal rule” (1968, 76). Likewise, Merleau-Ponty asserts: “Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we unlearn how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel” (1962, 229). Similar to the evolutionary account of synaesthesia given by Hartshorne (1968, 9), Whitehead (PR 119), and Peirce (1.418), Merleau-Ponty states: “It is as if one could sometimes see the occasional collapse of the barriers established in the course of evolution between the senses” (1962, 228). For Merleau-Ponty, as for the tradition of American process philosophy, the doctrine of synaesthesia is based on a phenomenology of primordial perception. He employs phenomenological description of the lived body to “reveal a ‘primary layer’ of sense experience which precedes its division among the separate senses” (1962, 227). Merleau-Ponty argues that the primordial perception of the lived body is a “total awareness of my posture within the intersensory world, a ‘form’ in the sense of Gestalt Psychology” (1962, 100). Like Hartshorne (1968, 33-34), Merleau-Ponty criticizes the “mosaic hypothesis” of sensory atomism in terms of a Gestalt model wherein “perception of the whole is more natural and more primary that the perception of isolated elements” (1962, 49). At the level of primordial perception the lived body physically incarnates the Gestalt pattern of the perceptual field as a global sensorium of intersensory synaesthesia. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Hartshorne, the synaesthetic fusion of sense qualities is thus explained as a function of the value-laden figure/ground

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Gestalt structure of the perceptual field as a whole richer than the sum of its parts. Hartshorne, following Whitehead, argues that while sense qualities appear separate at the level of sense perception, they are fused in the primordial perception of affective feeling-tone. Merleau-Ponty likewise holds that while sensations are discrete at the reflective standpoint of act or thetic intentionality, they are fused in primordial perception of synaesthesia at the prereflective standpoint of operative or motor intentionality. According to Merleau-Ponty, one experiences synaesthesia in primordial perception through the operative intentionality of the lived body by opening out upon the total structure of a thing so as to simultaneously hear, see, smell, taste, and touch the phenomenon as an intersensorial whole. Merleau-Ponty goes on to explain the synaesthetic character of primordial perception through an ontology of the Flesh, where he now describes the “intertwining” or “criss-crossing” of sensations in a “chiasm.” Merleau-Ponty further argues for the synaesthetic character of primordial perception through the empirical testimony of those who have ingested a psychedelic catalyst known as mescaline (1962, 228). For Merleau-Ponty, however, intersensory synaesthesia is not an exceptional state produced by psychedelics, but is the normal condition of unified bodymind awareness, and which can be recovered through the phenomenology of primordial perception. In his essays on phenomenological aesthetics, Merleau-Ponty invokes the empirical testimony of Cézanne to clarify the synaesthetic character of primary perception: Cézanne does not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations which would give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of the science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between the senses.

He continues: Cézanne said that one could see the velvetiness, the hardness, the softness, and event the odor of objects. My perception is therefore not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being, which speaks to all my senses at once. (1964, 50)

For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s discipline of painting is akin to phenomenology in that it endeavors to recapture the total field of primordial perception as an organic whole prior to its division into discrete atomic sensations. In Cézanne’s paintings one can see, as well as hear, smell, taste, and touch the landscapes of nature. Merleau-Ponty thus employs the French postimpressionist painting of Cézanne to illustrate his theme of embodiment whereby one physically incarnates the total figure/ ground Gestalt situation through the sense openings of the lived body as

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a global sensorium of intersensory synaesthesia. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Whitehead, Hartshorne, Peirce, and Dewey, aesthetic experience of synaesthesia in nature and art is ultimately based on a phenomenology of primordial perception. Synaesthesia in Japanese Aesthetics It has already been examined how the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō articulates a doctrine of pure experience as qualitative immediacy and its reformulation into a Zen philosophy of pure qualities in the place of nothingness. For Nishida, as for the process philosophy of Hartshorne, qualities of feeling are the most immediately given data of experience. Also, in common with Hartshorne, Nishida posits a doctrine of intersensory synaesthesia. Nishida, like Peirce, Whitehead, and their synthesis in Hartshorne argues for interfusion of sense qualities in an affective continuum of aesthetic feeling. Moreover, like Hartshorne, Nishida explains the phenomenon of synaesthesia as a function of the Gestalt structure of immediate experience as a felt whole richer than the sum of parts. Nishida elaborates a doctrine of synaesthesia in a chapter titled “Affective Feeling” (Kanjō, 感情) from Problems of Consciousness (Ishiki no mondai, 意識の問題、1918). Here Nishida writes: In this frame of reference, affective feeling can be described as a unity underlying various intellectual forces. It can be considered as an a priori of a prior. When Rimbaud writes “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu,” or when Baudelaire claims “les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se [répondent],” the fusion of sense qualities to which they refer must be accomplished on the basis of affective feeling. (1979, 223/NKZ 3: 62)

In this passage Nishida makes reference to the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire’s synaesthetic dictum: “scent and sound and color correspond.” He also quotes Arthur Rimbaud’s scheme of color-sound correspondences: “black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O.” Nishida then argues that the “fusion of sense qualities to which they refer must be accomplished on the basis of affective feeling.” Although there are recently coined technical terms for “synaesthesia” in the modern Japanese language such as tsūkankaku (通感覚)　or “fusion of senses”, and kyōkankaku (共感覚) or “unity of the senses,” 5 Nishida employs the Japanese word yūgō (融合) or “fusion” to signify the interpenetration of diverse sense qualities at the level of kanjō (感情), “affective feeling.” Nishida’s concept of intersensory synaesthesia is formulated in terms of a theory of “standpoints” (tachiba、立場). Self-awareness (jikaku, 自覚) is analyzed into a hierarchy of states of experiential concreteness wherein contradictions of the more abstract or discriminative standpoints of intellect and sensation are reconciled as positive content in the more concrete

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or unified standpoints of will and feeling. Nishida holds that although scents, sounds, and colors are separate at the abstract standpoints of intellect and sensation, they are continuous at the more concrete standpoint of affective feeling. For this reason, Nishida argues the “fusion” (yūgō) of sense qualities described by Baudelaire and the French symbolists is possible only at the standpoint of affective feeling, comprehended as the most concrete horizon of pure, direct, or immediate experience at the base of self-awareness. In another chapter of Problems of Consciousness entitled “Various Continuities of Empirical Content,” Nishida invokes Leibniz’s famous Principle of Continuity as codified by his dictum: imo extensione prius, “the whole is prior to its smallest extensive quantity.” Anything real must always be a “complex whole” exhibiting undivided continuity between its various parts. In Nishida’s words: A set of discrete elements not exhibiting continuity within itself cannot be said to be real. Some psychologists talk about discrete sensations as elements of mental phenomena. But discrete sensations are the product of intellectual analysis; they are not living sensations in themselves. (1980, 234)

Nishida and Hartshorne thus both argue for intersensory perception based on the continuity between phenomena of consciousness, thereby establishing a continuum of sensations, the immediate experience of which is synaesthesia. Nishida asserts that in accord with the phenomenological method of Franz Brentano, he will “distinguish phenomena of consciousness according to their respective intentionalities” (1979, 231). Following Brentano, “intentionality” was identified by Husserl as the invariable structure of consciousness whereby each mental act intends or points toward some content, datum, or object. In this context Nishida argues that pure affective feeling has its own unique and irreducible intentionality structure which distinguishes it from intellect, sensation, and all other phenomena of consciousness. He maintains that the irreducible intentionality structure of affective feeling is its (noematic) content of felt wholeness as unified through (noetic) acts of creative imagination: “The content of feeling is always a creative whole beyond the mere combination of its elements” (1979, 226 ). By virtue of its felt wholeness unified by creative acts, a state of affective feeling possesses aesthetic value (1979, 226). He further specifies that insofar as it is a creative whole with aesthetic value, the unified content of affective feeling states can be expressed only through art (1979, 227). Nishida’s theory of synaesthesia is grounded in a phenomenology of affective feeling-tone. His description of affective feeling states as a “creative whole beyond the mere combination of its elements” (1979, 226), is at once in accord with the standard definition of a Gestalt as a whole not

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equal to the sum of its parts. Like the Gestalt psychologists he argues that what is given in immediate experience at the standpoint of pure affective feeling is not a mosaic of discrete sensations but a Gestalt quality, an emergent qualitative unity felt as a new whole richer than the mere sum of its components: A phenomenon of consciousness cannot be a compound; it must be a unity. . . . This is especially true of feelings as Wundt also holds. For example, the feeling of harmony constitutes one feeling in itself. Feeling is the fundamental unity in which we discriminate an indefinite number of qualitative differences. (1979, 224 )

Nishida’s analysis at once resonates with the view of Whitehead: “The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is feeling-tone. . . . In the higher grades of perception vague feeling-tone differentiates itself into various types of sensa – those of touch, sight, smell, etc” (PR 119). Nishida also considers the theme of synaesthesia in his essay on Basho (Place) as the “locus” of absolute nothingness. In this essay, Nishida develops a modern Zen Buddhist metaphysics of absolute nothingness as the enveloping locus of “pure qualities” (junsui seishitsu, 純粋性質). He asserts that in the depths of the basho of absolute nothingness as the locus of pure qualities, perception has an aesthetic content: “In speaking of our true livedness in perceptual acts, we are implaced in the basho of true nothing, an endless overlapping of mirrors. For this reason we can even see an aesthetic content in the depths of so-called perception” (2012, 83). From the standpoint of phenomenology Nishida then considers the unity of the senses in the basho of consciousness: “As [Franz] Brentano states in The Psychology of the Senses, they are phenomenally conjoined” (2012, 80). In this context Nishida goes on to give a phenomenological description of how in the basho of consciousness there is an “overlapping” of sounds, colors, and other sense qualities implaced within the same space of the perceptual field: Although in space two things cannot simultaneously occupy the same space, in the basho of consciousness, an infinite overlap is possible. . . . The claim that individual sounds are elements and they constitute the melody is a consequence of our thinking. But in perception itself, each individual sound is implaced in the melody. However we can also say that melody as well, as an element, is further implaced in another perception, and that sounds and colors are [all] also implaced in a single field of perception. (2012, 81)

Nishida and Hartshorne articulate a doctrine of synaesthesia on the basis of a phenomenology of affective feeling. For Nishida as for Hartshorne, at the level of affective feeling all phenomena have aesthetic value quality. Moreover, both argue that while sensations appear separate at the level of sense perception they are fused at the level of affective feeling. Furthermore, both develop an argument based on Gestalt psychology where-

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in at the level of affective feeling diverse sense qualities such as colors, shapes, fragrances, and musical tones are not a mosaic of discrete sensations but a Gestalt where the whole is richer than the sum of its parts. For Nishida as for Hartshorne, Whitehead, and Peirce, at the standpoint of pure affective feeling all experience is aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience is synaesthetic experience. Nishida’s philosophical arguments for interfusion of sense qualities in pure affective feeling has broader implications for the tradition of Japanese aesthetics, when it is considered that he elsewhere asserts: “Japanese culture was a culture . . . of pure feeling” (1970, 252). Moreover, in his study of Zen aestheticism D. T. Suzuki writes: “I have come to think that ‘feeling’ is a better term than ‘intuition’ for the experience Zen claims to have—‘feeling’ in its deepest, broadest, and most basic sense” (1959, 219, fn. 1). If Zen aestheticism cultivates the direct experience of primordial affective feeling states as claimed by Suzuki, and if all experience at the level of pure affective feeling is synaesthetic as argued by Nishida, then one should expect that Zen meditation is a somaesthetic discipline that fosters heightened aesthetic experience of synaesthesia and its expression in art. It is thus significant that in his book Synesthesia, Dr. Richard Cytowic refers to clinical studies demonstrating that intersensory synaesthesia can be methodically cultivated by Zen, while further confirming this view through his own practice of Zen meditation (2002, 121-122; 1993, 167-176). In what follows I would like to briefly discuss how the aesthetic experience of beauty as synaesthesia or fusion of sense qualities in an affective continuum of feeling is a recurrent structural element discoverable in a wide range of Japanese arts developed under the aegis of Zen, including Kabuki theater, haiku poetry, inkwash painting, and the tea ceremony as well as modern Japanese literature and cinema. In Film Form (1949) and The Film Sense (1947) the soviet film theorist and movie director Sergei Eisenstein claims that the study Japanese aesthetics, especially Kabuki theater and haiku poetry, led to his discovery of the principles of synaesthetic cinema based on the idea of montage, or juxtaposition of contrasting images into a new filmic whole to create a total aesthetic impression. As Leonard C. Pronko asserts in Theater East and West: In the Kabuki, he [Eisenstein] saw a brilliant example of effects that might be achieved through the camera. . . . The Kabuki, Eisenstein notes, appeals to every level of the spectator simultaneously, creating what may be called synaesthesia. (1967, 127)

In an essay on film aesthetics called “The Unexpected” Eisenstein recounts his initial amazement at the “perfection of montage” displayed by the first Kabuki dramas performed outside Japan, which occurred in Moscow and Leningrad during 1928, emphasizing that the most impor-

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tant lesson offered to modern cinematography by Kabuki theater is synchronization of diverse senses in synaesthesia: “In experiencing Kabuki one . . . hears light and sees sound” (1949, 21-22). Eisenstein further discusses how synaesthesia is expressed in haiku poetry as a montage built up through juxtaposition of contrasting sense images. According to Eisenstein, the synaesthetic principle of montage is a characteristic of Japanese art and literature grounded in the nature of the Japanese language itself where simple pictograms are juxtaposed into complex ideographs to form a new meaning beyond the mere combination of elements. Eisenstein criticizes Japanese filmmaking of the 1920s for failing to have developed a synaesthetic cinema based on their own montage principle: “To understand and apply her cultural peculiarities to the cinema, this is the task of Japan!” (1949, 44). However, a more recent Japanese film titled Synesthesia (2004) directed by Toru Matsuura, not only endeavors to create a synaesthetic effect, but also directly thematizes the clinical notion of synaesthesia based on the research of Dr. Richard Cytowic. 6 Toward the end, a male and female pair of synaesthetes both see and hear the rainfall while perceiving the raindrops as colored flower blossoms, thus to demonstrate how they both experience the same correspondences between sight, sound, and other senses. The intended result is to produce a total aesthetic impression by jolting the viewer into an altered state of multisensory synaesthesia. In Synesthesia in Haiku and Other Essays (1990), Horiuchi Toshimi underscores the importance of synaesthesia in Japanese haiku poetry. Horiuchi explains: “Poetry is usually based on sensory experience; thus, poetry can have visual image, auditory image, tactual image, gustatory image, olfactory image, motor image, and so forth” (1990, 1). He adds that in Japanese haiku poetry, “one excellent way to communicate human emotions is through the synesthetic way, which mixes sensory experiences to generate some kind of metaphor” (1990, 1). According to Horiuchi, “Synesthetic imagery has been one of the distinguishing features of modern [haiku] poetry. . . . An image of one sense develops into images appealing to other senses. Haiku poems have a multiplicity of images, deliberately mixed images of synesthesia” (1990, 2). He affirms the view that in modern Japanese haiku poetry there has been a gradual breaking down of the distinction between the senses so that “aural, visual, tactual qualities are perpetually interfused” (1990, 21). Horiuchi concludes that a haiku poem containing only one sense quality is not so powerful as those expressing fusion between two or more sense qualities so that the structure of modern haiku imagery has been getting “more and more synesthetic” (1990, 21). The importance of synaesthesia as a recurrent structural method of Bashō’s haiku poetry has also been pointed out by Ueda Makoto (1967, 162-63):

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There seems to be one special case . . . in which we can define a structural method of the haiku with a modern scientific term. This is the case of synaesthesia. In some haiku two objects are juxtaposed in such a way that the merging of different senses may take place. Here are some examples: Their fragrance Is whiter than peach blossoms The daffodils. Over the evening sea The wild ducks cry Is faintly white. It is whiter Than the rocks of Ishiyama The autum wind. Onions lie Washed in white How chilly it is.

Ueda then indicates some of the philosophical implications of Bashō’s haiku technique of synaesthesia, arguing that it functions to capture the organismic unity and interrelatedness of experience, over against the analytical method of science, which reduces a whole into isolated components: In these poems a color is used to suggest the quality of fragrance, a sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature. Such a method is very effective for presenting an experience in its totality, in contrast to the method of science, which dissolves a whole into its component parts. Synaesthesia presumes an attitude which accepts the ultimate interrelatedness of all things and events. (1967, 163)

While the poems cited by Ueda expresses the merging of two sensory qualities, in other haiku Bashō describes more complex forms of synaesthetic perception involving at least three sense qualities: 7 Kane kiete

As the bell tone fades

hana no ka wa tsuku

Blossom scents take up the ringing

yube kana

Evening shade

In this haiku poem Basho uses the aesthetic experience of synaesthesia or sensory fusion to express the Japanese sense of ephemeral beauty. The beauty of synaesthesia is the aesthetic value arising through enjoyment of the relatedness of things in enveloping background space as well as their evanescence in the flow of time. Here the fading bell tone and fragile cherry blossoms symbolize the pathos of aware as the beauty and sadness of perishability, just as the image of evening shade elicits the aesthetic experience of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows.

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The intersensory triplet which Bashō evokes in the above haiku poem at once calls to mind the dictum of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), according to which “scent and sound and color correspond,” a statement which marked the principle of synaesthesia as the fundamental doctrine for the French Symbolist school of art and literature. Thus, in his poem “Correspondences,” Baudelaire writes: As echoes meet in common bond And in profound and shadowy unity So scent and sound and color correspond (1961, 19)

Hence, like French symbolism, Japanese haiku poetry acts to fuse various sense qualities into a Gestalt quality as a new emergent whole richer than the sum of its parts in an aesthetic experience of cross-modal perception wherein the entire field of perception is embodied in a global sensorium of intersensory synaesthesia. It can be said that in all of the above poems expressing the beauty of intersensory synaesthesia, aesthetic delight arises by discovering new connections between two or more sense qualities usually regarded as separate. The use of intersensory synaesthesia to record fleeting moments of evanescent beauty is also seen in modern Japanese literature. Influenced by both the haiku poetry of Bashō and French symbolism, 1968 Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari frequently employs the method of synaesthesia to merge various sense qualities in a background of affective feeling to create a total aesthetic effect. Thus, in Kawabata’s novel Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushisa to kanashimi to, 美しさと悲しみと, 1973) he describes a painting of a winter landscape by an artist named Keiko, stating: “The background might even be an image of Keiko’s own feelings. . . . The feeling of the cold of the snow and its warm color became a kind of music (1973, 55). Chanoyu, or the tea ceremony, has been called the apex of Japanese aestheticism as a religion of beauty. One of the characteristics of the tea ceremony is the ritualized stimulation and synchronization of diverse sense-impulses to produce aesthetic experience of beauty as synaesthesia. I would argue that the traditional Japanese tea ceremony functions as what Richard Shusterman has called a “somaesthetics” (2008). 8 By this view the Zen-influenced art of sadō or the Way of tea can be regarded as a Japanese somaesthetic discipline that cultivate unified bodymind experience of heightened intersensory awareness in which sights, sounds, scents, tastes, and tactile sensations fuse into the pervasive aesthetic quality of wabi as the atmospheric beauty of simplicity, tranquility, and spiritual poverty. In his book on the tea ceremony Hamamoto Soshun writes: The six sense organs signify the modes of perception—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body (touch), and consciousness—that we see constantly in daily life. True practice of Tea brings all senses to function simultane-

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ously and in accord and leads us to the realm of immovable tranquility. (1984, 39)

In his essay “The Taste of Tea,” Sen Sōshitsu, the fifteenth generation grandmaster of the Urasenke lineage of the tea ceremony founded by Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591), describes the fusion of sense qualities cultivated through the somaesthetic discipline of chanoyu when he writes: “In the tea room . . . the boundaries of the senses blur and sensations tend to run, like liquids, into each other; vision assumes a tactile character, touch and sound suggest visual images” (1980, 5). Sen Sōshitsu holds that in chanoyu a bowl of green tea is “tasted” not just with the tongue: it is also tasted with the eyes, the nose, the ears, the hands, and all of the other sense organs. The fusion of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and other sense qualities into a new aesthetic whole evoked through the tea ceremony is then described by Sen Sōshitsu in the language of Gestalt psychology: “the whole of this experience is greater than the sum of the individual tastes” (1980, 5 ). It can thus be said that in traditional Zen aestheticism the Way of tea is the paradigm of a total synaesthetic art, just as the Japanese tea ceremony is the paradigm of a somaesthetic discipline for the bodymind that cultivates heightened intersensory awareness of beauty as synaesthesia. Conclusion Synaesthesis is one of the most remarkable varieties of aesthetic experience found in both the Western and Japanese traditions of art and literature. For both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism, the aesthetic experience of synaesthesia can be explained as a function of the relatedness of things. At the metaphysical level of discourse, for both the Whiteheadian and Japanese Buddhist traditions the aesthetic experience of beauty as synaesthesia is a natural outcome of the interpenetration of all events in the panoramic continuum of nature. The Japanese tradition of Zen aestheticism is deeply influenced by the Kegon (C. Huayan; Skt. Avatamsaka) Buddhist teachings of “interpenetration between particulars and the universal-whole” (riji muge, 理事無礙) and “interpenetration between particular and particular” (jiji muge, 事事無礙). As stated by D. T. Suzuki: “The balancing of unity and multiplicity . . . in the philosophy of Avatamsaka (Kegon) is absolutely necessary to the aesthetic understanding of Nature (1959, 354). In my book Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism (1982) I have examined at length parallels as well as conflicts between Whitehead and Kegon Buddhism on the harmonious interpenetration of many into one. Here my argument is extended into philosophy of art, so that the metaphysical principle of arising through interpenetration of many into one is the basis for cross-modal perception, whereupon there is an interfusion of diverse colors, sounds, scents, and flavors as well a

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tactile and thermal sensations into an aesthetic experience of beauty as synaesthesia. In his book on visionary experience in Buddhist scripture titled Empty Vision, David L. McMahan examines descriptions of intersensory synaesthesia in the Gandavyūha, the final chapter of the Avatamsaka Sūtra (Kegonkyō, 華厳経): Another way the text relates vision to sound and speech is through synesthesia, the phenomenon of sensory cross-over; such that one seems to “hear visions” or “see sounds.” Passages that cross sensory boundaries are fairy frequent in the Gandavyūha. (2002, 126)

Throughout the Avatamsaka Sūtra there are depictions of enlightened buddhas held spellbound in ecstatic trance by astonishing visions of unobstructed harmonious interfusion between parts and the whole, such that an event arising by interdependent origination becomes like a jewel on Indra’s Net that mirrors totality from its own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm, whereupon each moment is said to contain the universe as contracted and to pervade the universe as expanded. Kaleidoscopic visions of events radiating multicolored lights that spread throughout the vastness of space are accompanied by intoxicating fragrances, melodious sounds, and exotic flavors, all of which fuse into an aesthetic and mystical experience of synaesthesia through unimpeded harmonious interpenetration between multiplicity and unity. According to the Whiteheadian process metaphysics of Hartshorne, synaesthesia is a special case of the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity, which specifies that each occasion of experience is produced through creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity as irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts. The experience of synaesthesia thus exhibits the fundamental aesthetic law of unity-in-plurality or simplicity-in-complexity. In the Japanese tradition of art influenced by Zen aestheticism the perception of synaesthesia as interfusion of colors, sounds, flavors, tastes, and other sense qualities, can likewise be explained as a special case of the Kegon metaphysical principles of riji muge or unobstructed harmonious interpenetration between particulars and the universal-whole and jiji muge or unobstructed harmonious interpenetration between particulars and particulars. Thus, for both the Whiteheadian and Japanese Buddhist traditions, an aesthetic experience of beauty as intersensory synaesthesia is to be analyzed as a function of the generalized metaphysical principle of harmonious interpenetration between the many and the one.

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NOTES 1. The problem of synesthesia was popularized by the groundbreaking textbook by Dr. Richard Cytowic, in his book Synesthesia, (2002), along with his popular work The Man Who Tasted Shapes (1993). 2. In The Foundations of Aesthetics (1925) I. A. Richard’s key principle of beauty as synaesthesis or harmony of diverse sense-impulses produced by an artwork is said to be inspired by the Confucian work Chung-yung (Jhongyong, 中庸) or Doctrine of the Mean. 3. See Daniel A. Dombrowski’s Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. This is the definitive treatment of Hartshorne’s aesthetics and doctrine of beauty as developed in the latter’s process theology and process metaphysics. 4. Similar to Whitehead’s radical empiricism, Merleau-Ponty gives a phenomenological account of the synaesthetic character of primordial perception. However, Merleau-Ponty’s book Nature was directly influenced by Whitehead’s The Concept of Nature. See Merleau-Ponty’s book Nature (2003), especially part II, chapter 3, “The Idea of Nature in Whitehead,” pp. 113-122. This essay is based on Merleau-Ponty’s 1957-58 lecture series from The College de France titled “The Concept of Nature.” In this essay, Merleau-Ponty cites Whitehead’s Nature and Life, The Concept of Nature, and Science and the Modern World. 5. Concerning recently coined technical terms for “synaesthesia” in the modern Japanese language such as tsūkankaku (通感覚) or “fusion of senses,” and kyōkankaku (共感覚) or “unity of the senses,” see Kenkyūsha’s New English-Japanese Dictionary, ed. Sanki Ichikawa (Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 1953), p. 1836. 6. The Japanese film Synesthesia (2004) directed by Toru Matsuuru was released by Shochiku/Art Port/Euro Space/Kansai Telecasting Corporation. The 2-disk DVD set for release in North America was produced by ADV Films (2007). 7. For an analysis of synaesthetic interconnections between sight, sound, and scent in this haiku poem by Bashō in relation to the French symbolist poetry of Charles Baudelaire, see my essay “Blossom Scents Take Up the Ringing: Synaesthesia in Japanese and Western Aesthetics,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 1986, Vol. LXIX, No. 3, pp. 256-281. In the second edition of his now classic textbook Synaesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2002, 320, 375), Dr. Richard Cytowic discusses my analysis of this haiku poem (2002, 320, 375). 8. According to the American pragmatist aesthetics of Richard Shusterman (2008), “somaesthetics” is a study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-cultivation.

Part III

A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen and Aware in Japanese Aesthetics Penumbral Beauty

As elucidated in the classic 1939 treatise Yūgen to aware (幽玄とあわれ) by Onishi Yoshinori, the two most fundamental aesthetic categories which emerged in the canons of taste governing traditional Japanese art and literature, are yūgen (幽玄) or beauty of darkness and shadows, and aware (哀れ) or pathos as sad, melancholic, or tragic beauty, both of which are rooted in yojō (余情) or “overtones of feeling.” Onishi analyzes the aesthetic category of yūgen in German phenomenological terms as having the interior content of Tiefe or “depth” (J. fukasa, 深さ), a cosmic depth arising from a feeling of the unity, fullness, and wholeness of nature. Yūgen as the profound beauty of darkness and shadows, is embodied in traditional Japanese arts such as the waka poetry of Fujiwara no Teika, the nō drama of Zeami, and monochrome sumie inkwash landscape paintings of Sesshū. In these arts, the pervasive atmospheric beauty of yūgen is evoked by determinate phenomena clearly articulated in the foreground, gradually fading into the twilight darkness of the surrounding nonarticulated background field of indeterminate nothingness as the boundless openness where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness so that everything is disclosed just as it is in suchness. This analysis of the distinctive Japanese aesthetic qualities of yūgen and aware as rooted in the primordial aesthetic value quality of yojō or overtones of feeling, is also seen in the modern Zen thought of Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), the founder of twentieth century Japanese philosophy. Nishida develops an interpretation of Japan as a culture of pure aesthetic feeling in which emerged a distinctively Japanese Buddhism based on pure feeling as an aesthetically immediate experience of beauty in art, nature, and everyday life. He argues that the Japanese ideals of beauty such as aware and yūgen are based on pure aesthetic feeling in the basho or field of absolute nothingness. Nishida states that while Japan is an Eastern culture of pure aesthetic feeling, which has its ultimate

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ground in “nothingness” (mu, 無), the West is a culture of rational form which instead finds its ground in “being” (u,有). He states that “Japanese culture can be regarded as an aesthetic culture” (1970, 247). Japanese culture is not based on rationalism, moralism, or ritualism, but on pure aesthetic feeling. Analyzing the Japanese culture of aesthetic feeling, and its metaphysical ground in nothingness, he goes on to discuss Japanese ideals of beauty like aware (sorrowful beauty) and yūgen (profound mystery) as aesthetic qualities of pure feeling. In the Japanese Zen Buddhist metaphysics of creative nothingness, the aesthetic value of aware as pathos of sorrow-tinged beauty is not a subjective emotion, but constitutes a transpersonal feeling beyond subject-object duality: “When I say feeling . . . feelings are impersonal. In fact, there is neither interior nor exterior in pure feeling. The ‘aware of things’ (物の哀れ) is also felt therein” (1970, 248). After arguing that mono no aware as the sad beauty of impermanence is grounded in a transpersonal feeling, Nishida then goes on to argue that the aesthetic quality of yūgen is also based on pure feeling: Japanese culture was a culture neither of eidos nor of ritual, but one of pure feeling. The fact that Greek aesthetics differed in essence from Japanese aesthetics lies herein. The quality of yūgen (yūgensei, 幽玄性) in Japanese aesthetics was also grounded on pure feeling. (1970, 252; 1965, 7, 451)

Hence, for Nishida, the aesthetic qualities of aware and yūgen as functions of junjō (純情), “pure feeling.” The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan by co-authors Izutsu Toshihiku and Izutsu Toyo (1981), underscores the primary character of pure aesthetic emotion overflowing from the creative heart-mind according to the traditional Japanese ideals of beauty. 1 In a chapter titled “The Supremacy of Yo-jō, “they seek to demonstrate how in classical Japanese aesthetics, the mysterious atmospheric beauty of yūgen as the pervasive aesthetic quality of darkness and shadows, and aware as the sad beauty of perishability, are both alike rooted in the primacy of yojō, meaning “surplus emotion,” or “overtones of feeling.” They further describe these immediately felt overtones of yojō as springing from what they term the “creative subjectivity” of kokoro, the “heart-mind.” Illustrating this creative process with reference to classical Japanese 31 syllable waka (和歌) poetics of Fujiwara no Teika and others, they clarify how from the creative subjectivity of heart-mind (kokoro, 心) there emerges interior feeling (jō, 情) and corresponding nonarticulated inner thought (omoi, 思い), which is then externalized through surplus emotion or overflow of feeling (yo-jō, 余情) and corresponding outer linguistically articulated thought (kotoba,ことば), thereby to achieve artistic expression in a poetic field of associations tinged with the pervasive atmospheric beauty of aware and yūgen.

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The chapter titled “The Supremacy of Yo-Jō” further demonstrates through textual analysis that in the classical aesthetics of Japan, overtones of feeling was the fundamental aesthetic value, so that aware as pathos of sad beauty and yūgen as mysterious beauty of shadows are rooted in the primordial value of yojō or surplus emotion: Aware and yūgen, which are unanimously recognized to be the most important of the key aesthetic ideas in the field of [Japanese] literature and art from the classical through the early medieval periods, are actually nothing but two specified derivates stemming from the aesthetic value of yojō. (1981, 16)

The Izutsu’s analysis of this supremacy of yojō underlying both yūgen and aware as the two fundamental categories of beauty in the classical aesthetics of Japan can be graphically presented in a schematic diagram as follows:

Figure 10.1.

According to the scholarship of nihonjinron (日本人論), or “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” aware (哀れ) as the sad or tragic beauty of evanescence, and yūgen (幽玄) as the profound beauty of darkness and shadows, are distinctive, culture-bound aesthetic qualities unique to the Japanese tradition of art and literature, with no counterparts to be found in the West. 2 Yet in refutation of the nihonjinron thesis, I seek to demonstrate that clear parallels to the Japanese aesthetic categories of yūgen and aware are to be found in A. N. Whitehead’s process metaphysics running throughout his corpus of writings, especially in his later speculative works including Adventures of Ideas (1933), and Modes of Thought (1938). I propose that in Whitehead’s process aesthetics, one finds a similar infrastructure to that expounded by theories of beauty in the classical aesthetics of Japan, as summed up by modern Japanese philosophers, literati, and aestheticians cited above, such as Onishi Yoshinori, Nishida Kitarō, and Izutsu Toshihiku. As explained throughout the present volume, Whitehead’s later writings expound a process aesthetics culminat-

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ing in a generalized notion of beauty as perishability. Whitehead’s aesthetic categories are grounded in his radically empirical process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy. Based on his phenomenology of concrete feeling states of qualitative immediacy, the two fundamental aesthetic value qualities underlying Whitehead’s process aesthetics are what I have identified as the penumbral beauty of shadows and darkness, and the tragic beauty of perishability. These two aesthetic qualities are in turn based on a phenomenological description of two radically empirical data of qualitative feeling, including felt wholeness and felt transitions, both of which are disclosed in the felt background of experiential immediacy. Both the “penumbral beauty” of darkness, and the “tragic beauty” of perishability, are grounded in the primordial aesthetic value category of overtones of feeling. The directly felt aesthetic quality of events is described by Whitehead through his radical empiricism with its appeal to perception in the primordial mode of causal feeling. In this primordial mode of perception, the immediately felt aesthetic quality of events is analyzed as emerging from “feeling-tones” (AI 120), “vague emotional tone” (AI 281), “feeling-tone” (PR 119), and “tone of feeling” (PR 85). These aesthetic categories are in turn derivative from the ultimate metaphysical category of creativity (PR 21), whereby there is a concrescence or emergent creative synthesis of multiple feeling-tones into a new occasion with patterned harmonic contrast between a clear foreground and dark penumbral background, thereby realizing maximum intensity of consummatory satisfaction in evanescent beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic value quality. For Whitehead, all events create themselves as novel emergent occasions of aesthetic experience with the intrinsic value of ephemeral beauty. The infrastructure of Whitehead’s process aesthetics of qualitative immediacy can be schematized as below: Scholarly texts on Japanese art and literature adopting the bias of nihojinron (日本人論) or “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” typically hold that like the sad or tragic beauty of aware, the mysterious, profound, and dark beauty of yūgen is a unique, culture-bound aesthetic quality peculiar to Japan, with no counterpart to be found in Western aesthetics. Yet here I will demonstrate that a near functional equivalent to the categories of yūgen and aware are to be found in the organic process aesthetics of A. N. Whitehead: namely, what he calls the beauty of penumbral shadow and the pathos of tragic beauty. For Whitehead, the mysterious beauty of penumbral darkness is fundamental to his analysis of aesthetic experience of nature as well as his philosophy of art, literature, and poetry. Moreover, it will be shown how the poetic image of yūgen in the Japanese tradition of art and literature functions to illustrate Whitehead’s aesthetic vision of penumbral beauty. Likewise, the Japanese aesthetics of impermanence as summed up by aware or pathos as the sad beauty of evanescence functions to illustrate Whitehead’s process aesthetics of pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability.

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Figure 10.2.

Like his poetic ideal of tragic beauty, Whitehead’s concept of the penumbral beauty of darkness and shadows has been mostly overlooked by Whiteheadian scholarship. It is my view that Whitehead’s two aesthetic categories of penumbral beauty and tragic beauty are best illuminated through the lens of traditional Japanese aesthetics, with its two major poetic ideals of aware and yūgen. The expression of aware as sad or tragic beauty of impermanence in The Tale of Genji, depicted by poetic images of evanescence such as the fleeting cherry blossoms in spring, clearly illuminate Whitehead’s own aesthetic view of pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability. Likewise, the aesthetic category of yūgen or profound beauty of darkness as expressed in medieval Japanese literature and art, such as the waka poetry by Fujiwara no Teika, the nō drama by Zeami, and the monochrome sumie inkwash landscape painting by Sesshū, all alike provide vivid illustrations for Whitehead’s penumbral beauty as the aesthetic vision of nonsubstantial phenomena fading into darkness and shadows. Whitehead’s notion of beauty as penumbral shadow and the yūgen tradition of Japanese arts similarly hold that the content of beauty is depth of feeling-tone. For both the Whiteheadian and Japanese traditions, the mysterious beauty of darkness and the tragic beauty of perishability are rooted in the primordial aesthetic experience of overtones of feeling. It is thus my intention to construct an East-West intercultural dialogue that opens up a new perspective on Whitehead’s process metaphysics of evanescent beauty from the standpoint of Japanese Buddhist aesthetics.

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NOTES 1. See The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan by Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu (Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). The Izutsu’s argue that in the Japanese canons of taste, beauty came to be defined especially by the categories of yūgen (幽玄) and aware (哀れ), both of which are derivative from the primordial value of yojō (余情), “surplus emotion,” or “overtones of feeling.” They further demonstrate how in classical Japanese aesthetics, the beauty of yojō or overtones of feeling are rooted in kokoro (心) as the primordial “heart-mind” of creative subjectivity. 2. For a critique of nihonjinron (日本人論) or the “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” see Peter Dale’s The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

ELEVEN The “Penumbral Beauty” of Darkness and Shadows in Whitehead’s Process Aesthetics

Whitehead sets forth an axiological process metaphysics of nature as an aesthetic continuum of beauty. Throughout his philosophical writings he argues that the dynamic continuum of nature is a creative process aimed toward maximum production of aesthetic value. It is in his later writings, especially Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938), whereupon he comes to proclaim the centrality, primacy, and ultimacy of beauty in nature. Whitehead now declares: “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). Here I would like to clarify Whitehead’s formulation of a very specific and highly refined aesthetic category: namely, the beauty of “penumbral shadow,” or what I otherwise refer to in this volume as penumbral beauty. 1 According to Whitehead’s process metaphysics, the world is “a passing shadow” (RM 87). Elsewhere he cites the view that the world is a flux of shades and shadows (S 48). For Whitehead, this Platonic image of the world as a passing shadow discloses the evanescence, insubstantiality, and transitoriness of life as a process of perpetual perishing. However, the poetic metaphor of a penumbral shadow is also used to evoke the beauty of “depth” constituted by a foreground shading off into a remote background. Whitehead’s aesthetic category of beauty as penumbral shadow has been almost completely overlooked by scholars in the field. Yet the notion of penumbral shadow is a key to Whitehead’s phenomenology of primordial perception, his use of William James’s radical empiricism to describe the focus/fringe pattern of immediate experience, his Leibnizian theory of perspectives, his concept of beauty, his theory of aesthetic experience, along with his philosophy of art, literature, and 175

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poetry. Following the radical empiricism of James, Whitehead’s phenomenology of perception characterizes an occasion of experience with directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality in terms of its invariant foreground/ background pattern, constituted by illuminated sense data articulated in the foreground, which gradually shades off into a nonarticulated “penumbral region” of darkness and shadows, thus bringing forth into disclosure the mysterious beauty of hidden depths. In Whitehead’s process aesthetics the notion of mysterious beauty as penumbral shadow is based on the focus/field or foreground/background model of immediate experience. This focus/field model is itself grounded in Whitehead’s scientific process cosmology based on relativity and quantum physics. According to Whitehead’s interpretation of modern quantum physics, the universe is an “‘electromagnetic’ society” constituted by a multiplicity of interpenetrating “electromagnetic occasions,” each of which is a concentrated focus-point for the whole “electromagnetic field” (PR 98). Elsewhere he terms these quantum units “electronic occasions” (PR 91). Whitehead describes the focus/field structure of electronic occasions as follows: The electron . . . is the focus of the whole, the essential focal property being that the field at any instant is completely determined by the previous history of the focus and its space relations through all previous time. But the field and the focus are not independent concepts, they are essentially correlated in one organized unity. . . . (AE 150)

The focus/field structure of electronic occasions thus corresponds to Whitehead’s phenomenological description of penumbral beauty constituted by the foreground/background pattern of aesthetically immediate experience.Whitehead’s process metaphysics is otherwise referred to as “the philosophy of organism” (PR 18). His process metaphysics articulates the organic continuity, wholeness, and solidarity of nature as an undivided aesthetic continuum of interrelated electromagnetic occasions with mutual immanence. 2 In fact, the notions of process and organism are inseparable, insofar as both denote a concept of reality as defined by events arising through concrescence, or an act of creative synthesis that unifies causal relationships into a background field for the foreground focus in a new occasion of experience with the beauty of directly felt aesthetic quality. It can be said that the poetic image of a “penumbral shadow” functions in Whitehead’s process metaphysics as an organic metaphor for the invariant “focus/field” or “focus/fringe” patterning of concrete aesthetically immediate experience, wherein a vague indeterminate fringe of causal relationships are dimly felt as surrounding all determinate focal objects at the center of the perceptual field. He further describes the focus/field pattern of immediate experience as a Leibnizian monad, or perspective of the universe, whereby each novel aesthetic perspective is characterized by a clear foreground that shades into a dark

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background. For Whitehead, each focus/field event is a novel perspective that reflects the universe as a microcosm of the macrocosm, thus to both contain and pervade the whole aesthetic continuum of nature. He argues that each perspectival occasion of experience arises through creative synthesis, a process of concrescence which functions to unify diverse multiplicity into novel unity from its own standpoint. The act of concrescence, prehensive unification, or creative synthesis gathers the many into a dark penumbral background field encompassing the illuminated object in the foreground focus of attention, whereupon it is the irreducible harmonic contrast between the clarity of the foreground and vagueness of the dark background that constitutes the basic pattern of beauty. An emergent creative act of concrescence arises through a process of valuation, so that by an act of selective attention the important data shift into the foreground and the trivial data recede into the background, thus producing a new focus/field event with the aesthetic value of beauty. This focus/field patterning of an occasion of aesthetic experience constitutes a Leibnizian monad, whereby the perceptual field is organized into a new perspective of the cosmos with a clear foreground and vague background. Hence, in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, the function of art, literature, and poetry is to manifest the beauty of hidden depths from the dark penumbral background that always surrounds the illuminated foreground. For this reason, Whitehead holds that his process philosophy is akin to poetry and mysticism, in that it yields new insights into penumbral depths. The English word “penumbra” etymologically derives from the Latin prefix paena meaning “almost,” added to the noun umbra meaning “shadow.” Whitehead’s recurrent image of a “penumbral shadow,” in its sense as an aura or halo of faint darkness which envelops the clearly illuminated sense qualities in the focal region of consciousness, functions in the context of his writings as an organismic metaphor for expressing the undivided continuity, interfusion, and wholeness of the perceptual field, as well as the beauty intrinsic to all phenomena by virtue of their hidden depths. Or in terms of Whitehead’s phenomenological description of the invariant focus/fringe structure of the perceptual field, whereby clearly discriminated focal elements are enveloped by a vague, undiscriminated fringe of relationships, the image of a “penumbral shadow” functions as an organismic metaphor elucidating the patterned harmonic contrast between foreground and background. The poetic image of a “penumbral shadow” hence designates the beauty of hidden depths as an undiscriminated whole emerging from the dimly felt background of immediate experience, which always haunts those clearly discriminated objects illuminated in the foreground focus of attention. This organic metaphor of a “penumbral shadow” used in Whitehead’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience has its origins in the radical empiricism of William James. In the chapter titled “The Stream of Consciousness” from his 1890 Principles of Psychology, and its abbreviated

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version in his 1892 textbook Psychology: The Briefer Course, James phenomenologically describes the invariant focus/field or focus/fringe patterning of immediate experience in terms of his organic metaphor of a “penumbra” which surrounds all focal actualities as an encompassing horizon. He thus writes of a “halo or penumbra” which encircles our perception of an object (2001, 33). He adds: “Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations . . . by the name of ‘psychic overtone’ or ‘fringe’” (2001, 33). James’s phenomenological method of radical empiricism supports a description of the undiscriminated penumbral fringe of dimly felt relationships enveloping objects discriminated in the stream of consciousness: “Of most of [the relations of a discriminated object] we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a ‘fringe’ of unarticulated affinities about it” (2001, 34). According to James’s phenomenology of immediate experience, the field of perception is organized into a clear focus and dark penumbral fringe of relations through constitutive acts of selective attention governed by pragmatic interests. It is a shift of attention that enables one to redirect the gaze from elements in the clear focus to the penumbral fringe receding into a dark background. In his phenomenology of qualitative flow in the stream of immediate experience, Whitehead adopts James’s organic metaphor of an expansive dark penumbral region, which surrounds illuminated focal objects as a vague fringe or halo of relationships dimly prehended in the encompassing background horizon of psychical overtones. Whitehead’s aesthetic category of tragic beauty is depicted by his Jamesian flow metaphor of felt transitions in the “stream of experience” (PR 189, 190), which itself comes incrementally by “drops of experience” (PR 18). Likewise, Whitehead’s aesthetic category of penumbral beauty is envisaged by his Jamesian organismic metaphor of the “penumbral shadow” (PR 15), which characterizes the dimly felt background constituting the felt wholeness of immediate experience. While the aesthetic principle of tragic beauty is a dynamic function of process as creative advance to novelty, the aesthetic principle of penumbral beauty is a holistic function of organism as harmonious interpenetration of many and one in the undivided continuum of nature. Again, while the aesthetic principle of penumbral beauty as the vaguely felt background whole adds depth of feeling, the tragic beauty of evanescence evokes intensity of aesthetic feeling in each transient occasion of experience. For Whitehead, as for James, it is this notion of a penumbral fringe of dimly felt causal relationships derived from the method of radical empiricism, which itself holds the key to resolving fundamental problems in the history of philosophy. Both Whitehead and James argue counter to Hume’s empirical claim that causal relations are not experienced between atomic sensations, but arise through a “habit of thought” formed through constant conjunction and imaginative association (S 39). Moreover, both oppose Kant’s transcendental idealist account, whereby causal relations,

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though not found in experience itself, are an a priori “category of thought” superimposed upon the manifold of sensations as a condition for the possibility of experience in general (S 40). But for Whitehead, as for James, causal relations are directly felt in the stream of immediate experience at the vague penumbral fringe which encircles all sense data at the focal center of the perceptual field (S 30-43). Whitehead acknowledges that his view of “feeling” and description of the directly felt background of immediate experience shares much in common with F. H. Bradley. At the same time, the pluralistic metaphysics of Whitehead, like that of James, rejects the absolute idealism of Bradley’s monistic Hegelian philosophy (PR viii-xix), whereby the felt background of immediate experience constitutes a Felt Totality, otherwise termed the Absolute. 3 Whereas for Bradley’s absolute idealism, immediate experience reveals how all events, space, time, and God ultimately merge into a Felt Totality, for Whitehead’s process metaphysics, immediate experience discloses a pluralistic multiverse of irreducibly unique perspectival occasions, each of which feels the whole from its own novel standpoint. Bradley holds that the felt background of immediate experience shows how Appearances dissolve into Reality as a single Felt Totality. For Whitehead, as for James, the directly felt background of immediate experience is to be phenomenologically described as a vague penumbral fringe consisting of asymmetrical relationships, including both internal and external relations, conjunctions and disjunctions, continuities and discontinuities, thereby to constitute the theoretical basis for a pluralistic multiverse. The phenomenological account of the penumbral fringe of immediate experience in the radical empiricism of Whitehead and James thus abandons both the monism of Bradley and the atomism of Hume, for a via media doctrine of pluralism. According to Whitehead’s metaphysical pluralism, the evolving aesthetic continuum of nature includes an irreducible multiplicity of interacting relational fields that overlap at their edges without merging into an absolute oneness as postulated by monism, or being reduced to a flux of discrete material particles as held by atomism. Like James, Whitehead gives a phenomenological account of the focus/ fringe pattern of immediate experience in its directly felt qualitative wholeness, so as to overcome both the extreme atomism of Hume as well as the extreme monism of Bradley, along with the transcendental idealism of Kant. What is perhaps most striking about Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, however, is that he uses the focus/ fringe pattern of immediate experience, as well as the organic literary metaphor of a dark penumbral shadow that characterizes this surrounding fringe, to set forth a phenomenological account of beauty in aesthetic experience, as well as a philosophy of art, literature, and poetry. Whitehead’s phenomenology of primordial perception characterizes the embodied field of aesthetically immediate experience as an illuminat-

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ed focal region of consciousness encircled by a subconscious penumbral region of dim shadows and darkness. Whitehead writes: Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. (PR 267; italics added)

And elsewhere: Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. (PR 15; italics added).

The “Penumbral Beauty” of Darkness and Shadows in Whitehead’s Process Aesthetics In an important passage from Science and Philosophy (1948), Whitehead describes philosophy as an effort to penetrate beyond the clear focus of immediate experience to the dim consciousness of a “penumbral background”: Thus the task of philosophy is to penetrate beyond the more obvious accidents to those principles of existence which are presupposed in dim consciousness, as involved in the total meaning of seeming clarity. . . . In the focus of experience there is a comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background. . . . The problem is to discriminate exactly what we know vaguely. (SP 131; italics added)

Whitehead’s notion of the “penumbra” as a metaphor for the vaguely felt background of causal relationships which constitute each occasion of experience as a felt whole with aesthetic value, has often gone unnoticed by scholars of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Yet throughout the corpus of his major speculative works, Whitehead repeatedly makes reference to this notion of a vast encompassing background field, fringe, or horizon of penumbral darkness, which he variously terms the “penumbral shadow” (PR 15), “penumbral region” (PR 267), “penumbral background” (SP 131), “penumbral welter” (PR 187), “penumbra of consciousness” (AI 249), and “penumbra of feeling” (AI 260). In the present volume I have coined the term “penumbral beauty” to characterize one aspect of Whitehead’s poetics, doctrine of aesthetic experience, concept of beauty, and philosophy of art. In Whitehead’s accounts of penumbral beauty, he describes how beauty emerges in an occasion of experience when clearly discriminated sense data in the focal region make symbolic reference to the vague, obscure, and dim feelings of causal relationships disclosed in the penumbral background of the perceptual field. He further underscores how in a work of art such as a painting or poem, beauty emerges when the clear foreground elicits the depths from a dimly felt penumbral

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Figure 11.1.

background. Thus, for Whitehead, it is this penumbral region of darkness and shadows in the felt background of the perceptual field which evokes beauty of hidden depths in an aesthetic experience of nature and its imaginative expression in a work of art. Whitehead’s aesthetics of beauty as penumbral shadow further involves his notion of the penumbral background of an artwork as a “lure for feeling.” As discussed previously, in the history of aesthetics, a wide variety of definitions for art have been suggested, all of which have their limitations, including representationalism, expressionism, formalism, institutionalism, and nonessentialism. Yet based on his metaphysics of aesthetic experience, which endeavors to formulate the most generic traits of existence, Whitehead sets forth a new and highly generalized definition

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of an artwork as a “lure for feeling” that elicits aesthetic delight, thus to act as an invitation for enjoyment of beauty. Whitehead further discusses his idea of a dimly felt “penumbral background” while discussing how an imaginative work of art operates as a proposition for entertaining new horizons of aesthetic feeling. The primary function of a “proposition,” is not that of a logical theory to be judged as true or false, but as a lure for feeling (PR 184). 4 Moreover, as a “lure for feeling,” an imaginative work of art and literature such as a Shakespearean tragedy, functions to elicit sheer aesthetic delight. The existence of imaginative literature should have warned logicians that their narrow doctrine is absurd. It is difficult to believe that all logicians as they read Hamlet’s speech, “To be or not to be: . . .” commence by judging whether the initial proposition be true or false. . . . Surely, at some point in the reading, judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight. The speech, for the theatre audience, is purely theoretical, a mere lure for feeling. (PR 184-185)

For Whitehead, an imaginative work of art and literature acts as a “lure for feeling” which aims toward evocation of aesthetic delight, in the sense of a proposition for entertainment of new possibilities, thereby leading to an emergent novel creation of aesthetic value experience. As Whitehead asserts, “A propositional feeling is a lure to creative emergence …” (PR 263). In this context, he describes the idea of a vague, suggestive, and ambiguous penumbral region of multiple possibilities opened up by the artwork for eliciting novel creation of aesthetic experience (PR 184-185). He now explains the artwork in its function as a proposition or lure as a “penumbra of eternal objects,” or a “penumbra of alternatives,” which thereby evokes a “penumbral complex into effective feeling” (PR 185-187). For Whitehead, the functioning of an artwork as a proposition or lure for feeling is that of a “penumbral welter of alternatives” (PR 187). He adds, “The elements of this penumbra are propositional prehensions” (PR 185). The imaginative artwork in its function as a lure for feeling attracts the self-creative occasion to entertain a penumbral horizon of multiple, alternative, and novel value patterns, thereby to achieve maximum depth of aesthetic value experience through production of emergent novelty. Hence, in its poetic operation as a lure for feeling, the penumbral horizon of alternate potentialities in the imaginative artwork induces the perpetual creation and recreation of immediate experience into a diverse multiplicity of novel aesthetic perspectives. Elsewhere, Whitehead clarifies that the “emotional lure” of a proposition acts as a suggestion (AI 245). This clarifies how the artwork in its function as a proposition or lure has a vague penumbral aura of suggestive indefiniteness, which evokes an imaginative response of entertaining new possibilities. It follows that for Whitehead, suggestiveness is a vital element of the dim penumbral region of darkness and shadows that char-

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acterizes the mysterious beauty of art. The artwork is a lure for feeling that operates as a suggestive, vague, and ambiguous penumbral region of alternate value possibilities, which functions to induce an endless play of multiplicity in our imaginative constitution of aesthetically immediate experience. In an occasion of aesthetic experience or its imaginative expression in art, the ambiguous penumbral background of darkness elicits beauty through suggestion. In the vocabulary of phenomenological method, Whitehead’s account of beauty as constituted by a penumbral shadow, penumbral region, or penumbral background involves a descriptive profile of enveloping horizons-phenomena. Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic delight in penumbral beauty can be described in phenomenological terms through its noesis–>noema intentionality structure, which at the noematic (object) pole is characterized by its core/horizon or foreground/background pattern, and which at the noetic (subject) pole requires a shift of attention from foreground focus to background field. Otherwise stated, the beauty of penumbral shadow is characterized as the embodiment of a value-laden figure/ground Gestalt pattern organized by an act of selective attention. Through the phenomenological exercise of epoché or neutralization of sedimented patterns, followed by practice of free variation in imagination, there is a noetic reversal from core to horizon, thereby to dramatically reconstitute the perceptual field into an aesthetic experience of penumbral beauty with a clear foreground and a dark background. It is through this noetic reversal, gestalt switch, or shift of attention from foreground focus to background field which results in aesthetic experience of penumbral beauty characterized by its multiplicity, variety, and novelty, along with its wholeness, fullness, openness, and depth. 5 This phenomenological description of the focus/fringe structure of the perceptual field with a clear foreground and dark background as depicted by his recurrent poetic image of the penumbral shadow runs throughout Whitehead’s entire corpus of writings. Starting from even his earliest philosophical work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1918), he provides a phenomenological account of intrinsic value of all perceptual events in the stream of creative advance, as characterized by a clearly discriminated foreground focus of attention shading off into a dim background field of relationships. Moreover, he emphasizes that although the undiscriminated whole in the background is not clearly discriminated by consciousness, one can nevertheless feel its presence. Whitehead asserts: There are also differences in attention and in consequent clearness of awareness, shading off into a dim knowledge of events barely on the threshold of consciousness…. Within this present stream the perceived is not sharply differentiated from the unperceived; there is always an indefinite ‘beyond’ of which we feel the presence although we do not discriminate the qualities of the parts. (PNK 69; italics added)

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Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Whitehead clarifies that the illuminated center of immediate experience is determined by the constitutive act of selective attention governed by pragmatic aims, while other items recede into the vaguely felt presence of a dark background, or completely dismissed into utter blackness. In his later philosophical texts, Whitehead goes on to apply this phenomenological description of the perceptual field as having a clear foreground that shades into a dim penumbral background to characterize aesthetic experience of nature and its creative expression in the beauty of an artwork. Whitehead provides various phenomenological descriptions of this felt background of penumbral darkness in terms of what he calls “the brooding presence of the whole onto its various parts” (PR 176). This brooding presence of the whole signifies the brute causal efficacy of enveloping nature, dimly felt or prehended in the concrete aesthetic qualitative immediacy of lived experience as a vague undiscriminated background of affective feeling-tone, which forever presses in upon us in the penumbral darkness: In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feeling from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feelings of influence from vague things around us. (PR 176)

Above, Whitehead provides a splendid phenomenological description of the penumbral region of darkness in our aesthetic experience of nature. It is this dimly felt brooding presence of the whole in the vague indeterminate background horizon of aesthetic experience arising through perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy which surrounds the determinate sense data arising through perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Whitehead refers to this dimly felt background surrounding the vivid sense data of presentational immediacy as the “penumbral region” of darkness and shadows. For Whitehead, then, the function of imaginative art and literature is to reveal the brooding presence of the whole aesthetic continuum of nature coming from this penumbral region of darkness and shadows encircling sense data in the foreground, thus to disclose the profound beauty of hidden depths. One of the most intriguing aspects of Whitehead’s writings is his use of romantic nature poetry in support of his vision of nature as an aesthetic continuum of beauty and value. According to Whitehead, romantic nature poetry is an account of concrete aesthetically immediate experience, which acts to disclose nature a dynamic network of interrelated events that realize the intrinsic value of beauty as aesthetic quality. In chapter 5 titled “The Romantic Reaction” from SMW, Whitehead cites the

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British romantic nature poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and others, as overcoming the mechanistic view of nature articulated by scientific materialism based on the fallacy of vacuous actuality, by providing empirical testimony that all events in nature realize the intrinsic value of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. For Whitehead, the romantic nature poets establish an argument on behalf of a philosophy of organism that undercuts the fact/value dichotomy: “Both Shelly and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot be divorced from aesthetic values, and that these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts” (SMW 88). Romantic nature poetry, he argues, reveals the insight that “Aesthetic attainment is interwoven in the texture of realisation” (SMW 94). For Whitehead, the penumbral beauty of art, literature, and poetry is the vague background of darkness and shadows that elicits maximum depth of feeling. Moreover, this penumbral darkness of the felt background is described by Whitehead as a “mysterious presence” enveloping all phenomena. He states: “The brooding, immediate presence of things are an obsession to Wordsworth” (SMW 92). In his explanation of Wordsworth’s romantic nature poetry, he further asserts: [Wordsworth’s] theme in nature is . . . that mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we set up as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance. That is why he laughs with the daffodils, and finds in the primrose thoughts “too deep for tears.” (SMW 83)

He continues: Wordsworth’s greatest poem is, by far, the first book of The Prelude. It is pervaded by this sense of the haunting presences of nature. . . . Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others: ‘Ye Presences of Nature in the sky And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! . . . Haunting me thus among my boyish sports.’ (SMW 83-84)

Hence, for Whitehead the romantic nature poetry of Wordsworth evokes the mystery, depth, and wholeness of the aesthetic continuum of nature in the dark penumbral background, dimly felt as a mysterious, brooding, and haunting presence of the undiscriminated totality that always surrounds those parts discriminated at the center of the perceptual field. It is this poetic image of a penumbral shadow in the dark background that Whitehead uses as a literary metaphor to suggest the haunting presence of the whole in each part and each part as revealing the mysterious presence of whole.

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Art and the Unconscious Whitehead discusses how the penumbral beauty of darkness and shadows charactering an artwork springs from the depths of the unconscious. For Whitehead, the “penumbra of consciousness” (AI 249), or “penumbra of feeling” (AI 260), is to be explained by prehension (AI 176) as vague unconscious feelings of the whole in each part disclosed through the dimly felt qualitative background of aesthetically immediate experience. In contrast to “ap-prehension” denoting conscious awareness, and “com-prehension” denoting cognitive awareness, the Whiteheadian term “prehension” signifies a vague, unconscious, intuitive feeling of relationships to the surrounding environment in the vague penumbral background. Just as for Leibniz’s monadology there is a distinction between conscious apperception of parts and unconscious perception of the whole in each perspective, for Whitehead an actual occasion can have both conscious apprehension of focal elements and unconscious prehension of background elements in each perspective of the universe. Furthermore, Whitehead goes on to account for the penumbral beauty of art in terms of his theory of perception in three modes, whereby aesthetic sense qualities such as vivid colors make symbolic reference to this unconscious penumbral background of vague feeling-tone. According to Whitehead, the creative act from which an artwork springs is not only from the conscious mind, but also from the dark recesses of the deep unconscious: But that art which arises within clear consciousness is only a specialization of the more widely distributed art within dim consciousness or within the unconscious activities of experience. (AI 270; italics added)

He adds: “In this way the work of art is a message from the Unseen. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails” (AI 271). Whitehead analyzes the dark penumbral background of an artwork as a proposition, or lure for feeling, that aims toward novel recreation of experience with aesthetic delight. Moreover, in his discussion of the penumbral dimensions of art, Whitehead discusses how entertainment of a proposition or emotional lure is an unconscious creative activity: The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualized philosophers, has obscured the main function of propositions in the nature of things. They are not primarily for belief, but for feeling at the physical level of unconsciousness. (PR 186; italics added)

The unconscious or subconscious entertainment of an objectified proposition such as an artwork in its function as a lure for feeling, is further clarified as follows:

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A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for feeling. . . . Anyone who at bedtime consciously reviews the events of the day is subconsciously projecting them against the penumbral welter of alternatives. He is also unconsciously deciding feelings so as to maximize his primary feeling . . . (PR 187; italics added)

In Whitehead’s process aesthetics, the dim penumbral beauty of art is ultimately rooted in the creative activities of the deep unconscious. Here it is important to see how the conscious/unconscious model of depth psychology relates to the foreground/background model of radical empiricism. While the clear foreground of immediate experience is apprehended by consciousness, the dark penumbral background is vaguely felt or prehended in the subliminal regions of the deep unconscious. For Whitehead, then, the primary function of an artwork as a lure for feeling, is to elicit the dark penumbral background of the deep unconscious, which forever envelops the illuminated foreground focus of consciousness. Whitehead’s organismic metaphor of the penumbral shadow is a key to his phenomenology of immediate experience as characterized by the invariant foreground/background pattern of the perceptual field. Moreover, Whitehead’s metaphor of the penumbral shadow further operates as the explicit basis for his foreground/background model of beauty as manifest in the aesthetic experience of nature, art, and everyday life. Whitehead’s metaphor of a “penumbral shadow” is important not only to his phenomenology of perception, but also to his concept of aesthetic experience, his axiological doctrine of intrinsic value, and his concept of beauty, as well as his philosophy of art, literature, and poetry. Throughout the present volume, I refer to Whitehead’s characterization of art in terms of the fading beauty of “penumbral shadow” as penumbral beauty. Generally speaking, Whitehead describes the penumbral beauty of art as a function of patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground and background elements that reveal the boundless hidden depths of feelingtone in aesthetically immediate experience. In chapter 17 titled “Beauty” from Adventures of Ideas (1933), Whitehead develops a phenomenological profile of the “focus/fringe” or “foreground/background” structure of beauty in the perceptual field, wherein clear and distinct sense objects articulated in the foreground focus of attention gradually shade off into the bottomless depths of a vague, obscure, and dimly felt penumbral region of psychical overtones in the nonarticulated whole of an encompassing background field: But if one be kept at a lower intensity in the penumbra of feeling, it may act as a background. . . . This is the habitual state of human experience, a vast undiscriminated or dimly discriminated background of low intensity, and a clear foreground. (AI 260; italics added)

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It is precisely this undiscriminated background that Whitehead calls the “penumbra of feeling” (AI 260) or the “penumbra of consciousness” (AI 249) in his description of beauty. Or in terms his phenomenology of primordial perception, the discriminated foreground focus of attention represents a “small focal region of clear illumination,” whereas the expansive, vague, and remote undiscriminated background field signifies a “large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension” (PR 267; italics added). Whitehead and Dewey on the Penumbral Dimension of Art Already it has been discussed how both Whitehead and Dewey have formulated versions of a radically empirical process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy, wherein the basic ontological unit is an event or transactional situation constituted by a field of relations unified by directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Here I would like to further show how, similar to Whitehead’s analysis of aesthetic experience of art in terms of his poetic ideal of penumbral beauty, Dewey has used the metaphor of a “penumbral aura” to characterize an artwork in its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Like Whitehead, Dewey on one occasion also mentions this “penumbral” dimension of art based on the foreground/background structure of consummatory aesthetic experience. Furthermore, like Whitehead, Dewey formulates a concept of nature as an undivided aesthetic continuum of interactive events unified by pervasive quality with intrinsic value. In Art as Experience, Dewey analyzes the process of immediate experience as both instrumental and consummatory in an endsmeans continuum funded throughout by pervasive aesthetic value quality. By this view, immediate experience is not only “instrumental” as a means for realizing pragmatic aims, but is also consummatory as a qualitative aesthetic experience with intrinsic value signifying an end in itself. Dewey argues that when ordinary experience is funded by pervasive aesthetic quality, it functions “to restore the continuity between . . . works of art and the everyday events” (1980, 3). He articulates an organic, holistic, and nondualistic view of consummatory aesthetic experience and its expression in art as arising through transactions between foreground and background, organism and environment, or part and whole. For Dewey, aesthetic value is not localized just in the subject or in the object, in the spectator or in the artwork, but is spread and fused throughout the whole foreground/background situation as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Dewey’s transactional, contextual, and situational analysis of consummatory aesthetic value experience as framed for appreciative reception by an artwork, underscores how phenomena discriminated in the foreground, gradually recede into the vague undiscriminated wholeness of an enveloping qualitative background. The aesthetic quality pervading an experience of beauty in art and nature is characterized by its fore-

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ground/background structure, wherein the directly felt nonarticulated whole of the qualitative background functions to permeate and qualify all the parts articulated in the foreground: It is the background which is more than spatial because it enters into and qualifies everything in the focus. . . . We are accustomed to think of physical objects as having bounded edges. . . . But any experience the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points of a here and now in a whole that stretches out indefinitely. This is the qualitative “background.” (1980, 193; italics added)

Dewey then describes how the work of art produces mystical rapture by intensifying the directly felt qualitative background of the indeterminate enveloping horizon: “any experience becomes mystical in the degree in which the sense, the feeling, of the unlimited envelope becomes intense— as it may do in experience of an object of art” (1980, 193). He further explains: The immediately felt enveloping qualitative background is dimly experienced as an ever-receding horizon wherein, the margins shade into that indefinite expanse beyond which imagination calls the universe. This sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experience is rendered intense within the frame of a painting or poem ...About every explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped ... The undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole. (1980, 194)

For Dewey, all experience is qualitative, aesthetic, and valuable insofar as the discriminated focal objects are encircled with a dimly felt enveloping qualitative background. However, when the feeling of pervasive quality is intensified by the sense of merging into the felt wholeness of the qualitative background, it deepens into aesthetic seizure and mystical ecstasy. Dewey also describes “the aura and penumbra in which a work of art swims” (AE 123; italics added). Moreover, “the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole . . . felt as an expansion of ourselves” (AE 195). Hence, like Whitehead, Dewey gives a phenomenological account of consummatory aesthetic value experience and its imaginative expression in art as a penumbral aura characterizing the directly felt enveloping qualitative background of the perceptual field. Whitehead’s Aesthetic Perspectivism Whitehead further develops his phenomenology of the focus/field pattern of aesthetic experience with a clear foreground and a dark penumbral background in terms of his Leibnizian doctrine of spiritual mon-

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ads or perspectives. In such works as Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Modes of Thought, Whitehead describes an occasion of experience as a Leibnizian monad, metaphysical point, or perspective which views the entire universe from its own standpoint in the continuum of nature. The notion of perspective thus becomes a key metaphysical principle in Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. 6 It will be clarified how Whitehead’s axiological process metaphysics of nature as a pluralistic continuum of multiple overlapping aesthetic perspectives that aim to realize intrinsic value as beauty itself approximates in some respects Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Just as Nietzsche’s perspectivism attempts to overcomes nihilism through a transvaluation of values, Whitehead’s doctrine of aesthetic perspectives undermines the “fallacy of vacuous actuality.” Yet as I argue elsewhere in this volume, for Nietzsche the world is a nihilistic void, overcome only through the aesthetic perspective imposed upon an otherwise meaningless chaotic flux by his Dionysian overman, who superimposes a perspective through sheer will to power. By contrast, for Whitehead nature is a continuum of creative events, each of which is an objective aesthetic perspective of the cosmos attaining intrinsic value as beauty. It should be recalled that in Process and Reality, Whitehead explains his pluralistic multiverse of actual occasions as a reconstruction of Leibniz’s metaphysical doctrine of “monads,” each of which is a living mirror that reflects the world from its own perspective: This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an “actual occasion”; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process. (PR 80)

In Modes of Thought Whitehead rejects the fallacy of simple location for a Leibnizian theory of perspectival occasions understood as spiritual monads, each of which constitutes a “perspective” that mirrors totality from its own viewpoint as a microcosm of the macrocosm. For Whitehead, a monad is a novel, creative, and aesthetic perspective of the universe. Each perspective is described as having an illuminated focus that gradually shades into the penumbral shadow of a dark background. The clear focus of a perspective on the universe is the area viewed by conscious acts of “apprehension,” while the dark background is grasped by unconscious acts of prehension (feeling), just as for Leibniz the luminous aspect of a monadic perspective is seen by conscious “apperception,” while the obscure aspect is grasped by unconscious perception. It should be emphasized that Whitehead’s ecological concept of nature as an organization of multiple, diverse, and overlapping aesthetic perspectives of the universe is the basis for his axiological metaphysics of

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values, the ultimate value being that of beauty. Each immediately felt qualitative occasion of experience is a revised Leibnizian monad, metaphysical point, or perspective arising by a process of concrescence as a creative synthesis unifying many into one that aims toward production of aesthetic value, otherwise termed importance: “The generic aim of process is attainment of importance” (MT 12). He adds: Thus one characterization of importance is that it is that aspect of feeling whereby a perspective is imposed upon the universe of things felt. . . . The two notions of importance and of perspective are closely intertwined. (MT 11)

In this it is made clear that the importance or intrinsic value of a selfcreative occasion, is that it frames a new aesthetic perspective of the universe as directly felt from its own unique standpoint in the continuum of nature. Each occasion as a new perspective of totality realizes intrinsic value as “aesthetic significance,” “aesthetic worth,” or “aesthetic importance” (MT 121). A perspectival occasion spontaneously produced by an emergent act of concrescence, prehensive unification, or creative synthesis, is organized by sorting out the given initial data into a novel perspective with a clear focus and a dark penumbral background. This organization of data into a felt perspective with a focus/field pattern is constituted through a valuation process according to degrees of relevance based on selective attention governed by pragmatic interests. In each perspective, aesthetic importance is achieved by grading the multiplicity of given data so that the most relevant data are highlighted in the clarity of the foreground, while the less relevant data recede into the dim horizon, and irrelevant data are eliminated from feeling, reduced to zero relevancy, or dismissed into the remote periphery of total blackness in a dark penumbral background (MT 89). An aesthetic, novel, and unique perspective of totality emerges through a valuation process of inclusion and exclusion through positive or negative prehensions, thereby to constitute the foreground/background pattern of immediate experience. Each perspectival occasion has a moral aspect in that it aims to realize the intrinsic value of aesthetic importance for itself, for others, and for the whole (MT 111). The creative organization of occasions into novel aesthetic perspectives of the universe with a clear foreground and dark background is further described by Whitehead as characterizing “beauty,” and “beauty is a grand fact in the universe” (MT 120). Whitehead goes on to relate the aesthetic enjoyment of beauty to an “intuition of holiness” or “intuition of the sacred” underlying religious experience (MT 120). The intuition of holiness, like the aesthetic feeling of beauty, is an immediate experience of the whole in each part and each part as a disclosure of the whole. He thus describes philosophy as akin to “poetry” as well as “mysticism,” insofar as it provides new insights into penumbral depths as yet unspok-

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en (MT 174). For Whitehead, there is a continuity between art and religion in that both are grounded in primordial perception of qualitative immediacy, wherein the directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities of events also have numinous, religious and mystical content, revealing the directly felt depth, wholeness, and intensity of events in their felt quality. Throughout Modes of Thought, Whitehead continues to develop his phenomenological account of the invariant focus/fringe pattern of occasions found in the characterization of nature as an organization of multiple overlapping aesthetic perspectives with the intrinsic value of beauty. Here, as elsewhere, Whitehead reformulates Leibniz’s doctrine of perspectives, metaphysical points, or spiritual monads, each of which is a living mirror that reflects totality from its own viewpoint as a microcosm of the macrocosm. 7 He now describes a self-creative, novel, and aesthetic occasion of immediate experience as a “perspective of the universe” (MT 88). It is explained how a multiplicity of given initial data are fused into an emergent unity by the category of transmutation from the unique standpoint of each occasion in nature, so as to create a novel perspective of nature that realizes intrinsic value, otherwise termed aesthetic significance, aesthetic importance, aesthetic worth, or beauty. In each unique perspective, aesthetic importance is achieved by grading relevant data into a near-far perspective with a clear foreground and a vague background. Hence, in chapter 4 titled “Perspective,” Whitehead describes the focus/field structure of each novel aesthetic perspective in terms of an ultimate contrast between “clarity and vagueness”: The finite focus of clarity fades into an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond. . . . In this way, immediacy of finite existence refuses to be deprived of that infinitude of extension which is its perspective. (MT 83) In recent years there has been a surge of interest in points of convergence between Whitehead’s process metaphysics and the contemporary French deconstructivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. This interest has in part been elicited by Deleuze’s own remarks about the significance of Whitehead’s process thought. Deleuze refers to Whitehead’s Process and Reality as “one of the greatest books of modern philosophy” (1994, 284). In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993), Deleuze examines Leibniz’s doctrine of perspectival monads, as well as its reformulation in the organic process metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead, 8 Deleuze’s French deconstructionist analysis sees the Whiteheadian cosmos as the openness of a chaosmos devoid of any fixed ground, center, or closure, perpetually overflowing into a spontaneous creative play of irreducible multiplicities of vibrating relational events in a ceaseless flux of creative becoming. At one point, Deleuze explains the character of a monad or perspective as a geometrical conic section, whereupon an illuminated focus gradually shades into a dark background:

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More exactly, since monads have no openings, a light that has been “sealed” is lit in each one when it is raised to the level of reason. A whiteness is produced through all the tiny inner mirrors. It makes white, but shadow too: it makes the white that is confounded with the illuminated area of the monad, that soon becomes obscure or shades toward the dark background. . . . (1993, 32)

Deleuze further describes the geometric patterning of the monad as a conic section in aesthetic terms of chiaroscuro, the play of light and darkness in a painting: Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity. Chiaroscuro fills the monad following a series that can move in either of two directions: at one end is a dark background and at the other is light, sealed; when it is lit, the monad produces white light in an area set aside, but the white is progressively shaded, giving way to obscurity, to a thicker and thicker shadow, as it spreads toward the dark background in the whole monad. (1993, 32)

Whitehead adopts Leibniz’s doctrine of monads or perspectives of the universe, described in phenomenological terms as having a luminous foreground that shades off into a dark background. As Deleuze clarifies, Whitehead reconstructs Leibniz’s idea of a perspectival monad as a sealed, closed, or windowless substance devoid of relations, arriving at an organic process theory of multiple perspectives as relational vibrating events or interactive monads, already open onto the world, without having to pass through a window (1993, 81). Symbolic Reference At yet another level of analysis, Whitehead’s aesthetic ideal of penumbral beauty as typified by patterned harmonic contrast between an illuminated foreground and a dark penumbral background can be restated in terms of his theory of perception in three modes. According to Whitehead’s account, the empiricism of Hume recognizes only the clear and distinct sensations of presentational immediacy. Yet beneath the vivid data of sense perception in the foreground, there is the haunting, brooding presence of a dim penumbral background of relationships directly felt through perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. When sensations in the foreground act as symbols referring to the dim elements of causal efficacy in the background, the value of these otherwise empty or meaningless sense data are revealed in their aesthetic significance. Whitehead’s aesthetic ideal of penumbral beauty as understood in terms of his doctrine of perception in three modes can be illustrated as follows: Three Modes of Perception a. Causal Efficacy

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b. Presentational Immediacy c. Symbolic Reference PENUMBRAL BEAUTY AS A FUNCTION OF SYMBOLIC REFERENCE Penumbral Beauty as Patterned Contrasts of Light and Darkness Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic experience is formally articulated by his categoreal scheme, and his scheme of categories is based on imaginative generalization of aesthetic principles derived from art and literature (PR 279). According to his categoreal scheme, the ultimate metaphysical category is creativity (PR 21), or “creative synthesis” of many into one, which aims toward maximum production of aesthetic value quality. By this view, an occasion of experience aims toward “satis-

Figure 11.2.

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faction” through enjoyment of intensity of aesthetic delight by fulfillment of its categoreal conditions, such as intensity, harmony, and contrast. A minimum requirement for beauty is that there be a “mutual adaptation” or “harmony” of factors in an aesthetic occasion of experience (AI 252). To produce the maximum degree of beauty, there is a categoreal requirement for intensity as well as harmony in an occasion. Thus, a categoreal obligation for realizing intensity of aesthetic satisfaction in the beauty of felt quality is attainment of maximum depth of feeling through irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts. Here it will be shown how, for Whitehead, the aesthetic value of penumbral beauty as depth of feeling-tone is a function of patterned contrasts between light and darkness. For Whitehead, beauty is a function of irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between parts and the whole in a self-creative occasion of aesthetic experience. Appearance is beautiful when the qualitative objects which compose it are interwoven in patterned contrasts, so that the prehensions of the whole of its parts produces the fullest harmony of mutual support. By this is meant . . . the whole heightens the feelings for the parts, and the parts heighten the feelings for the whole, and for each other. This is harmony of feeling, and with harmony of feeling its objective content is beautiful. (AI 267-268: italics added)

In the technical lexicon of Whitehead’s organic process metaphysics, the aesthetic value of beauty arising through irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between parts and the whole is correlated with patterned contrasts between other pairs of opposites, such as appearance and reality, one and many, organism and environment, or foreground and background. For Whitehead, the richer the contrasts integrated into an experience the greater the intensity of aesthetic feeling. This is relevant to our analysis of penumbral beauty in Whitehead’s process aesthetics, wherein beauty now becomes a function of harmonic contrasts between foreground and background elements. Each occasion of aesthetic experience arises out of a process of creative synthesis unifying a multiplicity of relationships into a background field for the foreground focus of attention, whereupon the patterned harmonic contrast between foreground focus and background field is the primordial structure of beauty as depth of feeling-tone. Thus for Whitehead, beauty is a function of patterned contrasts between a luminous foreground and a dark background. According to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, intensity of aesthetic feeling arises as a function of contrasts: “This “aim at contrast” is the expression of the ultimate creative purpose that each unification shall achieve some maximum depth of intensity of feeling” (PR 114). And

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again, “Contrast elicits depth, and only shallow experience is possible when there is a lack of patterned contrast” (PR 114). The aesthetic quality of beauty as depth of feeling-tone characterized by the organismic metaphor of a penumbral shadow is attained through irreducible harmonic contrast between a clearly illuminated foreground focus of attention and the dimly felt background field constituted by an enveloping fringe of relationships. Whitehead describes the categoreal obligation that an event strives to incorporate the felt background of experiential immediacy to realize heightened intensity of feeling-tone, whereupon a diverse multiplicity of factors are integrated as harmonic contrasts, instead of being eliminated from feeling by negative prehensions: That the heightening of intensity arises from order such that the multiplicity of components in the nexus can enter explicitly feeling as contrasts, and are not dismissed into negative prehensions as incompatibilities. (PR 83)

Here the key point is that in each creative synthesis, diverse multiplicity is entered as patterned harmonic contrasts, instead of being dismissed into negative prehensions, or eliminated from feeling, as incompatible for creative synthesis into the unifying pattern of a new occasion of experience characterized by the aesthetic principle of unity in diversity. The descriptive account of beauty in art as a function of foreground/ background contrasts in Whitehead’s later writings such as Adventures of Ideas itself develops from his characterizations of aesthetic value experience in earlier writings such as Process and Reality. He writes: According to this account, the background in which the environment is set must be discriminated into two layers. There is first the relevant background, providing a massive systematic uniformity. . . . Secondly, there is the remote chaotic background which has merely an irrelevant triviality. . . . In the background there is triviality, vagueness, and massive uniformity; in the foreground discrimination and contrasts . . . (PR 112)

The foreground/background structure of an experience realizing aesthetic satisfaction by fulfillment of its categoreal demands, is now summed up as follows: “Satisfactions can be classified by reference to ‘triviality, ‘vagueness,’ ‘narrowness,’ ‘width’”(PR 11). Whitehead’s phenomenological account of aesthetic value intensity as a dynamic function of balanced complexity, or irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground and background elements, thus further articulates four sub-categories of the perceptual field, including: two background categories of (i) “triviality” and (ii) “vagueness; and two foreground categories of (i) “narrowness” and (ii) “width.” It is asserted that the categoreal condition for achieving maximum depth of intensity of aesthetic feeling in an occasion of experience, is achieved through the evocation of patterned har-

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monic contrasts between the “narrowness” and “width” characterizing the foreground focus of attention, as over against the “triviality” and “vagueness” of the encompassing background field (PR 111-112). The sub-categories of “triviality” and “vagueness” describe the dim remoteness and massive uniformity of the undiscriminated background field; while “narrowness” accounts for clarity of sense-objects discriminated in the foreground focus; and “width” allows for patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground focus and background field. Thus for Whitehead, beauty is a function of patterned contrasts between a luminous foreground with narrowness and width and a dark background with triviality and vagueness. Whitehead relates the irreducible foreground/background contrast producing an aesthetic experience of beauty to the harmonic contrast between appearance and reality: Thus it is Appearance which in consciousness is clear and distinct, and it is Reality which lies dimly in the background with its details hardly to be distinguished in consciousness. (AI 270)

By appearance is therefore meant those focal objects situated in the clearly articulated foreground as apprehended through vivid sense perception (presentational immediacy), while reality designates the nonarticulated whole in the background of the perceptual field as prehended or dimly felt in that dark penumbral region though perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. He writes, the Appearance is simplification of Reality, reducing it to a foreground of enduring individuals and to a background of undiscriminated occasions. Sense-perception belongs to Appearance. (AI 281)

Whitehead here clarifies that vivid sense perception in the clearly articulated foreground belongs to appearance, whereas the dimly felt causal relationships in the background designate the given reality from which each occasions springs. Thus, Whitehead’s phenomenological account of beauty as a dynamic function of irreducible harmonic contrasts between foreground and background elements, and its corresponding notion of patterned contrasts between appearance and reality, itself directly relates to his theory of perception in three modes, whereby sense data in the clear foreground make symbolic reference to dimly felt relationships in the vague penumbral background of aesthetic experience. All occasions of experience are said to enjoy the intrinsic value of beauty, or depth of feeling-tone, in that they arise through a novel, emergent, creative synthesis that harmonizes a multiplicity of feelings or prehensions into irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground and background components: “Each occasion lifts some components into primacy and retreats others into a background enriching the total enjoyment” (AI 226). Moreover, each occasion or aesthetic event is

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Figure 11.3. Penumbral Beauty as a Function of Patterned Contrasts between a Luminous Foreground and a Dark Background.

dipolar, having both a mental pole and a physical pole. The physical pole is conformal, or receptive in nature, insofar as it feels (prehends) the objective given reality of the past as the directly felt background of causal efficacy from which creative synthesis begins. Describing the operation of the physical pole, Whitehead writes: The objective content of the initial phase of reception is the real antecedent world, as given for that occasion. This is the “reality” from which that creative advance starts. (AI 210)

Yet the mental pole is primarily originative in nature, insofar as it introduces spontaneous emergent creative novelty into the present occasion of experience, thus giving rise to appearance as over against the objective reality of stubborn fact inherited from the past: “In other words, ‘appear-

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ance’ is the effect of the activity of the mental pole, whereby the qualities and coordinations of the given physical world undergo transformation” (AI 211). Furthermore, each dipolar occasion elicits beauty, emotional intensity, or depth of feeling-tone, by seeking “contrast between the Appearance resulting from the operations of the mental pole and the inherited Realities of the physical pole” (AI 258). In this generic sense, then, each occasion of experience with directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality is comprehended as a natural work of art, insofar as it arises through an emergent act of creative synthesis unifying the many into a patterned harmonic contrast between the given reality of the background field and the simplified appearance in foreground focus of attention: The Appearance is a simplification by a process of emphasis and combination. Thus the enduring individuals, with their wealth of emotional significance, appear in the foreground. In the background there lie a mass of undistinguished occasions providing the environment with its vague emotional tone. In a general sense, the Appearance is a work of Art, elicited from the primary Reality. (AI 281; italics added)

Thus, a dipolar occasion of aesthetic experience is a natural work of art that dimly feels the whole universe in the penumbral background of darkness at the physical pole, yet introduces spontaneous emergent creative novelty in the illuminated foreground at the mental pole. All self-creative events with the beauty of directly felt aesthetic value quality are natural works of art in the generic sense that they interweave appearance and reality into patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground and background, or focus and field, thereby to express the organic interdependence of parts and the whole as a microcosm of the macrocosm in each perspectival occasion of experience: Appearance is beautiful when the qualitative objects which oppose it are interwoven in patterned contrasts, so that the prehension of the whole of its parts produce the fullest harmony of mutual support. . . . The whole heightens the feelings for the parts, and the parts heighten the feelings for the whole; and with harmony of feeling its objective content is beautiful. (AI 267-268)

In the passage cited above, Whitehead thus provides a definition of beauty that characterizes his later writings. Beauty is a creative synthesis of many into one culminating in a novel occasion having directly felt aesthetic quality with patterned harmonic contrasts, such that the new qualitative whole enhances the feelings of its constituent parts, just as the parts enhance feelings for the whole. When distinguishing human art from natural art in the generic sense Whitehead writes: “Art is the purposeful adaptation of Appearance to Reality” (AI 267). All self-creative aesthetic events in nature seek attainment of beauty, or maximum depth of intensity of feeling-tone, by intro-

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ducing patterned contrasts between appearance resulting from novel originations of the mental pole in the illuminated foreground, and the causally inherited reality of the physical pole in the dimly felt penumbral background, and in this generic sense are creative works of art. Human art involves much greater degrees of emergent creativity, novelty, and originality at the mental pole, such that the distinguishing characteristic of human art lies in its “artificiality and its finiteness” (AI 270). He elucidates this characteristic of human art as follows: “The work of Art is a fragment of nature with the mark on it of a finite creative effort, so that it stands alone against the vague infinity of its background” (AI 271). There are thus at least three major aspects of Whitehead’s technical analysis of art: (i) The first aspect of Whitehead’s theory of human art is that “the type of truth which human art seeks lies in the eliciting of the background to haunt those objects presented for clear consciousness” (AI 270). This aspect emphasizes that the function of human art is to use the simplified appearance of clear sense-data articulated in the foreground focus of attention to disclose the dimly felt nonarticulated whole of the encompassing background field as the inherited reality of the given past. Moreover, it is this dimly felt penumbral background field or fringe of relationships arising through perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy that Whitehead depicts through his organic metaphor of a “penumbral shadow.” (ii) The second aspect is expressed by his statement that “art is the purposeful adaptation of Appearance to Reality” (AI 267). This aspect emphasizes the high degree of creative novelty and emergent spontaneous originality springing from the “mental pole” of dipolar occasions, such that the appearance of novel articulations introduced into the foreground focus of attention are distinct from the initial given reality of causal feeling received from the nonarticulated background arising through the embodied “physical pole.” (iii) Beauty is elicited through interweaving of appearance and reality, thereby evoking maximum intensity of feeling through irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between creative articulations of parts in the foreground focus of attention, and the dimly felt nonarticulated whole in the penumbral shadow of the background field. According to Whitehead, the aesthetic value of penumbral beauty is constituted by irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between a luminous foreground and a dark background. Otherwise stated, for Whitehead the aesthetic value of penumbral beauty is a function of the play of light and darkness or clarity and vagueness. Ultimately, the aesthetic value of penumbral beauty arising by contrasts between an illuminated foreground and a dark background is production of maximum depth of feeling.

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Whitehead’s Penumbral Beauty and Foucault’s Philosophy of Art Whitehead’s view of art as disclosing the vague penumbral beauty of darkness can itself be located within an historical framework by means of the analysis of Western visual art developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). In The Order of Things (1994), Foucault provides an archaeological excavation of the history of visual art from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries by means of successive epistemic orders (epistemes), otherwise termed historical a prioris, conceptual grids, cultural codes, or perceptual schema. According to Foucault, there are three major episteme in the history of Western visual art leading into the period of modernist painting: (1) the Renaissance, extending from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century; (2) the classical era, the seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth; and (3) the modern era, which for Foucault, begins at the close of the eighteenth century and continues to the present time. Here I will underscore the epistemic shift from classical to modern art. Foucault’s archaeological analysis of the historical conditions for the emergence of art reveals how classical art is based on representation, whereby the function of painting is to represent, reflect, or imitate by making external reference to an outer world. Yet with the advent of modern art, there is a disjunctive “rupture” or epistemic shift whereby the artwork becomes nonrepresentational. According to Foucault, this disruptive epistemic mutation from the “representational” art of classical painting, to the post-representational art of modernist painting, is initiated by Kadinsky, Manet, Klee, Magritte, and others. As clarified especially in Foucault’s Philosophy of Art by Joseph J. Tanke (2009, 46-51), in his archaeological investigation of modernist art, Foucault discusses how with the discovery of organic structure in the natural world, art begins to disclose the deep, vague, ambiguous, dark, and invisible dimension arising through a play of hidden forces operating beneath those clearly visible elements in perception. Foucault himself sums up this epistemic shift from the representational to the modernist period of visual art as follows: Thus, European culture is inventing a depth for itself in what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables . . . but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history. From now on things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself, perhaps blurred and darkened by its obscurity . . . that is hidden down below, in those depths. Visible forms, their connections, the blank spaces, that isolate them and surround their outlines—all these will now be presented to our gaze only in an already composed state, already articulated in that nether darkness that is fomenting them with time. (Foucault: 1994, 251-252; italics added)

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The clear sensory objects depicted by the classical period of representational art is here exposed as “a superficial glitter above an abyss” (Foucault: 1994, 251). According to Foucault, in this post-representational period of modern art, there will now be an effort to discover a new depth beyond representation, as revealed by a deep abyss of darkness, vagueness, and ambiguity, thereby to show the invisible beneath the visible. In such a manner, Foucault’s archaeological excavation of modern art, elucidates an historical framework of successive episteme which can be applied toward clarifying the emergence of Whitehead’s organic process view of art, wherein representation of clear sense-objects discriminated in the foreground of an artwork, is itself a glimmer of light above a deep abyss disclosed as the beauty of an undiscriminated dark penumbral background. 9 Kant, Heidegger, and Whitehead on Truth and Beauty in Art There is at once a striking convergence between Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which gives a phenomenological description of reality as dynamic process, and Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), itself giving a phenomenological account of human existence as a being-in-time. Here I will focus upon some points of convergence between Whitehead and Heidegger on the relation between truth and beauty in a work of art. Whitehead holds that the beauty of art has the truth-function of disclosure, thereby to elicit the dark penumbral background of dimly felt relationships to the whole encompassing sense-objects appearing in a clear foreground. This Whiteheadian doctrine of art establishes a parallel with Heidegger’s phenomenological account of beauty in art as having the primordial truth of disclosure, which reveals a background horizon of openness whereby phenomena radiate into unhiddeness, presence, and nonconcealment. In this way, both Whitehead and Heidegger argue that the beauty of an artwork contains the truth of disclosure, thus to counter the Kantian claim that art has beauty, yet is devoid of truth. It has been seen how in his axiological process aesthetics, Whitehead espouses the primacy of beauty when he writes: “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). The function of art is disclosure of beauty in nature and life. Making reference to the Platonic trinity of values, he underscores the relationship of goodness to the beauty of art: “Goodness is the third member of the trinity which traditionally has been assigned as the complex aim of art: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” (AI 268). Explaining the moral dimension related to aesthetic experience of beauty in art and nature, he adds, “The real world is good when it is beautiful” (AI 268). Whitehead makes a further claim that the beauty of an artwork is related to not only goodness but also to truth:

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The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation. The Truth that for such extremity of Beauty is wanted is that truth-relation whereby Appearance summons up new resources of feeling from the depths of Reality. It is a Truth of feeling, and not a Truth of verbalization. (AI 267; italics added)

The truth of beauty in an artwork is discovery of hidden depths of feeling-tone from that given reality in the vague undiscriminated penumbral background that always surrounds the appearance of an aesthetic object in the clearly discriminated foreground of the perceptual field. Whitehead further elucidates this relation between truth and beauty in an artwork as follows: The deliverances of clear and distinct consciousness require criticism by reference to elements in experience which are . . . dim, massive and important. These dim elements provide for art that final background apart from which its effects fade. The type of Truth which human art seeks lies in the eliciting of the background to haunt the objects presented for clear consciousness. (AI 270)

In this key passage Whitehead explicitly addresses the problem of the relation between beauty and truth in the work of art. For Whitehead, the penumbral region of shadows and darkness characterizing the truth revealed in the beauty of art refers to the dimly felt background of aesthetically immediate experience, which discloses the felt wholeness, continuity, and depth of objects discerned in the foreground. The truth of beauty in a creative artwork functions to elicit the dark penumbral background of dimly felt relationships to the whole aesthetic continuum of nature. Insofar as the truth of beauty in art discloses the hidden depths of the felt penumbral background of experiential immediacy, it reveals the aesthetic significance of an occasion as a function of relatedness. Thus, the truthfunction of an artwork is to bring clarity to the vague and inarticulate feelings from a dim penumbral region, thereby to manifest the mysterious beauty of hidden depths. One of the key problems in the history of the philosophy of art since Kant is the relation between truth and beauty. From the above it can be seen that Whitehead explicitly argues for the truth-function of beauty in art. For Kant, however, an artwork has beauty yet is devoid of truth. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant developed his famous view that beauty is a “disinterested delight,” insofar as aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime in matters of taste are grounded in an impartial artistic attitude of disinterested contemplation. Kant asserts, “The judgment of taste is aesthetic” (§I: 41). Based on his rigid dualism between subject and object, Kant explains that the determination of the beautiful by a judgment of taste is not an act of understanding, which refers the representation (G. Vorstellung) of the object with the view toward cognition, but is determined by a “free play” of imagination, understanding, and other

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faculties, which instead makes reference only to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Accordingly, a judgment of taste in the beautiful is not cognitive, and hence not logical, but aesthetic, which means that it is one whose determining ground must be pure subjective feeling (§I:41). Kant regards aesthetic judgments of beauty, which are subjectively grounded in an impartial aesthetic attitude of disinterested delight, as having “subjective universal validity,” thus to overcome relativism. Yet aesthetic judgments in matters of taste regarding the beauty of art and the sublime cannot make an “objective universal validity claim,” as do logical judgments of truth or falsity (grounded in the rational objectivity of a priori universal categories of understanding), or moral judgments of right and wrong (grounded in the rational objectivity of the categorical imperative as a moral test of universalizability). Otherwise stated, aesthetic judgments of taste in the beautiful are not governed by a rule, as is the case for moral judgments of goodness, or logical judgments of truth. Hence, an aesthetic judgment regarding the beauty of nature or art is based on a purely subjective feeling of disinterested delight, with no objective truth value or cognitive meaning. Heidegger has given a significant response to Kant’s claim that there is no objective truth or cognitive meaning in an artwork, but only a subjective feeling of beauty. In his 1936 treatise The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger proclaims: “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (1977, 183). Heidegger develops a nondualistic ontology which argues counter to Kant’s dualistic position, holding that while the beauty of art does not have logical truth as “correspondence” between subjective ideas and objective facts, it does have another mode of truth: namely, the primordial truth of ancient Greek aletheia—openness, unhiddenness, or unconcealedness. He thus asserts: “Truth means . . . aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings” (1977, 173). Moreover, with regard to the beauty of art in its relation to truth, he writes: “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness” (1977, 178). He adds, “Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of beings” (1977, 185). According to Heidegger, philosophy as poetic thinking discloses the primordial truth of beauty as unconcealedness by opening up a cultural-historical world, horizon, or context in a great work of art. For Heidegger, the beauty of art is therefore one of the basic ways that truth as aletheia or openness happens as an event of ontological disclosure. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, several competing notions of truth have emerged, including truth as “correspondence,” or correctness between subjective ideas and objective facts; truth as “coherence” within a conceptual scheme; and the “pragmatic” theory of truth as usefulness, whereby concepts are instruments used by an organism adapting to its environment within a problematic situation. It was Heidegger who introduced the “phenomenological” theory of truth, based on the ancient Greek concept of aletheia or unconcealedness as the hori-

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zon of disclosure. In his phenomenological ontology Heidegger argues that the beauty of an artwork shows forth the primordial truth of ancient Greek aletheia as an event of ontological disclosure, whereby phenomena are revealed by presencing into the surrounding horizon of openness, unhiddenness, and nonconcealment. It is this phenomenological notion of truth as disclosure of the horizon, background, or context of a culturalhistorical world, that Heidegger sees as revealed by the beauty of a great artwork, such a painting by van Gogh, a poem by Hölderlin, or an ancient Greek temple. The key insight here is that both Whitehead and Heidegger view the beauty of art as having the truth-function of disclosure. Heidegger argues that the beauty of an artwork has a poetic function of dis-closing or opening-up the mysterious presence of existence as the Being of beings in the contextual horizon of a world. Whitehead holds that the beauty of an artwork discloses truth as an encompassing field of relationships by which phenomena are constituted in the dimly felt background of immediate experience. For Heidegger, the beauty of art has the primordial truth of openness in that it discloses the mystery of surrounding horizons-phenomena usually hidden from view. It can thus be said that Heidegger, like Whitehead, argues that an artwork discloses truth as well as beauty, and that the truth of beauty in art functions to elicit the vague background horizon of presence, mystery, and depth. Similar to Heidegger’s phenomenology of the artwork, which describes the mystery of horizons-phenomena encircling all focal actualities in the region of openness, Whitehead provides a phenomenological description of directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality in immediate experience of nature and art as characterized by its foreground/background pattern of beauty. Similar to Heidegger’s phenomenology of the artwork, Whitehead argues that the beauty of art has its own kind of truth-relation. In Whitehead’s own words: “This end, which is the purpose of art, is two-fold—namely Truth and Beauty. The perfection of art has only one end, which is Truthful Beauty” (AI 267). Next, he clarifies the type of truth relating to the beauty of art: “It is a Truth of feeling, not a Truth of verbalization. . . . The Truth of supreme Beauty lies beyond the dictionary meaning of words” (AI 267). Whitehead then goes on to elucidate how the specific mode of truth signified by the beauty of art is the vague feeling of an unarticulated whole in the peripheral background of the perceptual field: “The type of Truth which human art seeks lies in the eliciting of the background to haunt the objects presented for clear consciousness” (AI 270). In his Foreground/Background model of penumbral beauty in art and the aesthetic experience of nature, Whitehead argues that each novel occasion arises by an act of creative synthesis that unifies the many into a background field for the foreground focus of attention, and that the irreducible patterned harmonic contrast between foreground and back-

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ground constitutes the elementary form of beauty. Furthermore, he argues that the kind of truth that the beauty of art seeks is disclosure of the indeterminate whole in the felt background of immediate experience. For Whitehead, the truth-value of beauty in art is that it discloses the given reality of dimly felt relationships to the vast undiscriminated wholeness of nature presented in the penumbral background of darkness and shadows, that always encircles the simplified appearance of those clearly illuminated sense objects discriminated in the foreground focus of attention. For Heidegger, the beauty of art contains the ancient Greek primordial truth of aletheia as openness or dis-closure of the peripheral world horizon encircling all objects at the center of the perceptual field. According to Heidegger’s later writings, the truth-disclosing function of art as unconcealedness is not manifested by calculative thinking based on the correspondence theory of truth, but is instead a function of poetic or meditative thinking. For Heidegger, poetic thinking is a “letting be” of that which shows itself by presencing into the openness of the horizon. Indeed, the concept of “disclosure” is also of central importance to Whitehead’s concept of philosophy. Whitehead views philosophy as akin to both poetry and mysticism as direct insight into penumbral depths as yet unspoken (MT 174). Moreover, Whitehead further proposes: “The aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure” (MT 49). For Whitehead, philosophy thus has a poetic function of eliciting aesthetically immediate experience as sheer disclosure of concrete phenomena in their hidden depths. As said by Isabelle Stengers in Thinking With Whitehead: Whitehead associates with the goal of philosophy, an experience of “sheer disclosure” (MT, 49), rather than the concepts themselves. The concepts are required by the transformation of experience, but it is this disclosure, that has, and always will have, the last word. (2011, 17-21)

In his comparative study titled Heidegger and Whitehead, Ron L. Cooper (1993) holds that Whitehead’s philosophical method of radical empiricism as “sheer disclosure” of events in their experiential openness is akin to Heidegger’s phenomenological method of revealing events in their original truth as aletheia, understood as openness, unconcealedness, or disclosure. The essence of this [phenomenological/radically empirical] method is captured in Whitehead’s remark that “the aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure” [MT 49]. . . . Whitehead’s concern for disclosing the immediate content of experience certainly reveals at least an alignment with the goals of phenomenology (1993, 138). In the conclusion of his study, Cooper explains how both Whitehead and Heidegger develop a phenomenological method of describing lived existence that results in a disclosure of experiential openness:

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Heidegger’s notion of our experiental openness has its analogue in Whitehead’s view that “events are the relata of the fundamental homogeneous relation of ‘extension’” [PNK 61]. The actual occasion openly extends toward its past to appropriate its past and to aim these appropriations toward its future. In this way, “every event extends over other events which are part of itself, and every event is extended over by other events of which it is a part . . . both philosophers seek to disclose by means of transcendental inquiry the existential structures that make experiential openness possible. (1993, 138)

The studies cited above clarify how both Whitehead and Heidegger share a phenomenological orientation toward ontological dis-closure of the experiential openness of events. Yet these studies do not discuss how philosophical disclosure of events in their openness also pertain to the beauty of aesthetic experience and their imaginative expression in art. I would therefore like to elucidate how for Whitehead, as for Heidegger, the kind of truth to which the beauty of an artwork aspires, is the phenomenological truth of disclosure, which functions to dis-close or open-up the surrounding background horizon of mystery, wholeness, and depth. In Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, the primordial truth of beauty in art is an event of ontological disclosure which reveals the Being of beings, the mysterious presence of what is present. For Heidegger, the truth of beauty in art is the event of presencing into nonconcealment. Whitehead’s phenomenology of perception underscores how the truth of beauty in art and aesthetic experience is disclosure of the vaguely felt relationships to the surrounding environment of society and nature in the background field that encompasses the foreground focus of attention. In Whitehead’s phenomenological description of concrete, aesthetically immediate experience of nature, the brooding presence of the whole that haunts the parts is the great theme of Wordsworth in British romantic nature poetry. In Heidegger’s phenomenology, the ontological disclosure or primordial openness of the Being of beings as the presencing of what is present is brought into unconcealedness by the German poetry of Goethe, Rilke, Hölderlin, and others. Hence, it can be said that both Whitehead and Heidegger develop a phenomenological orientation based on a description of beauty and its truth-function in art by reference to the mysterious background horizon encircling all focal actualities at the vague outermost periphery of the perceptual field. Also, just as Whitehead’s process aesthetics influenced by Heraclitean flux argues that the beauty of art is a function of contrasts between foreground and background, Heidegger likewise underscores the agonistic conflict of Heraclitean “strife” between earth and world or closing and opening in the artwork. Moreover, just as the later Heidegger underscores the poetic character of philosophy as poiêsis, which brings forth into openness/dis-closure the mysterious beauty of the surrounding horizon, so the later writings of Whitehead emphasize that philosophy is akin to mysticism and poetry

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(MT 174), insofar as it yields new insights into the beauty of hidden depths arising from out of the dimly felt background of aesthetically immediate experience. This understanding of the beauty in art and poetry as revealing the primordial truth of sheer disclosure of enveloping horizons-phenomena is one of the deepest insights in the phenomenological descriptions of experiential openness articulated by Whitehead and Heidegger. The Upshot It has been seen that for Whitehead, each self-creative occasion of experience is an emergent, novel, and aesthetic perspective of totality that expresses the whole universe from its own unique standpoint as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Whitehead’s axiological metaphysics describes how each occasion of experience arises through concrescence as an emergent creative synthesis of diverse multiplicity into novel unity, thereby to produce a new aesthetic perspective of the universe. Each work of art likewise opens a novel aesthetic perspective of the cosmos. An aesthetic perspective is described in phenomenological terms as a focus/field event, with a clearly discriminated foreground focus of attention that gradually shades into the undiscriminated horizon of a dark penumbral background field. For Whitehead, the penumbral beauty of an artwork is therefore elicited by a near-far perspective of an articulated foreground disclosing the truth of a nonarticulated whole vaguely felt in a dark background. According to Whitehead’s process aesthetics, the dark penumbral region of an artwork as a vague horizon of alternate possibilities is a proposition or a suggestion that operates as a “lure for feeling” for enjoyment of aesthetic delight, thereby to open up a diverse multiplicity of new aesthetic perspectives of the universe. As he also states, the aim of philosophy is akin to both poetry and mysticism, insofar as it aims toward an aesthetically immediate experience culminating in sheer disclosure of penumbral depths. From the standpoint of Whitehead’s process aesthetics, then, the function of art, literature, and poetry is to disclose the mysterious beauty of hidden depths, by raising into clarity the vague and indistinct overtones of feeling from a dim penumbral region of shadows and darkness in the nonarticulated background field, vaguely felt as that brooding presence of the whole that forever haunts those clearly articulated parts illuminated in the foreground focus of attention. NOTES 1. Steve Odin, “The Penumbral Shadow: A Whiteheadian Perspective on the Yūgen Style of Art and Literature in Japanese Aesthetics,” in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Vol. 12, No. 1 (March 1985).

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2. The solidarity thesis underlying Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, whereby there is a mutual immanence between interrelated occasions in the extensive continuum of nature, is analyzed at length in Jorge Luis Nobo’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968). 3. See Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis by Leemon B. McHenry. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). 4. In his book A Whiteheadian Aesthetic (1961), Donald Sherburne argues that an artwork has the ontological status of a Whiteheadian proposition, or a “lure for feeling,” which seduces the subjective aim of an occasion of experience into suspending its usual aims, and substituting a deeper aim of aesthetic recreation of an artwork. 5. For an account of phenomenological method in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, see Don Ihde’s Experimental Phenomenology (1977). 6. In his book Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983), Stephen C. Ross argues that Perspective is the key principle in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme of categories: “Among these principles is one which I believe to be the key to Whitehead’s philosophy—the principle of perspective” (1983, vii). Ross’s study is significant in that it underscores the centrality of Perspective in Whitehead’s metaphysics. However, Ross’s study completely neglects the relation between Whitehead’s principle of perspective and the realization of aesthetic importance, intrinsic value and beauty. 7. G. W. F. Leibniz (1646-1716) develops his cosmological theory of monads, perspectives, or metaphysical points, in his Monadology and other works. See Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics/Monadology, translated by F. R. Montgomery (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1973.) 8. For a detailed study of Whiteheadian process metaphysics from the standpoint of Gilles Deleuze’s French postmodernism, see Secrets of Becoming: Negotiating Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler, edited by Roland Faber and Andrea M. Stephenson. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.) 9. See Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). My presentation of Foucault’s archaeological method of analyzing modern art is based on my colleague Joseph J. Tanke’s outstanding book, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2009).

TWELVE Yūgen as the Beauty of Darkness in Japanese Aesthetics

Foremost among the principles of beauty in the medieval Japanese canons of taste was the aesthetic value quality of yūgen (幽玄), meaning “shadows and darkness.” Insofar as the aesthetic category of yūgen is associated with the beauty of myō (妙) or “mystery,” it is also understood as the profound beauty of “mystery and depth.” In contrast to aesthetic categories such as aware or the sad beauty of evanescent forms, or the wabi-sabi aesthetic of folkcrafts with the faded natural beauty of use in everyday life, the aesthetic category of yūgen is nearer to what romanticism terms “the sublime”—the awesome beauty of the formless dimensions of phenomena in the indeterminate background horizon of nature. In The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics, Hisamatsu Sen’ichi explains the historical development of the Japanese poetic ideal of yūgen from its origins in ancient Chinese Buddhist thought as follows: Though the term yūgen originated in China, where it is to be found in documents dating from Later Han [22-250 A.D.] to T’ang [618-907], it was never treated by the Chinese as a principle of poetic criticism. Even in Japan, it seems to have been purely a Buddhist word at the outset. . . . By the late Heian period (late Middle Antiquity), yūgen had come into use as a criterion in poetry contests. (1963, 33)

Hence, while the term yūgen (Chinese: yu-hsüan) has its roots in Chinese thought, it became a fully explicit aesthetic category of beauty in medieval Japanese Buddhist poetics. It is this poetic ideal of yūgen as the beauty of shadows and darkness or mystery and depth which became the pervasive aesthetic quality characterizing medieval Japanese literature and art that flourished under the aegis of Zen. As one source puts it: 211

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Japanese Buddhist philosophy of art and literature points to the mysterious beauty of yūgen as the most important poetic ideal in the geidō (芸道) or religio-aesthetic tradition of medieval Zen Buddhism. The atmospheric beauty of mystery and depth represented by yūgen both incorporates, and yet transcends, the ephemeral aesthetic quality of aware as the tragic beauty of perishability. Yūgen is an ethereal beauty of dark mystery combined with a sad feeling of perishability. Whereas aware evokes melancholy feelings of sadness and beauty through sympathy with transitory aesthetic qualities of perishing events, yūgen involves a deeper mode of nonattachment to phenomena, whereby one instead focuses not on the evanescent colorful blossoms themselves, but rather on the patterns of shadows which they cast as they recede into the surrounding void of profound darkness, thereby to conjure an aura of mystery and depth. Thus, whereas aware is depicted by images of impermanence such as evanescent, brightly colored blossoms, yūgen is illustrated by pictorial images of monochrome blackness wherein the evanescent phenomena discriminated in the foreground appear to fade into the indeterminate depths of an encompassing background field of darkness and shadows. Yet, the sad beauty of aware is itself a component in the mysterious beauty of yūgen, wherein evanescent phenomena fade into the black void of a night sky. The term yūgen is composed of two characters (yū-gen, 幽玄), that literally designate “shadowy darkness” or “dim blackness,” and by extension, “hidden depth” or “profound mystery.” Izutsu Toshihiko explains the poetic term yūgen as follows: Yū, the first component of the word yūgen usually connotes faintness or shadowy-ness, in the sense that it negates the self-subsistent solidity of existence, or that it suggests insubstantiality. . . . Gen, the second component of the word means dimness, darkness or blackness. It is the darkness caused by profundity; so dark that our physical eyesight cannot possibly reach its depth. . . . (1981, 27)

As emphasized by Izutsu above, the Japanese aesthetic category of yūgen or beauty of darkness and shadows functions to deconstruct the solid character of objects to reveal their emptiness, nothingness, or insubstantiality. Moreover, the darkness of yūgen is a profound beauty that functions to manifest the bottomless hidden depths of phenomena beyond the range of sense perception. The yūgen ideal of beauty was first introduced into the canons of taste in medieval Japanese poetics by the leading waka (31 syllable) poets and theorists of the Kamakura period (1192-1333), especially Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204), Kamo no Chōmei (1153-1216), and Fujiwara no Tei-

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ka (1162-1241). Although the ideal of yūgen was employed as the standard of literary criticism in the area of waka poetry for several centuries before Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), the foremost author and theorist of classical nō theater, it was with him that it was finally raised to its full meaning as the unifying aesthetic principle underlying all of the arts in traditional Japanese geidō—the “Dao of aesthetics.” In Zeami’s words: Yūgen is considered to be the mark of supreme attainment in all of the arts and accomplishments. In the art of nō in particular the manifestation of yūgen is of first importance. (Tsunoda: 1958, Vol. 1, p. 283)

For Zeami, the nō actor communicates the mysterious beauty of yūgen through aesthetic symbolism. Influenced by the Japanese school of Esoteric (Mikkyō, 密教) Buddhism, each action by the nō actor is a symbolic act of body, speech, and mind that suggests the boundless depths of aesthetic feeling in the dark background of emptiness or nothingness. Also, influenced by Zen, for Zeami the nō actor’s stage presence is based on the awareness of emptiness in mushin (無心), no-mind. Kamo no Chōmei (1153-1216), the second major waka poet and theorist during the Kamakura period, went on to define the beauty of yūgen or shadowy darkness in terms of his key notion of yojō, or “overtones of feeling.” Chōmei explicitly identifies yūgen with yojō, or overtones of feeling, while also providing an example of a tranquil scene of monochrome darkness in autumn dusk: According to the views of those who have penetrated into the realm of yūgen, the importance lies in yojō. . . . On an autumn evening, for example, there is no color in the sky, nor any sound, and, although we cannot give a definite reason for it, we are somehow moved to tears. A person lacking in sensitivity finds nothing particular in such a sight, he just admires the cherry blossoms and scarlet autumn leaves that he can see with his own eyes. (cited by LaFleur: 1983, 99, 177)

Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), the third major waka poet of the Kamakura period, has composed the waka poem most often cited by Japanese literary critics as epitomizing the aesthetic principles of yūgen and yojō. Teika’s poem does not celebrate the melancholy beauty of aware symbolized by evanescent cherry blossoms or scarlet maple leaves in the clearly discriminated foreground, but the mysterious beauty of yūgen symbolized by the enveloping void of autumn dusk in the undiscriminated background of twilight darkness. All around, no flowers in bloom Nor maple leaves in glare, A solitary fisherman’s hut alone On the twilight shore In the autumn eve.

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Izutsu remarks on Teika’s celebrated waka poem about autumn dusk as follows: “In this poetic field only a solitary hut remains positively articulated in the twilight faintness of the atmosphere as if half diffused into it” (1981, 51). There, Izutsu emphasizes the atmospheric character of this Japanese sense of mysterious beauty as yūgen in Teika’s poetry. In his analysis of Teika’s poem, Izutsu gives a phenomenological description of yūgen as atmospheric beauty where an insubstantial object in the foreground shades off into the surrounding monochrome blackness of a dark background, thereby suffusing the whole landscape of nature as its pervasive aesthetic quality. William LaFleur sums up the consensus of leading scholars that the profound beauty of yūgen signified the emergence of a new “depth” (fukasa, 深さ) within the Japanese canons of taste (1983, 80). LaFleur goes on to describe the profound beauty of yūgen in Japanese literature as an “epiphany of depth” (1983, 131). Moreover, he clarifies how the “depth” of yūgen is itself related to the theory and practice of Tendai Buddhism, which predated the emergence of Zen in Japan. To begin with, the founders of twelfth-century waka poetry such as Shunzei no Teika (1114-1204) and Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), make explicit the connection between poetry and Tendai Buddhist teachings. LaFleur develops the central importance of the Tendai meditation practice called shikan (止観) or “tranquility and insight,” thereby cultivating the detached contemplative awareness required for seeing the mysterious beauty of yūgen. 1 It should be underscored that the mysterious beauty of yūgen, as well as the sad beauty of aware, are both alike modes of evanescent beauty. Earl Miner explains: “The beauty of aware, which struck the heart with such force, like the depths of mystery called yūgen, was usually a reminder of mutability and was sometimes a shaft of death” (1968, 16). The sad beauty of aware is illustrated by fragile cherry blossoms falling in the spring rain, while the mysterious beauty of yūgen is depicted by insubstantial phenomena of nature shading into the twilight darkness, as if about to vanish into the enveloping black void of nothingness from which they emerged. It can therefore be said that both the poetic ideals of yūgen and aware are inseparable elements in the Japanese process aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Truth and the Beauty of Yūgen In the tradition of medieval Japanese aesthetics, the poetic ideal of yūgen as the beauty of darkness is explicitly related to notions of truth. Ueda Makoto discusses the “mysterious beauty” of yūgen in relation to “cosmic truth” found in the theory of nō drama articulated by Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443):

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Zeami’s idea of yūgen seems to combine its conventional meaning of elegant beauty with its original meaning of profound, mysterious truth of the universe. Zeami perceived mysterious beauty in cosmic truth: beauty, was the color of truth, so to speak. (Ueda: 1967, 60-61).

Ueda concludes that for Zeami, “yūgen contains cosmic truth” (1967, 61). LaFleur demonstrates how for medieval waka poets such as Fujiwara no Shunzei, Fujiwara no Teika, and Kamo no Chōmei, the mysterious beauty of yūgen was related not only to the Tendai Buddhist practice of shikan or “tranquility and insight” meditation, but also to Tendai Buddhist metaphysical teachings of the “middle way” (chūdō, 中道) between nihilism and eternalism. He explicates how the “epiphany of depth” revealed by the profound beauty of yūgen in Japanese literature and art, especially the uta (歌) or lyrical poem, is related to the Tendai Buddhist philosophical doctrine of the “three truths” (santai, 三諦). In this context, he cites the words of Fujiwara no Shunzei: I can now for the record state that the Japanese lyric called the uta has a dimension of depth, one that has affinity with the three stages of truth in Tendai, namely, the void (kū), the provisional (ke), and the middle (chū). (cited by LaFleur, 1983, 93)

According to the Tendai doctrine of three truths, all contingent phenomena generated by the process of arising into existence through “interdependent origination” (engi, 縁起；innen, 因縁), are “provisional” (ke, 仮), “empty” (kū, 空), and in the “middle” (chū, 中). The three truths doctrine of Tendai Buddhist philosophy supports the Japanese aesthetic view of interdependently originated phenomena in nature by adopting a middle way (chū) that affirms the provisional existence (ke) of relational events, while at the same time seeing them as empty (kū). The standpoint of the middle way realized by an enlightened Buddha thus allows one to cultivate aesthetic appreciation for the dreamlike phenomena of conventional existence as beautiful yet evanescent, insubstantial, and void. LaFleur goes on to clarify how the beauty of yūgen as an “epiphany of depth” in Japanese literature and art discloses the ultimate metaphysical truth of Tendai Buddhism: The Buddhists of medieval Japan, nurtured as they were in Tendai, held that the universe was such that even “in one thought there are three thousand worlds” (“ichinen sanzen”). This implied the boundlessness of the interpenetration of phenomena with one another. To the dimension of depth in the universe itself these Buddhists reacted with a sense of awe (myō). (1983, 106)

The Tendai Buddhist ultimate metaphysical truth of ichinen sanzen (一念 三千) or “three thousand dimensions in each thought-instant,” signifies what for the Kegon (華厳) school of Japanese Buddhism is designated by the principle of riji muge (理事無礙), the unobstructed interpenetration of

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one and many, part and whole, or microcosm and macrocosm. It is this Tendai metaphysical principle of “three thousand dimensions in each thought-instant” which constitutes the “depth” revealed by the profound beauty of yūgen in medieval Japanese literature and art. The mysterious beauty of enveloping darkness in the yūgen style of Japanese art and literature thus has cosmic truth insofar as it reveals how each part manifests the whole in an “epiphany of depth.” Yūgen in Modern Japanese Literature With the advent of Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), at which time there was an end to the policy of “national seclusion” (sakoku, 鎖国) there arose a renaissance of modern Japanese literature, accompanied by a golden age of modern Japanese cinema, producing films based on the remarkable outpour of original creative fiction during this period. 2 The yūgen ideal of literary aesthetics constitutes an important stream in modern Japanese fiction, and numerous contemporary classics in this genre could be cited, for instance, The Three Cornered World by Natsume Sōseki (18681912), Snow Country by Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari (1898-1972), and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Mishima Yukio (1925-1970). All of these novels are pervaded by the poetic image of yūgen as the aesthetic symbol of mysterious beauty along with the ultimate truth of Japanese Buddhism, whereby all phenomena, articulated in the foreground focus of attention, gradually shade off into an aura of twilight darkness in the nonarticulated background field of Zen emptiness, nothingness or openness, thereby to reveal their bottomless hidden depths. Hence, the characteristic of these works of modern Japanese literature is that they culminate in imaginative visions of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows as an “epiphany of depth.” Also, of special interest here is the literary aesthetics of Tanizaki Junichirō (1886-1965). In his acclaimed treatise on Japanese aesthetics entitled In Praise of Shadows (1977), Tanizaki contrasts Western versus Japanese ideals of beauty in terms of a distinction between light and shade, surface and depth, or revealed and hidden. According to Tanizaki, whereas modern Western culture may be characterized by its aesthetic preference for brightly colored objects revealed in the glare of electric lights, traditional Japanese culture has developed a highly refined aesthetic preference for the patterns of shadows cast by things as they recede into darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of dimly felt overtones but partly suggested: We orientals . . . create a kind of beauty of the shadows we have made. . . . We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates. (1977, 30)

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Tanizaki argues that the principles of Japanese architecture are designed to create a mysterious world of faint darkness through the strategic use of massive roofs with overhanging eaves, in order to cast deep spacious shadows over the whole structure, in contrast to Western architectural principles designed to expose the interior and exterior of a structure to maximum sunlight: In the temples of Japan . . . a roof of heavy tiles is first layed out, and in deep, spacious shadows created by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. . . . Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge. (1977, 30)

While discussing the principles of interior decorating, Tanizaki further describes how the mysterious beauty of a traditional Japanese room in the natural and rustic wabi (侘び) style, with its barren simplicity and austere poverty, lies not in ornamental furniture or decorations, but in its intertwining variations of shadows alone: “And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variations of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else “ (1977, 18). He compares a traditional Japanese room to a sumie monochrome inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shōji (sliding door) being the expanse where the ink is thinnest and the tokonoma or picture alcove where it is darkest (1977, 18). The picture alcove, characterized by its deep recession into darkness and shadows, typically displays a kakemono or hanging scroll of painting and calligraphy, as well as an ikebana flower arrangement: “But the scroll and flowers serve not as an ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows” (1977, 19). Then, while contemplating the subtle beauty of lacquerware trays and bowls used in the tea ceremony as they glow with a faint, smoky luster or sheen of antiquity in the flickering shadows of a candlelit room, Tanizaki exclaims: “And I realized that only in the dim half-light is the true beauty of lacquerware revealed. . . . Darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty of lacquerware” (1977, 13). What is the reason for Japan’s aesthetic preference for the beauty of darkness and shadows? To this question, Tanizaki replies that the patterns of shadows cast by things as they recede into darkness confers upon the a bottomless dimension of mystery and depth: “This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space, they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth” (1977, 20-21). At the conclusion of his treatise on traditional Japanese yūgen aesthetics, Tanizaki expresses his view that the function of modern Japanese literature and art is to restore and preserve that mysterious world of darkness and shadows so rapidly disappearing with the modernization of Japan: “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would strip away the useless decoration”

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(1977, 42). In his various novels and short stories, Tanizaki therefore deliberately turns off the electric lights imported from modern Western technology in order to create a strangely dreamlike aesthetic world permeated with haunting images of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows manifesting an epiphany of depth. NOTES 1. In my book Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West (2001) I have used Kantian theories of disinterested aesthetic contemplation of beauty and the sublime to analyze the Japanese poetic ideal of yūgen as a function of Buddhist shikan or “tranquility and insight” meditation. 2. The policy of “national seclusion” (sakoku, 鎖国) was enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate through a series of edicts from 1633-1639 that remained in effect until 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Mathew Perry and the opening of Japan in the Meiji Restoration period.

THIRTEEN A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen in Japanese Aesthetics

In chapter 12 I have endeavored to show how the penumbral beauty of darkness and shadows is basic to Whitehead’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience and concept of beauty as well as his philosophy of art, literature, and poetry. Yet Whitehead’s notion of penumbral beauty has been almost completely neglected by scholars of Whitehead’s philosophy. I would suggest that the profound significance of Whitehead’s vision of beauty as penumbral shadow can be especially appreciated from the standpoint of the yūgen style of art and literature in traditional Japanese aesthetics. Japan has a longstanding aesthetic preference for the yūgen style of art and literature such that the subtle beauty of mysterious depths and faint darkness has become embodied in traditional Japanese waka poetry, nō drama, and sumie inkwash painting as well as modern Japanese novels, cinema, and other art forms. The Japanese sense of beauty as yûgen can be further elucidated through the more recent Japanese aesthetic design principle of nôtan (濃淡）or the beauty of dynamic contrast between light and darkness. It is my intention to clarify how the highly refined Japanese sense of beauty as yūgen can add a whole new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead’s process aesthetics with its concept of beauty as penumbral shadow. Likewise, I will endeavor to show how the poetic ideal of penumbral beauty in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism can be used as a framework to edify the yūgen style of art and literature in traditional Japanese aesthetics. It will be shown that from the standpoint of Whitehead’s metaphysics of qualitative immediacy and its method of radical empiricism, the aesthetic ideal of beauty as yūgen can be elucidated through a phenomenology of the foreground/ background pattern of immediate experience where a clear foreground shades into a dark background. Moreover, from a Whiteheadian perspec219

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tive the Japanese ideal of yūgen can be phenomenologically described as an atmospheric beauty that cannot simply be located in any of the parts but is spread throughout the whole perceptual field as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Finally, it will be shown that for Whitehead, as for Japanese tradition, the pervasive aesthetic quality of darkness and shadows involves a notion of mysterious beauty as an epiphany of depth. It can be said that the mysterious beauty of yūgen in the Japanese canons of taste, and the penumbral beauty of darkness and shadows in Whitehead’s aesthetics, both alike comprehend the inner content of beauty as depth. Onishi Yoshinori has phenomenologically analyzed the content of aware and yūgen in terms of the German concept of Tiefe or “depth” (J. fukasa, 深さ) as the cosmic feeling of nature as a whole (Marra: 1999, 130). According to LaFleur, the mysterious beauty of yūgen in Japanese literary arts functions as an “epiphany of depth” (1983, 131). In

Figure 13.1.

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modern Japanese philosophy Nishida Kitarō analyzes great art as having a content of “depth of feeling” which arises from out of a vast metaphysical background (1958, 148). Likewise, Whitehead’s aesthetics describes the metaphysical content of penumbral beauty in terms of “depth” (PR 114), “depth of satisfaction” (PR 93), “depth of being” (PR 15), “depth of experience” (PR 318), and “depths of Reality” (AI 267), all of which signify “depths of feeling” (AI 271). Whitehead holds that penumbral beauty as depth of feeling-tone is elicited by primordial perception of objects in the clear foreground shading off into the remoteness of a dark background. I would argue that for Whitehead, as for Japanese yūgen aesthetics, the penumbral beauty of darkness in nature and its imaginative expression in art is also to be understood as an epiphany of depth. Hence, for Whitehead, as for Japanese yūgen aesthetics, a primary function of art, literature, and poetry is disclosure of penumbral beauty as depth of feeling. Whitehead discusses how the penumbral beauty of darkness characterizing art springs from the depths of the unconscious: “But that art which arises within clear consciousness is only a specialization of … the unconscious activities of experience” (AI 270). In his analysis of an aesthetic experience of beauty in art and nature Whitehead explains the deep unconscious in phenomenological terms as the “penumbra of consciousness” (AI 249), or “penumbra of feeling” (AI 260), grasped in primordial perception through prehension as a vague feeling of the whole in the background of immediate experience. The analysis of beauty in aesthetic experience of art and literature as a creative function of the deep Unconscious is seen throughout the tradition of modern German aesthetics, including von Hartmann, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others, and is developed through the tradition of modern German depth psychology represented by Freud and Jung. It is interesting to note the view of Mori Ogai (1862-1922), a medical doctor at the rank of surgeon general who, during the Meiji Restoration period (1868-1912), became the first modern Japanese novelist to import German philosophical, literary, and aesthetic theories. In modern Japanese literature, it was Mori Ogai who first began to use the tradition of German aesthetics to illuminate the Japanese notion of mysterious beauty as yūgen. At one point early in his career, Ogai endeavored to interpret traditional Japanese artistic and literary ideas through the aesthetic idealism propounded by Eduard von Hartmann in his Philosophy of the Unconscious . Based on von Hartmann’s aesthetic Idealism, Ogai argued that the deep Unconscious is the source of all beauty in art, poetry, and literature. Ogai then analyzed the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen, using it as synonymous with von Hartmann’s notion of the Unconscious (Bowring: 1979, 73-77, 129-130). In Zen and Japanese Culture (2010), D. T. Suzuki describes how for the Zen-influenced tradition of Japanese art and poetry, the aesthetic experi-

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ence of beauty as yūgen (幽玄) or darkness and shadows, also termed myō (妙) or mystery and depth, is itself rooted in the Zen awakening of satori (悟り), “sudden enlightenment.” He illustrates the mysterious beauty of yūgen and myō through various arts that flourished under the aegis of Zen. Moreover, Suzuki connects the profound beauty of yūgen in Zeninfluenced art, along with its basis in Zen satori, to the state of mushin (無 心) or “no-mind,” which, influenced by C. J. Jung’s depth psychology, he also calls the Unconscious: This supreme moment in the life of an artist, when expressed in Zen terms, is the experience of satori. To experience satori is to become conscious of the Unconscious (mushin, no-mind), psychologically speaking. Art has always something of the Unconscious about it. (2010, 220)

Suzuki here gives his depth psychological interpretation of satori or sudden enlightenment as the process whereby the Unconscious becomes conscious. Moreover, he understands Zen art as a product of the deep Unconscious. He continues: The true artist, like a Zen master, is one who knows how to appreciate the myō of things. Myō is sometimes called yūgen . . . in Japanese literature. Some critics state that all great works of art embody in them yūgen whereby we attain a glimpse of things eternal in the world of constant changes: that is, we look into the secrets of Reality. When satori flashes, there is the tapping of creative energy; where creative energy is felt, art breathes myō and yūgen. (2010, 220)

According to Suzuki, then, the mysterious beauty of yūgen and myō displayed by Zen art springs from the depths of mushin or no-mind as the Unconscious. Throughout Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki describes how the mysterious beauty of yūgen is immediately experienced by “Zen intuition.” It is by the Zen aesthetic intuition of phenomena in their emptiness or suchness that one awakens to the profound beauty of yūgen in nature and art at the moment of satori or sudden enlightenment, which is itself related to mushin or no-mind as the deep Unconscious. In one passage, Suzuki explains this Zen aesthetic intuition of mysterious beauty as yūgen in terms of the distinctively Whiteheadian notion of “feeling” as intuitive prehension. Suzuki writes: The idea that the ultimate truth of life and of things generally is to be intuitively and not conceptually grasped, and that this intuitive prehension is the foundation not only of philosophy but of all other cultural activities, is what the Zen form of Buddhism has contributed to the cultivation of artistic appreciation among the Japanese people. It is here then that the spiritual relationship between Zen and the Japanese conception of art is established. (2010, 219)

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The term prehension or “feeling” was coined by Whitehead to describe unconscious feeling, intuition, or sympathy with the aesthetic quality of events in contrast to the consciousness denoted by “apprehension” or “comprehension.” Although he does not mention Whitehead directly, it can be assumed that D. T. Suzuki has borrowed Whitehead’s distinctive idea of an unconscious intuitive prehension to express the aesthetic experience of mysterious beauty as yūgen in his account of Japanese art as a path to Zen enlightenment. It has now been seen how the dominant aesthetic category in the canons of taste which emerged during the medieval period (ca. 950-1400 AD) of Japanese Buddhism, was that of yūgen—the ethereal beauty of darkness and shadows, or mystery and depth. In the waka poetry of Fujiwara no Teika, the nō drama of Zeami, or the sumie monochrome inkwash paintings of Sesshū, aesthetic delight in the beauty of yūgen manifested an epiphany of depth, revealed through pictorial images wherein determinate phenomena in the foreground focus of attention gradually fade into the indeterminate horizon of darkness and shadows as the background field of formless emptiness, nothingness or openness. Of all the traditional Japanese arts and crafts in geidō (芸道) or the “Dao of aesthetics,” it is perhaps sumie (墨絵) monochrome inkwash landscape painting which most graphically portrays the beauty of yūgen. The sumie or black-ink style of calligraphy and brush painting is typically monochrome in design, being composed of tonal variations of a single colorless color, namely, black ink. It is precisely this spatial continuum of monochrome blackness or grayness which confers upon the sumie style of painting, calligraphy, and line-drawing its pervasive aesthetic quality of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of shadows and darkness. This aesthetic preference for monochrome blackness over the use of bright color in the compositional design of Japanese sumie inkwash painting, in part springs from traditional Daoist and Zen Buddhist attitudes of cultivating artistic detachment from worldly things and pacifying the emotions. One of the most famous teachings of Zen Buddhism adopted from the Heart Sūtra is expressed by the line: 色即是空、空即是色 shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki “Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.”

In the Japanese written language, the ideograph for “color,” pronounced iro (色), also means “form,” as well as “passion” or erotic desire. The earlier Heian poetic ideal of aware as the melancholy beauty of evanescent phenomena was depicted by the fading colors of cherry blossoms or scarlet maples. The mysterious beauty of yūgen instead expresses an aesthetic preference for kū (空), or emptiness, as the colorless, formless world of detachment from emotions, as opposed to the world of form, color and passions. A second reason for this aesthetic preference for monochrome

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blackness is that sumie inkwash painting aims to manifest not the colored surface aspect of things, but to portray their bottomless depths. A third reason is that in contrast to the representational styles of Western landscape painting, wherein myriad substantial objects are sharply distinguished through multivariate colors, the monochrome spread of black inkwash in a sumie landscape picture instead functions to suggest the organic wholeness, continuity and interfusion of nature, as expressed through the Kegon (C. Huayan) Buddhist doctrinal formulas of riji muge or “interpenetration of universal whole and particular and jiji muge or “interpenetration of particular and particular.” The sumie black-ink paintings of medieval Japan were profoundly influenced by Zen/Chan Buddhism as well as Daoism. Hence, the mysterious beauty of yūgen exhibited by a Zen monochrome inkwash painting and other medieval Japanese arts can be analyzed in terms of the yin-yang (J. in’yō, 陰陽) contrast of Daoist cosmology. The first character in the aesthetic category yūgen (Chinese: yu-hsüan, 幽玄) is used in Daodejing by Laozi to characterize the otherwise unfathomable Dao (J. dō, 道) as a “mystery” (Chinese: hsüan,玄), or a “mystery upon mysteries.” It can be said the beauty of yūgen in medieval Japanese sumie monochrome landscape paintings of nature depict symbolic images of Dao in its unfathomable darkness, mystery, and depth. In a Japanese inkwash painting, there is an illuminated foreground that shades into the vague indeterminate background horizon of formless nothingness. While the illuminated foreground symbolizes the yang (J. yō,陽) component of an inkwash painting which is solid, near, and bright, the vague background symbolizes the yin (J. in, 陰 ) component which is void, remote, and dark. It is this “lightdark” polarity characterizing the foreground/background pattern of a sumie monochrome inkwash picture that constitutes the mysterious beauty of yūgen as boundless mystery and depth. The sumie black-ink style of monochrome landscape painting culminated in Japan during the Muromachi period (1933-1573), with the lineage succession of Zen Buddhist artist-monks who trained at Shōkokuji temple in Kyoto, including Josetsu, Shūbun, and Sesshū. As the authors of Zen Ink Painting describe in their analysis of the Zen tradition of sumie monochrome inkwash landscape painting during this period: “The usual format in the fifteenth century is a hanging scroll of vertical composition depicting three planes of depth” (Barnet and Burto: 1982, 68). These “three planes of depth” characterizing a Zen sumie Japanese inkwash monochrome landscape painting include: (i) a clear foreground with sharply defined rocks in the lower quarter; (ii) a vague midground; and (iii) a remote background with a dominating mountain which fades into the mystery and depth of the empty void depicted by enveloping pictorial space. The monochrome spread of black ink conveying the pervasive aesthetic quality of yūgen or shadowy darkness in a sumie picture establishes an unbroken continuity between all three planes of depth,

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thereby suggesting the Kegon Buddhist metaphysical principle of riji muge designating unobstructed interfusion of part and whole, object and space, or solid and void. Moreover, an atmospheric haze of concealing mist veils the transitions at each plane, thereby further enhancing the pervasive aesthetic quality of yūgen as hidden depths. The Zen tradition of sumie monochrome inkwash landscape painting provides yet another vivid illustration of Whitehead’s phenomenological description of the invariant foreground/background character of beauty in art and aesthetic experience. Whitehead describes aesthetic experience as a depth of feeling elicited by irreducible patterned harmonic contrasts between foreground focus and background field. While discussing the aesthetics of painting, Whitehead states: “Yet, the aesthetic feelings whereby there is pictorial art, are nothing else than products of the contrasts. . . .” (PR 162). Elizabeth Kraus thus illustrates Whitehead’s idea of how an occasion achieves intensity of aesthetic satisfaction by fulfillment of its categoreal requirements of harmonic contrast between focus and field with an analogy to the foreground/background structure of a painting: 1 An intense satisfaction will therefore manifest width in its earlier stages and progressively simplify that width in the later stages. It resembles a painting with a carefully detailed foreground set against yet growing out of a vaguely discriminated background. (1979, 61-62)

Although Kraus compares the aesthetic satisfaction of an occasion of experience to the beauty of a painting with a foreground/background pattern, she does not mention any particular style of painting. However, if one seeks to find a pictorial style that best expresses Whitehead’s ideal of penumbral beauty, the Japanese yūgen tradition of Zen inkwash landscape painting is perhaps the single closest parallel. It can be said that in Whitehead’s process metaphysics of aesthetic experience with its poetic ideal of penumbral beauty, each self-creative occasion of experience might be likened to a Japanese monochrome inkwash landscape painting characterized by the ethereal beauty of yūgen, depicted by a clear foreground against a dark background of mystery and depth. At this level in Whitehead’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience, the perceptual field is characterized by two planes of depth: a clearly discriminated focus and a vague undiscriminated fringe of penumbral shadow. At a more detailed level of phenomenological description, however, he then proceeds to explicate how an occasion of experience is organized into an aesthetic perspective with three planes of depth in the field of perception, including: (i) a clear and distinct foreground; (ii) a dim relevant background; and (iii) a remote chaotic background of darkness. According to this account the perceptual field is to be described as an illuminated focal region surrounded by a background with two layers, a relevant background and remote background.

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In such a manner, Whitehead’s phenomenological description of the perceptual field in terms of three planes of depth provides a radically empirical basis for the interpretation of Japanese sumie inkwash paintings including a clear foreground, vague midground, and dark background structure of compositional design. It is in terms of these same three planes of depth that Whitehead describes an occasion of aesthetic experience through his poetic imagery of gradual recession into the atmospheric darkness of the penumbral background: “Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness in other occasions” (PR 15). Elsewhere, he writes: “The finite focus of clarity fades into an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond” (MT 78). Thus, in his description of a perspectival occasion of experience as an aesthetic whole with the intrinsic value of beauty, Whitehead visualizes an image of ever-widening concentric circles with three planes of depth, such that the clearly illuminated focal region in the foreground gradually fades in a vague penumbral shadow in the midground, which finally shades off into the expanse of total darkness in the background horizon at the most peripheral region of the perceptual field. It might therefore be suggested that Whitehead’s phenomenological description of the three planes of depth characterizing the perceptual field, as specified by the threefold foreground/midground/background pattern of a self-creative occasion of aesthetic experience as a natural work of art, is itself like a Zen sumie monochrome inkwash landscape painting with the atmospheric beauty of yūgen. Whitehead’s poetic ideal of penumbral beauty in an artwork and the Japanese aesthetic category of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness in art, both include an explicit relationship with truth. Earlier it was argued that Whitehead’s position stands counter to the Kantian view, whereby aesthetic judgments of beauty and the sublime in art and nature are determined by subjective feeling, and are thus devoid of truth or cognitive meaning. Whitehead’s view more closely approximates to Heidegger’s claim that the beauty of art and poetry does contain truth: namely, the primordial truth of aletheia or unconcealedness. For Heidegger, the truth of beauty in art is an event of ontological disclosure, whereby the aesthetic presence of a phenomenon is disclosed by shining into the mysterious horizon of openness. For Whitehead, as for Heidegger, the artwork contains both truth and beauty: “The perfection of art has only one

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end, which is Truthful Beauty” (AI 267). Explaining the kind of truth revealed in the beauty of penumbral darkness characterizing the metaphysical background of art, Whitehead asserts: “The type of Truth which human art seeks lies in the eliciting of the background to haunt the objects presented for clear consciousness” (AI 270). Similar to Whitehead’s aesthetics, Japanese Buddhist aesthetics holds that art contains beauty as well as truth, in that it reveals the truths of impermanence, nonsubstantiality, suffering, and interdependent origination as the emptiness/suchness of all events in the flux of nature. Furthermore, like Whitehead’s account of truthful beauty in art, the kind of truth characterizing the beauty of yūgen in Japanese art lies in eliciting the vague background of penumbral darkness to haunt the objects clearly presented in the foreground. It has been shown how the yūgen ideal of sublime beauty as darkness and shadows that emerged in medieval Japanese waka poetics was explicitly related to the Tendai Buddhist doctrine of “three truths” (santai, 三諦). To repeat the words of Fujiwara no Shunzei: “I can now for the record state that the Japanese lyric called the uta has a dimension of depth, one that has affinity with the three stages of truth in Tendai, namely, the void (kū), the provisional (ke), and the middle (chū)” (cited by LaFleur: 1983, 93). Moreover, the yūgen style of Japanese art and literature discloses the Tendai Buddhist truth of “three thousand dimensions in each thought-instant” (J. ichinen sanzen, 一念三千), a functional equivalent of the Kegon (C. Huayan, 華厳) supreme metaphysical principle of “unobstructed interpenetration of particular and the universal whole” (riji muge, 理事無礙). Similarly, for Whitehead’s process aesthetics the penumbral beauty of art also contains truth insofar as it discloses the ultimate metaphysical principle of creativity (PR 21), or “creative synthesis” of diverse multiplicity into novel unity. It can be said that for both Whitehead’s poetic ideal of penumbral beauty, and the Japanese poetic ideal of yūgen as the beauty of darkness and shadows, the mysterious beauty of art and poetry functions to reveal the ultimate metaphysical truth of harmonious unobstructed interpenetration between part and whole, one and many, or microcosm and macrocosm, thereby resulting in an epiphany of depth. From the perspective of Whitehead’s process aesthetics, it can be said that the yūgen style of Japanese art and literature operates as a proposition, or “lure for feeling” that elicits aesthetic delight (PR 184-185). In its role as a “lure,” an inkwash painting is a suggestion, or an invitation to contemplate the landscape of nature with its three planes of depth, including a clear foreground, vague midground, and dark background, unified throughout by the pervasive aesthetic quality of yūgen as the atmospheric beauty of mystery and depth. The mysterious beauty of yūgen is atmospheric in that it cannot be simply located in the subject or object, audience or artwork, foreground or background, part or whole, but spreads throughout the whole situation as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic

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quality. In its primary operation as a lure for feeling, the yūgen style of Japanese art and literature, with its depiction of nonsubstantial mountains and waters gradually fading to the dark void of formless emptiness, ultimately functions to induce an “epiphany of depth.” A traditional Japanese inkwash monochrome landscape painting typically has a clear foreground such as a few cherry blossoms surrounded by a dark background of emptiness, nothingness, or openness. It is the blank canvas with a dark background of emptiness or openness that induces one to become a participant who enters into the landscape, thereby to co-create the painting by imagining its details. Hence, a Japanese inkwash painting comes to function as a lure for feeling. As an emotional lure, the Japanese monochrome inkwash landscape painting, or waka poem, is characterized by the aesthetic quality of suggestiveness, insofar as the dim, vague, and obscure background of twilight darkness suggests multiple new perspectives of nature. In its function as a “lure for feeling,” a Japanese monochrome inkwash painting has an indeterminate aura of suggestiveness that includes a penumbral welter of alternate possibilities, thereby to induce the imaginative creation and recreation of the landscape. Hence, from the standpoint of Whitehead’s organic process aesthetics, the yūgen ideal of mysterious beauty illustrated by the Zen style of Japanese inkwash landscape painting functions as a lure that elicits aesthetic delight through maximum depth of feeling-tone. Parallels between Japanese yūgen aesthetics and Whitehead’s process notion of beauty as depth of feeling-tone depicted by his organismic image of a haunting penumbral shadow of darkness in the felt background of immediate experience, become yet more profound when considered in terms of the aesthetics of Nishida Kitarō. It has already been discussed how Nishida argues that Japan is above all an artistic culture grounded in the pure aesthetic feeling. Furthermore, Nishida maintains that traditional Japanese poetic ideals of beauty such as yūgen and aware are rooted in aesthetic feeling. In this context, Nishida states: “The quality of yūgen (yūgensei 幽玄性) of Japanese aesthetics was also grounded on pure feeling” (1970, 252). In his essay “The Philosophy of Nishida,” Takeuchi Yoshinori of the Kyoto School summarizes the organismic model of consciousness in the east-west syncretic metaphysics formulated by Nishida during the second period of his speculative writings: According to Nishida . . . the self ultimately finds itself in the abyss of darkness (corresponding to the Ungrund or Urgrund of Jacob Bohme) enveloping within itself every light of self-consciousness. This darkness, however, is “dazzling obscurity” (cf. Dionysius the Areopagite) giving the self an unfathomable depth of meaning and being. The self is thus haloed with a luminous darkness. (1982, 183)

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Thus for Nishida, the self in its totality is to be envisioned by the light of self-consciousness surrounded by an aura of luminous darkness with dazzling obscurity, thereby giving the self an unfathomable depth. Nishida develops a comparative analysis of traditional Japanese yūgen aesthetics as depicted in monochrome sumie inkwash painting in relation to Western pictorial art in the chapter titled “From Max Klinger’s ‘Painting and Line Drawing” included in Art and Morality (1978, 33-35). 2 According to Nishida, each artistic medium has its own function, and the function of black-ink line drawing as seen in Japanese Zen-influenced calligraphy and sumie monochrome landscape paintings is to imaginatively express the spatial wholeness, continuity, and depth of reality. Nishida argues that while in Japan the minimalist style of black-ink monochrome painting based on calligraphic line drawing became standard, in the Western tradition line drawings were only used as the preliminary sketch for painting in oil or water colors. Yet a significant exception is to be found in the line drawings of Max Klinger, whose monochrome line drawings and correlate theory of art closely resembles that of traditional Japanese Buddhist inkwash paintings, with their use of calligraphic lines and enveloping dark voids to express spatial wholeness, fusion, and depth of Zen nothingness. In another East-West comparative interpretation of beauty in art and aesthetic experience given in his essay titled “Goethe’s Metaphysical Background,” Nishida emphasizes how beauty is a function of the enveloping metaphysical background that signifies boundless depth of feeling. He further depicts the depth of feeling in this metaphysical background of great art and poetry in terms of an image of enveloping darkness: “Any kind of art has essentially such a background and that which does not have such a background, cannot be called art” (1958, 146). Speaking of Goethe’s poetry, Nishida argues that while Goethe was influenced by classical Greek philosophy underscoring the clarity of eidos or rational form, nonetheless, he reveals the clarity of form against the boundless depth of feeling that emerges from out of the vast metaphysical background of faint darkness in which it is surrounded: “Although he [Goethe] was touched and refined by the spirit of the classical world, in the depth of his soul there was not the clarity of ‘eidos’, but a depth of feeling to which the vision of ideas was not sufficient” (1958, 152). Nishida goes on to argue that the beauty constituted by depth of feeling that emerges from the metaphysical background of enveloping nothingness is to be seen in both early Christian as well as Buddhist art: “Oriental art is essentially impersonal because the background is an integral part of it. This produces [in our hearts] a formless, boundless vibration, and an endless, voiceless echo” (1958, 146). Furthermore: In Christian culture, where the personal is recognized as true “being,” art gains in depth and background. Early Christian art has an inward-

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In the seventeenth century Dutch society of Amsterdam, the first reaction to Rembrandt’s painting known as The Night Watch (1643) was that it showed nothing but darkness, shadows, and vagueness, thereby obscuring the distinctive features of persons commissioned to be depicted by his portrait. Speaking of Rembrandt’s paintings, famous for their dark backgrounds enveloping brilliant golden colored objects in the foreground, Nishida says: Could it not be said that the background of Rembrandt’s paintings has such a significance? There is depth in his paintings, but it is a completely different type of depth, compared with Michelangelo . . . it is not the depth of force, but the depth of feeling. (1958, 148; italics added)

As underscored by Robert Schinzinger in his translator’s Introduction to Nishida’s essay “Goethe’s Metaphysical Background,” for Nishida, the formal structure of beauty in art and literature is constituted by “depth of background” (1958, 42), or “depth of feeling” (1958, 41). Schinzinger explains that while the word “metaphysical” is not found in the original title of the essay, it is added by the translator in order to clarify Nishida’s use of the term “background” (haikei, 背景) as suggesting the “depth of feeling” of the surrounding darkness of an enveloping nothingness depicted in Zen inkwash paintings: This addition is intended to suggest the . . . depth of feeling which is implied by Nishida in the word “background” (haikei). As in a black and white painting of the Zen school, Nishida gives a few brush strokes which suggest what is to be read into his work. (1958, 42)

Schinzinger further points out how this metaphysical “background” of eternity suggesting boundless “depth of feeling” that springs from a bottomless abyss of darkness, is especially to be seen in the metaphysical art of Buddhism in the east and early Christian art in the West: “A piece of art, according to Nishida, is a relief cut out of the marble block of eternity. . . . Nishida feels strongly this background of eternity in Buddhist and early Christian art” (1958, 42). It can thus be said that Nishida’s modern Zen philosophy of art approximates Whitehead’s process aesthetics, insofar as both emphasize the beauty of art as disclosure of the metaphysical background of immediate experience, which itself reveals the “depth of feeling” of a bottomless abyss of shadows and darkness. The Japanese sense of beauty as yūgen at once resembles Whitehead’s idea of beauty as characterized by the directly felt indeterminate horizons-phenomenon of a “penumbral shadow.” For both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism, beauty in art, nature, and everyday life is based on a

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phenomenology of the perceptual field wherein clearly illumined objects in the foreground shade off into a surrounding fringe of causal relationships depicted through the image of a vague penumbral region of shadows and darkness. Chōmei’s identification of yūgen or the beauty of shadows and darkness, with the emotional surplus of yojō (余情) or “overtone of feeling,” assumes special significance in light of Whitehead’s notion of a “penumbra of feeling” (AI 260). Furthermore, just as for Chōmei the yūgen ideal of mysterious beauty as darkness and shadows is itself rooted in yojō or “overtones of feeling,” so for Whitehead, the beauty of depth constituted by the penumbral horizon of darkness in art and nature is constituted by “feeling-tones” (PR 120), “affective tone” (AI 176), or “tone of feeling” (PR 85). Whitehead explicitly describes how it is perception in the primordial mode of affective feeling-tone in the dark background that provides depth of aesthetic importance to sense qualities in the foreground: “The primary status of the sensa as qualifications of affective tone must be kept in mind. . . . The immense aesthetic importance of sensa is due to this status of sensa” (AI 245). For Whitehead it is when a person is tired and relaxes awareness of affective feeling-tone in the background that the presentation of sense qualities in the foreground seems barren, empty, and devoid of aesthetic importance. Chōmei’s example of a person lacking in sensitivity who sees only the brightly colored cherry blossoms and scarlet leaves, while neglecting the more subtle experience of yūgen and its underlying source in yojō, is in Whiteheadian terms an instance of one who apprehends merely the clear and distinct sense-data of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (sense perception), while neglecting the vague and dim “penumbra of feeling” experienced through perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as affective feeling-tone. According to Whitehead’s epistemology, sense perception belongs to appearance in the clearly discriminated foreground (AI 281). Perception in the more primordial mode of causal efficacy, however, prehends the given reality arising from those vague overtones of feeling from the undiscriminated background field of causal relationships: “In the background there lies a mass of undistinguished occasions providing the environment with its vague emotional tone” (AI 281). Moreover, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is perception of the world in the past as constituted by its “affective tone” (AI 176) or “feeling-tones” (AI 120). It is this level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy which alone prehends the dim and massive “penumbra of feeling” in the undiscriminated background of the perceptual field, the inherited reality of the past constituted by its “feeling-tone” (PR 119), or “tone of feeling” (PR 85), experienced through prehension as overtones of feeling. Whitehead’s idea of mysterious beauty as the “penumbral shadow” may be said to represent the indeterminate felt background of immediate experience,

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which constitutes each moment as a felt whole with directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality characterized by change, fusion, and spread. Already it has been seen how D. T. Suzuki describes experience of beauty as yūgen in the Zen arts as “intuitive prehension” (2010, 219). Moreover, in his discussion of how the Japanese aesthetic experience of beauty as yūgen springs from mushin or no-self as the deep Unconscious, D. T. Suzuki explains that while he previously used the word “intuition,” he now prefers the term feeling to express the Zen realization of beauty: Recently, however, I have come to think that “feeling” is a better term than “intuition” for the experience Zen claims to have—“feeling” in its deepest, broadest, and most basic sense. . . . The experience the human mind has when it when it is identified with the totality of things or when the finite becomes conscious of the infinite residing in it—this experience is the most primary feeling which lies at the basis of every form of psychic functioning we are capable of. (1993, 219, fn. 1)

Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen aesthetic experience of beauty in distinctively Whiteheadian terms as “feeling” or “intuitive prehension” as the deepest, most basic, and primary feeling of oneness with totality, stands in full accord with Whitehead’s notion of prehension as sympathetic feeling of the whole in each part arising through creative synthesis of many into one. Suzuki, like Whitehead, thus uses the notion of prehensive intuition as unconscious primordial feeling of the whole in each part to describe the mysterious beauty of darkness and shadows in both the aesthetic continuum of nature as well as its creative expression in art and literature. During the “medieval” period of Japanese culture (ca. 950-1400 AD), the pervasive aesthetic quality of yūgen came to have a symbolic function for evoking a new depth in poetry, literature, and the arts. If one looks at a Zen-influenced sumie monochrome inkwash landscape picture with a few brushstrokes suggesting unsubstantial mountains fading into the dark void, the paintings are not representational, but symbolic. The atmospheric beauty of yūgen is not a literal depiction of nature, but a symbol of the boundless mystery and depth of phenomena as they shade into the indeterminate horizon of formless emptiness, voidness, or nothingness, understood as the boundless openness where all things are disclosed in suchness. According to the classification scheme of Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, yūgen denotes “sublimity,” or “sublime beauty” (sōbi, 壮美) (1963, 8-9). Moreover, the symbolic beauty of yūgen is to be classified as “a symbolic beauty” (1963, 112). Hisamatsu describes the symbolic character of medieval Japanese yūgen aesthetics in relation to Buddhist symbolism as follows: The literary concept known as yūgen is an important criterion in judging whether or not a thing is “medieval.” Yūgen as an aesthetic quality was esteemed throughout the medieval period. In the subtle overtones

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of its symbolic statements, one discerns the influence of Buddhist philosophy. (1963, 4-5)

Hence, in the medieval literature of Japan, the aesthetic quality of yūgen with its subtle overtones came to function as a symbol for depth of feeling. As said by LaFleur, the literati of medieval Japan regarded Buddhism as a system of symbols revealing the depths of reality (1983, 17). He states that in the medieval literature of Japan a variety of Buddhist symbols became standardized, so that lotus blossoms symbolized ordinary life as lived, while falling cherry blossoms symbolized the transience of all things (1983, 17). In medieval Japanese poetics, aesthetic images based on vivid sense impressions, such as the full moon of autumn expressing the beauty of yūgen or profound darkness, came to function as Buddhist symbols of “depth” (J. fukasa, 深さ) (1983, 80-106). LaFleur further clarifies how this use of yūgen as a Buddhist symbol of boundless depth, mystery, and profundity was itself based on the Tendai Buddhist metaphysical principle of “three thousand dimensions in each thought-instant” (J. ichinen sanzen, 一念三千), or interpenetration of part and whole (1983, 106). As DeBary puts it, Yūgen was a word to describe the profound, remote, and mysterious, those things which cannot easily be grasped or expressed in words. Its closest equivalent in Western terms is probably “symbolism,” . . . what Poe called “a suggestive indefiniteness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect.” (Tsunoda et al.: 1958, Vol. I, 278)

Here, DeBary explicitly defines the traditional Japanese aesthetic ideal of yūgen or profound darkness as “symbolism,” wherein that which is clear is used as a symbol to suggest that which is deep, profound, remote, and mysterious. This understanding of poetic images of yūgen as symbols for depth of feeling-tone evoked by vivid sense-impressions such as the full moon of an autumn eve in Japanese art and literature, can be elucidated from the philosophical standpoint of Whitehead’s symbolic reference theory of perception. Here it was shown how the Japanese aesthetic ideal of yūgen can be interpreted from the standpoint of Whitehead’s doctrine of perception in three modes. At the level of perception in the mode of symbolic reference, clearly articulated sense data in the foreground symbolize the hidden depth of felt relationships to the surrounding whole in the nonarticulated background. From the perspective of Whitehead’s theory of symbolic perception, Japanese poetic images of yūgen such as the full moon glowing in the twilight darkness of an autumn eve, are sense percepts functioning as symbols of depth, thus to make symbolic reference to hidden depths of feeling that are revealed at the level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy. Poetic images of yūgen such as the full moon in a dark

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autumn sky are derived from vivid sense impressions discriminated in the foreground focus of attention, which then operate as symbolic forms for depth of feeling that arises from the dim penumbra of relationships in the background field. When sense percepts in the foreground operate as symbols of depth constituted by felt relations in the penumbral background, there is satisfaction of a categoreal condition for realization of beauty as maximum depth of feeling-tone. Symbolic images of yūgen in Japanese art and literature might further be understood from the standpoint of the Whiteheadian cosmology of imaginative synthesis developed by Robert C. Neville. Whitehead’s category of the ultimate as creativity, or creative synthesis, is reformulated by Neville into a notion of imaginative synthesis. Neville holds that the primary function of human imagination as experiential synthesis is to gather the field of causal relations into harmonic contrasts between background field and foreground focus, thereby to constitute the basic structure of beauty. Neville writes: Experience is distinguished by virtue of involving a synthesis of otherwise merely causal components. . . . The most elementary form of this is synthesis of the components into a field that serves as a background for focused attention. (1981, 17)

He continues: The contrast between background field and foreground focus of attention is the elementary form of beauty. The gathering of otherwise merely causal components of human processes into imaginative experiential synthesis is thus a primary form of valuation. (1981, 18)

Following Whitehead, Neville further clarifies that a creative act of imaginative synthesis aims to produce beauty as depth of feeling, established through irreducible harmonic contrasts between a “foreground focus” having narrowness and width, and a “background field” with triviality and vagueness (1981, 18). By Neville’s view, the decision as to what is constituted as foreground focus and what recedes into the background field through an act of imaginative synthesis, is the primary form of valuation in creating the aesthetic experience of beauty. Neville asserts that “images are the means by which imagination constitutes experience” (1981, 272). For Neville, images operate as normative measures governing the process of concrescence as an act of imaginative synthesis whereby given data are unified into the aesthetic satisfaction of an occasion of experience, characterized by harmonic contrasts between foreground and background: On the subjective side, the imagery functions within the process of concrescence as the complex normative measure by which the initial data are sorted into an appearing world. . . . Inherited from the past, the imagery functions essentially to order the experiential elements, distin-

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guishing important foreground elements from trivial background ones. (1981, 263)

Neville further clarifies how images are normative for imaginative synthesis as follows: An image is the form by which imagination synthesizes its components into experience. It is that section of components whose integrated presence allows the other components to be present in the synthesis, either as background or as focal elements. An image is thus normative for a particular synthesis. (1981, 19)

Thus, in Neville’s Whiteheadian axiological cosmology of imagination as synthesis, images produced by human imagination are normative measures that organize the multiplicity of causal data into foreground and background elements to constitute the elementary form of beauty as depth. Neville himself discusses how in the imaginative visualization exercises of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist meditation, symbolic images of mandala paintings depicting buddhas encircled by auras of light, are used as norms for imaginative synthesis to reconstitute the perceptual field into expansive foreground/background patterns of the mandala, thereby to systematically cultivate religious, moral and aesthetic experience (1981, 262). This can be further extended to interpret the imaginative visualization exercises used by Shingon and Tendai schools of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan, teaching the secret path to enlightenment by contemplating the beauty of mandala art as symbolic images of totality, thus to reconstruct immediate experience into the foreground/background pattern of the mandala as a microcosm of the macrocosm. It can now be seen how Neville’s Whiteheadian cosmology of imaginative experiential synthesis might be applied to images of beauty in traditional Japanese art and literature. I suggest that Neville’s Whiteheadian cosmology of imaginative synthesis clarifies how the symbolic image of yūgen in traditional Japanese aesthetics functions as a normative measure reconstituting the perceptual field into foreground/background patterns with the mysterious beauty of penumbral shadow. When symbolic images of yūgen are used as normative measures for imaginative synthesis organizing initial data into a dark background for a clear foreground, they act to recreate immediate experience into the mysterious beauty of a waka poem, a nō drama, or a sumie inkwash landscape painting, thereby resulting in creative transformation of everyday life into art, whereupon each moment discloses the aesthetic value of penumbral beauty as depth of feeling.

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CONCLUSION In this section I have argued that Whitehead’s aesthetic ideal of beauty as penumbral shadow is central to his phenomenology of the perceptual field as well as his doctrine of aesthetic experience and its imaginative expression in art, poetry and literature. Moreover, it is maintained that Whitehead’s notion of penumbral beauty can be applied toward an elucidation of the traditional Japanese aesthetic category of yūgen as the profound beauty of darkness and shadows. In phenomenological terms both the penumbral beauty of Whitehead and the poetic ideal of yūgen in Japanese aesthetics are described as primordial perception of a clear foreground shading off into the remoteness of a dark background, thus to achieve an epiphany of depth. From the Whiteheadian perspective, then, the function of art and literature in the yūgen style of Japanese aesthetics is to disclose the mysterious beauty of hidden depths, by raising into clarity the vague and indistinct overtones of feeling from a dim penumbral region of shadows and darkness in the background field, vaguely felt as that brooding presence of the whole that forever haunts those parts illuminated in the foreground focus of attention. NOTES 1. For one of the most insightful guides to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, see Elizabeth M. Kraus’s The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. 2. Nishida Kitarō develops a complex neo-Kantian theory of aesthetics in his 1923 work Geijutsu to dōtoku (芸術と道徳), translated into English as Art and Morality (1978). In this work he argues that the beauty of art and the good of morality tend toward the ecstasy, rapture and holiness of the saint. A highlight of this book is the brief chapter titled “From Max Klinger’s ‘Painting and Line Drawing’” (1978, 33-35), wherein he discusses similarities and differences between Japanese and Western styles of pictorial art.

FOURTEEN Time as Discontinuous Continuity in Whitehead, Dōgen, and Nishida

As a prolegomena to investigating parallels between Whiteheadian and Japanese aesthetic doctrines regarding the tragic beauty of perishability, I will first examine the radicalized doctrines of time as a continuity of discontinuity articulated in both philosophical traditions. The Structure of Time in Whitehead’s Process Metaphysics Whitehead’s poetic vision of the tragic beauty of perishability is grounded in his process metaphysics of perpetually perishing occasions with the intrinsic value of directly felt aesthetic quality. Whitehead describes the unity of time as a discontinuous continuity developing as a process of creative synthesis from many to one, producing evanescent occasions of experience that are contingent, perishing, and transitory. In his early work An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Whitehead argues for the unbroken “continuity” of temporal passage: The answer is that we do not perceive isolated instantaneous facts, but a continuity of existence, and that it is this observed continuity of existence which guarantees the persistence of material. . . . For a “continuity of existence” must mean an unbroken duration of existence. Accordingly it is admitted that the ultimate fact for observational knowledge is perception through a duration; namely, that the content of a specious present, and not that of a durationless instant, is an ultimate datum for science. (PNK 7-8)

Whitehead’s doctrine is here close to Henri Bergson’s notion of time as a “duration” of élan vital or vital life-force in the qualitative flow of creative evolution, which is itself directly grasped by sympathy or metaphysical 237

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intuition. Bergson, like Whitehead’s early thought, underscores the sheer continuity of temporal flow as real duration prior to its spatialization by concepts. In his later process metaphysics, however, Whitehead shifts from a notion of “temporal continuity” to a doctrine of “temporal atomicity,” or what he otherwise calls his “epochal” theory of time as flowing through a succession of temporally thick quanta of energy vibration, conceived as drops, atoms, or pulsations of time. His epochal theory of time is based of his phenomenological description of temporal flow, wherein the continuous ‘“stream” of immediate experience is seen to come by incremental “drops,” or discontinuous occasions of aesthetically immediate experience. Moreover, he argues that his epochal theory of time is a metaphysical generalization from the notion of discrete quanta or photons in modern quantum physics. As indicated by the very title of Whitehead’s magnum opus Process and Reality, reality is process and process is reality. Yet Whitehead traces his signature theme that reality is process to the ancient Greek philosophy of Heraclitus, who proclaims “all things flow” (PR 208). In Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the Heraclitean doctrine that all things flow is expressed by his “principle of process.” The first category of explanation in Whitehead’s categoreal scheme asserts: “[T]hat the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. . . they are also termed ‘actual occasions’” (PR 22). The fundamental units of reality are not enduring substances with attributes undergoing change, but a succession of becoming and perishing occasions: “The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity” (PR 219). Again, “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. . . . Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the ‘principle of process’” (PR 23). Here the “principle of process” is explained by the statement that being is the becoming of an actual occasion. The real internal constitution of an actual occasion is itself a process of becoming and perishing: “The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity” (PR 219). Further elucidating the first category of explanation, he writes: “It follows from the first category of explanation that ‘becoming’ is a creative advance into novelty” (PR 28). Similarly, in a proposition that sums his entire process metaphysics, he states: “The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty” (PR 222). In AI Whitehead rephrases his principle of process as follows: “The doctrine is founded upon three metaphysical principles. One principle is that the very essence of real actuality—that is, of the completely real—is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing” (AI 274). As will be seen, Whitehead’s notion of tragic beauty is developed upon the basis of his metaphysical principle of process as the becoming and perishing of occasions. Whitehead’s epochal concept of time holds that the continuous stream of temporal flux comes incrementally by discrete, abrupt, or discontinu-

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ous moments of experience. As Lewis Ford has clarified: “The adoption of temporal atomism marked a fundamental reorientation of his metaphysical thinking” (1984, 5). He adds, “this doctrine of temporal atomicity directly contravenes Whitehead’s earlier emphasis upon temporal continuity” (1984, 3). 1 While the early Whitehead describes the structure of temporal process as a pure continuity in order to accentuate the flow of causal transmission in the stream of experience, the later Whitehead breaks with this model and develops an atomic or epochal theory of time as discontinuous continuity, thereby reconstructing his process metaphysics in accordance with insights of modern quantum physics. Einstein discovered that although light appears to be continuous, it actually comes in quanta, or discrete quantities of energy vibration, otherwise termed photons. Thus in SMW, Whitehead argues that the revolutionary discovery of “discontinuous existence,” or the quantum jump in modern quantum physics, compels us to “revise all of our notions of the ultimate character of material existence” (SMW 35). Moreover, in his chapter entitled “The Quantum Theory” from the same work he states: The discontinuities introduced by the quantum theory require revision of physical concepts in order to meet them. In particular, it has been pointed out that some theory of discontinuous existence is required. (SMW 135)

Whitehead’s epochal theory of time as discontinuous continuity is further clarified in PR wherein he articulates his epochal theory of time as a series of atomic occasions of aesthetic experience which become and perish whole in quantum jumps. He now argues that due to the radical discontinuity or quantum characteristic of each becoming and perishing occasion of experience, the temporal passage of the concrete self as a creative advance from many into one involves, not a “continuity of becoming,” but a “becoming of continuity” (PR 35). This means that there is a “creation of continuity” within each discontinuous atomic occasion of experience as a recreation of the whole of time. Each self-actualizing occasion of aesthetically immediate experience constituting the unity of time at a given moment is “continuous” with its predecessors in that it arises through antecedent causal conditions in the ever-flowing stream of experience; yet is “discontinuous” as a spontaneous creative act with emergent novelty in the present moment of actuality as a drop of experience. Whitehead’s own phenomenological description of temporal process as a continuously flowing stream constituted by a series of atomic occasions is influenced especially by the radical empiricism of William James. For Whitehead, the epochal or atomic structure of time is depicted by his Jamesian flow metaphor of felt transitions in the “stream of experience” (PR 189, 190), which itself comes incrementally by “drops of experience” (PR 18).

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Each concrescence is an emergent creative act of synthesizing diverse multiplicity into novel unity, so that the creative advance of time is not continuous, but discrete, abrubt, and discontinuous. Yet the “temporal atomicity” of Whitehead’s organic metaphysics which displaces his earlier emphasis on “temporal continuity” must not be confused for a theory of solid material atoms based on the fallacy of simple location posited by scientific materialism, since each atomic occasion is a vibrating quantum field arising as a network of relations through an emergent creative synthesis of many into one, thereby to both pervade and contain the entire universe as a microcosm of the macrocosm: Thus the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic. In the present cosmic epoch there is a creation of continuity. . . . But atomism does not exclude complexity and universal relativity. Each atom is a system of all things. (PR 35)

Hence, Whitehead abandons the notion of time composed of enduring material substances undergoing change for that of a process model of time as a series of becoming and perishing epochal occasions of experience, each of which atomizes the whole spatiotemporal continuum of interpenetrating events from the standpoint of its own aesthetic perspective of the universe. Based on his epochal theory of time as discontinuous continuity, Whitehead describes temporality as a process of “perpetual perishing” (PR 340). Moreover, since each atomic occasion of experience constituting the unity of time must perish immediately upon its arising, he elsewhere refers to this existential experience of perpetual perishing as “the sense of tragedy” (AI 294). This “epochal” doctrine of time as a continuous stream of discontinuous atomic events, and its expression by the principle of process, whereby each actual occasion of aesthetic experience is to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing, underlies Whitehead’s aesthetics of beauty as perishability culminating in his poetic vision of tragic beauty. The Structure of Time in Japanese Philosophy Every school of Japanese Buddhism proclaims the emptiness, nonsubstantiality, and impermanence of all relational events arising into existence through causation, understood as pratitya-samutâda or interdependent origination. Here I would now like to clarify how the paradigmatic metaphysics of impermanence expressed by Dōgen in classical Zen Buddhist philosophy, and its reformulation by Nishida Kitarō in modern Japanese philosophy, describes how the unity of time is constituted as a discontinuous continuity, or a continuity of discontinuity. Both Dōgen and Nishida describe temporal flow as an atomic succession of momentary events, whereby each moment expresses the whole universe as a

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microcosm of the macrocosm. Moreover, the radicalized notion of time as discontinuous continuity functions as the metaphysical basis for the Japanese poetic ideal of mono no aware or the sad beauty of perishability, whereby beauty does not just gradually fade away, but instead abruptly vanishes into nothingness with each arising and perishing moment of aesthetically immediate experience. Zen master Dōgen (道元、1200-1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen sect of Buddhism in Japan, formulated a Zen Buddhist metaphysics of reality as genjōkōan-su (現成公安)、the “presencing of events as they are,” or the “manifesting of suchness,” as grasped through the practice-enlightenment of Zen meditation. In Dōgen’s philosophy the idea of Buddha-nature must not be conceived through extreme views, either as a reified material substance of “being-Buddha-nature” (u-bussho) as postulated by eternalism, or “nothingness-Buddha-nature” (mu-bussho) as held by nihilism, but is instead to be grasped as “impermanence-Buddha-nature” (mujō-bussho) as propounded by the doctrine of the middle way of interdependent origination between eternalism and nihilism. Dōgen thus articulates the reality of things presencing as they are in temporal categories, namely, what he terms “impermanence-Buddha-nature” (mujōbusshō, 無常仏性), and “being-time” (uji, 有時). Dōgen recognizes the category of time as a metaphysical condition for the possibility of existence. For Dōgen, all events have Buddha-nature since all events are impermanent in the flux of being-time: the very impermanence of grasses and trees, thickets and forests is Buddha-nature. Dōgen proclaims that being is time and that time is being. Insofar as reality is being-time, the mountains are time, the waters are time, the blossoms are time, the bamboo are time, the rocks are time, the trees are time, the changing seasons are time, and human life is time. The impermanence-Buddha-nature of being-time is not to be viewed as sheer continuity. Leading scholars of Zen Buddhism have emphasized that the element of radical discontinuity is primary in the notion of beingtime at the core of Dōgen’s metaphysics of impermanence-Buddha-nature. Hee-Jin Kim asserts that there is an “ultimacy of discontinuity” in Dōgen’s Zen Buddhist theory of being-time (1975, 213). As Kim explains, for Dōgen each discontinuous “dharma-position” (jū-hōi, 住法位) constitutes the whole of “being-time” (uji, 有時) as an “absolute now” (nikon, 而 今), comprehended as the self-actualization of the total presence of the Buddha-nature in each and every moment. Kim further elaborates: This is a radical rejection of the flow of time, or the stream of consciousness, or any other conception of time based on the idea of continuity or duration. That is, time is absolutely discrete and discontinuous. This characteristic is primary in Dōgen’s thought. (1975, 202)

Abe Masao of the Kyoto School also emphasizes the radical discontinuity of “being-time” (J. uji) in Dōgen’s theory of “impermanence-Buddha-

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nature” (mujō-busshō, 無常仏性) asserting: “Dōgen denies continuity of time and emphasizes the independence of each point of time” (1985, 63). 2 He adds, “only by the realization of the complete discontinuity of time and of the independent moment . . . does time become real time” (1985, 65). Yet in Dōgen’s concept of uji or being-time, primordial temporality is not merely discontinuous, since it also flows continuously as is denoted by the concept of kyōryaku (経歴), “continuous passage.” For Dōgen, there is a profound sense in which the true self of being-time in the flux of impermanence-Buddha-nature, comprehended as a unity of nikon (herenow) and kyōryaku (continuous passage), is a paradoxical juxtaposition or contradictory identity of both continuity and discontinuity. Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) is known as Japan’s leading philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. 3 Nishida develops an East-West philosophy and Christian-Buddhist interfaith dialogue based on a Zen metaphysics of nothingness. 4 At various points in his writings Nishida expresses his views on the Japanese sense of beauty. In one of his earliest philosophical essays titled “An Explanation of Beauty” (Bi no setsumei, 1900), Nishida develops the Japanese sense of beauty in terms of the Zen notion of muga (無我), no-self or ecstasy. 5 Elsewhere, Nishida explains the traditional Japanese sense of beauty in terms of the traditional Japanese aesthetic notion of mono no aware: When I say feeling, it may be thought to be something internal in contradistinction to the external, and therefore may be thought to be immediately personal. But . . . feelings are impersonal. In fact there is neither interior not exterior in pure feeling. The “aware of things” (物の 哀れ) is also felt therein. (1970, 248)

Nishida’s account of the traditional Japanese poetics of mono no aware underscores the point that the ephemeral beauty of aware is not simply located in the subject or the object, but is a pervasive aesthetic quality of an atmospheric mood or feeling that permeates the whole event co-arising through interaction of subject and object. Thus, the sad beauty of mono no aware is a form of muga, or ecstasy, insofar as it is located both in the subject and the object as a transpersonal feeling in the basho, or field, of absolute nothingness. Nishida’s modern Zen philosophy of nothingness reformulates Dōgen’s theory of time as discontinuous continuity. Nishida refutes the position held by traditional Western philosophy which conceives of the temporal structure of self as a series of discrete moments characterized by pure “discontinuity” (hirenzoku, 非連続) as held by Hume; yet he also repudiates the concept of time as having the form of pure “continuity” (renzoku, 連続) as held by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, or Bergson. Instead, the unity of time constituting the true self as a creative movement from many into one can only be described in Zen paradoxical

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terms as a discontinuous continuity, or continuity of discontinuity (hirenzoku no renzoku, 非連続の連続).　Nishida thus writes: As I have said before, the unity of the individual cannot be thought of as simply a continuity, rather, it must be a continuity of discontinuity so as to constitute the unity of independent beings with every step. Each moment of time passes into the next moment by negating itself, hence establishing the unity of time. (1965, 7, 268)

The radicalization of time as a discontinuous continuity expressed by Dōgen in classical Zen Buddhism and by Nishida Kitarō in modern Japanese philosophy, functions as a philosophical basis underlying the traditional Japanese aesthetics of perishability. If time is viewed as a stream constituted by a series of discrete or discontinous moments, then beauty does not gradually fade away, but instead abruptly vanishes with each becoming and perishing event. The feeling of pathos as the sorrow of eternally vanishing beauty resides at the heart of traditional Japanese aesthetic culture. For Whitehead, reality is process and process is reality, which resonates with Heidegger’s notion that being is time and time is being. From the standpoint of comparative philosophy, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein or authentic human existence as a being-in-time and being-toward-death, appears reminiscent of the “being-time” (uji, 有時) of Dōgen’s metaphysics of “impermanence” (mujō, 無常). It must be emphasized, however, that according to the phenomenology of time developed by Heidegger, as well as his mentor Husserl, temporality is continuous without any gaps. In contrast, both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist philosophy clarify that temporal process is neither a sheer continuity nor a linear series of discontinuous atomic moments, but rather have converged on the ultimacy of time as a discontinuous continuity. Both Whitehead and Nishida describe how time advances from the created to the creating through harmonious interpenetration of many into one as a continuity of discontinuity in the existential mode of perpetual perishing or living by dying. For Whitehead, this epochal notion of temporal flow as a succession of discontinuous occasions arising through a quantum jump from occasion to occasion underlies his idea of tragic beauty and correlate idea of creative process as the becoming and perishing of vibratory events realizing vivid yet evanescent aesthetic quality. Moreover, Whitehead’s epochal theory of time as discontinuous continuity also resonates with the Japanese Buddhist doctrine of impermanence along with the poetic ideal of tragic beauty in the Japanese aesthetics of perishability. Here I would like to clarify how the evanescent aesthetic quality of tragic beauty as perishability in both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism is itself based on an analysis of time as discontinuous continuity, or the continuity of discontinuity. The tragic beauty of evanescence is radicalized in both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist philosophy by the notion

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that the continuous flow of time comes by abrupt, discrete, or discontinuous events. According to this radical notion of temporality articulated by both Whitehead and Japanese philosophy, the tragic beauty of time as discontinuous continuity signifies that beauty does not just gradually fade away into oblivion, but arises and perishes at each and every moment. Furthermore, both recognize that each ephemeral moment reflects totality grasped from its own perspective in nature. Like Dōgen in traditional Zen Buddhism, and Whitehead in American process metaphysics, the leading twentieth century Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō underscores the radically temporal character of lived existence. Moreover, like Dōgen in Japan and Whitehead in the West, Nishida emphasizes that the insubstantial self of pure experience always exists in the instant field of the absolute present, or what he refers to as the eternal now. For Nishida, as for Whitehead, the unity of the self in time is constituted by a series of appearing and disappearing events of immediate experience, whereupon at each moment in the absolute present the previous self is replaced by a partly new self, which is numerically nonidentical with its predecessors. Nishida develops a Zen model of the true self as a “continuity of discontinuity” (hirenzoku no renzoku, 非連続の連 続), formulated in terms of a temporal process which moves “from the created to the creating” (tsukurareta mono kara tsukuru mono e, 作られたも のから作るものへ), as constituted through the “contradictory self-identity of the many and the one” (ta to ichi to no mujunteki jikodōitsu, 多と一と の矛盾的自己同一 ) (1965, 9, 149). Similar to Whitehead’s description of the self as a discontinuous continuity which develops as an evolutionary temporal process of emergent creative advance from the many to the one, Nishida underscores the unifying power of self as a creative act which at each new moment synthesizes the many into the one, thereby constituting the unity of the self as a continuity of discontinuity. Nishida writes: The process of many becoming one does not create a unity without specific distinctions as it usually thought. The individual become an individual by negating itself. A continuity of discontinuity as the selfdetermination of the dialectical universal must exist. . . . A continuity of discontinuity is not simply a continuity, nor is it simply a discontinuity; and again, neither is it simply a jump from individual to individual; also, it does not mean that there is no connection between them. (1965, 7, 257)

In this passage, Nishida refutes the position held by traditional Western substance philosophy which conceives of the temporal structure of self either as a series of discrete moments characterized by “discontinuity” (hirenzoku, 非連続), or as as an unbroken “continuity” (renzoku, 連続). Instead, for Nishida the unity of time constituting the true self as a creative advance from many to one can only be described through a Zen logic

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of paradox as a discontinuous continuity, or continuity of discontinuity (hirenzoku no renzoku, 非連続の連続). Thus, later in the same text Nishida writes: As I have said before, the unity of the individual cannot be thought of as simply a continuity, rather, it must be a continuity of discontinuity so as to constitute the unity of independent beings with every step. Each moment of time passes into the next moment by negating itself, hence establishing the unity of time. (1965, 7, 268)

Moreover, Nishida describes the existential realization of discontinuous continuity in the absolute present as “living by dying” (shisuru koto ni yotte ikiru, 死することによって生きる) (1965, 7, 268). Here, as elsewhere in his later writings, Nishida articulates lived experience in terms of his Zen Buddhist logic of paradox, wherein human existence as “living by dying” is a contradictory identity between existence and nonexistence, form and emptiness, presence and absence, or being and nothingness. For Nishida, this paradoxical Zen logic of nothingness is expressed by the Zen principle of soku hi (即非), “is and yet is not’ (Nishida: 1987, 70). Hence, at the existential level of analysis, just as for Whitehead the realization that the self appears and disappears at every instant is felt as a tragic sense of “perpetual perishing,” for Nishida it is this discontinuous continuity of creative advance whereby the true self negates itself and enters into nothingness at each and every present moment which constitutes human selfhood as a temporal process of “living by dying.” Consequently, authentic selfhood is not realized by the “futural anticipation,” or “anticipatory resoluteness” of oncoming death and nothingness as is the case for Heidegger, but through the existential realization of Zen “living by dying,” or Whiteheadian “perpetual perishing,” which occurs in the present moment of immediate experience. The organic process model of selfhood developed by Whitehead thus converges with the modern Zen concept of selfhood postulated by Nishida in that it clarifies how the self is a radically temporal process as a continuity of discontinuity wherein creative advance from many to one is constituted by a sequence of transitory events forever arising and perishing whole in the present moment of the stream of immediate experience. In Nishida’s “The Logic of Place and a Religious Worldview” he argues, “when the truth of the sorrow of human life is faced the problem of religion arises” (1965: 11, 393). Religion arises through the encounter with the existential mood of “sorrow” (hiai, 悲哀), a term which can also be rendered as sadness, grief, or pathos. It should be noted that the term hiai or “sorrow” is composed of two Sino-Japanese characters, (hi 悲) as in the term higeki (悲劇) or “tragedy,” and ai (哀), which can also be read as aware or sympathetic feeling of the pathos and beauty of evanescent things. For Nishida the problem of religion arises by a deep reflection upon the “sorrow” or pathos of fleeting human existence, just as for

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Buddhism it is defined as a response to “suffering” (dukkha) rooted in the impermanence of all events in the flux of becoming. In this context Nishida develops an existential-religious inquiry into the source of pathos or sorrow in human existence, arguing that it arises from the ultimate paradox of the self as a living being which knows it must die: “I think the truth of the fundamental self-contradiction of human existence is based on the consciousness of death. All living things must die and nothing will live forever. I also know I must die” (1965, 11, 394). Thus, according to Omine Akira, “pathos” or the sadness of life is an underlying current running throughout Nishida’s thought. 6 What Nishida terms the “self-awareness of death” (shi no jikaku, 死の 自覚), however, must be comprehended in terms of his theory of time as a “continuity of discontinuity.” For Nishida, the unity of the true self is a process of creative advance from the created to the creating, having the paradoxical structure of a continuity of discontinuity, in which each and every moment the self negates itself by entering into nothingness and death. Thus, in Fundamental Problems of Philosophy he writes: “For the individual to be connected with the following moment as the continuity of discontinuity, it is necessary that one die at this moment and enter into nothingness. Unless one dies in this sense, there is no self. . . . Moreover, we live by dying only in the present” (1965, 7, 295). Insofar as the unity of the self is constituted as a “continuity of discontinuity” which enters into death or nothingness with each and every moment in the absolute present, it is what Nishida refers to above in Zen paradoxical terms as a constant “living by dying.” In Whitehead’s process metaphysics, living by dying through time as discontinuous continuity and advance from the created to the creating itself correspond to the ultimate fact that temporal process is a “perpetual perishing” (PR 340). Moreover, the existential awareness of the self as a succession of “perpetually perishing” atomic occasions of experience is what Whitehead elsewhere terms “the sense of tragedy” (AI 294). Like the Buddhist doctrine of “suffering,” for Whitehead “the sense of tragedy” is intrinsic to the temporal process of creative advance: “Decay, Transition, Loss, Displacement, belong to the essence of Creative Advance. . . . As soon as high consciousness is reached the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy” (AI 286). It can now be seen how at the existential level of discourse the philosophy of both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism are to be distinguished from that of Heidegger. In that for Heidegger the ontological-temporal unity of Dasein or human existence is constituted as an uninterrupted “continuity” (G. Kontinuität), he sees death and nothingness as the utmost horizon of its projection of future potentialities through the authentic attitude of futural anticipation. For Japanese Buddhist thinkers like Dōgen and Nishida, time is a succession of discontinuous events so that each appearing and disappearing moment is itself a realization of fini-

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tude, death and nothingness. Likewise, according to the epochal theory of time in Whitehead’s process metaphysics, the self is a succession of perpetually perishing occasions of experience. There is thus a significant difference between the theories of time developed by Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist philosophy as over against Heidegger’s concept of temporal existence. For Heidegger, authentic existence as being-in-time is a being-toward-death, so as to involve the “futural anticipation” of death, and nothingness. By contrast, the Whiteheadian/Japanese Buddhist model of time as discontinuous continuity is the ground for a deep existentialreligious awareness that with the creation and dissolution of each atomic occasion of immediate experience one enters into death and nothingness, or what Nishida terms “living by dying,” and what Whitehead calls time as “perpetual perishing.” Finally, I have endeavored to clarify how the notion of time as constituted by discontinous continuity, seen both in the classical Zen Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence-Buddha-nature in being-time posited by Dōgen, and its reformulation in the modern Zen philosophy of Nishida Kitarō, is itself the philosophical basis for the aesthetic notion of aware as the sorrowful beauty of perishability. This radicalization of time as a discontinuous continuity articulated by Dōgen and Nishida in Japan, as well as Whitehead in the tradition of American process philosophy, entails that with each fleeting moment, the fragile beauty of an evanescent aesthetic event becomes and perishes whole in the incessant flux of temporal process. Hence, the tragic beauty of perishability is itself a function of temporal atomicity as the continuity of discontinuity thorough creative of advance of many into one, whereby the evanescent beauty of each passing moment vanishes into nothingness as soon as it becomes. 7 Toward the end of the final ten Uji chapters in The Tale of Genji, in chapter 52 titled “The Drake Fly”(kagerō, 蜻蛉), Prince Niou composes a poem comparing the pathos of his fleeting love affairs to the brief existence of a drake fly (mayfly or gossamer): As he sank deeper in memories of Uji, cruel ties with the Uji family, drake flies, than which no creatures are more fragile and insubstantial, were flitting back and forth in the evening light. “I see the drake fly, take it up in my hand. Ah, here it is—and it is gone.” And he added softly, as always: “here—and perhaps not here at all.” (Murasaki: 1976, 2, 1042)

The kagerō or drake fly (ephemera) is symbolic of aware as the sorrowtinged ephemeral beauty of perishability. Furthermore, the drake fly is a poetic image used to illustrate the Buddhist notion of mujōkan, the “feeling of impermanence.” The short-lived drake fly is briefly visible, yet intangible. This reminds Prince Niou of an old Japanese poem that begins “here—and perhaps not here at all.” The drake fly or ephemera is so insub-

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stantial, fragile, and evanescent that it is here, yet somehow not here at all, both being and nothing or presence and absence in the eternal vanishing of time. The paradox of this insubstantial existence of ephemeral beauty is summed by the poetic form: “here and perhaps not here at all.” In the translator’s Postscript to Nishida Kitarō’s Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, Dilworth interprets this passage about the drake fly in terms of Nishida’s Eastern logic of nothingness, based on the Zen Buddhist paradoxical logic of “is and is not” (soku hi, 即非). The Zen paradoxical logic of “is and is not” is also expressed by Nishida in terms of his logic of nothingness as the “self-identity of absolute contradictions” (zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu, 絶対矛盾的自己同一). Nishida himself explains the paradoxical Buddhist logic of soku hi or “is and yet is not” as follows: Buddhism expresses this paradox through the dialectic of “is” and “is not” (soku hi). I am indebted to Suzuki Daisetsu for showing me the following passage in the Diamond Sutra: Because all dharmas are not all dharmas, Therefore they are called dharmas. Because there is no Buddha, there is Buddha; Because there are no sentient beings, there are sentient beings. (Nishida: 1987, 70)

According to this view, Nishida’s Zen Buddhist paradoxical logic of soku hi or “is and is not,” is an illustration of the literary phrase “here, and perhaps not here at all,” which is the fundamental mode of literary discourse articulating the paradoxical nature of insubstantial existence as a play of presence and absence in The Tale of Genji: “Here, and perhaps not here at all” is the discursive mode in which the poignant meaning of this text [The Tale of Genji] is crystallized. It is a version of the logic of “is and is not,” as presence and absence, which rings through the sensibility expressed in . . . traditional Japanese poetic anthologies. (Nishida: 1987, 133)

As he goes on the clarify, this delicate sense of “paradox” (gyakusetsu, 逆 説), or “contradiction” (mujun, 矛盾) is a pervasive feature of Japanese literary style, from the ancient Japanese anthologies including the Kokinshū and the Shinkokinshū, The Tale of Genji through the haiku of Matsuo Bashō to the modern novels of Kawabata Yasunari, along with the close relation between this aesthetic sensibility and the religious sensibility of such Buddhist thinkers as Kūkai, Dōgen, and Musō Soseki (Nishida: 1987, 132-133). Here I would like to point out the remarkable convergence between Nishida’s paradoxical Zen logic of soku hi or “is and yet is not” (1987, 70), and Whitehead’s principle of process, which holds that since an aesthetic occasion of experience is always becoming and perishing, “ it never really is” (PR 82, 85). In Whitehead’s words:

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The concrescence is thus the building up of a determinate “satisfaction,” which constitutes the completion of the actual togetherness of the discrete components . . . Completion is the perishing of immediacy: “It never really is.” (PR 85)

Whitehead further explicates the character of an evanescent occasion of experience in terms of his principle of process by quoting from Plato’s Timaeus: “‘But that which is conceived . . . is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is’” (PR 82). Whitehead’s process metaphysics thus proclaims the unreified and unreifable insubstantiality of a becoming and perishing occasion of aesthetic experience: “It never really is” (PR 85). Whitehead’s Platonic insight that since an aesthetic occasion is always in process of becoming and perishing “it never really is,” can be regarded as a western variant of Nishida’s paradoxical Zen logic of soku hi, or “is and yet is not.” Or in Whiteheadian terms, this can be explained in terms of his logic of irreducible contrasts. For Whitehead, dialectical opposites such as one and many are not sublated into a totalizing absolute as in Hegel’s monism, but are instead juxtaposed as irreducible contrasts as the basis of pluralism. Moreover, Whitehead’s view that an evanescent aesthetic occasion is always becoming and perishing and “never really is,” is also a western variant of the paradoxical mode of discourse articulated in Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, whereby the ephemeral drake fly is “here, yet not here at all” (Murasaki: 1976, 2, 1042). Indeed, the exclamation “here, yet not here at all” is echoed in the opening pages of Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics (1911), where making reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he cites a verse describing the ethereal ghost of Hamlet’s father: “‘Tis here, ‘tis there, ‘tis gone” (IM 7). It is this metaphysical insight into the ephemerality of all insubstantial, transitory, and impermanent phenomena wherein events perish as soon as they become, that underlies the Whiteheadian/Japanese Buddhist process aesthetics of evanescent beauty with its culminating poetic vision of pathos as tragic beauty. NOTES 1. Lewis Ford’s The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (1984) best clarifies this shift from “temporal continuity” to “temporal atomicity” in Whitehead`s process metaphysics. 2. Abe Masao (阿部正雄) is a representative of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Abe here emphasizes that in there is an ultimacy of discontinuity Dōgen’s theory of being-time and impermanence-Buddha-nature. 3. For a comprehensive account of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, see James Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Heisig explains the Kyoto School as a triangulation between Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji.

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4. Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎、1870-1945) is the founder of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Nishida arose to prominence in 1911 with his first book An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū, 善の研究), wherein he endeavors to articulate reality using a Zen-colored notion of “pure experience” (junsui keiken, 純粋経験) influenced by William James. In subsequent works he reformulates pure experience in terms such concepts as the will, self-awareness, place, and the historical world. Nishida’s mature thought is characterized by an East-West comparative philosophy and Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue based on his key notion of “absolute nothingness” (zettai mu, 絶対無), or what he otherwise terms the “place (field) of nothingness” (mu no basho, 無の場所). 5. For an annotated translation of Nishida Kitarō’s 1900 essay on aesthetic experience titled Bi no setsumei (美の説明, 1900), see “An Explanation of Beauty: Bi no setsumei,” translated with an introduction and notes by Steve Odin. Monumenta Nipponica vol. 42, no.2, Summer, 1987, 511-517. 6. As pointed out by James Heisig (2001, 295-296), in an essay on Nishida’s aesthetics [La visione artistica di Nishida Kitarō, Marchiano, 1996, 137] Yoshioka Kenjirō attempts to distinguish Nishida from the West’s concern with “certain knowledge” in virtue of the starting point in the “pathos” of existence. Discussing Yoshioka Kenjirō’s view of the role of pathos in Nishida’s thought, Heisig comments: “one could consider ‘pathos’ present in Nishida’s location of the starting point for philosophy not in ‘wonder’ but in ‘the sadness of life’” [Nishida Kitarō zenshū: 6:19] (2001, 296). He adds that Omine Akira (1990, 101) views “pathos” as an underlying current running throughout Nishida’s thought. But in opposition to Omine’s view, Heisig asserts: “I find the element of pathos distinctively absent in Nishida, whether in an aesthetic sense or a more philosophical sense” (2001, 296). I would agree with Heisig that pathos is not a pervasive characteristic of Nishida’s philosophy. However, Nishida does on occasion discuss the existential notion of pathos as well as the aesthetic notion of aware. I would argue that Nishida’s radical time-consciousness of discontinuous continuity supports the Japanese tragic sense of life and aesthetics of evanescent beauty. 7. In Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen and the Psychedelic Eschaton (2007), Eric Cunningham gives a fascinating account of Nishida Kitarō’s modern Zen concepts of time, history, and eschatology with references to A. N. Whitehead’s process metaphysics. Moreover, Cunningham develops the “eschatological” (shūmaturonteki, 終末論的) dimension of Nishida’s doctrine of time and history. Cunningham then argues that modern Zen and its reformulation in Nishida’s eschatological notions of time and history are best comprehended in terms of the “psychedelic paradigm” developed by Terrence McKenna. In his effort to establish a philosophical basis for his psychedelic time-wave theory, McKenna relies strongly on Whitehead’s organic process metaphysics of creative advance into novelty (1991; 1993). Hence, in his exposition of McKenna’s psychedelic model of eschatological history, Cunningham discusses Whitehead’s process metaphysics (2007, 33, 53, 268, 293). In this work Cunningham develops a process aesthetic of the “moving image,” including dreams, films, and psychedelic hallucinations.

Part IV

A Whiteheadian Perspective on Yūgen and Aware in Japanese Aesthetics Tragic Beauty

Whitehead’s concept of pathos and aesthetics of tragic beauty is grounded in his organic process metaphysics of qualitative flow. Likewise, the Japanese poetic ideal of aware as pathos or the feeling of beauty mixed with sorrow is influenced by the Buddhist metaphysical principle of mujō or “impermanence.” For both Whitehead and Japanese tradition the poetics of ephemeral beauty has its source in a radical time-consciousness as continuity of discontinuity. To explain how both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have converged on an aesthetics of tragic beauty as perishability, the present section will be divided into two parts, the first examining the structure of time in Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism, and the second examining the nature of tragic beauty in Whiteheadian and Japanese aesthetics. Whitehead’s aesthetics of perishability is his view that reality is a creative emergent process of becoming and perishing events with vivid yet transient aesthetic values. To clarify the structure of time in Japanese philosophy, I will consider two representative thinkers, Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen Buddhism, and Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. It will be shown that both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist philosophy have converged on the structure of time as a continuous stream of discontinuous events. 1 Both have developed a radicalized time-consciousness based on the momentariness of temporal flow as a succession of appearing and disappearing events. For Whitehead radical time-consciousness is based on the method of radical empiricism with its phenomenological description of reality as dynamic process. For Dōgen, radical time-consciousness is grounded in Zen meditation on being-time and impermanence-Buddha-nature. Nishida’s radical time-consciousness is influenced both by James’s radical empiricism and Zen meditation on being-time. Finally, it will be demonstrated how

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both Whitehead and Japanese tradition have formulated an aesthetics of tragic beauty grounded in radical time-consciousness as a continuity of discontinuity. NOTE 1. Steve Odin, “The Epochal Theory of Time in Whitehead & Japanese Buddhism: An East-West Study of Whitehead, Dōgen, and Nishida,” in Process Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1994).

FIFTEEN Tragic Beauty in Whitehead’s Process Aesthetics

The thought process of A. N. Whitehead is commonly known as process philosophy, process metaphysics, or process theology. In this work I argue that Whitehead’s process metaphysics of qualitative immediacy culminates in an aesthetics of beauty as perishability as summed up by his vision of pathos as tragic beauty. Whitehead’s concept of evanescent beauty is grounded in a radical empiricism with its phenomenology of qualitative flow in the stream of consciousness. For Whitehead, the aesthetic experience of ephemeral beauty involves the mood of pathos or the feeling of pity and sadness arising with the flow of time. He illustrates the aesthetic experience of pathos through its symbolic expression in poetry. The doctrine of pathos thus constitutes another element in Whitehead’s process aesthetics of beauty as perishability and its culmination in his vision of tragic beauty. Whitehead’s concept of pathos is based on his doctrine of perception in three modes, including (i) perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as prehension, sympathy, or feeling; (ii) perception in the mode of sense-presentation; and (iii) perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference, wherein sense data clearly articulated in the foreground operate as aesthetic symbols making reference to the dimly felt background of causal relationships. Whitehead’s theory of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy is itself influenced by the radical empiricism of William James, which gives a phenomenological description of qualitative flow in the stream of immediate experience grounded on the empirical datum of felt transitions. In PR, Whitehead argues that the doctrine of Heraclitus that “all things flow” is the first metaphysical generalization in ancient Greek philosophy, and that the recollection of the “flux of things” always “lends its 253

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pathos to poetry” (PR 208). Moreover, Whitehead explains how while the mere succession of atomic sense data are empty of meaning, perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy reveals the deeper aesthetic significance of temporal flow. At the level of perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference, the disconnected sensations of presentational immediacy become fused with the dim feeling-tones of causal efficacy, thereby to disclose the wholeness, fullness, and interrelatedness of events in time. It is when the clear sense data of presentational immediacy function as poetic symbols referring to dim feeling-tones of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy, that the haunting pathos of time is disclosed: The contrast between the comparative emptiness of Presentational Immediacy and the deep significance disclosed by Causal Efficacy is at the root of the pathos which haunts the world. . . . Almost all pathos includes a reference to lapse of time. (S 37)

According to Whitehead’s phenomenological doctrine of perception in three modes, then, “the pathos which haunts the world” (S 47) is to be explained by sense data in the clearly discriminated focus operating as aesthetic symbols making reference to vague feelings of relationships of sense data to the undiscriminated whole of the background fringe constituting the stream of immediate experience, including the backward-going fringe of memory and the forward-going fringe of anticipation, altogether making up a “duration” or span of time revealed by the radically empirical datum of felt transitions. A key source for Whitehead’s process aesthetics is to be found in chapter 5 titled “The Romantic Reaction” from SMW. Here it is argued that in contrast to the notion of vacuous existence, romantic nature poetry reveals that aesthetic value quality is intrinsic to all events in nature (SMW 94). Whitehead goes on to demonstrate how the haunting beauty of pathos in the lapse of time is depicted by the poetry of Shakespeare, Shelly, Keats, and others (S 47-48). In this context he cites the romantic poetry of Keats: The final stanza of Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes” commences with the haunting lines: And they are gone: ay, ages long ago Those lovers fled away into the storm. (S 48)

Analyzing this stanza from Keats’ poem, Whitehead adds: “There the pathos of the lapse of time arises from the imagined fusion of the two perceptive modes by one intensity of emotion” (S 48). The feeling of pathos emerging through lapse of time is analyzed in romantic poetry using his doctrine of perception in three modes. By this view, sense data isolated from their background context of directly felt causal relationships are vacuous or empty of value. But when vivid sense data arising

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through perception in the mode of presentational immediacy function as poetic symbols making reference to deeper perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy, there is a fusion of the two modes into a unity of feeling with aesthetic value quality. Although at the level of presentational immediacy the mere succession of discrete sense percepts appear barren of meaning, at the level of symbolic reference they become poetic symbols of pathos as a vague aesthetic feeling of the continuity of time as the past flows into the present and the present flows into the future. This doctrine of pathos as a vague feeling of the lapse of time revealed by perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy will thus come to play an important role in Whitehead’s aesthetics of perishability and vision of tragic beauty. It can be said that the aesthetic mood of “pathos” as the feeling of pity or sadness evoked by symbolic images of evanescence in romantic nature poetry is what in Whitehead’s later writings is further crystallized as the “tragic beauty” of perishability. For Whitehead, the romantic poetry of Wordsworth evokes the haunting, brooding, and mysterious presence of events in nature as an organic whole disclosed in each of its parts. Furthermore, it is the poetic verse of Shelly that captures the evanescence of nature as a dynamic process of qualitative flow. “Shelly thinks of nature as changing, dissolving, transforming as it were at a fairy’s touch. The leaves fly before the West Wind” (SMW 86). In this context he cites directly from Shelly’s most acclaimed poem, “Ode to the West Wind”: O Wild West Wind, Thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead, Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing . . . (SMW 86)

According to Whitehead’s theory of perception, when vivid sense percepts of scarlet autumn leaves scattering in the wind function as poetic images making symbolic reference to perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy, there arises a vague aesthetic feeling of pathos in the flow of time. Elsewhere, Whitehead again quotes an inspired verse by Shelly containing poetic images of evanescence: Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like Bubbles in a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away. (MT 44)

Indeed, Shelly’s poem as cited by Whitehead is at once reminiscent of a famous verse from the classic Buddhist scripture titled The Diamond Sutra: Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

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In the Buddhist literary tradition, appearing and disappearing phenomena emerging through the network of causal relationships are depicted by poetic images of evanescence, such as bubbles, dreams, shadows, dewdrops, and rainbows. All interdependently originated dharmas are thus like rainbows—beautiful yet void, unsubstantial and evanescent. It has been shown how SMW articulates a process metaphysics and cosmology of transient aesthetic values wherein the temporal flow of life is evoked by poignant images of evanescence in romantic nature poetry. In Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1956), Whitehead is recorded as saying: “That is what poetry at its best does . . . [it] comes somewhere near capturing in a net of words one of those powerful, evanescent moments of happiness or pain” (D 159). Whitehead thus expresses what I have termed his poetics of evanescence, which discloses the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. As explained by the literary critic M. H. Abrams (1973, 418-427), a leitmotif of modern literature is what James Joyce called the “epiphany”—a moment of insight into beauty. “The Moment” of Wordsworth and the romantic nature poets, Proust’s moments privilégiés, and Virginia Woolf’s “moments of vision,” are all cited by Abrams as variants of Joyce’s “epiphany” in modern literature. In The Japanese Haiku (1960), Kenneth Yasuda develops an Asian counterpart to Joyce’s epiphany, according to which Japanese haiku poetry acts to elicit the “haiku moment,” a satori-like flash of insight into beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic qualities such as wabi (rustic beauty), sabi (solitary beauty), and yūgen (mysterious beauty). Likewise, Whitehead above sketches a literary doctrine of epiphany, wherein poetry acts to capture “evanescent moments” in their happiness and pain (D 159). In Whitehead’s final work he claims that “Philosophy is akin to poetry” (MT 174). It can therefore be said that Whitehead’s own speculative philosophy has a poetic function aiming at sheer disclosure of evanescent moments of aesthetic experience with the intrinsic value of ephemeral beauty. Thus, each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing” (AI 274). According to Whitehead, then, the tragic beauty of actual occasions of aesthetic experience in the creative advance toward novelty is rooted in his metaphysical principle of process, whereby each transitory, finite, and novel occasion of experience is conceived in terms of its becoming and perishing. The principle of process therefore underscores the two fundamental aspects of Whitehead’s notion of tragic beauty: whereas the “becoming” of self-creative actual occasions involves an aim directed toward the creation and enjoyment of evanescent beauty, their “perishing” results in the sorrow and pathos of tragedy as the loss of beauty. Hence, the principle of process includes the doctrine that due to the transitoriness of

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each time-bound occasion of aesthetically immediate experience, beauty is always tragic, since it must perish immediately upon its attainment. The principle of process whereby each occasion is only to be understood in terms of its arising and perishing, is itself related to one of the fundamental notions in Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, namely, the doctrine of time as a “perpetual perishing” (PR 29). Each occasion of experience aims toward achieving consummatory satisfaction in aesthetic experience as beauty. However, due to the perpetual perishing of all occasions, the aesthetic experience of beauty is always the beauty of perishability. Whitehead’s concept of tragic beauty involves his notion of evil as “aesthetic destruction” (AI 256). Elsewhere he describes the evil of aesthetic destruction as based on the process theory of perpetual perishing: The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a “perpetual perishing.” . . . In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entail loss. (PR 340).

Thus, in Whitehead’s notion of tragic beauty, the evil of aesthetic destruction in the temporal world of process arises through the loss, the fading, and the perpetual perishing of beauty. At the outset of SMW Whitehead describes the profound influence of ancient Greek tragedy on the history of Western thought from medieval times to twentieth century science. The great scientists are compared with the great tragedians of ancient Greece, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He argues that the ancient Greek tragic vision of fate has been reformulated by modern science: “Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought” (SMW 10). Whitehead further explains that the essence of ancient Greek tragedy is not unhappiness, but the inevitableness of fate, adding: “The laws of physics are the decrees of fate” (SMW 10-11). Thus for Whitehead, the remorseless indifference of fate or destiny at the heart of ancient Greek tragic drama is replaced in modern science by the inexorable laws of nature, while the scientific community of inquirers now become the ancient Greek chorus witnessing the spectacle of the life as it unfolds in all of its beauty, splendor, and glory as well as its inevitable tragedy. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is based upon a tragic vision of life as perpetual perishing. It can be said that Whitehead develops what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno calls the “tragic view of life” (1954). Joseph Grange has argued that Whitehead’s thought is a “tragic vision” of existence based on acknowledgment of process, finitude, and a deep existential sense of loss that results in the achievement of “tragic value” (1972, 127-144). Grange asserts: “The consequence of being human in a process world is recognition of tragic value as the fate of man” (1972, 131). Nancy Arnison holds that there is a “tragic vision” common to

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Whitehead’s process theology and the plays of Aeschylus in ancient Greek tragedy, insofar as both illuminate the interplay of necessity and freedom (2012, 2). What must now be further clarified is that Whitehead’s “tragic vision” is in fact a profoundly aesthetic vision of tragic beauty. For Whitehead the aim of creative process is attainment of aesthetic value as beauty, yet since all beauty perishes as soon as it becomes, all beauty is tragic beauty. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is thus based on a tragic vision of temporal existence, whereby due to the finitude of the human condition, the fate of humanity is experience of both the joy of life arising through creation of beauty and the pathos of life owing to the inevitable loss, perishing, and destruction of beauty. In MT, Whitehead develops his idea of nature as a continuum of diverse multiple perspectives realizing aesthetic significance, aesthetic importance, or aesthetic worth (MT 119-121). He further proclaims that beauty is a grand fact in the universe (MT 120). For Whitehead, this leads to a moral view whereby each creative occasion aims to produce aesthetic significance as evanescent beauty not only for itself, but also for others and the whole. Insofar as nature is a process of creative advance into novelty, all aesthetic experience is ephemeral, just as all beauty is tragic. Thus, Whitehead asserts: “The future is big with every possibility of achievement and of tragedy” (MT 171). In AI, Whitehead proclaims the ultimacy of beauty, thereby to overturn nihilism and counter the fallacy of vacuous actuality. He now propounds that “Beauty is left as the one aim which by its very nature is selfjustifying” (AI 266). Again, “The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). At the conclusion of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead introduces his consummatory aesthetic value of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296). According to Whitehead’s process metaphysics, nature is a “creative advance into novelty” (PR 28, 222). Whitehead not only acknowledges, but even celebrates the evanescence of beauty in nature as a process of creative advance. Yet inherent in his notion of process as a creative advance to novelty is also a tragic view of life, which includes the pathos of loss, suffering, and tragedy: “Decay, Transition, Loss, Displacement belong to the essence of Creative Advance” (AI 286). In his later writings Whitehead thus goes on to develop his notion of tragedy as the destruction of aesthetic experience and the loss of beauty. At the conclusion of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead sets forth his vision of tragic Beauty as follows: “At the heart of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty” (AI 296). In the context of Whitehead’s process metaphysics, the “dream of youth” represents that subjective aim toward ideal beauty which initiates the becoming of each self-creative occasion of experience; whereas the “harvest of

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tragedy” designates the loss of beauty which results with the aesthetic satisfaction and perishing of each time-bound occasion. Whitehead’s process vision of tragic beauty is summed up above when he proclaims: “The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty” (AI 296). Beauty, as a fleeting moment of aesthetic experience, always involves tragedy. For Whitehead, tragedy means the loss, perishing, or destruction of beauty. Since each timebound occasion perishes as soon as it becomes, all beauty is tragic. Thus for Whitehead, reality is likened to an evanescent dream that ends in tragic beauty. It can be said that Whitehead’s poetic vision of tragic beauty is the summit of his process aesthetics of beauty as perishability. In his essay “The Aesthetic Meaning of Death,” Charles Hartshorne articulates a process aesthetics based on a tragic vision of life where death is the source of beauty. 1 At the outset of this essay Hartshorne cites a verse from the American poet Wallace Stevens: “Death is the mother of beauties” (1987, 51). Steven poetically sums up Hartshorne’s own Whiteheadian process aesthetics of evanescent beauty. Hartshorne begins this essay with the assertion: “To understand death we must know what life is ... What is life? It is most fundamentally aesthetic creation, the achievement of harmonious experiences” (1987, 51). For Hartshorne, as for Whitehead, life is a process of aesthetic creativity aiming to produce finite occasions of harmonious intensity, so that all life is comparable to a work of art: Aesthetic wholes are definite and finite. . . . Works of art are finite. We expect a novel to have a last chapter; a poem, a last verse; a symphony, a last note. If life is at all analogous to a work of art, we can, in this analogy, find a clue to the meaning of death. (1987, 53)

He adds: If, then, a life is a work of art, it is one peculiarly subject to chance interruptions and premature endings. It could not be otherwise, so fragile is a life in its hold on existence. In this sense all life is tragic. (1987, 54; italics added)

Hartshorne emphasizes that insofar as life is analogous to a work of art, it is directed toward optimal production of aesthetic values. Also, “value requires definiteness and finitude, inducing the finitude of having a beginning and ending of a career” (1987, 54). Moreover, insofar as the fragile beauty of life as a work of art is finite, “all life is tragic” (1987, 54). Hartshorne’s view of the aesthetic meaning of death is itself based on Whitehead’s poetic vision of tragic beauty, whereby all events have aesthetic value, and aesthetic value requires limitation, definiteness, and finitude. As Whitehead himself asserts: “Value is an element which permeates through and through the poetic view of nature. . . .Value is the outcome of limitation” (SMW 93-94; italics added). For Hartshorne, as for

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Whitehead, life is a creative art-process aimed at production of events with the aesthetic value of beauty, and all aesthetic value is the outcome of limitation, including the temporal finitude of mortality, perishing, and death. Because each aesthetic, novel, and evanescent occasion of experience arising through creative process is finite, it has the character of tragic beauty. According to Hartshorne and Whitehead, the aesthetic value of beauty in an artwork is characterized by finitude, and without finitude, limitation, and mortality there could be no beauty. Insofar as life as a process of aesthetic creativity is analogous to a work of art, it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just as a novel has a final chapter, a poem has a final verse, and a musical symphony has a final note. Temporal finitude as characterized by mortality, perishing, and death, is thus a necessary condition for the possibility of beauty. For the process aesthetics of Whitehead and Hartshorne, as for the poetics of Wallace Stevens, the temporal finitude of death as the fragility, mortality, and perishability of life is itself the source of all beauty. Thus, insofar as death is the ultimate condition for the becoming of beauty, all beauty is tragic beauty. NOTE 1. Charles Hartshorne’s essay “The Aesthetic Meaning of Death” is located in his 1987 book The Wisdom of Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

SIXTEEN Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

Japanese Buddhism, like all schools of Buddhism, proclaims the emptiness, insubstantiality, and evanescence of all dharmas. An event arising through interdependent origination (pratitya-samutpâda) is produced by a combination of factors—the mind, body, senses, perspective, light, space, time, environment, situation, and so forth. All things that emerge through the process of interdependent origination are without own-being or inherent self-existence and soon vanish into nothingness. Insofar as aesthetic phenomena are constituted by the process of interdependent origination they arise into appearance yet are completely void or empty of substance. All transient phenomena are like mirages, dreams, bubbles, shadows, and dewdrops. Thus, all events arising by interdependent origination are ultimately like rainbows—beautiful yet empty, insubstantial and ephemeral. According to early Buddhist philosophy the three marks of all dharmas or events are “impermanence” (Sanskrit: anitya), “nonsubstantiality” or “no-self” (anâtman), and “suffering” (duhkha), all of which are summed up as “emptiness” (´sūnyatâ), defined as “interdependent origination” (pratîtya-samutpâda). The tradition of Japanese Buddhism is to be characterized especially by its emphasis on the centrality of mujō (無常) or “impermanence,” and mujōkan (無常観), the “feeling of impermanence.” This Buddhist notion of impermanence otherwise became known by the Japanese term hakanasa (儚さ), “evanescence,” “transience,” or “perishability.” While all Buddhist schools underscore the “impermanence” of events, Japanese Buddhist poetics came to accept the reality of evanescence through the tranquil and detached attitude of akirame (諦め) or “resignation.” Japanese poetics not only accepts impermanence through calm resignation, but even celebrates the beauty, the glory, and the splendor of 261

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evanescence. Saito Yuriko calls this artistic preference for the beauty of evanescence in Japanese tradition the “aestheticization of transience” (2007, 184). It is this aesthetic response to transience that allows for recognition of the suffering of impermanence without falling into despair, anxiety, or nihilism. Indeed, Japanese Buddhist aestheticism not only thematizes the beauty of transience, but also views perishability as a necessary condition for the possibility of beauty. Here a dramatic contrast emerges between the Japanese and Platonic traditions of aesthetics. According to Plato, beauty is realized through participation in eternal forms. Plato’s dualistic worldview holds that under the influence of divine Eros there is an ascent from the beauty of particular objects in the world of becoming to the beauty of eternal ideas in the world of being, finally mounting upward to behold absolute beauty. Thus, in the Platonic tradition of Western art and literature there is a celebration of an absolute beauty that is eternal, unchanging, immutable, and everlasting. However, in the nondualistic Japanese Buddhist metaphysics of nothingness with its explicit identification of nirvana and samsara, there is no dichotomy between the realms of being and becoming, thereby resulting in dialectical interpenetration between transcendence and immanence, absolute and relative or sacred and profane. Thus, in the tradition of Japanese art and literature there is an aesthetic affirmation of becoming and a celebration of the beauty of perishability, ephemerality, and fragility. D. T. Suzuki emphasizes that the aesthetic value of nature can never be grasped as static substance but only as dynamic process: “Nature is always in motion, never at a standstill; if Nature is to be loved, it must be caught while moving and in this way its aesthetic value must be appraised” (2010, 361). Suzuki then explains the celebration of evanescence and the beauty of transitoriness in traditional Japanese art influenced by Zen aestheticism: “The morning-glory is one of the most common flowering plants in Japan. . . . However splendid the flowers are, they fade even before noon of the same day. This evanescent glory has appealed very much to the Japanese imagination” (2010, 380-381). He adds: I do not know whether this momentaristic tendency in Japanese psychology is in their native blood or is due in some measure to the Buddhist Weltanschauung; but the fact is, beauty is something momentary and ever-fleeting. . . . Beauty is ever alive, because for it there is no past, no future, but the present. (2010, 381)

For Suzuki, since beauty is evanescent, transitory, and fading, its glory must be fully appreciated at each and every moment. Suzuki thus clarifies the traditional Japanese aesthetic preference for the fleeting beauty of evanescence, changeability, and momentariness. While discussing the Japanese aesthetic appreciation of transitoriness in nature and its creative expression by Zen artists and poets, Suzuki

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writes: “Changeability itself is frequently the object of admiration . . . it is associated with the virtue of non-attachment, which is characteristically Buddhistic as well as an aspect of Japanese character” (2010, 380). The aesthetic appreciation of changeability in nature requires the Zen mind of nonattachment, also called the state of no-mind or empty-minded-ness. Elsewhere Suzuki writes: Such a disinterested enjoyment of Nature . . . is known as fūryū, and those without this feeling of fūryū, are classed among the most uncultured in Japan. The feeling is not merely aesthetical, it has also a religious significance. (2010, 81-82).

Suzuki holds that aesthetic appreciation of changeability requires “a disinterested enjoyment of Nature.” According to Suzuki, one of the Japanese aesthetic and religious terms for this disinterested enjoyment of beauty as changeability in the flux of nature is fūryū (風流) or windblown elegance. It can thus be said that delight in the evanescent beauty of nature is the function of the Zen mind of nonattachment, otherwise understood as an aesthetic attitude of artistic detachment, psychical distance, or disinterested contemplation. The notion of perishability has been thematized in various ways throughout the history of Japanese aesthetics, including the “evanescence” (hakanasa , 儚さ) of things in the Heian period, the “impermanence” (mujō, 無常) of life in the Kamakura period, and the ephemerality of erotic or romantic love within the “floating world” (ukiyo, 浮世) of the pleasure districts in the Edo period. During the Heian period (794-1191), the Japanese aesthetic preference for ephemeral beauty came to be encapsulated by the poetic ideal of aware (哀れ) as pathos or the feeling of beauty and sadness, also referred to as mono no aware (物の哀れ) as the pathos of ephemeral things. It can be said that the melancholic beauty of aware became the master concept in the history of Japanese aesthetics. In Japanese culture the Buddhist metaphysics of “impermanence” (mujō, 無常) was developed into an aesthetics of perishability celebrating the sorrow-tinged beauty of evanescence. The Japanese poetic ideal of aware (哀れ) designating the pathos of sad, melancholic, or tragic beauty, came to be symbolized by various conventional poetic images, such as the fragile “cherry blossoms” (sakura, 桜) scattering in the spring rain, “crimson maple leaves” (kōyō, 紅葉) of autumn, or “dewdrops” (tsuyu, 露) evaporating on a blade of grass in the morning sunlight, “fireflys” (hotaru, 蛍) flickering on and off in a dark summer eve, the “floating world” (ukiyo, 浮き世), “dreams” (yumei, 夢), and “shadows” (kage, 影), as well as earlier symbols of evanescence such as an “empty cicada shell” (utsusemi, 空蝉). The poetic ideal of aware as the beauty and sadness of perishability, is also to be found as an element in other aesthetic categories which emerged in the Japanese canons of taste under the influence of Zen, such

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as yūgen (幽玄) or the mysterious beauty of evanescent things fading into twilight darkness, as expressed in waka poetry, the nō drama, and monochrome sumie inkwash paintings; wabi (侘び) or the antique beauty of artifacts used in the tea ceremony; and sabi (寂び) as the rust of age shown by the transient, desolate, and quiet beauty of weathered and lonely things in nature as expressed by haiku poetry. The Heian period notion of mono no aware thus evolved into the later ideal of wabi sabi cultivated by Zen aestheticism and its flourishing in the tea ceremony as a religion of beauty. As Juniper puts it: Mono no aware—Literally “an intense feeling of things.” An ancient term that enshrines the Buddhist idea of ephemerality. Used in art criticism to convey a sense of beautiful sadness or gentle melancholy. Its links with the beauty of impermanence make it a very close relative of the term wabi sabi. (2003, 161)

The aesthetic ideal of mono no aware is exemplified by the brevity of fleeting cherry blossoms. However, the wabi sabi aesthetic of perishability is instead exemplified by the natural patina of an old, faded, and rustic tea bowl with its sheen of antiquity, that despite its long years of use in everyday life, reveals the fragile beauty of ephemerality through the aging effects of time. It has often been asserted by scholars of Asian literature and art that the celebration of the sad or tragic beauty of perishability is the most uniquely Japanese of all aesthetic principles. From the early eleventh century novel titled The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 源氏物語り, ca. 1008) by Murasaki Shikibu, to the twentieth century Nobel prize winning Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushisa to kanashimi to, 美しさと哀しみと, 1961/1975), there has been an ongoing tradition of depicting the pathos of evanescent things characterized by mono no aware, the sorrowful beauty of perishability, or the melancholic beauty of joy mixed with sadness. The “Empty Cicada Shell” as the Earliest Image of Evanescence The concept of evanescence underlying the Japanese aesthetics of perishability is generally regarded as the hallmark of Buddhist philosophy. Yet in his book Evanescence and Form, Charles Shirō Inouye argues that there is a pre-Buddhist source for the Japanese aesthetics of evanescence (2008, 17). 1 Inouye points out that in ancient Japanese literature, a recurrent poetic image symbolizing the beauty of evanescence is that of an “empty cicada shell” (utsusemi, 空蝉), or the husk left behind after the insect has crawled from the earth and metamorphosed into its winged form (2008, 12). As an example, Inouye (2008, 13) cites a 31 syllable tanka poem by Otomo

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Yakamochi (716-785), contained in first anthology of ancient Japanese verse titled Manyōshū: Utsusemi no

I know well

Yo wa tsune nashi to

That in this cicada-husk world

Shiru mono o

there is no permanence;

Akikaze samui

But the autumn wind is cold,

Shinobitsuru kamo

And makes me long again for you.

Inouye further comments on this poem, stating: As an early image of evanescence, utsusemi affirms life’s brevity and fragility–the active summer that ends with the death of fall. In this instance, its meaning is articulated as “tsune nashi” 常無し a term that in its Chinese reading, mujō, 無常 later appears as the primary feature of Buddhist reality. (2008, 13)

It is significant that the term utsu (空) in the word utsu-semi, is the same character as kū (空), the Japanese Buddhist term for sūnyatâ meaning “emptiness,” “hollowness,” or “voidness.” Also, in the above verse, the poetic image of utsusemi is used to designate the “impermanence” (tsune nashi, 常無し) of the world. Again, it is significant that the word tsune nashi, in its Chinese reading, would later become used to denote the “impermanence” (mujō, 無常) in Japanese Buddhism. Thus, whether or not the ancient Japanese poetic image of utsusemi or the “empty cicada shell,” and tsune nashi or “impermanence,” designate a pre-Buddhist source for the Japanese aesthetics of evanescence, Inouye provides an excellent account of the “empty cicada shell” as an early, if not the earliest poetic image of evanescence in Japanese literature. Evanescence, Apocalypse, and the End of the World Inouye argues that “the end of the world has emerged as a postwar manifestation of evanescence. The conflict that killed fifty to seventy million people worldwide is remembered in Japan as a tragedy” (2008, 192). According to Inouye, Japanese notions of evanescence developed into the eschatological theme of apocalypse or the “end of the world” (sekai no owari, 世界の終わり) in post-World War II art and literature, including novels, films, manga, and anime. Summing up his overview of evanescence in the history of Japanese art, Inouye writes: The frequency with which Japanese artists treat this theme of the end [of the world] . . . can continue the line we have drawn from utsusemi to hakanasa to mujō to ukio to mono no aware to monstrosity [yōsai] to adaptor-die to wartime atrocity to holocaust to the ebullience of economic growth to the popping of the bubble to include contemporary fashion,

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Although throughout its history Japan has been a seismically active region prone to devastating earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, typhoons, and other cataclysms, with the advent of World War II it became the first and only nation so far to experience the nuclear holocaust of an A-bomb. Some of the post-World War II literary and artistic works thematizing apocalypse examined by Inouye are anime and manga, such as Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Komatsu Sakyo’s novel and movie Japan Sinks, the monster (yōsai) film Godzilla, and Murakami Haruki’s novel Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the World (2008, 191-197). The Japanese artistic and literary theme of evanescence has thereby developed into the post-World War II recurrent theme of apocalypse. Inouye demonstrates how the poetic image of utsusemi as the “empty cicada shell” symbolizing the evanescence of life, has been revived in the contemporary Japanese manga by Miyazaki Hayao, titled Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 風の谷のナウシカ、19821991), also turned into an anime (animated film) by the same title (1984). 2 In both Miyazaki’s manga and anime versions of Nausicaä, the impermanence, evanescence, and perishability of existence in its insubstantial emptiness is graphically conveyed through a cautionary futuristic tale of apocalyptic holocaust at the end of the world due to nuclear and biochemical warfare. At the very outset of the story, the heroine Nausicaä enters a toxic jungle of poison fungi and acid lakes to find the “empty shell” of a giant mutated insect called Ohmu, and delights in its ephemeral beauty (Inouye: 2008, 195-197; also, see Odin: 2010). “Aware” in the Tale of Genji The locus classicus for the sorrow-tinged beauty of aware in the Heian period (平安時代 794-1186) aesthetics of perishability is the eleventh century literary masterwork entitled The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 源氏 物語り, ca. 1008) composed by the aristocratic court lady Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-1014). This work is today recognized as the oldest and one of the greatest novels in world literature. The Tale of Genji is a multilayered text with a variety of meanings, and cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. At one level it is a tale about the floating dreamlike world of romantic love and heartbreak between men and women of the Japanese imperial court. Although the novel does not enter into abstract Buddhist speculations, it nonetheless uses literary imagination to portray a Buddhist cosmological vision of reality. The fundamental Buddhist theme underlying The Tale of Genji is that of mujōkan (無常観), the “feeling of impermanence,” and hakanasa (儚さ), or “evanescence.” This work

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underscores a number of Buddhist philosophical notions, including the sense of impermanence, the evanescence of life, the suffering of transitoriness, karma, and reincarnation, as well as the ideal of emancipation from suffering through Buddhist ritual, meditation, and prayer, including devotion to Amida Buddha. In the climactic “Uji Chapters,” or the final ten chapters of the novel focusing on events at Uji village near the old capital of Kyoto, there is an increasing emphasis on Buddhist religious themes. Today, one can still see the Uji River, the Uji Bridge, and the magnificent Byōdō Temple, the only remaining temple from the Heian period, located on the western side of the Uji River. The final chapter titled “The Floating Bridge of Dreams” (Yume no ukihashi), which sums up the whole novel, is a symbol for the evanescence of human life as a floating bridge of dreams whereby one crosses over from the defiled material world of samsara in the east, to the Pure Land of Amida Buddha in the western paradise. In the Japanese Buddhist literary imagination, a direct link between evanescence and dreams can be seen in that the character for “evanescence” (hakanasa, 儚さ), itself contains the character for “dream” (yume, 夢), so that the transitory human life of samsara is likened to a dream within a dream. The Uji River and its Floating Bridge of Dreams thus function to symbolize one of the novel’s central themes: that the every-flowing stream of life is an eternally vanishing dream with both exquisite beauty and overwhelming sorrow. Indeed, this poetic depiction of life as an evanescent dream with the pathos of beauty and sadness has itself become the leitmotif of traditional Japanese aesthetics. As emphasized by Ivan Morris, in the last ten chapters of the novel occurring in Uji, various recurrent symbols are used to evoke the tragedy of evanescent beauty, such as the Floating Bridge of Dreams and the Uji River. In these final chapters, the tragic heroine is a beautiful woman named Ukifune (floating boat), who becomes romantically involved with two noblemen, Kaoru and Niou, which finally drives her to attempt suicide by drowning in the Uji River. Morris explains, “Ukifune [is] the tragic heroine of the last five books” (1994, 268). This tragic event is a pattern in the architecture of the novel referring to a similar kind of tragic love relationship involving Prince Genji, leading Morris to write: “In both cases the relationships are marked by a sense of strangeness and end in tragedy” (1994, 270). According to Morris, the Uji River becomes a recurrent symbolic image of pathos as the grief, sorrow and tragedy of evanescent beauty: Of all the images that symbolize the atmosphere at Uji none is used more consistently and with greater effect than that of the river outside Prince Hachi’s house. As the central image of these final books, it serves to evoke the grief and tragedy that dominate the house at Uji and its inhabitants. (1994, 272)

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Descibing how Ukifune finally drowns herself in the Uji River, Morris writes: A recurrent image has become a reality: the fierce waters, which have always represented the mood of sorrow and tragedy at Uji, become the real agent of the culminating disaster. . . . The river continues to appear as a symbol of tragedy long after Ukifune’s supposed suicide. (1994, 275)

Hence, the recurrent aesthetic symbols of evanescence at the climax of The Tale of Genji, such as the Floating Bridge of Dreams and the everflowing Uji River, are poetic images of the evanescence of life that always ends in the pathos of tragic beauty. Moreover, the poetic theme as well as the dominant feeling-tone expressed throughout this novel is the pervasive aesthetic quality of aware (哀れ), the sad, melancholic, or tragic beauty of perishability. This tragic beauty of evanescence is imaginatively expressed by poetic images of transience, including evanescent “cherry blossoms” (sakura,桜) of spring, “crimson maple leaves” (kōyō, 紅葉) of autumn, “empty cicada shells” (utsusemi, 空蝉) ”glow worms” (hotaru, 蛍) blinking on and off in a dark summer night, “drake flies”(kagerō, 蜻蛉) that live for one day, ephemeral “dreams” (yumei, 夢), and the ever-flowing Uji River (Ujigawa, 宇治川). As the characters of the novel all fade away and perish at the peak of their ephemeral glory, like fragile cherry blossoms scattering in the spring wind, the novel further evokes the sad beauty of evanescence through the poetic image of “dewdrops” (tsuyu, 露), symbolizing the “teardrops” (namida, 涙) shed from the grief of human mortality. All of these poetic images have thus become symbols of eternally vanishing beauty in the Japanese aesthetics of perishability. In The Tale of Genji the term aware is used one hundred eight times, while the phrase mono no aware is used fourteen times, leading Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) to argue that the central theme of this novel is mono no aware. As one source writes: The eighteenth century achieved glory in Japanese studies by . . . Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), the greatest literary scholar the nation has produced. . . . His most influential work is his Genji Monogatari Tama no Ogushi (1793-1795) ... [It] is famous for positing mono no aware as the thematic and tonal basis of the Genji Monogatari (Miner: 1985, 96).

For Motoori Norinaga, the most important wisdom to be acquired by a connoisseur exemplified by the refined Japanese person in Genji’s aristocratic world is “to know mono no aware” (mono no aware o shiru,物の哀れを知る), or knowledge of the pathos of things. To know mono no aware means to cultivate a deep sensitivity to pathos as the beauty and sorrow of things that move the “heart-mind” (kokoro, 心). Motoori Nori-

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naga further expanded his insights into a generalized poetics, wherein the function of Japanese literature is to express mono no aware. Onishi Yoshinori argues that discussion of aware should no longer be confined to the esoteric discourse of medieval Japanese poetics, but should now be clearly articulated as an “aesthetic category” (1999, 115). Onishi holds that aware is a kind of “Beauty” (das Schöne) (1999, 122). He adds, “we must think of this experience [aware] as something that gives us a special aesthetic satisfaction or pleasure, such as the ‘Tragic’ and the ‘Melancholic’” (Onishi: 1999, 139). Moreover, he analyzes the beauty of aware as an aesthetic experience having two contrastive meanings, a positive meaning as praise for the fragility of beauty and a negative meaning as sorrow or pity (1999, 133). According to Onishi, the aesthetic experience of the beauty of aware is a mixture of the “feelings of ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ that are part of positive ‘life feelings’ (Lebensgefühl)” and “the negative emotions of ‘sadness’ and ‘alienation’”(1999, 132). For Onishi, then, aware is a kind of elegant beauty that moves the heart-mind so as to give an aesthetic satisfaction in the tragic or the melancholic, and which is constituted by two oppositional values, including both a positive value of joy and a negative value of sorrow. Miner explains how in the Heian aesthetics of perishability the key notion of mono no aware came to signify the evanescent beauty of things: The search for the “uruwashi ” or beautiful is one that marks the age. . . . The most famous word to describe the shadows of this world is aware or mono no aware. . . . It came to be associated particularly with the longstanding Japanese sense of the evanescent, “hakanashi,” which Buddhism did much to accentuate. The evanescent was related to what was beautiful and valued. (Miner: 1985, 28)

As stated above, mono no aware is the sorrow-tinged beauty of “evanescence” (hakanasa, 儚さ), a term used to denote the Buddhist notion of perishability. Hakanasa as evanescence or perishability is further defined by the same text: “Transience, lack of stability, evanescence . . . the Japanese noun (adjective, hakanashi) for the human and natural world in time, as also for the Buddhist idea of the flux of worldly phenomena” (1985, 276). It is further clarified how mono no aware specifically came to mean “tragic feelings” elicited by the evanescent beauty of transitory events arising and perishing in the temporal flux of nature (1985, 28). As Miner states in The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature: Mono no aware 物の哀れ. Or aware. The deep feeling inherent in, or felt from, the world and experience of it. In early classical times “aware” might be an exclamation of joy or other intense feeling, but later came to designate sadder and even tragic feelings. (Miner: 1985, 290)

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Thus, in accordance with the meaning of this term acquired during the medieval period, one can render the Japanese notion of aware as “tragic beauty,” and mono no aware as the “tragic beauty of things.” Motoori Norinaga held that although the Japanese term aware (composed of two interjectives Ah! and Hare!) at first designated an exclamation of surprise or delight at the sight of anything which moved the “heart-mind” (kokoro, 心 ), by literary convention it came to represent the bittersweet emotion of intense beauty and overwhelming sadness evoked by the feeling of evanescent moments in the flow of time. As Ueda Makoto defines it, mono no aware is “a literary and aesthetic ideal cultivated during the Heian period (794-1185). At its core is a deep, sympathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifest in nature and human life, and it is therefore usually tinged with a hint of sadness” (1983, 246). Emphasizing the relation between the Heian appreciation of evanescent beauty and the Buddhist notion of ephemerality, Ueda continues: In its earliest usage, aware seems to have been an exclamation indicating the presence of any intense emotion. . . . The Heian court nobility toned down the emotional intensity and limited the semantic comprehensiveness of the term, modifying the meaning of aware so as to stress elegant beauty, gentle melancholy, and the Buddhist sense of ephemerality. (1983, 246)

Finally, Ueda concludes, “Theoretically the meaning of mono no aware is as comprehensive as the whole range of human emotions, but in its actual usage it tends to focus on the beauty of impermanence and on the sensitive heart capable of appreciating that beauty” (1983, 247). The aesthetic ideal of aware is further explained by Ivan Morris, one of the premier scholars of the Heian period of Japanese aesthetic culture: Though in Murasaki’s time aware still retained its early catholic range, its most characteristic use in The Tale of Genji is to suggest the pathos inherent in the beauty of the our world, a beauty that is inexorably fated to disappear together with the observer. Buddhist doctrines about the evanescence of all living things naturally influenced this particular content of the word, but the stress in aware was always on direct emotional experience rather than on religious understanding. Aware never entirely lost its simple interjectional sense of ‘Ah!’ (1994, 196-197)

He continues: Often the word [aware ] appears in the phrase mono no aware, which roughly corresponds to the Latin phrase lacrimae rerum, the pathos of things. It is when people perceive the connection between the beauty and the sadness of the world that they most poignantly sense mono no aware. . . . Scene after scene in The Tale of Genji reaches its emotional climax in this conjunction of aesthetic enjoyment with sorrow. (1994, 197)

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Yoji Yamakuse defines the traditional Japanese aesthetic notion of mono no aware as follows: Mono no aware is the sense of pathos the Japanese feel when contemplating the fleetingness of life. Cherry blossom viewing is an example of this sense of pathos in action. The blossoms give pleasure but also arouse feelings of pathos because their beauty will last only a few days. Japanese literature is full of examples of this aching appreciation of transient beauty from the Heian period onward. Mono no aware is a crucial component of the Japanese sense of beauty. (2012, 72)

W. J. Puette elucidates mono no aware as “the inherent pathos of all that is beautiful” (1983, 57). He adds: “[I]n The Tale of Genji the most important of all virtues, the aristocratic touchstone by which men and women at court were ultimately measured, was essentially their sensitivity to the inherent pathos of things, especially the traditional arts. This aesthetic was known as aware ” (1983, 42). Janeira explains the aesthetics of mono no aware as related to Buddhism in The Tale of Genji as follows: From Buddhist thought comes the feeling of sorrow, pity, and sympathy for things, mono no aware. It is a connection between beauty and the sadness of the world, because the greatest beauty is the one that has the shortest time. Life flows away with its pleasures, all things are evanescent . . . both men and things suffer from this poignant feeling of irreparable loss. (1970, 61)

According to Miner, aware is “that which stirs cultivated sympathies by touching them with beauty, sadness, and the awareness of ephemeral experience” (1969, 1; Puette: 1983, 43). De Barry holds that in The Tale of Genji, “aware . . . bespoke the sensitive poet’s awareness of a sight or a sound, of its beauty and its perishability” (Hume: 1995, 434). Cranston defines the pathos of aware as “a feeling of gentle, sorrow-tinged appreciation of transitory beauty” (Murasaki Shikibu: 1969, 232-33; Puette: 1983, 44). As Stephen Addiss puts it: “This empathy also enables the Japanese to appreciate the fleeting quality of beauty, knowing that as quickly as the cherry blossoms bloom, a gust of wind may blow them away. This appreciation is described as mono no aware, an acute and often melancholy sensitivity to things” (1996, 118). In his influential work The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics, Hisamatsu Sen’ichi endeavors to sum up the meaning of aware in successive phases of Japanese literary history: Emotion, harmony, pathos, and elegance are the aesthetic qualities implicit in aware. . . . In the Heian period, harmony was another attribute of aware. . . . In Middle Antiquity, the term [aware] usually implies intense sadness, though melancholy is not invariably the dominant feature, as it is during and after the Medieval period. Likwise, aware’s harmony naturally manifests itself as elegance. (1963, 16-17)

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According to Hisamatsu, during the medieval period of Japanese history the term aware came to designate an aesthetic feeling of elegant beauty mixed with deep sorrow. He further underscores the importance of “harmony” (wa, 和) as an essential component in the aesthetic quality of aware. For it is the element of harmony in aware that balances the deeply emotional pathos of sadness, melancholy, and grief with the attitude of calm restraint, thereby expressing itself in the beauty of art as elegance, style, and gracefulness. According to Minamoto Toyomune, “Beauty, as it exists in Japanese art, has the ‘sympathetic’ beauty of aware, the beauty found in emotional identification with ephemeral qualities of the perceived object” (1982, 56). Minamoto Toyomune’s definition clarifies Motoori Noringa’s view of mono no aware as the heart-mind’s sympathy with the beauty and pathos of things. This understanding of mono no aware as arising from sympathy with the evanescent aesthetic qualities of perishable events has significant implications for the ontology of beauty. Insofar as mono no aware denotes the pathos of things as sympathy with the ephemeral qualities of phenomena, aware is not simply located in the subject or in the object, but is instead an atmospheric feeling or mood spread throughout the whole event as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. While such definitions could be multiplied without end, the general consensus of scholars is that mono no aware represents the single most distinctive Japanese poetic ideal. Altogether the aesthetic category of mono no aware signifies the heart-mind’s most deeply felt sympathy with the fleeting aesthetic quality of transient events, thus revealing the pathos of evanescent beauty in the flow of time. The early Japanese sense of tragic beauty as aesthetic enjoyment mixed with deep sadness was so characterized by the pathos of aware and its associated Buddhist notions of mujō (impermanence) and hakanasa (evanescence), that it has been aptly called the Heian period aesthetic of beauty as perishability. In his study on late Heian aesthetics, K. L. Richards thus states: “Affectivity or the perception of beauty in Japanese lyric poetry, became systematized into the aesthetic of beauty as perishability through poetic convention” (1978, 59; italics added). Likewise, in an essay on the Japanese sense of beauty, Donald Keene argues that Japanese aesthetics can be distinguished in terms of four aesthetic qualities: simplicity, suggestiveness, naturalness, and perishability. Yet it is the sadness and beauty of perishability which is the most uniquely Japanese aesthetic quality. Keene writes: “Beyond the preference for simplicity and the natural qualities of things lies what is perhaps the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal, perishability” (1981, 23). Keene further argues that the tradition of Japanese aesthetics is unique in its recognition that “perishability is a necessary element in beauty” (1981, 24). Furthermore, “without mortality there could be no beauty” (1981, 23). He continues:

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The frailty of human existence, a common theme in literature throughout the world, has rarely been recognized as the necessary condition for beauty. The Japanese not only knew this, but express their preference for varieties of beauty which most conspicuously betrayed their impermanence. (1981, 24)

From the above definition of aware as the melancholic beauty of perishability, we arrive at one of the key philosophical notions of Japanese aesthetics: namely, that perishability is itself a necessary condition for beauty, and that without the finitude of mortality, there could be no beauty. This aesthetic preference for the tragic beauty of perishability has been given one of its most direct expressions in a twelfth century literary work entitled “Essays in Idleness” (Tsurezuregusa) composed by a Japanese Buddhist monk named Kenkō. In the introductory essay to his translation of this work, Donald Keene states: “Kenkō put forward the most peculiarly Japanese of aesthetic principles: beauty is indissolubly bound to its perishability” (Kenkō: 1981, xvii; italics added). Keene goes on to cite with approval the fact that “Lafcadio Hearn once termed the appreciation of perishability ‘the genius of Japanese civilization’” (Kenkō: 1981, xviii). As a primary example of Japan’s aesthetic preference for the fragile beauty of perishability, Keene cites its famous “cult of cherry blossoms” which has persisted from the early Heian period even into modern times: Yet the Japanese appreciation of impermanence surely lies behind their love for the cherry blossoms. . . . The falling of the cherry blossoms is always regretted, but their very brevity gives them beauty. (1981, xvii)

Keene argues that whereas the West has usually built for permanence in an effort to realize artistic immortality through stone monuments of enduring marble as exemplified by ancient Greek temples, the Japanese have throughout their history built for impermanence, constructing their edifices of perishable wood and paper instead of stone. Again, he argues that in contrast to the Western aesthetic preference for newness, Japan has traditionally exhibited an aesthetic preference for the faded beauty of old, antique, and aged things. In this context Keene further illustrates Japanese appreciation for the sad beauty of perishability by reference to the wabi style of faded rustic natural beauty characterizing those irregular ceramic bowls used in the tea ceremony, which manifest the ageing effects of time. Tea bowls which embody the closely related aesthetic ideals of wabi （侘び）and sabi (寂び), are characterized by an aged quality showing rustic simplicity and beauty of oldness, thereby acquiring a sheen of antiquity that discloses the fragile beauty of perishability. Keene writes: “The visible presence of perishability in the cracked tea bowl carefully mended in gold has been appreciated not because it makes the object an indisputable antique, but because without the possibility of

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aging with time and with usage there could be no real beauty” (1981, 24). Keene then cites a passage from the work of Kenkō, who asserts: If a man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. (1981, 7)

In this passage Kenkō establishes the key Japanese aesthetic principle that perishability is a necessary condition of beauty, such that without mortality and the possibility of ageing in time, there could be no beauty. If events were not evanescent, if they did not fade away in the flow of time, or if they did not vanish like smoke from the cremation grounds of Adashino and Toribeyama, they would lose their aesthetic quality of aware as pathos or the sorrow-tinged beauty of perishability. The Japanese aesthetic of beauty as perishability based on the notion of aware or pathos is also discussed by Donald Richie, one of the foremost experts on Japanese cinema. In his book Ozu, Richie underscores how the early Japanese films of Ozu Yasujiro (1903-1963) are the most distinctively Japanese of all movies in Japanese cinema. He clarifies that one of the key elements in Ozu’s films is the Japanese aesthetic ideal of mono no aware (1977). Moreover, Richie discusses how another Japanese artistic ideal pervading Ozu’s films is the aesthetic quality of ma (間), the beauty of negative space, otherwise conceived as the Zen beauty of emptiness, nothingness, or voidness. The hero of Ozu’s cinema is one who is able to contemplate evanescent phenomena such as fleeting cherry blossoms of spring or crimson maple leaves of autumn, framed by empty voids and silent intervals of ma as a plenum of negative space, thus to savor the passing moment with its sorrow-tinged beauty of perishability. In his book A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, Richie discusses Donald Keene’s view that simplicity, asymmetry, suggestion, and perishability are the four aesthetic qualities underlying the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. He affirms that “perishability” is the single most characteristic trait of Japanese aesthetics: Western aesthetics is sometimes familiar with simplicity, asymmetry and suggestion, but the idea that beauty lies in its own vanishing is an idea much less common. Perishability remains, however, what Keene has called “the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal.” It is certainly among the earliest, being based on the Buddhist concept of mujō, a term usually translated as “impermanence”: nothing is stable and our only refuge lies in accepting, even celebrating this. (2007, 18)

As said by Richie, the distinctively Japanese aesthetic of perishability based on the poetic ideal of aware or pathos and its underlying Buddhist principle of mujō or impermanence has resulted in the view that beauty lies in its own vanishing. This traditional Japanese aesthetic preference for the sad beauty of perishability is seen in the admiration for an old,

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faded and cracked tea bowl in the wabi style of tea, enthusiasm for the short-lived cherry blossoms, and parallels with the samurai warrior who dies at the peak of his strength, glory and beauty. According to Richie the Japanese aesthetic notion of aware finds its nearest western counterpart in Nabokov’s definition of art: These might be compared to one of the few contemporary Western references to the importance of transience, that of Vladimir Nabokov: “Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies.” (2007, 21)

As pointed out by Richie, the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s definition of art as “beauty plus pity” at once resonates with the Japanese poetic ideal of aware or “pathos” as the beauty and sadness of evanescent things. For Nabokov, as for the Japanese aesthetics of perishability, art includes the pathos of beauty plus sadness or pity since beauty always dies. 3 Lafcadio Hearn on the Japanese Aesthetics of Perishability It should be recalled that Donald Keene cites with approval the fact that, “Lafcadio Hearn once termed the appreciation of perishability ‘the genius of Japanese civilization’“ (Kenkō: 1981, xviii). In 1890, Lafcadio Hearn abandoned Western materialism for a life as an expatriate in Japan, whereupon he became one of the most fascinating early Western interpreters of traditional Japanese culture. In his 1895 essay “The Genius of Japanese Civilization,” Hearn describes how the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence came to influence the traditional culture of Japan, including the Japanese aesthetic of perishability: Even in Japanese art—developed, if not actually created, under Buddhist influence—the doctrine of impermanency has left its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream... but it also taught men how to seize the fleeting impressions of that dream and how to interpret them in relation to the highest truth. In the flushed splendor of the blossombursts of spring, in the coming and the going of the cicadae, in the dying crimson of autumn foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of wave or cloud, they saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even their calamities—fire, flood, earthquake, pestilence— interpreted to them unceasingly the doctrine of the eternal Vanishing. (1972, 23-24)

Hearn articulates the fundamental insights of Japanese Buddhist teachings, which propounds: “All things which exists in Time must perish” (1972, 24). “All are transient” (1972, 25). “All component things, without exception, are impermanent” (1972, 25). “All are temporary as a mirage, as a phantom, or as foam” (1972, 25). For Hearn, then, the genius of

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Japanese civilization is its aesthetic appreciation of evanescence, transience, and impermanence, especially the beauty and sadness of perishability based on what he calls above: “the Buddhist doctrine of eternal Vanishing.” An essay by Hearn titled “The Idea of Preexistence” argues that the Buddhist notion of pre-existence as reincarnation or transmigration is the fundamental concept distinguishing traditional Japanese aesthetic culture from western modes of thought (1972, 222). In his essay “Sadness in Beauty,” Hearn develops a strikingly original interpretation of the Japanese aesthetics of evanescence as the sad beauty of perishability, which is rooted in traditional Japanese Buddhist notions such as karma (gō, 業) or the moral law of retribution, reincarnation (umarekawari, 生まれ変わり), and samsara or transmigration (rinne, 輪回) as the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The aesthetic experience of mono no aware as the beauty and sadness of perishability has been linked to Buddhist notions of reincarnation and karma since The Tale of Genji. Often in The Tale of Genji, the ephemeral romantic relationships arising between men and women are explained as being due to deep karmic relationships formed in previous incarnations. Like Buddhism in general, Japanese Buddhism understands karma as the moral law of cause and effect, driven by the latent subconscious tendencies inherited from actions in previous lives, resulting in continuous transmigration, until one finally achieves emancipation from suffering produced through the karmic wheel of rebirth in the eternal peace, light, and bliss of nirvana. Hearn describes how the beauty and sadness of perishability is not only felt through one’s present experiences of transitoriness, mortality and death; he further holds that this sad beauty of evanescence is amplified by the cumulative karmic effect of subconscious dim remembrances of countless similar experiences of ephemerality from innumerable previous lives in the beginningless and endless cycle of transmigration. Hearn writes: “The poet who sang that beautiful things bring sadness, named as beautiful things music and sunset and night, clear skies and transparent waters” (1971, 211). He continues: For the mysterious sadness associated with the sense of beauty is certainly not of this existence, but of countless anterior lives—and therefore is indeed a sadness of reminiscence. (1971, 211)

Hearn goes on to explain his karma-based transmigratory aesthetics of sad beauty as perishability: “Aesthetic sadness is related rather to desire” (1971, 213). Again, “ ‘All beautiful things bring sadness,’ is a statement as near to truth as most general statements” (1971, 213). This is further explicated by Hearn as follows: Yet there should be some one emotional element common to aesthetic sadness,—one general kind of feeling which would help us to solve the riddle of the melancholy inspired by the sight of beauty in Nature.

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Such a common element, I believe, is inherited longing,—inherited dim sense of loss, shadowed and qualified variously by interrelated feelings. . . . In the case of human beauty, the aesthetic recognition might be toned or shadowed by immemorial inheritance of pain—pain of longing, and pain of separation from numberless forgotten beloved. (1971, 214)

He adds, “The melancholy given by the sight of a beautiful landscape is certainly a melancholy of longing,—a sadness massive as vague, because made by the experience of millions of our dead” (1971, 214). For Hearn, the melancholy longing, sadness, and pain of evanescent beauty is related to the dim remembrance of the joyful aesthetic experience of beauty followed by the tragic loss of beauty in countless former existences. Thus, according to Hearn the insight of Japanese Buddhism is that the aesthetic experience of melancholic beauty as the sorrow-tinged appreciation of perishability, is not just the result of a single experience of our present life but is the cumulative effect of innumerable past lives in the process of reincarnation, whereby the joy and sadness arising from loss of beauty is compounded by countless other ancient memories inherited since the dawn of time. Dōgen and the Religio-Aesthetic Tradition It has already been discussed how Dōgen (道元 1200-1253) formulates a Zen Buddhist metaphysics of reality as genjōkōan (現成公安), conceived as “presence of things as they are,” 4 or “manifestation of suchness.” 5 For Dōgen, the immediate experience of things presencing just as they are in suchness is realized through nondualistic Zen meditation as the “nonduality of practice and enlightenment” (shushō ichinyō, 修証一女), actualized in the state of “beyond thinking” (hishiryō, 非思量) at the midpoint between thinking and not-thinking or affirmation and negation. Furthermore, Dōgen’s description of the presencing of things as they are in suchness is articulated in radically temporal categories as “impermanenceBuddha-nature” (mujō-busshō, 無常仏性) in the flux of “being-time” (uji, 有時), which in turn has the two aspects of “right-now” (nikon, 而今) and kyōryaku (経歴) or “continuous passage.” Steven Heine underscores the convergence of Dōgen’s Zen philosophy of being-time with the religio-aesthetic tradition of Japanese culture (2005, 31). Dōgen’s Zen metaphysics of impermanence, especially as expressed by his 31 syllable waka (和歌) poetry, fully resonates with the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition based on emotional attunement to transience, including the Heian period sentiment of aware or the sadness and beauty of perishability. As Heine puts it: Dōgen’s works are in accord with Japanese religio-aesthetics because of a common concern with the issue of change symbolized by the revolving seasons. . . . The frailty of things and the poignancy of the passage

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For Dōgen, it is aesthetic sensitivity to and emotional sympathy with the ephemeral beauty of transitory phenomena that itself awakens moral compassion as empathetic grief, metaphysical insight into the nonsubstantiality and dynamism of being-time, and the aspiration for religious emancipation from the suffering of impermanence. Thus, in continuation with the religio-aesthetic tradition of Japan, Dōgen’s Zen philosophy of being-time and impermanence-Buddha-nature is grounded in the aesthetic experience of beauty as perishability expressed in terms of a traditional Japanese poetics of ephemerality. 6 Dōgen’s Zen Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence-Buddha-nature in the flux of being-time is depicted in poetic verse by poignant images of evanescence such as “dewdrops” (tsuyu, 露 ) falling off blades of autumn grass in the morning sun, thereby to evoke the pathos of aware as aesthetic sensitivity to the ephemeral beauty of things. A waka poem by Dōgen reads: Asahi matsu

Dewdrops on a blade of grass

Kusaba no tsuyu no

Having so little time

Hodomaki ni

Before the sun rise

Isogina tachi so

Let not the autumn wind

Nobe no akikaze

Blow so quickly on the field (Heine: 2005, 50)

In another Japanese waka poem by Dōgen, the evanescent beauty of a transitory event is likened to “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop” 「無常」世の中は何にたとへん水鳥の、はしふる露にやどる月影 7 Muj ō

“Impermanence”

Yo no naka wa

To what shall

Nani ni tatoen

I liken the world?

Mizudori no

Moonlight, reflected

Hashi furu tsuyu ni

In dewdrops,

Yadoru tsukikage

Shaken from crane’s bill.

Elsewhere, Dōgen uses this poetic image of “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop” to convey the experience of satori or enlightenment:

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Man attaining enlightenment is like the reflection of the moon on the water. The moon does not get wet, the water is not broken. For all the breadth and vastness of the light, it rests upon a small patch of water. Both the whole moon and the sky in its entirety come to rest in a single dewdrop of grass, in a mere drop of water. (1972, 136)

Dōgen’s poetic image of “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop” enables one to imaginatively picture his Zen Buddhist philosophy of impermanenceBuddha-nature in the flux of being-time with its correlate aesthetics of beauty as perishability, as well as its organic metaphysics of interpenetration between part and whole with its correlate aesthetics of mysterious beauty as twilight darkness. This poem expresses the changeability, evanescence, and momentariness of nonsubstantial existence as being-time while also showing how each moment contains the whole universe. Dōgen’s recurrent poetic image of “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop” illustrates the Kegon/Huayan Buddhist teaching of “unhindered interpenetration between parts and universal-whole” (rijimuge, 理事無礙), and its literary expression by the organic metaphor of “Indra’s Net” (Indara no ami, インダラの網). As used in Dōgen’s poetry, this image of “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop” expresses how all transitory events in nature reflect the total light of Buddha-nature like brilliant gems in the Jeweled Net of Indra. The image of moonlight reflected in a dewdrop thus depicts the exquisite beauty of an event as a mirror reflecting the entire universe from its own perspective as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Moreover, Dōgen’s poetic image combines the aesthetic ideals of yūgen or the profound beauty of mystery and depth as symbolized by moonlight glowing in the twilight darkness of a night sky, and aware as the sorrow-tinged beauty of impermanence symbolized by evanescent dewdrops. The poetic image of “dewdrops” (tsuyu, 露) symbolizing the evanescent beauty of each passing moment, further suggests the “teardrops” (namida, 涙) arising from sympathetic grief in response to the perishability of all living things, including the mortality of finite human existence. It can be said that Dōgen’s Zen Buddhist religio-aesthetic vision of reality as impermanence Buddha-nature wherein each transitory moment contains the whole universe can be most easily visualized by his striking poetic image of “moonlight reflected in a dewdrop.” Kawabata Yasunari on the Sadness and Beauty of Evanescence The religio-aesthetic ideal of mono no aware permeates the creative fiction of the modern Japanese novelist Kawabata Yasunari, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. In his lecture delivered at the University of Hawaii in 1969, titled The Existence and Discovery of Beauty (Bi no sonzai to hakken, 美の存在と発見), Kawabata emphasizes the influence he received from The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu in Heian period literature, especially admiring its theme of mono no aware or the

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Figure 16.1.

Moonlight reflected in a dewdrop.

beauty and sadness of perishability (1969, 51). Kawabata further relates the theme of mono no aware in The Tale of Genji to a passage under the heading “Things that simply pass by” in The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon (1969, 38)—“Things which simply pass by: a sailboat; the years of a person’s life; spring, summer, autumn, and winter.” Kawabata’s essay begins with a description of his chance discovery of vanishing beauty in Honolulu, Hawaii. On this occasion, Kawabata was staying at the Kahala Hilton Hotel in Waikiki, which has a dining area on the terrace. As he passed the dining room in the morning Kawabata noticed how the glasses on the tables reflected sparks of rainbow colored light of the dramatic tropical sunrise, which displayed an evanescent beauty with a profound aesthetic effect. For Kawabata, this sudden encounter with evanescent beauty was reminiscent of the pathos of the beauty and sadness of perishability recorded The Tale of Genji: Thus it indeed would have been better if I had begun with The Tale of Genji. . . . Yet I also had the strong desire to set down at this time in my

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own words my discovery and experience of the beauty of glasses sparkling in the morning sun . . . there is perhaps no beauty precisely like this one? At least, since I have never seen it until now perhaps I may say that it was “a unique encounter in my life” (ichigo ichie). (1969, 22-23)

Kawabata further writes: I encountered this beauty for the first time. I thought that I had never seen it anywhere until then. Is not precisely this kind of encounter the very essence of literature and also human life itself? (1969, 19)

In this essay Kawabata suggests that the function of Japanese literature is to discover and record fleeting moments of evanescent beauty in nature, art, and everyday life. He refers to this sudden unexpected experience of evanescent beauty as what in sadō (茶道) or the Way of tea is called “a unique encounter in my life” (ichigo ichie, 一期一絵), a notion related to the aesthetic experience of aware or the beauty and sadness of perishability, as a transient event that happens once and only once and will never occur again. This Zen attitude of ichigo ichie focuses attention on the transiency of life and cultivates a heightened aesthetic appreciation for vanishing beauty in each and every passing moment both in its joy and its sorrow. Moreover, Kawabata emphasizes that the aim of Japanese literature to capture the evanescent beauty and sadness of impermanent events itself traces back to the ancient Heian period aesthetics of fragile beauty as perishability expressed in lady Murasaki Shikubu’s The Tale of Genji. At the outset of his 1968 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Japan the Beautiful and Myself (Utsukushii Nihon to Wakashi, 美しい日本と私、1969), Kawabata quotes a waka (31 syllable) poem by Zen master Dōgen (12001253), while remarking about the profound influence of Zen aesthetics on his own fiction. In Seidensticker’s English translation of the speech (1969, 76; Japanese original on page 6) the verse reads: Haru wa hana

In the spring, cherry blossoms

Natsu hototogisu

In the summer the cuckoo

Aki wa tsuki

In autumn the moon, and in

Fuyu yuki kiede

winter the snow, clear, cold.

Suzushi kari keri As Kawabata goes on the explain, Dōgen’s poem uses changing seasonal images standardized by poetic convention to express the ephemeral yet cyclical quality of the vanishing beauty of nature in the ceaseless flux of impermanence. Hence, Kawabata’s fiction is characterized by a deep sense of pathos influenced not only by the Heian literary ideal of mono no aware from The Tale of Genji, but also by Dōgen’s Zen Buddhist metaphys-

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ics of impermanence (mujō ) and being-time (uji), as well as his waka poetry celebrating the beauty and sadness of perishability through conventional images of transitoriness—falling cherry blossoms, dewdrops, and maple leaves, all illustrating the evanescence of momentary events in the changing seasons of nature. The theme of mono no aware as the sad beauty of perishability is at once invoked by the very title of Kawabata’s novel: Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushisa to kanashimi to, 美しさと哀しみと、l961). As clarified by Ueda Makoto, in his essay “Undying Beauty,” Kawabata has explained that “sadness” is a word having close affinities with “beauty” in the Japanese language. According to Ueda, Kawabata’s fiction aims to express the traditional Japanese aesthetic preference for the sad beauty of perishability: “Kawabata’s favorite beauty was delicate, fragile, and perishable; when it perished, sadness ensued. . . . In short, anything truly beautiful is sad and anything truly sad is beautiful” (1976, 201). He adds: “Pure beauty, as conceived by Kawabata, is also perishable, fragile beauty” (1976, 184). Ueda remarks, “Most of Kawabata’s novels could be retitled Beauty and Sadness” (1976, 201). Hence, the pathos of beauty and sadness characterizing Kawabata’s fiction represents a continuation of the Heian period aesthetic of perishability as the sorrow-tinged appreciation of evanescent beauty. As stated by G. B. Petersen: “He [Kawabata] has repeatedly spoke of his intention: to preserve the ‘traditional taste,’ that is, the poetic sense, of Japan—a sense that he reminds us has always linked beauty with sadness” (1979, 127). Summing up Kawabata’s literary expression of traditional Japanese poetic ideals such as yūgen or the mysterious beauty of shadows and darkness, and the ephemeral beauty of aware representing “the qualities of beauty and sadness that characterize his work” (1979, 189), Petersen further writes: Unlike the Meiji writers, who tended to deny their tradition . . . Kawabata responds to the past proudly and without excuse . . . he can appreciate the visual charm (en) of beauty and convey the deepest mystery of yūgen . . . . And above all he has expressed in countless ways the sensitive, reflective tone of the thousand-year-old aesthetic: aware, the traditional linking of beauty and sorrow. (1979, 187-188)

At the outset of Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, the novel’s protagonist is going to hear the resonating sound of Buddhist temple bells in Kyoto on New Year’s eve, ringing 108 times, whose fading reverberations signal the pathos of existence in the flow of time as held by the ancient Buddhist doctrine of mujō or impermanence: The deep booming note of a huge Buddhist temple bell resounded at the leisurely intervals, and the lingering reverberations held an awareness of the old Japan and of the flow of time. (1975, 4)

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This passage from Kawabata’s novel is at once reminiscent of those famous opening lines from The Tale of Heike (Heike Monogatari, twelfth century): Gion shōja no

At the Jetavana Temple

kane no koe

The bell gives voice

Shogyō mujō no

To the impermanence of all

Hibiki ari

As it reverberates . . .(Miner: 1985, 163)

In this passage from The Tale of Heike, the fading bell tones of a Buddhist temple in Kyoto function to disclose the “impermanence” (mujō, 無常) of all insubstantial phenomena, just as the passage from Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness describes how the fading reverberations of a temple bell reveal the pathos of evanescent beauty in the flow of time. The centrality and relativity of the “flow of time” (toki no nagare, 時の流れ) is itself a recurrent motif, if not the main theme, running throughout Kawabata’s novel. Moreover, Kawabata’s thematization of the flow of time is explicitly connected to the Japanese Buddhist aesthetics of perishability based on the poetic ideal of mono no aware as the beauty and sadness of perishability. Throughout his novel Kawabata discusses the Japanese sense of beauty as perishability influenced by traditional Zen aesthetics. Explaining how the Japanese sense of beauty in Zen aestheticism is expressed by Buddhist temples in Kyoto he writes: “among the many famous old stone gardens in Kyoto are those of the Moss Temple, the Silver Pavilion, and Ryōanji; indeed, the latter is almost too famous, though it may be said to embody the very essence of Zen aesthetics” (1975, 4). The leading characters of the work include a novelist called Oki, along with two painters named Otoko (his old mistress) and Keiko (her young protogé). Thus, the book has a focus on literature, art and the nature of beauty as described from the perspective of artists. The aesthetic concerns are especially the beauty and sadness of all ephemeral things in the flow of time. At one point in the story, Oki discusses a museum journal essay called “Vanishing Beauty” (Bi wa kiesaru mono ka :美は消え去る物か 1975, 179; 1973, 138). This essay recounts the excavation of the tomb of Princess Kazunomiya, (d. 1877), described as “a tragic Imperial Princess, who must have died before she was thirty” (1975, 137). The “tragic Princess” (1975, 139) is further described as holding “something beautiful and mysterious and fragile” (1975, 137). The fragile object of vanishing beauty grasped by the tragic Princess is a glass plate, which upon scientific analysis is shown to be a photograph with the fading image of a young man wearing ceremonial robes, most likely her lover: “But by morning the

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image had faded away completely. Overnight the photograph had turned into plain glass. . . . That’s because it was exposed to the air and light after being buried for years” (1975, 139; 1973, 180). The pathos of vanishing beauty in the flow of time is finally described as follows: The essay [Vanishing Beauty] calls it ‘truly a story of fleeting life.’ . . . It makes a good story to have a picture of her lover vanish overnight, after being brought back from the grave. (1975, 139)

Hence, the fading image on the photographic plate is yet another aspect of the novel’s focus on the problem of time, especially the pathos of vanishing beauty, or as it were, the evanescent beauty and sadness of transitory aesthetic events which become and perish in the flow of time. In such a manner, then, Kawabata’s novel clarifies the traditional Zen poetics of ephemerality, with its view that a necessary condition for beauty lies in its own vanishing. The existential dimension of aware or pathos as the sad beauty of perishability is brought out in Kawabata’s essay titled “The Eyes of a Dying Man,” referring to a suicide note of the Japanese gothic story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke, which in part reads: “Nature looks more beautiful to me now. . . . You may laugh at the paradox: I am about to commit suicide when nature looks so tenderly beautiful. But nature looks beautiful precisely because it is seen through the eyes of a dying man.” Kawabata goes on to say, “the ultimate principle in all artistic activities lies in ‘the eyes of a dying man’“ (cited by Ueda: 1976, 192). As in the death poems from the Zen-influenced bushidō (武士道) tradition of Japanese literature, wherein a samurai (侍) warrior on the verge of committing ritual suicide through hara-kiri（腹切り）records his final moments of life in a brief waka (31 syllable) or haiku (17 syllable) poem, the suicide note of Akutagawa describes how the beauty and sadness of life is disclosed in an epiphany just as one gazes out at the world for the very last time immediately prior to the instant of death as passing into the oblivion of nothingness. It is the finality of this attitude of seeing things as if for the last time which invokes the pathos of mono no aware, since to the extent that one is conscious of an event’s perishability, to that extent it increases in pathos of tragic beauty. For this reason many of Kawabata’s works of fiction evoke pathos as the vanishing beauty and sadness of perishability in the flow of time as recorded in the final moments of a dying person at the extremity of vision. Mishima Yukio’s Aesthetics of “Tragic Beauty” A dramatic portrayal of tragic beauty is to be found in the novel by Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) titled Kinkakuji (金閣寺), translated by Ivan Morris in 1959 as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The plot of Mishima’s novel is based on the true story of how Japan’s famous Golden Pavilion

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in Kyoto was set on fire and burned to ashes through an act of arson by a Zen monk after World War II in 1950. The theme of the work is the traditional Japanese sense of beauty, and the narrative takes the form of a treatise on Zen aesthetics. Throughout the work the Zen monk is haunted by the question: What is the source of the beauty of the Golden Pavilion? Is it in the ideal form of the Golden Pavilion? Or is it in the dark void of formless nothingness that envelops the Golden Pavilion? The climax of this novel ends with a spectacular vision of the Golden Pavilion manifesting the aesthetic ideal of yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness, when the burning pavilion set ablaze by the Zen monk is seen fading into the black night of nothingness in which it stands. Moreover, this vision of yūgen is shown to be inseparable from mono no aware, the tragic beauty of perishability. The majestic beauty of the Golden Pavilion is fully revealed to the Zen monk only when he gazes upon it for the last time. For it is only through the heightened awareness of the evanescence of the Golden Pavilion as it burns into a black void of nothingness, that the tragic beauty of the Golden Temple as yūgen or darkness and shadows is finally brought to full disclosure. The tragic beauty of the Golden Pavilion is revealed precisely at the moment of its destruction and subsequent vanishing into the dark night of nothingness. This climactic vision of the Golden Temple fading into the twilight void of nothingness thus discloses the relation between aware or tragic beauty of ephemerality, and yūgen as the mysterious beauty of darkness. The tragic beauty which arises through the loss of passing things is directly related to the beauty of the darkness into which things pass. Kawabata’s novel thus ends with an epiphany of depth through disclosure of ephemeral beauty as yūgen and aware. In the second chapter, Mishima brilliantly describes how the traditional Japanese aesthetic of perishability is encapsulated by the notion of “tragic beauty.” During World War II, the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto, formerly known as Heian-kyō, was scheduled to be burned to ashes in air raids by American bomber planes, whereupon the residents now became increasingly aware of the immeasurable aesthetic value of the many temples, shrines, palaces, artworks, and gardens located throughout the city. The fact remained that the Golden Temple was in danger of soon becoming burned down in an air raid. Indeed if things continued as they were, the Golden Temple was sure to turn into ashes. Since this idea took root within me, the Golden Temple once again increased in tragic beauty. (1959, 43; 1960, 54)

In the original Japanese version of this passage, Mishima explicitly articulates his notion of “tragic beauty” (higekiteki na utsukushisa, 悲劇的な美し さ) (1960, 54). 8 The narrative continues:

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Hence for Mishima, upon the verge of its destruction, the aesthetic splendor of the Golden Pavilion becomes an artistic symbol for the pathos and tragic beauty of evanescence. It is only with its annihilation that the Golden Pavilions can reveal its beauty through the negation of permanence. To the extent that one becomes aware of the perishability of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of art, to that extent it increases in intensity of tragic beauty. Scholars of Japanese literature have described how Mishima’s dramatic ritual suicide in 1970 was itself an effort to realize his aesthetic ideal of tragic beauty as glorified by the samurai (侍) warrior. Through both weightlifting and the traditional Japanese martial art of bushidō (武士道), Mishima endeavored to recreate his physical body as an aesthetic work of art like the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, then through the violent selfdestructive act of seppuku (切腹) or ritual suicide, burn it to ashes at the peak of its beauty, like a fragile cherry blossom scattering in the spring wind. Mishima aspired to transform his own life into literature, like a novel composed of several chapters that finally culminates in the tragic beauty of ritual suicide. As said by Charles Shirō Inouye: “[W]hat Mishima most wanted was to die tragically and beautifully. His romantic wish was to become a scattered cherry blossom” (2008, 168). The nihilism of Mishima’s view is exposed by the deliberate and intentional destruction of beauty. Mishima’s concept of tragic beauty degenerates into a nihilistic aesthetics of blood, destruction, violence, and death, as exemplified by disclosure of tragic beauty through burning down the Golden Pavilion, or its repetition in Mishima’s own act of ritual suicide. Nonetheless, Mishima’s aesthetics of tragic beauty shows how Buddhist artworks such as the Temple of the Golden Pavilion function to express the traditional Japanese ideals of beauty such as yūgen and aware, which arose in the canons of taste influenced by Zen aestheticism. Also, Mishima clarifies how to the degree that one becomes conscious of the transience of aesthetic experience and the evanescence of art, to that degree it increases in its intensity of tragic beauty. The tragic beauty of art, nature, and everyday life are thereby manifested upon seeing them as if for the very last time. Mishima’s modern literary aesthetics of tragic beauty thus coincides with the traditional Japanese philosophical insight that perishing is necessary for intensity of aesthetic experience, such that an essential condition for beauty lies in its own vanishing.

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NOTES 1. In his book Evanescence and Form (2008) Charles Shirō Inouye gives an illuminating overview of the concept of evanescence in the history of Japanese culture. 2. As pointed out by Charles Shirō Inouye in Evanescence and Form, the Japanese aesthetics of evanescence can be seen in contemporary Japanese manga and anime. While traditional Japanese cultural exports have included nō drama, kabuki plays, bunraku puppet theater, martial arts, tea ceremony, landscape paintings, flower arrangement, and haiku poetry, the new Otaku or “cool Japan” cultural exports include manga and anime as well as their extension into computer games. 3. Donald Richie holds that Nabokov’s definition of art as “beauty plus pity” is a rare exception within the Western tradition of aesthetics. He argues that while the beauty of perishability is itself the hallmark of Japanese aesthetics, it is almost entirely absent in the West. Here it is interesting to note that Richie begins A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics with a quote from Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead: “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern” [Dialogues: 1954, 10 June 1943]. For Richie, Whitehead’s notion of beauty as pattern, and of aesthetic delight as the recognition of pattern, is consonant with the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. 4. See T. P. Kasulis (1981, 83-86). 5. See Abe Masao and Norman Waddell (2002, 39). 6. The most important study of Dōgen’s aesthetics is Steven Heine’s The Zen Poetry of Dōgen (2005). In this outstanding work Heine translates the collection of Dōgen’s waka poetry, while also clarifying the convergence of Dōgen’s Zen philosophy of being-time with the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition. Heine clarifies how Dōgen’s Zen metaphysics of impermanence is continuous with the religio-aesthetic tradition of Japanese culture based on an aesthetic sensitivity to and sympathy with the evanescent beauty of transience. At the same time Heine analyzes the apparent tension between art and religion in Dōgen’s thought, based on Dōgen’s criticism of poetry as an “idle pastime,” and as an example of “dramatic phrases and flowery words.” 7. 道元禅師全集、第七巻、Dōgenzenshi zenshū, Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1990. Vol. 7, p. 179. For an English translation of Dōgen’s waka poem titled Mujō (無常) with commentary, see Steven Heine, The Zen Poetry of Dōgen. New York: Dharma Communications, 2005. p. 78. 8. This is a literal translation from Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji (金閣寺, 1956), since the adjectival word for “tragic” is higeki-teki ( 悲劇的), and the nominal word for “beauty” is utsukushisa (美しさ) a phrase which can only be translated as “tragic beauty” (1960, 54).

SEVENTEEN A Whiteheadian Perspective on Aware in Japanese Aesthetics

In this volume I hold that Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in an aesthetics of beauty as perishability as summed up by his poetic vision of tragic beauty. I suggest that a deeper appreciation for Whitehead’s aesthetic ideal of tragic beauty comes when viewed through the lens of the traditional Japanese sense of beauty as perishability and its underlying Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence. Mono no aware or the beauty and sadness of perishability has often been regarded as the distinguishing characteristic of traditional Japanese Buddhist aesthetics. Likewise, Whitehead’s doctrine of becoming and perishing events with the pathos of tragic beauty must be regarded as constituting the most explicit, comprehensive, and systematic aesthetics of evanescent beauty in the West. A Whiteheadian Critique of Nihonjinron According to the tradition of nihonjinron (日本人論) or “theories of Japanese uniqueness,” the poetic ideal of aware as the sad beauty of perishability is itself a culture-bound notion unique to the tradition of Japanese aesthetics. This poetic ideal of aware in the Japanese aesthetic of perishability is itself grounded in “impermanence” (mujōkan, 無常感), what in the Zen philosophy of Dōgen is mujō-busshō (無常仏性) or “impermanence-Buddha-nature” of uji (有時) as “being-time.” Yet contrary to the nihonjinron thesis of Japanese uniqueness, I have endeavored to demonstrate that Whitehead has also set forth an aesthetic ideal of the tragic beauty of perishability articulated in the context of a systematic process metaphysics of perpetually perishing occasions. In his book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (1986), Peter N. Dale has leveled a relentless ideology critique against the position of nihonjiron (日 289

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本人論), or “studies of Japanese uniqueness.” Dale endeavors to demythologize the idea that Japan is a unique and therefore superior culture. He further develops a sustained ideological critique that endeavors to show how nihonjinron theories of Japanese uniqueness are used to support ultra-nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, militarism, imperialism, colonialism, and other dangerous political ideologies that maintain the status quo used to legitimize social injustices. According to Dale, the basic strategy of nihonjinron theories is to analyze the “essence” of the uniquely Japanese consciousness as defined by a single key word (1986, 37). Scholars have often proposed various aesthetic principles to characterize the essence Japanese uniqueness, such as ma (間) or negative space, kata (型) or ritual pattern, wabi (侘び) or rustic simplicity, and iki (粋) or “chic.” However, as the paradigmatic case underlying the nihonjinron thesis, Dale critically examines mono no aware in The Tale of Genji as analyzed by Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). Dale writes: The locus classicus for this aware is the Genji Monogatari, where it occurs some 1,018 times. . . . It was the great scholar of national learning Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) who seized on the form mono no aware to define the essence of Japanese literature. It is to his treatment that the nihonjinron refer. (1986, 67)

According to Dale, Motoori Norinaga’s analysis of mono no aware as the essence of Japanese aesthetic culture served as the template for all subsequent nihonjinron theories of Japanese uniqueness. The nihonjinron hypothesis is explicitly stated by Onishi Yoshinori (1888-1959) in an essay on Aware from chapter 4 of his Aesthetics (Bigaku, 美学、Vol. 2, 288-368). First, Onishi argues that aware is a basic category of the Japanese aesthetic consciousness: I will now turn from the same perspective of “basic category” to another form of beauty branching off in a different direction: the notion of aware. As most of my readers already know, this concept has been variously used by scholars of Japanese literature to indicate the content of the aesthetic consciousness of our people. I doubt, however, that it has ever been acknowledged as an “aesthetic category.” (Onishi: 1999, 122-3)

Onishi then goes on to claim that although aware is a basic category of the uniquely Japanese aesthetic consciousness, it is unknown to the Western tradition of aesthetics: First of all, notwithstanding the fact that aware is a specific form of beauty, it developed completely among our own people, particularly in the spirit of the Heian period, and therefore contains a special, autonomous “aesthetic content” that is completely alien to the West. (1999, 123)

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Onishi argues that aware was exclusively developed by the Japanese cultural tradition, so as to be “completely alien to the West” (Marra: 1999, 123). He adds that “aware [is] a topic that has never been treated in Western aesthetics” (Marra: 1999, 123). Moreover, Onishi asserts that both aware and yūgen are distinctively Japanese aesthetic categories, with no counterparts to be found in western aesthetics (Onishi: 1999, 123). In opposition to the nihonjinron thesis of Japanese uniqueness, I hold that there is a striking parallel between the Japanese category of aware and Whitehead’s aesthetic category of the tragic beauty of perishability. Both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhism describe the aesthetics of perishability in terms of pathos as a feeling of sorrow arising through loss of beauty in the flow of time. Also, both show how the pathos of sad or tragic beauty is expressed in imaginative works of art, poetry, and literature. The Japanese poetic ideal of mono no aware developed by Motoori Norinaga functioned to establish the unity of interior subjective experience (aware) and external objective reality (mono) (Dale: 1986, 68). Likewise, for Whitehead, the aesthetic experience of pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability cannot be simply located either in the subject or in the object, but is located throughout a contextual, situational, and transactional event as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. Both the Whiteheadian and Japanese traditions have realized that perishability is a necessary condition for realizing aesthetic experience of beauty as perishability. All occasions of aesthetically immediate experience are brief, yet their brevity adds to their beauty. Without evanescence there could be no beauty. For both traditions, a condition for achievement of beauty in evanescent aesthetic occasions lies in their own vanishing. In the medieval canons of taste the Japanese aesthetic principle of aware was understood as a sad, melancholic, or tragic sense of beauty: “[A] key concept in the vocabulary of Japanese arts, is aware . . . often referred to as mono no aware . . . in the medieval period, it came to represent a sudden consciousness of the sad, even tragic nature of one’s feelings and of the world itself” (Addiss: 2006, 86-7). Likewise, Whitehead’s process metaphysics achieves its consummation in his aesthetic notion of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296). The Japanese aesthetic principle of aware and Whitehead’s concept of tragic beauty are both culture-specific notions embedded in their own historical and social contexts. Yet from the standpoint of East-West comparative aesthetics I propose that Whitehead’s concept of tragic beauty is a functional equivalent to the Japanese poetic ideal of aware as the sad or tragic beauty of perishability. Similar to the Japanese poetics of ephemerality as summed up by the aesthetic principle of aware, Whitehead holds that all aesthetic experience is transient, just as all beauty is tragic, where “tragedy” is here defined in Whitehead’s sense as loss of beauty.

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Saito Yuriko gives an excellent summary of the Japanese aesthetics of ephemeral beauty along with its underlying Buddhist metaphysics of impermanence, insubstantiality and interrelatedness: [O]ne of the distinguishing features of Japanese aesthetics is its celebration of transience, giving rise to the culturally shared sensibility toward the ephemeral beauty of nature and the aging effect on material objects. While the aesthetics of falling cherry blossoms had problematic [militarized] consequences . . . the ontology, metaphysics and resultant aesthetics based upon “becoming” provide an alternative to the Western preference for “being.” So does the Japanese cultural heritage that emphasizes the relational identity of both humans and nonhumans, in comparison with the primacy placed over discrete and independent existence of “being” in Western philosophy. (2014, 39)

Saito rightly identifies the celebration of transience and the ephemeral beauty of nature along with the aging effects on everyday objects as one of the “distinguishing features” of traditional Japanese aesthetics. She also notes that the Japanese aesthetics of ephemeral beauty is grounded in a Buddhist metaphysics of becoming as over against the conventional western metaphysics of being. Furthermore, the Japanese aesthetics of ephemeral beauty is rooted in the Buddhist primacy of relationships in contrast to the Western tradition, which accords ontological primacy to “substance” with separate and permanent existence. But here I would emphasize that A. N. Whitehead is to be credited with having independently formulated an aesthetics of evanescent beauty. Furthermore, Whitehead’s aesthetics of evanescent beauty is grounded in an organic process metaphysics framed in opposition to the conventional Western substance philosophy. It can thus be said that both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have framed a poetics of ephemerality that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the evanescence of beauty. Whitehead’s doctrine of tragic beauty abandons the substance metaphysics which has dominated Western speculative thought, and is instead grounded in a process metaphysics analogous to the dynamic temporal worldview of Japanese Buddhism and the Heian period aesthetics of beauty as perishability, which affirms impermanence, embraces change, and celebrates transience. Both negate the extreme positions of substantialism and nihilism for a middle way standpoint whereby insubstantial events arise by what Buddhism calls the process of interdependent origination, or what Whitehead terms concrescence of many into one. While rejecting the abstract notion of reified substance with independent and permanent being, they avoid nihilism by grasping the aesthetic value of beauty manifested by all insubstantial events in the flow of becoming. Yet both view the beauty of aesthetic events created through the process of concrescence or interdependent origination as a tragic beauty owing to their evanescence, impermanence, and perishability. Ac-

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cording to the middle way position of Whiteheadian and Japanese Buddhist aestheticism, the extreme view of nihilism is overcome by seeing the beauty of processive and relational events, while substantialism is overcome by the insight that all beauty is ephemeral beauty. An aesthetic appreciation for the sorrow-tinged beauty of perishability is therefore the genius of both Japanese civilization in the East and Whiteheadian process metaphysics in the West. While appreciation for evanescent beauty has characterized Japanese aesthetics throughout its history, Whitehead overturns the Western tradition to initiate a paradigm-shift from substance to process culminating in a new aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Japanese tradition has developed a poetics of ephemerality not only at the doctrinal level, but at the cultural level, exhibiting a widespread aesthetic preference for evanescent beauty as exemplified by its cult of cherry blossoms. This celebration of transience in Japanese aesthetics has given rise to what Saito Yuriko calls “the culturally shared sensibility toward the ephemeral beauty of nature and the aging effect on material objects” (2014, 39). Moreover, Japan has developed various Zen-influenced practices, such as haiku poetry, flower arrangement, landscape painting, and the tea ceremony, which through somaesthetic disciplines of bodymind training cultivate heightened aesthetic appreciation of evanescent beauty. Whitehead’s process aesthetics of beauty as perishability thus finds its historical and cultural exemplification in the Japanese poetics of ephemerality with its aesthetic preference for eternally vanishing beauty. Pathos as an Aesthetic Category The Japanese aesthetics of beauty as perishability is summed up by the key principle of aware or pathos, also known as mono no aware or the “pathos of things.” Likewise, Whitehead has also developed an explicit concept of pathos arising through the tragic beauty of perishability. For both Whitehead and Japanese tradition the nature poets use poignant images of evanescence to arouse the haunting mood of pathos as the sympathetic feeling of pity and sadness that emerges with the fading of beauty in the passage of time. In Process and Reality Whitehead argues how the Heraclitean doctrine that “all things flow” always “lends its pathos to poetry” (PR 208). Furthermore, in Symbolism he explains that while the mere succession of barren sense data are devoid of aesthetic meaning, it is the symbolic reference to dimly felt relationships in the primordial perception of causal efficacy which reveals the evanescent beauty of pathos in the lapse of time. Whitehead thus writes that symbolic images of evanescence in romantic nature poetry function to disclose “the pathos which haunts the world” (S 47).

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According to Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, the aesthetic feeling of pathos in the flow of time arises when clear sense data in the foreground make symbolic reference to perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as the felt background of experiential immediacy. Whitehead quotes the verses of Keats, Shakespeare, and others to demonstrate how poetic images can be used as aesthetic symbols resulting in fusion of the two perceptive modes by one intensity of emotion (S 48). Images of evanescence thus function in poetry as aesthetic symbols for the haunting pathos of tragic beauty. The feeling of pathos as the tragic beauty of perishability is depicted through artistic convention in the Japanese canons of taste by various aesthetic symbols, including autumn grasses, evaporating dew, scarlet maple leaves, and falling cherry blossoms. The scattering of cherry blossoms in the spring wind has philosophical content as poetic symbols of relationships and processes of transitory events with pervasive aesthetic quality. While discussing S. K. Langer’s doctrine of symbolism, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney defines the symbolic function of sakura (桜) or cherry blossoms in Japanese aesthetics as follows: Ultimately, cherry blossoms symbolize processes and relationships. Thus, they are a symbol of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth . . . all representing processes. In addition, cherry blossom viewing is an occasion for the collective activity for each social group within Japanese society (Ohnuki-Tierney: 2002, 38).

Cherry blossoms are an apt image for Whitehead’s concept of perpetually perishing aesthetic events arising through processes and relationships. In terms of Whitehead’s theory of perception, the poetic image of cherry blossoms illuminates Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, wherein cherry blossoms in the foreground are vivid sense qualities acting as aesthetic symbols making reference to affective feeling-tone in the background, thereby to disclose the haunting pathos of fading beauty with the passage of time. Aesthetics of Beauty as Perishability Like Buddhism, Whitehead’s process metaphysics emphasizes that reality is not to be conceived in abstract terms as reified being, substance, or matter, but in concrete terms as becoming, impermanence, and flux. Moreover, like traditional Japanese Buddhist poetics, Whitehead emphasizes not only the primacy, centrality, and ultimacy of aesthetically immediate experience, but also its transitoriness, evanescence, and perishability. Although for Whitehead the dynamic continuum of nature is a creative aesthetic process that aims toward maximum production of beauty, it is always the evanescent beauty of perishability, or what he otherwise terms the pathos of tragic beauty.

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It should be recalled that in his essay “The Aesthetic Meaning of Death” (1987), Charles Hartshorne sums up his own Whiteheadian process aesthetics of perpetually perishing beauty by citing a verse from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, “Death is the mother of all beauties” (1987, 51). Hartshorne argues that insofar as life as a process of aesthetic creativity is analogous to a work of art, it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just as a novel has a final chapter, a poem has a final verse, and a musical symphony has a final note. The finitude imposed by mortality, perishing, and death is therefore established as a necessary condition for the possibility of beauty. Furthermore, since the beauty of life as a work of art is finite, “all life is tragic” (1987, 54). For the aesthetics of perishability developed by Whitehead and Hartshorne in American process philosophy, as for Wallace Stevens in American poetry, death as mortality, finitude, and limitation is the source of all beauty. In Whitehead’s process metaphysics, beauty is the ideal of perfection, and “no static maintenance of perfection is possible” (AI 281). He adds: “This axiom is rooted in the nature of things” (AI 274). Whitehead argues that the primordial appetitions of Eros which strive for realization of beauty, “are seeking intensity, and not preservation” (PR 105; italics added). His process metaphysics overturns the assumption of conventional western substance philosophy by asserting that the aim of a self-creative occasion is not directed toward eternal glory, but toward intensity of aesthetic value feeling. According to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the ultimate aim of each occasion is realization of aesthetic value experience as maximum intensity of feeling, and “perishability” is itself a categoreal condition for achieving optimal intensity of feeling in an occasion of experience. Evanescence is a categoreal obligation that must be satisfied by each occasion as it emerges into actuality through concrescence as a creative synthesis of many into one, thereby attaining consummatory satisfaction as harmonious intensity with directly felt aesthetic value quality. Whitehead asserts, “the Appearance is a work of Art, elicited from the primary Reality” (AI 281). He further maintains, “Appearance is beautiful when the qualitative objects which oppose it are interwoven in patterned contrasts . . .” (AI 267-268). Appearances are therefore natural works of art with patterned contrasts that produce intense yet evanescent beauty. In Time, Space and Knowledge, the Tibetan Buddhist philosopher Tarthang Tulku uses phenomenology to describe how radiant events presence through the ecstatic openness of time and space into the magnificent beauty of appearances: “All appearance is sheer art, beautiful beyond all enduring, appealing beyond any possibility of possession” (1977, 291). Likewise, Whitehead holds that self-creative events are natural works of art with transient beauty that aim toward intensity and not permanence. The evanescent beauty of fleeting appearances can neither endure nor be possessed. Thus, the liberating response to impermanence

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is disinterested appreciation of evanescent beauty without clinging, craving, or attachment. The Beauty of Mono no Aware as “Sympathy with Things” Both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have converged upon a process aesthetics of evanescent beauty. For Whitehead, as for the Japanese tradition, the beauty of perishability is based on the capacity for sympathy with the evanescent aesthetic qualities of events. Motoori Norinaga holds that the deepest wisdom of the Japanese poetic spirit is “to know mono no aware” (mono no aware o shiru, 物の哀れを知る). This means that one has a “heart-mind” (kokoro, 心) sensitive to the “beauty” (bi, 美) and “pathos” (aware, 哀れ) of evanescent phenomena, or an ability to sympathize with the fleeting aesthetic qualities of events in everyday life. As Minamoto Toyomune puts it, “Beauty, as it exists in Japanese art, has the ‘sympathetic’ beauty of aware, the beauty found in emotional identification with ephemeral qualities of the perceived object” (1982, 56). Or as Ueda Makoto’s puts it, mono no aware is “a literary and aesthetic ideal cultivated during the Heian period (794-1185). At its core is a deep, sympathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifest in nature and human life, and it is therefore usually tinged with a hint of sadness” (1983, 246). In his study titled Aware, Onishi Yoshinori relates Motoori Norinaga’s understanding of mono no aware as sympathy with the pathos of things to what in modern German aesthetics is called “empathy” (G. Einfülung ), or “feeling into”: The meaning of aware should be clear enough from Norinaga’s explanation . . . we cannot overlook the remarkable closeness that this concept has with the so-called notion of empathy (Einfülung) of modern Western aesthetics. (1999, 129)

Although Onishi Yoshinori’s interpretation of mono no aware in terms of the western aesthetic notion of “empathy” is of great value, it is important to further clarify this notion of empathy as it functions in Japanese aesthetics. In the literature of aesthetics, sympathy or “feeling with,” and empathy or “feeling into,” are often used interchangeably. Stephen Addiss explains the Japanese sense of beauty as mono no aware in terms of a melancholy appreciation of passing beauty elicited through empathy with the transient aesthetic qualities of momentary events: “This empathy also enables the Japanese to appreciate the fleeting quality of beauty, knowing that as quickly as the cherry blossoms bloom, a gust of wind may blow them away. This appreciation is described as mono no aware, an acute and often melancholy sensitivity to things” (1996 118).

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In The Sense of Beauty Santayana develops a concept of beauty as “empathy” in terms of his key idea of objectified pleasure. Santayana argues that the differentia of aesthetic pleasure is its objectification (1955, 33). He adds: “Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified” (1955, 33). Santayana’s hedonistic notion of beauty as pleasure objectified is based on the German concept of “empathy” (G. Einfühlung), first introduced into aesthetics by Robert Vischer, and subsequently made famous by Theodor Lipps and Vernon Lee. Empathy, or “feeling into,” explains how interior subjective human feelings are projected as if they were the aesthetic qualities of exterior objects. Santayana’s dualistic understanding of Einfühlung or “empathy” is very different from the Japanese nondualistic sense of beauty as mono no aware. A closer Western parallel to the Japanese notion of aware as the beauty and sadness arising from sympathetic feeling with the evanescent aesthetic qualities of events is to be found in Whitehead’s process aesthetics. According to Whitehead’s theory of perception, beneath vivid sense perception lies a deeper level of perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as sympathy, prehension, or affective feeling-tone. Through prehension or sympathy one directly feels the ephemeral aesthetic qualities of becoming and perishing events. It is perception in this primordial mode of sympathetic feeling that discloses the haunting pathos and evanescent beauty of events in the passage of time. In the context of discussing “the aesthetic feelings, whereby there is pictorial art” (PR 162), Whitehead describes perception in the primordial mode of causal efficacy as sympathy or sympathetic feeling: “The primitive form of physical experience is … sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another” (PR 162). I would argue that it is perception in the primordial mode of sympathy, prehension, or affective feeling-tone that provides the basis for a nondualistic aesthetics of beauty as perishability in both Whitehead and Japanese thought. Both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition set forth an atmospheric sense of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality. A fundamental problem in the philosophy of art and beauty arises from the question: “Where is the locus of aesthetic quality?” Is the aesthetic quality of directly felt ephemeral beauty located in the subject or the object? Whitehead rejects the fallacy of simple location, arguing that the locus of aesthetic quality is neither in the subject nor the object but in an interactive situation. In the Japanese aesthetics of perishability, the ephemeral beauty of mono no aware is “the pathos of things,” a feeling located in both the subject and the object. According to both the Whiteheadian and Japanese traditions, insofar as evanescent beauty arises through sympathetic feeling with the evanescent aesthetic qualities of events, beauty cannot be simply located either in the subject or the object, in the mind or matter, in the audience or in the artwork, but is fused and spread throughout the total interactive event as its directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality.

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Perishability as a Condition for Aesthetic Experience In his essay “The Genius of Japanese Civilization,” Lafcadio Hearn describes how the traditional Japanese aesthetics of perishability was influenced by the Buddhist concept of impermanence, or what he otherwise terms “the doctrine of the eternal Vanishing” (1972, 24). In his novel Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata Yasunari describes the Japanese aesthetic ideal of “vanishing beauty” (bi wa kiesaru mono ka ,美は消え去る物か、 1975, 179; 1973, 138). In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead likewise argues that all events arising through the process of concrescence of many into one realize the aesthetic value of ephemeral beauty, whereupon he then describes the ceaseless vanishing of all events: “Events become and perish. In their becoming they are immediate and then vanish into the past. They are gone: they have perished” (AI 237). It can be said that Whitehead and Japanese tradition formulate variants of a process aesthetics based on the principle of vanishing beauty. Both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition thereby arrive at an aesthetics of beauty as perishability, wherein a condition for beauty lies in its own vanishing. It should be recalled how Donald Keene underscores the culturebound uniqueness of the Japanese Buddhist aesthetics of impermanence based on its cultivation of an awareness of transience in which beauty is inseparably linked to its perishability. Keene then goes on to cite with approval the fact that “Lafcadio Hearn once termed the appreciation of perishability ‘the genius of Japanese civilization’” (Kenkō: 1981, xviii). However, one of Whitehead’s greatest achievements was to develop his process metaphysics of becoming and perishing occasions into an aesthetics of evanescent beauty. The perishability characterizing occasions of aesthetic experience is articulated throughout Process and Reality with the fundamental doctrine: “Time is ‘perpetually perishing’” (PR 81; also, 128, 210, 340). Whitehead argues that all occasions of experience realize directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality as the intrinsic value of beauty. Yet it is further argued that each occasion of aesthetic experience perishes as soon as it becomes, thus to arrive at an aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Whitehead’s process metaphysics based on the doctrine of time as perpetual perishing does not fall into nihilism insofar as it also celebrates the evanescent beauty of perishability. Keene points out how one of the single greatest contributions of Japanese literature is its recognition that perishability is a necessary condition for beauty, while also expressing an aesthetic preference for the ephemeral beauty of perishability (1981, 24). Likewise, Whitehead’s categoreal scheme establishes “perpetual perishing” (PR 29) as a categoreal condition for the emergence of all aesthetic occasions in the creative advance to novelty. According to the categoreal scheme outlining those requirements placed upon each occasion, it is by

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satisfying categoreal obligations of finitude, transience, and perishability that aesthetic value quality is actualized in an occasion of experience. Donald Keene argues that the tradition of Japanese aesthetics is unique in its view that “perishability is a necessary element in beauty” (1981, 24). According to Keene, Japanese aesthetics recognizes that “without mortality there could be no beauty” (1981, 23). For Keene, the key insight of Japanese aesthetics is that it establishes “perishability” as “the necessary condition for beauty” (1984, 24). Whitehead’s categoreal scheme similarly holds that perishability is a necessary condition or categoreal requirement for actualization of beauty. Although a self-creative occasion of experience lasts for only a brief duration, its brevity adds to its beauty and intensifies its enjoyment of aesthetic value quality. For Whitehead’s process aesthetics of beauty as perishability, as for Japanese aesthetics of evanescent beauty, the precondition for beauty lies in its own vanishing. Thus, one of the deepest insights of both Whiteheadian and Japanese traditions is that perishability is a categoreal condition for the possibility of aesthetic experience, so that without perishability there could be no beauty. An East-West Vision of Tragic Beauty In his study of late Heian aesthetics, K. L. Richards states: “Affectivity or the perception of beauty in Japanese lyric poetry, became systematized into the aesthetic of beauty as perishability through poetic convention” (1978, 59). I would suggest that both Whitehead and Japanese poetics have converged upon an aesthetics of beauty as perishability. Whitehead’s aesthetics of perishability is summed up by his notion of tragic beauty, just as the traditional Japanese aesthetics of evanescence is summed up by the notion of aware as the sad or tragic beauty of impermanence. It has been seen how scholars of Japanese culture often translate the aesthetic notion of aware as pathos, or feeling of the pity and beauty of evanescence. Likewise, Whitehead develops a process aesthetics of perishability which involves an explicit doctrine of pathos as a feeling of sadness that arises through the fading of beauty in the flow of time. Whitehead’s aesthetics of perishability based on his notion of tragic beauty is grounded in his process metaphysics of creative advance to novelty. Likewise, the Japanese aesthetics of perishability based on the principle of aware is grounded in a Buddhist process metaphysics of mujō or impermanence. Although the attainment of beauty is brief, its brevity increases the aesthetic value of beauty. Both hold that impermanence is a requirement for aesthetic experience so that transitoriness is in part constitutive of beauty. Moreover, both Whitehead and Japanese poetics arrive at the insight that perishability is a necessary condition for the realization of beauty, and that without evanescence there could be no beauty. Thus, both Whitehead and Japanese tradition formulate culture-specific versions of an aes-

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thetics of evanescence where a necessary condition for beauty lies in its own vanishing. The Tale of Genji portrays human life as a “floating bridge of dreams” that produces exquisite beauty, yet always ends in the suffering of grief, loss and tragedy. Likewise, Whitehead sums up his aesthetic of beauty as perishability when he states: “The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty” (AI 296). Both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition develop a poetics of ephemerality wherein temporal existence is like an evanescent dream with both magnificent beauty and overwhelming sadness. Although both Whitehead and Japanese poetics celebrate the evanescent beauty of art, nature, and everyday life, they recognize that all aesthetic experience is fleeting just as all beauty is tragic. In such a manner, both Whitehead and Japanese poetics set forth an aesthetics of beauty as perishability grounded in a process metaphysics of impermanence that culminates in a vision of pathos as tragic beauty.

EIGHTEEN Tragic Beauty and Peace in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics

Whitehead, like Japanese Buddhism, recognizes that since reality is process and not substance, aesthetic experience is transient and beauty is tragic. How does one respond to the tragic beauty of perishability? Reactions to the pathos, suffering, and tragedy of evanescent beauty in Japanese aestheticism include hedonistic indulgence, nihilism, ritual suicide, resignation, acceptance, renunciation, and nonattachment. The various somaesthetic disciplines in the Japanese tradition of Zen art such as tea, bushidō, flowers, gardening, ceramics, and painting, all cultivate nonattachment and tranquility as a response to the sorrow of ephemeral beauty. For Whitehead the ultimate response to the tragic beauty of perishability is the supreme ecstasy of peace. Likewise, in Japanese Buddhist aestheticism the ultimate response to pathos as the sorrow of life is the peace and bliss of nirvana. Whitehead’s process metaphysics reaches its crescendo with an eschatological doctrine stating that the pathos, suffering, and tragic beauty of life as perpetual perishing are reconciled in the ecstasy of peace. Whitehead systematically formulates his doctrine of peace in Adventures of Ideas. In this work he shifts from a theistic to a naturalistic framework, in which God is naturalized, secularized, and de-ontologized. From the standpoint of Deluezean deconstructionism, Roland Faber de-ontologizes Whitehead’s process theology so that there is a transformation “from God as an ontological reality to God as an aesthetic . . . and eschatological reality” (2002, 210). For Whitehead the primordial nature of the dipolar God as a persuasive lure toward aesthetic value as ephemeral beauty is now termed “the Eros,” whereas the consequent nature of God is “the Adventure of the Universe as One” (AI 295). 301

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In the final chapter of AI titled “Peace,” Whitehead defines his theory of civilization as follows: “Thus a society is to be termed civilized whose members participate in the five qualities—Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace” (AI 285). The fifth quality of peace is the harmony underlying art, beauty, truth, and adventure: “I choose the term ‘Peace’ for that Harmony of Harmonies which calms destructive turbulence and completes civilization” (AI 285). Whitehead’s PR includes an open-ended eschatological view of time as “a creative advance into novelty” (PR 222). In AI he then goes on to formulate what Roland Faber calls a doctrine of “Eschatological peace” (2004, 250). The tragic beauty of creative process aims toward the eschaton of peace. Yet peace also requires the quality of adventure (AI 273283). Insofar as aesthetic experience of beauty arises out of contrasts, it requires an irreducible harmonic contrast between “adventure” and “peace.” This dual requirement for both peace and adventure in the eschatological process as a creative advance toward novelty is clarified by Faber when he asserts: “Peace and Adventure represent wholly valid realizations of the eschaton… Whitehead understands the eschatological concurrence of Peace and Adventure as the Harmony of Harmonies” (2004, 251-252). Although peace is regarded by Whitehead as an ideal of civilization, it applies not only to social, political, or ideological conditions, but ultimately to an inner mental peace: “Here by the last quality of Peace I am not referring to political relations. I mean a quality of mind...” (AI 274). For Whitehead, inner peace as a quality of mind is achieved by a process of overcoming the substantial ego-self and its desires: “Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. . . . Thus Peace is self-control at its widest,—at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality” (AI 285). Again, he relates peace to “this final Beauty which constitutes the zest of self-forgetful transcendence” (AI 295-296). Elsewhere he describes overcoming the sense of tragedy in a state of peace through “the sublimation of the egoistic aim by its inclusion of the transcendent whole” (AI 249). Peace as the resolution of suffering, pathos, and tragedy thus involves transcendence of “egotistic desire” (AI 288), or “selfish desire” (AI 289). The process of creative advance is directed toward the production of beauty. But since beauty perishes upon attainment, all beauty is tragic beauty. For Whitehead, tragedy is the loss, perishability, or destruction of beauty. Due to the principle of process as the becoming and perishing of occasions (AI 274), tragedy is inherent in reality as creative advance: “Decay, Transition, Loss, Displacement belong to the essence of the Creative Advance. . . . As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy” (AI 286).

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The pathos, suffering, and tragedy of existence is intrinsic to reality as a temporal process of perpetual perishing. But the suffering that arises through the tragic beauty of evanescence is resolved in peace: “Amid the passing of so much beauty. . . . Peace is then the intuition of permanence” (AI 369). The notion of peace is thus to be comprehended in its dialectical relation to tragedy as loss of beauty: The meaning of Peace is most clearly understood by considering it in its relation to the tragic issues which are essential in the nature of things. Peace is the understanding of tragedy . . . (AI 286)

For Whitehead, then, the “sense of tragedy” (AI 294) arising through the process of creative advance is overcome by the “sense of Peace” (AI 295). If Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in an aesthetics of evanescent beauty, it reaches full consummation with a new religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its resolution in peace: The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace:—That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies . . . the sense of Peace. (AI 296)

The suffering, pain, and tragedy of temporal flux as the perpetual perishing of evanescent beauty, is itself finally surmounted in an immediate experience of peace as a harmony of harmonies (AI 296). It can be said that this eschatological vision whereby the suffering of tragic beauty is transcended in the supreme ecstasy of peace is itself the pinnacle of Whitehead’s process metaphysics. Whitehead, like Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), argues that the suffering and tragedy of existence as ceaseless flux is overcome in a state of inner peace through transcendence of the ego and its desires. According to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, affirmation of the will as selfish desire results in the suffering of samsara, whereas negation of will is salvation and equivalent to the peace and bliss of Buddhist nirvana (1969: II, 609). According to Schopenhauer the peace of nirvana is ultimately attained by mystical resignation of the saints. But for Schopenhauer one can have a temporary glimpse or foretaste of the peace of nirvana through the tranquility achieved by disinterested aesthetic contemplation of beauty in art and nature (1969: I, 212). 1 Nietzsche, however, claims that the peace of nirvana understood by Schopenhauer and Buddhism is a life-denying attitude of passive nihilism. It must therefore be asked if Whitehead’s attempt to resolve the pathos, suffering, and tragic beauty of life in an egoless state of peace is also a mode of passive nihilism? As Whitehead notes, “The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute: Anaesthesia” (AI 285). According to Whitehead, however, peace is not an anesthesia which numbs the emotions, but the positive feeling of ecstasy: “The Peace that is

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here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling . . .” (AI 285). Whitehead further specifies this positive feeling as “the extreme ecstasy of Peace” (AI 289). It must therefore be emphasized how for Whitehead, the peace that overcomes suffering and reconciles the tragic beauty of art and life is not a negative attitude of life-denying nihilism, nor is it a state of anesthesia that deadens all aesthetic feeling, but is instead expressed in positive terms as “the extreme ecstasy.” Here I would like to clarify how Whitehead’s notion of tragic beauty and its reconciliation in peace resonates with the tragic sense of life in Japanese aesthetics. Li Zehou explains the absence of tragedy in the Chinese literary tradition as owing to a narrative of deliverance from conflict through release of tension into harmony: “This probably explains why China never produced the great, heart-stirring tragic works that arose in ancient Greece” (2010, 74). Similarly, Janeira cites the view of Kitamura Tokoku that there is no tragedy in Japanese literature. According to Kitamura, as Japanese literature moved toward aestheticism and mysticism, tragic conflict was dissipated into harmony, tranquility, and peace. Kitamura asserts: “That is why [Japanese] literature excels in elegance and refinement and has been deficient in seriousness and sublimity: there is too much lyricism but no epic, no tragedy, nor comedy” (cited by Janeira: 1970, 265). Janeira argues that the heroic effort to overcome the tragic is not found in the Japanese literary tradition: “The tension in the tragic and the epic exaltation in which man overcomes tragedy itself is unknown in Japanese literature, and alien to Eastern thought. . . . Enlightenment comes from the Buddhist dissolution of self in the ocean of reality; not in superseding reality but in accepting it as it is…” (1970, 238). Whereas in the Western literary tradition the tragic hero strives to defiantly resist and triumphantly overcome tragedy, in Japanese literature there is a Buddhist acceptance of fate and tranquil resignation to the tragic forces of destiny. Janeira explores “the sense of tragedy” in Japanese literature. He argues that while Japanese literature did not develop tragedy in the sense of the Western tradition, it expresses a “tragic sense of life.” He states that the two characteristics of the Japanese tragic sense of life are “compassion and evanescence” (1970, 262). Janeira contends that the differences between Western and Japanese tragedy can be seen by comparing the former with nō drama and the plays of Chikamatsu. “Suffering, guilt, expiation, and salvation take a prominent part in both of these theatrical forms, but there is a main difference in the nature of thought and emotion: Noh develops no conflict; everything happens on the lyrical plane. Thus, Noh can be called lyrical drama” (1970, 259). Janeira discusses Donald Keene’s view that a parallel with Western tragedy can be seen in the plays of Chikamatsu such as Love Suicide of Amijima. Keene asserts that Chikamatsu’s plays are “the first mature tragedies written about the common man” (1961, 1). Yet in response, Janeiro claims: “Strictly speaking, they

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[Chikamatsu’s plays] cannot be considered tragedies, though in many passages they show a truly tragic sense of life. Chikamatsu is a romantic…” (1970, 260). Janeira writes, It is in the tragic conflict, in the rebellion against destiny expressed in extremes of tension, that the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern thought lies. Eastern thought found a plane of harmony between man and the universe. The ideal of serenity of man, of composure and restraint in action, has opened the way to quiet contentment and spiritual peace. (1970, 259)

He adds: It is true that underneath the tragic lies a deep imperceptible harmony. Western man had to dramatize his inner contradictions in order to throw the fullest light on the source of his anxiety and find spiritual rest. Eastern man could attain inner rest and harmony with the world through meditation. (1970, 258)

It can now be seen how near Whitehead comes to the tragic sense of life in Japanese literature. Whitehead sometimes makes reference to the ancient Greek tragedy of Aeschulus, Sophocles, and Euripides (AI 279), just as he illustrates the “pathos” of life by citing verses from Shakespeare (S 48). However, Whitehead’s doctrine of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296) is not meant as a strict interpretation of ancient Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. Rather, Whitehead’s view is closer to what Miguel de Unamuno calls a “tragic sense of life.” 2 Whitehead thus speaks of the “sense of tragedy” (AI 294), and its resolution in “the sense of Peace” (AI 295). Janeira states that the fundamental difference between Western and Japanese literary approaches to the tragic is that for the latter conflict is resolved in the underlying harmony of a spiritual peace (1970, 259). For Whitehead the “sense of peace” is also based on the wider pattern of harmony in the background of nature. He therefore defines the sense of peace as “a Harmony of Harmonies” (AI 296). Both Whitehead and Japanese aestheticism recognize that beneath the tragic events of life there abides a deep underlying harmony. It can thus be said that Whitehead’s process metaphysics of tragic beauty approximates the Japanese aesthetic worldview insofar as it portrays a tragic sense of life that is reconciled in the underlying harmony of spiritual peace. In Whitehead’s theory of civilization, the harmony of peace is a necessary condition for enjoyment of tragic beauty in art, nature, and life. Whitehead’s view that the suffering, pathos, and tragic beauty of existence are surmounted in the ecstasy of peace results in what may be termed a notion of peaceful beauty. When tragedy as loss of beauty is experienced with a sense of peace, the pathos and suffering of tragic beauty is resolved in the supreme ecstasy of peaceful beauty. Peaceful beauty is an aesthetic feeling of delight in which the tragic beauty of an

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event is now felt as being included within the larger qualitative background whole of a cosmic harmony. It can be argued that Whitehead’s vision of the tragic beauty of perishability experienced through the ecstasy of peace is a version of the psychical distance theory of aesthetic experience. By this view peace is realized through a tranquil observation of evanescent occasions with the pathos of tragic beauty from the standpoint of an aesthetic attitude of artistic detachment, psychical distance, or disinterested contemplation. For Whitehead, the psychical distance of peace is thus an essential requirement for aesthetic delight in the pathos of tragic beauty. Here I would like to briefly consider Whitehead’s concept of peace in relation to Eastern aesthetics. My view is that for Whitehead’s vision of tragic beauty, as for the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian aesthetic traditions, a basic function of art is to reveal the deep underlying harmony of nature as an intuition of peace. In Creativity and Taoism Chang Chungyuan uses Whitehead’s notion of peace to interpret the peace, harmony, and tranquility characteristic of the Daoist and Buddhist traditions of Chinese art. First he argues that the Dao in Chinese philosophy corresponds to Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical category of “creativity” as the spontaneous act whereby all events create themselves (1968, 66). In chapter 3 titled “Peace as Identification of Reality and Appearance” (1968, 89-122), Chang argues that the profound tranquility, harmony, and peace of Chinese landscape art is based on the Huayan Buddhist principle of “unobstructed harmonious interpenetration of particular and universal-whole” (C. li-shih wu-ai, 理事無礙), otherwise understood in Whitehead’s metaphysics as the interfusion of Appearance and Reality (1968, 97-99). Moreover, Chang discusses peace, harmony, and tranquility in Chinese art, including painting, poetry, calligraphy, and music. He then interprets tranquility in Chinese art by references to Whitehead’s concept of peace: The word peace in Chinese is ho p’ing which, more precisely, means harmony and tranquility. . . . The highest sense of peace is what we might call in the words of Whitehead, “a deep underlying harmony.” (1968, 89)

According to Chang, then, Whitehead’s notion of peace illuminates the tranquility, peace, and harmony of Chinese art based on the metaphysics of unobstructed harmonious interpenetration between Part and Whole or Appearance and Reality. Whitehead’s aesthetic notion of tragic beauty and its transcendence in peace can be further clarified by reference to traditional Japanese aesthetics. The ideal of peace as an element in the beauty of Zen art is made fully explicit by Hisamatsu Shini’ichi (1889-1980). 3 In Zen and the Fine Arts, (Zen to bijutsu, 禅と美術), Hisamatsu describes what he calls the seven characteristics of Zen art (1982, 28-38; 1958, 23-37). These seven character-

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istics are identified as (1) Asymmetry, Irregularity (fukinsei, 不均整); (2) Simplicity (kanso, 簡素); (3) Austere Sublimity, Lofty Dryness (kokō, 枯高); (4) Naturalness (shizen/jinen, 自然); 5) Deep Reserve, Profundity, Darkness (yūgen, 幽玄); (6) Nonattachment (datsuzoku, 脱俗); (7) Tranquility, Calmness, Peace (seijaku, 静寂). Hisamatsu further explains how these seven characteristics of Zen art are based on mu (無) or Nothingness, or what he otherwise terms the Formless Subject of Absolute Nothingness. The fifth characteristic of Zen art, that of deep reserve, profundity, or darkness, is the mysterious beauty of yūgen. The sixth characteristic of Zen art, that of nonattachment, is related by Hisamatsu to the Kantian notion of the disinterested aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful. He recognizes psychical distance as a factor in beauty, art, and aesthetic experience. Of special relevance here is Hisamatsu’s seventh characteristic of Zen art, seijaku as tranquility, serenity or peace (1982, 36-7). It is this seventh characteristic which requires tranquility as an essential condition for beauty in Zen art. Hisamatsu emphasizes that the profound tranquility or peacefulness of beauty in Zen art is itself a function of the sixth characteristic of nonattachment. As examples of peace and nonattachment in Zen/Chan artworks, Hisamatsu cites Japanese nō drama along with ink paintings and calligraphy of China and Japan (1982, 36). Hisamatsu thus identifies seijaku in its meaning as tranquility or peace as a key element of beauty in Zen aesthetics while providing concrete illustrations from the East Asian tradition of art. 4 In Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki describes Zen aestheticism in the art of tea as a way to peace. Here he cites the words of Zen Master Takuan (1573-1645): “The principle of cha-no-yu is the spirit of harmonious blending of Heaven and Earth and provides the means for establishing universal peace” (2010, 276). The art of tea is based on the four principles of “harmony” (wa, 和), “reverence” (kei, 敬), “purity” (sei, 清), and “tranquility” (jaku, 寂) (2010, 273). Of these four principles it is tranquility or peace that is identified as the core of both Zen aestheticism and the art of tea (2010, 283). The aesthetic principle of jaku corresponds to the seventh trait of Zen art identified by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, that of seijaku, (静寂), tranquility, or peace. Suzuki explains that the Sino-Japanese character for jaku meaning tranquility, serenity or peace, is also pronounced sabi (寂び), which in traditional Japanese aesthetics means the quiet beauty of poverty, simplicity, and solitariness, thus to be identical to wabi (侘 び) (2010, 284). He comments that in the art of tea, “wabi is sabi and sabi is wabi; they are interchangeable terms” (2010, 285). Although jaku is tranquility, serenity, and peace, in it’s meaning as the quiet beauty of wabi and sabi, it also designates a “highly cultivated aesthetic ecstasy” (2010, 285). Suzuki further clarifies that the Japanese character for jaku/sabi (寂) is an equivalent to the Sanskrit term ´sânta or “peace”:

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Here it should be pointed out that in the classical Indian rasa aesthetics of Abhinavagupta (tenth century), the highest rasa or mode of aesthetic delight is called ´sânta-rasa, the “rasa of peace.” In his Dhvanyâloca Locana (“Light on Suggestion”), Abhinavagupta holds that rasa or aesthetic taste is the intoxicating delight of beauty (1990, 611). For Abhinavagupta, aesthetic delight of rasa arises when the supreme “bliss” (ânanda) of absolute Brahman is tasted through the sensuous beauty of art. In Indian aesthetics there are nine rasas or dominant aesthetic emotions, including erotic love, pathos or tragedy, laughter, rage, fear, heroism, disgust, wonder, and peace. Ordinary personal feelings are transformed into the blissful aesthetic experience of rasa in the transpersonal state of detachment through a process of universalization, generalization, or de-individuation. While earlier theorists argued that the most important rasa is erotic love, Abhinavagupta proclaims that the supreme rasa is ´sântarasa, the “rasa of peace.” The peaceful beauty of ´sântarasa is the most important rasa not only because it is the ultimate mode of aesthetic delight, but also because it culminates in the religious experience of “liberation” (moksa) from suffering (1990, 525). In Abhinavagupta’s words: “Suffice it to say that as the rasa of peace leads to moksa, which is the highest aim of man, it is the most important of all the rasas” (1990, 525). 5 While Abhinavagupta identifies the rasa of peace as a distinctive rasa, at the same time he emphasizes that the tranquil beauty of ´sântarasa is the ultimate source of all other rasas: “The peaceful (´sânta) is the basic nature common to all the rasas” (1990, 521). He cites the words of Bharata: “The [aesthetic] emotions arise from peace, each from its peculiar cause, and when the cause has ceased, they melt back into peace” (cited by Abhinavagupta: 1990, 521). Hence, the beauty manifested by all the other eight rasas is ultimately rooted in the immovable tranquility of ´sântarasa as the blissful aesthetic experience of delight in peaceful beauty. Whitehead’s vision of the suffering of tragic beauty and its resolution in peace can be understood in terms of Abhinavagupta’s concept of ´sântarasa or the rasa of peace. The rasa of peace is the supreme rasa both as the ultimate aesthetic delight in beauty as well as the religious experience of liberation from suffering. It can be said that Whitehead’s notion of beauty as directly felt pervasive aesthetic quality is a mode of rasa as the overall total feeling imparted by an artwork. Whitehead’s student Susanne K. Langer describes the aesthetic experience of rasa in classical Indian theater as "the feeling that shines through the play itself—the vital feeling of the piece. This last they call rasa" (1953, 323). For Abhinavagupta’s rasa theory, as for Langer and Whitehead, beauty cannot be simply located in either the subject or the object, the audience or the artwork, but

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is the total feeling spread throughout the total interactive situation as its pervasive aesthetic quality. Whitehead’s notion of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296) especially fits with the rasa of tragedy (karuna). In classical Indian aesthetics the ordinary personal emotion (sthâyabhâva) of “sorrow” (sōka) is converted into the ecstatic transpersonal rasa of “the tragic” (karuna) in a state of “detachment” (vairâgya) through the universalizing process of de-individuation (sâdhâranikarana). Moreover, as argued by Abhinavagupta, artistic delight in the rasa of tragedy is itself ultimately rooted in the blissful aesthetic experience of ´sântarasa or the supreme rasa of peace. Similarly, for Whitehead the pathos and suffering of tragic beauty is transcended in the supreme ecstasy of peace. The tragic beauty of art and life must ultimately be experienced from the nonattached, serene, and tranquil attitude of peace, such that it becomes transformed into the intoxicating ecstasy, rapture and bliss of peaceful beauty. In the Western tradition of philosophy Whitehead’s process metaphysics has set forth a new religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its resolution in the supreme ecstasy of peace. Whitehead provides an illustration of his ideal of inner peace as exhibited in the gospel of Christianity: “The essence of Christianity is to appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world . . . with his message of peace, love, and sympathy” (AI 167). Elsewhere he makes reference to the Biblical idea of salvation as realizing that inner peace spoken of in Philippians 4:7, citing the “peace which passeth all understanding” (RM 98). From the standpoint of Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue, it can be further said that Whitehead’s soteriological notion of peace converges with the Buddhist doctrine of suffering and its transcendence in the peace of nirvana. Although nirvana is said to be ineffable and beyond articulation by intellectual concepts, it is often defined in negative terms as freedom from suffering of impermanence, and in positive terms as the blissful experience of peace. Thus in the classic early Buddhist text The Questions of King Milinda it is written: How is Nirvana to be known? It is by its freedom from distress and danger, by confidence, by peace, by calm, by bliss, by happiness. (Muller: 1963, vol. 2, 196)

In this famous Buddhist text, nirvana is defined not only in negative terms as extinction of desire or nonattachment to a fabricated ego-self, but also in the positive terms as calmness and peace. Furthermore, the peace of nirvana is described as a realization of happiness and bliss. Like the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence, Whitehead’s process metaphysics culminates in a soteriological doctrine, whereby salvation or enlightenment signifies the end of suffering through transcendence of the ego and its selfish desires in the supreme ecstasy of peace, or what Buddhism calls nirvâna (nehan, 涅槃). Whitehead develops a profoundly Bud-

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dhist analysis of the human experiential process as summed up by the four noble truths. [1] The first noble truth of Buddhism is a diagnosis that identifies the problem of existence, whereby all life is duhkha, “suffering.” Likewise, Whitehead asserts: “As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy” (AI 286). Elsewhere he explicitly describes the pain of temporal process as “suffering” (AI 296). [2] The second noble truth of Buddhism is that the cause of suffering is tanha, selfish desire. Whitehead also clearly associates the suffering, pain, and tragedy of evanescence with “egotistic desire” (AI 288), or “selfish desire” (AI 289). [3] The third noble truth of Buddhism teaches the solution to the problem of existence, namely, that suffering has its end in nirvâna or peace as extinction of selfish desires. Similarly, Whitehead propounds: “suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies . . . the sense of Peace” (AI 296). [4] The fourth noble truth of Buddhism elucidates the marga or path for achieving an end to suffering through the peace of nirvana, wherein cultivation of insight into reality as interdependent origination is a middle way between substantialism and nihilism. It can be said that Whitehead also formulates a via media insofar as he abandons the notion of substance for a doctrine of nonsubstantial occasions arising through concrescence of many into one, while also rejecting nihilism or the idea of vacuous existence, instead holding that reality is a creative process that aims toward production of vivid and intense yet transient aesthetic value as evanescent beauty. This striking correspondence between the transcendence of suffering and tragedy in both Whitehead’s notion of peace and Buddhist nirvana is highlighted by the American process philosopher Charles Hartshorne: “In this transcendence of the personal there is a kind of ‘peace’ or ‘Nirvana’, and escape from the agonies of egotism” (1970, 308). Elsewhere Hartshorne asserts: When Buddhists talk of the misery of unredeemed human or animal existence, and when Christians talk about original sin, they are trying to face the deep tragedy of life on the highly conscious level that is human existence, as well as the general tragedy of life of any kind. They attribute frustration, suffering, anxiety, hatred, fear, and other evils at least partly to self-centeredness, or greed. (1987, 57)

Analyzing the solution to the fundamental problem of tragedy as the suffering caused by egoism, Hartshorne continues: The solution for this troublesome problem [of suffering] Buddhists call Nirvana; Jesus called it “peace.” So, no doubt deliberately, did Whitehead. I am convinced that the best so far presented philosophical explication of this idea is Whitehead’s. (1987, 57)

Indeed, this transcendence of tragedy and suffering achieved through peace in Whitehead’s process metaphysics, has many points of conver-

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gence with Japanese Buddhist freedom from suffering in nirvana. Whitehead’s idea of peace is in accordance with all schools of Buddhism wherein suffering is overcome in nirvana by transcending the selfish desires of egoism. Yet Whitehead’s eschatological vision whereby the suffering of tragic beauty has its end in the supreme ecstasy of peace finds its deepest parallel in the Japanese Buddhist poetics of ephemerality, as summed up by the Japanese aesthetic ideal of aware or pathos as the beauty and sorrow of perishability, along with the cessation of suffering in the peace and bliss of nirvana. CONCLUSION According to Whitehead, art discloses that reality is not substance but process, thereby to reveal the perishability, the brevity, and the ephemerality of beauty. The function of art is to declare the metaphysical truth of eternally vanishing beauty. For Whitehead art proclaims that all aesthetic experience is fleeting, just as all beauty is tragic. Yet beyond the evanescence of aesthetic experience and the pathos of tragic beauty, there is the intuition of peace as a deep underlying harmony. Whitehead’s process metaphysics thus announces a new religio-aesthetic vision in the West based on the tragic beauty of perishablity and its resolution in the supreme ecstasy of peace. In this volume I have argued that both Whitehead’s process metaphysics and the Japanese religio-aesthetic tradition have both set forth a poetics of evanescence that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. Both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist poetics have thus converged upon an aesthetics of beauty as perishability. It can be asserted that both traditions articulate a process aesthetics of evanescent beauty, wherein an essential requirement for the attainment of beauty lies in its own vanishing. For both traditions perishability is a necessary condition for the emergence of beauty, so that without perishability there could be no beauty. Moreover, for both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition, the aesthetics of beauty as perishability achieves its consummation in a poetic vision of tragic beauty. Whitehead proclaims: “The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty” (AI 296). I have suggested that Whitehead here approximates the tragic view of life articulated in the Japanese aesthetics of perishability, whereby the fleeting world is likened to an evanescent dream with both astonishing beauty and overwhelming sadness. This tragic view of life grounded upon the ephemerality of beauty is further articulated in both Whitehead and Japanese Buddhist aestheticism through a notion of mysterious beauty as penumbral shadow, wherein transitory, evanescent, and insubstantial phenomena in the clearly discriminated foreground, gradually shade off and vanish away

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into the faint darkness of an undiscriminated background. Yet the doctrine of the pathos, loss, and suffering of “tragic Beauty” (AI 296) is brought to completion only with the eschatological notion of peace or harmony, such that it is now proclaimed: “the suffering attains its end in . . . the sense of Peace” (AI 296). Thus, both Whitehead’s process metaphysics and the Japanese Buddhist poetics of evanescence culminate at their apex in a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its overcoming in the supreme ecstasy of peace or nirvana. NOTES 1. Like Whitehead, Schopenhauer is a Platonist who adheres to the notion of Platonic forms. Schopenhauer holds that disinterested aesthetic contemplation of beauty in art or nature results in a momentary silencing of will in the peace and bliss attained by cognizing a Platonic Idea as the universal in the particular (1969: I, 212). According to Whitehead, the beauty of aesthetic quality in art is due to ingression of eternal objects or Platonic forms. However, for Whitehead the peace and beauty of art is not grasped as a Platonic Idea through cognition, but is instead directly felt as a pervasive aesthetic quality. 2. See Miguel de Unamuno’s book The Tragic Sense of Life (1954). 3. Hisamatsu Shini’ichi (1889-1980) studied under Nishida Kitarō at Kyoto University, and subsequently became a representative of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Also, Hisamatsu became prominent as a Zen master and a leading expert on sadō or the way of tea. See Hisamatsu’s Zen to bijutsu, 禅と美術 (1958), translated into English as Zen and the Fine Arts (1982). 4. Although Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s analysis of the seven characteristics of Zen art is illuminating, I would argue that it is not exhaustive or complete, since it lacks one of the key principles underlying the Japanese sense of beauty: namely, “perishability, “ which according to Donald Keene (1981) is the most distinctive trait of Japanese aesthetics. 5. Abhinavagupta asserts that “detachment” (vairâgya) is the basic state of ´sântarasa or the beauty of peace (1990: 479, 490). Scholars thus point out that Abinavagupta develops a theory of artistic detachment or psychical distance formulated in terms of the concept of ´sântarasa as “peaceful beauty.” In his book Comparative Aesthetics: East and West, Angral Chaudhary relates the de-individualizing process (sâdharanikarana) of Abhinavagupta’s rasa theory to Edward Bullough’s idea of “psychical distance” as a factor in beauty, art and aesthetic experience (1991, 49). The de-individualization process of inserting psychic distance is thus an essential component of ´sântarasa or peaceful beauty.

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Glossary of Sino-Japanese Characters

akirame

resignation

諦め

aware

pathos, sad or tragic beauty

哀れ

bi

beauty

美

bigaku

aesthetics, study of beauty

美学

engi

dependent coorigination

縁起

enkinhō

far-near perspective

遠近法

fūga

windblown elegance,

風雅

fukasa

depth

深さ

fūryū

flowing, windblown elegance

風流

geidō

the Way of art

芸道

hakanasa

evanescence, momentariness

儚さ

heiwa

harmony

平和

higeki

tragedy

悲劇

higekiteki na bi

tragic beauty

悲劇的な美

iki

chic, style

粋

Indaramō

Indra’s Net

因陀羅網

Innen

interdependent origination

因縁

Isshun

moment

一瞬

kieru

to vanish

消える

kū

emptiness

空

kyōmu

nihilism

虚　

ma

negative space, interval

間

323

324

Glossary of Sino-Japanese Characters

mono no aware

tragic beauty of things 物の哀れ

mu

nothingness

無

mujō

impermanence

無常

mujō busshō

impermanencebuddha-nature

無常仏性

myō

mystery

妙

nagareru

to flow

流れる

nehan (nirvana)

peace

涅槃

nôtan

beauty of dynamic contrast between light and darkness

濃淡

sabi

impersonal loneliness

寂び

sakura

cherry blossoms

桜

satori

sudden enlightenment 悟り

setsuna

moment

刹那

shibumi

understatement

渋み

shōmetsu

extinction

消滅

sōbi

sublime beauty, sublimity

壮美

sūkō

sublime

崇高

tsunenashi

impermanence

常無し

uji

being-time

有時

utsusemi

empty Chicada shell

空蝉

wabi

rustic beauty

侘び

yojō

overtones of feeling

余情

yūgen

mysterious beauty of 幽玄 darkness and shadows

Index

adventure, xvii, xx, 29, 31, 69, 130, 258, 300, 301, 302, 303, 311 aesthesis, 68 aesthetic destruction, 257 aesthetic education, 20, 28, 29–30 aesthetic importance (and aesthetic significance, or worth), xxi, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 41, 47, 53, 64, 64–65, 66, 70, 71–72, 72, 79, 102, 145, 148–150, 153, 154, 155, 160, 162, 169, 172, 175, 176, 184, 188–189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 199, 205, 209n6, 211, 219, 230, 242, 243, 254, 272, 295, 297, 298, 299, 308, 312n1. See also intrinsic value and significance aesthetic situation, 46 aesthetic symbol, 43 aesthetic synthesis (and organic synthesis or creative synthesis), 32, 33, 46, 164, 165 aestheticism (and Japanese/Zen aestheticism), 75–93, 118, 128, 145, 161, 166, 261, 262, 263, 283, 286, 301, 304, 307 affective continuum, 144, 145, 149–150, 151–153, 158, 161 agape , 153 aida (間). See ma aidagara (間柄) (betweenness), 89, 90 aikidō (合気道), 89, 94n10 aletheia, 204–205, 206, 226. See also unconcealedness American Pragmatism, 31, 112, 113, 124, 126 Amida Buddha, 55, 133, 139n4, 266. See also Shinran Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism anâtman. See no-self anitya.. See impermanence

art, xviii, xx, xxii, 3–6, 7–9, 8, 11, 12, 14–15, 20, 29, 29–30, 33, 41, 46–47, 50–53, 54, 59–62, 64, 71, 82–93, 104–105, 112, 117, 128, 136–139, 137–139, 147–148, 161, 164, 165, 169, 172, 180–189, 196, 199–200, 199–208, 209n4, 209n9, 213, 214–217, 226–232, 233–236, 259, 262, 271, 285–286, 295, 297, 305–308, 311 artistic detachment (also psychical distance), 51–53, 84–85, 138, 218n1, 223, 263, 305, 307, 312n5 Avatamsaka Sūtra (Kegonkyō, 華厳経), 4, 7, 9n2, 165–166. See also Kegon Buddhism, jiji muge, and riji muge aware (哀れ), xiii, xviii, xx, xxii, 5, 84, 86, 94n6, 110, 135, 163, 169–174, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220, 223, 228, 240, 242, 245, 247, 250n6, 251–252 aware of things (物の哀れ). See aware basho (場所) (place), 111, 133, 134, 160, 169, 242, 250n4 Being and Time , 202 being-time (uji, 有時), 135, 241, 247, 249n2, 251, 277–279, 287n6, 289 betweenness. See aidagara bifurcation of nature, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 100 biotic community, xv, 21, 63, 68, 77 bliss (skt. ananda), 25, 30n5, 276, 301, 303, 308–311 body, 115, 148, 155–157, 213, 286. See also somaesthetics Book of Changes (Yijing), 54 Brahman, 25, 308 bushidō (武士道) (the Way of the samurai warrior), 7, 83, 89, 284, 286, 301

325

326

Index

calonology, 94n3 chanoyu (茶の湯). See tea ceremony chaos, 49, 153, 192 chaosmos, 192 cherry blossoms (sakura, 桜), 5, 83, 163, 173, 213, 214, 223, 228, 230, 233, 263, 264, 268, 271, 273, 274, 281, 286, 292, 293, 294, 296 chiaroscuro, 193 chūdō (中道). See middle way Chung-yung (Jhongyong, 中庸) or Doctrine of the Mean, 167n2 cicada shell (empty) (utsusemi, 空蝉), 263, 264–265, 266, 268 compassion, 80, 83, 84, 86, 133, 278, 304. See also sympathy and aware concrescence, 26, 32, 34, 38–56, 99, 101, 142, 176, 190, 191, 208, 234, 240, 249, 292, 295, 298, 309 Confucianism, 54, 92 consequentialism (or utilitarianism), 77 consummatory experience, 47, 103, 105, 114, 129 cosmic memory, 143. See also eternal objects and storehouse consciousness creativity, 21–22, 32–37, 47, 54–57, 78, 79, 83, 127–128, 135, 259, 306 cross-modal perception, 147, 151, 153, 164, 165, 259. See also synaesthesia Dao (道) (and Daoism), 6, 40, 54, 57, 111, 122, 223, 224, 306 Daodejing (道得経), 38, 57. See also Dao (道) death, 83, 132, 243, 245–246, 259–260, 265, 276, 277, 284, 286, 294, 295, 308 depth (G. Tiefe) (J. fukasa, 深さ) (and depth of feeling, and epiphany of depth), xviii, xxii, 25, 26, 27, 42, 43, 50, 62, 66, 67, 84, 88, 101, 128, 129, 131, 132, 160, 169, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 183, 186, 187, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 203, 206, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216–217, 219–221, 223, 224–226, 227, 229, 230, 233, 234, 235, 236 depth psychology, 221–223 dewdrops (tsuyu, 露), 5, 261, 263, 268, 278–279, 281

dharmakaya, 55 Diamond Sutra , 255–256 divine lure, xvii, 142 divine memory, xvii, 53, 130, 142 doctrine of vibrations. See vibratory nature of reality drops of experience, xix, 178, 239 duhkha. See suffering dynamic quality, 123, 125, 139n2 ecological ethics (or environmental ethics), xv, 19, 20, 21–22, 63, 77–79 ecstasy, xvi, xxii, 6, 11, 60, 61, 62, 88, 93n1, 94n9, 115, 116, 135, 147, 189, 236n2, 242 electronic occasions (or electromagnetic occasions), 25, 38, 176 emergent synthesis, 33, 34, 57, 240 emptiness (J. sunyata, or kū, 空), 6, 12, 54, 55, 56, 89, 89–91, 109–111, 133, 139n4, 169, 213, 216, 222, 223, 227, 227–228, 232, 240, 245, 261, 265, 266, 274 epiphany, 256 epochal occasions. See occasions eros, xvii, 59, 69–70, 73, 124, 153, 262, 295, 301. See also agape eternal objects, xxi, 53, 102, 112, 129, 141–145, 182 eternalism (or substantialism), xxi, 12, 141, 142, 145, 215, 241, 292, 309. See also nihilism evil, 62, 257 fallacy of vacuous actuality, xv, 11, 14, 32, 59, 60, 100, 184, 258 flesh, 67, 156 floating world (ukiyo, 浮世), 8, 115, 263 focus/fringe (also focus/field and foreground/background), xviii, xix, xxii, 13, 22, 26, 27, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 65, 70, 89, 101, 102, 103, 105, 114, 115, 122, 128, 152, 169, 172, 175–177, 179, 180–208. See also penumbral beauty fukasa (深さ). See depth fūryū (風流) (windblown elegance), 6, 263

Index geidō (芸道) (Way of art), 6, 87, 89, 212, 223 Gestalt, 110, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 165, 183 Godzilla, 266 Greek tragedy, 60, 61, 257, 305 haiku poetry, 6, 84, 85, 110, 147, 161, 162–164, 167n7, 248, 256, 263, 284, 287n2, 293 hakanasa (儚さ) (evanescence). See impermanence Hamlet, 50, 52, 85, 182, 249 hara-kiri (腹切り). See seppuku harmonic contrasts (also patterned harmonic contrasts and irreducible harmonic contrasts), 31, 41, 62, 107, 143, 166, 187, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 234 harmony (wa, 和), 7, 24, 41, 49, 62, 271, 307. See also harmonic contrasts Heart Sūtra, 223 hininjō (非人情). See artistic detachment holiness (and the sacred), 66, 191 Huayan Buddhism. See Avatamasaka Sutra and Kegon Buddhism iki (粋) (chic, fashion, or style), 8, 290 impermanence (skt. anitya) (J. mujō 無 常), xx, 8, 44, 56, 110, 135, 169, 173, 212, 227, 240, 241, 243, 247, 249n2, 251, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 273, 274, 275, 278–279, 283, 298, 299 Indras’s Net (Indaramō, 因陀羅網), 4, 40, 166, 279 inkwash painting (sumie, 墨絵), 6, 85, 89, 91, 117, 147, 161, 169, 173, 217, 219, 223, 224–225, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 235, 263 instrumentalism, 124 internal relations, 12, 17 interdependent origination (skt. pratîtya-samutpâda) (J. engi, 縁起), 12, 44, 54, 55, 56, 89, 166, 241, 261, 292, 309 interpenetration, 4, 7, 9n2, 34, 39–40, 57, 151, 158, 165, 167, 178, 215, 223–224, 227, 233, 243, 262, 306; See also riji muge; synaesthesia

327

intersensory continuity, 150. See also synesthesia intrinsic value (or intrinsic worth), xv, 11–12, 16, 19, 22, 24, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 123, 124, 127, 129, 172, 184, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 226, 237, 256, 298 jiji muge (事事無礙) (interpenetration between particular and particular), 165, 166, 223. See also Avatamasaka Sutra and Kegon Buddhism jikaku (自覚) (self-awareness), 158, 245, 246 Julius Caesar , 52 junjō (純情) (pure feeling), 161, 169, 228, 242 kabuki theater, 161, 263 kalogenic, 77, 78, 94n2, 94n3 karma, 266, 276 Kashmir Shaivism, 25, 30n5 Kegon (華厳) Buddhism (Skt., Avatamsaka), 4, 7, 40, 165, 166, 215, 223, 224, 227, 279 Kegonkyō (華厳経) See Avatamsaka Sūtra kenōsis , 133 kokoro (心) (heart mind), 170, 174, 268, 270, 296 kotoba (ことば) (word or language), 170 kōyō, (紅葉) (crimson maple leaves), 263, 268 kū (空). See emptiness lyrical poem (uta, 歌), 215, 227 ma (and aida) (間), 94n10, 274, 290 mandala, 4, 235 Meiji Restoration (or Period), 87, 92, 216, 282 middle way (chūdō, 中道), 111, 241, 292, 309 Mikkyō (密教) Buddhism, 3, 4, 213 militarism, 83, 289. See also ultranationalism monad (and monadology), 17–18, 30n1, 37, 38, 39, 40, 68, 176, 186, 189, 190, 192, 192–193, 209n7

328

Index

mono no aware (物の哀れ). See aware mu (無), 89, 94n10, 169, 274, 290 mujō (無常). See impermanence mujōkan (無常観) (the feeling of impermanence), 247, 261, 266, 289 mujun (矛盾) (contradiction), 248 mushin (無心). See no-mind myō (妙) (mystery), 211, 221–222 mysticism (or mystical, mystical experience, mystical rapture, mystical resignation), 60, 66, 84, 129, 147, 148, 166, 176, 189, 191, 206, 207, 208, 303, 304 myth of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron, 日本人論), xviii, 171, 174, 289–293 national seclusion (sakoku, 鎖国), 216, 218n2 nehan (涅槃). See nirvana nihilism, 11–12, 14, 60–61, 67, 88, 105, 132, 135, 142, 189, 215, 241, 258, 261, 286, 292, 298, 301, 303, 309. See also eternalism, bifurcation of nature, and fallacy of vacuous actuality nihonjinron (日本人論). See myth of Japanese uniqueness ningen (人間) (human being), 89–91 nirvana (nehan, 涅槃), 133, 262, 276, 301, 303, 309, 310 nō theater, 6, 85, 89, 91, 169, 173, 212–213, 214, 219, 223, 235, 263, 287n2, 304, 307 no-mind (mushin, 無心), 6, 213, 221, 222, 232 no-self, 88, 261 nôtan (濃淡), xviii, 219 nothingness (mu, 無) (including relative or absolute nothingness), 12, 55, 57n1, 89, 109, 133, 134, 139n4, 153, 158, 160, 169, 212, 213, 214, 223, 224, 228. See also suchness, emptiness nyojitsu (女実), see suchness objectified pleasure, 297 occasions (also epochal occasions and actual occasions), xvii, 12, 21–22, 22, 25, 26, 30n3, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38,

39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 53–54, 55, 57n1, 59, 62, 63, 64–66, 68, 77, 79, 80, 93n1, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114, 115, 120, 133, 139n4, 141–143, 172, 190, 191, 197, 199, 209n2, 226, 231, 237, 238, 239, 240, 243, 246, 256, 259, 289, 291, 298, 302, 305, 309. See also concrescence and electronic occasions Ophelia, 85 openness, 20, 89–90, 109–110, 192, 202–208, 223, 226–227, 228 organic synthesis, 16, 17, 18, 32 overtones of feeling. See surplus emotion panpsychism (also panexperientialism), 36, 38, 63, 150 peace (seijaku, 静寂) (and the sense of peace), 59, 62, 127, 276. See also artistic detachment, nirvana, resignation, satori, and nirvana penumbra (also penumbral beauty, penumbra of feeling, penumbra of consciousness, penumbral fringe penumbral background, and penumbral shadow), xiii, xivn2, xviii–xix, xxii, 13, 38, 42, 62, 169–174 perception in three modes, 25, 42–43, 186, 193, 197, 254 perspectivism, 17, 18, 37, 65, 189–192 pervasive quality, 102, 104, 117, 126, 136, 138, 139, 155, 188, 189 phenomenology, xv, 23, 43, 67, 89, 93n1, 149, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 171, 177, 178, 179, 187, 188, 189, 205, 206, 207, 209n5, 219, 225, 230, 236, 243, 253, 295 Platonic Forms, xxi, 53, 112, 141–145 place. See basho poet of the world (God as the poet of the world), xvii, 53, 54, 69, 130, 142 poiêsis , 207 power (and the will to power), 29, 61, 64, 189 pratitya-samutâda. See interdependent origination prehension (and negative prehensions), 25, 32, 33, 38, 41, 45,

Index 62, 80, 101, 103, 113, 114, 152, 182, 186, 190, 191, 195, 196, 199, 221, 222, 223, 231, 232, 253, 297 prehensive unification. See concrescence process theology, xv, xvii, 45, 53, 55, 128–135, 139n4, 142, 143, 145, 167n3, 253, 257, 301 psychical distance. See artistic detachment pure experience (junsui keiken, 純粋経 験), 104, 111, 115, 122, 125, 126, 127, 133, 158, 244, 250n4 Pure Land Buddhism, 55, 58n4, 133, 266. See also Amida Buddha and Shinran Buddhism pure qualities (junsui seishitsu, 純粋性 質), 111, 134, 160 quality. See aesthetic quality quantum physics, 38, 176, 238 rasa aesthetics, 136, 139, 140n6, 308 resignation (akirame, 諦め), 8, 60, 261, 301, 303, 304. See also peace, nirvana, and artistic detachment riji muge (理事無礙) (interpenetration of part and universal-whole), 4, 215. See also Avatamasaka Sutra and Kegon Buddhism rock garden, 89 romantic poets, 18–19, 254–255 sabi (寂び) (impersonal loneliness or solitary beauty), 6, 89, 211, 256, 263–264, 273, 277, 307 sadō (茶道) (the Way of tea). See tea ceremony sakura (桜). See cherry blossoms samsara , 133, 266, 276, 303 samurai (侍), 6, 7, 83, 89, 274, 284, 286 satori (悟り) (enlightenment), 6, 7, 84, 221–222 sense of tragedy, 62, 246, 303, 304, 305 seppuku (切腹), 284, 286 shibumi (渋み) (graceful understatement), 6, 8 shikan (止観) (Tendai meditation practice of 'tranquility and insight'),

329

214, 215, 218n1 Shingon Buddhism, 3–4, 235; See also Mikkyō Buddhism Shinran Buddhism, 55, 133; See also Amida Buddha, and Pure Land Buddhism Shintoism, 92, 118 significance (also importance and worth), 12, 28, 64, 65, 66, 77, 78, 79, 102, 105, 137, 190–191, 254. See also aesthetic importance and intrinsic value simple location, fallacy of, 15, 17, 18, 37, 38, 39, 190, 240, 297. See also vacuous actuality situated ethics, 79 sōbi (壮美). See sublime soku hi (即非) (is and yet is not), 245, 248. See also contradiction solipsism, 26, 76, 77, 93n1 somaesthetics, 6, 161, 164, 167n8, 293, 301 spiritual death, 132 standpoints (tachiba, 立場), 158 storehouse consciousness (or storehouse of divine memory, and divine storehouse of memory), xvii, 45, 130, 142. See also cosmic memory and eternal objects subjectivism, 76, 93n1 sublime (also sublime beauty) (sōbi, 壮 美), 49, 51, 71, 211, 218n1, 226–227, 232 substance ontology, 20 substantialism. See eternalism suchness (or isness) (skt. tathatâ) (J. nyojitsu, 女実), 6, 12, 97, 103, 109–111, 115, 133, 153, 169, 222, 227, 232, 241, 277 suffering (skt. duhkha), 60–62, 135, 246–248, 261, 276, 278, 300, 301–312 sumie (墨絵). See inkwash painting sūnyatâ (emptiness), 6, 55, 56, 110, 133, 261, 265 surplus emotion (or overtones of feeling) (yojō, 余情), xviii, xxii, 169, 170–171, 174, 213, 230 symbolism, 25–28, 42, 136, 137, 138, 164, 213, 233, 293–294

330

Index

sympathy, 80, 86, 94n6, 114, 152, 223, 253, 272, 278, 296, 297. See also aware and compassion tathatâ. See suchness tea ceremony (also teaism) (chanoyu, 茶 の湯) or sadō (茶道) (the way of tea), 6, 7, 8, 81, 89, 90, 91, 92–93, 118, 147, 161, 164–165, 212, 217, 263, 264, 273, 274, 281, 287n2, 293, 301, 307, 312n3 Tendai Buddhism, 214, 215, 227, 233, 235 The Order of Things, 201 The Origin of the Work of Art , 204 The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 源氏 物語り), 247, 248, 249, 264, 266–275, 276, 277, 279, 280, 281, 290, 300 theopoetic function (or operation) (of God), 53, 69, 142 Tiefe, see depth tsūkankaku (通感覚) (fusion of senses), 158, 167n5. See also synesthesia tsuyu (露). See dewdrops u (有) (being), 169 uji (有時). See being-time ukiyo (浮世). See floating world ultra-nationalism, 83, 289. See also militarism unconcealedness, 204–205, 206, 207. See also aletheia

unconscious, 32–35, 83, 186–208, 232 universal relativity, 56 urasenke lineage, 165 uta (歌). See lyrical poem utsusemi (空蝉) (empty) cicada shell, 180 vacuous actuality, xv, xvi, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 32, 38, 59, 60, 67, 68, 75, 100, 119, 135, 184, 258 vacuous existence, 11, 14, 60. See also nihilism vibratory nature of reality, 24–25, 30n5, 238, 243 wa (和). See harmony wabi (侘び) (rustic beauty), 6, 7, 8, 89, 164, 211, 217, 256, 263–264, 273, 274, 290, 307. See also sabi waka poetry (和歌), 169, 170, 173, 212, 213, 213–214, 214, 215, 219, 223, 227, 228, 235, 263, 277, 278, 281, 284, 287n6, 287n7 Yijing, see Book of Changes yojō (余情). See surplus emotion yūgen (幽玄) (profound mystery), xviii, xxii, 6, 89, 256, 282, 284, 286, 291, 306. See also aware yūgen to aware (幽玄とあわれ). See aware; yugen

Index of Names

Abe Masao, 241, 249n2 Abhinavagupta, 140n6, 308, 312n5 Abrams, M. H., 94n5, 256 Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 284 Alexander, Samuel, 103, 106–107 Aristotle, 47, 49, 51, 56, 60, 112, 125 Arnison, Nancy, 257

114, 115, 116, 129, 131, 133, 137, 139n2, 147, 155, 157, 188–189 Dombrowski, Daniel A., 53, 80, 144, 150, 151, 167n3 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 12

Bashō Matsuo, 84–85, 162–164, 167n7 Baudelaire, Charles, 148, 158, 164 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 87 Bell, Clive, 51, 137 Bentham, Jeremy, 77 Bergson, Henri, 103, 112, 237, 242 Bernstein, Richard J., 99, 100, 133 Bertram Morris, 46, 76 Bradley, F. H., 179 Brentano, Franz, 159, 160 Buchler, Justus, 107n1 Bullough, Edward, 51–52, 52, 138, 312n5

Faber, Roland, xiii, xvi, xvii, 53, 139n3, 142, 209n8, 301, 302 Ferré, Frederick, 77, 94n2 Foucault, Michel, 201–202, 209n9 Frankenberry, Nancy, 102, 103, 111 Fujiwara no Shunzei, 212, 215, 227 Fujiwara no Teika, 212, 213

Cézanne, Paul, 157 Chang Chungyuan, 57, 306 Chari, V. K., 140n6 Cobb, John B., xiii, 55, 58n3, 58n4, 133, 139n4 Collingwood, R. G., 67, 107 Cooper, Ron L, 206–207 Cytowic, Richard, 148, 149, 162, 167n1, 167n7 Dale, Peter, 174, 289–291 De Mente, Boyé, 7–8 Deleuze, Gilles, xvii, 68–69, 192, 193, 209n8 Dennett, Daniel C., 107n1 Descartes, René, 31, 100, 112 Dewey, John, 47, 67, 70, 71, 72, 99, 100, 103, 104–107, 107n1, 108n2, 110, 112,

Eisenstein, Sergei, 161

Grange, Joseph, 257 Griffin, David A., xiii, 55, 58n3, 133, 139n4 Guenther, Herbert V., 110 Hargrove, Eugene, 21 Hartmann, Eduard von, 221 Hartshorne, Charles, xiii, xvi, xxi, 23, 24, 30n4, 33, 34, 35, 47, 49, 54, 80, 128, 143–145, 149–154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 166, 167n3, 259, 295, 310 Hee-Jin Kim, 241 Heidegger, Martin, 89, 149, 202–207, 226, 242, 243, 245, 246 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 151 Henning, Brian G., xiii, xvi, 40, 76–79, 93n1, 94n2, 94n3 Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, 211, 232, 271–272, 306–307, 312n3, 312n4 Hori Ichiro, 128, 135 Horiuchi Toshimi, 162 Hume, David, 26, 42, 152, 179, 193, 242

331

332

Index of Names

Ihde, Don, 209n5 Imamichi Tomonobu, 94n3 Inouye, Charles Shirō, 264–266, 286, 287n1, 287n2 Izutsu Toshihiku, xviii, 170, 171, 174, 212, 214. See also Izutsu Toyo Izutsu Toyo, 170. See also Izutsu Toshihiku Jacobson, Nolan Pliny, 100, 111, 133 James, William, xix, 71, 99, 100, 103, 104, 111, 112, 115, 122, 124, 129, 133, 137, 139n2, 175, 177–179, 239, 250n4, 251, 253 Johnson, Galen A., 67–68, 70 Jones, Judith, 40, 57n2, 76, 93n1, 102, 103 Joyce, James, 256 Kamo no Chōmei, 212, 213 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 26, 31, 35–37, 42, 51, 67, 72, 77, 85, 87, 88, 94n5, 178, 179, 202, 203, 204, 218n1, 226, 236n1, 307 Karatani Kōjin, 91, 92 Kawabata Yasunari, 164, 216, 248, 264, 279–284 Keene, Donald, xx, 110, 118, 272–275, 298–299, 304, 312n4 Keiji, Nishitani, 12, 249n3 Klinger, Max, 229, 236n2 Koehler, Wolfgang, 154 Komatsu Sakyo, 266 Kōsaka Masaaki, 3, 81 Kraus, Elizabeth, 225, 236n1 Kūkai, 3, 4, 248 Kuki Shūzō, 8 LaFleur, William, 91, 213, 214, 215, 220, 227, 233 Langer, Susanne K., 136–139, 139n5, 140n6, 294, 308 Laozi, 57 Lee, Vernon, 297 Leibniz, G. W. F, 17–18, 38, 39, 190, 192, 209n7 Leopold, Aldo, 21 Lipps, Theodor, 71, 297

McMahan, David L., 166 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 67–68, 147, 155–157, 167n4, 209n5 Mill, John S., 77 Millais, John Everett, 85 Miller, David Lee, 128, 135 Minamoto Toyomune, 110, 272, 296 Miner, Earl, 214 Mishima Yukio, 216, 284–286, 287n8 Miyazaki Hayao, 266 Mori Ogai, 221 Morris, Ivan, 5, 82, 83, 267, 268, 270, 284 Murakami Haruki, 266 Murasaki Shikibu, 78, 266, 271, 279 Nabokov, Vladimir, 148, 275, 287n3 Naess, Arnae, 77 Neville, Robert C., xiii, 37, 57n1, 234–235 Nietzsche, Friedrich W., 11, 12, 30, 60–61, 64, 67, 189, 221, 303 Nishi Amane, 87 Nishida Kitarō, 54, 81, 87–89, 94n8, 94n9, 111, 133–134, 147, 158–161, 169–171, 220, 228–230, 236n2, 240, 242–249, 249n3, 250n4, 250n5, 250n6, 250n7, 312n3 Nobo, Jorge Luis, xvi, 209n2 Northrop, F. S. C., xxi, 15, 40, 111, 118, 119, 119–121, 121, 122, 128, 139n1 Oh Sadaharu, 94n10 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 83, 294 Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), 81, 91–93 Onishi Yoshinori, xx, 169, 171, 220, 269, 290, 296 Otomo Yakamochi, 265 Ozu Yasujiro, 89, 274 Peirce, C. S., 23, 24, 30n4, 71, 80, 99, 100, 103, 129, 133, 137, 145, 147, 149, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160 Pepper, Stephen C., xxi, 33, 47, 99, 110, 111–118 Petersen, G. B., 282 Pirsig, Robert M., 123–128, 139n2 Plato, xxi, 51, 53, 60, 67, 68–70, 73, 112, 124, 141, 141–145, 175, 202, 249, 262, 312n1

Index of Names Pronko, Leonard C., 161 Puette, William J., 4, 5, 271 Reck, Andrew J., 152 Richards, K. L., 299 Richie, Donald, xx, 274, 287n3 Rikyū, 165 Rimbaud, Arthur, 148, 158 Rimer, Thomas, xx Ross, Stephen D., 18, 209n6 Saito Yuriko, 261, 292 Santayana, George, 26, 67, 71–72, 99, 100, 133, 137, 297 Schilpp, Paul A., 76, 108n2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60, 221, 303, 312n1 Schweitzer, Albert, 77 Seddon, Fred, 121 Sei Shōnagon, 279 Sen no Rikyū. See Rikyū Sen Sōshitsu, 165 Sesshū Tōyō, 85, 117, 169, 173, 223, 224 Shakespeare, 27, 50, 52, 85, 182, 249, 254, 294, 305 Shaviro, Steven, 71 Shelly, P. B., 18, 19, 85, 184, 254, 255 Sherburne, Donald, xvi, 50–51, 52, 118, 121, 209n4 Shusterman, Richard, 6, 164, 167n8 Singer, Peter, 77 Sōseki Natsume, 81, 84, 84–86, 94n4, 94n5, 94n6, 216, 248 Spinoza, Baruch, 31, 54

333

Stcherbatsky, F. T., 56 Stenger, Isabelle, 206 Stevens, Wallace, 259, 295 Suzuki, D. T., 6, 7, 12, 81, 82, 83, 86, 161, 165, 221, 222, 223, 232, 248, 262, 263, 307 Swinburne, Algernon, 85 Takeuchi Yoshinori, 228 Takuan, 307 Tanizaki Junichirō, 216–217 Tanke, Joseph, 201, 209n9 Trungpa, Chogyam, 109–110 Ueda Makoto, 214–215 Ueshiba Morihei, 89, 94n10 Unamuno, Miguel de, 257, 305 Viglielmo, Valdo H., 94n8, 94n9 Vischer, Robert, 71, 297 Watsuji Tetsurō, 81, 89–91, 94n11 Wieman, Henry Nelson, 128–135, 139n3, 143, 145 Yamakuse Yoji, 271 Yasuda, Ken, 110, 256 Zeami Motokiyo, 85, 169, 173, 212–213, 214–215, 223 Zietz, Karl, 154