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On the Experience of Sublime: An Examination between Western Sense of Sublime and Japanese Kami (神)
Abstract
The study deals with the relationship between the sense of sublime and ontology. In this study, it has been tried to make an examination between a concept from western history of philosophy and aesthetics -the concept of sublime- and its counterpart (if not so counterpart, but the possible idea that holds the essential meaning and experience of the sublime in its sense) within the East-Asian intellectual and cultural world namely, Kami (神). By this examination, it is aimed to enrichen the investigations within both comparative and fusion philosophy. In first chapter, the historical progress of the western sublime has been tracked and analyzed. Through the names like Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Lyotard and Derrida, the historical change of the notion of sublime in Western culture has been followed and investigated. Its aesthetical, political, ethical, metaphysical roots and connotations have been clarified within the examination. By doing this, the concept’s relation with the concepts like nature, the self, and the relation between nature and self are problematized and taken into consideration. The accounts of sublime regarding the idea of excess, transcendence, a sort of withdraw-repel relation have been criticized in order to understand the specific emphasizes on the notion during its historical changes. In the second chapter, Japanese religion Shinto and its effects on the Japanese aesthetics have been investigated. By this investigation, the meaning and usages of the belief kami (and its connotation within metaphysics and ontology) are deconstructed regarding the notion of sublime in Japanese cultural and intellectual world. Through some semantic, etymological and grammatical analyzes, the examination reaches to the point where the connection between the western sublime and Japanese kami has been cleared. In the conclusion, the phenomenality within Japanese aesthetics has been revealed through the interrelation between kami and sublime.
Keywords
References
- Ashfield, A. – Bolla, P. (Ed.). 1998. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Blake, W. 1906. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Boston: John W. Luce and Company.
- Boyd, J. W., Williams, R. G. 2005. “Japanese Shinto: An Interpretation of a Priestly Perspective”. Philosophy East and West, 55 (1): 33-63.
- Brady, E. 2013. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Budd, M. 2005. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Burke, E. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Burke, E. 2009. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Campbell, C. 2016. The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era. New York: Routledge.
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Philosophy
Journal Section
Research Article
Publication Date
December 23, 2020
Submission Date
October 1, 2020
Acceptance Date
November 6, 2020
Published in Issue
Year 2020 Number: 14