The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy by Yusa Michiko

Author:Yusa, Michiko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Some of the themes that he examines through this lens of giving form to experience are “vanguard and tradition,” “emptiness,” “the body and nature,” “the mountain asceticism.” In this way the possibility implicit in the positive vision of emptiness leads him to reflect on the need to continually produce new forms derived from a groundless ground. So he raises the idea that the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century can also serve as examples for rethinking the relation between a sign and its condition of possibility. This same line of thought affirms the need for artists to achieve an emptiness within, thereby making them able to generate form. From this idea stem the psychophysical techniques developed by Asian spiritual traditions to encourage harmony between the body (microcosm) and nature (macrocosm). The mountain is presented as a privileged space for putting this ascetic-spiritual dimension into practice, as reflected in the Japanese tradition of mountain asceticism or shugendō, which, according to Pasqualotto, finds its most artistic expression in the symbolism of the garden. Resorting to his characteristic comparative-intercultural approach, Pasqualotto is able to relate concepts that seem radically incongruous at first. For instance, he takes Paul Klee’s attempt to reveal the vital connections that have been obscured by our habit of perceiving reality only from an “optical” perspective, and links it with the Buddhist notion of pratītyasamutpāda—the “universal concatenation of all things.” As we saw before, this notion emphasizes the interrelation that exists between all beings. If no being is self-generated, none is self-sufficient. Rather, all beings are the products of a causal chain and are therefore interdependent. In other words, “all being is in reality an event, that is to say, a process whose birth, development, and end are determined by conditions which do not depend on itself.”17 This leads us to think about reality in terms of process rather than essence and objects. Elsewhere Pasqualotto draws upon the “Mondrian’s space,” which resists objectification but rather sheds light on subjectivity: Malevic’s determination to make visible the background which lies behind every form; the “positive nothingness” of the Neo-Platonist and the mystical traditions; the basho (topos) of the absolute nothingness in Nishida; and emptiness understood as a pure space present in all canonical Buddhist writings. In all these cases, which are “homeomorphic equivalents” (or “functional equivalents”), to use Raimon Panikkar’s term, the background is an element which allows the relation and emergence of forms and beings in a way that they form a constituent part of the being (although they are not the being in and of themselves).18

The intercultural approach to philosophy undertaken by Pasqualotto responds to the contemporary need to find new modes of expression, and to widen the horizons of philosophy. It is also an ethical positioning in the face of a social reality that has become increasingly diverse and complex. We should not forget that “comparison” here does not mean the mere categorizing and cataloguing of philosophical “objects” in terms of their analogy or difference according to a neutral, disinterested, external observer.

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