Odin, Steve. Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

Abstract

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic attitude theories of artistic detachment in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern, especially Japanese, aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, the author focuses on a remarkably wide spectrum of theories in the West, including the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation and Heidegger's openness or letting-be. This Kantian tradition, wherein beauty is understood as a function of an attitude of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, is then related to the Japanese sense of beauty, ranging from the experience of beauty as hidden depth through meditation in the early poetics of Fujiwara no Teika and poet-priests such as Zen master Dôgen, to the idea of riken no ken (seeing of detached perception) in the nô drama, to its modern reformulation in the twentieth-century Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy, as well as the decadent aestheticism of Kuki Shûzô. In his exploration of portrait-of-the-artist fiction by such writers as Henry James and James Joyce along with MoriÔgai and Natsume Sôseki, the author demonstrates how the main theme of artistic detachment is imaginatively expressed in literary traditions. He further shows how the conflict between artistic detachment and moral sympathy has become a central problem within the literary tradition of aestheticism both in Japan and the West. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy, comparative aesthetics, and literary studies.