Lorenzo Marinucci

This chapter offers an introduction to three fundamental atmospheric notions deployed by Japanese culture, observing them both in their original context and through a neophenomenological frame. The three concepts are that of 空 ku- “sky”, 風 fu- “wind” and 気 ki “air” or “breath”. Each of them, however, shows an impressive complexity and a wide array of meanings, many of which, despite the puzzling effect on a non-Asian reader, are highly coherent. Why is the character for “sky” also the signifier for the Buddhist notion of emptiness and imagination? Why is “wind” both the chief element of “landscapes”, a signifier for the aesthetic in general and having even the sense of “culture”? Is ki, with its impressive use for phenomena both bodily and psychic, external and internal, an actual phenomenon in the world? Despite the risk of exoticizing the cultural difference of non-European sources or the opposite refusal of these notions as “totally other”, the potential of a cross-cultural phenomenology of atmospheres is made evident, also presenting the work of modern Japanese philosophers who have already retraced the heritage of these concepts in a philosophical perspective.

Mitate is the name used to describe a typically Japanese visual trope, in which one object is meant to be seen as something else. While mitate is a defining element of Edo period haikai and ukiyo-e, a this kind of overlapping meanings can be found in much earlier sources. Its aesthetic effects are often smile, laughter, and parody, but mitate can also bestow a hidden depth to the commonplace and the contemporary through explicit and implicit connections to more noble and remote cultural antecedents. In this paper I examine mitate and mitate-like configurations throughout the history of Japanese aesthetics, and conclude by asking whether mitate is indeed a uniquely Japanese phenomenon and by analysing whether and how it can be relevant to some philosophical discussions (Husserl's and Wittgenstein’s) concerned with the phenomenological and ontological status of images.

ABSTRACT This paper explores philosophically the experiences of laughter and irony, focusing on Japanese sources but with a cross-cultural outlook. I ask whether globally unfavorable attitudes towards the comic in the European canon might have left unexplored or misunderstood several insights offered by the bodily and spiritual dimension revealed by laughter, and examine them through Japanese sources. Following a short but poignant triad of examples in Kuki Shūzō’s work, the paper analyses three instances of Japanese laughter and irony: the orgiastic laughter of the gods luring Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Cave in Kojiki; the anthropomorphic animal scrolls of Chōjūgiga, and the “Tiger Cubs Crossing” stone garden in Ryōanji, Kyoto, concluding how each one of them offers an important insight on the bodily and conceptual phenomenological cluster of laughter and irony. I conclude with a further exploration of laughter in Zen, a religious tradition with a unique stress on the spiritual potential of humor, following Nishitani’s reading of Mumonkan and his connection to the experience of “emptiness”.

In this paper I will consider together the work of a premodern Japanese poet, the haikai master Matsuo Bashō, and that of a contemporary German phenomenologist, Hermann Schmitz, letting them dialogue on the act of breathing, its role in spatial consciousness, and the aesthetic constitution of landscapes. The great distance between these two figures (one European, the other Asian, one contemporary, one early-modern, one a poet, one a philosopher) creates hermeneutical difficulties but also a free conceptual space, including not static “perspectives” but living concepts involved in a dialectical breath: a moment of expansion towards commonality and universality, and one of contraction onto uniqueness of different languages, experiences, places.