Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking :
Crisis in Self-Recognition and Task for the Future

Organizer: INAGA Shigemi, Professor

　Oriental aesthetics and philosophical thinking were consciously established and propagated by Asians from around the 1930s. A deep identity crisis lay waiting beneath the awakening of Asian self-consciousness; and the encounter of the East with the West provoked a spiritual, as well as a material, conflict in the decades to follow. The nationalistic and self-assertive image of the ‘Orient’ has frequently been contested and criticized, yet neither the aesthetics nor the philosophy of the East has successfully proposed an alternative self-representation to replace the stereotypical term, ‘oriental,’ which came into use in the 1930s.
　The present project consists of three aspects. First, it aims to critically question the genesis and process of elaborating and diffusing so-called ‘oriental aesthetics and philosophical thinking’ in modern Asia. Secondly, it seeks to analyze Western involvement in this process.
　Judging from the circumstances, the rehabilitation of Eastern philosophy or aesthetics is no longer the issue here. The project therefore, proposes as its third feature to rethink the very possibility of a dialog between the East and the West. Communication can be established within (and only within) the strict limitation – the acceptable heterogeneity (of the items to be treated) within the sphere of admissible homogeneity. Unacceptable heterogeneities are literally ex-communicated from the arena of possible dialog according to the logic of the dialog itself.
　The limit of dialog, as revealed above, is one of the reasons (among many others which must also be taken into account) why the critical re-assessment of ‘Oriental’ cultural identities in aesthetics and philosophy is crucial.
　The questioning of the destiny of the ‘Orient’ through aesthetics and philosophy is not alien from the quest of its legacy. The theoretical perspective that the project is expected to open will be made available through the publication of scholarly papers. This publication will hopefully be accompanied by a compilation of critical anthologies, other important texts, and a biobibliography. An international symposium is also planned so as to extend this intellectual discussion beyond the restrictive limits of Japan’s own national academic border.

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