咸鱼随笔

Kawabata Yasunari knew multiple foreign scholars after he became famous for receiving Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. He has always been insisting on rooting for the traditional aesthetic of Japan rather than the American style of mass culture. However, he shows acknowledgment of the opinion that foreigners knew the beauty of Japan better than the local people in the essay I cited above. Why? I think the reason is that the nature of beauty contained “a consciousness toward something”, one must have a specific target to be aware of, and thus one will discover to what extent this target is “beauty”.

So, the Japanese people wouldn’t think of how they live as beautiful, because that is something that doesn’t need to be aware of, it’s the daily life of reality. We can say from this that, beauty can’t be “experienced”. The reason is very clear. The moment when you try to say “I have a beautiful experience”, that “experience” already become a “target” for you to describe rather than the experience you felt with your body. And now, since the life of the Japanese is not the life of foreigners, this enables it to become a “target” for foreigners to think of it as beautiful. From this part, we can make the first claim that beauty comes from heterogeneity. The reason is, “a consciousness toward something” means one can be aware of the distance between the subject and the target. So, it means there is a “difference” in the target for it to create distance between it and your consciousness. Even if it’s your personal experience, the fact that “you receive the experience” you didn’t have before already means it is different from your previous experience, and of course that can make it a target.

When it comes to the traditional literature of Japan, Donald Keene said “Compared to Japanese people, it’s easier for foreigners to appreciate it”. Tagore said, “It’s easier for foreigners to be touched by the beauty of Japan”. I think their opinion fits coincidentally to a certain extent. Both of them experience the happiness of discovering the existence of beauty — 美の存在と発見 1969.

“I won’t go to Japan, because my perfect image of it would break down”, scholar and translator Arthur Waley said to Kawabata after Kawabata invited him to take a trip to Japan. For a person who loves Eastern culture this much, it’s just weird that he refuses the invitation from one of the most famous Japanese authors, right? This event is also included in the essay 美の存在と発見, so this is also related to the concept of beauty, even though Kawabata never said it. I already said you can’t “experience” beauty as a concept, now I will say a further claim, which is beauty exists from the “external perspective”. This didn’t mean personal experience can’t be beautiful. The meaning is, one has to “observe it from a distance” to see the complete image and thus give it a description. If one enters it or at the current process of doing it, one wouldn’t know the full image of it and thus be unable to give it a comment. The same goes for how we comment on the people in history, we must comment only after they passed away and even have to wait for a few more hundred years to know what to say about their achievements. Basically, beauty comes from observation.