Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture E PDF
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture E PDF
Phenomenology of Japanese
Architecture:
En (edge, connection, destiny)
Michael Lazarin
Ryukoku University, Kyoto
1
Kamo no Chōmei 1212: First sentence.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 135
2
Tokudaiji 1205: 141. Full name Go-Tokudaiji Sadaijin Fujiwara no Sanesada (1139–
1191). “Sadaijin” is the highest ministerial rank; the Fujiwara clan were the preeminent masters
of both power and poetry in the Heian Period; “go” means “the later” to distinguish him from
his grandfather who was also known by the sobriquet “Tokudaji” (Grand Temple of Virtue).
136 Michael Lazarin
them from the branches just as they are achieving full bloom. I live near the
“Philosopher’s Path” in Kyoto, which follows a canal lined with cherry trees.
They draw large crowds as the flowers come into full bloom, but the largest
crowds come to see the petals falling into the canal, piling up eight centime-
ters or more, flowing toward a waterfall near one end of the path. And yet,
this catastrophe is not seen as misfortune; on the contrary, by being subsumed
into the flow of the river, the blossoms fulfill their destiny; in their passing,
they achieve their reality. Everyone knows that the demise of the blossoms is
a symbol of death, and everyone is smiling.
When the concept of mono no aware was applied to architecture, it came
to describe the “blown away roof ” views in illustrations of Genji Monoga-
tari, where one gets glimpses of intimate moments but never a comprehen-
sive view of the situation. The variety of architectural elements that misdirect
perceptions and blur boundaries also became signatures of mono-no-aware in
Japanese buildings, for example, carved transoms (ranma), blinds (sudare),
latticework (kōshi), paper sliding doors (fusuma and shōji) and folding screens
(byobu). Finally, mono-no-aware describes the instability of Japanese buildings
so easily knocked down by earthquakes or burned up in fires. One could ask:
“Why not make sturdier buildings?”, but the Japanese attitude maintains that
it is better to replace things than reinforce them.
During the Edo period, Tokyo was beset by forty-nine great fires and near-
ly constant lesser fires that consumed hundreds of temples and thousands
of houses. These fires were called “the flowers of Edo,” comparing them to
the falling cherry blossoms, and working class townhouses called nagaya were
jokingly referred to as yakiya (a pun meaning both burnt houses and a res-
taurant specializing in grilled meat). Though some efforts were made to build
firebreaks, not much could be done because the city was laid out in a spiral
pattern rather than a Cartesian grid.3 Real fire protection amounted to keep-
ing a supply of pre-cut lumber in another neighborhood so that one could get
one’s shop up and running within three days after a fire. One still finds such
bundles of lumber scattered around Kyoto.
This attitude of building for the moment rather than the long run can be
seen in some of the most famous contemporary Japanese architects. Unpro-
tected concrete begins to disintegrate and become shabby in about fifty years.
When Ando Tadao (b. 1941) was asked about how his museums would look
in the future, he answered that he did not care about such things. He writes in
Beyond Architecture, “Architecture is intimately involved with time. Standing
amid time’s continual flow, architecture simultaneously experiences the receding
past and the arriving future.”4 Isozaki Arata (b. 1931) argues that the principle
3
This spiral pattern was for military purposes because the grid system of Kyoto (based on
the Chinese capital Changan) had proven so vulnerable to invading armies.
4
Ando 1991: 100.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 137
5
Isozaki 2006: 83–85.
6
Kurokawa 1997: Ch. 10.
7
Isozaki 1979: “According to the Iwanami Dictionary of Ancient Terms, ‘the natural distance
between two or more things existing in a continuity’ or ‘the space delineated by posts and
screens (rooms)’ or ‘the natural pause or interval between two or more phenomena occurring
continuously’.”
8
The nine categories according to the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition catalog are: (1) Himo-
rogi, also called onbashira (site/chora: altar, gate, kingpost), (2) Hashi (joint: bridge, hallway,
engawa), (3) Yami (darkness/shadow/gloom: roof, eaves), (4) Suki (refined taste), (5) Utsuroi
(change, fading), (6) Utsushimi (mortal body, manifestation), (7) Sabi (rusticity, antique patina,
decay; loneliness, solitude; moment of grace, moment of extinction), (8) Susabi, modern pro-
nunciation “asobu” (game, amusement, idleness), and (9) Michiyuki (on the way, on the move).
138 Michael Lazarin
Anything that crossed, filled, or projected into the chasm of Ma (space be-
tween two edges) was designated hashi. The edges bridged might include, for
example, the secular world and heavenly world; the upper level and the lower
level; the plate and the mouth.9 Ascending a bridge to reach the gods on high,
marking boundaries by stretching ropes, embarking on the ship of the dead for
the paradise beyond the seas, all these are hashi—the bridging of Ma.10
In Japanese, a bridging structure that has “ma” is said to have “en,” which
means both “edge” and “connection.” It also means “destiny” and has connota-
tions of transcendence in the sense of leaping toward one’s destiny. Two archi-
tectural examples of bridging structures are the “engawa,” an area at the rear
or side of a building used to view the garden, and the “hashigakari” bridgeway
of the Noh theater by which the principal actor gets from the green room
to the stage. In both cases, the architectural construction is designed to give
one the experience of the span being stretched out so as to blur the discrete
boundaries into a sensation of continuity. Situated in this continuum, a mo-
ment of transcendence becomes possible not only in terms of consciousness
but also in terms of the living body. If the bridging structure can achieve the
harmonic tension of “ma,” then seated on an engawa, one should feel oneself
flying toward the horizon of the world; and seated in the audience of a Noh
theater, when the principal actor glides across the hashigakari to the stage, one
should feel oneself leaping onto the stage alongside him.
9
Hashi (bridge) is a homophone of hashi (chopsticks) but the Chinese characters are unrelated.
10
Isozaki 1979: 13.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 139
at the exterior edge of the engawa. The shōji screens can be opened to greater
or lesser extents to create apertures between the interior and exterior. They can
also be completely removed so that there is no obstacle between the interior
of the building and the garden. In former times, swallows could pass easily
into a house, and if they built a nest in the house, it was considered good luck.
The engawa is an “intermediary zone” at the extreme interior of a temple,
teahouse or residence. In a Japanese building, “in” (oku) does not mean the
center of the building; rather, “in” is “back” and “up,” away from society and
towards nature. Areas of a building are differentiated by horizontal planes
rather than vertical barriers. In my house, a typical Kyoto townhouse, there
are seven elevations from the street level to the most important tokonoma
display alcove in the room at the rear of the house. The sliding panels that
constitute the walls come and go depending on the seasons, and the number
and kind of occupants. The first floor of the house may have as few as two
rooms or as many as five rooms depending on how the partitions are arranged.
In residential architecture, the tokonoma is usually side-lit by the engawa, from
which stepping stones and gravel beds provide descending elevations to the
garden. Although the engawa is the most articulated and variable “intermedi-
ary zone” in a house, in fact, the whole house can be seen as a series of tran-
sitional spaces between the public world at the front and the natural world at
the rear.
One of the most desirable features of a Japanese garden is “borrowed scen-
ery” (shakkei), where it appears that one’s garden actually extends to a distant
mountain at the horizon. At Entsuji Temple (1629-50), one views a typical
sand, stone and moss garden from the engawa of the main hall. In this case,
the area just beyond the garden drops away precipitously so that the next
field of vision is treetops. Beyond this field is Hieizan, the highest and most
sacred mountain in the chain that runs along the eastern side of Kyoto. The
effect is one of disjunctive leaps from moss to treetops to mountaintop. This
garden is often singled out as one of the best examples of shakkei because of
the great distance that is incorporated into the line-of-sight and the dizzying
sense of acceleration experienced when the gaze passes from the foreground
to the background. Nevertheless, not many buildings are so fortunately situ-
ated, so various landscaping techniques are employed to establish the illusion
of distance and depth. To mention one example, trees are forcefully cropped
and shaped so that what is scarcely more than a line of shrubs appears to
be a majestic forest in the distance. The illusion is sustained by the careful
arrangement of the shōji screens and considered juxtapositions of other gar-
den elements so that the engawa functions like a primitive telescopic lens.
Consequently, the engawa is not only an “intermediary zone” from the inte-
rior of the house to the garden, but it is also intended to give a sensation of
body extensionality toward the horizon of earth and sky. Japanese architecture
uses “intermediary zones” in order to misdirect and thereby annul ordinary
140 Michael Lazarin
perception so that one is forced to make use of and further develop one’s pro-
prioceptive capacities, especially the sensation of “spanning” through intervals
of space and time: ma.
This projection toward the sky is not only a matter of aesthetics but also
spiritual transcendence: epoché. Many engawa, garden and shakkei arrange-
ments are explicitly designed to facilitate Buddhist meditation: experiences
of non-attachment. Thus the construction of architectural elements such as
engawa are not simply a matter of tackling the design problem of interfacing
interior and exterior spaces; it is much more a matter of providing sites con-
ducive to certain ways of dwelling in the world.
“Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (Bauen, Wohnen, Denken) was delivered
on August 5, 1951 at the Darmstadt Colloquium II when there were still
three million homeless and thirteen million displaced persons in Germany.
Heidegger took the opportunity to inform the audience of architects and
building engineers convened to deal with this problem that building actually
rests upon dwelling and that once this is grasped, they would see that building
really has very little to do with providing shelter in the usual sense of enclosing
a secure space.
We cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the essence
of the building of buildings might be so long as we fail to be mindful of the
fact that all building is in itself dwelling. We do not dwell because we have
built; rather, we build and have built insofar as we dwell, that is, because we
are dwellers.11
This was not a recent idea that he had cobbled together for the occasion.
As early as 1925 Heidegger had already argued in The History of the Concept
of Time (Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs) that the archaic German
word for “domus” or “house” is the same as the English word “inn” and that
this word comes from “innan” which means “to dwell.” At that time, he
maintained that dwelling primarily signified “being familiar with” rather than
the enclosure of space.12 Further, this reversal of the dependency of dwelling
on building, which would have been the usual framework on which the build-
ers hung their projects, could be expected from a philosopher who defined
the very essence of human existence as care of (Sorge) and concern for (besor-
gen) the Being of beings. The continuous care and maintenance of a building
by generations of dwellers certainly decides the destiny of a building more
than a couple of months of preparations in a design studio. For example, that
the Luxembourg Palace would eventually become the first public museum
in Paris, the headquarters of the German Luftwaffe in France and the Senate
chambers of the Fifth Republic certainly exceeded the intentions of Marie
11
GA 7: 150.
12
GA 20: §19.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 141
13
GA 7: 148–151.
14
GA 9: 185ff.
142 Michael Lazarin
die Unverborgenheit). We learn that the process of logos is the “way” that the
open happens, and this “way” is neither a process of connecting (Verknüpfen)
nor even freely juxtaposing (Verkoppeln) beings in the open, but rather “en-
during differences hauled out to their utmost extremity” (das Tragende [in die
äusßserste Weite] im Austrag).15 What makes it so difficult for modern thinking
to understand that “rational explanation” is a matter of stretching out the rela-
tions among things almost to the breaking point rather than locking them up
in an ever tighter framework of connections is the “Platonic Turn” in Western
thinking. This problem had also been worked out many years before the pe-
riod of “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.”
About the same time that he delivered his lectures on “The Essence of
Truth” in the winter semester of 1931/32, Heidegger was gathering his
thoughts on the Platonic idea of logos, later published as “Plato’s Doctrine
of Truth” (Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit 1931/32: 40). The text demolishes
the metaphysical understanding of logos as the “agreement” of the sensible
and supersensible and the expression of this agreement in the “correctness”
of assertions. Instead of the unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of things to a
knower, i.e., “letting-beings-be-in-openness,” truth becomes sorting (kritein)
the ways a knower knows things. Ultimately, in the present age, the truth of
things is determined by the judgments of a knower, whereupon Nietzsche
declares that “truth is a kind of error”(Wahrheit is die Art von Irrtum).16 Hei-
degger also says that when “unconcealment” becomes “correctness” in Plato,
the relationship between truth (aletheia), knowledge (nous) and beauty (kala)
gets cross-circuited such that knowledge becomes an apprehension of correct
assertions rather than beauty, the shining presence (ekphanestaton) of things.17
The sorry consequence of this is expressed in the fourth lecture of the first
semester of What is Called Thinking? where Heidegger imagines modern phi-
losophers standing before a tree in bloom puzzling about the reality of the
tree rather than taking in the splendor of its presence, and modern scientists
scanning the brains of the philosophers to discover if anything is happening in
there.18 If “agreement” and “correctness” are not the measure of truth granted
by openness, then what could decide this? The answer is pursued in a second
attempt at elucidating dwelling and building that takes place two months
after the Darmstadt Colloquium II.
On October 6, 1951, at Bühlerhöhe, Heidegger delivered a lecture titled
“…Poetically Man Dwells…” (…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch…). Hei-
degger says that “poetic” has little to do with what goes on at the desk of
a poet and even less with what passes as literary criticism. Instead, “poetic”
describes a fundamental way of Being-in-the-world which Heidegger defines
15
GA 7: 224–226.
16
GA 9: 231–233.
17
GA 9: 231–232.
18
GA 8: 45 ff.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 143
19
GA 7: 193.
20
GA 7: 199.
21
Vitruvius: II.1.2.
144 Michael Lazarin
22
According to Kluge 1891: Dichten, invent, imagine, fabricate, write, from MHG. ti[c]hten
meaning schaffen (make), erdenken (create), aussinnen (invent), anordnen (arrange).
23
According to Liddell-Scott: poiein (infinitive), poieô (present indicative): generally pro-
duce: A.: 1. make something material such as equipment or art (frequently used in Homer
for building), 2. create, bring into existence, 3. compose, write, 4. bring about, make it so,
put in a certain place or condition, prepare, 5 postulate, conclude, suppose it to be, 6. deem,
consider it to be lawful or right, 7. play the part of. B.: 1. do, act, 2. do something to another
or for another.
24
Cf. the active aspect of dwelling as “letting-lie-forth” (vorliegenlassen) above.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 145
25
Hölderlin 1963: 619.
26
Hölderlin 1963: 623.
146 Michael Lazarin
27
GA 7: 307–208.
28
Aquinas II-I Q113–114. Grace is the salvation of the embodied soul, and there are two
cases: (1) justification of the ungodly and (2) merits of the godly. The route to salvation differs
for each, but in general the goal is to achieve a state of “justice” with God by acts of free-will.
This is achieved by charity, both in itself and insofar as charity organizes all of the virtues to be
oriented toward “justice.”
29
Especially when it is exercised as “fraternal criticism.”
30
According to Kluge 1891: Gemüt, spirits, disposition, from MHG. gemüete, a collective
of Mut, the totality of thoughts and feelings. Mut, courage, mood, from MHG and OHG
muot, spirits, courage, mind. OSax. and AS. môd, courage, heart, zeal, inner self. Clearly a
much more vigorous word in the old Teutonic languages than the present day Gemütlichkeit: a
pleasant and friendly atmosphere.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 147
31
GA 8: 142 ff.
32
GA 8: 149.
33
GA 8: 146–47. This very loose translation of An-denken follows from Heidegger’s expla-
nation that An-denken is what transforms the essentialist question of “What is thinking?” into
the more important existentialist question “What calls for thinking?.” In Heidegger’s elucida-
tion of Hölderlin’s hymn “Remembrance” (Andenken), he argues that what is memorialized
is the moment when Hölderlin became a poet of “presence” rather than a poetizer of events.
34
GA 8: 108.
148 Michael Lazarin
dance and choral chant until the character once again departs from the stage.
The performance always ends with the character finding some measure of
tranquility but not expiation; thus, the character must forever return to the
site and live the horror again and again. The comings and goings of this char-
acter occur by crossing over a bridgeway structure called hashigakari.
If now all of us here think of the old bridge in Heidelberg, what this think-
ing gets at is no mere experience inside the people present here; the essence
of such thinking is much more a matter of thinking about the bridge in a way
that in itself thinking gets through the distance to that site. From here, we are
out there with the bridge rather than in some kind of representation within
our consciousness.35
The bridge spans the banks of the Neckar River. In thinking about it, a
second spanning occurs such that we are present at the bridge.
In a Japanese Noh theater, there is a long bridgeway (hashigakari) between
the green room (kagaminoma, lit. the “ma” of mirrors) and the stage proper
(butai), which is regarded as a sacred religious altar. The bridgeway gives onto
the upstage right corner of the stage at about a 120 degree angle. It spans about
eight meters and it can take the actor ten or fifteen minutes to reach the stage,
which is about 5.5 meters on each side. It is the means by which the actor gets
to the stage, but it also provides an interval by which the actor is projected
into the dramatic world of demons and ghosts. If the actor can make this leap,
then he will bear the “flower” (hana) of artistic excellence and the audience
will be absorbed into the performance as “fascination” (omoshiroki).36
But to achieve the highest level of aesthetic perfection, the actor must
possess “grace” (yūgen). This level of performance is called “fulfillment” (jōju,
lit. “coming to settle in a place”) and describes a situation where “the whole
audience expresses astonishment in a single gasp,” and as one mass conscious-
ness is projected onto the stage to meet the actor in the sacred space of the
performance.37
Komparu Kunio (1926–1983), a 22nd generation Noh actor, contrasts
hana and yūgen in this way:
35
GA 7: 159.
36
Zeami 1984c: 119.
37
Zeami 1984e: 137–40.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 149
If we contrast these two inseparable concepts we will have both hana: exterior
symbolic beauty, beauty seen, and yūgen: subconscious beauty, beauty felt and
responded to, and there can be seen a change of consciousness from beauty
that one is made to see to beauty that one is made to feel.38
Noh means “ability.” It is not merely the ability to dance and sing and play
music; it is the fundamental poetic power to “bring forth” worlds. Thus, yūgen
is not only an aesthetic quality; it also means spiritual transcendence in the
Zen Buddhist sense of living intensely in the present moment.
Yūgen is composed of two characters both of which mean “darkness and
mystery,” but the first character “yū” also has connotations of “serenity and
peace.” In China, Daoism used the word to describe a truth beyond rational
explanation. In Japan, the word was used to describe how waka and haiku lyric
poetry convey meaning through associations rather than explicit connections.
There is a preference for things only dimly seen through mist or obscured
by the fading light of autumn dusk. The sense of vagueness and attenuation
continued to be the primary meaning of the word in the wabi-sabi aesthetic
of the tea ceremony, especially the “refined rusticity” (kireisabi) practice as-
sociated with the tea-master Kobori Enshū (1579–1647).39 But when yūgen
was employed in discussions of dramatic performance a radical shift occurred.
The intellectual founder of the Kanze Noh school, Zeami Motokiyo
(1363–1443) originally used the word yūgen to describe the hana of maiden
roles, but as his thought matured, it came to mean the sudden insight of
Zen Buddhism: “In Silla, in the dead
of night, the sun shines brightly.”40
In the lyric tradition of the waka and
haiku poets the relation of light and
darkness, presence and absence, in-
finitude and finitude is dialectical,
but in the dramatic tradition of Noh,
the contrasts should be stark contra-
dictions existing side by side, a “har-
monic opposition.” The shining sun
does not nullify the darkness; only be-
cause there is light can we have shad-
ows. The shadow-world does not dim
the light; the dark depths accentuate
anything that glimmers. The perfor-
mance of an old man should have a
trace of former vigor; there should be
38
Komparu 2005: 14.
39
JAANUS.
40
Zeami 1984d: 120. “Silla” is an old name for Korea.
150 Michael Lazarin
41
Zeami 1984a: 17. The expression “flower blooming among the rocks” has become an
iconic definition of the essence of Noh.
42
The translation of jo-ha-kyū by prosodia, capriccio, presto is my own.
43
Komparu 2005: 24–25.
44
In the spatial arts, one is more apt to find an aesthetic triplet such as ten-chi-jin (sky-
earth-man) in the theoretical texts. All the schools of flower arrangement agree that sky is the
correlate of presto (kyū), but they differ as to whether earth or man is the capricious element.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 151
(kyū) and the third darts out at a capricious angle (ha). The same thing can
be seen in temple design with the heavy, brooding roof (yane, lit. room-root)
of the main hall (jo) beside the soaring elevation of the pagoda (kyū) which
come into view upon passing through the main gate (ha), which is capricious
in that there is rarely a wall.
In any artistic practice, for every poetic way of bringing-something-forth,
the ha moment should be a capricious interruption in which something that
already has been is allowed to burst forth into the full flower of its being.
Komparu describes this event of transcendence as a reversal of figure and
ground. The man as actor fades and the choral chant comes to the fore. Sud-
denly, a ghost or a demon is present.45 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says,
the chorus forms “a living wall which tragedy draws around itself in order to
separate itself cleanly from the real world and to protect its ideal space and its
poetical freedom for itself.” The ideal space of poetic freedom is neither real
nor un-real; rather, it is another kind of reality, that is, the religious reality of
“fictitious natural beings.”46
Hölderlin also understood the importance of a disruptive “ha” moment in
tragedy. In one of his notes on the translation of Sophocles, he writes,
In tragedy, […] the way in which ideas and feelings and reflections
emerge […] is more counterpoise than pure succession. For the tragic
transport is essentially empty and the most unbounded of all. Hence
the rhythmic succession of ideas wherein the transport manifests itself
demands a counter-rhythmic interruption, a pure word, that which in
metrics is called a caesura, in order to confront the speeding alternation
of ideas at its climax, so that not the alternation of the idea, but the
idea itself appears.47
45
Komparu 2005: 162.
46
Nietzsche 1968: 59.
47
Hölderlin 2009: 317–18.
48
Komparu 2005: 162
152 Michael Lazarin
49
Komparu 2005: 138–39.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 153
house that required the inhabitants to go outside to get from one room to the
other.
These different attitudes about durability and accommodation pale in
relation to how Japanese architects realize the experience of delight. When
Vitruvius gazed into the heavens, he saw order and did his best to replicate
these proportions in patterns which have defined Western architecture until
modern times.50 Japanese see order in the great cycle of the Buddhist year, the
eternal return, but they map it on the Earth with the maxim “make a circle,
then break the circle.” Breaking the circle is the moment of “ha” which gives
the building its aesthetic delight (hana), but it is also an occasion for tran-
scendence (yūgen). This sense that the perfection of the circle is only achieved
when the circle is momentarily broken is expressed in the well-known poem
of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694):
The old pond— Furu ike ya jo: stillness
frog jumping Kawazu tobikomu ha: otherness
water sound.51 mizu no oto kyū: enlightenment
In Japanese culture, the old pond is an image of stillness and silence; it is
the serenity of enlightenment, a way of Being which is always already avail-
able but somehow forgotten. The frog is as tiny as one can imagine; it is the
everyday self leaping into the true mind. The sound of the water is barely
audible; what exactly jumped cannot be said, but if one looks quickly, perhaps
the expanding circles of the event can still be seen on the surface of the pond.
The serenity of the pond is realized only when the peace is broken by a
capricious event, expressed in the poem by the startled exhalation: “ya.” But
what sound does the frog hear as it plunges into the depths of the pond?
Basho’s “thinking gets through the distance to that” diving frog. The poem also
implies that such moments should not be too precious. One cannot inten-
tionally sit by ponds waiting to be startled by leaping frogs. In fact, the poem
was composed during a poetry competition on the theme of frogs, and the
tiny diving frog managed to catch the attention of a dozen poets. Bashō seized
the moment and brought forth the prize-winning lines.
How can a Noh actor prepare the audience for the rupture of the great
circle, if everyone knows where and when it is supposed to happen? According
to Zeami, this can only happen when the actor learns to “keep the beginner’s
mind (shoshin),” by which he means that every performance must be as if it
were the first time, untried and untested. In order to bestow grace (yūgen), an
50
Vitruvius: I.2.1. Architecture consists in order (ordinatio), which the Greeks call taxis,
and arrangement (dispositio), which the Greeks called diathesin, and proportion (eurythmia),
symmetry (symmetria), elegance (decore) and management (distributio) which the Greeks called
oeconomia.
51
Matsuo Bashō 1686. This is a literal translation.
154 Michael Lazarin
accomplished actor must recover his original “purity of heart” lest he rely too
heavily on performance elements that have succeeded in the past.52 In 1928,
upon gaining his professorship at Freiburg, Heidegger took the time to write
to his old headmaster at the seminary in Constance, “Perhaps philosophy
shows most forcibly and persistently how much Man is a beginner. Philoso-
phizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner.”53
As mentioned above, Hölderlin calls the experience of “divinely empow-
ered” poetic composition, kindness (Freundlichkeit am Herzen), and Heidegger
claims that kindness is Hölderlin’s way of saying “grace.” We know the “har-
monic opposition” of the poetic composition has been achieved when mortals
live in joy, at peace and through mercy. But the emphasis in Hölderlin’s phrase
is on the heart, the “heartfelt concern” that maintains and preserves the open-
ness of the logos. Heidegger says that Hölderlin always uses the word “pure”
(die Reine) when he mentions the heart and so the “at heart” in the phrase
means original innocence: “Their [the poets] highest decisiveness (Entschie-
denheit), the poetic saying, appears as the most innocent (unschuldigste).”54 In
“As on a Holiday,” Hölderlin says that the divinely empowered poetic com-
position will not destroy the poets only if their “hearts are pure” and their
“hands are guiltless.” The bridge that crosses over from the spirit of revenge,
the antagonism to transience and evanescence, is “purity of heart.” This is not
primarily a matter of morality; instead, it concerns a way of thinking, the way
of the “beginner’s mind.” It is a way of thinking in which our perceptive and
proprioceptive powers have not yet been tamped down. It is a way of thinking
that is primarily characterized by imagination and action.
In What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger first translates the Greek word
“noein” with the phrase “paying attention” (In-die-Acht-nehmen), and says
that it is a kind of “active” perception, but he later emends the translation to
“taking-to-heart” (nous bedeutet… sich zu Herzen nimmt) and notes that the
site of nous in the Homeric period was the heart. He goes on to say this heart-
felt attention to matters is similar to what we mean when we say wild animals
are able to sniff out (Witterung) the situation.55
In fact, noein probably derives from “to sniff,” the most reliable sense, but
soon became associated with “sight,” designating a trustworthy or accurate
level of this less reliable sense. In the Homeric age, noein has two basic aspects.
First, it means the ability to instantly comprehend a situation and imagine the
implications, e.g. when Menelaus and Paris first eye each other on the battle-
field, they see their long-awaited destinies begin to unfold. This vision of the
future is both far-reaching and comprehensive. It is also variable: not in terms
52
Zeami 1984a: 58. A Noh actor begins training at the age of five. The maxim comes from
Zen Buddhism.
53
Safranski 2002: 1.
54
GA 4: 71–72.
55
GA 8: 206 and 210.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 155
of accuracy but rather in terms of values. One culture may view a redwood
forest with reverence, another may see it as affordable lawn furniture. Second,
about half the mentions of nous/noein in Homer involve emotional excite-
ment that translates thought directly into action, especially when it involves
the apprehension of something concrete, e.g. Menelaus, filled with bloodlust,
advances at the sight of Paris, while Paris, nauseated by fear, shrinks back.56 It
is this connection with emotional urgency and action that distinguishes noein
from similar words such as idein and gignôskein, which are more concerned
with observation and identification of a situation. For the less intelligent, a
grasp of the situation usually involves sifting through (kritein) contradictory
evidence. For this reason, noein became confused with calculation, for which
the emotional component was seen as more of a hindrance than an advantage.
Stripped of its imaginative and emotional components, noein was steadily
aligned with other rational functions such as deduction and demonstration.
This neutering of the potency of noein was continued in modern philosophy
so that intelligence came to mean a dispassionate scientific observation of
objective reality rather than a poetic vision of the measure.
Zeami says that performers need to develop riken no ken, literally the “see-
ing of detached perception.”
[…] an actor must come to have the ability to see himself as the specta-
tors do, grasp the logic of the fact that the eyes cannot see themselves,
and find the skill to grasp the whole—left and right, ahead and behind.
If an actor can achieve this, his peerless appearance will be as elegant
as that of a flower or a jewel and will serve as living proof of his under-
standing.57
This kind of seeing is necessary because the Noh actor is denied the use of
most of his other senses. Hearing is muffled by a heavy wig, and a Noh actor
should bend his body forward from the hips to the point of almost toppling
over. This is done to thrust the mask as far forward as possible. The mask is a
great impediment to normal seeing. It is not worn on the face but rather in
front of it so that the eye holes provide only pinhole views of the stage. The
separation of the eye holes is not wide enough for parallax vision, so it is dif-
ficult to know one’s exact relation to a stage property even if one sees it. If an
actor is playing a female role, then the mask will be positioned so high on the
face that the actor is only able to glimpse the world through the nose holes.
Furthermore, a Noh mask changes expression according to its inclination.
Most of the time, the mask must look straight ahead. If the actor loses his
position on the stage, he cannot look around to find the edge. Young actors
sometimes fly off the edge of the stage into the audience. In fact, part of the
56
Von Fritz 1945: 223–225.
57
Zeami 1984b: 81.
156 Michael Lazarin
training of young actors is to be suddenly thrown off the stage by their teach-
ers so as to overcome the fear of falling.
Every aspect of the Noh performance is structured so as to deny normal
perception and the normal lived experience of the body. Thus, when Zeami
speaks of “detached perception,” he does not mean some mystical superhu-
man power; instead, he means that the actor must enable his powers of pro-
prioception that have atrophied through over-reliance on seeing and hearing
in the usual sense. Detached perception is really about recovering our original
proprioceptive powers—powers which the wild animals still use to “sniff out”
the situation, but which we have lost living in the overly regulated and over-
structured spaces of the urban environment.
According to Japanese Noh actors, the object of these proprioceptive pow-
ers is the “ma” of the theater. They say that when they can sense this “ma,”
their “heartfelt mind” (kokoro) is at peace and they no longer fear falling off
the stage. They are able to move more freely and explore more improvisational
movements. They also say that it is this “ma” that allows them to feel the
response of the audience and whether or not the passion of their role is being
conveyed in an appropriate way. In general, the detached perception of “ma”
allows the actors to experience “en” with the architecture of the stage and the
emotional atmosphere of the audience, but not every theater possesses “ma.”
Since all the stages are nearly the same dimensions and constructed out of
the same materials, the difference between one and another must be subtle,
but the actors say it is definite and knowable (bestimmter und erkennbarer).
To achieve this certainty, the most important thing is to “keep the beginner’s
mind.”
If someone tries to grasp it by stealth, he holds
A dream in his hand, and he who uses force
To make himself its peer, it punishes.
Yet often it takes by surprise
A man whose mind it has hardly entered.58
Conclusion
58
Hölderlin 1994: 421.
Phenomenology of Japanese Architecture 157
Michael Lazarin
Faculty of Letters
Ryukoku University
Shichijyo, Omiya Shimogyo-ku
Kyoto 600-8268, Japan
[email protected]
Works cited
Images
The three images are scans of Meiji period (1868–1912) woodblock prints (51x18.5
cm.) by an unknown artist; the originals are owned by myself.