An intercultural approach to a world aesthetics

Grazia Marchianò

pp. 11-18

in: Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, Nicole Note (eds), Intercultural aesthetics, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

How can a truly honest intercultural approach to aesthetics contribute to convert its once insulary horizons into planetary ones?Since this query was raised at an intercontinental conference at the University of Bologna 7 years ago¹ and furthermore debated in scholarly gatherings in several countries,² I am glad to contribute to the volume edited by Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note with a handful of scattered reflections covering the last ten years of my intercourse with this matter.³In my introduction to East and West in Aesthetics, a collection of writings by various authors that I edited in 1997,4 I attempted to identify not just the roses that have fostered the enlarging of the aesthetic ecumene across the twentieth century, thanks to pioneering thinkers like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Nakamura Hajime, Eliot Deutsch, and Belgian orientalist Ulrich Libbrecht, but the thorns as well, that is to say the different forms of resistance put up by the international aesthetic community to acknowledging Asian aesthetics as an intrinsic part of a common Eurasian heritage since its very beginnings. This attitude clearly has historical grounds. Martin Heidegger's view that philosophy was the invention of the Greek mind has deep roots in European consciousness, and has been, to all effects, universally endorsed. To limit myself to one example, when Japan, at the beginning of the Meiji era (1868), took the historic decision to set under way the process of modernization after 150 years of isolation, it was obliged to adapt its traditional lexicon to Western concepts or even to coin new words. In the case of philosophy acknowledged in its original meaning of love of wisdom, the group of linguists guided by the statesman Nishi Amane, did not find a better solution than to adopt tetsugaku, a Japanese compound that is a literal translation of the Greek word philosophy.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Kimmerle Heinz

Deutsch Eliot

Note Nicole

Libbrecht Ulrich