Spengler and Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows in the Orient and Occident
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- Опубликовано: 13 мар 2022
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In Praise of Shadows is a seminal essay by Tanizaki in which the author bemoans the loss of shadows in Japan through the encroachment of the electrified light coming from the Occident. But is the Occident really the land of absolute illumination? We turn to Spengler and the dark depths of the Faustian soul to carve out what may really be occurring with the advent of electric light.
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Copyright: Johannes Achill Niederhauser
The adoption of electric lighting was historically associated with increasing worker productivity by increasing artificially the length of the day. We forget that now, when our work hours are so restricted that we have time for the purely social use of lighting. All part of Spengler's decline and the move toward civilization.
Yes plus air conditioning in offices
The "setting sun" plays a role as a metaphorical image for Faust's soul in Goethe's Faust. Very crazy stuff and too strong to dismiss as coincidental
This was beautiful. Thank you.
I adore Tanizaki, but I have not heard him brought together with Spengler: this was a brilliant move. I’m going to send this to Michelle because now my brain feels like its on fire, and I hope we can discuss this over dinner. There’s a lot here.
Johannes you are on to something with neither...nor thinking. I am a Caucasian man living in Hawaii in a Soto Japanese Buddhist temple. My Bishop, who was born in Japan, grew up in Hawaii and went to college in New Mexico stresses constantly that our temple is not like Japan, neither like America. We are neither nor, yet we are just our selves as we are. This kind of feeling you have to experience for yourself. Sorry for getting too wordy, thanks for your patience and great presentation!
I'm reminded of one of Klages' aphorisms:
"The Romantics distinguished between the day-pole and the night-pole of the soul. This distinction pointed to the polar relationship between the dreaming and the waking states of consciousness. In the night-pole, instinct, yearning, clairvoyance, telepathy, sooth-saying, dream, poetry, art, and magic have their roots; in the day-pole, we locate thinking and willing. The night-pole bespeaks woman, left, night, moon, and ganglion; the day-pole bespeaks man, law, day, and the brain. But what the Romantics were unable to clarify is the central capacity of the night-pole: the gift of vision, out of which, as from an ocean, emerges a primal flux, an unending stream of influences and impressions."
It's easy for me to imagine (not to put the words of a pleb like me into the mouth of a great thinker) Klages saying that it is perfectly understandable that a Japanese would assume the machine spirit to be innate to the west because both the west and the spirit are foreign to the culture of the land of the rising sun, but that actually the spirit (geist) that comes from the Outside is in the west only as the result of an invasion from that grand Outside and that cleaves the soul (seele) of the west first, yes, but only because it is on the way to all humanity and we were it's first victims. Klages' essay ''Man and Earth" in particular demonstrates his horror and disgust.
As well as the allusion to light in the word 'Enlightenment', it is interesting to note that the word Meiji includes Japanese character for light 明. In addition, one of the catchphrases at the beginning of the Meiji period, when Japan was first confronted with Western-style modernity, was 文明開化 (bunmei kaika) which means something like 'civilisation and enlightenment'. It seems that the concept of light played an important part in Japan's characterisation of its own modern transformation. I found it very interesting to think that the centrality of the concept of light have been aberration, and not a true expression of Spengler's Faustian man. Thanks very much the thought-provoking presentation.
beautiful
Thank you
The word 幽玄 for dark and partly obscured which also means mysterious and profound. In Chinese ‘You Xuan’, In Japanese aesthetics (also 幽玄 ) pronounced ‘Yugen’. A parallel, perhaps, in early medieval Christianity, the concept of (contemplating the) ‘The cloud of unknowing’ comes close ?
Shocking presentation!
Thanks!
Thank you
I am surprised you didn’t mention Plato who might be the crucial figure in development of “towards-the-light” thinking in the West. Suhrawardi also talked about light, influenced by Plato and Neoplatonists.
Thank you!
That could be true, but the references to Plato can get overdone. I'm ignorant of Suhrawardi so thank you for that mention. Of course though, yes, it's good to ponder the West's obsession with light, and the visual field as the one purportedly providing the means of solving our problems.
What comes to mind is Bresson’s prison cycle. Recently I have picked up a book on Transcendental Style in Cinema and have been perplexed at the front door of Kant’s antinomies. What I mean is the following. Light and shade characteristically have been taken to be in relations of priority. Shade comes from brightness as a species from genus, minus the gradations of light to some diminishing extent. And not the other way round. The persuasive belief in the preponderance of the data for the existence of light overshadows the darkness. Beyond speaking in hyperbole, this investigation into the realms of interface underscores the presence of participation and not its absence.
This is pretty brilliant, great comments, and especially alluding to the work of Bresson. Of course it naturally brings to mind why still to this day there is a place for black&white or sepia, etc in cinema and the power it implies to the human mind. I still often ponder the photon and how little I understand it (or maybe better stated, how little "we" understand it), and the odd reality about how light exists I find similar to the old question of why anything exists. But there you have it, matter and energy (light), two sides of the same metaphysical coin.
Clever idea & contrast ... i'm struck right away by what Tanizaki says about music, because recently attending several wonderful live shows at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music one can FEEL the music vibrate in one's ears, head, body, and soul ... totally different from the synthetic, remote, and pasteurized sound that comes from an electronic medium, with the life withdrawn and quartered!!
I agree. Recording technology is not suited to the spirit of Western music either. Benjamin calls that quality that is lost through mechanical reproduction "aura". You see in the electronic works of Stockhausen for example an attempt to get back at the shadows (see Telemusik). To bring magic back into the medium. Pierre Schaeffer named the music that he developed in the recording studio "acousmatic". A term that comes from akousmatikoi, allegedly certain followers of Phythagoras who listened to their teacher through a veil. Here Schaeffer compares the veil with the phonograph recording which hides the original source of the sound, allowing it to become abstract musical material. This concept seems to have arisen from the desire to reconnect back to some kind of lost magic.
But society moved in the opposite direction. When sound is introduced to cinema, out goes the final vestiges of ambiguity. Likewise, it is only in digitally recorded music that we have true silence. Magnetic tape or phonograph still contained background noise that evoked a certain mystery. But more clarity is the direction in which this technology has moved. And this affects the way we listen and the way we make music too. Listen to 20 recordings of a Beethoven symphony and unless you're lucky to come across Jordi Saval they all sound more or less the same. And the more recent you look the more similar they sound. Pop music these days literally is the same tune and the same chord progression (if you can call it that) over and over and over again. It's as if the music is just a trigger that starts some sort of internal playback of a tape. Like imagining a phantasy when in bed with a partner. The relationship becomes pornographic and that of consumption.
Listening to the discussion about the radio and music makes me think about irezumi - How tebori resulted in a similar but actually very different ‘tattoo’ to what the electronic tattoo machines produce.
"Who has seen a shadow separated from the light?" -Muhammad Jalal-ud-Din Rumi.
This video was very good! :)
Nice try defending the west but, I think Tanizaki was right - 'The West' is obsessed with light and illumination because it is the descendant, the flower, of the Greek ideal of truth, idealism, and objectivity. Western culture is all about 'finding out' and evaporating mystery. Yes, there are classical European painters who valued shadow but that is a small group of people who understand the value of shadow, that it is required to model form and make their paintings realistic...but there again is the difference in the artwork of the two cultures...Japanese (or oriental) art is less concerned with realism than it is with style and atmosphere. The West is what it is and very useful...but as Tanizaki says, a shame it is embraced by his countrymen so hard that it destroys the shadows, the mystery, the elegance, and the atmosphere of Japan. Happily, there will always be that small percentage of people in the fortunate position of being intelligent, educated, and refined enough to choose atmosphere over convenience and keep shadows alive.
Don’t forget that Plato’s Cave myth ends not outside the cave, but inside it. One has to return into it and face: the shadows and death!
@@JohannesNiederhauser in theory yes, but how many western people do you know who actively do that? Again, the Japanese are better at that. In fact, another way to define 'The West' is the place that denies death and darkness. We're always so shocked at badness in the world...we aren't good at acknowledging it...despite Plato's advice.
The appearance that "western culture is about evaporating mystery" only comes from the fact that we are at the nadir of the west's civilization. Spengler writes that all cultures go through their phases of vital primitivism and cold intelligence. In addition, Spengler emphasizes - as was pointed out in this video - that contrary to the beliefs of many intellectuals, western and classical greek cultures are if anything opposites.
Note also that Spengler says that the japanese never had a culture of their own - they always operated as a satellite; before the west it was china. So a different way of putting it would be that what you are observing is the japanese culture catching up with the western one along with the chinese.
I don't agree. What about Buddhism? Isn't Buddhism also all about evaporating the mystery, and snuffing out the fire that's called life? Do we remember the Samurai for writing books on making magical flower potions? Too many simplifications being made here lol