What Kind of Artistic Beauty Can Philosophy Attain?

Abstract

In our era of Hegel’s “end of art” thesis, I shall dare to consider creating art of a sort out of philosophy, taking the risk of being called anachronistic. The clue lies in the efforts of philosophers who employed styles close to those of literature. For example, the writing styles of moralists such as Montaigne, Pascal and Alain will serve as reference. The issue is what precisely “writing style” means. While there are cases where even Nishida’s philosophy has been called “philosophical essayism or essayistic philosophy”and criticized for it, I will instead put this factor in a positive light. Therefore, the “artisticbeauty” to be focused on here will on here will mainly be the beauty inherent in the prose. I consider that the locus for the realization of such beauty is where the prose can be said to be alive, and where the words can be said to have life. This can only be when they become entities with bodies. This state cannot be achieved when the style is something that could merely be called logical. What is the issue then? I shall try to develop the issue manifestly as a story of “language and the body.”That is to say, I am engaging in Nishida’s clearly stated argument of “language as the body of thought.”In addition, I shall clarify how this argument is actively linked with the factors Nishida tried to develop in his later years as “creative monadology.”I shall demonstrate that “creative monadology”is what enables us to elegantly enter the so-called “hermeneutic cycle,”which is generated from the obvious situation that “although individual words constituting prose cannot be understood within the work made from the assemblage of prose without grasping the whole of what is known as the assemblage, the whole also consists of individual words.”In doing so, I shall state the possibility of gaining a hint as to the place of “active intuition,”using as a clue the fact that the active point of departure for Nishida in his commentary on art is the body’s being transcended in the direction of the body, and by examining what is called “thought,” which can be possessed by a flesh-and-blood human being, i.e., by an entity with a body. Finally, I shall suggest that, by expanding the discussion from prose to the world, it will become possible to thematize the situation where the world is formed by monads, and that, in fact, this situation of “formation”itself is the part that should be called the quintessence of “creative monadology.”