Encuentro entre Oriente y Occidente en el arte y la filosofía: Nishida Kitarō, Fujioka Sakutarō y Hishida Shunsō

Abstract

This essay began with my encounter with the panting by Hishida Shunsō, who was a contemporary of Nishida Kitarō, and his friend from boyhood, the multitalented scholar-aesthete Fujioka Sakutarō. I was curious to find out if there was a common thread that ran through these creative minds, as they breathed in the Zeitgeist of the Meiji period. Nishida's uncle (in law), and later his father (in law), Tokuda Tagayasu, was a trained artist in western-style painting. Nishida developed his appreciation of the artistic creative process through his uncle. This familiarity eventually blossomed in his philosophy of art and production of things. The experiment of Goethe to develop himself as an artist by the age forty (see his Italian Journey) explains to me the aspect of "differentiation and development" of Nishida's notion of “pure experience.” Fujioka Sakutarō was quick to recognize the unusual talent of Hishida Shunsō, a relatively unknown artist then. Shunsō was an analytically minded painter, who experimented with all sorts of painting materials and techniques, while he was convinced that art (painting, in his case) was to transfer the artist's "mental image" onto the canvas. The invisible thread that ran through Nishida, Fujioka, and Shunsō—the Zeitgeist of the Meiji period—was this intellectual and spiritual spirit of openness, a forward-looking attitude that eagerly embraced the global world, while mindfully maintaining the tradition. Nishida, Fujioka, and Shunsō each pursued a new way of experiencing the world, by consciously cultivating "new sensitivity to ideas" (lumen mentis), while painters strove to capture the "quality of light" (lumen) and air.