Japanese Prints: Iki

By Benjamin Hoffman

‘Iki’ (粋 / いき) refers to an aesthetic style and a disposition, or quality of the personality. It is world-weary and sensual, precise in its expression yet broad in its applicability. It can be translated roughly as ‘chic,’ or maybe ‘cool,’ (it has been called also ‘‘urbane, plucky stylishness”) and it has in common with these terms the fact that it can be applied to a person’s way of living as well as to objects. A person who displays iki is constantly aware of impermanence, and yet permits herself the experience of love – or at least lust  – and aesthetic enjoyment; but never naively, or too eagerly, or without distance. She is aware of trends but tired of history. Iki involves a Buddhist longing for freedom from time and change. But iki is rooted in the everyday world, as a personal style and a quality of art and design. It is minimalistic but never ascetic. A simple black dress (or better yet gray) is iki. A habit is not; nor are sweatpants. Abstract expressionism can be iki: Barnett Newman, perhaps; de Kooning, no. As a ‘style’ in the broad sense, iki is a moral disposition, an aesthetic category, and a kind of religiosity, all at once. Among other Japanese aesthetic categories, like mono no aware, yugen, or wabi-sabi, iki is an ill-fit for schemas like that of the Kantian beautiful and the sublime, which draw a line around art and aesthetics, distinguishing these from morality and religion.

Once you have set eyes on the vague traces of warm and sincere tears behind a bewitching, lightly-worn smile, you will have been able to grasp the manifestation of iki for the first time. Perhaps the ‘resignation’ in iki is a mood produced by over-ripeness and decadence. … the Buddhist world view is one which sees transmigration and transience as the form of the determined, and puts nothingness and nirvana as the principle of the non-determined. It is a religious view of life which basically preaches resignation in the face of evil karma and teaches contemplation towards fate. There is no doubt that such a view emphasizes this moment of transformation which reveals itself in iki. (Clark 43)

This passage, from Kuki Shuzo’s (1888-1941) The Structure of Iki (1930), was written in light of Japan’s ongoing process of modernization, as an investigation of modernity and tradition. Kuki was born twenty years after the 1868 start of the Meiji Restoration: a period of intentional, systematic modernization, following an 1853 appearance of British warships. An awareness of the demand for modernization, as a matter of Japan’s self-preservation, was coupled with concern about what would be lost and what could be preserved. Kuki received a western education, and at 23 converted to Catholicism. He studied in Heidelberg and Paris, where he was tutored in French by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and introduced the latter to the works of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Kuki was, therefore, a major influence in the development of Sartre’s existentialism, as presented in Being and Nothingness.

(For an introduction to Sartre’s existentialism, see “Existentialism is a Humanism.” )

Through the lens of a European education and the then radical phenomenology of Heidegger and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Kuki turned to questions of Japanese tradition, and found in iki a deeply familiar Japanese notion that could not be adequately translated into a European language. This does not necessarily mean that it cannot be understood by non-Japanese persons. But the discourse of art and ethics and religion in Europe did not have a place for it, or an adequate correlate.

Kuki saw a possibility for translation by way of Heidegger’s phenomenology. Heidegger’s attempt to describe the world without a fundamental division between subjects and objects (persons having experiences and the world as experienced), to give an account of everyday life in its ordinariness, and to ask about ‘the question of the meaning of being,’ was an inspiration for Kuki in his discussion of iki, which similarly displays contact with both the ordinary and the transcendental, or the everyday and the religious.

The Structure of Iki is, therefore, a work of phenomenology, following Husserl’s principle “to the things themselves”—which means it is an attempt to describe rather than “explain” the world, where the latter would involve an account of causal mechanisms, like science. The Structure of Iki concerns ‘tradition’ as what structures the world as it is lived, but as expressed in Japanese urban centers and as persisting through modernization: new technology, bureaucratization, and political reform. It is as an aesthetic quality visible at once, and in this sense ‘universal’ (as Kant would say about the beautiful) or perhaps ‘general’; but it is at the same time a feature of a very specific Japanese context. By analogy and translation, and in Japanese art, we can see iki but perhaps only in a limited way. The question of whether we see it or of what can be translated is one of the major concerns of Kuki’s book.

Of course, meaning and language attached to so-called natural phenomena have a certain universality. That universality is, however, never absolute. For instance, if we compare the French ciel or bois to the English sky and wood and the German Himmel and Wald, the meanings of these words are not necessarily identical. This is a fact that anyone who has lived in one of these countries would readily comprehend. … If words describing natural phenomena already differ in this way among languages, we cannot hope to find precise counterparts in one language for words describing specifc social phenomena in other languages. (Nara 14-15)

Iki remains Japanese, a feature of a particular world, and especially the Edo (modern Tokyo) ‘floating world’ of the geisha, art, theater, courtesans, and prostitution, which involved a specific and severe sort of impermanence.

We are given the suggested translation of Iki as ‘chic’ which is described further as ‘brave composure.’ Iki has erotic significance and is used in reference to matters of sex and romantic relations. But it is a mode of the romantic that recognizes impermanence, change, as absolute. Therefore it is romantic love in which one knows the other cannot be grasped forever, or for long. Iki refers also to a way of being in the world: a style of dress and action, which is ‘coquettish’ i.e. which is open to the erotic without the expectation of possession, or even fulfillment. Iki as a disposition of the lover demands something of the dignity or the composure of the monk.

Among the major streams of Japanese culture – Zen, the samurai, and the geisha – there is the commonality of this entanglement of religion and worldliness. Zen masters practiced the arts, were often fond of drinking, and married. Samurai practiced meditation. As Kuki shows, the geisha likewise represent this religiosity-within-worldliness, and in a way that was also a major spring for Japanese cultural creativity, in connection with art, literature, clothing, and the formation of an urban culture.

Kuki’s book asks to what extent aesthetic values can be translated.  Can iki be grasped outside of the sea of aesthetic, traditional, and intellectual significance, the styles and meanings – religion, class, gender, history – of the Japanese context? The question of the meaning of iki raises too these questions of whether a style can be understood outside of its world, or of what is lost and what preserved, or gained, in the translating.

Kuki writes: Before questioning the essentia of iki, we should instead question first the existentia of iki. In short, a study of iki cannot be ‘‘eidetic’’; it should be ‘‘hermeneutic.’’ (15)

Here Kuki is using the terminology of phenomenology. “Eidetic” refers to “bracketing” of ordinary assumptions—the attempt to describe how something ‘appears,’ isolated from what we normally imagine or think it to be. Imagine looking at the sky as though it were paint on a canvas, or color on a screen—forgetting that it is a sky and attempting to describe the experience of color. To say that iki must be approached through a hermeneutic means that it cannot be taken out of its context, outside of the interpretations of a given world. This is to say that it has meaning within a world of meanings.

To say that “existence” (existentia) must be considered before essence (essentia) is to say that iki has to be approached in its reality, through its examples, or that it cannot be defined abstractly. (See Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism,” linked above.) Iki cannot be ‘bracketed.’ As a ‘style’ it is seen in its examples: this person’s dress, or way of walking; brushstrokes in a painting. Descriptions of iki are not ‘definitions.’ Consider again the word ‘cool,’ as used to describe a person, a movie, or music. To explain its meaning we would have to give many examples, and eventually an idea of it or a sense for it emerges.

Research and Discussion Questions

1. What is a ‘style’? How do styles emerge, historically? What forces shape the development of style, and what kinds of freedom might be involved? In what ways is style a ‘constraint’ and in what ways might it be the opposite?

2. What challenges are involved in translating aesthetic qualities or styles from one language and tradition to another? What forces (historical, social, material, economic) shape taste, and to what extent is an aesthetic quality like iki intelligible outside of Japan? How can translation be approached?

3. In what ways iki display a religious vision of the world? Is it possible to reconcile the asceticism of Buddhism with the aestheticism of the “floating world” of the geisha, art, and urbanity?

4. How does iki compare to the ideal of the flaneur or the dandy? Consider Baudelaire.

5. What might iki reveal about values regarding gender? In what ways might it involve passivity and on the other hand freedom?

6. What might Kuki’s philosophical interest in iki show about his sense of Japan’s relationship to Europe? Why during the process of modernization might a specifically Japanese style have been of special interest?

7. How might iki as a matter of art and a quality of style reveal a religious worldview? What is that worldview, and how might it differ from for instance the Christianity of Western Europe?