![]() The Japanese tradition, in contrast, embraces imperfection and its relationship to the numerous past identities and influences from which it emerged. He criticizes the West, which attempts to edit reality into its mental ideals. Tanizaki describes a polarity that underlies the difference between Eastern and Western aesthetics. While he describes the West as highly industrialized, motivated by a capitalist system that places value on commodities and other tangibles, Tanizaki argues that Japanese society places value often on the negation of these objects: their “shadows.” Forms and patterns of shadow, a kind of positive absence, are essential to Japanese figurations of beauty. Directed at a wide audience, it examines the intellectual foundations of the Japanese aesthetic tradition, contrasting them broadly with the foundations of Western thought. In Praise of Shadows is a 1933 book on Japanese aesthetics by Japanese writer Jun’Ichirō Tanizaki.
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