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Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’

Kenneth Leung Chi-ho Fellow
· 5 replies · 159 views
Beauty & artGreek & RomanIndianJapanese & KoreanAristotlePlatoSen no RikyūZeami#concept-of-art#false-friends#geido#kala#techne
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I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong and spend most of my time warning students about false friends. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art.

Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of any kind: medicine, shoemaking, navigation, poetry. When Plato criticises the poets, he's discussing a technē and what it does to the soul, in the same terms he uses for medicine.

Sanskrit has kalā, and traditional lists of sixty-four kalās mix music and painting with perfume-making, carpentry and teaching parrots to talk.

Chinese had the classical "six arts": rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy and mathematics.

Japanese has the "ways" (michi, dō): tea, flower arrangement, calligraphy, Noh. Here the emphasis falls on lifelong discipline, not on a class of objects.

The modern European idea of "the fine arts" as one category, painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry grouped together and set apart from crafts, appears to be largely an eighteenth-century construction. Paul Oskar Kristeller made the classic case for that in the early 1950s.

So here's my puzzle. If "art" as a unified category is that recent and that local, is the whole debate about defining art parochial? Or is there a real phenomenon underneath, which other cultures carved up differently?

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  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    The Greek case is even stronger than you say. "Is it art?" has no ancient Greek equivalent. The nearest question is "was it made with skill?", which has a completely different kind of answer. Aristotle's Poetics reads to modern eyes like aesthetics, but much of it is a craft manual: how to build a plot that works. My students find that disappointing at first and liberating later.

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  2. Govinda Prasad Mishra

    Fellow

    On kalā: yes, the lists are wonderfully mixed, and that is the point. But Sanskrit also has kāvya, poetry as a distinct and highly theorised art, with its own long tradition of criticism. So the tradition didn't lack a concept of aesthetic making. It just didn't put painting, music and poetry in one box called "fine art". It had several boxes, differently drawn.

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  3. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    The "ways" change the question entirely. Zeami wrote about Noh as a discipline transmitted from teacher to student over a lifetime, and the tea masters after Sen no Rikyū treated a simple bowl of tea as the expression of a whole way of being. In that frame, "is this object art?" sounds odd. The better question is "is this practice a way?" Many things become art because of how they are done, not what they are.

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  4. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    The same debate has run in African art history. For a long time, objects made for ritual or royal use were displayed in Europe as "art", and scholars argued over whether that category fit. Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language (2014) argues for interpreting Yoruba works through Yoruba concepts and verbal arts, oríkì included, rather than through a borrowed category. That's Kenneth's point from the other direction: there's a real phenomenon, but the concept you use to see it decides what you see.

  5. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    Fellow

    So the answer emerging is: the phenomenon is real (skilled making that rewards attention for its own sake), but every tradition drew the boundaries differently, and the modern European boundary is one more drawing, not the true one. That makes the definitional debate less parochial than I feared, provided we stop assuming its boxes are the only boxes.

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