Il passaggio del Kami e la dimora di Dio. Considerazioni estetiche tra eternità e impermanenza a partire da Ryōsuke Ōhashi

This contribution is meant to compare Japanese artistic practice and Western Aesthetics. By means of the concept of ‘kire’, which in Ryosuke Ohashi’s thinking constitutes nature’s cutting action towards artistic figuration, this article claims to focus on the way in which the Japanese experience of the Beautiful strictly connects with a close relationship of dis/continuity (kire-tsuzuki) between immediate naturalness and art as technical craft. This paradoxical in/distinction, initially emerging in shintoistic architecture, has been placed against and compared with the dualistic metaphysics of Platonic origin, which can be found in Western Gothic architecture. The sanctuary and the cathedral have thus made possible an intercultural rethinking on the different, though still comparable, ways of perceiving the time, the space, the world of the senses and the sacred.