The Sociology of Philosophies

ized aristocracy produces the culture of lifestyle aestheticism. The respective

“Renaissance” periods of Europe and Japan share another similarity besides

concentration on artistic creativity: they are also troughs in first-rate philo-

sophical creativity, as we can see by comparing the 1400s and 1500s in Figures

9.6 and 9.7 and the virtually coinciding period (1365–1600) in Figures 7.2 and

7.3. In both cases the philosophical intellectuals were taken up with imports

of “antiquarian” culture, ancient Greek and Latin and Neo-Confucianism,

respectively. Imports and revivals were filling up the attention space, substitut-

ing for the formation of new lines of intellectual fractionalization. It would

take a break with the entire Buddhist base and the rise of a new mode of

intellectual production in the Tokugawa educational marketplace to jolt a new

intellectual restructuring in the direction of abstract thought.

FIGURE 7.3. ZEN ARTISTS AND TEA MASTERS, 1400–1600

340 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths