Tuesday, September 2, 2008

bernard-leach quote "] “The Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pilgrim" - Google Search

Essay by “The Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pi SUZUKI Sadahiro (Ochanomizu University)

bernard-leach quote "] “The Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pilgrim" - Google Search

Quote from Leach:

"“The Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pi

In claiming that the meeting of East and West is the meeting of the two extremes of human evolution, the spiritual and the practical: that thehe Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pidecadence of the East is due to the exaggeration of spiritual life, of imagination and dreamy idealism unsupported by reason and exact practical knowledge of things; that the perversion of the West is due to the exaggeration of practical life, of reason and the exact knowledge of things, not governed by spirit, by intuition by instinct, by imagination, naturally I not only make an aesthetic claim, but one, which if it is accepted, is of widespread importance . It means that the East has more to offer us than we have to offer to the East. It means, to anyone who is not a sheer materialist, that the failure of the East is not so great as that of the West, and that consequently our traditional attitude of superiority towards the Yellow and the Brown races is indefensiblei.

This is from a lecture entitled “The Meeting of East and West in Pottery”, a paper he read at a meeting in Tokyo in 1915, soon after his second trip to China.

i Bernard Leach, “The Meeting of East and West in Pottery”. The Far East 29 May 1915: 247-50; 5 June 1915: 288-91; 12 Jun 1915: 312-5, . 312.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.

Togeika said...

Thanks Zoe! There are aspects of Mingei and Yanagi's and Leach's thought that are not discussed much in the USA. But I think they are important to the understanding of the philosophy.

Anonymous said...

This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday..