Kuki Shuzo Quotes

Kuki Shuzo was a Japanese philosopher who studied with Heinrich Rickert and Martin Heidegger in Germany before returning to teach at Kyoto Imperial University. His most original work, The Structure of Iki, offered a phenomenological analysis of the Edo aesthetic ideal of iki, a refined, resigned, and coquettish style, as the expression of a distinctly Japanese mode of being-in-the-world. The quotes below are attributed to Kuki Shuzo, organized by topic.

Kuki Shuzo on Mind

Attributed to Kuki Shuzo:

“Iki is a refinement that has come to know resignation.”
Attributed to Kuki Shuzo:

“A culture's mode of being is sedimented in its aesthetic ideals.”
Attributed to Kuki Shuzo:

“The structure of iki is the structure of a worldly attunement, not of an isolated feeling.”

Kuki Shuzo on Nature

Attributed to Kuki Shuzo:

“Contingency is the encounter of independent series; it is the fact that the world need not have been thus.”
Attributed to Kuki Shuzo:

“Necessity dreams of the contingent; without contingency, the necessary would be empty.”