In traditional Japanese aesthetics the notion of the “cut” [kire, 切れ] is actualised in a variety of their arts as the expression of the Zen principle that seeing into one’s nature, their fundamental being, can only be realised after having “cut off the root of life”, that is severed it from the place and temporality it’s “at home” in. Within the art of ikebana (flower arrangement), the Kyoto school philosopher Keiji Nishitani discusses this as such:
The essential difference [between…