Uno iato incolmabile tra l’insieme di momenti concettuali e l’esperienza del significato

Under the current pandemic, while people are obliged to keep certain physical distance from each other by law in several countries, it is only recommended to keep a suitable distance in Japan. Under such circumstances, Japanese people are more nervous on how they can maintain the appropriate distance from each other. This leads to the question: how do we try to guess the validity of the distance? As the author was contemplating the concept of the appropriateness of the distance, a word came to her mind was the one by Shūzo Kuki, a Japanese philosopher. The word iki explains how to maintain a favorable relationship with other people that is full of affection but not annoyed by attachment. Iki is an aesthetic as well as an ethical concept. The purpose of this paper is to confront the ethical and speculative steps surrounding the phenomenon of iki, which Kuki studied in depth by phenomenological methods for its unique structure and function of Japanese traditional culture.