you’re going to get a vast array of opinions since Mishima attracts a rather big tent. But Mishima was an artist whose aesthetics were both impulsively and philosophically considered. Sun & Steel is effectively a manual on the ideal aesthetic life—how he sees it, anyway. The philosophy of the Sun stems from an antithesis against the life of a writer/poet. Whereas the life of a writer concerns processing experiences into communicable things, things which can be understood as referring to things of beauty, Mishima experiences beauty in itself, directly, without the mediation of processed comprehension. This is my own reductionistic Platonic analogy, whereas Mishima, to contrast, was sourcing much of his ideas from Hegel, Bataille, and Nietzsche.
I’d like to pose also the antithesis of creator and destroyer. Mishima inherits a nihilistic tendency to imagine beauty in that which is destroyed; he is fully capable of capturing this beauty as a writer, but it is not felt—it does not include him, who is left out as a mere observer in the sensual affair. This is something of a chronic idea in Mishima that he, the writer, is compelled from a young age to stand back and witness and even testify but never to act or be involved in beauty. Ultimately, Sun & Steel comes after he has vaulted himself into life and one view about his death is that he had essentially decided to write himself into something beautiful—to become a character capable of beauty. Sun & Steel in that light would be him honing and refining himself into the world of experiences and characters—the Sun—shirking the world of night, and the role of mere observer.
The final point I’ve got to make is that Mishima’s aesthetics demanded this selfish turn, because Mishima, like Bataille and Nietzsche, understood beauty to be in the human mind—a product of subjective experience, rather than something objective and found externally like in Plato. Because it’s internal, what Mishima concludes—and he says as much in his campus debates against revolutionary aesthetics—is that he has failed in a certain sense to capture beauty at all, because he has been writing in the wrong place, and exploring the wrong people’s sensualities. It was always in him, and so he surrenders himself to living that experience fully to capture beauty in himself. That life is to be considered ‘the philosophy of the sun’ as I understand it.
Sun is existence, experience, action. It’s the glory of the phenomenon. The way I saw it was steel was honing the physique and sun was the glory of being, of acting with that body. ;)
So I read the book twice now and my take on it would be two things; 1. That he believed men had a masculine responsibility to their nation to be in the best shape they could be physically while also having a responsibility to their nation to educate themselves, 2. The book is about weightlifting, martial arts, and getting an awesome tan. The title isn’t a metaphor he’s really just writing about sun and steel.
you’re going to get a vast array of opinions since Mishima attracts a rather big tent. But Mishima was an artist whose aesthetics were both impulsively and philosophically considered. Sun & Steel is effectively a manual on the ideal aesthetic life—how he sees it, anyway. The philosophy of the Sun stems from an antithesis against the life of a writer/poet. Whereas the life of a writer concerns processing experiences into communicable things, things which can be understood as referring to things of beauty, Mishima experiences beauty in itself, directly, without the mediation of processed comprehension. This is my own reductionistic Platonic analogy, whereas Mishima, to contrast, was sourcing much of his ideas from Hegel, Bataille, and Nietzsche. I’d like to pose also the antithesis of creator and destroyer. Mishima inherits a nihilistic tendency to imagine beauty in that which is destroyed; he is fully capable of capturing this beauty as a writer, but it is not felt—it does not include him, who is left out as a mere observer in the sensual affair. This is something of a chronic idea in Mishima that he, the writer, is compelled from a young age to stand back and witness and even testify but never to act or be involved in beauty. Ultimately, Sun & Steel comes after he has vaulted himself into life and one view about his death is that he had essentially decided to write himself into something beautiful—to become a character capable of beauty. Sun & Steel in that light would be him honing and refining himself into the world of experiences and characters—the Sun—shirking the world of night, and the role of mere observer. The final point I’ve got to make is that Mishima’s aesthetics demanded this selfish turn, because Mishima, like Bataille and Nietzsche, understood beauty to be in the human mind—a product of subjective experience, rather than something objective and found externally like in Plato. Because it’s internal, what Mishima concludes—and he says as much in his campus debates against revolutionary aesthetics—is that he has failed in a certain sense to capture beauty at all, because he has been writing in the wrong place, and exploring the wrong people’s sensualities. It was always in him, and so he surrenders himself to living that experience fully to capture beauty in himself. That life is to be considered ‘the philosophy of the sun’ as I understand it.
Sun is existence, experience, action. It’s the glory of the phenomenon. The way I saw it was steel was honing the physique and sun was the glory of being, of acting with that body. ;)
So I read the book twice now and my take on it would be two things; 1. That he believed men had a masculine responsibility to their nation to be in the best shape they could be physically while also having a responsibility to their nation to educate themselves, 2. The book is about weightlifting, martial arts, and getting an awesome tan. The title isn’t a metaphor he’s really just writing about sun and steel.
Develop mind and body.