Contemporary Philosophical Aesthetics in China: The Relation between Subject and Object (original) (raw)
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Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2020
Looking back at the reason why Western scholars in modern times demanded the birth of philosophical aesthetics, we can assess what role "Chinese aesthetics" should play in today's academic environment. As well known, by the time Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the new term "aesthetics" in his master's thesis (1735), the field of aesthetics, which had not been given a name yet, was already flourishing in European academia and life. 1 Reflecting the growing interest in artistic experience and sense perception of people at that time, Baumgarten endorsed human experience as an important source of knowledge. Ironically, however, he put this field in a secondary position by defining it as "the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition" and "the art of the analogue of reason." 2 Aesthetics arrived much later in China as part of the modern educational curriculum, but soon received an enthusiastic welcome. Contrary to the European intellectuals, who were reluctant to regard aesthetics as an essential discipline, Chinese intellectuals assumed aesthetics as a core academic framework for explaining Chinese intellectual history. Therefore, the so-called "culture fever (wenhua re 文化熱)" of the late 1980s China, which was a large-scale debate about the criticism and succession of Chinese tradition, can also be referred to "aesthetics fever (meixue re 美學熱)" by nature. On the one hand, this fever was auspicious in that the Chinese have noticed a modern discipline that takes emotion and experience seriously. On the other hand, the huge writings resulting from the fever were mainly consumed in China and hardly caused any chemistry with Western aesthetics. Three decades later, I believe that we are now able to soberly reevaluate the topics that have been discussed in the field of Chinese aesthetics thus far. The holistic nature of Chinese aesthetics, which
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Chinese Aesthetics in the Contemporary World
Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2020
Looking back at the reason why Western scholars in modern times demanded the birth of philosophical aesthetics, we can assess what role "Chinese aesthetics" should play in today's academic environment. As well known, by the time Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) coined the new term "aesthetics" in his master's thesis (1735), the field of aesthetics, which had not been given a name yet, was already flourishing in European academia and life. 1 Reflecting the growing interest in artistic experience and sense perception of people at that time, Baumgarten endorsed human experience as an important source of knowledge. Ironically, however, he put this field in a secondary position by defining it as "the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition" and "the art of the analogue of reason." 2 Aesthetics arrived much later in China as part of the modern educational curriculum, but soon received an enthusiastic welcome. Contrary to the European intellectuals, who were reluctant to regard aesthetics as an essential discipline, Chinese intellectuals assumed aesthetics as a core academic framework for explaining Chinese intellectual history. Therefore, the so-called "culture fever (wenhua re 文化熱)" of the late 1980s China, which was a large-scale debate about the criticism and succession of Chinese tradition, can also be referred to "aesthetics fever (meixue re 美學熱)" by nature. On the one hand, this fever was auspicious in that the Chinese have noticed a modern discipline that takes emotion and experience seriously. On the other hand, the huge writings resulting from the fever were mainly consumed in China and hardly caused any chemistry with Western aesthetics. Three decades later, I believe that we are now able to soberly reevaluate the topics that have been discussed in the field of Chinese aesthetics thus far. The holistic nature of Chinese aesthetics, which
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Proceeding from the inseparable relation between ethics and aesthetics in traditional (and often also modern) Chinese thought, this article aims to illuminate two important approaches to the aesthetic foundations of Chinese modernity. The relation between the individual and society, which is a core question of modern ethics, is reflected in most of the ethical theories of 20th century China. In this context, the article first presents Li Zehou’s theory of aesthetics and his definition of aesthetic experience. In this way, it aims to illuminate Li’s interpretation of modern art and society, and to posit it into a contrastive position to Xu Fuguan’s ethico-aesthetic theories, especially the ones regarding modernity and Western culture. The basic approaches applied by these two important modern Chinese scholars reveal great differences in attitude towards the spiritual and material development of humanity in the 20th century, which is especially interesting since they are both rooted i...