Chinese Aesthetics: Revised Illustrated Edition

Author: Li Zehou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-11-01
Features: The Aesthetics of China and The Journey of Beauty form the inner and outer volumes of the history of Chinese aesthetics, both being specialized works by Professor Li Zehou on traditional Chinese aesthetics. This book discusses the non-Dionysian characteristics of Chinese culture, which emphasizes the fusion of reason and desire, from a philosophical perspective, describing its emergence, development, and changes internally. It is now accompanied by exquisite illustrations, complementing The Journey of Beauty and forming a unified whole. Chinese aesthetics refers to the traditional Chinese aesthetics centered on Confucian thought. Its long history originates from the non-Dionysian tradition of rites and music. Its fundamental viewpoints, categories, the problems it seeks to address, and the contradictions it contains have long been embedded in this traditional root. Thus, how to handle the relationships between society and nature, emotion and form, art and politics, heaven and humanity, and how to understand the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity, become the central focus of Chinese aesthetics. The author gradually discusses the rites and music of ancient times, the humanism of Confucius and Mencius, the of Zhuangzi, the deep emotions of Qu Yuan, and the metaphysical pursuit of Zen, concluding that Chinese philosophy, aesthetics, literature and art, as well as ethics and politics, are all based on a psychologism. This psychologism is not the object of any empirical science but a philosophical proposition with emotion as its foundation. This metaphysical entity is neither God, nor morality, nor reason, but the human psychological state where emotion and reason are intertwined. It is both "transcendent" and internal; both sensory and supersensory, serving as the metaphysics of aesthetics. The revised illustrated edition published this time is based on Three Books on Aesthetics by the author, Li Zehou, with all the text newly corrected. The selection and arrangement of illustrations in this edition focus on the comparison between the East and the West, highlighting the non-Dionysian characteristics of Chinese aesthetics. Together with the revised illustrated editions of The Journey of Beauty and Four Lectures on Aesthetics, it forms a complete, unified, and richly diverse aesthetic landscape.