Chinese Aesthetics: Revised Color Illustration Edition

Author: Li Zehou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-10-01
Features: Huaxia Aesthetics and The Journey of Beauty form the inner and outer volumes of the history of Chinese aesthetics, both being monographs by Professor Li Zehou on traditional Chinese aesthetics. This book discusses the non-Nietzschean characteristics of Huaxia culture, which emphasizes the integration 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 (Revised Color Edition) and forming a unified whole. Huaxia aesthetics refers to the traditional Chinese aesthetics centered around Confucian thought. Its long history originates from the non-Nietzschean tradition of rites and music, and its fundamental concepts, categories, and the issues it addresses, as well as the contradictions it contains, are already 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 Huaxia aesthetics. The author progressively 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 form of psychologism. This psychologism is not the object of any empirical science but a philosophical proposition with emotion as its foundation. This essence is neither God, nor morality, nor reason, but the human psychological nature that integrates emotion and reason. It is both "transcendent" and internal, both sensory and supersensory, serving as the metaphysics of aesthetics.