Chinese Aesthetics Revised Illustrated Edition (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 academic works by Professor Li Zehou on traditional Chinese aesthetics. This book discusses the non-Dionysian characteristics of Huaxia culture, which emphasizes the fusion of reason and desire, from a philosophical perspective, describing its emergence, development, and changes internally. It is now complemented by exquisite illustrations, working together with The Journey of Beauty as a unified whole. Huaxia aesthetics refers to the traditional Chinese aesthetics centered around Confucian thought. Its long history is rooted in the non-Dionysian tradition of rites and music. Its fundamental viewpoints, categories, the problems it addresses, and the contradictions it contains are all embedded in this traditional origin. Consequently, 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 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. He concludes 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 metaphysical basis is neither God, nor morality, nor reason, but the human psychological state where emotion and reason are intertwined. It is both "transcendent" and "immanent"; 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 corrections to the entire text. The selection and arrangement of illustrations in this edition focus on comparisons between the East and the West, highlighting the non-Dionysian characteristics of Huaxia 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 landscape of aesthetics.