Chinese Aesthetics (Revised Illustration Edition)

Author: Li Zehou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-10-01
Features: Huaxia Aesthetics and The Journey of Beauty form the inner and outer chapters of the history of Chinese aesthetics, both being academic monographs by Professor Li Zehou on traditional Chinese aesthetics. This book discusses the non-Dionysian characteristics of Huaxia culture's emphasis on the fusion of reason and desire from a philosophical perspective, describing its origins, development, and changes internally. It is now accompanied by exquisite illustrations, complementing The Journey of Beauty (Revised Color Edition) and forming a cohesive whole. Huaxia aesthetics refers to the traditional Chinese aesthetics centered around Confucian thought. Its long-standing historical roots lie in the non-Dionysian Confucian and musical traditions, and its fundamental viewpoints, categories, and the issues it addresses are deeply embedded within this traditional foundation. Thus, how to handle the relationships between society and nature, emotions and forms, 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 explores the ancient rituals and music, Confucian and Mencian humanism, Zhuangzi's, Qu Yuan's profound emotions, and the metaphysical pursuits of Chan Buddhism, concluding that Chinese philosophy, aesthetics, literature and arts, as well as ethics and political thought, are all grounded in a kind of psychologism. This psychologism is not the object of any empirical science but a philosophical proposition based on the primacy of emotion. This essence is neither God, nor morality, nor reason, but the human psychological state where emotion and reason are integrated. It is both "transcendent" and internal, both sensible and supersensible—thereby becoming the metaphysics of aesthetics.