West Wind Breaks: Three Thousand Years of Western Beauty

Author: Cheng Bo
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-09-01
Features: He, with the vast ocean of beauty, gazes intently and feels an infinite joy in his heart, giving rise to countless beautiful and noble thoughts and languages, achieving rich philosophical insights. After this energetic immersion, he finally grasps the only all-encompassing— the that takes beauty as its object. — Plato
At noon, the sun shines brightly, and the maenads of Dionysus lie drunk on the grasslands of the Alps. At this moment, the god of the sun approaches and touches him lightly with a laurel branch. Thus, the magic of Dionysus and music seems to burst forth in all directions from the sleeping figure, igniting sparks of fantasy and poetry—this is lyric poetry, whose highest form is called tragedy and the dramatized Dionysian hymn. Beauty is the fullness of vitality. — Nietzsche
The sublime style reaches its climax like a sword suddenly drawn from its sheath, like lightning that shatters everything it encounters. In this flash, the author’s entire strength is fully revealed. The psychological effect of the sublime is not "persuasion" but "ecstasy." — Longinus
I am a man, and when love moves me, I write down according to the command that issues from my heart. — Dante
Beauty is such an order and structure among the parts of an object; due to the inherent nature of humanity, customs, or, this order and structure are suited to bring joy and satisfaction to the soul—this is the characteristic of beauty, and the distinction between beauty and ugliness lies in this. Therefore, pleasure and pain are not merely accompanying companions of beauty and ugliness but are also their true essence. — Hume
A poet is either nature itself or one who pursues nature—must be one of the two. The former makes him a simple poet, while the latter makes him a sentimental poet. — Schiller
If everyone has a love for beauty, then does everyone also have a love for "aesthetics"? No one dares to say so. Although we might play with words and whimsically interpret "aesthetics" as "learning beauty"—learning how to be beautiful oneself. In fact, when the craze for aesthetics became a social fashion in the 1980s, some young people bought Hegel’s magnificent three or four volumes of "Aesthetics" and exclaimed that they had joined the trend at that time, understanding aesthetics in just this way. The purpose of aesthetic research should not be to prove one’s refined taste or to indulge in self-admiration, but rather to hope that aesthetics can truly become a bridge connecting reason and emotion, this world and the other. We hope that ordinary readers, after reading such works, will not only be attracted by the more vivid and evocative language, nourished by the beauty of the prose, but also improve their thinking and cultivation, gaining a "from within to without" aesthetic refinement. In this sense, "beauty" and "learning" can be said to have achieved a practical fusion. The completion of this book marks a solid step taken on this path. The author is eager to recommend it to the readers and hereby expresses his joy in being the first to see it.