Beauty Aesthetics: Rediscovering Art and Life

Author: Liu Chengji
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-08-01
Features: German poet and aesthetician Schiller once said in Letters on Aesthetic Education, "The more the boundaries of science expand, the smaller the realm of poetry becomes." Indeed, in reality, where science goes, poetry often disappears as well. Today, who among the Chinese can still write poems about the moon in the style of Li Bai? It can be said that such a possibility has been completely lost. Because for a cold, desolate planet, we can no longer summon the sincerity and passion of Li Bai in gazing at the goddess in the moon.
In the early 18th century in the West, English poets once engaged in a heated debate over "Newton's rainbow" and "the poet's rainbow." Just as ancient Chinese poets loved to write poems about the moon, English poets throughout history also often took the rainbow as their subject, for in their eyes, the rainbow was a graceful and beautiful fairy named Lemnia. However, when the physicist Newton analyzed it using his prism, he discovered that the rainbow was merely a seven-colored light arc composed of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The so-called fairy was merely a figment of the poets' imagination. In a sense, Newton reduced the rainbow to a seven-colored light arc, which, on one hand, gave us a realistic rainbow, but on the other hand, completely ruined the poets' appetite for expression. This was just as the British poet Thomas Campbell said at the time: "When science tears away the magical veil from the face of creation, what was once a lovely fantasy is now bound by cold material laws." In short, science mocks poetry with its icy realism, mocking humanity's rich imagination and tender emotions, as well as our literary and aesthetic.
However, this overly realistic scientific world is undeniably cold and frightening. As a being that blends reason and emotion, humans not only need the truth of the world to confirm their self-worth but also require the gentle beauty of art and the realm of non-realistic fantasy to open their hearts and soothe their souls. It can be said that the more realistic a world becomes, the more supreme and valuable beautiful dreams become to humans, because under the pressure of reality, humans still need a space for free imagination to provide themselves with a place to breathe. Precisely in this sense, aesthetics offers people a new and enchanting world that stands in opposition to science in modern times.
Art creation is a highly individualized spiritual labor, and originality is the lifeblood of artistic works. Therefore, to correctly understand the unity of subject and object, we must not only oppose copying nature but also oppose mechanically copying the works of predecessors, while instead advocating the creative genius of artists. Yes, a stone is originally a stone, and even after thousands of years without the "blessing" of an artist, it will still present itself to people as a stone. In this context, only if it is fortunate enough to be noticed by a sculptor will it have the chance to change its fate as a stubborn stone, transforming into a human sculpture or another form and thus coming to life. Here, the stone itself is cold, but when Rodin stroked the Venus de Milo statue in the Louvre, he sensed a warmth of the human body in it. It can be said that this human-like vitality given to a stubborn stone by the sculptor is what truly enables the aesthetic object to transcend its materiality, transforming from a natural object into an artistic one. Therefore, in the creation of art, the artistic work generated by the unity of subject and object is no longer the beauty of reality itself but a "second nature," and the artist becomes a true "turning stone into gold."
Regarding the important role of the aesthetic subject in art creation, the poet Guo Moruo once said, "An artist should not be the grandson of nature, nor its son, but its grandfather." Although this statement is somewhat crude, it correctly reflects the relationship between the subject and object in artistic works.
Secondly, from the perspective of the self-construction of artistic works, an artistic work is the unity of aesthetic content and aesthetic form. Artistic beauty emphasizes form but does not detach from content, because artistic works must move people emotionally, and mere form cannot influence people's thoughts and feelings. In artistic appreciation, the aesthetic form first directly affects people's senses, but the reason why the form can move people is that it vividly and clearly expresses the content. Otherwise, the form would lose its meaning. For example, when appreciating an ancient Chinese regulated verse, we can feel the beauty of its form from the orderly arrangement of its lines, its transitions, its parallelism, its tones, its rhymes, and its rhythms. However, what ultimately stays with us is the poem's conveyance of the poet's inner emotions and artistic conception. Take Liu Zongyuan's "River Snow":
"Thousand mountains birds fly past,
Ten thousand paths show no man's track.
A lone boat, with a fishing hat,
Alone fishes in the cold river snow."
This poem is beautiful in its rhythm and inner structure, but what makes it be sung and recited through the ages is its expression of the poet's desolation and solitude after political failure. This content truly moves us and evokes sympathy. Otherwise, something with an extremely perfect form but a maudlin and self-pitying content would not leave a deep impression.
In modern art, although formalism and aestheticism have become highly valued trends among artists in both the East and the West, the enduring charm of an artistic work ultimately lies in the aesthetic shock and emotion it evokes. For example, the modern Chinese poet Wen Yiduo of the Crescent Moon Society once expressed his pursuit of poetic form beauty as "painting beauty, architectural beauty, and musical beauty." However, reading Wen Yiduo's "Dead Water," "Red Candle," and other poems, one can sense a patriotic fervor constantly flowing through them. This patriotic spirit in his poetry is precisely why he is more admirable and beloved than Xu Zhimo, another poet of the Crescent Moon Society.
Throughout the history of literary and artistic works in China and the world, a righteous and responsible artist has always placed content above form. However, this does not prove that artistic form is insignificant, especially for artistic styles that demand high attention to form. For example, as a visual art, painting requires a painter to have excellent compositional and modeling skills, as well as mastery of techniques and the ability to excel with color and line. Without these, it is hard to imagine how the beauty of painting could be expressed. Similarly, in poetic art, although the content and emotions of a poem are very important, if a poem is ultimately written as a lyrical prose or an essay rich in thought, it cannot be called poetry because it deviates from the form of poetry.
Therefore, the specificity of artistic form is a crucial condition for the creation of artistic beauty and a marker that distinguishes one art from another. During the Italian Renaissance, the poet Dante Alighieri pointed out in The Divine Comedy that poetry is untranslatable. The reason for this is that there are significant formal differences between one language and another in terms of musicality and rhythm, and poor translation could ruin the original beauty of the poem.
An aesthetic image deepens aesthetic impressions. It does not merely use subjective impressions to transform the aesthetic object but reshapes the object with inner emotions and spirit, making it truly a crystallization of the soul. Both in the East and the West, aestheticians have placed great importance on the study of aesthetic images. For example, Kant believed that an aesthetic image is a sensory representation of rational concepts, an image formed by the imagination; while the psychologist Carl Jung considered an aesthetic image to be a reenactment of archetypal images, an image hidden deep within the human psyche. In China, the aesthetician Ye Lang emphasized that "Chinese classical aesthetics is centered on aesthetic images." They reached a basic consensus that an aesthetic image is the organic fusion of emotion and scene, representation and deep-level concepts, a psychological state where subjective meaning and objective image are in balance.
Because aesthetic images are more involved with human spiritual life, they correspond to a more mature and independent artistic form. For example, in the early 20th century, after Impressionist art emerged in the West, Imagist poetry appeared, which no longer focused on depicting the fleeting appearance of objects but sought to use objects to achieve a comprehensive expression of the human mind and emotions, making the aesthetic object more spiritually encompassing and enduring in meaning. Take Ezra Pound's famous poem "In a Station of the Metro":
"The faces in the crowd,
Faces of people, faces of faces,
Luminous faces on wet black branches,
Many flowers on the black branches."
This is Pound's record of an aesthetic image. He once described the background of writing this poem in his memoirs: "Three years ago in Paris, I stepped out of the metro at the Gare d'Orsay. Suddenly, I saw a beautiful face, then another, then the face of a beautiful child, and then that of a beautiful woman." This series of beautiful faces left Pound a strong aesthetic impression. If he had recorded the women he saw in the light of the metro in poetic language, the result might have been an Impressionist poem. In fact, that was exactly what Pound initially did. However, as the aesthetic impression gradually sank into the depths of his soul, he felt that he should use his heart to encompass this impression, achieving a perfect combination of the momentary object and the mind.
Therefore, although this poem originated from Pound's aesthetic impression, it went far beyond that. He imagined many beautiful faces as beautiful flowers, with the metro and the night forming a black branch to string them together. Here, the images in the poem are no longer mere reproductions of objective images but the embodiment of the poet's emotions and aspirations.
If the fusion of subjective meaning and objective image is the essence of an aesthetic image, then this fusion requires a process, namely the process from conception to manifestation. In artistic creation, we see that Chinese painters often have a long period of artistic gestation before entering the creative process, known as "searching for strange peaks to sketch drafts." This "sketching" process involves first integrating natural images into the mind, transforming them into psychological images, and then conveying these mental images in the creative process. For example, when watching a calligrapher perform, they first lift the brush, concentrate, and calm their spirit, then grasp the dimensions of the Xuan paper, and make several strokes with the brush on the paper. This process is even longer than the actual writing process. It can be imagined that the calligrapher's concentration and other habitual behaviors before creation are aimed at achieving mental tranquility, eliminating all distractions, and entering the creative state, i.e., conception. While making strokes on the Xuan paper, this already suggests that the calligraphic image has taken shape in the mind. The actual writing process is merely the final task of materializing the mental image.
Therefore, the formation of an aesthetic image is not an easy or instant task but requires a long process of mental gestation.