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, thus giving birth to countless beautiful and noble thoughts and languages, gaining rich philosophical insights. After such vigorous effort, he finally achieves a breakthrough in one day, understanding the only that encompasses everything—the dedicated to beauty. —Plato At noon, the sun shines brightly, and the maenads, drunk, lie on the grasslands of the Alps. At this moment, the god of day approaches and touches him lightly with a laurel branch. Thus, the magic of the maenads and music seems to burst forth in all directions, igniting sparks of fantasy and poetry—this is lyric poetry, whose highest form is called tragedy and the dramatized dithyramb. Beauty is the fullness of vitality. —Nietzsche The style reaches its climax like a sword suddenly drawn from its sheath, like lightning that shatters everything it encounters, completely revealing the author's full strength in a single flash. The psychological effect has on people is not "persuasion" but "ecstasy." —Longinus I am a man, and when love moves me, I write down according to the command that comes from within me. —Dante Beauty is such an order and structure among the parts of an object; due to the inherent nature of humanity, customs, or mood, this order and structure are suited to bring joy and satisfaction to the soul—this is the characteristic of beauty, and the difference 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 the love of beauty is universal, then what about the love of "aesthetics"? Is it also universal? No one dares to say so. Although we might play with words and whimsically interpret "aesthetics" as "learning to be beautiful"—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 were in vogue, interpreting 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 to hope that aesthetics can truly become a bridge connecting reason and emotion, this world and the other. We hope that the general public, after reading such works, will not only be attracted by the more vivid and descriptive 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 pleased to recommend it to the readers and hereby expresses his joy in being the first to see it.