The Cultural Lineage of Chinese Aesthetics

Author: Wang Zhenfu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-08-01
Features: This book introduces the study topic of the historical context of Chinese aesthetics. Context, originally a Western structuralist linguistic philosophy and aesthetic category, can be translated as context or connotation. Meaning: the domain of contextual relevance. Therefore, the author believes that translating it as "context" aligns more closely with the original meaning of Context, and thus the concept of context is adopted to examine and interpret the cultural journey of Chinese aesthetics. The historical context of Chinese aesthetics is divided into seven stages.
1. Before the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, primitive aesthetic consciousness was nurtured in the ancient Chinese culture dominated by primitive shamanistic culture. The development of primitive shamanistic culture toward "history" rather than religion determined the cultural character and basic direction of Chinese aesthetics thereafter.
2. During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the construction of the school of the hundred schools of thought was the period of maturation of the aesthetic consciousness of the Chinese nation, reflecting the "disenchantment" and liberation of primitive shamanism toward humanism.
3. During the Qin and Han periods, the Chinese nation, with Confucian culture as its "main trunk," constructed a spiritual world and institutional world unified by classical studies.
4. During the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties periods.
5. During the Sui and Tang periods.
6. During the Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism periods, Chinese aesthetics had the contextual characteristics of the integration of the three schools of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.
7. The aesthetic trend of pragmatic realism that originated with Wang Fuzhi in the Qing Dynasty, with its emphasis on material, action, and practicality, marked the end of the "practical rationality" meaning of Chinese classical aesthetics in the Confucian tradition.
This book studies the historical context of Chinese aesthetics from the perspective of Chinese culture and philosophy, rather than the usual approach of "literary and artistic aesthetics." The basic argument of the book is to incorporate a series of important theoretical questions of Chinese aesthetics into the temporal and spatial framework of the historical context to "narrate" them.