Wind Breaks: Three Thousand Years of Western Beauty -- Daya Lecture Series

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 such vigorous effort, he finally achieves a breakthrough in one day, comprehending the only that encompasses everything—the of beauty. —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 day approaches and lightly touches him 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 dithyramb. Beauty is the fullness of vitality. —Nietzsche The style reaches its climax like a sword suddenly unsheathed, like lightning that shatters everything it encounters. In this flash, the author's entire strength is fully revealed. The psychological effect of 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, 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 the love of beauty is common to all, then what about the love of "aesthetics"? Is it also common to all? No one dares to say so. Although we can 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 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. It is hoped that ordinary readers, after reading such works, will not only be attracted by the more vivid and evocative language but also feel nourished by beautiful prose, while also improving 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.