Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics

362 Pages·1995·5.67 MB·English

by  Zhu Liyuan

Contemporary Chinese
Aesthetics
Edited by
Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker
Contemporary Chinese
Aesthetics
Asian Thought and Culture
Charles Wei-hsun Fu
General Editor
Vol. 17
PETER LANG
New York • San Francisco • Bern • Baltimore
Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Wien • Paris
Contemporary Chinese
Aesthetics
Edited by
Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker
PETER LANG
New York San Francisco Bern Baltimore
o o o
Frankfurt am Main Berlin Wien Paris
o o o
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contemporary Chinese aesthetics I edited by Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker.
p. em. - (Asian thought and culture; vol. 17)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Aesthetics, Chinese. 2. Aesthetics. I. Chu, Li-yiian, 1945-
II. Blocker, H. Gene. III. Series.
BH221.C6C66 Ill' .85'0951-dc20 94-16416
ISBN 0-8204-2527-3
ISSN 0893-6870
Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Contemporary Chinese aesthetics I ed. by Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker.
- New York; Washington, D.C.IBaltimore; San Francisco; Bern; Frankfurt am
Main; Berlin; Vienna; Paris: Lang.
(Asian thought and culture; Vol. 17)
ISBN 0-8204-2527-3
NE: Zhu, Liyuan [Hrsg.]; GT
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of
the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
© 1995 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in the United States of America.
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
H. Gene Blocker
Comparing Chinese and Western Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Zhu Guangqian
The Dearth and Death of Tragedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Zhu Guangqian
Space-consciousness in Chinese Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Tsung Paihwa
The Sense of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Cai Yi
Art Appreciation as Recreation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Wang Zhaowen
Aesthetics of the "Musical Records" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Jiang Kongyang
Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Li Zehou
Ancient Chinese Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Liu Gangji
The Essence of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Liu Gangji
Harmony and Chinese Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Zhou Laixiang
Modern Morphology of Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Yie Lang
Modern Chinese Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Yie Lang
Aesthetic Image and Conception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Yie Lang
Art and Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Hu Jingzhi
Chinese Primitive Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Lin Tonghua
Hegel and the "Disintegration of Art" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Zhu Liyuan
The Function of Literary Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Zhu Liyuan
Chinese and Western Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Zhu Liyuan
Comparative Concepts of Natural Beauty.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Chen Wangheng
The Essence of Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
Chen Wangheng
The Essence of Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Chen Wei
Preface
Cross-cultural understanding is as important as it is difficult to achieve. This
is especially true for the mutual understanding of the peoples of China and the
Western world. Because of the relative isolation of China from the West,
roughly from 1950 until the end of the Cultural Revolution around 1978,
Chinese and Western peoples, and even intellectuals, are badly out of touch with
one another. This is especially true of the kind of thinking which infonns the
humanities. Unlike areas within the natural sciences, humanistic studies can
develop along very different lines in different parts of the world at different
times, and unless a positive effort is made to keep avenues of communication
open, we lose touch with even the main trends in the humanistic thought in
different parts of the world (and vice versa).
This is all the more troubling considering the important role humanistic
studies normally play in defining, shaping and articulating the more general
aspirations and conceptual orientation of different national and regional groups.
This is especially pertinent in light of recent developments in China. Part of the
general pattern of change taking place in China today are some very far-ranging
changes in the area of humanistic studies. This is in fact an extremely dynamic
period in Chinese thought concerning the problem of civilization and culture
change.
Beyond a small group of Asian specialists, who are literate in both Chinese
and English, such cross-cultural understanding is possible only through mutual
translation, not only of traditional classics, but, more important, of contemporary
works on both sides. Today one fmds masses of material being translated from
English into Chinese but relatively little from Chinese into English. This can
viii Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics
only make more difficult the important task of trying to understand what is
going on in China today. Despite the Mao years, the Cultural Revolution and
the current political situation in China, a great deal of extremely interesting and
important work has been carried out by Chinese intellectuals in recent studies
of culture and civilization, which remains virtually unknown in the United States
and the West.
And yet the task of translating important contemporary and recent works from
Chinese into English is not unduly formidable. The main problem is the
difficulty to fmd the means to produce good English translations and to secure
their publication in English-speaking countries, along with the equal difficulty
for interested Americans to get hold of the best manuscripts for translation.
While there are many Chinese scholars capable of English translation, many are
reluctant to undertake such work through fear of producing translations whose
English is not sufficiently polished. We, the editors of this volume, think we
have overcome these difficulties by adopting a joint Chinese-American "team"
approach. Zhu Liyuan, Professor of Chinese Literature at Fudan University,
Shanghai, has selected the manuscripts from well-known Chinese aestheticians
and asked that they be translated into English, in most cases by their young
student assistants. At that point the other member of the "team", Professor H.
Gene Blocker of the Philosophy Department at Ohio University, undertook to
hone and polish the translations still further and to fmd a suitable publisher. We
hope to continue this sort of joint translation project in the future. Zhu Liyuan
has already translated Prof. Blocker's 77le Aesthetics of Primitive Art into
Chinese (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1992), and other translation
projects from Chinese into English are being considered. We think the end
product speaks for itself.
In many ways this collection of contemporary writing by leading Chinese
aestheticians represents the depth and diversity within Chinese humanistic
studies today. Most of the contributors of this volume are well-known
aestheticians representing three generations (old, middle-aged, and young), as
well as different aesthetics schools, among whom Professors Zhu GuangQian,
Cai Yi, Wang Zhao Wen, Li ZeHou, Jiang KongYang, and Zong BaiHua are the
most distinguished. They represent the main aesthetics schools in China in the
past thirty years, including the "subjective school," the "objective school," the
"unification of subject and object school," the "practice school," and the
"aesthetic relationship school." We regret that some of the aestheticians of the
older generation, such as Zhu GuangQian, Zong BaiHua and Cai Yi are no
longer with us. We are grateful to them for their contribution to the
Preface ix
development of Chinese contemporary aesthetics and cultural communication
between American and Chinese peoples, and we would like to dedicate this
volume to their memory. China has a long and rich tradition of speculation in
aesthetics. And, along with efforts to modernize and "learn from the West,"
Chinese aestheticians have long been familiar with Western, including Marxist,
aesthetics. This has naturally raised questions as to how these different
aesthetics traditions might be usefully compared. Three approaches can be
found among the contributors to our volume, and these three approaches
represent the range of approaches in current Chinese humanistic studies more
generally. First is the attempt to reinterpret traditional Chinese aesthetics in
ways which make clear its continued relevance to today's world, both in China
and in the West. Second is a deep and informed interest in Western aesthetics.
And third is the attempt to compare and contrast and bring the two into
"conversation" with one another. American readers familiar with contemporary
Western aesthetics, whether of the analytic, phenomenological, or "postmodern"
variety, and even those familiar with traditional Chinese aesthetics, will be
surprised, we think, by the richness and depth of Marxist and neoldealist
Western aesthetics (e.g., Croce, Collingwood) traditions and, above all, by the
suggestive ways in which these Western traditions are related to the ancient
traditions of Chinese aesthetics. There is much here from which Western
aestheticians can learn and benefit. But more important, this volume marks the
beginning of a meaningful dialogue between colleagues on either side of the
Pacific.
We would like to thank all our contributors, especially for their patience, and,
above all, to Professor Charles Wei-Hsun Fu for his encouragement in seeing
this book into print. Finally, we wish to apologize for our inability to supply
the usual scholarly citations and bibliographic references, especially where the
Chinese texts have never been translated into English and references to
European texts have been taken from Chinese summaries.
Zhu Liyuan
Gene Blocker