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Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics PDF

362 Pages·1995·5.67 MB·English
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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

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This book is a collection of translations of recent work by contemporary Chinese aestheticians. Because of the relative isolation of China until recently, little is known of this rich and ongoing aesthetics tradition in China. Although some of the articles are concerned with the traditional ancient
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