The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

Epilogue

223 Epilogue Confucius said, “One who warms up the old in order to know the new can be a teacher” (Analects 2.11). The purpose of looking back is in order, through history, to discover oneself, grasp the present, and determine the future. It is the means of understanding one’s current situation and of looking ahead to one’s prospects for the future. All of these actions will bear the marks of one’s own historical prejudices—prejudices that result from the sedimentation of a certain cultural-psychological formation and noumenal consciousness. What is the noumenon? It is ultimate reality, the origin of everything. According to the Confucian-based Chinese tradition, the noumenon is not nature, for a universe without humanity is meaningless. Nor is the noumenon a deity, for to ask humans to prostrate themselves before a god would not fit with the notions of “partnering in the transformation and nurturing of all things” or “establishing the heart of heaven and earth.” It must follow, then, that the noumenon is humankind itself. In this book I have advocated a kind of anthropological ontology1 (or, a practical philosophy of subjectivity), according to which ultimate reality is to be found in humankind’s social-technological construction and culturalpsychological formation. In other words, ultimate reality is found in the two types of “humanization of nature”;2 the first, in which external nature is brought into the human realm, and the second, in which internal nature is molded into “human nature.” This human nature constitutes the psychological noumenon, an indispensable element of which is the naturalization of humans. An important property of the psychological noumenon is natural human emotion. Although based physiologically in biological instincts like sexual love, mother love, and communal love, emotion comes to constitute human nature by undergoing a concrete and historical process of development that takes place in the course of individual and corporate human life. Without this historical process—the process of living—human nature could never have emerged. 224 epilogue Evidently, this (apparently universal) sedimentation of emotion, or noumenal construction, comes about only as the individual takes the initiative to grasp his or her own “being.” It emerges only through the effort to live, the experience of struggle, the furnace of love. It arises in the midst of great homesickness, in the grief of separation, in the bleak loneliness of human existence, or in the intuitive response to nature, whether that response be one of delight or sorrow or some combination of the two. It follows, of course, that it also exists in works of art, in which the flavor of human life is condensed. One should take hold of these, experience and savor them. In so doing, one participates in the construction and sedimentation of the human psychological noumenon, as well as in its continual deconstruction and re-creation. For each person’s individual sensuous existence, each person’s “being,” is completely and utterly unique. The Doctrine of the Mean states that “There is no one who does not eat and drink, but it is rare to find someone who can distinguish the flavors.” Is it possible that, by “warming up” the old, Confucian-based tradition of Chinese art and aesthetics—from the ancient rites and music tradition through Confucian humanism, Zhuangzian freedom, Qu Yuan’s deep emotion, and Chan metaphysics—we can get a small taste of what it means to be human and gain some new knowledge as well, thereby pushing ourselves ahead yet further? This is my earnest hope. ...