The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

Translator’s Introduction

ix Translator’s Introduction Contemporary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou (b. 1930) has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s, but became a particularly important figure on the cultural scene during the “culture fever” of the 1980s. A member of the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li left China for the United States after his works were banned in China following the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, as authorities feared their possible role in inspiring dissent against the leadership of the Communist Party. The present volume is a translation of Li’s Huaxia meixue (1989), a work he regards as one of his most important. Because it is beyond the realm of my expertise to attempt a comprehensive discussion of Li Zehou’s philosophical framework or of his significance to contemporary Chinese thought and society, I am glad to be able to refer the reader to the works listed below, under “Suggested Readings .” I will confine my discussion here to a few key terms in Li’s aesthetics, and to the broad contours of Li’s argument in this book. Quite apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China’s foremost thinkers, an English translation of Li Zehou’s The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition fills an important gap in the literature on Chinese aesthetics in English, as works that address Chinese aesthetic theory have for the most part treated either literature or art but rarely both. This work presents Li’s synthesis of the whole trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from the earliest times through the beginning of the modern period, incorporating pre-Confucian and Confucian ideas, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and the influence of Western thought beginning in the late imperial period. As one of China’s major aesthetic Marxists1 and China’s preeminent authority on Kant, Li is uniquely positioned to observe this trajectory and make it intelligible to contemporary readers, discussing the Chinese aesthetic tradition with reference to comparable trends in Western aesthetic thought. x Translator’s Introduction Chinese aesthetics goes beyond literature and art to encompass the “art of living.” Right government, the ideal human being, the path to spiritual transcendence—all these fall into the province of aesthetic thought. This was thecasefromearlyConfucianexplanationsofpoetryasthatwhichgivesexpression to the often political, always socially oriented intent; through Zhuangzi’s highly artistic depictions of the ideal person who can discern the natural way of things and live according to it; to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together in surprising ways to yield insight and enlightenment. Artistic and literary production in China has always been closely intertwined with political aspiration (through the orientation of the educational system toward qualification for civil service), social critique, and issues surrounding the lifestyle of the intellectual (such as the decision to withdraw from the political scene, or the designing of homes and gardens). For this reason, aesthetics has always played a key role in Chinese views of society and education, from the Confucian imperative to study the Book of Songs, to Western-influenced modernizers like Cai Yuanpei and other May Fourth intellectuals for whom literature and the arts were an indispensable ingredient of the intellectual and scientific enlightenment China required. Li Zehou is an inheritor of this tradition, and indeed consciously affirms the practical , humanistic rationality of the Confucian tradition, even as he sees in it part of the reason for China’s inability to modernize effectively. Li is also highly critical of Maoist voluntarism, seeing it as deeply rooted in Confucian and Daoist views of the power of a virtuous personality to effect good. Just as this view tended to inhibit modernization in China, it also explains, in Li’s view, Mao’s overly idealistic excesses (such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution). Li sees the fundamental importance of science, technology, and post-Enlightenment theories (including Marxism) in the West as an important corrective that China must more thoroughly comprehend and internalize as the basis of its further cultural, social, and material progress. In each chapter of The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition, Li demonstrates how the incorporation of a new idea or set of ideas took Chinese aesthetics further along the path of the accumulation or “sedimentation” (jidian) of what he calls the human “cultural-psychological formation” (wenhua xinli jiegou). The term “sedimentation” is one Li is credited with originating, and one that plays a crucial role in what he describes as his anthropological ontology.2 In the...