To Convert or Revert: An Outsider’s View of Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics

Francis K. H. So (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan) [BIO]

Email: francs@mail.nsysu.edu.tw

 

ABSTRACT:

Ideas travel and they easily travel far and wide in an inconceivable manner. In the 1920’s two Chinese students went to Europe for further studies; consequently they brought back the modern understanding of western aesthetics to China. The first of these two Chinese students later initiated psychological aesthetics in China was called Zhu Guangqian (1897-1986) and he enjoyed high acclaim among the young intellectuals. He has studied in Edinburgh, London and Paris. The other person is named Zong Baihua (1897-1986), coincidentally having the same biographical dates. He went to Germany to study in Frankfurt and Berlin and upon his return to China he established his Chinese-based aesthetics in reference to Western aesthetics. To a large extent, the two forerunners helped the Chinese mind understand and critique the western aesthetic tradition. Zong Baihua, in particular, influences the contemporary foremost Chinese aesthetician Li Zehou. Though Li Zehou has never studied abroad, by the early 1990’s, he was treated as an influential scholar in his field and is widely recognized in China for his pragmatic subjectivity in discussing aesthetics philosophy. After the 1992, however, he chose to live in the US and has since been slackening down on his aesthetic views though basically he did not change much on his previous positions. One thing Li does which is very much unlike his predecessors is that he admits that contemporary Chinese aesthetics cannot do away with Marxist aesthetics. While engaging in introducing Kant to China just as his predecessors did, Li somehow did the first in-depth study of the German philosopher in Chinese. If Zhu Guangqian ushered the scientific method of approaching aesthetics, Zong Baihua borrowed analytical method to explicate the conventional Chinese contemplation of appreciating things beautiful. Both have recourse to classical Chinese literary texts for their illustrations. Li Zehou does similar thing in his development of contemporary study of aesthetics. This article attempts to chart out some of the obvious traces of European aesthetic notions that have traveled to the Eastern continent and are incorporated into Li’s aesthetics system wrapped up in the Marxist context of historical materialism which ironically is not something that Zong Baihua promotes.