| Li Yu lived in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty.As a great art master in everyday life,Li Yu is famous in Chinese history.His famous book,Xian Qing Ou Ji,summarizes his experiences of how to break through the limitations of the material conditions,beautifying life and pursuing happiness.It's the first practical everyday aesthetics writings addressed to the general public in Chinese history.All along there are only few,scattered and unsystematic studies on Xian Qing Ou Ji.In consideration of that,this article intends to analyze and summarize Li Yii's Xian-Qing aesthetics by explaining it theoretically.Taking Xian Qing Ou Ji as the main text,its characteristics and nature are grasped accurately and comprehensively.It also draws the conclusion that it shares the characteristics of citizen aesthetics during the transitional period from ancient to the modern in Chinese history.In the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty,the commodity economy had a huge impact on the traditional system of feudal society.Li Yu failed to pass the imperial examination.He is just a Shi-Min,a social class between the scholar and citizen.On the cultural property he belongs to the scholars,while on the economical status and life pattern he is part of the citizen.The dynasty changing ruined his dreams.The identity of social life broke and made him feel lost.The Xin Xue thought sparked his impulse to find himself.And there are also inner demands to relieve the pressure of daily life which bridge the physical and mental aspects in order to complete the self-identity construction.All these contribute as the psychological drive of Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics.Xian Qing Ou Ji is rich in content and loose in structure.Previous studies just analyze it from single or limited specific aspects such as the opera,house,garden,health etc.Taking Xian Qing Ou Ji as the core text,this essay systematically summarizes the aesthetic qualities of Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics,along with Li Yu's poems,essays,dramas and novels.It points out that Li Yii's Xian-Qing aesthetics has four concepts:novel,economical,practical and natural.Novel is at the elementary level while economical and practical stand higher.Natural is at the highest.Le,the aesthetic pursuit of Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics,which means physical and mental pleasure,contains all the aesthetic senses.These four concepts,three levels and one pursuit interweave and interact for the goal of making Li Yil's Xian-Qing aesthetics an organic and inherently rich entirety.In Li Yu's pursuit,Le is not simply the sensual pleasures but also inner peace and happiness.He pursues no pure sensuous pleasure but the happiness of life.His Xian Qing Ou Ji is not a simple hedonic book but a practical book on everyday aesthetics which leads the way to individual happiness.His thought is precious in the history of Chinese aesthetics thus needs further excavations.Li Yii's Xian-Qing aesthetics is the result of era and personal experience interaction.Li Yu's thought presents the local and historical inevitability in Chinese aesthetics development.In the late Ming dynasty,the citizen culture boomed when the Spiritual shackles were broken and scholars began to make a living.These facts,along with the social customs and cultural tradition of the Lanxi-Tsinghua region where Li Yu lived his whole juvenile years,influenced his choices of life style and path which were presented in his Xian-Qing aesthetics.Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics is based on the Confucianism which emphasizes statecraft,educating citizen and giving full scope to human subjectivity.It also mostly absorbed the thought of Xin Xue on respecting individual desires and denying the difference between the sage and the common.Although Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics gives high praise to nature,he enriches it with new contents and views nature in a secular way which shares no similarity with the Taoist.It is based on reality and utility and reflect the characteristics of secular culture that trying to keep balance between the individual desires and social norms.The scholars living in the same era also wrote many books on living aesthetics,in which forms the late Ming scholars' Xian-Shang aesthetics.But there are important differences between the Xian-Shang aesthetics and Li YU's Xian-Qing aesthetics.The late Ming scholars' Xian-Shang aesthetics is purely a self expression of their aesthetic interests.The objects they appreciate have nothing to do with everyday concerns.They have the greatest esteem for extraordinary refined.Their taste is elegant,pure and delicate.They emphasized the different statuses between themselves and common citizens.In contrast,Li Yu's Xian-Qing aesthetics is pragmatic,which bases on daily citizen life and shows a crude and mixed taste.It's an innovation.He wants to bring some elegance into the secular life only to find eventually there is more secularity and less elegance.Li Yii's Xian-Qing aesthetics is based on common people's daily life.It shows strong commerciality and entertainment of public art which is full of comedy,witty and vulgar.He also brings the cultural taste of scholars into people's daily life and reflects the mixed character in the transition stage from ancient to modern.Essentially speaking,it is practical that everyday aesthetics could enlighten and guide the citizen's life.When evaluating Li Yu and his Xian-Qing aesthetics,previous studies always took the standpoints of traditional ethics or politics.Limited by their era and perspective of knowledge,they develop some unfair conclusions by criticizing or even denying it in an oversimplified and crude way.Nowadays the market economy flourishes and everyday aesthetics develops rapidly.Living in an open and diverse era with wider vision,we should reconsider and scrutinize the historical value of Li Yu and his Xian-Qing aesthetics,which may also contain aesthetic ideas leading to future.We should not divorce Li Yu's life from his era and social class to demand perfection with fault-find.Li Yu and his Xian-Qing aesthetics have its historical limitation.It retreated from answering some certain questions of his society and life by narrowly confining happiness to family life,which made it vulgar even shallow in certain degree.But there is still some rationality under the special historical background.He tried to find a possible way out of the conflict between old ethics and new social change which leads to the happiness.In terms of the political situation and the severe social unrest,his answer may be superficial and unrealistic.But from the aesthetic point of view,it is profound,sagacious and enlightening.He takes his duty and makes his possible theoretical response to the changes of the times.His Xian-Qing aesthetics stresses on beautifying our everyday life with aesthetic experiences by making it shinning poetically.These aesthetic ideas and the practical characters adhered to them,which belongs not only to the past but also to nowadays and even future. |
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