Rudolf Ahnheim's Early Aesthetices Research

Rudolf Arnheim(1904-2007),as a representative figure in the research field of "psychological aesthetics" and " aesthetic perception theory" in the 20 th century world aesthetic history,his aesthetic thought development and speech can be divided into three stages,namely,early stage,middle stage and late stage.The existing literature shows that the Chinese academic circle has a rich research on the aesthetic thoughts in its middle and late stages,which tends to be saturated,while its early aesthetic thoughts have not been fully studied.This leads to at least two phenomena and deficiencies in the study of Arnheim in the Chinese academic circle.First,the overall appearance of Arnheim's academic thought is obscured.As the Chinese academic circle adopted the cognitive path of " partially replacing the whole" to Arnheim's academic thought,the result was that it was impossible to understand and comprehend the overall appearance of Arnheim's aesthetic thought from the development history of academic thought.The study of Arnheim in the Chinese academic circle only involves the early work “Film as Art”.In fact,in addition to "Film as Art",Arnheim's early aesthetic works include " Radio: An Art of Sound" and " Film Essays and Criticim".However,these important academic documents not only do not have complete Chinese translations,but also the existing researches in the Chinese academic circle have not been paid enough attention to.That is to say,if we do not change the forgotten status of Arnheim's early aesthetic works and their ideological values,we will not really have a clear and complete understanding of the development and evolution of Arnheim's aesthetic thoughts.Secondly,the generalization and one-sided understanding of the rich connotation of Arnheim's aesthetics.The Chinese academic circles all regard Arnheim's aesthetic works in the middle and late period as the representative of his thoughts,and regard Arnheim's aesthetic thoughts as formal psychology aesthetics,which is the conclusion generally accepted by the academic circles.However,in the earlier period,Arnheim was not a complete Gestalt psychology esthetics thinker,but a double play of formalism esthetics and Gestalt psychology esthetics,which made its early period contain rich and diverse complicated esthetics thoughts.However,the Chinese academic circle failed to directly filter out the differences and diversities of Arnheim's early aesthetic thoughts under the condition of fully studying his early aesthetic works,resulting in the generalization or one-sided understanding of Arnheim's aesthetic thoughts.Therefore,this thesis attempts to change this situation and focus on Arnheim's early aesthetic thoughts.First of all,the paper combed the background and theoretical basis of Arnheim's early aesthetics to find the foundation and discourse resources of Arnheim's early aesthetics.Secondly,starting from the horizontal perspective,the thesis takes five aesthetic issues as the main logic of the thesis,that is,to conduct in-depth research on Arnheim's early aesthetic thoughts from the perspectives of early simplified aesthetic principles,early aesthetic perception theory,early author's aesthetic thoughts,early media aesthetic thoughts and early cognitive aesthetic thoughts respectively,so as to fully present the appearance of Arnheim's early aesthetic thoughts.Finally,starting from a vertical perspective,the paper takes Arnheim's academic life as a clue for thinking and research,and according to the differences of academic objects and academic development stages in Arnheim,it studies the similarities and differences of Arnheim's early,middle and late thoughts and the development process.Through this purpose,it achieves the academic goal of a thorough and systematic reflection on Arnheim's entire academic thoughts.To sum up,the thesis makes a longitudinal comparison of the development process and differences of Arnheim's whole aesthetic thought through the horizontal and vertical dual research perspectives,so as to realize a diachronic grasp of Arnheim's whole aesthetic thought,and to show the complete appearance of Arnheim's early aesthetics,and at the same time try to realize the contemporary transformation of his early aesthetics and activate the value and contemporary enlightenment of early aesthetics.