Lived Experience And Aesthetic: A Study Of Dilthey’s Aesthetic Thought

Dilthey was in the era of rapid development of natural sciences,which were so powerful that the humanities could not find their own basis and even lost themselves.Starting from the definition and exploration of spiritual science,Dilthey kept digging deeper into the methodological foundation behind spiritual science,using descriptive and analytical psychology and hermeneutics successively to lay the foundation for it and make the universal validity of spiritual science possible.In the process of laying the foundation of spiritual science,Dilthey made it the epistemological foundation through the prescription of experience,and at the same time,experience became the core concept of Dilthey’s aesthetics,and the connection between experience and works of art became one of the most important aspects of aesthetic theory,which also made art in Dilthey’s spiritual science field in a very special and lofty position.The examination of art-related issues,on the one hand,inherently participates in the construction of the theoretical system of spiritual science,and on the other hand,the investigation of art from the theory of spiritual science becomes a profound aesthetic issue.If Dilthey’s question in the field of spiritual science is what makes spiritual science possible,then Dilthey’s question in the field of art is what art can do for life.This is what will be accomplished in the first two chapters of this paper.The paradigm of aesthetics in Dilthey’s time had undergone a tremendous change;the peak of classical German aesthetics had just passed,leaving behind the brilliant achievements of rationalist aesthetics,while German psychologists were rebuilding the foundations of aesthetics from the bottom up through psychoanalysis,and the historicist approach had also entered Dilthey’s vision.Dilthey’s aim was to recover the natural and healthy relationship between the artist,the critic,the public,and aesthetic thinking by critiquing and assimilating these methods and by analyzing the creativity of the artist in order to find out how works of art are created and what they mean to human beings.The study of the artist’s imagination thus becomes Dilthey’s primary task.Dilthey not only discovered multiple laws of imagination,but also proposed criteria to distinguish the poet’s imagination from madness.This is the task to be accomplished in the third chapter of this paper.The artist creates works of art based on experience and imagination,and such works of art are essentially experiential expressions.Dilthey’s specification of works of art as experiential expressions gives a new basis to the nature of art and to the division of different types of art.Biography is important precisely because it is a historical depiction of the journey of a person’s life,a work of art that occupies a primary position among spiritual sciences,and biography is both artistic and scientific.Dilthey extends Kant’s formal category into a historical category of life,which can be used as an aesthetic category when applied to the field of aesthetics,and the principles and other patterns specified in the category of life can also be used as a reference for the aesthetic category.It is these issues that are primarily explored in Chapter four.If the creation of art requires a "creative genius",the understanding of art works also requires a "genius of understanding",and Dilthey proposed the concept of genius of understanding for the first time in the history of thought.For the first time in the history of thought,Dilthey introduced the concept of the genius of understanding,and clarified how the art of understanding,hermeneutics,was born.The discussion of this concept helps to clarify Dilthey’s long-held image as an "author-centrist.The inquiry into the place of art,the production of artworks,the nature of artworks,and the reception of artworks all point to the question of what art actually means to life.Dilthey argues that many types of worldviews,including art,religion,and philosophy,help one understand life,but art is the most important form of understanding life.Since experience is the foundation of intellectualism and existentialism,and art is the deepest expression of experience,and life and art are isomorphic,understanding art is essentially understanding life itself,and it can be said that art is the highest form of understanding life.