The Studies Of Guan: As One Of Categories Of Aesthetic Activity In The Chinese Classical Aesthetics

Chinese classical aesthetic categories refer to some concepts which were the most important and fundamental in use for a long time in ancient aesthetic activities and art criticism. Many of them are active or processing categories, tend to focus on describing the dynamic procedure of creation and appreciation, thus reveals the aesthetic features of literary and artistic works. Guan makes use of human visual sense as an aesthetic activity. Visual aesthetic appreciation should have begun from observating objects all over the world perceptively. It would acquire styles, shapes or other extrinsic forms of objects through a variety of observing angles and observation methods. With integrating subjective awareness into objective forms, these appreciations make people to experience aesthetic pleasure. The aesthetic category Guan has developed for a long historical period. To a certain extent, the development of aesthetics is the extending of aesthetic categories. It is not forming and maturing only by means of ideological resources, but generating and integrating with multi-cultural factors. Among at this situation, in my paper, I will take modern aesthetic theoretical system as a reference and then devote to analyzing ancient philosophical thoughts and artistic achievements which were relevant to aesthetic activities. I will explore the intension of Guan in its development to verify the real essence of Chinese aesthetics-meaning of life and relentless pursuit of spiritual freedom, and also make a summing-up of the basic paradigm of Chinese aesthetic history-the process of aesthetic categories'generation, evolution and maturity.Aesthetic category Guan rooted in ancient Chinese philosophy, and shaped gradually with the expanding of the type of objects, the variety of subjects, and the specific ways of aesthetic activity. It was derived from Zhouyi, and then expressed extensively in Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's Taoist thoughts. Wei-Jin Metaphysics took Zhouyi's method of observing, Lao Tzu's pursuit of Tao, and Chuang Tzu's experience of nature into aesthetic practices in reality. Because of the combination of all above, Guan had obtained objective contents about the evaluation of personality and the appreciation of landscape. In the Six Dynasties, the influence of Buddhist inwardness ideology made visual aesthetic activities become more delicate in style and more spiritual in process. Guan had been involved in the field of literary and artistic creation during this period. Zen Buddhism in Tang Dynasty absorbed the Taoist thought of Xujing in its historical process of chinesization and complemented the mainstream of Confucian culture in society, after that, it participated in the construction and improvement of the spiritual realm of chinese. This improvement had gone with the integration of Confucian, Taoism and Buddhism. It influenced aesthetic activities on three aspects:1). brought aesthetic mind to full development; 2).found new ways of observation and reflection which called Kong, Jing; 3).created a large number of poetry talks and literary theories. With their appreciations of natural landscape, social phenomena and artistic works, people in Tang and Song Dynasties integrated their psychological feelings and experiences into the appearance and visualization of external objects, and then discovered the truth and value of life in the process of aesthetic practices.Through the analysis above on the basis of the development of philosophical thoughts, I will try to derive the following conclusion in my paper:the content of Guan concerns the basic relationship between sensory physiology and aesthetic psychology. It has experienced the process of intuitive thinking that begins from the separation of objects and subjects, and ends in the integration of them. In this process, both natural landscape and human affairs could become the objects of aesthetic activity and artistic creation. As for the change of observing ways, it has been driven and influenced by the evolution of philosophy. The true connotation of Guan implies both the objective reflections with visual sense and the subjective emotions from themselves, in which we could easily comprehend the culture of China and the spirit of Chinese.