The Study Of Chien Mus Aesthetic Thoughts About Literary Life

In this dissertation,the introduction briefly presents the academic works and identities about Chien Mu,mainly reviews the researching status of Chien’s thoughts at home and abroad and simply explains the purpose and method of thisthesis.The whole dissertation includes four sections:In first chapter,author inspects Chien’s literary and artistic theory which belongs to his perspective of harmony and integration.Chien’s concepts of artistic life was based on Chinese traditional cultural perspectives of harmony and integration,he considered that the introverted characteristic of Chinese culture determined Chinese art laying emphasis on self-cultivation and pursuing the harmony between temperament and morality.Then author further confirms that Chien’s concepts of harmony and integration serves as the main part of his thoughts about literary life.In second chapter,author mainly investigates the theoretical prototype of Chien’s concepts of aesthetic thoughts about literary life.Emotionalization and historicization were the key elements of aesthetic thoughts about literary life under his perception of harmony and integration.Through summarizing the development of Chinese civilization,he found that people’s life course should be coherence with their own art experience.From emotion to Confucianism and even from Confucianism to history,Chien Mu paid attention to combine life with art together under the tradition of Rites and Music therefore accomplished his ideal life.In third chapter,author reveals Chien’s potential academic theories of the thoughts of life artistry under his perspective of harmony and integration via studying his well-known literatures which related to literary life.LakeLeisure was a book of philosophical essays which was written by Chien Mu at Jiangnan University in Wuxi in early 1940.WanXueMangYan was a book about which Chien Mu had thought deeply on the whole level of Chinese culture.Because of ocular diseases he was blind during the last years of his life,even though this book was completed by the help of his wife.Both of these two books talked about the contemplations related to philosophy,human life,nature and history.By comparing the differences between Western culture and Chinese culture,ChienMu revealed that the concepts about nature,harmony and integration played an important role in Chinese culture.And what’s more,he also explained the reasons that why the Chinese people possessed the special cultural psychology and the comprehensive view of life and value pursuit.In fourth chapter,author intensively discusses the relationship between Chien’s aesthetic thoughts and Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism.The theory that man was an integral part of nature determined profound life experience and the consciousness of harmony between man and universe were part of Chinese culture.And the thoughts about integration and compassion were the new continuities of Harmony of Heaven and Man which were developed by neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming Dynasties.Because of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianists paying attention to daily life,pursuing the meaning and happiness of life and combining life’s poeticizing,all these aspects indicates that Confucianism accentes the tendency toward the form of everyday life.Or,to put it another way,artistic life is a new direction in the development of Confucianism,which could accomplish the further understanding and fulfillment of self-awareness and real life.In the meantime,it also respondsto the hope which is an ideal Confucian daily life driving by the development of Confucianism.In conclusion section,the author declares the specific textures and present significance of the aesthetic thoughts of literary life of Chien Mu by investigating the luxurious theories about daily life,especially by comparing with the theories of everyday life aesthetic which are warmly discussed in the recent years.