Li Zehou's Research On Chinese Classical Aesthetics

Li Zehou is one of the most outstanding philosophers, thinkers, aesthetes on contemporary Chinese academic history. He has irreplaceable contributions in the construction of Chinese modern aesthetics and the development of our traditional culture.Li set himself at the Confucian school after studying other sources of theories, and make the Chinese traditional ideal, represented by the Confucian ideology, as the final home for his esthetics study. His books, "The Path of Beauty", "The Chinese Aesthetic", "Chinese ideological history" and "Ji Mao wu shuo" proved this point. This showed us that li Zehou's thoughts had changed obviously and become systematical.Since then, "Human naturalization" and "emotion ontology", as new key words, take the place of "Nature humanization" and "instrument noumenon ".In Li Zehou's theory, Chinese classical aesthetic thoughts are mixed in his subjective practical philosophy, and the above two parts are all related closely to the blueprint for the development and construction of Chinese traditional culture and Chinese classical aesthetics in modernizing age. In order to li Zehou's idea of Chinese classical aesthetic thoughts can be fully displayed, and make the theory integrity, this paper would start researched as the five follow asides:The first part introduces the multiple bases of Li Zehou's aesthetic thoughts. This chapter mainly discusses the foundation of Li's aesthetic thoughts from three aspects.First, the Marxist practical materialism constitutes the cornerstone of Li Zehou whole aesthetic system. Second, Li Zehou absorbed western ancient and modern aesthetics.Third, Li Zehou absorbed Chinese classical aesthetics. From these complex origins, we can obviously see the influences of multiple theory sources.The second part introduces the development process and important arguments of Li's Chinese classical aesthetic theories.This chapter describes the development process first. Li Zehou always attaches great importance to the national culture. In the early years of his academic career, he began to pay close attention to and participate in the research of Chinese classical aesthetics. Li Zehou's aesthetic thoughts, though confused, there is always a main line, namely the subjective practical philosophy.Based on the main line, Li Zehou has been intensive studied Chinese traditional aesthetics and brought up a complicated system of concepts such as musical culture, ontology of emotion, the mutual complementation between Confucianism and Taoism, the realm of heaven and earth etc. He believed that the character of Chinese traditional cultures is tied to the tradition of the witchcraft and history.This makes Chinese traditional culture formation feature of "one world", heavy emotion, harmony, aesthetic instead of religion. This becomes the core of his aesthetic thought in the recent 20 years.In the second section, the author explores the changes of Li's aesthetic study during the nearly two decades, and analyzes the reasons of changing.In the face of numerous theoretical resources, he tended to focus more on the traditional culture. There are three main reasons :(a) Committed to the development of Chinese traditional culture.(b) In the foreign language context, native culture is a distinct label.(c) The intrinsic demand of the development of his own theory. In the final, depending on analysis the development of Li Zehou's Chinese traditional aesthetic thoughts, this part is focused on three important theses of his Chinese classical aesthetics.(a) Compatible of Confucianism and Taoism is the backbone of Chinese classical aesthetics.(b) Music culture shows Chinese emotion ontology construction.(c) The realm of heaven and earth is the belief in home of Chinese classical aesthetics.The third part of this paper is the main characteristics of Li's Chinese aesthetic thoughts.The first section discusses four overall features of Li's Chinese aesthetic thoughts: combine history with theory; aesthetics ideology of life; Chinese discourse and worldwide wisdom.The second section introduced the characteristics of the representative works of Li's Chinese classical aesthetic study. These representative works are "History of Chinese Aesthetics", " The Path of Beauty", "The Chinese Aesthetic" and " Lectures on Aesthetics".The third section compares the differences between Li Zehou and other researchers in the following four aspects: the object and scope of Chinese classical aesthetic study; the method of the research in Chinese aesthetic history; the phase partitioning of Chinese aesthetic history; the characteristics of Chinese classical aesthetics ideology system.The fourth part of this paper I make synthesized comments on Li Zehou thoughts and functions, confirming his significant contribution to the Chinese Aesthetics Construction and criticize the imitations. Evaluations include four aspects.The first section discusses the meaning and value of Li's Chinese classical aesthetic study:(a) He opened the door to the research in aesthetic history in China.(b)He sets the paradigm for the Chinese aesthetics research.(c) Li is the first esthetician who has his unique system of thoughts with Chinese characteristics. So, Li Zehou's aesthetics has great influence on the construction of the Chinese aesthetics system and Chinese contemporary aesthetics.(d) Lead the spiritual liberation, ACTS as a spiritual leader.(e) Add new treasures to the world aesthetics research, and offer Chinese solution for the problem of modernizing people from around the world. The second section analyzes the shortcomings of Li's Chinese classical aesthetic research. There are three aspects of vulnerability: The defects of its own theory system; Problems existing in the Ontology of emotion theory; Good points and disadvantages of the theory "Western Body and Chinese Usage". The third section summarizes enlightenment we get from Li's research.The last part is the conclusion and appendix.The author reviews and assesses Li's aesthetic thought wholly, and points out the value and significance of the study of Li's aesthetics.Through the above analysis, showing the classical aesthetic thoughts in Li Zehou's ideological system, and finally to the understanding and thinking of classical aesthetic thought,to provide inspiration for further research showed China culture development and modernity.