A Study On Lin Yutang’s Idea About Performing Live Aesthetics

“Individual survival status” has always been the key point and the foothold in Lin Yutang’s cultural conception.He puts forward an aesthetic perspective to observe the life ontology and empirical “life world”,and to suit ourselves with a humorous philosophy of life,a consciousness of liberal life and a leisurely way of life,toward the realm of physical and mental harmony.This is also its special significance in the field of Chinese modern aesthetics.Lin’s aesthetics of life is not in an unchanging completed form,but in a construction process with unceasing enrichment,adjustment,expansion and perfection.This thesis takes the historical construction process of Lin’s life aesthetics as the center of the problem,and cuts in with the method of literary history,trying to return to historical scenes to reveal the dynamic generation process.The thesis is divided into four parts for discussion:In the introduction part,“spiritual belief” is taken as the observation point,to comb Lin’s long-standing exploration to belief.It points out that “humanistic God”,as his spiritual pillar,allows him to always hold on to his belief in life,to constantly inquire the “human spirituality problem” and to explore the “ideal of life”.Based on this,the method and horizon of cultural integration are used to transform and extract from the eastern and western cultures,aiming at building a human ideal life paradigm with universal values.The first chapter examines the changes that have taken place in Lin’s humorous philosophy of life from 1924 to 1970.Humor,which focused on “real life attitude”,was proposed in the 1920 s for the remould of national character.Enveloped in the national crisis in the 1930 s,Lin turned from social criticism to the maintenance of individual spiritual world.His humorous disposition continued to shrink inwards,and he resolved the early political criticism of humor with the qualities of tolerance,sympathy,and so on,which is of a sense of passive resistance.At the same time,he realized the transcendence of the current circumstances of life with “compassion” and “detachment”.In the context of introducing eastern culture to the west,Lin equipped himself with the vision of the eastern and western cultures integration and raised up the role of humor to the point of changing the foundation of human culture to understand.When gradually living to his old age,his humorous philosophy of life had increasingly showed his unremitting pursuit of “divineness”.The second chapter mainly elaborates Lin’s consciousness of liberal life.Looking into its completed form,Lin’s consciousness of liberal life first deals with the relationship between self and the external world.Second,it is about the matters on how to build an individual spiritual world and gain freedom of the mind.The third is to realize oneself and pursue the health,broadness and perfection of the individual spiritual world.In different historical contexts,Lin’s thoughts about “individual” encountered times problems that he had to face and to respond to.In the 1930 s,his “soul”(xingling)literary practice maintained the independence and liberty of the individuals through “self-expression”,to bypass the “revolutionary literature”.In the “The Importance of Living”,he spared no effort to explore the issues on “human nature” to resist the alienation and materialization of individuals against the western modern industrial civilization.In the late 1950 s,he sought the perfection of individuals’ spiritual world with the restoration of religion.After sorting out the above historical context,it reflects that Lin always puts the individual’s life freedom,independent personality,and the right to the pursue happiness at the top of his value conception,and endows it with the universal,supra-class significance.This is also the most basic and core part of Lin’s life aesthetics.The third chapter discusses the occurrence and evolution of the ideal leisure life.The leisurely way of life in the 1930 s was associated with Lin’s cultural ideal that sought to restore literary independence and reshape modern ideal character.His theoretical focus has always lain on how to construct a kind of leisurely culture atmosphere.In the context of cross culture,Lin’s leisure philosophy has a richer connotation.Contrapose the mental burden brought by modern industrial civilization,he used Chinese traditional lifestyle,that is full of romantic poetry,as a remedy to repair the anxious soul and fragmented individual life of western modern people.In the later period,he abstracted and integrated the quality factors of “life”,discussed in the ancient and modern cultures all over the world and enriched the connotation of his life aesthetics by transcending the broad horizon of time and space."Looking Beyond" is the concrete expression of his exploration of life aesthetic.