Pure-intuition and State-artistic Conception ——Comments on Wang Guo-wei's idea on Chinese aesthetics

Wang Guowei distinguishes aesthetics from epistemology and ethics. He is an outstanding forerunner who possesses a sense of discipline on aesthetics earlier than other thinkers in China at the turn of the modern times. Wang Guowei expounds his idea of stateartistic conception in Chinese aesthetic with the help of the theory of intuition of Schopenhauer and Indian Buddhism on which Schopenhauer himself relies. Meanwhile, he also explores other aesthetic elementary issues such as aesthetic nonutilitarianism, the relation between objects and subjects and spacetime consciousness. It is just because he comparatively applies German aesthetics to activate Chinese classical aesthetics and further investigates Chinese literature and art in view of purely empirical experience that he guides the modernization of Chinese aesthetics and makes its advantages more distinct. The Aesthetic circles have agreed unanimously that it is Wang Guowei who gives stateartistic conception in Chinese classical aesthetics to an unprecedented preciseness in the background of the contrast between Chinese and western cultures. From then on, stateartistic conception has become the most recapitulative, advanced, and mysterious category in Chinese classical aesthetics. So, Wang Guowei creditably deserves to be the torchbearer of Chinese aesthetics in modern times.The most important contribution Wang Guowei made to Chinese aesthetics is that he adopts state, a Buddhist concept, in leading the western concept of pureintuition to Chinese aesthetic context and studying Chinese classical poems and other artistic styles. As a result, he has brought forward stateartistic conception, which is regarded as the highest rank of category of Chinese classical aesthetics. In short, his outstanding ingenuity lies in the fact that he selects some Chinese traditional terms to depict state instead of directly applying the western concept of intuition.