Welsch’s Study of the Two Kinds of "Aesthetics"

Welsch’s Undoing Aesthetics is a main theoretical source of the discussion about the present Chinese daily life aesthetics in western countires,but its aesthetic thinking on the two levels of daily life and cognition is often neglected by Chinese learners.Welsch took daily life aesthetics as a cutural necessity of the post-morden consuming society,taking desire,pleasure and ecnomic sratege as its motive.This is of superficial value.Therefore,arts in public space should not add more beauties to a context which had already had a high level of aesthetics,but express its rebellion and virtue.The so-called aesthetics of cognition refers to some basic characteristics generally aknowledged by aesthetics,such as,visual form,construction,manipulation and ambiguity,ect.It is ont only the patent of arts but the basic category of the realistic cognition.Welsch attributes this tradition back to Nietzsche and Kant,which shows the efforts to use the post-modern culture represented by aesthetics to undo the modernism represented by science.Though this is or almost is an aesthetic Utopia in the flourishing period of post-modernism,it is very meaningful in the distinction,analysis,and promotion of aesthetics from daily life level to cognition level as well as in the thinking of undoing aesthetics.