The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

The author has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he published works on Emmanuel Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. This book, a translation of his Huaxia meixue (1989), is considered among the author's most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China's foremost intellectuals, the book fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents the author's synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern period. The book touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the “art of living.” Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to the author this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi's artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. This book demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define “humanity.”