What are the schools of aesthetics and their representatives?

1, the first kind, subjectivism, represented by Lv Ying and Gao Ertai.

They believe that the beauty of objective things depends entirely on the subjective feelings of the subject. What people can feel exists, and what they can't feel does not exist. So this school judges beauty by subjective feelings. As far as its advantages are concerned, emphasizing the dominant position in aesthetic activities, as far as its disadvantages are concerned, because of overemphasis on personal feelings, aesthetics has lost its unified standard and moved towards relativism.

2. Second, objectivism. Represented by Cai Yi

They believe that beauty is objective rather than subjective. First of all, beauty lies in the objective things themselves and has nothing to do with people's subjective wishes and emotions. Secondly, the beauty of objective things lies in their typicality. The so-called typicality means that the universality of species can be reflected in individuality. And aesthetic feeling is people's response to objective beauty.

Thirdly, beauty is eternal, not changed by history, not shaken by people's subjective feelings. People's aesthetic feeling can only reflect beauty, but can't change it. This school clearly adheres to the materialistic viewpoint of reflection theory, but it also encounters many theoretical dilemmas, and it is obviously wrong to regard beauty as irrelevant to people. Beauty is a value related to people. Moreover, typical things are not necessarily beautiful, such as typical toads, fleas, poisonous snakes and so on.

3. Third, Zhu Guangqian's subjectivity and objectivity are unified.

First of all, from an aesthetic point of view, he believes that beauty is not only subjective or objective, but also a combination of subjective and objective: "Beauty is not only in things, but also in the heart, and it is in the relationship between the heart and things." In order to demonstrate this theory, he also quoted Su Shi's poem Qin as proof: "If there is a piano sound on the piano, why not put it in a box?"

If the sound is on your fingers, why not listen to it on your fingers? "This theory made up for the paranoia of the first two theories to a certain extent, and Zhu Guangqian later further revised the theory of the unity of subject and object, which made it have a lot of practical colors.

4. Fourth, the "real school" represented by Li Zehou.

Li Zehou's understanding of beauty is reflected in the following aspects. First, for the birth of beauty, he believes that human labor practice is the root of beauty. It is in labor practice that people's essential strength can be objectified and things can be humanized, thus producing beautiful products.

Secondly, on the issue of the development of beauty, Li Zehou put forward the "accumulation theory", arguing that the formation and development of beauty is the historical accumulation process of humanization of nature. Li's contribution lies in introducing the category of "practice" into thinking about the essence of beauty.

Li Zehou believes that people as individuals can appreciate nature from the aesthetic point of view because the "practice" of people as a class has changed the relationship between nature and people, making nature, which was originally opposed to people, become human nature to some extent. The so-called "humanized nature" explores the essence of beauty mainly based on the reflection of individual psychological consciousness, but on the creation of group human material practice.

Its defects are as follows: first, he overemphasizes the collectivity, rationality and history, while ignoring the individuality and perceptual factors, which leads to his cultural and psychological structure becoming a suffocating barrier. Because of this, he was later attacked by many people. After 1980s, some people began to transform their own aesthetic system and put forward "emotional ontology". Secondly, it can't explain the beauty of those objects transformed by human practice.

Extended data

The development of world aesthetics can be roughly divided into four stages:

1. First, from the appearance of ceremonies and art 40,000 years ago to the primitive times before Egyptian civilization and Sumerian civilization 4000 BC, human's concept of beauty was reflected in the primitive art of this period;

2. The second is from the five major civilizations (Egypt and Sumerian civilization, Indus River, Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties in China, Olmec civilization in America) to the temple culture period before the Axis era in 700 BC, during which the human concept of beauty was expressed through a national religious art;

3. The third is the period from the axis era before 2000 to the beginning of modernity in17th century. At this time, major cultures, including Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Mediterranean, China, Indian, and later Islamic and Orthodox cultures, all achieved philosophical breakthroughs, treated people and the world with a rational thought, and began to talk about aesthetics in the form of theory. Among them, western culture began with Plato's pursuit of the essence of beauty.

4. Fourth, the history of more than 400 years since modernity. At this time, on the one hand, the aesthetics of western culture has been evolving with its own logic; On the other hand, under the influence of the mainstream culture in the world, non-western cultures learn from the west and establish their own aesthetics according to the western discipline, which constitutes the interaction between western aesthetics and non-western aesthetics.

Among these four stages, the first and second stages are potential aesthetics, which can be ignored from the perspective of discipline. What matters is the third and fourth stages. These two stages of aesthetic evolution constitute the historical context and overall style of world aesthetics.

Baidu encyclopedia-aesthetics