What is aesthetic vision?

The 20th century is a century of rapid expansion of body aesthetics. With the rise of mass media, the human body has become the most important aesthetic object. So far, most of the corresponding discourses only regard the body as the aesthetic object, which is at least logically incomplete.

As a phrase, body aesthetics has the following meanings: (1) aesthetics with the body as the aesthetic subject; ⑵ Aesthetics with the body as the aesthetic object; ⑶ Aesthetics with body as the aesthetic subject and body as the aesthetic object.

In such a vast field, the body will also be mentioned in the relationship with everything, but it has never been themed. This lies in the limitation of China's ancient concept of beauty. It is generally believed that the original meaning of Chinese "beauty" is "sheep is a great beauty" and "sheep is beautiful". "Beauty of sheep" means not only the fatness of the sheep itself, but also the delicious feeling it gives people. The beauty here has something to do with human feelings, especially taste. Taste is taste, which is to distinguish and compare. Not only the object of feeling, but also the feeling. If "Sheep are Beautiful" emphasizes the physiological and natural significance of beauty, then "Sheep are Beautiful" highlights the religious and social significance of beauty. Mainly refers to people dancing with sheep's head as totem to entertain people and gods, so as to achieve the connection between people and gods. The physical and mental happiness brought by dance itself is very important here. However, the beauty of this understanding should not only get rules from people, but also get rules from God. If only "sheep are beautiful" and "sheep are beautiful" are used to explain the aesthetics of China people, then this is undoubtedly one-sided. In fact, China people's aesthetic standards are mainly reflected in the thoughts of Confucianism, Taoism and Zen. Confucianism believes that beauty lies in rites and music, Taoism advocates the beauty of nature, Zen puts forward the beauty of artistic conception, and so on. In all these rules about beauty, we can see that they are not based on the body and its nature. On the contrary, if the body itself wants to have aesthetic characteristics, then it must obtain these regulations.

Similar to China's classical aesthetics, western traditional aesthetics also forgot the body phenomenon. Poetics is the main body of discussing the basic problems of aesthetics in ancient Greece. Poetics, like other disciplines of philosophy, is the study of different rational regions of human beings. Aristotle divided human rationality into three aspects: theoretical rationality, practical rationality and poetic rationality. Theoretical rationality is related to cognition, practical rationality is related to behavior, and poetic rationality is related to creation. The so-called poetics is a science about poetry or creative rationality. Its basic contents include the general nature of poetry, its creation and appreciation, etc. Poetry is fundamentally understood as imitation of the world, and imitation itself is the instinct of people to seek knowledge, so it is finally stipulated by theoretical reason, that is, epiphany. Based on this concept, the problem of body is not within the scope of poetics.

Aesthetics, as a perceptual science, was established only in modern times. Baum Tong Jia, who is known as aesthetics, thinks that people's psychological activities are divided into three aspects: knowledge, meaning and emotion. There is logic relative to cognition and ethics relative to will, but there is no discipline relative to emotion or perceptual knowledge. Therefore, he founded aesthetics, thinking that the object of aesthetics is the perfection of perceptual knowledge, that is, beauty. Therefore, aesthetics is not only a science of perceptual knowledge, but also a systematic discipline to improve perceptual knowledge. Body appears in the form of contradiction in perceptual science. On the one hand, the perfection of sensibility includes the perfection of the body; on the other hand, aesthetics must deny the body and control, improve and guide it. Based on this feature, aesthetics is not only theoretical but also practical.

Since modern times, aesthetics, as a perceptual science, has always been related to human sensibility, senses and feelings. Feeling can be divided into pleasure and non-pleasure. In pleasure, there is a difference between physical pleasure and spiritual pleasure. Aesthetics studies people's spiritual pleasure, mainly the feeling of beauty and art, but besides feeling, sensibility itself also includes perceptual objects, that is, things that can be felt. Finally, sensibility is also manifested as perceptual activity, that is, the world of human life itself. Therefore, aesthetics, as a perceptual science and a science about beauty, studies beauty, aesthetic feeling and art with a very broad vision. Therefore, the general understanding of aesthetics includes the theory of beauty, the theory of aesthetic feeling and the theory of art. But in aesthetics, philosophy of art has a unique position, so that people use it instead of aesthetics. As a philosophical reflection on artistic phenomena, it mainly rose in the period of German idealism. At this time, philosophy, as a typical form of subject philosophy, sets the dual thinking mode of subject and object, thus becoming a philosophy of world outlook and methodology. Art is understood as the emotional spiritual world created by people.

No matter how people understand aesthetics in modern times, it has always been placed in the framework of rational philosophy and stipulated by reason. In this regard, we have seen several different ideological systems. Kant's critical philosophy is divided into theoretical rationality, practical rationality and judgment criticism. Among them, judgment criticism, including aesthetics, is the cornerstone of his philosophy and the transition between nature and freedom. Beauty is described here as a universal and inevitable selfless happiness. Schelling believes that beauty and art are the highest functions of philosophy. Because art is a rational intuition, it can achieve the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. In contrast, Hegel advocates that beauty and art are the perceptual expression of absolute concept. Compared with religion as a representation and philosophy as a concept, art as intuition is in the primary stage of absolute concept development, which must be overcome by religion and philosophy. In these theoretical systems, beauty and art are understood as perceptual and related to reason. In the sense that sensibility is defined by reason, German idealism aesthetics is rationalism aesthetics like all modern aesthetics. Of course, there is no physical and physical aesthetics.

The aesthetic significance of body is found in modern thought. Because the mainstream of modern thoughts is to think about the different meanings of existence, they are both "non-"rationalism and "anti-"rationalism, so they are generalized sensibility and aestheticism. The so-called beauty and art are all in existence. Marx believes that beauty is the product of people's material production and labor practice, and art, as an ideology, depends on the economic base. Nietzsche emphasized that beauty is the direct expression of "creative will", so it is the realization of human vitality. Heidegger holds that beauty and art are the truth of existence and embedded in works, and poetry is the way people live in this land. In these modern aesthetic thoughts, the image of people is very prominent. He is either Marx's laborer, Nietzsche's impulsion, or Heidegger standing in the middle of the forest. Especially in Nietzsche's human image, the materiality of the body has gained unprecedented aesthetic significance. This is because Nietzsche's discussion on the origin of beauty and art is fundamentally physical. Beauty and art are anthropological first and the impulse of human life; Secondly, physiology is the strength of the body and the function of the body and blood; Finally, it is psychological, that is, the feeling of creativity. Nietzsche's body aesthetics is of great significance. On the one hand, it is a rebellion against the western traditional classical rational aesthetics, on the other hand, it is an inheritance of post-modern aesthetics.

In postmodernism, just like philosophy without traditional meaning, there is no aesthetics with traditional meaning. Therefore, postmodern aesthetics is "non-aesthetics" and "anti-aesthetics". Postmodernism, based on anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism, fundamentally opposes the hegemonism of traditional aesthetics' ideological pursuit of beauty, aesthetic feeling and the essence of art. The meaning of beauty and art is uncertain, complex, pluralistic and fractured. Therefore, aesthetics is the interpretation of language and text, and it is a unique field of discourse analysis. Since then, postmodernism has also broken the boundary between reality and art, and dispelled the dual mode of originality and reproduction. In the pluralistic discourse of postmodern aesthetics, the discourse about the body and its desire has become one of the dominant discourses. This is because it is irregular and uncertain. But postmodern body aesthetics is different from modern body aesthetics. Modern body is endowed by reality, while postmodern body is constructed by discourse. Modern body is defined by existence, while postmodern body is defined by desire.

Looking at the history of aesthetics from the perspective of body, we find that traditional aesthetics ignores the meaning of body on the one hand, and contains the possibility of thinking about body on the other. This is that sensibility has always been regarded as the sensibility of the body, and it is a problem that has not been considered in the mind. Modernity provides many ideological resources for the body as existence, while postmodernism provides many ideological resources for the body as desire and body aesthetics.

Of course, it is also necessary for us to look at the reality of contemporary aesthetics from the perspective of body and think about its aesthetic world. As we all know, the phenomenon of beauty is becoming more and more common and important in the contemporary world. Natural beauty enters people's daily life more directly. People not only demand the satisfaction of living space, but also emphasize its ecological environment. No longer just privileged literati, ordinary people also yearn for nature, travel to mountains and seas, and experience the beauty of mountains and rivers personally. As far as social life itself is concerned, people are advocating an aesthetic culture to make all aspects of social life full of aesthetic interest. Of course, various art forms have gone out of the ivory tower through modern information technology, which is no longer the patent of a few people. At the same time, the rise of popular culture makes everyone not only passively appreciate art after work, but also actively create art, just like a singer and dancer.

A special sign of the beauty of the contemporary life world is the so-called aestheticization of life. Life is people's basic necessities of life, labor and communication, and it is utilitarian. And aesthetics is not utilitarian. Life certainly contains aesthetic factors, but only art is a pure aesthetic activity. So there is a certain distance between life and aesthetics. However, this historical alienation has become interrelated in modern society, namely aesthetic life and aesthetic life. This is not a change of life attitude and aesthetic attitude, but the generation of history, that is, life becomes beautiful and beauty becomes life.

Because of the characteristics of the phenomenon of beauty in contemporary life, talking about it has become a familiar oral fact in daily language, and thinking about its "aesthetics" has now become one of the most famous disciplines in philosophy. Compared with the concern of epistemology and ethics in traditional disciplines, perhaps only the question of "what is beauty" in aesthetic thinking is more attractive. On the one hand, aesthetics is metaphysical thinking, such as the pursuit of so-called beauty essence, aesthetic essence and artistic essence; On the other hand, it is metaphysical analysis, such as the description of some aesthetic phenomena and the induction of aesthetic experience. Generally speaking, people divide aesthetics into philosophical aesthetics, psychological aesthetics and sociological aesthetics. Philosophical aesthetics is a philosophical reflection on the basic problems of aesthetics, which puts the basic problems of aesthetics among the basic problems of philosophy. Just as psychological aesthetics studies aesthetic phenomena from the perspective of psychology, sociological aesthetics analyzes the sociological significance of aesthetic phenomena. Modern times have also produced many emerging aesthetic disciplines, such as ecological aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, landscape aesthetics and so on.

But what about body aesthetics? For China's contemporary aesthetics, it is still just a problem, not a theme.

3. Body aesthetics certainly advocates that the body becomes one of the themes of aesthetics. People have many classifications about the scope of beauty. Traditional aesthetics divides it into natural beauty, social beauty and artistic beauty, while modern aesthetics extends its tentacles to the daily life world and the field of science and technology, paying attention to the beauty of life and science and technology. But the body is not only related to them, but also their gathering place. We can say that physical beauty is the peak of natural beauty, the carrier of social beauty and the center of artistic beauty, especially plastic arts and performing arts. The beauty of daily life and science and technology are also directly and indirectly related to body aesthetics. Therefore, the construction of body aesthetics not only highlights the unique significance of body beauty, but also leads to some intersection and reconstruction in the field of aesthetics.

Based on this characteristic of body beauty, body aesthetics not only requires the body to be one of the aesthetic themes, but also reiterates that the body and its related aesthetic phenomena should be discussed from the essence of the body. This must first create the body itself. It can no longer be divided into pieces in different fields of beauty, but should be independent and displayed as a complete organic whole. Secondly, we should understand the body from the body itself. Therefore, we should not only explain the body from different angles such as nature, society and art, but also look at the body itself from the perspective of the body. Finally, based on this, we can watch the corresponding aesthetic expression of the body in nature, society and art.

The key problem here is how to express the body itself as itself. We have various ideas about the body and its aesthetic expression, which may be daily, theoretical and logical. As principles of thought, they require us to describe, understand and explain the body, just as they open the way for all kinds of thoughts. But it may be a maze that prevents us from thinking about the body itself. Therefore, what is needed here is unprincipled criticism, that is, abandoning all kinds of preconceptions and prejudices about the body as principles.

Let's think about the body itself. Any body that exists here is of course endowed by nature, born by parents and inherited by genes; But it is also shaped by culture and the result of society and history. Therefore, the body is a dual product of nature and culture, and it is a work of constant self-renewal.

The direct presentation of this work is flesh and blood, that is, flesh and blood. Explain that the body is the existence of living life. This often leads to people being understood as animals or having animality. In fact, this is just a specious judgment. There is no doubt that people and animals are similar, but there is an insurmountable gap between them, that is, the human body is irreplaceable by the animal body. In other words, the human body is the human body from the beginning, not the animal body, so people are not ordinary animals or just animals from the beginning. At the same time, the human body has feeling, consciousness and language, which fully marks the uniqueness of the human body. People feel and know their bodies and talk about their bodies. So the human body not only exists here realistically, but also appears in the field of feeling and consciousness. Because language and body are both natural and cultural, it has become the original place where nature and culture interact. We can see that the body is endowed by reality on the one hand and constructed by words on the other.

The materiality of the human body is manifested in desire. Its love for life and death is the desire to eat and drink. People's desires point to what they want. Therefore, on the one hand, it drives people to feel themselves and form the inner feelings of the body, on the other hand, it forces people to feel outside people and form the outer feelings of the body, such as audio-visual, tactile. However, because of the realization of desire, desire becomes the activity of body, that is, the activity of hands and feet. Therefore, the human body's sensibility is not only feeling and perception, but also its own perceptual object and human perceptual activity. The most fundamental thing is people's economic activities, that is, the physical behavior of satisfying the desire to eat and drink through labor. This perceptual activity of the body even stipulates the feeling of the body and its object. In view of this situation, the human body can not be unilaterally understood as the feeling of the body or the perceived body, but as the activity of the body and the active body.

The body, as the body of perceptual activity, always points out of the body. This means that the body exists in its world. The body not only has a world, such as the world around it, all kinds of people and things, but also this world. This means that the world is not external to the body, but dispensable, but the most direct manifestation of the body. It is in the world that the body deals with things and forms the relationship between man and nature; Dealing with other people's bodies has formed the relationship between people and society; Dealing with God forms the relationship between man and spirit.

The interaction between the body and the people and things in its world promotes the growth of the body itself, thus forming the history of the body. In this history, the body did not deny naturalness and achieve culture as people imagined. It gradually separated from animals and became human itself, but the interaction between naturalness and culture of the body. At any stage of historical development, the naturalness and culture of the body have stimulated their vitality in a mutual opposition. Therefore, with the increasingly rich culture, the naturalness of the body is becoming more and more diverse. The historical generation of this body is the aestheticization of the body.

This shows that the desire of the body and its realization have completed the process from nature to culture, that is, humanization, that is, it is not only natural but also cultural. For example, diet has changed from hunger to food or even to a ceremonial banquet, and sexual desire has changed from reproduction to lust to love for life and death. Let's describe these basic instincts of the body in more detail.

The instinct to eat is based on human life characteristics. The human body needs to get food from the outside world to maintain its own survival and growth, and to avoid weakness, disease and death. This desire is manifested in hunger, that is, it requires that food be transformed into the body's own nutrition through eating. Therefore, the primary significance of eating is to satisfy hunger. Hunger is the first need for anyone to survive, especially those who are hungry and cold. So the activity of satisfying hunger has even become the driving force to promote people's lives and even a society. But when hunger is satisfied, people's eating behavior is no longer just to meet the needs of the stomach, but to meet the needs of the tongue. At this time, eating has become a food behavior while satisfying hunger. This is the smell of food. People demand not only some food, but also exquisite food; Not only requires food to be nutritious, but also requires food to be delicious; It requires not only variety of food, but also variety, and so on. People here often eat just to eat. The rise of this kind of delicious food has directly led to the development and promotion of appreciation interest. From this, people not only talk about food, but also talk about nature, people and art. But eating eventually evolved into a kind of etiquette. The action of eating here itself contains many meanings other than eating. People in China provide food for their ancestors during the Spring Festival, so that those who are not present and those who are present can get together. The wine and bread in the Eucharist of Western Christianity are the blood and flesh of Christ. Receiving believers is not only a commemoration of Christ, but also being with God. As for all kinds of private and public banquets in modern life, they have many different meanings: gathering, celebration, welcome and farewell.

If appetite is for the sake of personal body not dying, then sexual desire is for the sake of racial body not disappearing. So sex first manifests itself as reproduction. Man is dying, but this dying man sees his own death and resurrection in his descendants. He is endless. Of course, there is sexual desire in reproductive behavior, but real sexual desire and its satisfaction are relatively separated from reproduction. Therefore, sexual behavior is no longer used as an intermediary of reproduction, but as sexual desire itself, and such sexual desire and its satisfaction are directed at itself. Sex at this time is pure physical sensory pleasure, which is what people call erotic pleasure. But it is neither reproduction nor pornography. Only love is the highest sublimation of sex. Love is giving, so loving each other is giving and being paid. Why? In the process of growing up, an individual realizes his own boundaries and imperfections, and he can only achieve perfection in the opposite sex. Therefore, the existence of the opposite sex is the basis of one's desire and pursuit. It enables people to surpass themselves, end the deformity and achieve perfection in the unity of the two sexes. In this process, everyone is a giver and also a giver of others. This kind of giving and being paid is both physical and mental. The opposite sex is eager not only for spiritual communication, but also for physical communication, so as to become one. But this unity of love is the unity of giving and being given. So a great generation began in love, and men and women became new people. They not only developed their own unique personality, but also enriched their relationship.

This is the natural and cultural significance of appetite and sexual desire in the history of human growth. Of course, it is also the most outstanding performance of the body's own aesthetics. But the aestheticization of the body is multifaceted. First of all, as the body to be felt, such as appearance, appearance, temperament, demeanor and so on. In addition, clothes, especially fashion, are of great significance for beautifying the body. As far as a certain body part is concerned, clothes are both shielded and exposed. Secondly, the body as a feeling, such as vision, hearing and touch. In addition to the feelings outside the body, people also have feelings inside the body, such as the speed of heartbeat, the speed of breathing, the cold and hot body temperature and some unspeakable feelings. Finally, the body, as a perceptual activity, includes the activities of the human body driven by appetite and sexual desire. This is not only reflected in people's daily life, but also in the performance of the body in art, sports and other specialized fields.

But from the aesthetic point of view, the body has encountered many problems in its history, which are anti-aesthetic, non-aesthetic and pseudo-aesthetic. This first is the concept of "no body". When people think about the body and related things, they often forget the body itself. It doesn't matter that the body is absent here. Especially in the dual mode of "body and mind" and "inside and outside", people pay more attention to the fit of intellectual people and attach importance to the inside rather than the outside. Therefore, spiritual beauty is higher than physical beauty, and inner beauty is higher than external beauty. They ignore the interaction and unity of body and mind. The second is the misunderstanding of desire. People either think that desire is ugly, restrict desire and advocate asceticism; Or think that desire is beautiful, indulge desire and advocate sensualism. But desire itself is only desire, and there is no distinction between beauty and ugliness. The question of desire is whether it transcends its historical boundaries. Therefore, the key is to examine desire and give it a historic degree. Third, it is about the technicalization of the body. In our technological age, there are not only natural bodies and cultural bodies, but also technical bodies. People can not only beautify and beautify their bodies and create "artificial beauties", but also change their gender and re-divide men and women. Technology participates in the production and consumption of the body. It is an open secret in modern times to satisfy the most natural desires of the human body with the help of technology.

In view of this situation, the aesthetic education of the body has become an increasingly important issue. Its core is about the aesthetic shaping of the body. In fact, people have been engaged in physical aesthetic education for a long time. For example, aesthetic education about the body, including sports and bodybuilding; Aesthetic education about body feeling is more diverse, including painting and music for external feeling training, meditation and yoga for internal feeling training; There are all kinds of etiquette about the aesthetic education of active bodies. The goal of these types of aesthetic education is to promote the synchronous development of human nature and culture.

Of course, body aesthetics does not try to put forward a certain aesthetic ideal. Its fundamental problem is only to criticize the aesthetic phenomenon of the body, so as to think about the aesthetic significance of the body. Body aesthetics based on unprincipled criticism advocates nothing more than the freedom and liberation of the body, but also the freedom and liberation of the feeling. Aesthetic body is neither a prisoner of asceticism nor a slave of sensualism, but a playground of desire, technology and wisdom. In this sense, body aesthetics must think about what is the desire, technology and wisdom of our times, and their relationship.

Taking the body as one of many aesthetic objects is not a new idea, and the rise of body aesthetics in this sense does not mean a real aesthetic revolution. Body aesthetics mainly refers to aesthetics with the body as the main body. In this sense, body aesthetics is not a discipline of aesthetics, but aesthetics itself, which has returned to its foundation. Its birth means that aesthetics has finally returned to the essence of the body after a long lost road. Body aesthetics was put forward by German philosopher Nietzsche in the second half of the19th century, but it still did not occupy the mainstream position in western aesthetics in the 20th century. The reason is complicated.