Aesthetic principles know the answer. According to China's traditional aesthetics, what is the noumenon of beauty?

What is beauty? This is an old problem, and people are still discussing it today, and their views are very different.

In 1950s and 1960s, there was a great discussion about aesthetics in China academic circles. The central issue of the discussion is "what is beauty". In other words, this is a question of whether beauty exists in things or in the heart. It was called "the essence of beauty" at that time. Many scholars took part in the discussion, and they were divided into several factions in the discussion.

What does China's traditional aesthetics give us on this issue?

In the view of most thinkers in ancient China, there is no materialization of "beauty" outside people, and "beauty" cannot be separated from people's aesthetic activities.

The first thing to mention here is Liu Zongyuan, a thinker in the Tang Dynasty. He put forward a very important proposition:

"Husband beauty is not self-beauty, which varies from person to person. Lanting also, if he doesn't suffer from the right army, he will pack up bamboo branches and be destroyed in the empty mountain. " Liu Zongyuan means that if the natural scenery ("bamboo") is to become an aesthetic object, there must be aesthetic activities, and someone's consciousness is needed to "discover" it, "awaken" it and "illuminate" it, so that it can change from a physical object to an "image" (① foreign objects and scenery exist independently of the viewer, but the beauty does not lie in them (the thing itself). In other words, foreign objects and landscapes cannot become beautiful by themselves ("beauty is not self-beauty"). Beauty lies in experience. This aesthetic experience is a kind of creation and communication, that is, what Wang Yangming later said "My spirit is bright" and "Everything in heaven and earth" are harmonious and fluent, and they flow in one breath, that is, what Wang Fuzhi later said "My heart" and "Dahua" are "equal in value and each takes what he needs".

Liu Zongyuan's proposition reminds us of a passage by the contemporary French philosopher Sartre. Sartre said: Everything in the world is displayed as a unified landscape only because of the existence, witness and awakening of some people. Sartre said: "If we abandon this landscape, it will lose its witness and stagnate in eternal ignorance." Sartre's meaning of this passage is very similar to Liu Zongyuan's proposition.

There is no materialized and external "beauty", so where is the "beauty"?

The answer of China's traditional aesthetics is that "beauty" lies in images.

According to China's traditional aesthetics, aesthetic activity is to construct an image world outside the material world, that is, to construct a spectacle outside the world. This image world is the aesthetic object, which is what we usually call "beauty" in a broad sense (including various aesthetic forms). So what is an image?

China's traditional aesthetics gives the most general definition of "image", which is "scene blending". However, the "emotion" and "scenery" mentioned here cannot be understood as two external materialized things, but as the harmony and smoothness of "emotion" and "scenery"

The image world is not the physical world. The image of plum blossom tree is not the physical reality of plum blossom, and the image of distant mountain is not the physical reality of distant mountain. The image world is the creation of human beings. Wang Guowei said that if there were no poets in the world, there would be no such realm. Tao Qian's chrysanthemums are the world of Tao Qian, and Lin Bu's plum blossoms are the world of Lin Bu. This is just like Monet's Water Lily is Monet's world, and Van Gogh's Sunflower is Van Gogh's world. Without Tao Qian, Lin Bu, Monet and Van Gogh, there would certainly be no such image world. It is precisely because they are not real things, but unreal image worlds that Wang Guowei said that "things born in my heart and seen in the realm of external things are all instantaneous." The image world can only exist in aesthetic activities.