How to Understand the Essential Attributes of Literature

In the past, in our literary theory system, the question of "the essence of literature" has always been the dominant and central topic. It seems that if this problem is not solved first, all other problems can not be discussed. This is one of the biggest fallacies of the previous literary theory system. There are two reasons for this fallacy: the first is the "logocentric" way of thinking, and the second is the need to intervene in ideological values. We will analyze this in the following.

The so-called "logocentric" way of thinking essentially refers to all attempts to rationalize and order the world in an abstract way so as to grasp the theoretical construction. This is the fundamental basis of human subjectivity, is the fundamental basis of human beings who think they are the masters of all natural things, but also the fundamental reason why human beings often fall into the error of self-righteousness and arrogance. In this way of thinking, whether it is nature or human society, what people's senses can perceive is always constrained by something they cannot perceive. Human reason is to capture that transcendent cause through perceptual experience. In the history of Western philosophy, what is often called essence, law, ultimate cause, true nature, truth, ontology, entity, idea, prescriptive and in the history of Chinese philosophy, what is often called yin and yang, dao, wu, taiji, wuji, five elements, one, the root, the origin, and so on, are all the products of such a way of thinking (of course, there is a significant difference between the Chinese and Western ways of thinking, and the manifestation of their logocentrism is different, so we will only speak of their similarities here. the similarities between them). In fact, the self-existent world does not exist. As a matter of fact, there are no such transcendental things in the world of the Self; they are the product of human thinking, rather the externalization or projection of the Logos. That is to say, the Logos is not an objective being, but a way of thinking. It contains man's potential needs, desires, and helplessness in the face of the infinite world. When Feuerbach contemplated the spiritual edifice of German classical philosophy, which had been carefully constructed by a series of world-class thinkers, he was astonished to discover the profound inner identity between these splendid edifices and the old, crumbling Christian fortresses that had long since become old and worn out: they were all forms of human alienation! What underlies this identity today is the way of thinking known as the Logos.

The so-called "essentialism" that postmodernist thinkers abhor is one of the main manifestations of the "Logocentric" way of thinking. This "essentialism" presupposes a dichotomous existence of "phenomenon and essence" of everything, and believes that as long as one grasps the "essence" of a thing, the thing will be grasped by the human being. grasped. Prompted by this concept, human beings in the process of chasing the "essence" of the continuous performance of the game of grabbing soap bubbles: grabbed, but also disappeared. Each time he catches the "essence" of a thing, he feels a short-lived euphoria, but he soon realizes that the thing still exists in a simple and complex way, and that it still seems to him to be both knowable and unknowable. Postmodernism, which does not recognize any law, seems to be proving what the ancient Greek philosophers discovered long ago: the more a thinker understands his own (human) ignorance, the more profound his thoughts become. A succession of post-structuralists and deconstructionists who do not believe in any truth are nevertheless scrambling to prove the truth that all human knowledge is a phantom created by the mind. In short, in the postmodernist view, the so-called "essence" is just a label that people put on things to prove that they have control over them.

The so-called need for ideological value intervention means that the most simple and quickest means for any ideology to "invade" the territory of literary theory, to become its master, and to control the whole field of literature is to label the object of literary theory as "essence". The most simple and quickest means is to label the object of study of literary theory-literature-as "essence". Determining the "essence" of literature also means formulating the rules of literature and delimiting the scope of literary activities. Any literary creation or appreciation or criticism beyond this scope loses its legitimacy, and is inevitably rejected and suppressed. For example, to define the "essence" of literature as "the product of the reflection of social life in the mind of the writer" or "social ideology" is tantamount to saying that all literature necessarily and therefore It is tantamount to saying that all literature must necessarily, and therefore truly, reflect social life, otherwise it cannot be considered true literature. But how can it be regarded as "truly reflecting social life"? There is an implied value intervention here: only the "social life" that conforms to the core value standard of this ideology is "real", otherwise it is false. The conclusion that literature interferes with society is actually presupposed here. For example, by defining the "essence" of literature as "the natural outpouring of personal emotion" or "emotion recalled in tranquility," the individualist ideology is actually presupposed to be "rational:" individuality needs to be expressed, and individuality is not a matter of opinion. The rationality of the individualist idea is also presupposed: individuality needs to be expressed, and freedom is the natural human right of the living individual.

Of course, the setting of the "essence" of literature is generally in the form of objectivity and science, which seems to be trying to avoid the possibility of value intervention. For example, when the "essence" of literature was defined as "aesthetics" in the mid-1980s in China, people held a pious and objective attitude in order to give a proper name to the concept of literature that had been distorted by the ultra-leftist ideology. They did sincerely believe that only "aesthetics" was the essence of literature. Their work was to bring people's understanding of literature from ideology back to the scientific track. They may not have realized in the slightest that the real reason for their stipulation was in fact equally ideological. This so-called "correcting" work is not replacing false and erroneous views with objective and scientific ones, but replacing one ideological conception with another. This shows that whenever we talk about the essence, it is inevitable that the discourse is constructed from a way of thinking or values, and there can be no pure objectivity or science.

But does this mean that the question of the "essence" of literature is a worthless pseudo-question? It is not so simple to conclude.

Essence and phenomenon are the most important of Hegel's dialectical categories. Both of his Logic books devote a great deal of space to this pair of categories. In Hegel, essence is what things really are. He says: "We often think that the task or aim of philosophy is to know the essence of things, which means only that the thing should not be allowed to remain in its immediacy, but that it must be pointed out as mediated or grounded in something else. The immediate existence of things, according to this, is like a skin or a curtain, in which or behind which lies the essence." This means that what one can directly perceive is not the stable and constant nature of the thing (it is fluid), and therefore not the determining factor that makes the thing what it is (it is the determined). Rather, it is what is implied behind the immediate existence of the thing that is permanent and determining, i.e., the essence. But to the human senses, anything can exist only as it directly is, that is to say, before the senses there is only immediacy and not essence. Where then is essence? It can only exist relative to the human faculty of thought. What exists relative to the human senses is existence, and what exists relative to the human mind is also existence. Just as the existence of "immediacy" is inseparable from the senses, the existence of "essence" is also inseparable from human thinking. That is why Hegel says: "Essence is a concept set up, and the individual stipulations of essence are only relative ......." He also said: "In existence, everything is immediate, and conversely, in essence, everything is relative." 2 By "immediate" is meant that which is visible and tangible, i.e., that which appeals to the senses; it is what it is, and requires no conditions; by "set up" and "relative" are meant the abstract grasping of things by the mind. The so-called "set up" and "relative" refer to the abstract grasping of things by the mind, which is conditional, i.e., exists in comparison with other things (by comparing, we find out the ****similarity of things of the same kind, and at the same time, we distinguish the differences with other things.). . Thus, while essence is not an arbitrary creation of thought, it cannot exist independently of thought; rather, it exists only for the thinking brain.

The division of nature into essence and phenomenon is relatively easy to understand. For example, if we say that the leafy thing in front of us is a tree that exists as an immediacy, then those inner grounds that determine that it is a tree and not a grass are the essence. This essence is not only possessed by the tree that exists as an immediacy in front of us, but all trees have it, and it is ****ness. You cannot say that the essence of a tree is invisible and untouchable, and therefore non-existent, a phantom created by the mind. Here, although essence is a "concept set up", it does possess objectivity and universality, and is based on countless "immediacies". However, for social and spiritual existence, the term "essence", like "truth", becomes a highly subjective and uncertain concept. In general, this concept does not refer to something objective and universal, but only to a subjective attitude of the speaker. For example, what does it mean to say that class struggle is the essence of society? First of all, it proves that the speaker is speaking from the standpoint of the ruled in this society and not from the standpoint of the rulers. For no ruling class recognizes that its rule is based on class oppression (with a few exceptions for special political purposes). Rulers always emphasize social integration. Secondly, this proves that the speaker tries to use class conflict to change the status quo of society. Defining the nature of society as class struggle implicitly means that only through class struggle can the shape of society be changed. Therefore, emphasizing the importance of class struggle implies exploiting the purposefulness of class struggle. In this way, this definition of the nature of society is politically charged and the product of a discursive position. As another example, what does it mean to say that the essence of man is freedom? First of all, it means that the speaker feels that he is not free and that he tries to fight for freedom. If he felt that he had freedom, he would not have identified it as an essence. Identifying something as an essence means placing extreme value on that thing. And people only value what they do not have. Secondly, it implies an unprecedented value placed by the speaker on personal gain, a product of individualist thinking, and therefore a bourgeois view. What it implies is a strong bourgeois desire to be free from traditional ideas and the control of power. So what is the cause of this?

For the speaker or perceiver, natural existence and social and spiritual existence are completely different things. Their differences come mainly from the stance and attitude of the speaker or cognizer. In the face of natural existence, the speaker is able to exist as a subject in the true sense of the word. Here a true subject-object relationship can be established. This was very eloquently articulated by Marx in the Philosophical Manuscripts of Economics of 1844. Later Piaget's structuralist epistemology of occurrence was further systematically argued from the psychological point of view. In their view, the two-way construction between subject and object is the basic mechanism of knowledge formation. Although there exists the process of "objectification" and "conformity" here, the subject is the subject and the object is the object, and it is difficult to confuse the two. For example, when a person focuses on a bamboo tree, he is completely in the position of the subject, and how the bamboo looks in his eyes is determined by his visual ability, characteristics and mental state. The bamboo is just an objective thing that silently exists for him. That is to say, in the cognitive relationship between the two, only the observer as the subject is a variable, and the bamboo as the object is unchanged. When two people are facing each other, the situation is very different: they scrutinize each other and are subjects of each other. Both are variables. At that point, the two people who are both subject and object recognize each other through their understanding of themselves and recognize themselves through their understanding of each other. Consciousness and self-consciousness permeate each other as one. So there can be no mere subject-object relationship here.

The complexity of the problem does not stop there. In fact, the cognitive relationship between human beings and human beings or between human beings and social history is by no means a relationship between "scrutinizing" and "being scrutinized" in the original sense. There is an essential intermediary in this relationship - language. It is language that establishes the cognitive relationship between human beings and human beings, between human beings and social history, and it can even be said that it is language that makes human beings human beings and social history social history, which makes the subject-object relationship even more complicated: the subject becomes passive and constituted, i.e., the person who intertwines the active with the passive. (We will discuss the relationship between literary theory and language, and we will not expand on it here for the moment.) . The "essence" of the object revealed in such a subject-object relationship is obviously difficult to have true objectivity.

So does this mean that in the field of humanities and social sciences, the question of "essence" has become a meaningless pseudo-question? The answer is no. In fact, although in the contemporary academic discourse under the influence of postmodernism, the word "essence" is more and more rare (unless as the object of criticism), but the meaning of his reference can still be found everywhere. For example, Foucault's famous saying that "knowledge is power," if expressed in Hegelian terms, means "the essence of knowledge is power." These two propositions are not fundamentally different. Another example is the postmodernist philosophy of history, which holds that "history is text," which is obviously very different from the traditional view of history. However, it only emphasizes the subjectivity of historical narratives, which can be regarded as a deeper and more objective understanding of the nature of history. Even deconstructionism, which abhors "essentialism", cannot really get rid of the entanglement of "essence". As an American scholar puts it, "Just as deconstruction attempts to dismantle systems of thought, it is also logocentric, according to its assumptions." 1 The reason why deconstructionism seeks to dismantle past systems of thought is, of course, that it considers them to be false. Thus this very act of dismantling implies an attempt to reveal the real. And it is the central notion of Hegelian essentialism to reveal the inner truth through the false surface. Any system of discourse must always refer to something, either to what actually exists or to subjective consciousness, and speech without reference is not speech. As Marx said, if things were what they appear to be, then all science would be superfluous. Clearly, neither poststructuralism nor deconstructionism intends to deny the necessity of all speech, otherwise there would be no need for them to have something to say. Either reveal something or keep your mouth shut - this is the general rule that any research must follow. If things are the way you see them, and nothing at all to reveal exists, then everyone should just keep their mouths shut!

Post-structuralism and deconstructionism are not nonsense, and their critiques of essentialism have great value. The idea of trying to grasp (understand and control) something once and for all by grasping some so-called "essence" that is unchanging for all time is no doubt ludicrous, but it's a dream that first-rate human brains have been dreaming of for thousands of years, and that many are still dreaming of today. The greatest contribution of post-structuralism and deconstructionism is to wake people up from this dream. But that doesn't mean that people should just wake up from their dreams and go about their lives. We cannot deprive our brains of the right to think just because they have dreamed unrealistic dreams. It is impossible to think without leaving the general, the universal, the essential. Because formalizing or abstracting, generalizing or even metaphysicalizing the world is precisely the nature of human beings that can never be changed.

But the way of thinking can be changed and must be changed from time to time. Let us return to Hegel. He states that essence is "set up" in the sense that it does not exist apart from human thought in the same way that the immediacy of things does. Essence is the nature of things, that is, objective existence, but it does not exist for any of the senses, but only for the thinking mind. This is what Marx revealed long ago in his youth: the nature of external things exists in relation to a particular essential force in man. Sight and smell are essential forces; they are confirmed by shapes, colors, and smells; thinking or rational thought is likewise an essential force; it is confirmed by such things as essences, laws, and generalities. So it is not what is given up that counts, but what is retained. After the sacred and unchanging "essence" has lost its glittering aura, we call for a limited and specific essence. Hegel has long provided us with a theoretical basis: all intrinsic provisions of essence are relative. The so-called "relative" means that it is conditional and limited, that is, it is valid only in a certain range and at a certain level. There is no absolute essence or any generality in the world, and the idea that by mastering the so-called "essence" of a certain thing, one has once and for all mastered it completely is only a myth. But if one sets up a scope or dimension, in the context of finitude, the situation is quite different: one finds that we cannot say anything meaningful without an essence, a law, or a generality. To regard all theoretical discourse as an arbitrary linguistic game, devoid of any definite meaning, would be to deny the possibility of human consciousness and self-consciousness, which is clearly unsubstantiated.

It is true that literary theory cannot reveal the nature of that literature which is devoid of any qualification. This is not because literary theory is incompetent, but because there is no such nature. But what makes a literary theory a "theory" and nothing else is that it refers to the implicit essence or generality behind the literary phenomenon, otherwise what would be the use of a literary theory? It is only because literary phenomena are temporally, spatially, and hierarchically different that their essence or generality is limited. For example, fictionality (or virtuality) can be said to be one of the more generalized essential features of literature, but it is only valid within a certain range: it is valid for the history of Western literature, which is dominated by narrative literature, but not for ancient Chinese literature, which is dominated by lyric literature. For example, "speaking in images" is supposed to be a more universal characteristic of literature, but it is not true for the metaphysical poems of the Jin Dynasty, or for many of the Taoist poems of Shao Yong in the Song Dynasty and Chen Zhaoyuan in the Ming Dynasty. And many forms of discourse that do not belong to literature likewise speak with the help of images, as is the case, for example, with many religious and moral sermons.

What are we really doing, however, when we speak of a literary phenomenon in a somewhat theoretical manner (i.e., not from the point of view of feeling or experience)? Are we retelling or describing the phenomenon? Of course not. We are undoubtedly making some kind of judgment about it. And from a logical point of view, any judgment is based on generalization, induction, that is to say, it refers to some kind of generality. A generalization is precisely the essence of the phenomenon at some level. For example, we say, "This novel is expressionistic." This means that we are sure that this novel has the same thing as other novels that are called expressionist, and this same thing is generality. Moreover, in the discourse of literary theory, we often presuppose some level of literary essence or generality when we apply a concept that refers to a literary phenomenon. For example, we often say, "Great men of genius often emerge in the course of literary development." In this sentence, the concept of "literary development" refers to a series of literary phenomena arranged in a chronological order. But since the use of the word "development" implies that the speaker subscribes to the idea of social evolution, it is self-evident that he regards the chronological arrangement of literary phenomena as an orderly and inevitable process that follows a certain pattern. This is precisely a realization of the nature or generality of literature. Unless no judgment is made, it is impossible to escape from the entanglement of essence. Whether it is said that "literature is a reflection of social life", "literature is an expression of emotion", or "literature is a daydream", or "literature is a game of language", it is an interpretation of the nature of literature. All of them are an understanding of the nature of literature, and all of them do reveal a certain level of universality.

So the general tendency of the current academic circles to keep the essence secret is a kind of nervousness. Having abandoned unrealistic hopes for absolute essences, the search for relative essences is a time of great promise. In fact, except for the few who are still searching for non-existent essences and the few who are overdoing it and rejecting any universality, the majority of educated people have turned to the finite realm of relative universality. Within a limited scope and at a certain level, it should be the task of today's literary theory to reveal the relative stipulations of specific literary phenomena.

Literature is the art of reflecting the objective reality by using language as a tool, including drama, poetry, novels, essays and so on. Among them, the site of the original literature of the sons is the most comprehensive, including all forms and contents from children's literature to poetry, essays, novels, miscellaneous essays, lyrics, plays, academics and so on!

Objects, Scope and Methods of Studying the Nature of Literature

In any scientific research endeavor, the effective solution of a certain problem depends first of all on finding the right way of solving the problem, which involves determining the object of study, selecting the scope of study, and identifying the specific method of study that can be adapted to this object and this scope. This basic requirement of methodology also applies to the exploration of the nature of literature.

To recognize the essence of literature, one can only look for it in literature itself. However, the diversity of literature itself creates certain difficulties for people to grasp it. Literature is not static, nor is there only one type. Vertically, it has its own evolutionary history; horizontally, it has a variety of types and types; between vertical and horizontal, there are the rise and fall of various trends and schools of thought. In the history of Chinese and foreign literary theory and criticism, the reason why people's views on the nature of literature are not consistent or even contradictory is that, in addition to the constraints of their own subjective conditions and social environments, there is also a direct relationship between the objective and the diversity of literature's own development. Therefore, just a general understanding of the essence of literature is the object of literature itself is still too general, to determine the object of study should also take into account the fact that literature is constantly evolving, in the development of the object of study rather than static grasp.

To this end, first of all, literature must be regarded as a whole. The essence of literature to be summarized by the principle of literature is to be able to cover all kinds of literary phenomena **** have, belonging to the basic nature of literature as a social ideology in general, rather than the characteristics of a particular type of literature. The essence of literature cannot be fully embodied in individual literary styles, such as novels or poems, nor can it be encompassed by a particular literary trend or school of thought, such as realism, romanticism or modernism. The object of the examination of the essence of literature is the diverse, rich, vast and profound totality of literary facts constituted by the literary phenomena of the past and the present. The essence of literature should be the result of a high degree of generalization of literature as a whole. This is a requirement for recognizing literature in its development.

Secondly, we should also see that the development of literature is not only manifested in the diversity brought about by the continuous evolution and expansion of content and form, but also in the historical manifestation of literature from childishness to maturity. That is, literature is constantly getting rid of and melting away from all kinds of non-literary factors attached to itself, from a variety of to pure, and from pure to rich, thus gradually forming its own special nature. The history of literature is a history of evolution. The modern form of literature is obviously more conscious and more mature than the ancient form of literature, so the examination of the nature of literature should focus on the modern form of literature. Of course, the development of literature is endless, and any mature form is relative. In this sense, our exploration also only approaches rather than exhausts the understanding of the nature of literature.

In order to recognize the essence of literature, in what scope should the principle of literature place the above objects to be examined? We must expand and broaden the scope of the study of the essence of literature, under the guidance of historical materialism, the use of systematic analysis, from the object as a whole, in the whole and elements, elements and elements of the interconnections, interactions and mutual constraints to grasp the object of the synthesis.