The Preliminary Exploration Of The Aesthetics Of Zhanguo Ce School

The Zhanguo Ce school has become one of the focuses of studies in recent years. The existing research achievements were mostly made from the nation's perspective, discussing the literary value, cultural value, and political value of the Zhanguo Ce school. However, the research from the aesthetics' perspective is nearly nothing. To improve this situation, this thesis explores the aesthetic ideas of the Zhanguo Ce school, by focusing on the school's representative figure Chen Quan and Lin Tongji's aesthetic ideas.The first person of the Zhanguo Ce school as Chen Quan was, his aesthetic thought hasn't been attached much importance by the academic circles. In fact, Chen Quan and Wang Guowei, China's modern aesthetics master, were closely related. Although their significance in Chinese modern aesthetic history can be in no way comparable, both of them explained A Dream in Red Mansion with German voluntarism philosophy and aesthetics, and came up with their own esthetic ideas. In addition, they both cherished their teacher-student relationship. Till the anti-japanese war had Chen Quan admitted Wang Guowei's Comments on A Dream in Red Mansion's influence on him. Those suggested that Chen Quan and Wang Guowei had much in common. But Chen Quan's significance was that not only he went the same path with Wang Guowei, but also he overreached Wang Guowei on aesthetics on the basis of inheritance. Chen Quan and Wang Guowei admitted German voluntarism, and hold that will was the nature of the society, and found the pessimism in A Dream in Red Mansion. But Wang Guowei was prone to German Schopenhauer's theory of Will to Survival. convincing himself of pessimism, Chen Quan, on the other hand, accepted the Schopenhauer's will theory and went further to Nietzsche, and in return criticized Schopenhauer pessimism. Therefore Chen Quan should not be neglected in Chinese modern aesthetic history.Under the influence of Nietzsche and Chinese reality during anti-japanese war. Chen Quan established the powerful will theory. The view held that strong will was good and beautiful, thus formed the good- and -evil values, esthetic values with the establishment of standard of strong will. This showed the difference between his and Wang Guowei's aesthetic values. First, in view of genius, Wang Guowei was influenced more by Schopenhauer, and this constituted his pessimistic view; Chen Quan was influenced by Nietzsche and created a new genius view-- the hero worship. Hero worship was a strong and purer aesthetic worship. Chen Quan explored and explained the "surprise beauty" of the hero worship. Secondly, in the aesthetic spirit, Chen Quan differed Schopenhauer and Wang Guowei in view of pessimism, he showed more the strong spirit as Nietzsche did. And he also enriched his strong will theory with the German stress movement and doctor Faustus spirit. Strong spirit, as Chen Quan advocated, was a positive, dynamic, and forceful one, "the new spirit" in heart. It regarded truth, good,beauty as the permanent target, with active romantics as the core spirit, expressing a new aesthetic spirit and was different with Chinese traditional spiritual tendencies. Finally, in terms of tragic view, Chen Quan and Wang Guowei was also different. Wang Guowei's view on tragedy made the beginning of the contemporary tragedy, which was "beautiful", out of the traditional and but hadn't come to the core of western tragedy. Chen Quan's view on tragedy was entirely free from the traditional pathos tragedy, and Schopenhauer's influence whose view was close as Chinese traditional spirit, establishing " magnificent and beautiful "——"sublime" tragedy, which brought about modern Chinese a new view of the tragedy and made grand progress in tragedy theory.Lin Tongji was the other core figure of the Zhanguo Ce school, whose contribution on aesthetic theory was more significant than Chen Quan's. His largest contribution to the modern aesthetics was that he created a complete philosophy of powerful ontology and aesthetics.Lin Tongji's philosophy of powerful ontology expanded mainly from two dimensions:one was expanded from cosmos ontology. In this dimension, he summarized that it was primarily the universe view of Copernicus which dominated the western value; i.e. the essence of universe was force—the running, the change of the universe were dependent upon force. Lin Tongji called for Chinese to absorb the western Copernicus'spirit, reforming Chinese culture and literature with Copernicus'spirit. The second was expanded from the human ontology. In this dimension, upon his observation of source of Chinese characters combined with his rich western as well as eastern knowledge, Lin Tongji proposed that human regarded force as ontology and beauty in the beginning of China-western culture. The perfect combination of universal view and Chinese experience expressed Lin Tongji'self-consciousness in building forceful ontology of philosophy and aesthetics. The self-consciousness was also reflected when Lin Tongji criticized China's moral culture with the forceful ontology of philosophy. Lin Tongji thought the flourishing of Confucian culture gradually suppressed forceful ontology of the Chinese people,and also hampered the further development of the idea, that force was regarded as beauty. In order to retrieve the view and build a new forceful ontology aesthetics in the anti-Japanese war. Lin Tongji firstly called upon the appearance of "force-admired" personality on the basis of analyzing and comparing the culture of ancient and modern in china and abroad. Lin Tongji advocated the western valentine' personality type, the noble knight type before the warring states period and Nietzsche' warrior one. superman one.In an aesthetic sense. Lin Tongji focused more about the aesthetic value of the personality type. rather than the broad cultural level as other researchers did. For Lin Tongji, artistic creation was the best expression of the character. A certain personality type art would form the corresponding style and aesthetics types. Therefore, the character types proposed by Lin Tongji was close to the corresponding concepts of the aesthetic subject and artistic creation'subject. Lin Tongji's thread was that as long as readers and writers became forceful aesthetic subject and artistic creation' subject, aesthetic concepts of forceful ontology would appear in Chinese aesthetics. By his comparison, we can find in general that the valentine'character type indicated the instinct that westerners and the western art praised highly of, and dad'personality indicated that the Chinese people and Chinese arts paid much attention to ethical values; the noble knight type indicated the intellectuals and culture before the warring states valued character and creativity very much; scholar-official'character indicated the intellectuals and culture after the Warring States had effeminate and moderate feature; the appealing of warrior style and superman style indicated Lin Tongji called upon the new forceful personality and art.Lin Tongji had not only powerful ontology philosophy and esthetics view, but also the call to the lofty as powerful character and the aesthetic subject. More importantly, Lin Tongji provided new aesthetic concepts for the Chinese aesthetics, which was the terror, spree and piety. Thus Lin Tongji' aesthetic system entirely showed up. The three aesthetics concepts indicated Lin Tongji and Zhanguo Ce school had its own place in Chinese modern aesthetic history. Whether the terror, spree or piety, had metaphysical philosophic sense, and were a challenge to life tragedy, and an exploration into the conflict of people'finiteness and unlimitedness of the object. The three aesthetic concepts can be derived from Lin Tongji's powerful ontology, which was explained by the aesthetic subject, further reached the level of the strong handle to the tragedies in life and the art. The terror beauty was set off when the limited subject was overwhelmed to motivate the struggle within by the infinite object; the spree beauty when the limited subject generated contempt of all over the boundless creativity when the limited subject conquered the infinite object; the piety beauty when that the limited subject and the infinite object reached a blending highest aesthetic stature through the terror and spree. The three aesthetic concepts was Lin Tongji's organic mergence of the aesthetic view of the west and China. It not only absorbed the dionysian spirit of Nietzsche, but at the same time was alienated from it; it also absorbed the Chinese traditional aesthetics view that nature and man were in the one but criticized it at the same time, which indicated Lin Tongji and the Zhanguo Ce school had outstanding contributions to Chinese modern aesthetics.Finally, it should be pointed out that although Chen Quan and Lin Tongji advocated the independent value of philosophy, aesthetic and even tried to pursue metaphysical sense, their aesthetic view had some contradictory place because of their realistic political feelings and their urgent national feelings.