Ceremony And Aesthetic Scale

Since the founding of the PRC, Chinese aesthetics scholars' long and heated discussion of "aesthetic rules" have focused on the textual context of Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and attached priority to conceptions, which made the discussion rather misleading. This approach can not render a convincing interpretation of the Manuscript, besides it neglects the actual conditions of aesthetic and artistic activities more or less. In the past few years, with the renaissance and reconstruction of anthropology in China, multiple research perspectives and a change of research methodology have been brought into the field of humanities and social science. Under modern research conditions, it is necessary to reanalyze "aesthetic rules", especially the core conception of "standard", from the perspective of anthropo -logy.Under the precondition of advocating the coexisting of rituals and art, this dissertation looks upon the "standard" as "aesthetic measure" and considers it to be the rule or tradition in creating artistic images and our inner critical standard.If we look upon the aesthetic measure as the convention in creating artistic images, it is closely connected with other behaviors of the mankind, especially rituals. We argue that rituals, as a kind of cultural phenomena or system, are of great importance in passing down social tradition, keeping national memory and unifying the mind and feelings of a clan and these functions are mostly strengthened by artistic and aesthetic means. While the rite is over, the feeling experiences that have been evoked or molded by the rite usually coagulates in the materialized form of art and they are not only left to the ritual participants to recollect and experience again and again, but also help to construct their "pre-understanding" of aesthetic activities evidently or secretly and affect their judgement about beauties in the world. Consequently, while a clan holds rites for practical and utility purposes and make them become steadfast tradition with the multiplication of them, aesthetic activities mingled with rites also develop into some kind of "convention". Then, utility considerations are often mingled with aesthetic judgement, and aesthetic measure is closely connected with cultural background and keeps changing in different areas, periods and clans.If we look upon the aesthetic measure as the inner critical standard of human beings, considerations about aesthetic measure will be frequently implicated in the considerations about the complexity of human nature. There is no doubt that thesubject behind aesthetic measure is a subject that could be constantly reconstructed in different cultural backgrounds. We have exposed the secrets and complexities of human nature in cannibalistic and totemic rites and the restrictions and domestications that have been imposed on individuals by the society. Based on those analyses we want to emphasize that cultural background affects people's apperceiving about the world and themselves and affects the convention of art-composition and aesthetic interest. The special art-composition convention and aesthetic customs of each clan are usually burdened with the special spiritual notions and cultural cognitive map of them. While faced with cultural or artistic traditions, some artists are frequently restricted to them, but some others could break free from the convention and set up new ones because of their creativity.During the course of cultural contacts, art-composition conventions of different clans will influence each other inevitably. We not only pay attention to how each clan set out from their cultural tradition and base those extrinsic artistic conventions on their own and create new artistic forms, but pay attention to the fact that a stronger culture could do harm to a weaker culture in the course of contacts between two cultures. That is the relation between aesthetic measure and cultural contact.