On The Aesthetic Thought Of Wang Yangming

Wang Yangming's School of Mind came into being under the context of syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. It has the specific meaning of the conception, spiritual character and theoretical orientation. According to the connectiveness between the Mind and aesthetics, the school of Mind contains the abundant aesthetic factors, which arereflected in the basic propositions enduced by Wang Yangming, such as mind and ration ,mind and feeling, mind and things, mind and nature. Some of these factors can be explained as the aesthetic issuses of the time. Some have produced for-reaching influence in history. Some of the Mind issues lay the solid theoretical basis for his aesthetic idea.Wang Yangming's aesthetics is a kind of life aesthetics, based on the training of mind and nature of individual whose centre is the ethical evaluation. It values the beauty of external things using the individual's degree of character training as the standard. It can be kown from different understanding and evaluation of three kinds of taste modality, pleasing ears and eyes, pleasing mind and emotion ,pleasing will and spirit. As a kind of poetic wisdom and aesthetic idea of intense spirituality, Yangming's aesthetics stresses on surpassing reality by virtue of Zen in order to gain the godly joy of perfect Confucian thinkers, meanwhile, the surpassing is inseparable from the individual's daily contemplation of Tao.the aesthetics of Mind blended the wisdom Zhuang and Zen in the new historical situation, inheritting the basic character of Confucian aesthetics, such as taking goodness as beauty, refraining emotion with ration, besides, it aslo has some new characters,such as location of feeling, special emphasis on individual's experiences, etc. The spirit of Yangming's School of Mind includes paying close attention to the reality and ideal. In terms of reality, it is concerned with society and individual. Yangming's idea is a kind of pursuit which is interlinked between the spiritual realm of life and the aesthetic realm. His idea of aesthetics is harmony with his School of Mind with aesthetic idea, Moreover, Yangming's attention to the realm of life taste not only syncretize feeling and ration perfectly, but also makes his aesthetic idea reach the devotional dimension ofspirituality, therefore, Confucianist influential status in society taste is re-consolidated. Yangming also annotates the origin, characterand the status of the arts. His learning and aesthetics practice confirms the characters of the School of Mind.Yangming makes Confucian aesthetic fundamentals more spiritual, While making it a deep-seated theory. He solves the contradiction of the more marked conflict between form and substance of Confucian aesthetics. Due to its reasonable aligning for feeling and principle,aesthetics of Mind refrains from hostility between feeling and ration. Itenables Confucian aesthetics to illuminate the reality more profoundly. The aesthetics of Mind also exerted a deep influence on the following poetry and aesthetics, such as the liberation of individuality in late Ming-dynasty, and the Mordern Voluntarism aesthetics. Still some ideas of them are of great revealing significance for the contemporary philosophy and aesthetics.