Thomas Monroe Oriental Aesthetic Thought

Thomas Munro(1897-1974),was born in Omaha Northeast American, is one of the leading exponent New naturalism aesthetics ideology,a world famous esthetician, the founder and organizer of American esthetics institute. People paid close attention to his New naturalism aesthetics ideology, in the research of Munro, the scholars attend to estimate his scientific aesthetics ways through investigate his Towards Science in Aesthetics. As far as I know, nobody had done any research on his Oriental Aesthetics ideology.This thesis studies Thomas Munro's theory with the comparison method, and combines the macroscopic and microscopic view. And from the crosswise and longitudinal, internal research unifies with exterior research, this paper also tries to explore the way Thomas Munro studies the oriental aesthetics. Thus the paper studies his Eastern esthetics ideological content, and then tries to discover overall characteristic of the Eastern esthetics under the western vision and the trend of the theory development. Then as the result this paper seeks the strong point which the oriental aesthetics may be profited, and also avoids the insufficiency. Simultaneously this article to the Munro's East esthetics thought status, the value and its the influence, the contribution, limited and so on has also made the concrete appraisal.This paper consists of three parts, including the introduction. They are the following aspects.The introduction introduces the psychological basis and the background of Thomas Munro's East esthetic theory, and briefly introduces the way this paper uses in studying Munro's theory.First chapter analyzes the philosophy foundation of Thomas Munro's East esthetics thought, the basic theory and the background. Firstly, Eastern esthetics itself is one kind of comparison esthetics, and such kind of esthetics has its own base, they are the need of getting rid of the spiritual crisis and the cultural crisis, and the result of war and the technology. Next, Munro's Eastern esthetics is based on his new naturalism esthetics theory, and is the practice of his scientific esthetics method. Munro studies the process, embarks from the experience, and uses the dialectical thought method when he studies the Eastern esthetics. What's more, he puts the Eastern art and esthetics in a broader scope, which shows his great efforts in correcting some erroneous zones appearing at that time in esthetics research. The Second chapter is the main body of this paper, tries to analyze the content of Thomas the Munro's East esthetics thought from the following aspects: the subjective connotation of the Eastern esthetics, the way of symbolism performance, the Eastern art dialogue relations, and the Eastern art mysticalness as well as the Eastern art spiritual value. The characteristic of Thomas Munro's Eastern esthetics thought relies in that he takes "the subjectivity" as the starting point of Eastern art, and regards "the mysticism" and "the symbol" as the way the Eastern arts perform, and believes that "the spiritual value" is the terminal option of the Eastern arts. And he at the same time studies the form and the esthetic psychology during the course he studies the Eastern art, hence gradually moves towards the connotation through the form.The third chapter overall appraises Thomas Munro's East esthetics thought. Munro embarks from the artistic esthetic main body, and emphasizes that the subjectivity is the main characteristics of the Eastern arts. He not only compares eastern arts and western arts, but also compares the internal arts within the east esthetics, and puts this kind of difference into one kind of mutual connection. But there are still some weaknesses and limitation Munro's can't avoid: his thought hasn't a commanded core; the research is shallow and the research appears some kind of idealism tendency.