The Body Work On Aesthetics, And Yangming

Historically speaking, Chinese culture embodies much of warm humanity, which shows its distinctive features and can be summarized as follows: between the universe and earthly life, human beings are the main object of study; between the human body and human soul, the latter is the focus of inquiry and the inquiry of the mind is approached through practical experience. Its ultimate goal is to attain happiness of the mind. This kind of happiness has the ideal state in an ontological sense of being unified with the heaven and the earth. The entry to this kind of ideal state can not be finalized without the happiness of the mind and aesthetic education; this type of Chinese culture can be thought of as the culture of the mind and soul. Yangming's theory and his aesthetics reformed the traditional Confucianism in the sense that it elevated the inquiry of the human mind in its original substance sense. Within the Neo-Confucianism, Yangming converted Zhu Xi's concept of "the reason of the heaven"(Tianli) into that of "the internal conscience"(Liangzhi), advocating exploring the relationship between human beings and the physical world from the perspective of the substance of the human mind; "the internal conscience" exists in its original substance (Benti) sense prior to human mind, while the attainment of the former depends much on culture or mind self-education, i.e. effort (Gongfu). The two categories are mutually dependent and indispensable, which form a unified organic structure.To sum up, Yangming's aesthetics emphasizes the original substance of human mind; the unity between the objective world and the perceiver, the former cannot exist without the latter; the appreciation of the beautiful things cannot be finalized without the human mind; a sense of beauty can be realized only through intuition, subjective experience and happiness of the mind; the capability of appreciating the beautiful things can only be cultivated through simultaneous practical experience and aesthetic education. In brief, Yangming's aesthetics can be regarded as a sort of practical aesthetics, which emphasizes the unity of practical experience and art education and its ultimate goal is to achieve the extreme happiness of the mind with a sense of an organic whole of the heaven and the earth.This kind of approach to aesthetics does not distinguish the subject and the object, or the perceiver and the world; neither does it separate reason from experience. Unlike the Western aesthetics, it does not treat the physical world as the main object of inquiry without the involvement of the human life. Nor does it treat form as the focus of aesthetic appreciation and investigation. Yangming's aesthetics also has nothing to do with the Western aesthetic concept of "beauty for beauty's sake". The above-mentioned unique features of Yangming's aesthetics may show some similarities with modern Western aesthetics, the so-called "post-subjective", which are based on existentialism and phenomenology. This fact and tendency just manifests the value and influence of the Eastern aesthetics and the possibility of the latter learning from the former.