Formation Of Neo-Confucian Aesthetics In Northern And Southern Song Dynasties

The Neo-Confucians in Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, while constructing their own philosophic systems, put up with many ideas and opinions about literary aesthetics , which has become an important part of the Chinese Confucianism. It is a hard but significant topic to refine the scattered, fragmentary aesthetic viewpoints out of lots of philosophic works and form an organic series and card out a clear way of thinking about the producing and development of aesthetics and at last to construct a complete system of Neo-Confucianism's aesthetics .Because of the above purpose ,this dissertation ,on the basis of many materials , tries to clarify the conceiving and forming of Neo-Confucianism aesthetics in two Song period and constructs a relative clear and complete system of Neo-Confucianism's aesthetics.The dissertation is composed of four parts.Chapter One investigates the cultural background of Neo-Confucianism aesthetics and its essential features , mainly combs the origin and rheology of Neo-Confucianism, claries the centre and border of Neo-Confucianism aesthetics and differentiates the profound relations among Neo-Confucianism and aesthetics , Neo-Confucian aesthetics and other aesthetic forms .And then it states that Neo-Confucian aesthetics is not only a kind of philosophic aesthetics of ontology, but a kind of ethic aesthetics taking morals as the centre and realm aesthetics taking happiness as the highest aesthetic experience.Chapter Two discusses the basic categories of Neo-Confucian aesthetics. Centring on the topic of being harmony between writing and morals ,it analyses the basic connotations of the categories such as morals, spirit, writing and happiness and their aesthetic relations between one another. And the Neo-Confucian, according to their own philosophic ontology constructs a moral and aesthetic model: morals, spirit, writing and morals .And in this model, morals is the logic origin of beauty; spirit is the substantial makeup of beauty and the medium between morals and writing; and writing is, by means of spirit, the morals' perceptual representation, and the vivid picture(aesthetic pattern) from person's sensory organ; and happiness is just the realization of the realm being harmony between writing and morals.Chapter Three probes into the artistic philosophy of Neo-Confucianism. And it, from the distillation of art, mainly analyses the characteristics: emotional expression from...