| Fang Dong-mei is an influential philosopher and esthetician in the twentieth century. He contributed himself to reconstructing traditional Chinese culture. He is one of the early representatives of Chinese scholars attempting to modernize Chinese traditional life aesthetics in the twentieth century. As a thinker who had a sense of responsibility for his nation, he made great efforts to build the perfect life mode for humankind all his life. For this purpose, he integrated Chinese and western culture, even all kinds of values of human being with an ontological concept--'universal life'. So Fang Dong-mei's theory takes on such characteristics as compatibility, harmony, organism, and transcendency. Therefore, it is disputable to put him either into the school of Neo-Confucianism or into the school of Neo-Taoism, for his theory has already transcended school bounds.In the aspect of aesthetics, instead of analyzing concrete aesthetic experience or art theory, Fang Dong-mei directed us to human being's self-transcendence and its ideal life mode by rebuilding a brand-new value system of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. On the whole, Fang Dong-mei's life aesthetics focused on the following four questions: firstly, how to use the value unity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty to explain the life system of human being and nature; secondly, how to rejudge the essence and value of beauty in the new life system; thirdly, how to explain the value relation between human being and nature within the new life system; fourthly, how to bring forward perfect personality by integrating western and eastern culture resource. The answers to such questions revealed Fang Dong-mei's unique concepts on life, aesthetics, space-time and personality.There are two basic clues in this paper: one is to expound Fang Dong-mei's main viewpoints about the questions mentioned above; the other is to analyze the oriental and western origins of his thoughts, and to examine the efficiency of his theory in solving Chinese aesthetic problems by comparing his theory with that of Zong Bai-hua, Zhu Guang-qian, Xu Fu-guan and Wang Guo-wei.Fang Dong-mei combined western value philosophy and life philosophy of Plato, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Whitehead with the view of Chinese life and value in Chinese classics such as Zhou-yi, Zhong-yong, Lao-zi, and Zhuang-zi. And then brought forward an ontological conception 'universal life' to summarize the main characters of Chinese view of universe and life. From the point of its ingredient, 'universal life' includes six principles, they are life, love, feeding, synthesis, harmony, and assimilating; From the point of its development, it will go through six stages of world of the world of material, the world of body, the world of soul, the world of art, the world of morality, and the world of religion. As a life noumenon, 'universal life' gives life and life spirits to human being, with the spirits, mankind would step up his life values in the end. The new life system which takes beauty and goodness as ingredients of life was established to help man restore the losing values in modern society, it take beauty and goodness as life ingredients. Compared with metaphysics of morals of Neo-Confucianism, Fang Dong-mei's theory can be called a kind of metaphysics of values. His purpose was to build a transcendental base for values by this way, and use it to enlighten mankind to reflect original life mode and restore it in modern society. So his theory is of great significance today.But on the other side, the real developing process of traditional Chinese culture was not the same as what Fang Dong-mei had conceived. The fact is that Confucian established Chinese morality, and Taoist established Chinese aesthetics. Morality is rational, which needs to be set up between experience and metaphysics, but aesthetics relies more on experience, because aesthetic pleasure of man only come into being when he enjoys nature or arts directly, there is no pre- placed concept between subject and object. Fang Dong-mei ignored the major difference between morality and aesthetics in traditional Chinese culture, and almost treated them as one thing, that is a big mistake. After analyzing the ontology and methodology he used to explain Chinese values, we can see that they were originated from Plato's value philosophy and Christian theology, not from traditional Chinese philosophy, that explains why he misconstrued Chinese values. Western thinking made Fang Dong-mei deviate from real Chinese culture step by step, and tend to accept theology gradually.As a whole, Fang Dong-mei's life aesthetics is more profound than epistemological aesthetics, because it took the value of beauty as an inherent ingredient of life. Such theory revealed the essence of aesthetics. But on the other side, his mistakes caused by using western method and ontology to explain Chinese aesthetics warned us that we should stand firmly on national characteristics in rebuilding modern Chinese aesthetics, otherwise it will be difficult to make a real progress; in the development of Chinese aesthetics.
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