| At a special time in history when the West collided with the East,the old times gave way to the modern times,the traditional culture found itself in predicament,and the Western civilization embarked on self-reflection,Liang Qichao,a man who was concerned for both the society and the individual,a patriot and a cosmopolitan,and a man who readily took on his shoulders the double responsibilities of renewing the national spirit in order to strengthen his motherland and promoting the idea of cultivating taste and enjoying life in order to help save the common people from suffering,advanced a unique poetic outlook on life based on his notion of "taste" for the sake of the prosperity of the Chinese nation as well as the happiness of all the people in the world,after absorbing the cream of both the Eastern and the Western cultures while rectifying their defects and blended external pioneering—a prominent component of the modern way of living—and inner happiness—an ideal state of mind advocated by traditional Chinese culture—into a harmonious whole.His views on the cultivation of a "tasteful" personality and living an ideal "tasteful" life suggested building the quality of "pleasure" into the journey of life of "laboring" and combining poetic beauty with real life in which one seeks knowledge and fulfills responsibilities and were full of the wisdom of the Middle Way lifestyle that puts emphasis on passion and harmonious development of every living being.This dissertation studies Liang's notion of taste and tries to bring out its unique meaning and inspiration that can be drawn from it.It begins by discussing what taste is."Taste" itself is an abused term,but Liang used it as a symbol of his unique thoughts.Not only did Liang's "taste" have elements that could be found in different aesthetics such as the theory of artistic essence,the theory of artistic function,the theory of the essence of aesthetic feeling,the theory of the effect of aesthetic feeling and the theory of the value of aesthetic perception,but also it was elevated to be a serious term belonging to the realm of the philosophy of life.The content of Liang's notion of taste was profound and far-reaching. First,Liang used taste to define the nature and function of art.Taste was feeling.Taste was pleasure.Through emphasis on the two facets of "taste",Liang revealed the true nature of art—a unique and independent aesthetic perception process based on "feeling" and "beauty".Art moved people by the feelings it expressed and delighted people by the beauty it had.Vigorous feeling and delightful beauty formed the true quality of artistic experience. Thus,taste not only defined the aesthetic quality of art,but also prescribed its value and function.In Liang's understanding,the fundamental value of art lay not in its "usefulness" of directly providing cognitive,ethical and social functions,but in its seeming uselessness of providing "taste" of life,through which art benefited people and interacted in a delicate manner with society.Liang's idea of tasteful art reveals the inner relationship between the qualities of art and its influences on life.His idea is a unity of "art for life' sake" and "art for art's sake",and a unity of the theory of artistic essence and the theory of artistic value. Second,Liang used taste further to explain the nature of aesthetic perception experiences or the sense of beauty.In Liang's works,taste is almost a substitute for "the sense of beauty" and stands for the core of aesthetic feeling.Liang's notion of"taste" expresses his understanding of aesthetic feeling in three ways.1) The emphasis on the delightfulness of aesthetic feeling.The aesthetic feeling proves itself through delight.Whether taste is present or not can be revealed by whether one feels delight or not.Liang's expression of aesthetic feeling through taste reveals the noumenon quality and unique value of the delightfulness of aesthetic feeling.2) The covering of the complexity and diversity of aesthetic feeling or delight.Liang thought that although aesthetic feeling inevitably demonstrated itself in some form of enjoyment and satisfaction,the delight must be complex and diverse.It cannot be and should not confine itself to simple pleasure.What is more exhilarating is emotional excitement and satisfaction that are more complicated than jocosity and pleasure.It can be pain followed by excitement or a feeling of pain and delight at the same time.It can also be a comprehensive sentiment that includes many different emotional factors such as grief,pleasure,sorrow,and joy.Taste is just a term that includes enjoyment as its basic quality and encompasses at the same time more factors than pleasure.3) The revelation of the characteristics of aesthetic feeling as being super-utilitarian and spiritually free.According to Liang,"taste" took "no material gains" as its property and condition.It embodied the inner desire of life and was characterized by a non-utilitarian voluntariness and freedom.Therefore,Liang's discussion of aesthetic feeling via the notion of "taste" undoubtedly reveals the true nature of aesthetic feeling,i.e. freedom.The purpose of Liang's using "taste" to reveal the nature and value of art and aesthetic perception is to expand such quality and value to every field of real human life. As a matter of fact,his explanation of the connotation of "taste" and the definition he gave the term all had their roots in human life and were accomplished in the context of the philosophy of life.Third,in Liang's eyes,taste was the driving force behind life and also where the value of life resided.Liang pointed out that life was activity and creation;human activity and creation took mental energy as their driving force;and taste was the free mental impulse that found pleasure in endless creation and therefore could provide a forward-pushing momentum for life.At the same time,taste in the form of the pleasure of the mind gave life value.Liang thought that pleasure demonstrated the charm and value of life,and taste was pleasure.Such pleasure made working and life an enjoyment and helped an individual get lifelong happiness.Clearly,"taste" is the ideal way of living.It should not be just one of the experiences one gets from life,but life itself.The nature of taste is the unity of what is desired and what has been done,the unity of action and value.Liang lauded "taste" high to the level of the faith of life and the status of life itself and developed it into "the doctrine of taste".Liang's "doctrine of taste" is an outlook on life that considers "taste" to be the foundation of human life.This doctrine continues,expands and diffuses random and short-lived tasteful experiences from artistic activities,aesthetic perception processes and daily life into a long-lasting attitude of life which includes understandings and realizations about what life is,thus making the daily life we are creating and living pleasurable and charming.It is clear that through the notion of "taste" Liang not only reveals the true meaning of art and aesthetic perception,but also the true meaning of life. Logically speaking,Liang achieved his understanding of the meaning of "taste" in a gradual and generalized manner,which started from art and expanded to aesthetic appreciation and life.But basically,his elaborations on taste were all rooted in human life that was internally linked up with aesthetic perception,art and poetic quality.It can be seen that,through "taste",Liang produced an aesthetic framework based on the trinity of art, aesthetic perception and life.Since "taste" is so important to the life of an individual,and is the force that drives daily life forward and where the value of life resides,a question of formidable size arises:how can one live a life of taste? The path to such a life Liang pointed out for us is molding our temperament,heighten our mental outlook and doing everything in our daily life with an attitude consistent with the doctrine of taste.The significance of taste to life is based on the significance of emotion to life.Liang's theory of emotion is an important theoretical support for his outlook on tasteful and poetic life.Starting from life,Liang connected emotion with life to decode emotion,pointing out that emotion was the most sacred force in human society and a grand mystery within the universe.Emotion was an inner energy that directly caused human action.It was the prime mover of life.It entered the secret,subtle and inconceivable parts of life in an instinctual and individual way that could not find universal and rational normalization.With force that transformed instinct to super-instinct,reality to ideality,individual to super-individual and the ability to maintain a balanced relationship between the internal and the external, passion and rationality,emotion became the gateway to the ultimate depth of life where "my thoughts are combined with my life as one," and "my life is combined with the universe and the common people as one".Taste was an emotion in the first place,and emotion was the condition,component and nature of taste.But,not all emotions were taste. Taste was the emotion that had the strongest driving power and the strongest ability to link up the inner realm with the external world,and thus made life meaningful,pleasurable,and reasonable.It was different from common emotions,in Liang's words,in its unifying interest and responsibility.Responsibility generated and expanded one's interest in life and made taste last long.In this sense,it was necessary for a unified entity of interest and responsibility to be achieved.But at the same time,both interest and responsibility took themselves as their own foothold and both were the objects of life's inner aspiration.This fact provided the possibility for the two to be united.The unity of interest and responsibility demonstrated itself in action as the unity of "willing to do" and "ought to do",in a cause as the unity of "respecting one's work" and "taking delight in doing one's work",in inter-personal relations and relations between man and nature as the unity of giving full play to one's own and others' abilities and fully respect nature,and in a life course that was progressing continually as the unity of personal creation and social evolution and the creating evolution of the universe.Therefore,"taste" with the quality of responsibility in itself was a lofty emotion that had unified beauty with kindness,passion with rationality,inner mind with the external world,oneself with others,man with nature. Such taste was what people believing in the doctrine of taste thought could carry out the doctrine of taste to the fullest,and could only be achieved by molding one's temperament. Since emotion was the primary and fundamental quality of taste,the degree of the density and elegance of emotion decided the existence and fullness of taste.Liang suggested carrying out taste education aimed at cultivating taste in the form of emotional education. As art was the best way to decode the mysteries of human emotions,emotional education was in turn led to art education.Liang thought the "best tool" for the emotional education was art.The expression of human emotions in artistic works in the most complicated, delicate and brilliant manner and in the most beautiful form creates a unique empathic effect,making art a magic weapon for cultivating temperament and interest.However, since the empathic effect of an artistic work depends on the temperament of the artist and his ability to express emotions,the artist naturally becomes an important practitioner of emotional education.An artist should be aware of this solemn responsibility and try to fulfill this mission in the following two ways.In the first place,he should "cultivate in themselves elegant temperament",and secondly,he should express exquisite emotions "through excellent techniques".Liang thought the central part of emotional education was art education that entertained,making it clear that emotional education should be conducted in such a way as to guide actively along the natural course of emotional development,not to suppress in a passive manner against the general trends of emotional development.His approach to emotional education was not one that suppressed and gave up perception,but one that gave full play to and adroitly guided perceptual impulses.He advocated letting people express their emotion so as to cultivate their taste,exalting their emotion so as to correct their taste and expand their emotion so as to broaden their taste. Emotion freely and elegantly expressed,with an expanded content and space,is emotion that is free from personal anxieties,and sincere,pure,rich and profound.According to Liang,this emotion is the emotion of "the virtuous" who is free from anxieties.As a matter of fact,being a virtuous man who is free from anxieties is not just what can be depicted with such a term as "emotion",but rather it signifies an ideal state one hopes to achieve in one's life.Reaching such a state is "the paramount goal of emotional education".What is expressed in "the virtuous is free from anxieties" is a state of mind consistent with Liang's notion of taste that is achieved by forming an outlook on life that puts premium on being benevolent,by not caring about success or failure,gain and loss,and by keeping an optimistic attitude toward life.Liang thought this state of mind to be ideal because it gives an individual the feeling that one's inner mind and the external world,and man and nature, are combined as one.Such unity is just the highest mental state mankind strives to attain. What is more,what is special about this mental state is the feeling of "self-contentedness", or to be more exact,the feeling of "finding oneself in no situation in which one is not oneself".Liang used "self-contentedness" to explain the unique features of the state of tasteful life.His view of "self-contentedness" was largely based on ancient theories on self-contention and drew heavily from Confucian doctrine and the idealist philosophy of the Song and Ming Dynasties.According to ancient scholars,self-contention was the best way and the purpose to learn the Way of Nature.Its ultimate significance was a mental state achieved after an individual's wholehearted endeavor,i.e.a mental state with no external restraints or obstacles,as natural and sprightly as the kites fly in the air and fish jump in the water,featuring seamless integration with nature,boundless,and offering endless enjoyment.The starting point of Liang's elaboration on "taste" was exactly the significance of self-contentedness as a mental state,which included humanity exaltation, energetic vitality and spiritual freedom.He explained the "self-contentedness" phenomenon of the state of taste as follows:the state of taste is a state of life that is free from the constraints of worries about advantages and disadvantages,so in this state one feels happy and tireless and can freely do what he wants to do;the state of taste is a state where one feels highly spirited and independently minded;the state of taste is a happy state of life where the external world and the inner mind,the self and the nature are linked up in a natural way.The state of taste Liang promoted and the traditional notion of self-contentedness share much in common in terms of pursuing an easy-going,satisfied and sprightly mental state.What is more,to achieve the state of taste,one is to rely on the traditional method of self-contentedness.That is,one can only achieve that state through his own effort,and this effort refers to none other than his mental creation.According to Liang,every state is the result of one's mental creation.Because of the differences in psychological "Vorstruktur"(fore-structure),an individual with values different from other people will get a totally different experience when faced with the same situation,based on which Liang pointed out that an individual's mind was capable of being independent of external influences and getting rid of the confinement of the inevitable mechanical stimulus-response cause-and-effect linkage,thus making it possible for man to stop worrying about material gains and free himself from a passive state in which he is constrained by external situations and enter a mental state of infinite freedom.As a state, taste is the result of one's active mental endeavour.As a state with freedom,taste is crystal clear without utilitarian restriction and vast enough to go beyond one's mental perception. Liang absorbed the traditional idea of self-contentedness which suggested the first thing to do was to mold one's temperament and his idea of cultivating taste put emphasis on earnest efforts to attain a free and contented state of mind,especially an in-depth understanding of life in the following two aspects:the first is the understanding of "the incompletion of the universe",which implies that one should do away with anxieties about success or failure so as to foster "taste".To this,Liang offered explanation in three steps.First,he advocated "breaking the constraints of worrying about success and failure".He would often use the sixty-four hexagrams in I Ching beginning in Qian(Force) and ending in Weiji(Not Yet Completed) as evidence to explain that the endless evolution of the universe indicates that the ultimate outcome of a person's limited span of life is "zero success",and thus achieved a completely abandoning of a stubborn seeking of material gains.Next,he promoted the idea of "laboring".Since the ultimate outcome of life is "zero success",what is the right attitude that one should adopt toward life and doing things? Upon successfully breaking the constraints of worrying about gains and losses,Liang promoted the idea of "laboring" in a sense that goes beyond personal success and failure.On the one hand,he looked for evidence in the long span of history to give positive comments to events that seemed failed at the first look.By linking current failure with future success,accomplishments in one place with benefits received in another place,personal sacrifice with social progress, limited personal efforts with endless evolution of the universe,he brought out the positive values and profound significance of human activities that could be viewed as failed efforts because of the limits they had.At the same time,he pointed out that it was human nature to carry out various activities.Man had an inner demand for activities.His theory thus linked up activities with man's inner needs and provided theoretical support for the possible realization of a tasteful life that featured the harmony of the external world and man's inner heart.Furthermore,Liang advocated "efforts" out of one's own free will as tasteful activity. If human activity is free from the concerns for personal gains or losses,mankind is then given the greatest freedom to do whatever he want,and thus live his life in a tasteful manner.Secondly,"There is not a self":when one bothers oneself with no anxieties about personal gains or losses,he is bound to get taste.The key to getting rid of the anxiety about gains or losses is to stop being selfish and "clinging to the self",which requires one to broaden his mind and understand the "non-self" phenomena in the first place.Liang mainly used Buddhist concepts to explain the "non-self" phenomena.He pointed out that the Buddhist teaching,"All existence is impermanent," indicates that the "self" is always changing and without a constant entity and the Buddhist Law of Dependent Origination reveals the inter-dependency of all existence,which shows that the "self" cannot exist independently.After having a clear understanding of the notion of"non-self",one needs to bring this knowledge into real world practice and turn it into real experience.However, when it comes to transition from "knowledge" to "practice" and getting a real mental experience of "not-self",Liang drew more on Confucian ideas on self-cultivation.In his eyes,the path to the realm of "non-self" starts from one's personal life and continues in an expanding manner to include the society and the world as its final points.First,one starts by "loving his kinfolk" in order to trigger the awakening of "compassion",and then by proceeding from friends to strangers,from the near to the distant,from man to nature, reaches the supreme vast and free realm of harmonious unity with the universe.A person who has arrived at the "non-self" realm will have a spirit that roams freely in the universe and a mind that is bound by nothing.With no anxieties about gains or losses bothering him, he will experience total spiritual freedom and joy.All in all,through mental awakening, stopping clinging stubbornly to the "self" and attaching the value of an activity to the activity itself,an individual can get delight and pleasure in the process of an activity and life rather than from the result of an activity and life,so as to have a broad and carefree mind of taste,a long-lasting and stable tasteful psychological structure,which makes it possible for him to always maintain a high enthusiasm toward life no matter whether he succeeds or fails,gains or loses.The tasteful spiritual realm symbolized by "the virtuous is free from anxieties" is the mental basis for realization of a livelihood of taste.When that realm is implemented and carried out in real life,it is free life and free activities without the binding of narrow pursuit of material gains."Doing things for purpose of no material gains" is the ultimate goal of the doctrine of taste and the ultimate fulfillment of taste.Life is a process.A person lives his life for "purposes" and doing things continuously.Thus, the expression of taste in life and the vehicle of taste in real life are the dynamic actions and meaningful free activities.The free activities are not confined to nature and artistic appreciation;they involve education,learning and all other endeavors of the human societies.Taste in Liang's understanding as a driving force behind all activities has the characteristic of "involving matters",which is different from the "object involving" property of the vivid and visual tasteful appreciation.In Liang's understanding,taste as the driving force behind all activities has a characteristic of "involving things".He listed labor and career as the first objects of taste and pointed out that man has the nature of loving labor and taking delight in laboring—something that he called "the impulsion of creation", and activities themselves could be the source of joy,not just means for material gains.To carry out an activity and to live one's life in an ideal manner or in a tasteful manner,one should follow the natural direction of one's internal creation impulses rather than,out of utilitarian purposes,forcibly "carry out an activity for activity's sake" or "manage a livelihood for livelihood's sake".On the one hand,as life,taste does not deny and cannot deny utility.Liang's notion of taste,which denotes life itself,has a clear and strong utilitarian connotation:it refers to industrious and ambitious life;life that caters to strong desires and satisfies lofty and proper pursuits;life that tries to fulfill responsibilities and cares much about the welfare of the society and the universe.On the other hand,as taste, life has a quality that pursues "no material gains".Such life is free from the constraints of material desires.It surpasses anxieties about success or failure and therefore is free from the fear of gains or losses and enjoys freedom of choosing anything to do.In Liang's understanding,utility and non-utility,laboring and pursuing no material gains,working and enjoying do not oppose each other.In his notion of a tasteful life,he united the two aspects in a harmonious whole.The theoretical basis and philosophical foundation for his unity is an outlook on life that draws upon Henry Bergson's intuition-creating evolutionism and has the notion of benevolence as its core content.This outlook on life succeeds in linking utility and non-utility in two ways:on the one hand,it links the power of laboring with the creating impulse of an individual rather than the utilitarian purpose for success and gains; on the other hand,it links personal non-utilitarian endeavour with grand utilitarian efforts directed at advancing the development of the society and evolution of the universe.Liang's harmonious mixing of utility and non-utility makes his notion of tasteful life different from other notions of taste that put emphasis on consumption,entertainment,fun and leisure. What is unique about his tasteful outlook on life is that it expands the notion of taste from the fields of art and aesthetic perception to all other fields of human activities that pursues honesty and kindness,and expand the way to experience taste from "looking" to "practicing"—the normal state and the mainstream activity of life,thus uniting free and transcending quality of aesthetic perception with man's real action in the real world and making the delight of poetry become the quality of life itself,not just a decoration attached to life but actually having nothing to do with people's laboring.Liang's tasteful outlook on life,by focusing on the unity of material gains and no material gains,has achieved multiple-level bi-directional integration of different factors of life: contribution with transcending,creation with enjoyment,work with leisure,activity with will,duty with enthusiasm,responsibility with interest,material with spirit,and individual with group.Such integration,when it is realized in an individual's on-going life, demonstrates itself as the combination of action with value,and the co-existence of pleasure and hard working."Integration" is the theoretical characteristic and spiritual essence of Liang's notion of taste.It also endows it with unique value and strong vitality. Taking "laboring" as its state and the pleasure attained from renunciation of material gains as its character,this tasteful outlook on life not only inspired people at the time of national crisis to take delight in "laboring" and lose no heart in face of frustrations,but also comforted their heart.It was significant at the time since it reinvigorated the national spirit and reformed the national mentality and therefore helped to advance the society and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.It also showed great concern for the destiny of mankind.It is a humanitarian ideal that not only greatly influenced the time Liang was in,but also exerted profound influence upon the time to come,and that benefited not only the Chinese nation but also the whole world.It contains a forward-looking reflection on the development of the modern time and points out a way of refocusing on the development of mankind as a whole.At the present time when science and technology advance rapidly and material wealth and man's desires swell,when the mechanization of production and commercialization of human talents lead to more acute alienation problems,its idea on integrating work with interest,action with significance possesses paramount value prospects.
|
PDF Full Text Request