The Study On The Thoughts Of The Leisure Aesthetic In SuShi

1Because academia pays little attention to aesthetics of leisure, the research on Su Shi’s ideas about the taste of leisure is retarded. Therefore, first of all we will probe into the connotation and nature of leisure and taste of leisure. From the point of view of etymology,“Xiu”means that people free themselves from material stress, which is an affirmation of free time and space;“xian”means that people free themselves from cultural environment, which is an affirmation of the mental state of ease. In leisure activities, human beings are freed from outside restrictive environment: they don’t regard life as a means to an aim, but regard life itself as an aim, and at the same time experience self-existence, self-sufficiency and self-content. In the next place, the nature of leisure is to make human beings become part of nature. Thirdly, leisure can be characterized as the state of freedom, individuality and transcendence. Lastly, we can investigate the constitution of leisure theory from the points of view of ontology, effort theory and realm theory of leisure. As far as leisure aesthetics is concerned, from the point of view of mankind’s being part of nature, leisure is aesthetic. Just as games are the origin of aesthetics and artistic activity, leisure is that of aesthetic activity in a sense. Seen from the growing trends of the subject of aesthetics, leisure aesthetics reflects that aesthetics is going into our life and is facing realistic aesthetic practice.Su Shi’s taste of leisure has its philosophical basis: his emotion-based philosophy, which mainly appearsas the noumenon of emotion, the effort of enjoyment and the mind of void but one. Accordingly, they constitute Su Shi’s leisure aesthetics.Su Shi’s leisure aesthetics is elaborated from these three levels of noumenon, quiet and mind. His noumenon of leisure taste manifests the attention to sensibilities and the return to private fields. His quiet is incarnated in the state that“I am quiet, so I am not disturbed by things”. Being Quiet is the means to the leisure of private fields. Furthermore, it is connected with“wandering”to live a“congenial”life. Seeing from the two levels of“moving”and“game”, we can consider how Su Shi switch from “wandering”to“quiet”and from“quiet”to“leisure”. Su Shi’s aesthetic mind is transcendent and including two connotations: being pleased everywhere and going beyond earthly enjoyment. His transcendent mind of leisure is the peak of theancient scholar-bureaucrat’s aesthetic culture of leisure.Su Shi’s great contributions to aesthetic culture of leisure are not baseless but connected with his active inheritance and deploitation of previous aesthetic thoughts of leisure. He inherits from Confucian school the spirit of being part of nature shown in Confucius and Yan Hui’s happy living together and playing musical instruments and dancing leisurely with the breeze in the wild. He is also greatly affected by the quietness embodied in Leisurely Wandering by Zhuang Zi. Later Su Shi develops this kind of leisurely wandering into“the congenial mind of satisfactory not differential from leisurely wandering”. However, it is Tao Yuanming who impresses Su’s leisurely life in his personality, who voluntarily left off public affairs and escaped to the wild nature to seek his own leisure, where man’s nature of being part of the wild nature is fully realized. While absorbs Tao’s courting quiet personality, Su criticized and transcends Tao’s severe dependence on wild nature . In addition, Bai Juyi inspires Su in the boundary of leisure from earthly point of view: A person doesn’t need to achieve leisure by escaping from secular world to countryside . The importance of the midway hermit theory lies in the way that leisure is realized by basic material guarantee from being official, and in the way that the personality of freedom and novelty of ancient scholars is acquired in the leisurely and aesthetic life. Su Shi surpasses Tao and Bai basically----by an extramundane mood, he no longer confines leisure to nature or wealthy life, but be joyful in the secular world.As is seen from the above, Su Shi’s ideas of leisure and aesthetics which based on the philosophy of emotion is more profound than Tao and Bai’s and easier to be accepted by later scholars. His taste of leisure is not superficial gastronomy, but deep reflections of life in ancient scholar-bureaucrat culture and the questioning of the meaning and value of life. Though it comes into being in ancient China in pre-modern period, its profound reflections of life, its emotion of leisure and its transcendental mind of leisure brings forth a lot of fruitful revelation to modern leisure society.