Zhuangzi's Aesthetics Of Survival Research

Existence is the core of the ideology of Zhuang Zi, who stressed the freedom of life of the individual. In his opinion, existence is intimately related with the Dao in his philosophy, which is the driving force for existence. His aesthetics of life is structured around Dao, an endless exploration of the freedom of life. By exploring the relation between Dao and existence, his world of existence consisted of reality and his heart. As for the reality of existence, he analyzed the absurd society, reflecting the man within such a society, proposing an ideal person by promoting life with virtue, which showed his attention to reality; the permanent themes of existence are time, destiny, life and death, which are inevitable in one's life. Zhuang Zi's exploration of time, destiny, life and death is profound and complete, because he solved the puzzle of existence in an aesthetic way, by combining these themes with reality, revealing his natural idea of existence; as for the significance of individual existence, he proposed the idea of"the use of being useless"to guide the individual existence, which marked the beginning of converting aesthetic knowledge into practice of existence. As for the inside world, he invented the concept of aesthetic subject, or aesthetic heart, which could not be realized without a purification, which is the idea of"heart-fasting"; next, he employed the purified heart to feel the world, beautifying the nature, creating the aesthetic principle of"being natural and inactive", such as complete beauty, grand beauty and light beauty; finally he transformed his inner beauty into language, to unfold the beauty of the nature and the poetic imagination of his heart. Meanwhile, his language is also a poetic, a language for listening to the nature. He integrated the reality and heart, and the individual with the world with"tour", analyzing the application field of tour (distance) and the connation of tour (truth) to manifest the value of existence and significance of life.This paper conducted a thorough analysis of the aesthetics of existence by Zhuang Zi, in terms of history, philosophy, aesthetics and literature, employing text analysis, and integrated reflection. The paper expounded the peak of his aesthetics, beauty is the poetic search of individual for the freedom of life. The existence is realized through beauty, which is an immortal flower in the aesthetic philosophy of China.