Liang Shuming's Philosophical Thoughts-Aesthetics

Liang Shuming's thoughts are affected by not only the life philosophy of Henri Bergson but also the conventional Chinese Confucianism. Henri Bergson's life philosophies pay attention to the experience of subject intuition and regard that intuition is superior to rationality. He makes mystery of human life phenomenon. Meanwhile, he brings forth a dichotomy between life reality and physical existence resulted from life impulse. He also criticizes scientific method and promotes material life. Liang Shuming holed Bergson's point view that the universe was created by the life impulse. Under the influence of Bergson he developed the world outlook of universe as life and put forward the doctrine of "universal life", thus Liang Shuming continued Bergson's life theory. In addition, He also developed Henri Bergson's intuitionism. He thought intuition is the only path to connect the relationship between the outer world and themselves. Especially, he explains the Confucius' benevolence by intuition. It laid a solid foundation for modern Neo-ConfucianismAfter coordinating and reading Liang's literature and his research materials, I found that Liang holds many personal views on esthetics, especially on literary esthetics. For instance, he has analyzed the nature of "beauty", has probed into the relationship between the art taste effect and artistic expression form, he especially regarded the artistic impact bringing by music; he expatiated theoretically on the physiology and psychology base of art taste, he truly believed that the society will be more artistic in the future. That is to say, his thinking on aesthetics has treated of some basic issues of aesthetics.The article systematically parses Liang's philosophy and esthetics thoughts mainly with Literature analytical method, and tries to excavate Liang's esthetic spirit and thought via perspective of Liang's philosophy origin. Sternly speaking, Liang isn't an esthetician, but his thinking on literature aesthetics is affirmative in deed. Therefore, the article attempts to excavate Liang's aesthetic thought, and tries to break through the previous frame of research which limited on Liang's philosophy and culture, so as to provide a aesthetic platform for the study of Liang'sthought.