On Shen Congwen's Life Consciousness

In history of modern literature of our country, Shen Congwen is a writer who has the intense life consciousness. It originates in the influences of glorious Chu culture with a long history, nourishing of hard survival environment in western Hunan, mould of richly colorful nature, indignation witnessing many times the innocent life slaughtered, influence of the national traditional culture and many kinds of western culture, and life anxiety about the national spirit declining. His thinking and exploration of biological phenomena is extremely wide and profound, and therefore the connotation of his life consciousness has rich, broad and profound remarkable characteristic. He tries his best to explore into the significance of life transcendence and ultimatum, mainly by understanding and analyzing the relations between life and nature and the sociality, life and "emotion" and "contingency", life and "rationality" and "will", life and "beauty" and "love", life and "abstract principle" and so on. He takes a profound analysis of the relation between "living" and "life", "life" and "divine nature", and points out "living" refers to human survival and multiplication behavior like food, drink, shelter, clothing, transportation and sex, which is human basic physiological demand, and human exiting prerequisite. "Life" refers to the fact that man should get rid of the money enslaving, holds the simple and honorable human nature, has self-understanding and aware control of his own destiny conforming to the ration, and promotes life understanding outside the scope of his experience, and that man should have the ideal, the spirit, and "the surmounting custom heart and the eye", making the unremitting endeavor for the humanity upwardly. And life full of "divine nature" refers to the form of expression when "life" develops the higher phase and is filled with the ideal to the entire humanity's prospect. This is the bright leap which life develops, from "human nature" to "divine nature", and to complete this kind of leap, life "should surmount the gain or loss of utility and poor-rich rank" to gain "the abstract idea". The highest form of "life" is "fantasy or ideal" "fixing human gaze on human prospect". Shen Congwen's life consciousness has contained rich concrete life forms of expressions, such as defending life dignity. pursuing life freedom, yearning for fine life, eulogizing life force, praising and admiring sexual affection and becoming aware of life death, and fixing a gaze on life divine nature. His intense life consciousness not only displays in his subjective ideological recognition, but also specifically unfolds in his literary work. Mainly through describing contrastably two kinds of life forms between the metropolis and the village, he satirizes and criticizes the ugly form of metropolis life, and eulogizes and praises the natural form of life, in order to arouse the "divine nature" of national life to cause it's life light to shine everybody. Shen Congwen's life consciousness has a rich profound significance. All distinctively has manifested the rich and profound significance of his life consciousness, like curing modern metropolis dispirited soul, worrying about the stagnation of life form of village, redeeming modern consequence, developing the spirit of Hunan and recasting national soul, and exploring in historical and reality contradictory conflict, which will certainly give broad and the distant life inspiration to modern as well as future people.