Life And Freedom

Wei-Jin period is a heavy and hard time in Chinese history, and it is a time when people's spiritual world obtains great emancipation as well.At that time, the awakened individuals begins to pursue life value and cherish living ideals. Living in a trouble time "full of turbulences and social celebrities rarely die in mature age", and as one of the representatives of the academic circles of Wei-Jin period, Ji Kang's thoughts and behaviors reveals the peculiar features of that period, and his characteristics quite differs from the other scholars. He cherishes nature, pursues individual freedom and nobility, chews human life and tastes the truth of life in a transcending way with a hope to realize aesthetic life. He ignores fame and gain but values life, seeking peace by way of drinking and swinging hammer to forge iron by Luoyang City then, playing the piano when free, or traveling between mountains and waters, sometimes staying out for a few successive days, all these show his elegance out of simplicity. Ji Kang is in pursuit of art spirit all his life, emphasizing artistic aspect of life and emphasizing the being and flavor of life. His cares for human life, for human freedom, and the attention on art's delight are all inseparable from his thoughts on health-preservation.Although having a short life, Ji Kang put most attention to the value and the flavor of the individual's living. He depends on health-preservation,designs a spiritual inhabitable place for people by a thinking way of taste. At the same time, he tries to seek the paths leading them to this nice piritual homestead. He inherits the Early-Qin health-preservation thoughts and combines this sort of health-preservation thoughts with "longivity" as its purpose with his own pursuit of unbound being and life esthetics, thus forming his own special health-preservation view of esthetics, with the following as the main points: the individual should clear up the secular troubles and go beyond such fetters in a way of "nature" and "Peripateticism" esthetics of living, and enter a kind of aesthetic inhabitability. Only in this kind of realm can the individual come to possess the meaning and value of life, and the life be aesthetic and happy. This paper is based on the two monographies《The Theory of Health-preservation》,《Answers on Health-preservation》,and some states in his papers scattered in poems and essays, analyses the theory source ,social cultural background of health-preservation thoughts, reports the characteristics of esthetics,clarify the asthetics meaning about human life,and discusses the influences and enlightenment of Ji Kang's health-preservation thoughts.This paper includes two parts,introduction and text.The introduction part states the reason,intention of the paper research, the existing temperary problems , and the structure of the whole paper.This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter focuses on the origin, development and the aesthetic significance of health-preservation thoughts, analyses the point of the health-preservation thoughts of Taoism, which occupies the basic status in traditional thoughts, points out the three parts of the theory of traditional health-preservation, and gets the aesthetic significance of health-preservation—cherishing esthetics of human life and human being further. The second chapter states the rise of the health-preservation thoughts firstly,and the relationship between Ji Kang and these thoughs in Wei Jin, as to observes the influence on Ji Kang. Then, concludes the basic theory and significence of Ji Kang's thoughts. The third chapter based on the second states the health-preservation thoughts' status in Ji Kang's whole aesthetic theory and their links,then from the point that the soul of Chinese esthetics is human life esthetics, and that Chinese esthetics pursues a beautiful realm of being, clarifies the aesthetic significance of Ji Kang's health-preservation theory. The fourth chapter indicates the influences of Ji Kang's health-preservation thoughts , and the great instructive enlightenment to our modern life.This paper is different from common works on health-preservation, it emphasizes interpreting and analyzing Ji Kang's thoughts on health-preservation from the perspective of metaphysics, and further masters the essence of esthetics on health-preservation,what's more, this paper makes its own explaination on Ji Kang's esthetics thoughts of the health-preservation theory.