Wang Fu-chih Aesthetic Thought

Wang Fuzhi is the culminant figure of the classical Chinese culture. While there is an abundance of literature at home on Wang's philosophical ideas and historical viewpoints, few researches have been devoted to the study of the aesthetic ideas in his works. Based on his philosophic system of Qi ontology, the thesis tries to integrate Wang Fuzhi's philosophy and aesthetic ideas. Using a research method combining historical and logical perspectives, this thesis attempts to explore the significance and value behind Wang Fuzhi's aesthetic ideas by respectively examining his ideas of humanity aesthetics, music aesthetics, aesthetic education, and poetry aesthetics.The beauty of humanity is Wang Fuzhi's supreme aesthetic pursuit and his ideal realm of life. Human beings have to continuously transcend the self-life and the every present, sublimate their personal realm, grasp the infinite wholeness of man and nature, so as to enter a realm of life with a high-degree freedom of spirits, to realize the ideal world of extreme trueness, goodness and beauty, and thus to attain the value and meaning as human beings.Inheriting the Confucian tradition of music as the expression of moral sentiments and a tool of moral education, Wang Fuzhi believes that music follows the principle of Qi with Coherence and Harmony as its inner order, and that it expresses the emotion of goodness. Beautiful music has its own melody and can play the various emotios that arise in one's heart.Wang Fuzhi's idea of aesthetic education is based on his doctrine of good human nature, which enables it to have a profound moral value. An inherent need of humans, aesthetic education enables the natural self and moral self to be neatly unified in the theory of good human nature, thus making people perfect.Artistic conception is the core category of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Wang Fuzhi explicates the artistic conception mainly with the landscape & feeling integration, and explains the continuous generation of images of poetic beauty at various levels by the landscape & feeling relation. He affirms the inseparability of landscape and feeling, and at the same time suggests the three stages of landscape & feeling integration, i.e. "seamless integration", "landscape within feeling", and "feeling within landscape", with "landscape within feeling" as the supreme stage. Besides, Wang Fuzhi points out that in making poetry and appreciating beauty, "spirit" and "rule" should lean on each other, and that everything goes smoothly when the two harmonize. Good poetry should exhaust both the principles of physics and metaphysics and go beyond the superficiality. In his poetry production, Wang Fuzhi pursues a creative mind of instantaneity and intuitiveness, i.e. the instant feeling of aesthetic observation and image creation, also known as "the touch of landscape upon one's heart".