Wang Guowei’s Life-aesthetics On Life Misery

For thousands of years, the aesthetic object of traditional Chinese aesthetics has been considered as the relationship between human and the nature and society, with the absence of self-consciousness and life-consciousness.Under the ethical worship of "limitless birth and limitless transformation", the individual life experience was ignored.Wang Guowei integrated German classical aesthetics and Chinese traditional philosophy, created Chinese life aesthetics with the spirit of humanism to read the bitterness of life.The pain of life roots in the desire. The relief of pain asks for removing them. There are some distinctions of religionary or literary, graceful or magnificent between the two pathways to get the relief while they share different artistic conceptions and aesthetic or ethical confusion as well. In the example of Comments on "Dream of Red Mansions", Wang Guowei analyzed the reason causing life misery and the way how to relieve it with his irony on the theory of limitless birth and limitless transformation in traditional Chinese culture. His works criticized Chinese optimistic aesthetic predilection based on western philosophy and advocated that Chinese Life-aesthetics should get the pessimism, tragedy and pathos of life involved.Wang Guowei inherited the basic aesthetic thoughts from the West, and reconstructed Kant and Schopenhauer’s "disinterestedness in aesthetic appreciation", defined the concept of "elegant" and "spectacular","dizzy" and other aesthetic category. He introduced the concept of "tragedy" into China, and thought the Dream of Red Mansions of the tragedy of "tragedy". Meanwhile analyzed the pain of life, Wang Guowei finished the criticisms on Schopenhauer. Sincb he draw the conclusion that liberation eventually cannot be got due to the aesthetics and ethical dilemmas, Wang Guowei finally gave up his study of Schopenhauer and Philosophy. There are lots of sayings about Wang Guowei’s suicide, which has become a kind of cultural phenomenon. However, from his interpretation on the Dream of Red Mansions, we can find that his suicide does not counter with his thinkings, but harmoniously become a part of his aesthetic practice.