Analysis Of The Aesthetic Thought Of Fang Dongmei

Fang Dongmei is a philosopher and esthetician with outstanding accomplishments in 20 thcentury. Research on his aesthetic thought has begun to take shape. But there are still debate on such questions: whether ‘general life’ is substance or spirit? Fand Dongmei’s ontology origins from china classical philosophy or Platonism and Christian Theology? What’s more, A lot of research has pay more attention to Fang Dongmei’s synchronic view point of art but ignore his interpretation of art history. With the method of combining literature description and comparison research, this article takes “general life” as contact point, believes that ‘general life’,which is the combination of existence and value, is the inheritance of Chines Philosophy, rather than Western Philosophy or theology. The Second chapter discusses air theory in Fang Dongmei’s aesthetic. Fang Dongmei concludes that art originates from "general life" and play an important role in world beautification and humanity improvement. The third chapter organizes Fang Dongmei’s comment about the Hellenistic art, Modern European art and Chinese artreveals which appears in his different works.