The Study And Reflection On The Aesthetic Thoughts Of Lv Ying

Lv Ying is one of the most significant scholars in contemporary Chinese academic world, comprehensively dedicating to several fields like translation, literature theory,literature criticism,and aesthetics as well with huge contribution and achievement. Since 1950s, Lv Ying has gradually converted his focus of research from literature to aesthetics, specializing in the main aesthetic issues such as the essence of beauty and the aesthetic feeling. Then, he firmly put forward with his characteristic opinion of basic aesthetic view in limited exposition, which was always named "subjective group", that was beauty is the appearance of the objects in human’s mind, or the ideas formed in real world in another word. As a result, Lv Ying won a place for himself in the heat debate on aesthetics in 1950s, confronting with other three groups similarly popular at that time.Nevertheless, the aesthetic thoughts of Lv Ying was not paid enough attention, compared with other scholars’ opinions on that area. Even more, Lv Ying himself has been belittled for a long period by the professions, and that also means it is impossible for him to get a judgment impartial and objective. For instance, his aesthetic thoughts were roughly attributed to the group of Idealism by Cai Yi and Zhu Guangqian, which led to the countless criticize and the ignorance of the advantages of his aesthetic theory. Therefore, the essay endeavor to restudy the main part of Lv Ying’s thoughts on the background of that time.The first chapter summaries the core of aesthetic thoughts, in detail, of the view of the essence of beauty of Lv Ying in static mode, conforming to the perspective of study of Lv Ying as well. Based on the definition of the essence of beauty made by Lv Ying--a social consciousness originating in social life, the paper deems that sociality and subjectivity are the two major characteristics of Lv Ying’s aesthetic. On the one hand, Lv Ying showed close concerns on the social background in which beauty exists, summing up the essence of beauty to a kind of idea appearing and gaining its maturity in social life, which is the reflection of human toward the outside and will change with the transformation of social life. Meanwhile, the ideas of beauty do will have some impacts on the social life in particular ways, like aesthetic education and so on. On the other hand, Lv Ying was also devoted to highlighting the subjectivity factors, in another word, the effect of human themselves during aesthetic activities. He insisted that beauty in deed is a kind of idea of the subject, instead of a property of the object, which means the essence of beauty is the product of humans’ thoughts upon the objects.In order to demonstrate further, Lv Ying selected three methods including argument, example illustration, and direct exposition. Besides, he emphasized that the criterion of judgment of beauty depends on human, reckoning that whether an object is beautiful or not is determined by the subject out of their own needs. Everything that is deemed as beautiful inevitably has some benefits for people themselves, and the idea of beauty symbolizes the pursuit of human of happy life, which appears during the procession of aesthetic activity.The second chapter compares the essence of beauty of Lv Ying with that of other three aestheticians so as to find both the similarity and difference on this issue,what’s more, to reveal the peculiarities of Lv Ying’s own theory in a dramatic way, putting all the aesthetic thoughts back to the heat debate on aesthetic problems. Firstly, Lv Ying totally disagreed with Cai Yi for his ideas like’ beauty is the typical model’ or ’beauty is the attribute of object’, denying the way of thinking that is mechanical and rigescent in use of researching on aesthetic issues,partly because no one is able to make a clear definition of typical mode,moreover, equating beauty with attribute is like regarding aesthetics as a branch of natural science whose main study method is quantitative research, through which we can hardly answer "what is beauty". While, Cai yi fought back by condemning that Lv Ying’s view on the essence of beauty is Idealistic, on account of the innate conflict between material and idea existed in philosophy. As for the theories presented by Zhu Guangqian like "beauty is an attribute of art" or "beauty emerges after the interaction between the subjectivity and objectivity", Lv Ying also refuted it violently by searching for their drawbacks separately from the reality and philosophy, accordingly, Zhu Guangqian stroke back from three perspectives, holding that the aesthetic opinions of Lv Ying is changeable and chaotic which not only confuse the term of the idea of beauty and social consciousness but also simply treat beauty and the idea of beauty as the same,and that is the utter disobedience of the principle of materialism. To put it briefly, both Lv Ying and Cai Yi kept foothold on the real life, although the could not reach consensus on whether beauty is determined by subjectivity or objectivity. Meanwhile, Lv Ying and Zhu Guangqian showed similar interests on the factors of aesthetic subject, but had different views about the status of social factors in aesthetic activity. Gao Ertai, as another representative of the group of subjective aesthetics, always persisting in that beauty is a subjective judgment, thoroughly relevant with humans’thought. However, Lv Ying and Gao Ertai started their study from diverse approaches while advocating the importance of subjectivity simultaneously.The third chapter focuses on both the gain and loss of aesthetic thoughts of Lv Ying, introspecting the various reasons that finally caused the tragedy of Lv Ying and his aesthetic opinions in terms of the historical background. On the one hand, the paper deems that there are three major advantages in aesthetic thoughts of Lv Ying which deserves to be mentioned. The first one is the dimension of study which is comprehensive and dialectical, in light of which he paid nearly equal attention to both the subjectivity and objectivity of aesthetic activity. Second, the clear and rigorous way of research is supposed to be learned from, for he distinguishing the three areas of philosophy, those are ontology,epistemology, praxis and observing aesthetic issues from them without any omit toward any of them. The last one is his stress on the influence of subjectivity, which not only conforms to the tradition of aesthetic study but also embodies his full respect for individuals.On the other hand, Lv Ying swang between subjectivity and objectivity without deciding which one is the determinant element in aesthetic activity, in other words, he neglected the distinction between social consciousness and individual consciousness, having an inclination to understand the term "subject" as a whole, not an individual. It is those flaws that composed of the internal cause of his tragedy, mixing subjective aesthetics with objective aesthetics and covering the uniqueness of each one. Furthermore, the excessive interference of philosophy and some political factors are responsible for such a academic tragedy as external causes. Anyway, restudying the aesthetic thoughts of Lv Ying, as well as the sufferings he had encountered is meaningful for today’s research in the sense of reality.