The Poetry And The Reason: The Aesthetic Reason Of Su Shi’s Poetry

In the use of language,perceptual gains are called ’feeling’ or ’Feeling’ and rational gains are called ’understanding’ or ’knowledge’.knowledge’,and there seems to be a difference in the hierarchy of knowledge between perception and understanding,and between Feeling and Knowledge.The reason for this difference is the question that this thesis seeks to address.Since Plato denied art the possibility of grasping truth by assigning it to philosophy,Western philosophers have endeavoured to ensure the justification of art by stating that it is truthful.Since then,the debate over whether aesthetics is subjective or objective,or whether it is the unity of subject and object,has been a fundamental divide in the discipline of aesthetics.Plato’s division of truth and the underlying cause of these differences in aesthetic discussion lies in the original opposition between the intuitive-sensual and the logical-rational modes of thinking.Kant connects subject and object through aesthetic activity;Schiller proposes that play can unite the contradictions between the two natures;Hegel claims that aesthetics is emancipatory in nature;Marcuse attempts to resolve human alienation through a new sensual revolution;and Adorno’s aesthetic rationality,among other theories,all coincidentally focus on aesthetic activity as a bridge between reason and sensibility.The ability of aesthetics to resolve dichotomies lies in the fact that aesthetics,or art,begins with sensual materials and points to the purpose of rational cognition;unlike the grasp of concepts,aesthetic rationality is a creative cognition in which the full nature of man is presented.Taking Su Shi’s poetry as an example,we can see that subject and object,emotion and reason are not one or the other,clear-cut,and that the exposition of"reason" in Su Shi’s works sometimes comes from the expression of "emotion";and the rendering of "emotion is more penetrating by virtue of the presence of ’reason’.Therefore,there is not enough evidence to suggest that the involvement of the rational element undermines the aesthetic power of poetry as art,and that true art is the creation that blends sensibility and rationality,"poetry" and "thought" to the extreme.This thesis takes aesthetic reason as an entry point,and discusses how the aesthetic reason presented in Su Shi’s poetry contributes to the literary value and ideological height of the poetry from three levels: the realm of imagery,the realm of philosophy,and the realm of the void,in an attempt to provide a new interpretation and explanation of Sushi’s poetry.