Deviating While Inheriting:The Traditional Cultural Elements in Western Aestheticist Poetics

Bohai University,Jinzhou,China Email:762682183@qq.com

[Abstract]Western Aestheticism originated in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century.At this time,with Europe in turmoil,the people were confused,bewildered,spiritually decadent,and even felt that life was just for death.Art has become the only emotional sustenance.The people believed that they would have a common language and try to get rid of the fetters from tradition through art.This kind of aesthetic criticism seems to be contrary to tradition,but in fact there is an inseparable relationship between the two.For example,traditional literature originally contains the color of aestheticism,and traditional concepts also affect the attitude and perspective of aestheticism on life.

[Keywords]Aestheticism;Secularization;Modernity;The traditional culture

Introduction

Aestheticism,mainly originating in the 19th century when the people had preliminarily acquired a sense of modernization,is a trend of thought with a long history.“Art for art”has run through all the theories of aestheticism,which does not follow the masses and is independent.This is why academic circles believe that there is a gap between aesthetic criticism and traditional culture.In academia,people are used to thinking that there is a huge gap between aesthetic criticism and traditional culture and traditional theories while this is not the case.In reality,with careful analysis,there is a deviation as well as a connection between aestheticism and traditional culture where there is an exploration and analysis of the relationship.

Aestheticism in Traditional Literature

Aesthetics,in order to advertise not to be associated with the“ugly”reality,preach that true art is in conflict with bourgeois life and is opposed to bourgeois hypocritical morality.Therefore,it believes that art should not reflect life and need not take into account morality.The only thing for art to pursue is the form of appealing to feelings and impressions.Most of the works focus on love and joy as their basic themes,with privileged figures for pastime as the main character,emphasizing rhetoric and rhythm,and attaching importance to the description of still life to create visual and auditory beauty.It excludes the elements of nature,society,time,science,and morality from art,which is neither desirable nor possible.Therefore,at a certain point,people will naturally abandon it.But just as it existed,it had a wide and far-reaching impact on Western modernist literary theory and literature.

From the perspective of general and traditional poetics in the West,literature and art are the imitation,reflection and cognition of real life.The social function of literature and art is mainly to influence people through its content factors,and then to improve people.The way to realize the reality.Aesthetic criticism completely denies the cognitive nature of literature and art for real life,and further denies the content factors of literary works,which advocates that literature and art do not improve people’s cognition but use continuous innovation of formal factors,fundamentally change the way people know how to play their social role.

Aesthetic,cognition,and behavior are three concepts that are marked out according to human psychological activities,and“beauty”is generally regarded as a pure form.The construction of aestheticism poetics was initiated under the touch of Kant’s aesthetics.The application of Kant’s aesthetics in the field of literature and art not only directly generated the poetic topic of aestheticism literature autonomy,but also implied another poetic topic of aestheticism.The establishment of individual subjectivity.However,Kant’s aesthetics only provides a theoretical starting point for the generation of aestheticism,and it is difficult to cover the entire poetics of aestheticism in terms of specific connotations.When we inspect the history of aestheticism poetry students in France and Britain,we can clearly see that the field of poetry is expanding,and the theme of poetry is also in a state of change to a certain extent.In the 18th century,Kant put forward the concept of independence of aesthetic activities,and literary self-discipline also came from this theory of Kant.But if beauty is only regarded as a pure form,then there are a lot of aesthetic factors in Western literature.The concept of aestheticism has a long history in traditional Western literature.From the perspective of literary concepts,the aestheticist literary concept derived from Kant’s aesthetics is a complex of contradictions.It not only advocates that“aesthetics does not involve interests”,but also believes that“dependence of beauty cannot but involve purpose,knowledge and morality,and therefore involves utility.”It not only emphasizes that“art does not care about reality”,but also believes that“the more abstract and idealistic art is,the more it can reveal the characteristics of the times to us.”“When talking about beauty,most of medieval scholastics believed that beauty was only in form,but few discussed the beauty in terms of content.”,said Mr.Zhu Guangqian.

In fact,as early as the Greek period and the late ancient Rome,aestheticism has already had an inkling of the matter.On the basis of history,the Pythagorean school was the first to explore literary problems.It was the Pythagorean school that ascribed beauty to a category of form.According to the available data,the basic philosophical proposition of the Pythagorean School is:The element of number is the element of all things,and the whole universe is also a number,and should be an overall tune.The Pythagorean school pointed out a direction for the later aesthetic research,which led to the subsequent development of aesthetics after the Pythagoras school to beauty as an abstract idea.But this abstraction manifests itself in a pure form in reality(Lai & Qu,2016,p.2).Plato,Aristotle,Plotinus,Augustine,Thomas and so on are all representatives of this type of literature.Everyone has a different view on this.

For instance,Baudelaire believes that text creation is noble,it can purify all evil,transform ugliness into beauty,and it can even generate beauty;while Flaubert believes that the core of beauty is form;Plato is a utilitarian including art,he believes that art should be useful.Art and beauty are inconsistent in his eyes,and Plato distinguishes them well(Gao,2019,p.84).Aristotle is more changeable who has different opinions in different fields.For example,in political science,Aristotle thinks that beauty is kind,but sometimes he insists that there is a difference between beauty and kindness(Gao,2019,p.84).

Aestheticist poetics,as a modern ideological system,naturally does not leave room in its theoretical system for the super-temporal ideals in the sense of God and Plato.However,the sublation and abandonment of traditional culture by aestheticism is not holistic,but only partial.It discards the specific content of its alien world,and adopts a reserved and absorbed attitude to its entire cultural generation logic and generation structure.This kind of overall absorption and utilization is most prominently manifested as the emphasis on the realistic meaning of imagination and literature and art in aestheticism poetics.

In fact,as early as the middle ages,there were some people who had the idea of aestheticism.But only by the investigation and analysis of the above,it can be basically believed that aestheticism is not as novel as we imagined,it is one that has existed for a long time.Or it can be said that the promotion of aestheticism is not a novelty.Aestheticism has been produced in the Western civilization and has existed in large numbers in the later period.

Traditional Culture and Aesthetic Criticism

Aestheticism may seem difficult to understand,but if we conduct in-depth understanding and analysis,its secular influence is actually very strong.It originated from the collapse of the Western civilization system,and the birth of its literary works was a rapid response to social changes at that time.It came about when the western religious and cultural system collapsed sharply.The literature at that time could be said to quickly reflect the turbulent society at that time.According to thinking and reasoning in general,literature construction must conform to the monistic logic,but British critics of aestheticism believe that art is the purpose of life(Du,2009).

“Art is higher than life”is the world-view of aestheticism,which naturally derives the concept of“l(fā)ife imitating art”while calling for artistic self-discipline,trying to carry out aesthetic enlightenment in the field of artistic life,and make ordinary people’s perceptual ability be promoted to the artists.Therefore,in the process of the development of aestheticism,it is often accompanied by the trend of“aesthetic education”,which was inspired by German aesthetics and was put into practice in the British arts and crafts movement.It was developed by publishing houses,galleries,museums,charities,etc.A series of artistic social organizations,artistic activities and membership,and spread to many countries,promoted the wave of“new art movement”in Europe.

One of the most celebrated representatives of aestheticism is Oscar Wilde(1856-1900),who is an advocate of aestheticism theory and a practitioner of aesthetic creation.In terms of the relationship between art and reality,Wilde believes that art should transcend reality and free life.“Realistic events are the enemy of art.”;“All the disadvantages of art come from the sense of reality.”;“Nature is understanding,but understanding is not art.”;“All bad art work is produced from the description of returning to nature and the objective description of life.Therefore,I believe that all art that‘returns to life and nature’is bad,and the more art is far away from reality,the better it is.The only beautiful things are things that have nothing to do with us.”As for the role of art in life,Wilde believes that it is not art that reproduces life,but that life imitates art.Art is not a mirror of human social life,life is only a student of art,and art is supreme.Some people believe that this fundamentally denies the historical materialism view that social existence determines social consciousness.Others believe that Wilde did not completely deny that social existence determines social consciousness,but that social consciousness is relatively independent.Society.Consciousness may change and develop before social existence,and art,as an advanced social consciousness,has a positive reaction to social existence and positively promotes social development.

Therefore,in the eyes of Wilde,a person can only live in absolute freedom,and only by constantly exploring and enriching the range of his own experience; and a society and an era can only be fully realized when every individual member Only when life is truly realized can it be full of vigor and newness from time to time.However,the actual situation is inevitably different from it,and Wilde clearly see this.

The absorption and utilization of the dual logic model of traditional culture by aestheticist poetics does not only exist in the criticisms of the above critics,but as the most basic thinking mode for aestheticist criticism of the entire poetics construction.The most prominent and vivid manifestation of this existence is that the issue of literary self-discipline constitutes a core issue of aesthetic criticism,and it also constitutes a significant mark of the boundary of aestheticist criticism schools.

From a general view,aestheticism is still at a perceptual stage or still at a problem raising stage for the exploration of the poetics of literature and art to save the worldly life,and lacks detailed analysis and microscopic investigation for some specific operation mechanism of salvation.But,in spite of this,aestheticism’s poetics exploration as well has the quite important value and the significance to the development of this poetics question.

Aestheticism insists that art is everything that can fill up the spiritual emptiness as the result of the times.It is precisely because of aestheticism that people who were vacant in their spiritual life due to the dissolution of their religious beliefs were given life the guidance,and they were given a new meaning to life.

Inherent Concepts of Traditional Culture and Aesthetic Criticism

Aestheticism has not been only influenced by the Western concept of“conformity”,but also by the Chinese concept of“Tao”.According to this,the existence of the so-called“God”,“Idea”,and“Tao”in all their meanings in reality is an eternal existence regardless of the gap between time and region,but it is just the opposite of aestheticism in real life,which is confined to time and territory constraints.God and Heaven do not exist,but humans do exist,so humans need to create a world they want,a world of literature.

Another aesthetic factor with significant aestheticism in ancient Greece,ancient Rome and medieval aesthetics is the non-utilitarian and non-interested concepts of beauty and art.We generally believe that the non-utilitarian and non-interested concept of beauty and art is an aesthetic concept of modern Westerners,but in fact,such ideas existed in the aesthetics of ancient Greece,ancient Rome and the Middle Ages.The aestheticism of the implication of the function of“form”by ancient Greek,Roman and medieval aestheticians can be more clearly highlighted if compared with the corresponding poetic views of aesthetic critics.

Aestheticism is an existence of modernization with modern thinking mode.During its long boom years,the religion was in a period of decadence.At this time,aestheticism critics did not believe in the existence of God and extrasensory perception beyond time.They only believed in senses and time(Du,2009,p.4).Therefore,aesthetic critics can only heal the world and transcend reality in the one dimension of sense and time.It is in such a realistic situation that aestheticism has embarked on a different journey,trying to achieve the goal of transcending reality by enriching the senses in time portion.

In a series of critical articles such as The Decay of Lies and As an Artist’s Critic,Wilde has repeatedly pointed out the mediocrity,boring,humble,and lack of form of real life,and believed that with the development of society and civilization,people will Gradually lose interest in real life.In short,in the eyes of aesthetic critics,whether real life or the natural world is not complete,there are all kinds of defects,so they are all places that need to be surpassed.

Another problem that still exists is that aesthetic criticism places the entire human race in the senses and time.Aesthetic criticism advocates literary self-discipline,that is,the alienation of literature and art.The purpose is to grind people’s hearts and broaden people’s horizons through innovative literature and art,thereby strengthening the development and enrichment of human perception and experience.

As well as Western traditional culture and Chinese Taoist culture,aesthetic critics also take a contemptuous attitude towards real life and the natural material world,believing that the entire existing world and real life have huge defects.

In the past,the academic circles of China usually restricted the practice of aestheticist criticism to the pure field of art,and believed that aestheticist criticism separated literature and art from society and the times,and belonged to a decadent school of bourgeois criticism,which is actually misunderstood.Aesthetic criticism is not only based on the society and the times,focusing on the solution of practical problems;it is also integrated into the cultural trends of the whole times,consistent with the development direction of society and culture,and even to a degree it is also consistent with the socialist movement.

Modern Chinese literary criticism developed under the influence of Western literary thoughts.Aestheticism not only injected fresh vitality and theoretical passion into modern Chinese literary criticism,but also promoted the diversification of modern Chinese literary expression,aesthetic forms and aesthetic style.The modern transformation of Chinese literary concepts and criticism began in the early 20th century.With the continuous advent of Western literary works and literary theories translated and introduced by Lin Shu and others,China’s ideological and literary circles have received unprecedented shocks,and the Chinese literary world,which is eager for the transformation of Chinese literature,has been refreshed.

Implications and Conclusion

Through the above analyses and observations,we can find that the concept of“conformity”in Western culture and traditional Chinese“Tao”has a profound influence on aesthetic criticism.The aestheticism criticism places the whole human being in the unitary world of sense and time,and advocates to create a self-disciplined literature and art field which is different from reality.However,whether influencing or assimilating,in general,the effects of“conformity”and“Tao”on aestheticism have a great impact on the heart and soul of human beings,which touched the origin of aestheticism exploration,but no specific path to research was given,so on this road,various paths of exploration continued to emerge.