The main content of aesthetic thought in the Western Zhou Dynasty

From the perspective of the form of knowledge on which aesthetic thinking is based, Western aesthetics has generally gone through five stages of development, namely: essentialist aesthetics, theological aesthetics, epistemological aesthetics, linguistic aesthetics, and cultural aesthetics 1. Essentialist aesthetics is an aesthetic thinking tradition centered on the essence of beauty formed in ancient Greece. The essence (Qin Qi imitation essence) is.

What are the main categories of Western aesthetics: the beautiful and the sublime; tragedy, comedy; Ugly

Ancient Greco-Roman Aesthetics In ancient Greece, various arts such as mythology, architecture, sculpture, poetry, and drama were highly developed, which prepared the conditions for the birth of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the product of philosophical speculation on art and aesthetic activities. Greek aesthetic thought was first proposed by a group of philosophers and can be divided into three stages.

The first stage of unrepentance is the pre-Socratic aesthetics, the most important representative of which is the Pythagorean school, which was inspired by the relationship between the length of the middle string and the sound, and believed that the difference between the essence of things depends on and can ultimately be reduced to the proportional relationship of numbers, and put forward the idea of "harmony". In addition, Heraclitus emphasized that harmony is constituted by the opposition between different qualities, which cannot be reduced to numbers.

Democritus's view that man imitates animals became the germ of imitation. In the second phase of Greek aesthetics, the cultural center shifted to the aesthetics of Athens, Plato and Aristotle, becoming representative of the aesthetics of this period. The formal beauty represented by the concept of "harmony" in early Greek aesthetics and the artistic concept represented by the theory of imitation were inherited by Plato.

In Hippias the Great, Plato rebukes the prevailing ideas of beauty, but in Pherib, he is looking for beauty in the complexities of degree, proportion, symmetry, and simple forms of geometry, order, pure tone, and color.

He attaches great importance to the use of inanimate media to imitate people and objects, and believes that the medium does not exist as itself, but as the reproduction of another person or object, which is the earliest symbolic thought.

He was critical of imitation, believing that imitation was creating illusions, and he proposed the theory of three beds, namely the bed of ideas, the bed of reality and the bed of the painter, the painter's bed is the imitation of the bed of reality, and the bed of reality is the imitation of the bed of the idea, so the painter's bed is the "shadow of the shadow".

Plato's exposition of the ideal and imitation of formal beauty became the core theme of later Western aesthetics. In addition, the moralistic principles and inspiration of his art have also had an important influence on later generations. Aristotle's thought is a development of Plato.

The content of aesthetics includes artistic beauty (the beauty of a work of art, which is the main object of human aesthetics), social beauty (refers to the beauty of social things in real life), scientific beauty (refers to the beauty that exists in the creative scientific invention and discovery activities of human beings), and natural beauty (refers to the beauty presented by various natural things, which is the unity of sociality and naturalness).

Artistic beauty: It is the main object of human aesthetics. It is the combination of the artist's aesthetic feelings and aesthetic ideals of life and the beauty and ugliness of life in a beautiful artistic image.

Artistic beauty and art are not the same concept. Art is a form of social consciousness that stands alongside philosophy, religion, and ethics. Artistic beauty is a generalization of the aesthetic attributes of a work of art.

Social beauty: refers to the beauty of social things in real life. Juxtaposed with natural beauty, it is also a realistic beauty. Social beauty is not only rooted in practice, but is itself the most direct form of existence.

Scientific beauty: refers to the beauty that exists in the creative scientific invention and discovery activities of human beings. It is only when human aesthetic psychology and aesthetic consciousness have reached a high stage of development, and theoretical thinking and aesthetic consciousness are blended and infiltrated.

Natural beauty: refers to the beauty presented by various natural things, which is the unity of sociality and naturalness. Its sociality refers to the fact that the broad roots of natural beauty lie in practice, and its naturalness refers to the fact that certain attributes and characteristics of natural things (such as colors, lines, shapes, sounds, etc.) are necessary conditions for the formation of natural beauty.

Clues to the development of Western aesthetic thought.

The history of Western aesthetics, together with the history of philosophy, has gone through a "ontological stage" to an "epistemological stage".

and then to the transition to the "linguistic stage". Corresponding to philosophy, the main purpose of Western aesthetics in the ontological stage is to pursue an independent, ultimate, and universal beauty through specific and individual beautiful things, that is, to make all things the common essence of beauty. (The aesthetic thinkers of this period mainly include Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Plotin, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) Pythagoras and his followers in early ancient Greece began their philosophical and aesthetic thinking from the point of view of mathematics.

Plato made a strict distinction between the concepts of "beautiful things" and "beauty itself". (Through the analysis of a large number of beautiful things, Aristotle reduced the form of beauty to "order, symmetry, and clarity") In terms of methodology, special emphasis is placed on the inductive method. The ideas of empiricist aesthetics are represented by Bacon, Scheufzbury, Hume and Bock.

Bock emphasized the perceptual characteristics of beauty, believing that aesthetics is a perceptual activity. Self-preservation is the instinct of every organism or species to protect itself. The aesthetics of the French Enlightenment is represented by Diderot, and his aesthetic ideas are embodied in the theory of "beauty in the system".

Beauty is in relationships. German classical aesthetics is not only the aesthetic peak of the epistemological stage, but also a peak of Western aesthetics since ancient Greece. At this peak, great aesthetes in the true sense of the word appeared, such as Kant, Schiller, Hegel, etc.

Philosophical texts "Critique of Pure Reason" and "Critique of Practical Reason". Kant's Critique of Judgment, with discriminative judgment as the core, is also aesthetics. According to Hegel, beauty is rooted in the Absolute Idea, which is the sensual manifestation of the Absolute Idea.

According to our opinions, there are two main trends: humanistic aesthetics and scientist aesthetics. The pioneer of humanistic aesthetics is the voluntarist aesthetics represented by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the 19th century. The basic composition of contemporary scientism aesthetics includes naturalistic aesthetics, formalist aesthetics, semantic aesthetics, gestalt psychological aesthetics, analytical aesthetics, structuralist aesthetics, etc.

The history of Western aesthetics is the history of the development of aesthetic thought from ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, to modern Europe and the United States.

To break it down a little bit, it is:

Ancient Greco-Roman Aesthetic Thought.

Medieval Aesthetic Thought.

French Enlightenment aesthetics.

German Classical Aesthetics.

Modern aesthetics.