The second level is the relationship between the artist's life and his works of art. There are three understandings of The Artist's Life: 1, artistic lifestyle; 2. The artist's poetic and artistic life; 3, the artist's life outside of artistic creation, including the artist's daily life as an ordinary person, and his experience and observation of life as an artist. The understanding of 1 has been discussed before. The second understanding is a misunderstanding of the artist's lifestyle, because the poetry of life has nothing to do with the creation of artistic works, and it often hinders this creation. People's legendary descriptions of the lives of some geniuses conceal the most important thing of art-the ability to develop through concentration; Whether you live a poetic life is only related to the artist's temperament, not their talent. In the third understanding, the living condition of the artist as an ordinary person undoubtedly affects the state and mood of artistic creation, and at the same time, his observation or experience enters the work as material or experience material. This autobiographical relationship is the subject of many studies in art psychology and art sociology. However, it is impossible to understand a work of art only from autobiographical factors, because it is not the most essential part of the work. For a work, its form or content is first related to the artist's talent, but has little to do with his experience or observation. Even if there is a certain connection with the latter, it is only indirect and has gone through many links.
However, in addition to the above three understandings of "the artist's life", there may be a more authentic way of understanding: the artist's life is a natural force in him, something that survives, grows and matures in him. The artist's life is not his life as an ordinary person, nor his observation or experience. On the contrary, the latter two are only the appearance of real life. Understanding the artist's life as the artist's observation or experience is a way of understanding since modern times, because it sets people as the main body and understands life as the inner experience of people. But life itself is the premise of all experiences. It emerges, grows and illuminates itself. These natural forces, which grow, emerge and illuminate themselves, appear in the form of talent on artists (it is the unity of spiritual integrity, reality and vitality), and the relationship between this talent and life itself is far more powerful, powerful and essential than the relationship between artists' experience and observation and life. This is because talent is the condensation or individualization of the natural forces of life itself on artists, and its relationship with life itself is direct; However, observation and experience have an indirect and reflective relationship with life, and any good observation and experience itself is based on talent.
The third level is the relationship between a work of art and the life it wants to transform. A life changed by art is a life that is understood and given meaning through the artist's talent. Because the artist's talent is only an individualization or aggregation of life itself, the artist's understanding of life is essentially based on the illumination of life itself. Life illuminates itself, just as life grows by itself. However, human life is historic, and there are great differences in the ways of self-illumination, revelation and understanding of life in each historical era. The historicity of life, the talent of artists and the historicity of works of art are all the same, so we can imagine Schiller's On Simple Poetry and Sentimental Poetry and Hegel's Aesthetics. The different understanding of "what is life" discussed in this paper stipulates the contact way of "art and life" in different historical periods.
Starting from the way of understanding life in western classical times, the life presented by classical works of art is a imitation of real life. Because the ancient world's understanding of "real life" is twofold, this imitation is also twofold: on the one hand, music or Dionysian chorus is an imitation of the original unity of life, on the other hand, plastic arts and epic poems with images are an imitation of the personalized outstanding world of life. Nietzsche thinks that tragedy realizes these two imitations at the same time, that is, it combines the unified spirit of Dionysus with the individualized spirit of Apollo. Because the gods of Olympus have the upper hand in Greece, we can see that the understanding of the sun god can better represent the spiritual tendency of the Greeks. In Aristotle's view, imitation is not a copy, nor a performance, nor a copy plus a performance, but a demonstration or display of realization. The so-called "real life" is the realization of people in the sense of Aristotle, that is, from a potential and accidental person to a realistic person with Excellence or virtue. Man's realization or real life lies in his outstanding actions, and this realization is the nature or emerging and lasting power of man. Therefore, it is not surprising that Aristotle thinks that poetry is superior to history, because poetry presents human realization or human itself in the unity and inevitability of its plot, while history or human real life is subject to contingency, and human nature cannot be revealed in it. Classical art is ideal. It faces the highest sky in the human body and always shows the highest and most perfect possibility of human beings. However, Dionysus' understanding of life still constitutes the background of many tragic conflicts, which is often manifested as a natural force that is painful and destructive to human beings (for example, in King Oedipus), and as an action that transcends boundaries, making people reach the edge or end of the world opened by shining appearance or Excellence, and enter the self-shielding state and darkness of the whole existence. In addition to the order and image world given by the bright sunshine, there are gloomy devouring storms in the sky.
For modern people, because the unified understanding of life in classical times is decomposed into subjective and objective aspects of life, the presentation of art to life is also divided into two different directions. On the one hand, from understanding life as an inner experience, romanticism and modernism emerged: the former expressed the inner experience as emotion, while the latter paid attention to the inner experience as instinct or irrationality. Both of these arts are expressions of inner life. On the other hand, from the objective understanding of life, life has become an institutionalized common behavior and communication, and it has become an alienated state reduced and suppressed by the system, which has led to artistic realism, that is, the reproduction of actual daily life. A more extreme objective understanding is to understand life as a simple display of things. This kind of pure indifference constitutes a feature of French "new novels", and people are things. If romanticism still yearns for the sky-although the sky no longer has classical authenticity, but is only a place of exaggeration, promiscuity and accumulation of tears, then realism only cares about the ground. At the same time, modernism's expression of instinct or life impulse is reflected in its universal preference for sex and violence, that is, indulging in the abyss of human nature. And the new novel turns people into things, and the world becomes nothing at the bottom of the abyss. The historical evolution of modern art is such a process from heaven to underground, and then to abyss and nothingness.
But there is another kind of nothingness, which is not meaningless or nothing, but open, transcending any existence but showing it. The explicit understanding of life forms is to present this "nothingness" in life, and it is an effort to surpass reality through the present reality. This "nothingness" is the opportunity of life, and these moments of insight into opportunities are the moments when people are liberated from the heavy pressure of crowded life. It is a crack in life, a moment of understanding and epiphany, or an "out-of-body experience" moment. This moment came not because of imagination, but because of meditation. As an art of meditation, it tries to transcend the essential level of life and realize pure intuition about its form. This art is a form of mysticism. It glimpses the transcendental gap or "space" in crowded objects and events, or enters the open field by watching the background field, so it is "out of nothing". Every opportunity gives people such an opportunity to transcend "existence" and understand "existence" directly. As an art of meditation, ideal is transparent. It crosses things and opens an open and empty field in which things can be revealed. The language it generates removes all modifications and attachments to the content and becomes a place where secrets occur (see my essay "Oral Poetry: Possibility and Its Limits").