(1) The rising period of capitalist mode of production, or the period of classical art ... In the 16th and 17th centuries, with the emergence and development of capitalist mode of production, natural science first got rid of the fetters and fetters of medieval religious theology and made great progress. Of course, we can't simply think that the Middle Ages had absolutely no interest in science. In his famous book Science and Social Order, Barber also listed a "noteworthy list" of scientific inventions from the 9th century to15th century (P55) to show that the evolution of science has not been fundamentally broken. But it really started from the germination, emergence and development of capitalist mode of production, and the interaction between science and social development became more and more full. The development and progress of science has brought about the initial prosperity of modern western industrial civilization. Under this historical background, the development of aesthetics and art has entered the romantic stage in Europe. From16th century to19th century, in literature and art, from rabelais to Cervantes, from Shakespeare to Balzac, from Milton to Goethe, from Hugo to Dickens, from Tolstoy to Gorky, the romantic creative techniques have been fully demonstrated. Aesthetics is represented by British empirical aesthetics and German classical aesthetics. This is a time when many people come forth in large numbers and the classics are constantly repeated. At the same time, it is also a glorious period when the western traditional literary creation and aesthetic concept reached the extreme.
The question worth asking here is that when people study western art and aesthetics, they usually classify the period of the rise of capitalist mode of production or the period of classical art as the stage of modern western aesthetics, and this stage is roughly divided from literary enlightenment to the end of German classical rational aesthetics. In terms of time and characteristics, this division can be established. In a deeper sense, the germination, emergence and development of capitalist mode of production are accompanied by western culture, including art and aesthetics, thinking and answering the question of modernity and aesthetic modernity closely related to it. Modernity is a frequently used, rich and inconclusive issue. In people's view, the emergence of modernity goes hand in hand with the formation of modern developed society. As long as modernity is mentioned, people always associate it with social reality and social ideological and cultural changes after A.D. 1500, such as the religious reform, the Enlightenment, the rise of modern science and the industrial revolution. Generally speaking, the concentrated expression of modernity is the prominence of subjectivity and the real formation of rationalization. The prominence of subjectivity is related to the publicity of human subjectivity since the Enlightenment, especially since Hegel, and the real formation of rationalization is related to the rationality emphasized by Weber. The former makes western culture move from theological transcendence and religious mystery to secularity and man himself, and man becomes the only source of meaning; The latter directly leads to the differentiation and modernization of social structure, that is, people construct their own world according to their own rationality and establish the operating principles of society. Aesthetic modernity is a complex phenomenon full of contradictions, which is closely related to modernity. Judging from its emphasis on human instinct and emotional needs in the fields of aesthetics and art, aesthetic modernity is the defense of human subjectivity from the perspective of perceptual life and the power of modernity's own identity; In the sense that aesthetic modernity replaces all other spiritual and social principles with aesthetic principles and opposes the disadvantages brought by rational society with aesthetic perceptual principles, it is also a suspicion and denial of modern scientific and technological civilization and rational progress, and is an alien force of modernity. In the development of modern western aesthetics, Kant, Baum Tong Jia, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as Freud, Bergson, Marcuse and Adorno all thought about perceptual awakening and the power of aesthetic dimension from different aspects and angles. How to face all kinds of social phenomena in modern developed society, including subjective feelings and desires, is the central question that western modern aestheticians try to answer. Different thoughts on this issue constitute the complex and diverse ideological outlook and value orientation of modern western aesthetics. Therefore, from the perspective of modernity and aesthetic modernity, the staging and thinking of western modern aesthetics is more profound and rational than a single time staging. It is from this perspective that we bring the period of the rise of capitalism or the period of classical art into the research field of vision to examine the development of modern western aesthetics.
(2) The capitalist mode of production and its superstructure are gradually moving from unity to sharp opposition, or artistic modernism. This is one of the focuses of our thinking and analysis. Romantic culture based on industrial civilization is characterized by separation and alienation. The result of separation and alienation is passion and imagination. Shelley, a writer in the period of classical art, emphasized the important role of poetry in national awakening and ideological system reform-"the most reliable pioneer, partner and follower" [6](P56), and even praised poetry as a "sacred thing" [6](P56), because under the historical conditions of increasing division and opposition, poetry can provide an emotional support for individuals. It should be said that in the era when Shelley lived, capitalism was still on the rise, and the situation of division and opposition was far less serious than that of post-industrial society. However, Shelley foresaw the inevitable development result of the division and opposition of capitalism with the foresight of thinkers-"All inventions made to reduce labor and combined labor will be wrongly used to aggravate human inequality" [6](P55). If we say that beauty is a pure form within the theoretical framework of self-discipline aesthetics constructed by Kant and other classical writers, it takes memory and imagination filtered and purified by time as the most basic artistic expression to suppress ugly and unreasonable phenomena in reality. Or as Jameson summed up-"In the19th century, culture was also understood as just listening to elegant music, enjoying paintings or watching operas, and culture was still an escape from reality" [7](P 147), then, in the period of artistic modernism, that is, from the end of19th century to the beginning of 20th century. The development of capitalism relies more and more on instrumental rationality, and the whole society has plundered, dismembered and generally suppressed nature to an extreme extent. It is also from this period that a profound paradox has emerged between man and society: any development means going to the negative side of man and society at the same time. People are extremely rich and satisfied in material things, but more and more they lose their spiritual and natural homes. With the great changes of social reality, especially the serious alienation phenomenon, the philosophical concepts, aesthetic ideals, artistic norms and artistic styles of the whole western society have undergone profound changes compared with the classical period, showing unprecedented nature and characteristics. The academic circles have the same understanding of this profound change in western art and aesthetics-in a word, the whole western philosophy and culture have also embarked on the road of negation, which corresponds to the negation of society and people themselves. If the classical period of art and aesthetics advocates rationality, then the modernist period advocates irrationality, irrational willpower and surging vitality or the subconscious centered on sexual desire. In short, it is the negative of reason. As an important social theory thinker in Germany, Zimmel analyzed. Modern philosophy of life endows life and emotion with the "existence-action" standard traditionally determined by divinity, God, nature, ego and society. The concept of life has been elevated to the central position, and the concept of reality has been linked with metaphysics, psychology, ethics and aesthetic values. [8] (P224 ~ 225) Our thinking is to try our best to explain the negative characteristics of western aesthetics and art, as well as the profound and complicated dialectical relationship between society and human negativity.
(3) the post-industrial era of society and the post-modern period of artistic aesthetics. After World War II, western capitalism entered the post-industrial society. Post-industrial society is different from traditional industrial society, or liberal capitalism and monopoly capitalism: it involves the production of labor services rather than goods, and most of its labor force is engaged in white-collar work rather than manual labor. Many of these people are employees engaged in professional management and technical work. The working class in the original sense is gradually disappearing, and the new combination based on status and consumption replaces the old combination based on work and production. People's daily life is permeated with the logic of commodity circulation, and it is not restricted by market economy everywhere. During this period, people were placed in a high-tech rational rule, and as a result, people completely lost their control ability and became "one-sided people" summarized by Marcuse. As Heidegger pointed out when criticizing this kind of technological rule in post-industrial society, "the objectification of technological rule is faster and faster, more and more reckless, and more and more full of the content of the world that has been seen and used to." It not only sets everything as something that can be made in the production process, but also sends the products out through the market. In the manufacture of self-determination, human nature and physical attributes of things are divided into a market value that can be calculated in the market. This market not only covers the whole earth as a world market, but also trades in the essence of existence as a will, thus bringing all existence into a calculated transaction "[9](P 104). From a cultural point of view, "in post-modernism, due to advertising, image culture, unconsciousness and aesthetics, commercial forms are everywhere in the fields of culture, art and unconsciousness. "It is in this sense that we are in a new historical stage and culture has different meanings" [7](P 147). Jameson's above analysis tells people that the culture that really belonged to people's spiritual home in the past is now controlled and dominated by capitalist commodity circulation and market rules, and has become another industry in capitalist society, namely cultural industry. The spiritual value of culture has also been replaced by market value and consumption value. The sacred aura of cultural products and spiritual values has been stripped. If we say that in the modernism period of art and aesthetics, the excessive publicity of irrational subject contains the denial of rational subject, then in the post-modernism period, this denial has gone to extremes: it denies the subject of irrational subject, leaving only irrationality. Postmodernism not only declares that the subject is dead, the author is dead, but also people are dead, leaving only "decentralization", the loss of the subject, the loss of historical consciousness, and infinite digestion and reconstruction. Man is in a plane society that eliminates depth, and he has lost any sense that he is the subject. Such denial can only be the despair of redemption in the end.
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Is there a difference between modernism and postmodernism? Does the latter cover the former, or do they both point to the same period or the same object? The answer to the question depends on the angle at which we grasp the object. From the way of thinking, modernism and postmodernism are both discussing modernity, and they are consistent in the basic issues discussed. In other words, postmodernism is the development and deepening of modernism. From then on, we can better understand Lyotard's answer to "what is postmodernism"-"A work can be modern only if it is postmodern first. After this understanding, postmodernism is not a dead-end modernism, but a new state of modernism, and this state is repetitive. " [10](P 138) but from the stage of development, there are still significant differences between modernism and postmodernism. First of all, modernism corresponds to the second stage of capitalism, that is, the monopoly period, while postmodernism is connected with the third stage of capitalism. This stage has many names: late capitalism, media capitalism, post-industrial capitalism and so on. Secondly, due to the different social reality, philosophical basis and cultural soil corresponding to modernism and postmodernism, their art and aesthetics will inevitably show different properties and characteristics. Hassan made a detailed comparison. [1 1](P27) Of course, this distinction is not absolute, as Klaus Honneff, a famous contemporary German critic, described: "History will not break neatly like a glass rod, but will be worn, stretched and finally destroyed like a rope. The Renaissance did not end in a certain year, but it did end, although the culture is still full of elements left over from Renaissance thought. Modernism is also, even more, because we are closer to it. It also has reflex function from time to time, the separated limbs are still twitching, and all parts still exist; But they are no longer linked and no longer function as an organic whole. " [12] (p16 ~17) Therefore, when we study specific artistic or aesthetic objects, we should not only see the continuity of history, but also grasp its historical discontinuity, and deeply understand the internal relationship between western modern aesthetic thought and modern art in the dialectical relationship between dynamic and static.
The relationship between modern western aesthetic thought and art includes two theoretical contents: one is the theoretical response of aesthetics to the questions raised in artistic thought; The second is the general relationship between modern western aesthetic thoughts and modern artistic thoughts in cultural structure. From the perspective of relationship, the relationship between art and aesthetic theory is different in the three development stages of western modern aesthetics. In the first stage, that is, the rise of capitalist mode of production or the period of classical art, the relationship between the two is basically balanced and corresponding. In the second stage, that is, the modernism period of art, art is more ahead of theory. In the third stage, that is, the post-modern period of art and aesthetic theory, the theory is more ahead of art. Theoretically speaking, the relationship between aesthetic trend of thought and modern artistic trend of thought can be regarded as the relationship between theory and practice, and it can also be regarded as thinking and responding to social and cultural problems with the same image (art) and concept (aesthetics) respectively. Compared with the two, aesthetic thinking is more profound and difficult, so it is more important. Because it not only thinks about the interactive relationship between aesthetics and artistic practice, but also thinks about the same foundation of aesthetics and artistic practice-the realistic and constantly developing aesthetic relationship. By thinking about the aesthetic relationship between reality and aesthetics, we can understand the pulse of reality beating and changing more clearly, accurately and profoundly, and listen to the breath of society and the times.
Three stages of China's aesthetic development
China's aesthetics in the 20th century basically followed the development track of conflict, choice, development, dialogue and blending between China and the West. In the past hundred years, China's aesthetics has experienced a dynamic development process from separation to integration and then to new differentiation. This is: before the 1950s, it was "fen", and Marxist aesthetics did not really take the leading position, but it was still in the period of various aesthetic thoughts including Marxist aesthetics, especially in the 1930s. The 1950s to the mid-1980s was the stage of "integration". After two major aesthetic discussions, the dominant position of Marxist aesthetics, especially practical aesthetics, was truly established. From the end of 1980s to the end of 20th century, due to the inherent contradiction of practical ontology aesthetics, people re-examined basic theoretical issues such as aesthetics, Marxist aesthetics and practical shock. This begins a new division, which is qualitatively different from the previous division, based on Marxist aesthetics and a higher stage of the development of Marxist aesthetics. So I think this development trend of "separation-integration-separation" indicates a higher sense of integration.
The first stage is the formation of aesthetics as a discipline in China, which is the result of the conflict, mutual integration and the choice of the times based on various cultural factors. In terms of time, it is generally before the 1950 s and has gone through nearly half a century, which is the longest of the three stages. This big stage can be divided into several small periods. (1) 19 17 years ago was the period when the old traditional aesthetics gradually abdicated and a large number of western ideas were introduced. Represented by Wang Guowei and Liang Qichao, they all embody some ways of labeling people's seats in China tradition and western theory. (2) During the period of1918-1937, I translated and introduced a large number of western theories and constructed aesthetics according to my own understanding. This kind of construction is actually a transplant. For example, Lu Ying's {Introduction to Aesthetics} (the earliest textbook of aesthetic principles in China) was constructed by western empathy theory, and Zhu Guangqian's {Psychology of Literature and Art} illustrated this point. Intuitive aesthetics. Wait a minute. At the same time, Marxist aesthetics has also been translated and introduced with the political trend of thought, such as Chen Wangdao's translation of Marxist works and his aesthetic thoughts, which formed Lu Xun's aesthetic view. This period can be described as the first "aesthetic craze" in China in the 20th century, and aesthetic masters such as Zong Baihua, Zhu Guangqian and Deng Yizhe began to appear. (3) During the period of1938-1949, various ideas and viewpoints continued to argue, but there was a powerful force of Marxism, which could be represented by Mao Zedong's aesthetic view, Cai Yi's aesthetic view, Zhou Yang's aesthetic thought and Hu Feng's aesthetic thought. At the same time, there are voices calling for the nationalization of China's aesthetics. Among them, Cai Yi's "New Aesthetics" is an early monograph in China that attempts to discuss aesthetic issues from the materialistic point of view. In the book, his basic ideas are fully expounded. Beauty is typical. . This is the beginning of China's real application of Marxist viewpoint to establish a school. This school has played a very positive role in the two major discussions of China's aesthetics and in promoting the development of Marxist aesthetics. It is a bold application of scientism in aesthetics, which is very distinctive and needs to be expanded. However, the overall feature of this stage is that many elements coexist, but there is a trend of integration.
The second stage is the mid-1950s-1980s, which is the "integration" stage. That is, it is gradually "combined" with Marxist aesthetics through argumentation. Marxist aesthetics is essentially practical aesthetics, so it is mainly combined with practical aesthetics. This stage can be divided into two periods. The "Aesthetic Debate" from 1950s to 1964. This great discussion is an extremely important event in the aesthetic history of China and even China in the 20th century. This great discussion popularized Ding's aesthetics, made aesthetics a prominent school in China, and made great contributions to the modernization of China's aesthetics. In this great discussion, some aesthetic masters appeared, such as Zhu Guangqian, Zong Baihua, Cai Yi, Li Zehou, Wang Chaowen and Gao Ertai. The aesthetics of the unity of subjective and objective as represented by Zhu Guangqian came into being; Subjective aesthetics represented by Gao Ertai; The absolute objectivism aesthetics represented by Cai Yi, the four schools of practical ontology aesthetics represented by Li Zehou, and the aesthetics of the unity of subject and object represented by dynasty literature. The main topic of this big discussion is around "the essence of beauty", that is, "the root of beauty", and the focus of the debate is to think about aesthetic problems from the perspective of philosophy. Appearing or thinking that beauty is subjective. Or that beauty exists objectively. Or that beauty is the unity of subjective and objective. This discussion focuses too much on philosophical propositions, but ignores the character of aesthetics itself, and puts too much emphasis on political ideology, which restricts the real academic play. However, the number of participants in this big discussion, the number of aesthetic papers published and the length of discussion are rare. The second "aesthetic craze" period was from the end of the ten-year "Cultural Revolution" to the mid-1980s. This period can be described as a period when China's aesthetics saw the light of day, opened its doors wide, enjoyed new things and breathed fresh air, and was once again baptized by "European style and beautiful rain" on a large scale. Due to the improvement of social and economic living standards, a large number of international academic exchanges, the systematic translation and introduction of foreign aesthetic masterpieces, and the debate about "people", aesthetics has once again become the center of discussion among intellectuals in the streets. During this period, the "four schools" in the 1950s continued to argue. At the same time, various aesthetic problems are also launched in all directions. Especially on the basic theoretical issues such as the transformation from the origin of beauty to the noumenon of beauty, people began to doubt the accepted "practical aesthetics", and there was a contradiction between accumulation and breakthrough. Moreover, due to its own theoretical problems, with the deepening of academic research and the transfer of discourse power, "practical aesthetics" has increasingly exposed its fatal contradictions, that is, the confrontation between reason and sensibility, society and individuals. So this "combination" also indicates a new differentiation.
The third stage is from the end of 1980s to the end of this century, that is, the "new differentiation" stage, which is still continuing today. With the deepening of economic, social and cultural reforms and the contradiction of aesthetics itself, "practical aesthetics" can no longer meet the needs of social development. How to solve the problem of human existence in reality, aesthetics must rethink. In addition, aesthetics has moved from ideological function in 1980s to non-ideological edge in 1990s, which makes it more necessary to reposition aesthetics. For this reason, anti-practical aesthetics appeared on a large scale, surpassing the wave of practical aesthetics, and "practical aesthetics" once again became the focus. Thus, the whole aesthetic transformation began. It did not pay too much attention to the root of beauty, but turned to the more fundamental ontological problem of beauty involving the rationalization of aesthetic existence, which led to the aesthetics of life, existence, nothingness, negation, experience and harmony. In addition, ecological aesthetics and environmental aesthetics reflect the revival of scientism aesthetics. There are two remarkable phenomena in this stage: one is the life aesthetics represented by Pan Zhichang. Starting from the metaphysical structure of aesthetics, in order to promote the overall construction of aesthetics, actively intervene in life and pay attention to people's actual living conditions, they criticized a large number of anti-aesthetic phenomena represented by mass culture (market culture), which can be seen from his series of works. The other is to reposition aesthetics from the perspective of aesthetic culture in order to find the right to speak about aesthetics in life. At present, most scholars are very concerned about this, and it may also be a basic trend of aesthetics in the future, that is, from pure rational thinking to the harmony between rationality and sensibility in aesthetics. However, the overall characteristics of this stage are equal dialogue and diversity coexistence, preparing for a higher sense of integration and cooperation.