Of course, there are different voices. Dr. Liu Changyuan, a professor of aesthetics who is also a friend of this school, disagrees with this view. In a recent international aesthetic seminar, he read a long aesthetic paper and discussed the basic theoretical problems of aesthetics. He told scholars that the basic problem of aesthetics itself is irreplaceable by cultural studies. He will continue to meditate aesthetically and he doesn't want to change. His persistence in aesthetics is admirable.
Scholars think that these two development trends of aesthetics and literature and art are opposite, but they are complementary. Top-down and bottom-up should be complementary, and the key is how to combine them to promote new integration.
Scholars have always praised philosophical aesthetics, but they are not satisfied with making philosophical conclusions about aesthetics, but hope that aesthetics can explain the concrete aesthetics and beauty creation of human beings. Artistic creation and artistic aesthetics are a unique form of human aesthetic phenomenon, which has its unique nature and laws compared with natural aesthetics and cultural aesthetics. Therefore, in the early 1980s, scholars eagerly looked forward to the development of literary aesthetics or artistic aesthetics, and founded the Literary Aesthetics Series. Ye Lang, Jiang Rong and others initiated the compilation of the Peking University Literary Aesthetics Series and participated in the Artistic Aesthetics Series edited by Wang Chaowen. Nowadays, the development of literary aesthetics has become a discipline in literary research, and painting aesthetics, music aesthetics and film aesthetics are also developing to a deeper level. Scholars believe that literary aesthetics or artistic aesthetics should have new development.
However, literary aesthetics or artistic aesthetics have not and cannot replace philosophical aesthetics. The field of aesthetics is very wide, so we should at least make a theoretical summary of these two aesthetic phenomena: one is the aesthetics of nature and the other is the aesthetics of culture. Artistic creation and artistic aesthetics are just a cultural phenomenon.
Nature has brought endless beauty to mankind. Scholars advocate the beauty of nature, ingenious and natural, not caused by man-made, and unique charm. With the development of human practice, people find more and more natural beauty in nature; However, with the deterioration of the natural ecological environment, the beauty of nature has become more and more precious. China's traditional aesthetics has a special liking for the beauty of nature, and has many real experiences and incisive descriptions of natural aesthetics. But how to appreciate nature and how nature itself can be beautiful is not the same thing. There is no reasonable and realistic explanation for the beauty of nature itself. Both the theory of natural attributes of species and the objectification of human essential power are not satisfactory. Or whether Marx's axiology can guide scholars to make a more reasonable explanation of natural beauty, which seems promising and can develop into a new discipline: ecological aesthetics. Two years ago, scholars were expecting the early appearance of "ecological aesthetics" when editing the series "Man and Nature".
But people living in this world can't completely return to nature. Scholars, it is impossible for everyone to leave the cultural world they created. As a subject, in the process of continuous interaction with nature as an object, nature is also constantly humanized; The development of human communication makes the relationship between subjects more complicated and diverse; The interaction between individual learners and their surroundings makes the individual world more and more complicated. The interaction between things, people and things, and people is affecting the individual world.
Scholars can divide culture into material culture and spiritual culture, but any culture is the result of human activities in certain humanistic relations and the product of humanization. Scholars can look at their cultural world from different angles, but what they are most interested in is how to look at it from an aesthetic point of view. Scholars need all kinds of cultural studies, and scholars are more inclined to cultural aesthetics.
The beauty of culture is the beauty created by human beings, which is different from the beauty of nature. Beauty is not all created by human beings; What labor creates is not necessarily beautiful. But, in fact, labor is also creating beauty. If people can create according to the law of beauty, people can create beauty. However, if human labor violates the law of beauty, what is created is not necessarily beautiful. The objectification of man's essential power is not necessarily beautiful. How many fakes, ugliness and evil there are in the world! Isn't this all bred in the alienation of human self-learners? Then, how can human cultural creation conform to the law of beauty? This is the first question that cultural aesthetics must answer. Furthermore, the creation of human culture is not only to meet aesthetic needs, but also to meet practical needs, and may even put exchange needs in the first place. In this way, what kind of structural relationship should the practical value, exchange value and aesthetic value of cultural products be? This is also a question that cultural aesthetics must answer. Moreover, what is the relationship among cultural aesthetics, natural aesthetics and artistic aesthetics, and what are their connections and differences? This involves more complex aesthetic standards and ideals, and it should also be an unavoidable problem in cultural aesthetics.
People should be the focus of cultural aesthetics. Man is the yardstick of all things, and all things have beauty and ugliness because they have positive or negative objective value to people. The reason why human beings want to create culture is because nature can't fully satisfy people. People live in this world, not only for survival, but also for development and perfection. Therefore, people should create culture according to the law of beauty, constantly improve themselves in creation, become a complete person with free and all-round development, and achieve dynamic balance with the surrounding environment (natural environment and human environment). Of course, the development of man's free nature, the establishment of man's ideal personality and the dynamic balance between man and environment are all historical processes of continuous development. In the economic manuscript written by Marx in 1857- 1858, he once discussed the historical process of how people get freedom from the existing environment: First, in the era of "human dependence", individuals cannot be independent and can only rely on others to survive. Second, in the era of "independence based on material dependence", individuals are independent from human dependence, but they are caught in material dependence. Third, the era of "free personality based on individual's all-round development, its social productivity becomes its social wealth".
The era of "human dependence" is what scholars call pre-modernity. The era of "dependence on things" is the whole modern era including modernity and post-modernism. The all-round development of "free personality" needs an ideal era in the future. Every era has its own culture, and cultural aesthetics should face the cultural phenomena of its own era.
Scholars in this country are now in the primary stage of socialism and are struggling to realize socialist modernization. The goal is naturally to develop in an all-round way towards "free personality". However, China has a vast territory and a large population, and the development of different regions is extremely uneven. The vast western region is basically transforming from pre-modern to modern. Even in the developed coastal areas, they are still struggling to basically realize modernization. Pre-modern cultural phenomena can still be seen everywhere, while the West has introduced post-modern culture. In this way, the current cultural phenomenon in the scholar country is extremely complicated. Scholars urgently need to study the intricate and concrete cultural phenomena in the process of modernization, and also need to make a macro-examination of cultural development as soon as possible, and pay attention to the aesthetic direction of cultural development as a whole.
Cultural aesthetics and cultural studies are complementary, interrelated and different. In a country of scholars, everyone should be valued and developed.