Aesthetic Abstraction and the Aesthetic Nature of Literature

Image, imagination, and the illusory realm are the basic features of poetry, and indeed of all literature. It may be said that, once image and the concrete-figural are left behind, literature loses its liveliness and vitality, and in fact literature is thereby cancelled. Yet abstraction is precisely the opposite of image and the concrete-figural. What, then, does the “aesthetic abstraction” of which this paper speaks signify?

1. Delimiting the Meaning of Aesthetic Abstraction

Abstraction in philosophy means the drawing-out of the common from amid the particular, the making of a determinate grasp, in conceptual and logical form, of the rich, miscellaneous, flowing phenomena; that is, it is the discarding of the particular, living, concrete-figural. Aesthetic abstraction is the reverse. What philosophical abstraction discards is precisely what aesthetic abstraction treasures and preserves. Aesthetic abstraction also differs from abstraction in modern art. Modern abstract art tries to abstract away concrete real content, to shed the encumbrance of content (though in fact this is impossible), and to construct its own ivory tower and ideal kingdom out of pure formal factors such as point, line, plane, and color. Aesthetic abstraction does not, of course, exclude the so-called abstraction of abstract art, but it refers chiefly to the abstracting of the object and the concrete-figural out of their real social-relational web, making it become a “self-sufficient” whole; that is, aesthetic abstraction makes the object shed the entanglement of the world-network and hang suspended, becoming an “illusion” (semblance). As Susanne Langer says: “‘Illusion’ is an extremely important principle in art—a central principle of artistic abstraction whereby one can obtain artistic abstraction without having to pass through the generalizing process of scientific abstraction.” [1]

Moreover, aesthetic abstraction is more than the abstraction of the object. The subject itself must extricate itself from real connections and become an aesthetic subject before it can, at the same time, realize the aesthetic abstraction of the object. Therefore the aesthetic abstraction of which we speak is in fact a double abstraction: the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object are both at once abstracted out of phenomenal connections; the subject becomes a free aesthetic subject, the object becomes a self-sufficient aesthetic object; and thereupon, in the aesthetic relation established in an instant, subject and object realize a gapless accord. The free subject lives within the self-sufficient object, and likewise the self-sufficient object stirs within the free subject. Hence aesthetic construction does not take the real subject and object directly as its starting point; it must necessarily pass through the intermediary of aesthetic abstraction and, by way of double abstraction, realize a bidirectional construction. The creation of works of literature and art is nothing other than this, and so is aesthetic appreciation. Aesthetic abstraction makes both subject and object extricate themselves from real connections, yet does not thereby make the connotation of either grow impoverished and thin; on the contrary, it makes them more productive in aesthetic creation and re-creation, and provides infinite possibility for aesthetic construction.

The process of aesthetic abstraction is also a process of re-forming. In discussing the essential distinction between human and animal, Marx points out: “The animal's product is directly bound up with its physical body, whereas the human freely confronts his own product. The animal builds only according to the standard and need of the species to which it belongs, whereas the human knows how to produce according to the standard of any species, and knows everywhere how to apply the inherent standard to the object; therefore the human builds also according to the laws of beauty.” [2] Here Marx speaks very clearly: the so-called “building according to the laws of beauty” is, in the process of creation, to fuse the standard of the object with the inherent standard of the human. Yet the standard of the object is, after all, different from the human's inherent standard; the two mutually repel, so that to build according to one standard one must take the relinquishing of the other standard as the price. Aesthetic abstraction, however, provides the bridge for communicating and fusing the two. Double abstraction makes subject and object mutually become each other's dwelling-place of existence; in this process, both discard what is mutually external and opposed, discard their respective narrownesses and limitations, and are joined into one. This realm of “you within me, me within you, you being me and me being you” is the supreme realm of the aesthetic. Therefore the re-forming in aesthetic abstraction is the unification of the object's standard and the human's inner standard. And the human's inner standard is, in the last analysis, the human's sensuous form, that is, the form of the human's life. Thereupon this aesthetic object too necessarily becomes an object possessed of life-form—or rather, it is itself life-form. This object possessing “life-form” not only has, as Susanne Langer says, the structure of life, the moving form of life, and the indivisible wholeness of life; it ought itself to be a “living body,” possessed of the full richness of the sensuous form of life unfolded and the full richness of life's connotation. Because the sensuous form of life contains within it the content of life, and the content of life must manifest itself as the sensuous form of life, the content and form of the literary work are, like the living whole, indivisible. Content is form, and form is content. This wholeness is also not as Susanne Langer says—that each local part constituting the whole is indispensable—but lies in the work's being filled by life and continually taking in new life so as to constitute a living organism. In fact, the armless Venus does not at all prevent us from regarding her as a living form. Likewise a damaged masterpiece, or a few snatched lines, are also so, even though we may on that account feel regret. Abstraction gives the aesthetic object the form of life; and so aesthetic appreciation is then no longer an encounter with an external, alien object, but an encounter with life, with one's own life. The subject discovers within the object precisely life, and indeed his own life. This is an intimate identification, a surprised and joyful discovery. Without any compulsory external force, they mutually attract, mutually stimulate, mutually generate; that is, aesthetic abstraction has within it inherently contained the subject's free creation. This creation possesses a freedom hard for any other activity to attain.

Marx holds: “My labor is the free expression of life, and is therefore the joy of living.” [3] Aesthetic activity and aesthetic pleasure are likewise founded upon the premise and basis of the “free expression of life.” But in the human's life-activity, as Schiller says, the human is unfree; he is bound within necessity. This is the double necessity of the outer world and the inner world. Living within society, the human cannot but follow the already-existing social norms and role-norms. Every seemingly autonomous choice he makes is in fact pulled, behind the scenes, by the invisible cord of social reality; he is helplessly swept into the historical torrent and, against his will, manipulated by necessity. Even the inner world belonging to the self's own domain—the human is in fact not free there either; his thinking and his desires are all subject to the constraint of tradition and the influence of reality, what Nietzsche called the “common net of thought.” That “canopy of heaven, mat of earth, doing as one pleases,” that “Great Man” who “listens intently yet hears not the sound of thunder, gazes fixedly yet sees not the form of Mount Tai, is unaware of the cutting of cold and heat upon the flesh, or of the stirrings of desire and feeling” [4]—he is but a figure of fancy, not yet born into this present world. Even Dilthey, who champions the value of individual life, cannot but admit the connection of the individual with social history; individual life necessarily weaves itself into the network of the life-world. That is to say, individual life is, after all, a life situated within the social network. Although the network is woven out of individual lives, life is thereby already netted by the network. As for the world-picture described by structuralism, the human's freedom, and even the human's existence, are almost effaced.

“The human is born free,” yet what he obtains is an extremely finite, pitiable freedom. The aesthetic heaven and earth of literature and art is precisely a revolt against, and a compensation for, this real situation of the human. The aesthetic abstraction in literary creation and literary appreciation makes both subject and object shed the fetters of real connection, and thereupon the human's rich sensibility at last attains its fullest unfolding and comprehensive realization. Therefore the freedom that the human cannot possibly obtain in other practical activities is suddenly discovered in the aesthetic heaven and earth of literature; literature thus becomes the proof of the full richness of the human's sensibility, the symbol of the human's freedom and essential power, and the place where the human creates meaning and lodges meaning. Schiller once said: “Art must shed reality, and with redoubled courage step beyond need, because art is the daughter of freedom; it takes its directions only from the necessity of the spirit and not from the wants of matter.” [5]

In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer raises a criticism of Lipps's “theory of empathy.” He points out that the aesthetic enjoyment of which Lipps speaks—that it is the objectified enjoyment of the self, a savoring of the self within a sensuous object distinct from the self—is but “the simplest formula.” This view can find its ground only in ancient Greek art and cannot explain ancient Eastern art, late Roman art, Byzantine art, and especially primitive art. [6] He goes on to propose two mutually opposed impulses, empathy and abstraction: “The empathy-impulse takes as its condition that full, pantheistically tinged, intimate connection between the human and the external world, whereas the abstraction-impulse is the product of the great inner unease the human is occasioned by the external world.” [7] Amid different peoples and different historical-cultural backgrounds, the differing “sense of the world” or “artistic volition” that the human forms determines the nature of the impulse. In Worringer's view, the abstraction-impulse is the human's more primal, more fundamental impulse. For, facing a broad, contingency-filled, indeterminate, mysterious, chaotic world, abstraction “extracts the single thing of the external world from the false contingency of its ever-changing constancy, and, by means of a nearly abstract form, makes it eternal; in this way they find a place of rest in the flux of phenomena.”

Setting out from the facts of art history, Worringer expounds, in theory, the place that “abstraction” ought to occupy in art, and this should be said to have important theoretical value; but his consequent cleaving of abstraction and empathy apart, pushing them to two unconnected poles, appears one-sided. In fact, although the abstraction-impulse and the empathy-impulse mutually conflict and oppose, they always coexist within the human, this single unity. Tracing them to their root, these two impulses are precisely rooted in the human's love and freedom, in the irreconcilable self-contradiction between the obsession with the present world and the pursuit of the eternal. Love impels the human to throw himself into the embrace of object, group, world, and to fuse with them into one. But the union with the real object makes the human unable to escape the constraint of object, group, and world, and so he loses his own freedom. To gain freedom, the human ardently longs to detach himself transcendently from the world of objects. Likewise, the obsession with the present world makes one cling tightly to the present, sink into the present, while the pursuit of the eternal in turn impels the human to abstract himself out of the ever-shifting present. Love and the obsession with the present world are the ground of the empathy-impulse; freedom and the pursuit of the eternal then constitute the contrary abstraction-demand. The human is thus unavoidably trapped in self-contradiction.

The aesthetic world of literature and art becomes precisely the intermediary that reconciles this irreconcilable inner conflict. In this realm, both subject and object shed real entanglements, and so the human can love freely, while love itself is the experience of freedom. Likewise, because abstraction has discarded the contingent, one-sided things of the real world, the human can also throw himself more deeply into the instant of beauty, sink into the enjoyment of the present, and apprehend that this instant is filled with the remembrance of the past and the yearning toward the future, the boundary of time thereby vanishing, the light of the eternal flashing forth. The mutually opposed, mutually departing conflict of contradiction thus becomes, in the aesthetic realm of literature and art, an inseparable conjoined twin, shadow following form. Because double abstraction makes the self “stand together with nature as one body,” abstraction therefore also contains within it empathy and is unified with empathy.

2. Aesthetic Abstraction and Aesthetic Emotion

That the aesthetic appreciation of literature and art always evokes aesthetic emotion and produces aesthetic pleasure—this point has long been universally acknowledged. Yet what is the nature of aesthetic emotion? Is it consistent with everyday emotion or not? On this, opinions are tangled and various, with no settled view. Richards denies that aesthetic experience and aesthetic emotion are essentially distinct from everyday experience and everyday emotion, holding that the so-called aesthetic experience is merely a more refined organization. He says: “When we view a painting, chant a poem, or appreciate a piece of music, our behavior is no different from our behavior in going down a road to the gallery or dressing in the early morning. The way our experience is aroused is different, and experience that is a kind of regularity is more complex; if we successfully grasp the regularity, the experience becomes more unified. But our activity is by no means an activity of a wholly different type.” Dewey, setting out further from the wholeness and unity of experience, proposes “art as experience”: the experience and emotion obtained from literature and art differ only in degree of completeness and intensity, and are by no means something different in kind. To insist on cleaving aesthetic experience apart from other experience would inevitably lead to what Santayana said—regarding art as a Sunday-afternoon world, and treating the rest of experience as a heap of fearful stuff. [8] Richards's and Dewey's emphasis on the connection among the human's various experiences and emotions is undoubtedly correct; but in effacing the distinctiveness of aesthetic emotion, it becomes hard to explain the phenomena that actually occur in aesthetic activity. For example, when immersed in drama or other literary works, although we may feel excitement, indignation, sorrow, or grief, we are throughout in a state of “aesthetic inhibition.” The emotion aroused by aesthetic appreciation does not lead to a direct impulse; this emotion seems to be a “filtering” of everyday emotion.

Opposed to the above view, Collingwood firmly maintains the distinctiveness of aesthetic emotion: “Although whenever pleasure and pain occur they are in some sense the same thing, yet pleasure and pain, with respect to each particular activity, have their own special quality. These special differences directly distinguish the pleasure of one experience from the pleasure of another, and they can be neither interchanged nor described.” [9] Clive Bell had earlier delimited aesthetic emotion with a still more radical attitude. Setting out from the view that art is “significant form,” he holds that aesthetic emotion is precisely the import contained in form: “It expresses a certain profound and universal emotion, an emotion common to every age, and not one peculiar to a particular age.” [10] Bell probably also realized that to attribute aesthetic emotion wholly to form makes it hard to explain the many works that are narrative or descriptive. In order to keep his theory thorough, he flatly, with the arrogance of an antique-appraising connoisseur, lightly passes a verdict on those works that “hint at emotion and convey information”: “They do not count as artworks” [11], and expels them from the hall of art. By comparison, Susanne Langer has a more feminine breadth of tolerance. She prudently distinguishes “the emotion within the work” from the psychic effect upon the appreciator: the appreciator “seeks only the import of the artwork, and will regard this import as ‘the emotion within the work.’ This emotion (from the most fleeting subtle feeling to the subjective pattern of the whole of human life) cannot be ‘communicated’; it can only be expressed. The created form ‘includes’ this emotion. Therefore the perceptual process of the fictional object (for instance, the famous middle column of the Parthenon) is at the same time the perceptual process of that astonishing complete and tense emotion.” [12] This emotion is precisely the import contained in Bell's so-called “significant form”—or rather, it is the emotion contained in the formal sign, that is, what we usually call “aesthetic emotion.” The other kind of emotion is “the actual emotion lured out by the work's intention, wholly different from ‘the emotion included in the work’; the former people call ‘aesthetic emotion’; it is not the emotion the work expresses, but the spectator's own emotion, the psychic effect produced by the spectator's artistic activity.” The “aesthetic emotion” spoken of here is, on the contrary, opposite in meaning to what we usually intend. Unlike Bell, who scorns this, Susanne Langer magnanimously says: “In fact, ‘aesthetic emotion’ is an omnipresent ‘exciting’ emotion, directly aroused when appreciating excellent art, the ‘pleasure’ that people hold art ought to give.” Although this emotion is “omnipresent” and indeed deserves appreciation, Susanne Langer still kindly advises people in the end to avoid the two terms “pleasure” and “aesthetic emotion.” [13] Having gone full circle, Susanne Langer in the end returns to Clive Bell's position. This is in fact not strange. The title of her book, Feeling and Form, has long made it clear: what she sets out to explore is only form as the sign of feeling, or the feeling contained in the formal sign. Susanne Langer's emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the artistic sign, pointing out that it is not a tool for “communicating” the emotion of author and appreciator, is a point of distinguished insight. Once literature and art leave the author's hand, they become an independent existence with their own independent constitution. The appreciator can only savor the import of the work itself, and not re-create the author's emotion. Yet what is puzzling is: how, after all, is one to distinguish the “emotion within the work” the appreciator “seeks” from the “psychic effect the appreciator produces in artistic activity”? Is not the emotion the appreciator “finds” within the work precisely the psychic effect of his participation in it? And apart from this “psychic effect,” how is one to go and seek the “emotion within the work”? Put bluntly, what Susanne Langer painstakingly seeks is to cleave apart “the import of form” and “the emotion contained in content,” elevating the former and suppressing the latter. Not only this: she would have the appreciator concentrate on the work's form, and put the content in brackets, set it aside and disregard it—which in fact is not to view the work as the unity of content and form, and thereby to go and seek the “emotion within the work” she treasures. But whether “the import of form” or “the emotion of content,” both are the psychic effect the appreciator obtains in aesthetic activity, and the two are originally inseparable. Going a step further: as an organically unified whole, the form of the literary-artistic work is precisely the sensuous form of life, and the content is precisely life itself; the two are two-in-one, and there is therefore no mutually independent “import of form” and “emotion of content.” To stress form one-sidedly, concentrating on seeking the “import of form,” is to obtain something that is no longer the “emotion within the work” as a whole, but quite another thing.

Then is there, after all, an independent aesthetic emotion? The answer is affirmative. This aesthetic emotion is rooted in everyday emotion, but it is an emotion that has passed through abstraction (or sublimation). Because aesthetic creation and aesthetic appreciation both contain abstract activity, at the same time emotion too sheds the heavy burden of reality and becomes lighter and more freely flowing. Wordsworth's saying that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility contains this layer of meaning. However intense your emotion in real experience, once it is transposed into the poem, it has passed through a round of abstraction, as though the dregs were filtered off and it grew tranquil. Because aesthetic emotion is rooted in everyday emotion, it has a structure similar to everyday emotion and is connected with everyday emotion by a thousand threads; and because aesthetic emotion is an emotion that has passed through abstraction, it also loses the directness of everyday emotional response—or rather, it seems to undergo “aesthetic inhibition.” Aesthetic abstraction discards the narrow, one-sided things in everyday emotion, and so possesses universality—that is, possesses what Cassirer called the “quality of all humankind.” Thus the aesthetic emotion obtained in aesthetic abstraction is both connected with the distinctive, personal everyday emotion and possessed of universality. Because it is freed from the heavy burden of reality, aesthetic emotion is freer and more profound; it can almost without any constraint penetrate into every corner and deep stratum of the soul. On the other hand, aesthetic emotion also, because aesthetic abstraction makes both subject and object richer, makes itself appear ever richer; because subject and object become freer, it appears ever freer, and is kindled by the flame of love that flashes from the mutual fusion and mutual collision of subject and object, and thereby further contains the experience of freedom and of love itself.

Aesthetic abstraction has different ways and levels. Generally speaking, the higher the degree of abstraction, the further from reality, the thinner the content, and the lighter, more hazy, and more universal the aesthetic emotion appears, and the closer it is to Clive Bell's “import of form” and Susanne Langer's “emotion within the work.” For example, Zhu Ziqing's “The Sight of Father's Back” and his “Mourning My Wife” and “Green,” “Moonlight over the Lotus Pond” are obviously different: the former narrates the past in a plain manner, with a relatively low degree of abstraction, still preserving the full-fleshed quality of the original state of life, and so the aesthetic emotion it possesses is also closer to everyday emotion and appears heavier (though different from everyday emotion); the latter make abundant use of metaphor and association to poeticize and abstract the object, and so the emotion is like a layer of mist, a wisp of light smoke, hard to grasp, the distance from everyday emotion ever more remote. The poetry of Li Yu, the last ruler of a fallen state, still possesses to this day an extreme charm, and the reason for it lies precisely here: the emotion the poems contain, having passed through abstraction, has shed its narrowness and become a universal aesthetic emotion. Likewise poetry, Li Bai and Du Fu are nonetheless different—Li Bai floats free and immortal-like, Du Fu instead bears his burden and treads with hardship; plainly this has much to do with the difference in emotional connotation brought about by differing ways and levels of aesthetic abstraction. Some modern “nonsense poems” almost wholly abstract away the content, and so there remains only the hazy import possessed by pure form (the variation of sound and rhythm). Of course, this does not mean it has no content. With the original meaning stripped away, the import contained in the form then becomes the content.

The creation and appreciation of literature and art both cannot do without aesthetic abstraction, and there exist different ways and different degrees of abstraction. But the difference of the way and the height of the degree of abstraction do not determine the grade of the work; they only mark a different artistic style. Some commentators often abstract the prosody out of poetry and make an isolated emotional analysis of it (or, as symbolism stresses, the correspondence of sound and emotion). In fact, prosody can only attach to the poetic whole; it interpenetrates and mutually merges with content and meaning, becoming one with them, and possesses only an emotional connotation of the whole. Once prosody is abstracted out and analyzed alone, the import it reveals is no longer the import within the poetic whole. When Vygotsky discussed the relation of content and form, he proposed that the content and form of the literary work are not unified and harmonious but mutually conflict and struggle, and he cited Ivan Bunin's “Light Breathing” to illustrate. This example precisely illustrates, from the reverse side, the organic wholeness of the literary work. Even when form and content conflict, the two conflicting sides mutually overcome, mutually condition, mutually abstract, and are joined into one. And so the work no longer has the mutually opposed “import of structural form” and “emotion of plot-content,” but only, uniquely, a single emotion—the emotional keynote like that of “Light Breathing.”

3. Aesthetic Abstraction and the Intoxication of Life

Aesthetic emotion is a precious gift that literature bestows on the appreciator; it springs from life itself and is closely linked with the most fundamental, most profound desires of life—namely, freedom, love, creation, and the eternal. Schiller says that in the aesthetic kingdom there is its “basic law”: “Give freedom by means of freedom.” [13] That is to say, aesthetic abstraction's making the subject a free subject and the object a self-sufficient object is the precondition for opening the great gate of the aesthetic kingdom and stepping into its inner hall. Only by paying this freedom in advance, taking freedom as the stake, can you possibly throw yourself truly into free creation, fully experience freedom, and thereby win a still more abundant freedom. Here, not only does the human's emotion attain full unfolding, but the full richness of the whole of the human's sensibility attains full unfolding; the force of life is greatly strengthened and given play, and “in a comprehensive way—that is, as a complete human—possesses his own comprehensive essence.” [14] Thereupon, the human is no longer the “fragment” bound to a lonely, isolated splinter within the social whole, but becomes a complete human in the true sense. The mutually opposed reason and sensibility thereby also become coordinated, discard their respective one-sidedness, rise to a new realm, and mutually fuse. Therefore, “only the aesthetic state is a whole within itself, for it contains within it all the conditions of its arising and continuing existence. Only here do we feel that we are outside of time; our human nature manifests itself in a pure and whole way, as though it had not yet suffered the impairment of any external force.” [15] Precisely because of this, Schiller regards the aesthetic realm as the supreme realm of human life, and regards the aesthetic human as the ideal mode of human life.

Marcuse, painfully sensible of the suppression that bourgeois reason, civilization, and social order exert upon human nature, more radically proposed the liberating function of literature and art. He holds: “Human freedom is rooted within the human's sensibility: the sense-organs not only ‘receive’ what is given to them (according to the way that thing originally is); moreover, they do not entrust to something else the ability (i.e., reason) to transform what is given; on the contrary, in practice, they discover, and can by their own efforts discover, the possibilities and abilities, forms and attributes of new (or more satisfying) things, and can prompt and guide the realization of these possibilities, abilities, forms, and attributes. The liberation of the sense-organs will obtain a freedom not yet existing—namely, attaining the goal pursued by the sensuous need of the life-instinct (eros).” [16] In Marcuse's mind, the human's sensibility is not only the sensation, emotion, imagination, and other factors of ordinary meaning, but, more importantly, the human's most basic, most primal eros; the human's various other sensuous forms all take eros as their source. Therefore, the liberation of sensibility means to some degree the Nietzschean Dionysian revel and the release of Freud's libido. But Marcuse is, after all, conscious of the duality of a liberation of sensibility taking eros as its basic content: it both constitutes a revolt against the unreasonable order of reason and possesses a blind destructive power toward the human himself; and so he stresses the sublimation of eros. The necessary path of this is precisely the aesthetic form of literature and art. “The so-called ‘aesthetic form’ refers to the result obtained by transforming a given content (i.e., real or historical, individual or social facts) into a self-sufficient whole (such as poetry, drama, fiction, etc.). With aesthetic form, the artwork sheds the endless process of reality and obtains its own meaning and truth. The realization of this aesthetic transformation is through the reorganization of language, perception, and understanding, so that they can make the original nature of reality be revealed within its phenomena: the suppressed potential of the human and of nature.” [17]

Literature does not exclude eros and the pleasure born of eros; to some degree it even obtains from it a basic power and impulse that the subject has never clearly been conscious of. But in the process of aesthetic abstraction, eros is filtered of its reality, is sublimated, and is generalized into a love of more universal meaning—namely, love for humankind, for nature, for free creation, and for the ideal; and the pleasure is also raised to the spiritual domain and becomes spiritual joy. Therefore aesthetic pleasure not only penetrates into the most hidden, most secret deep stratum of human nature, awakening the unconscious emotion never before noticed, but at the same time gives the spirit consolation on the metaphysical plane, thereby evoking the tremor of the soul. Literature is a promise. It repays love with love, repays freedom with freedom. However much the poet grieves over loneliness, or even deliberately and willfully manufactures loneliness, he is still calling for love, seeking response and resonance; however much the poet weeps and complains over the human's unfreedom, or even rejects freedom, it is freely experienced by people and strongly stimulates and arouses the human's longing and pursuit of freedom. Therefore Martin Buber says: it is precisely in literature that the human experiences the true embrace that ought to be between human and human. In the instant of this aesthetic experience, the human realizes the “peak experience,” throwing himself wholly into the “intoxication of life”: “They are immersed in a pure and perfect happiness, shedding all doubt, fear, suppression, tension, and timidity. Their self-consciousness too quietly vanishes. They no longer feel that there exists any distance and separation between themselves and the world; on the contrary, they feel that they have already become tightly merged with the world into one body. They feel that they truly belong to this world, and are not bystanders standing outside the world.” [18] The self throws itself into the world, dissolves into the world; and this is also the world dissolving into the self. This is the “true embrace that ought to be” between human and nature, between human and world. The vanishing of self-consciousness is also precisely in order truly to return to the self, to return to a more abundant, complete new self.

The experience of love and freedom is the experience of creation. For life unfolds freely under the impulse of love, and this is precisely the free creation of life. Creation makes life attain perfection and fullness, and so life is then brimming with the passion of love and the thirst for freedom. Love, freedom, and creation are thus so inextricably and inseparably intertwined within the whole of life, indispensable. As Rollo May says: “In this creative ecstasy, in this instant of self-realization, the individual momentarily crosses over the fence that lies between two personalities. This instant is the giving of the human's self and at the same time the discovery of the human's self. This ecstasy represents the most complete mutual dependence in human relations, and this paradox applies also to the creative consciousness—only when the individual has first obtained the ability to be independent and to become an independent person can he, in ecstasy, fuse with the other into one.” [19] Abstraction enables life to unfold freely on the greatest dimension; and in this creative activity of life, the human constructs the space of meaning for himself. The human has his own spiritual dwelling, or, as Novalis says, has “the universal home of beauty,” and so the human at last becomes “the truly absolute reality.”

Quite different from this, in real society the human lives so heavily, so wearily, that he has no leisure to experience and savor the meaning and value of life itself. At the same time, the feature that distinguishes the human from the animal lies precisely in his ceaselessly setting for his own life one concrete utilitarian aim after another, and devotedly pursuing this aim, as though every instant of life, every point of existence, raced toward this concrete aim and existed for this aim. The utilitarian aim possesses a supreme authority overriding the existence of life itself, and life itself, existence itself, is on the contrary neglected and cancelled. Once the pursuit fails, the human dissolves like an ice sculpture or sugar figure melting away, and existence too turns into a land of nowhere. Even with a successful struggle, the realization of the aim is equivalent to the cancellation of the aim, and so the human falls anew into boundless emptiness and bewilderment. Even though, in lonely emptiness, he looks back upon his past existence and recalls the process of life's unfolding, the past can only, owing to the self's neglect, leave behind the blank of memory.

Yet the aesthetic abstraction in literature precisely provides a “poetic open ground” for the human to create meaning and experience meaning. Abstraction makes literature shed real connection and become a self-sufficient whole; on this “poetic open ground,” the human no longer lives so heavily, so wearily, and this awakens in him a yearning for metaphysical consolation more intense than at any other time. Abstraction again makes him a free subject; he sheds those narrow, urgent utilitarian aims that entangled him day and night, that wound about his heart, and turns his gaze back to existence itself, fully immersing himself in the abundance of sensuous life. The relation of existence and aim in real life is, in the aesthetic heaven and earth of literature, precisely reversed. The finite aim becomes a human contrivance; it is like the glued bridge of a zither, by which to draw taut the string of existence so as to play the melody of life. Shi Tiesheng's Life as a String is an excellent example. From the viewpoint of real teleology, the old blind man is not only pitiable but foolish: he stakes his whole life upon an illusory goal—to make his eyes see again. When at last he breaks the thousandth string and takes from within the zither's belly the secret recipe his master left him, he discovers it is, after all, a blank sheet of paper. But in the aesthetic realm, the aim itself is, on the contrary, devalued; the tenacity, the stubborn pursuit of life, and the meaning of life itself rise to a position of unprecedented eminence and become the very core of aesthetic experience. The old blind man, with his unceasing pursuit, plays out the music of life and so creates meaning for life. Is not Goethe's Faust likewise so? For the reader, does not Doctor Faust's forever-unsatisfied pursuit far surpass his tragic grief?

In the literary work, the aim and the ending can be contrived, and they are contrived only in order to display the human's existence, to display the meaning of life. Between the human and the aim or ending it clears out a vast heaven and earth. Here, life leaps, struggles, conflicts, groans, and so displays a varied and many-formed sensuous existence; here, life creates its own meaning and value, and savors its own meaning and value. By comparison, that contrived aim and ending in the end pale into nothing, even to the point of vanishing. For creation and pursuit exclude any finite goal. When life is intoxicated in its own liveliness, intoxicated in the intense desire for creation and pursuit, and fully experiences the joy of creation and pursuit, it also breaks through the dyke of the finite aim's establishment, surpasses the aim, and extends limitlessly toward the future. Therefore, when you sink most deeply into the aesthetic present, you in fact experience the eternal meaning of existence, and you are then closest to the eternal. In the aesthetic realm, the present is forever joined to the eternal. Here, too, we discern the true mystery of the tragic sense of pleasure: after passing through aesthetic abstraction, tragedy makes the sensuous form of life, and the meaning of life, dazzlingly come to the fore, and thereby gives the human a metaphysical consolation. Within it we see the abundance of our own sensuous life, see our own infinite creative spirit, and experience the eternity of life's value. The pursuit of the eternal is deeply rooted in the primal impulse at the bottom stratum of the human soul; tragedy awakens this impulse and makes its desire be realized. This is an intoxication of life in the true sense, with which no bodily enjoyment or real recompense can compare. When life returns to the eternal and is intoxicated in the primal impulse, what do the sufferings of the human world, the buffetings of fate, even the destruction of the body, amount to? He has long since become the companion of the eternal, and risen to a new realm to look down upon all the variegated dust of the mortal world. And life thereby, in this brief glance, attains an enduring transcendence.