“Ecstasy” and “Empty Stillness”: Two Different Chinese and Western Paths of Aesthetic Return

Comparing Chinese and Western aesthetic thought, Zhang Shiying observes: “Confucian culture in China takes morality as the highest realm of life, with the aesthetic serving morality; and the chief criterion of morality is the elimination of the private. ‘I’ and ‘self’ (the ego), in the Confucian view, are largely synonyms for ‘the private,’ so that to eliminate the private is to eliminate the self. Daoist thought is the principal source of aesthetic conceptions in the whole Chinese cultural tradition, and the Daoist aesthetic realm is manifestly a realm of no-self (‘no-ego’) … Unlike the Chinese traditional aesthetic culture, the Western traditional aesthetic culture prizes the self; aesthetic consciousness is a consciousness of self-realization and self-expression … We may well say that the main line of Western aesthetic history is: ‘Beauty is the manifestation of the self in the sensuous.’ More concretely, beauty is the manifestation, in sensuous images, of the self’s ‘characteristics of reason, freedom, and individuality.’” That Zhang Shiying sums up the main lines of Chinese and Western aesthetics with “no-self” and “self” is a consensus among many scholars. “I” stands over against an object; where there is a “self” there must be an object, and the cleavage of thing and self becomes unavoidable. Only “no-self” can attain “no-thing,” and thereby realize the fusion of thing and self, the unity of Heaven and humanity. Chinese ancient aesthetics therefore stresses realizing the unity of Heaven and humanity through the no-self state of “empty stillness,” so as to reach the aesthetic realm; whereas Western aesthetics clings to self and subjectivity, and so finds it hard fully to heal the dualistic relation of subject-object opposition between human and world. Even when it stresses “the manifestation of the self in the sensuous,” it still regards this “sensuous manifesting one” as an “object of consciousness”—merely another, more covert, dualistic relation.

In fact, within Western aesthetics there likewise exists a monistic view that demands the mutual fusion of subject and object, though it occupies a non-mainstream position; and as to the path by which subject-object fusion is realized, the West tends more to advocate “ecstasy.” An analysis of “ecstasy” and “empty stillness” may afford a more concrete and detailed understanding of the differences between Chinese and Western aesthetic thought.

I.

As early as the ancient Greek period, Plato set great store by ecstasy. Plato held an ambivalent attitude toward art: on one hand, he regarded art as imitation of reality—art is only the shadow of the shadow of the Idea, separated from the true entity by three removes, and base; it often imitates the irrational part of human nature, fabricates false, unjust, immoral stories, and bewitches readers and audiences with emotion, producing bad effects, and so should be expelled from the ideal Republic. On the other hand, he greatly esteemed works whose inspiration comes from ecstasy, holding that this is the poet, by means of ecstasy, speaking for the god—grasping the Idea and true beauty. In the Ion, Plato, borrowing the words of Socrates, says: “The accomplished poets do not complete their beautiful poems by skill, but because they receive inspiration, are possessed by a divine power, and feel the frenzy of Dionysus.” “The god, for the poets, as for diviners and prophets, takes away their ordinary reason and uses them as his spokesmen, precisely so that the audience may know that the poets do not, by their own power, utter those precious words in ignorance and insensibility, but that it is the god, possessing them, who speaks to men … Such beautiful poems are in essence not human but divine, not the making of men but the oracles of the god; the poet is only the god’s spokesman, possessed by the god.” That is to say, the poetry Plato esteemed was not the poet’s imitation of reality but poetry able to speak for the god—in essence, the god speaking. The poet’s state of ecstasy is the god’s possession of the poet; at that moment the poet is also the god, god and man fused into one. Only in this state of ecstasy, the poet united with the god, can he recall the soul’s journeying with the gods, recall the true entities and the true beauty of the realm beyond the heavens; only then can poetry speak truth.

The Phaedrus, in the name of Stesichorus, recounts four kinds of ecstasy: prophecy, healing, possession by the Muses, and love—and uses a story expressly to explain the ecstasy of love. Stesichorus divides the soul into three parts, two horses and a charioteer; he likens reason to the docile horse and the irrational to the unruly horse, and, through the mutual pulling of the two horses and the coordination of the charioteer, finally brings the soul into the ecstasy of love. The poet’s ecstasy is just like love, likewise under the mutual pulling and mutual coordination of reason and the irrational.

Plato’s view of ecstasy exerted a profound influence on later scholars. Against the two views—that art is the imitation of nature, and Winckelmann’s view that art creates an ideal nature higher than reality and expresses spirit—Schelling offered a critique. He pointed out: art, like every living being, sets out from the original source, and in order to gain vigorous vitality must again and again return to that original source. In this process art concerns not only consciousness; there must also be an unconscious power participating—a perfect unity and mutual interpenetration of the two, brewing the surging of emotion and the soaring of fantasy. “Only when emotion surges, only when fantasy spreads its wings under the action of the resurrecting, all-governing force of nature, can art attain that irrepressible power by which—whether in the early, rigid, deep solemnity, or in works suffused with sensuous grace—it becomes truly faithful to the true, and produces from the spirit the highest reality, the reality fit for the contemplation of the earthly.” For Schelling, in art the highest unity and conformity to law are posited out of absolute freedom, for art is a higher organic organization, a growth woven of myriad threads, an absolute emanation. In the artistic process, the passion aroused by the interplay of conscious and unconscious activity impels the creator to return to the original state, to the unity of human and nature, and thereby to gain the truth of living things and of boundless nature. Of Schelling’s aesthetic thought, Gilbert and Kuhn give a fairly succinct account: “At different stages of the development of Schelling’s theoretical system, art and nature occupy very similar positions. The human body embodies the synthesis of conscious and unconscious activity (or freedom and necessity) before they have been divided by the human mind; while art, after these two activities have been divided within the sphere of conscious life, reunites them. Hence the sculptor or painter who re-presents nature needs, in his own mind, to sweep away the separation that human beings consciously create, and should return to a subconscious realm of the oneness of human and nature.”

In Nietzsche, the view of ecstasy receives its fullest exposition. Nietzsche held that the development of art is closely bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the two are at once contradictory and opposed yet symbiotically coexistent, mutually firing a strong, abundant creative power, and art only superficially reconciles this struggle. Apollo is the god of light, also the god of plastic form and prophecy, governing the beautiful appearance of the inner world of fantasy—like a dream of life—and should itself be seen as the magnificent divine image of the principle of individuation. Unlike Apollo, the Dionysian is the rapture that rises from the human being’s innermost nature when the principle of individuation collapses; it deliberately destroys the individual, releases the individual through a sense of unity, like the passion induced by drunkenness, prompting the subject gradually to dissolve into a state of utter self-forgetting—the process by which the individual merges into the whole, the human into nature. “Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only is the bond between man and man re-established, but estranged, hostile, enslaved nature too celebrates again the festival of her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man … Now he feels himself a god; he transforms himself, ecstatic and exalted, just as he saw the gods transform themselves in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art: the creative power of all nature, aiming at the supreme bliss of the primal One, here reveals itself through the tremor of drunkenness.” All art is the interweaving, conflict, and reconciliation of the opposed Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian makes us enamored of the individual, strips the Dionysian of its universality, displays the images of life to us one by one, and, with the vast energies of image, concept, ethical instruction, and sympathy, raises man up from the self-destruction of orgiastic mystery, spurring us to apprehend the mystery of life contained within. The Dionysian makes us, through the individual and through appearance, seek behind them an eternal joy, as if fused with primal existence, and makes us seem for a fleeting instant to become primal living beings themselves, intoxicated with an irrepressible will to existence and joy of existence, receiving metaphysical solace.

“Art itself, like a force of nature, expresses itself in man through these two states, governing him whether he will or no—either as a compelling drive toward illusion, or as a compelling drive toward excess.” True art always passes, through the Apollonian impulse toward beauty, into a Dionysian realm of drunkenness, transcending time and space and all phenomena, leading to the mother of being and the core of all things, fusing the finite individual into infinite nature; it experiences the primal conflict and pain, experiences the strength and eternity of the will to life, and gradually crosses over into the joyous order of the Olympian world of gods, refracting in its own self-contemplation the Olympian deities. Nietzsche regarded this intoxicated state of joy as a high sense of power, calling it the sense of mastery in the muscles, suppleness and the desire for movement, dance, lightness and swiftness, brave deeds, adventure, fearlessness toward life and death—all the higher elements of life mutually firing one another, a play of manifold forces constituting a creative inner dynamic. “Whether Apollonian art or Dionysian art, both attain their highest aim in the fraternal alliance of Apollo and Dionysus … He who has never experienced the situation of wishing both to look and to go beyond looking can scarcely imagine how, in beholding the tragic myth, these two processes coexist so distinctly and are felt at once … The tragic myth possesses the full delight of the Apollonian sphere of art in appearance and contemplation, and at the same time negates this delight, gaining a higher satisfaction from the destruction of the visible world of appearance.”

II.

Contrary to the West’s emphasis on “ecstasy,” ancient China was devoted to “empty stillness.” Chapter 16 of the Laozi says: “Attain utmost emptiness; hold fast to stillness.” And: “The myriad things, in their teeming, each return to their root. Returning to the root is called stillness; stillness is called returning to one’s destiny; returning to one’s destiny is called the constant; to know the constant is called clarity.” For Laozi, “empty stillness” is the root of the Dao, whence the myriad things arise; hence only by returning to the root, returning to the infant, leaving form behind and casting off knowledge—soft, weak, empty—and forgetting self in responding to things, can one contemplate the subtle and the manifest, know the constancy of the things of Heaven, illuminate the Dao of nature, and comply with it. Mou Zongsan offered his own interpretation. He held that Daoism understands and defines the Dao through “nothing,” so that “nothing” is the key. The realm that “nothing” displays is, in Daoist terms, “emptiness”—what Xunzi calls “empty, unified, and still”—“that is, making our mind not adhere to or be fixed upon any single direction … emptiness brings spiritual efficacy. When the mind adheres to a particular direction, the mind’s life is blocked and occupied by that direction, and is no longer empty; not being empty, it lacks efficacy.” Empty stillness is therefore “a mental state of infinite, marvelous functioning.”

Zhuangzi too directly regarded empty stillness and non-action as the root of the myriad things. He says: “Emptiness, stillness, placidity, and non-action are the root of the myriad things.” And he elaborates in the “Way of Heaven” chapter: “The sage’s stillness is not called good because stillness is good, and so he is still; rather, none of the myriad things is enough to disturb his mind, and so he is still. When water is still, it can mirror beard and brows; level, it serves as a standard, and the great craftsman takes his measure from it. If still water is thus clear, how much more the spirit! The stillness of the sage’s mind is the mirror of Heaven and Earth, the looking-glass of the myriad things. Emptiness, stillness, placidity, and non-action are the levelness of Heaven and Earth and the perfection of the Dao and its virtue; therefore emperors, kings, and sages rest in them. Resting, they are empty; empty, they are full; full, they are well-ordered. Empty, they are still; still, they move; moving, they attain.” In the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi, emptiness, nothing, the natural, and the Dao are closely related, even two sides of one thing. What is called “the natural” (ziran) is being so of itself, so without the application of any force—that is, non-action and empty stillness. The Dao of Heaven is non-acting, yet the myriad things transform themselves. Hence only by excluding human consciousness and will, abandoning desire and attachment, emptying the body, keeping an empty mind, knowing the masculine yet holding to the feminine, not harming the myriad things, complying with and yielding to nature so that things manifest themselves, can one attain and embody the Dao. With things external and life external, neither seeing nor hearing, the myriad things insufficient to disturb the mind, one returns to empty stillness, returns to the original state of life—“alone going to and fro with the spirit of Heaven and Earth, yet not looking down upon the myriad things”—and this is the precondition for merging into nature, joining the Great Thoroughfare, and realizing the realm of the unity of Heaven and humanity. Only non-action can do all; only the useless becomes the infinitely great use. The “Woodworker Qing carving the bell-stand” in the “Mastering Life” chapter of the Zhuangzi illustrates, with a concrete instance, that only through “the fasting of the mind,” entering a mind-state of non-action and empty stillness, can one match Heaven with Heaven and fashion a bell-stand of ghostly, surpassing craftsmanship.

Corresponding to the mind-state of empty stillness, Zhuangzi greatly prizes “roaming” (you)—that is, “roaming the mind in the bland.” As Feng Youlan says: “Zhuangzi, beyond speech, speaks of ‘no-speech’; beyond knowing, speaks of not-knowing; and through what is called ‘the fasting of the mind’ and ‘sitting in forgetfulness,’ actually reaches the realm of forgetting self and other, equalizing life and death, the oneness of the myriad things, the realm of absolute free-and-easy wandering.” “Roaming” is a state of freedom—“not depending” (wu dai)—relative to “depending” (you dai). Only by emptying and stilling the mind can one place human and world in a relation of non-dependence, transform together with things, and freely make the “free-and-easy wandering.” “Liezi rode the wind and traveled, cool and skillful, returning after fifteen days. Toward bringing about good fortune he was not anxious. Though he was spared walking, he still depended on something. But suppose one mounts the rectitude of Heaven and Earth, rides the changes of the six vapors, and roams the boundless—on what, then, would he depend? Therefore it is said: the utmost man has no self, the spirit man has no merit, the sage has no name.” No self, no merit, no name—thus no dependence. Without desire or seeking, without knowledge or learning, without preference or constancy, without obstruction or concealment, without thing or self, without anything to rely on and without the fetters of the flesh—roaming between Heaven and Earth in this state of empty stillness and non-action, unrestrained, in myriad transformations without limit—one is bound to be able to live together with Heaven and Earth, to be one with the myriad things, to meet and merge with the Dao, joining seamlessly, for the Dao is already contained therein, formless and traceless. This is the highest realm of Daoism. Free-and-easy wandering is both the path to the wholly fused realm of the unity of Heaven and humanity and that free state of unity itself. “He is about to be one with the maker of things, and roams in the single vapor of Heaven and Earth.” To be one with the maker of things is to have no separate self and no separate other; one is all, perfect and self-sufficient, an unencumbered freedom attaining harmony with Heaven.

If, in Zhuangzi, “empty stillness” is more often linked with the cultivation of body and mind, the perceptual mind-state, the way of responding to things, and the art of governing—so that in the end it relates, directly or indirectly, to purposiveness, tending toward avoiding harm and preserving the self, or toward the aim of inner sageliness and outer kingliness—then, when he links “empty stillness” with “free-and-easy wandering,” he almost brackets purposiveness, concentrating on the process itself, inclining toward a free existential attitude and the experience of that state, and thus it becomes the necessary precondition of literary-artistic and aesthetic activity. “He who attains utmost beauty and roams in utmost joy is called the utmost man.” Hence Xu Fuguan says: “Laozi and even Zhuangzi, at the starting point of their thought, had no artistic intention at all, still less took any concrete art as the object of their pursuit … they only swept away the actual human life in order to reach an ideal state of life … When Zhuangzi describes what he calls the Dao from the standpoint of concept, and we too grasp it only conceptually, this Dao has a speculative, metaphysical character. But when Zhuangzi states it as a lived experience of life, and we, responding to this lived experience of life, attain awakening, then it is, through and through, the artistic spirit. And upon the development of Chinese art it has, unwittingly, exerted a certain degree of influence.”

In Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, empty stillness has chiefly been used to explain literary creation and its aesthetic mind-state. The “Spirit Thought” chapter says: “In the thinking of literature, the spirit ranges far. Hence, silent and concentrating one’s thought, the mind reaches across a thousand years; quietly moving one’s countenance, the gaze penetrates ten thousand miles. In the act of chanting one issues the sounds of pearls and jade; before one’s very eyes there unfurl the colors of wind and cloud—such is the working of thought’s principle! Hence, in the marvel of thought’s principle, the spirit roams with things … Therefore, in shaping and turning literary thought, what is prized is empty stillness: clear out the five viscera, cleanse and purify the spirit … When spirit-thought is just in motion, ten thousand paths vie to sprout; rule and compass shape the empty places, carving and engraving the formless. Climb a mountain, and feeling fills the mountain; behold the sea, and intent overflows the sea—however much or little my talent, it will gallop alongside wind and cloud.” Liu Xie regards “clearing out the five viscera, cleansing and purifying the spirit” so as to reach the realm of “empty stillness” as the key to literary conception and artistic imagination. Once the various distractions are excluded and the mind-will is unified, still as a bright mirror, one can not only await things in emptiness, savor images with a clarified bosom, and merge into nature, but can also let thought soar, the spirit roaming with things, losing oneself in feeling among mountains and seas.

Laozi and Zhuangzi realize empty stillness and non-action through “diminishing and again diminishing,” “cleansing the mysterious mirror,” and “I lose myself,” so as to mirror the Dao of cosmos and human life; Liu Xie, by contrast, takes empty stillness as the starting point of literary creation and the far-ranging of literary thought. From one angle, as Wang Yuanhua says: “Liu Xie’s theory of empty stillness and the Laozi-Zhuangzi theory of empty stillness form precisely a sharp contrast. Laozi and Zhuangzi regard empty stillness as the final destination of returning to the simple and the true, as an endpoint; whereas Liu Xie regards empty stillness as the prior preparation for arousing imagination, as a starting point. Laozi and Zhuangzi advocate empty stillness in order to reach a realm of nescience and desirelessness, a muddled void; whereas Liu Xie advocates empty stillness in order, through empty stillness, to reach the opposite of empty stillness—a realm of lively thought and kindled feeling. The one is passive, the other active; the difference between the two is evident.” In fact, viewed from the relation between “empty stillness” and “the Dao,” Liu Xie’s view and that of Laozi and Zhuangzi are of one lineage, with no question of passive or active. Laozi and Zhuangzi focus on embodying and attaining the Dao: so long as one empties and stills the mind, complies with nature, and unites Heaven and humanity, the Dao is contained therein, clear to the mind; and it is precisely by entering this realm of empty stillness—thing and self fused, thing and self both forgotten, the two no longer bounded or estranged, cosmos and life all entering my mind in mutual response—that Liu Xie regards it as the important condition for the far-ranging of literary thought. This is in fact a continuation of the Laozi-Zhuangzi line of thought, applied to the special activity of literary creation.

III.

“The poet is a complete human being precisely because he can exercise his power to fuse every particular sensible form, every word in the language, into the breath of the whole. And he has this power because he draws on the latent force of collective experience, because in his eyes the wild nature and manifold forms of this new continent, and the activities of various peoples exploring and pioneering here, are all marvelous images.” In Chinese and Western aesthetic thought, ecstasy and empty stillness are respectively regarded as important conditions of literary-artistic activity, and their common function is to realize the coordination of individual with whole, human with nature, finite with infinite. Only by entering this state can one attain the supreme and most beautiful realm of literature and art and fully embody the freedom of the mind. Yet there are also marked differences between China and the West: to reach this state of union, the two sides seem to have adopted wholly different, even opposite, paths and ways, and their starting points and endpoints differ as well.

Literary-artistic and aesthetic activity contains both a mutually opposed duality and a mutually fused oneness; it is the interweaving of “objective relation” and “non-objective relation,” the unity of perception-cognition with intuition-experience, the complementarity of conscious and unconscious experience, always in a relation of tension and a state of transition. For Westerners, because individuality and subjectivity are fully developed, the mutually opposed duality between human and nature overwhelms the oneness that seeks fusion. To change this state of cleavage between subject and object, human and nature, there must be a fierce contest; one must pass through the passionate state of ecstasy, reversing the relation with surging unconscious and powerful will, again reconciling the opposition of subject and object, human and nature, and healing the cleavage. For the ancient Han people, by contrast, the family rather than the individual is the basic cell of society; individuality is often submerged in the collective and not fully developed, still lacking a strong, clear subject-consciousness. There is therefore no need to change the existing state by means of powerful will and passion—indeed, powerful will and passion are to be excluded—but rather, as Laozi says, to “diminish and again diminish,” continually washing out the bosom, cleansing the mysterious mirror, tracing back to the source, until reaching empty stillness and non-action. In this there is no conflict; rather, one returns to nature of itself, realizing the pure oneness of human and nature. In this state of the unity of Heaven and humanity, “the mind is the Dao, the Dao is Heaven; to know the mind is to know the Dao and to know Heaven.”

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer expounded aesthetic contemplation. He held that only by “isolating” the contemplated object from real relations and contemplating it in repose—freeing it from the principle of sufficient reason, forgetting the “where,” “when,” “why,” and “wherefore” of the thing under examination, and at the same time dissolving the entanglements of abstract thought and rational concepts—does the human being, at that moment, forget his individuality and his will and “lose himself in the object.” “He exists only as pure subject, as the mirror of the object; it is as if there were only the object’s existence and no one perceiving it, so that one can no longer separate the perceiver (the person) from the perceiving (itself); the two have become one, for the whole of consciousness is wholly filled and occupied by a single perceptual image.” Only when subject and object admit of no distinction, mutually filling and interpenetrating, is the “world as representation” truly constituted. Thus “the will is the in-itself of the Idea; the Idea objectifies the will, and this objectification is perfect.”

On the surface, Schopenhauer’s “contemplation,” which advocates realizing the fusion of subject and object through “repose-filled beholding,” closely resembles the “empty stillness” of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Yet his “pure subject” is still a “conscious subject,” and so long as there is a “conscious subject” there must be an “object of consciousness”; even if this object is the mind’s “representation,” it still cannot thoroughly heal the dualistic relation, because this subject-object-united “representation” still exists as an “object of consciousness,” cleft from the body. “Contemplation,” therefore, is sharply distinct from the “no-self” state of “empty stillness” and from the “non-objective” state of unconscious experience.

Besides these differences of path and way, the two also differ in their standpoint and in the degree of return. Plato’s “ecstasy” takes its cue from sorcery ritual, and sorcerous ecstasy often becomes the starting point from which many later scholars think about literary-artistic activity, while also being the endpoint of a return to the state of ecstasy. From this angle, the West thinks about ecstasy with sorcery ritual—with human activity—as its standpoint. The empty-stillness view of Laozi and Zhuangzi, however, far transcends this standpoint, transcends human activity, tracing directly back to the source of nature, to the chaotic state of the oneness of the myriad things, to the domain of “nothing.” That is to say, the West, by means of powerful will, excludes the conscious “ego” and retreats to the Freudian unconscious “id”; whereas the Han people, through “forgetting self,” return directly to the realm of “no-self”—a return that is at once unresisted and more thorough, bounded neither by the human nor by life, but “transforming together with things.” In this return it is a deeper, more primordial unconscious experience that is at work. To be sure, in Chinese aesthetic culture, the cursive calligraphy of Zhang Xu, the poetry of Li Bai, and Guo Moruo’s The Goddesses … also carry certain ecstatic colors; but they did not become the mainstream of literary-artistic and aesthetic thought. This is constrained not only by a particular cultural psychology; the ideas of “central harmony” (zhonghe) and “the mean” (zhongyong) also repel such an attitude.

If language, consciousness, and reason not only cleave the unity of human and nature, cultivating human subjectivity and creating the opposition of subject and object, but also, in the process of using language—owing to the continual distortion of meaning—ever more severely twist the original relation of the two, so that the human being no longer dwells on Heidegger’s “earth,” no longer encounters the god, and cannot but miss the truth; then ecstasy and empty stillness re-emphasize the importance of unconscious experience, so as to heal the cleavage of human and nature. Compared with ecstasy, empty stillness goes one layer deeper: it further excludes powerful will and the instinct of desire, summons the deepest, most primordial natural linkage, and returns to the original state of nature—and this healing is the most thorough and perfect, truly able to meet and merge with the Dao, the realm of great beauty and great virtue. Unlike empty stillness, ecstasy is grounded in powerful will and unconscious desire; and although will and desire pursue the fusion of thing and self, they always point to an object, still retaining traces of cleavage, and inevitably obscure truth and the Dao.

Clearly, the differences existing within the commonality of ecstasy and empty stillness express the subtle distinctions between Chinese and Western aesthetic activity and aesthetic thought, embodying the differences of cultural psychology. Hegel held that the ideal of art is to combine two freedoms: first, the freedom of the modern person who creates his own world by his own will; second, the desireless, non-acting freedom embodied by the ancient gods. Although art fuses these two freedoms, China and the West differ, each with its own emphasis. This difference further leads to the fact that, in Chinese and Western aesthetic thought, the West attends more to the “sublime,” while the Han people favor “grand beauty” (zhuangmei).

IV.

After Longinus and Burke expounded the objective features of the sublime, Kant, successively in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and the Critique of Judgment, offered a more penetrating account from the subjective side. Kant called the absolutely great the sublime, but held that the reason an object is sublime should not be sought in the natural object; rather one must turn to the inner self of the one who judges: this infinite, absolutely great thing transcends all the powers of the senses and even of the imagination. “The quality of the feeling of the sublime is this: it is a feeling of displeasure, with respect to the aesthetic faculty of judging, about an object—a displeasure that is at the same time represented as purposive. This is possible because this very incapacity reveals the consciousness of an unlimited faculty in the same subject, and the mind can aesthetically judge the latter only through the former.” For Kant, the beautiful is what pleases in mere judging, whereas the sublime contains at once displeasure and pleasure, contains an antagonistic factor: the subject feels within itself a sensible obstacle and is thereby roused to the feeling of overcoming that obstacle.

Likewise, Santayana too pointed out the opposed factor within the sublime: “The unity attained by inclusion gives us beauty; the unity attained by exclusion, opposition, and isolation gives us sublimity. Both are pleasures. But the pleasure of beauty is warm, passive, and pervasive, whereas the pleasure of sublimity is cool, imperious, and sharp. Beauty makes us one with the world; sublimity sets us above it.”

Unlike the sublime, which contains opposed factors of subject-object cleavage, grand beauty has no mutually opposed factors. Praising Yao, Confucius said: “Great indeed was Yao as a sovereign! Lofty! Only Heaven is great, and only Yao took it as his model. Vast! The people could find no name for it. Lofty! He had achievements. Brilliant! He had cultural patterns.” Lofty is the greatness of Heaven, with the Dao residing therein; Yao complied with the Way of Heaven to accomplish great deeds. Though “lofty” may also be rendered as “sublime,” it is plainly different from the sublime in the Western aesthetic category: there is no opposed factor, and it is closer to a “greatness” or “grand beauty” without opposition. Mencius said: “The full and replete is called beautiful; the full and replete that has radiance is called great; the great that transforms is called sage; the sage that cannot be fathomed is called divine.” Precisely because he takes “replete fullness” and “greatness” as beauty, Mencius greatly esteems the “flood-like vital energy” (haoran zhi qi)—this utmost-great and utmost-firm energy, filling the space between Heaven and Earth, is the most beautiful character. It summons people, draws their longing, until they throw themselves into it and dissolve within it.

Taking “greatness” as “beauty” seems to have been a consensus in ancient China. “Heaven and Earth are what the ancients held great, and what the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun together held beautiful.” The “Autumn Floods” chapter of the Zhuangzi tells a parable: when the autumn floods came in season, the hundred streams poured into the river, its flow vast, and the River Earl complacently took himself to hold all the beauty under Heaven. But when he beheld the boundless sea, he knew his own meanness. “Free-and-Easy Wandering” describes the Kun-Peng thus: “In the bald north there is a dark sea, the Pool of Heaven. There is a fish there, several thousand li broad, and no one knows its length; its name is Kun. There is a bird there named Peng, its back like Mount Tai, its wings like clouds hanging from the sky; mounting the whirlwind it rises ninety thousand li, cutting through the cloud-vapor, bearing the blue sky, and then heads south, bound for the Southern Dark.” The Kun-Peng, immense beyond compare, soars straight up, cleaves the cloud-vapor, bears the blue sky on its back, and wheels through the boundless firmament—an exceedingly grand and beautiful scene. The Kun-Peng “roams” freely between Heaven, Earth, and cosmos, with no estrangement or opposed factor whatever. For the imaginer who enters this realm, likewise attracted and intoxicated by such a vision, following the Kun-Peng to merge into grand and beautiful nature, there is only heartfelt wonder and joy, without any sense of repulsion or displeasure.

“The Way of Heaven is vast—is it not great!” For the ancient Han people, literary-artistic and aesthetic activity takes embodying and attaining the Dao as its aim; the operation of the Way of Heaven is itself formless and limitless, vast and boundless. To truly attain an apprehension of the Dao there is no other route than to “roam the mind in the bland, blend the vapors with the indifferent, comply with the self-so of things, and admit no private self.” With a mind of empty stillness one roams between Heaven and Earth, uniting with them, and in grand, beautiful nature apprehends the Dao of Heaven and Earth.

Grand beauty and the sublime both pursue unity; their difference lies in this: grand beauty does not, like the sublime, move toward unity by way of opposition. This is not to say there is no grand beauty in the Western aesthetic categories, or no sublime among the Han people, but rather that the two sides have a preference for different typical forms of literary-artistic and aesthetic activity, taking the sublime and grand beauty respectively as their types. The Chinese nation, which takes “central harmony” as beauty, more readily favors grand beauty over the sublime. Correspondingly, the “tragedy” of the Han people also differs from Western tragedy, often ending in grand reunion or the manifest justice of Heavenly principle—so much so that Lu Xun disparaged it as a literature of “deception and cheating.”

The difference between the sublime and grand beauty in the Chinese and Western aesthetic categories echoes the difference between ecstasy and empty stillness; in essence it is the difference in the overall relation between human and world. Within the tension relation in which human and world are at once opposed and fused, China and the West each have different tendencies. From this are constituted the two sides’ different cultural psychologies, which determine the ethnic characteristics of aesthetic preference, and the ethnic characteristics of literary-artistic creation and aesthetic activity.