Goodman: The Everyday Life-World and the World of Literature and Art

Concerning the theory of fiction, Kermode made a rather in-depth reflection. In The Sense of an Ending, he points out that the human always constructs the spatiotemporal structure of the world according to his own inner needs, artificially positing a beginning and an ending to endow human existence with meaning, dividing millennia, centuries, and other highly subjective historical periods in order to lodge anxiety and hope, and bringing the perception of the present, the memory of the past, and the expectation of the future into a common structure. The human needs beginnings, endings, and temporal order. It is precisely this subjectivity of the human that determines the fictionality of history. Therefore, there is no unique, objective history, only all sorts of histories established according to different paradigms—and these paradigms are precisely products of the human's subjectivity. Compared with history, literature is freer; literature is granted the privilege of creation: it can not only disregard so-called historical facts but also challenge established paradigms, constructing its own world at will to satisfy the needs of the mind—yet however it does so, they are all fictional. "All types of fiction, whether inherited or invented, simple or complex… are all parts of this world of language, parts of that deception that can endow the world with life." (1)

What Kermode chiefly expounds is the problem of literary fiction. Yet in fact it contains such an insight: the human's history and the human's world are constructed, constructed by language signs; they are all built upon the human's own fictionalizing act, constrained by the human's life-structure and mind-structure, and therefore history and even the world are not objective realities—they are fictional and plural. Compared with Kermode, Goodman's thought of "plural worlds" puts forward its own distinctive view; his Ways of Worldmaking expounds this in depth, and the two together merge into the mainstream of modern Western philosophy. As Goodman points out: "This mainstream modern philosophy began when Kant replaced the structure of the world with the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis replaced the structure of the mind with the structure of concepts, and now goes further, replacing the structure of concepts with the structure of the many symbol systems of science, philosophy, art, perception, and everyday discourse. This movement is a shift from the unique truth and a fixed, found world to many correct, and even conflicting, versions or worlds in the making." (2) Goodman himself is a philosopher and aesthetician who explores the world and the modes of constitution of literature and art precisely with an eye to the structure of symbol systems.

In Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman bluntly puts forward his own view: the world is not self-existent but constructed, constructed from nothing with the aid of various symbol systems. (12) Therefore there does not exist one real world, but only scientific, artistic, perceptual, everyday, and various symbol-constructed worlds. The constructed character of the world determines that the world is man-made, stamped with the imprint of the human's subjectivity and creativity, and therefore also fictional and multifarious. Since the world is constructed by symbols, the diversity of the world depends on the human's choice of symbol systems and is directly related to symbolic style and manner. Different symbol systems—such as language, number, picture, sound, and various other symbols—and different symbolic styles and manners construct different human worlds; these worlds not only differ from one another but may even conflict, be incommensurable, and hard to translate, yet they coexist at the same time, each interpreting the world in its own way. Even using the same symbol system, different worlds are constructed because of different ways of decomposition, combination, emphasis, ordering, deletion, and supplementation. There exist all sorts of symbolized worlds, but there is no purely self-existent real world, nor is it possible to reduce the various different worlds to one primordial world. This makes Goodman's view clearly distinct from metaphysical realism.

Here we also see an important difference between Goodman and Kermode. What Kermode stresses is the connection between the human's psychological structure and historical construction (world construction), whereas for Goodman the importance of the symbol system replaces the importance of the mind. In Kermode's eyes, the construction of history, literature, and other worlds depends on the human's psychological structure—that is, is determined by the human's subjectivity, needs, and desires. But in Goodman's theoretical horizon, although the symbol is created by the human, the product of human activity, and stamped with the human's subjective imprint, once it is produced it becomes an objective existence, and the structure, characteristics, and rules of the symbol system predetermine the way the world is constructed. Of course, this objectivity is not the objectivity of the material world that people formerly believed in, but the priority and shared character of the symbol system. Goodman does not deny the role of the human's subjectivity; he says: "Our devotion to a world has been satisfied, at different times and for different purposes, through many different ways. Not only motion, derivation, emphasis, and order are relative; even reality is relative." (2) The human's choice of different symbol systems, styles, and manners, and the different ways the human adopts in emphasis, ordering, addition and subtraction, and combination when using a certain symbol system, are all influenced by the human's particular purposes and inner desires. But this subjective role is not fundamental; it is constrained by the structure and rules of the symbol; once a certain symbol system is chosen, the human is constrained by that system. The human can choose a symbol system and can modify its rules, yet not at will; and his construction of the world can only be a remaking on the basis of the already-constructed old world—a reconstruction of the world. The development of human cognition is precisely a process of continually reconstructing the world. This involves the question of truth. Therefore, although Goodman calls his theory "relativism" and "irrealism," he also stresses that it is a "radical relativism under rigorous restraints," a view "close to a kind of irrealism." (2)

Goodman's theory of world construction stresses the plurality of the world, yet it does not deny the question of truth and lead to agnosticism. In fact, when we propose that practice is the criterion for testing truth, we have already raised the human's practical activity to the foremost position. As long as one points out the symbolic character of human practice, points out that human practice can only be symbolic activity, then one cannot but see that the human's world is precisely the product of the human's symbolic activity, constructed according to symbolic rules, and that truth is built on the basis of symbolic rules. (13) The important feature of human practice lies precisely in its being a practice that uses symbols and operates through symbolic activity. None of the human's practical activities can do without symbols; all are permeated, normalized, and determined by symbols, including the human's sense organs, which are all symbolized. Different types of practice are, fundamentally, practices using different symbol systems. When we adopt different symbol systems, and when our symbolized practice continually expands its field of activity and thereby expands the frame of reference, we construct different truths. From this angle, truth is both discovered and created; it is not unique. There is no single correct objective truth. Truth can only be placed within the symbol system to which it belongs and examined for its "fitness" within the frame of reference that this symbol system provides. Therefore Goodman says: "When a version conflicts with neither stubborn beliefs nor its own rules, we count it true." (2) Truth should be consistent with the rules of the symbol system to which it belongs and consistent with the rules of the world constructed by that symbol system. We do not arbitrarily put symbols together to form a whole to construct a world; the real world can only be constructed by real or correct versions and be fitted to them. For this, Goodman proposes "validity," "consistency," and "coherence" as criteria of measurement. Only when a "truth" is valid in the world constructed by the symbol system to which it belongs, and consistent and coherent with the other rules of this world, will it gain recognition. Truth is tested by the practice of the human's symbolic activity. "Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant." (2) Of course, if a newly proposed "truth" follows the rules of the symbol system yet conflicts with the rules of the world constructed by that system, then, besides re-testing the "truth," it may also lead to doubt about the symbolic version itself, and even to revision and reconstruction of the version and a shaking of belief. Clearly, Goodman's "plural worlds" view is inseparable from the historical background of an era in which cultural diversity is highlighted in the process of globalization.

The world is constructed by symbols and is plural; then how is the ordinary person's everyday life-world constituted? On this Goodman also gives an incisive exposition. In Goodman's view, the world-constructing activities of various different symbol systems—including science, art, philosophy, history, and other symbols—all participate in the process of constructing the everyday life-world, all influence its construction, merge into it, and become a component of it. The everyday life-world is a hodgepodge world pieced together from symbols of various different systems. "For an ordinary person, the great majority of the versions from science, art, and perception differ in some way from that familiar everyday world. This world is one he has built, cutting corners, from the traditional fragments of science and art and in his own struggle for survival. In fact, this world is most often taken to be real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit." (2) The everyday life-world differs from any world strictly constructed according to the rules of a symbol system; it is like a monk's "patchwork robe," a stitched-together world into which fragments of science, news, history, and literature and art, as well as firsthand perception in daily activity, are all spliced; it is also like a "palimpsest," continually rewritten with the development and popularization of scientific knowledge, the change of media technology, the expansion of the human's horizon, and the shift of human interest—a world repeatedly smeared and revised, with layer upon layer of overlapping color.

Even fragments of the world of literature and art, which has always been regarded as fictional, participate in constructing the everyday life-world. For instance, because of Balzac's Grandet, Gogol's Chichikov, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Lu Xun's Ah Q, we reconstruct and newly understand quite a few figures in the everyday world. "'Don Quixote,' taken literally, applies to no one, but taken figuratively applies to many of us… literal falsehood or inapplicability is fully compatible with metaphorical truth." (2) Both fiction and non-fiction participate in constructing the everyday life-world. Literature and art give us a new way of constructing the world, a new perspective for viewing it. "After leaving an exhibition, a person is suddenly able to observe the world with the eye of the artist, from the perspective of the artist's works, according to the aesthetics those works display… works of art are often tools for expanding and intensifying the perception of the world." (3) Literature and art can even go on to change the human's way of life, "providing a paradigm for a way of life." (3) Thus the world appears before our eyes with a new countenance. From this angle, nature too is constructed in the human's symbol-creating and speaking activity. "Nature is a product of art and discourse." (4) Only because we have, since birth, lived directly in a world constructed by symbols—all our activities being themselves symbolic activities, constructing or reconstructing our life-world with symbols at every moment—are we confined within the construction methods of the various constructed things, dealing directly with these constructs in one way or another and bringing them into our life-activity; and so the symbols that construct the world become what Heidegger calls "the ready-to-hand," and we thereby lose consciousness of these construction methods, lose consciousness of the very symbolicity, subjectivity, and fictionality of the everyday life-world itself. The reason analytic philosophy values the analysis of everyday discourse is precisely that the language signs constructing the everyday life-world are not unified or standardized, and are even distorted, and this phenomenon of non-unification, non-standardization, and distortion spreads and invades the use of language signs in specialized fields, thereby distorting and concealing meaning. Only through analytic clearing can these distorted, concealed meanings be made to reappear. At the same time, it also strives, through the combing of language signs, to reveal the historical strata covered layer upon layer.

Just such a pieced-together, overlapping motley world is regarded by us as the real world, as the world in which we solidly live. In this, tradition and habit play an extremely important role. Because we have always lived in this world constructed in the traditional way, we have long since become habituated and numbed, and have never thought to question this hodgepodge symbolized world. Habit covers over the unreasonable, incongruous, and even self-conflicting factors in the everyday world, and everything is taken for granted. Therefore, the so-called everyday life-world is precisely an already-habituated world. The so-called fact is an object and event constructed in the habitual way and habitually accepted. In truth, fact is not a purely objective object or event, because the object is the human's object, and the event is constructed by the human's symbolic activity; they are all perceived and known by the human after symbolization or re-symbolization. Fact is man-made. (16) The reason it is regarded as objective is grounded in people's having already become completely habituated to this symbolic activity, to the point of being utterly unaware of the intervention of symbols. So Goodman says: "Some of the perceived stubbornness of facts is really the force of this habit—the habit that our firm foundation is indeed cold and dull." "Facts are small theories, and correct theories are large facts." (2) That is to say, fact is always constructed in the human's symbolic activity according to a particular version; it is bound to be constrained by the human's cognitive mode and symbolic version and is permeated with the flavor of "theory"; while correct theory is precisely the model on which we construct history and even the world. As long as it is the human's practical activity, it can only be symbolic activity; as long as it is the human's world, it can only be a symbolized world; the human's knowledge of the world and of facts can only be a remaking of the world and of facts, itself a process of symbolization and re-symbolization, with understanding and creation always fused together like shadow following form. The force of human inertia in the everyday life-world is so enormous that it is often hard to shake—precisely because it conceals the way the world is constructed, lets us grow habituated to the existence of symbolic versions, and lets us forget that all our perception and cognition pass through these symbolic versions, thereby naturalizing everything. Only when a certain way of constructing the world is frustrated, or when this constructed world cracks because of the sharpening of inner contradictions, thereby provoking doubt, does a new symbolic version rise to replace it. "The construction of a world begins from one version and ends at another version." (2) And so it leads to the leap-like advance of human cognition.

The everyday life-world is a habituated, symbolized world, and also a world that has lost its freshness and become dull and lusterless; metaphor is precisely a kind of linguistic-sign version that tries to challenge habit and reendow the world with luster. Metaphor, as a distinctive version of the linguistic sign, is a version that deviates from the habitual version. On one hand, it maintains the original extension and usage of the linguistic sign; on the other, it places itself within a new context, forcing itself to detach and shift from what came before, and induces another new usage, establishing a new designating relation, thereby producing an ambiguity of designation and an inner tension. In the use of metaphor, "what actually happens is a transfer of a schema, a migration of a concept, a transfer of a category. Indeed, metaphor may be regarded as a calculated category-mistake, or rather as a happy and life-renewing remarriage—though it may commit bigamy." (4) Metaphor indeed commits "bigamy": it contracts a new marriage without dissolving the old one, simultaneously possessing both the new and the old object and bringing the two together, thereby inducing us to reconstruct in a new way the object we are accustomed to, organizing an unfamiliar domain, and then viewing the habituated object from a new angle. Or, more precisely, metaphor hopes to encounter a "romance," establishing an "illegitimate" "affair" by seeking a new designating relation, and finding surprise and excitement in it. Therefore metaphor should always be novel.

Metaphor is like a bride in beautiful makeup; when we slowly grow familiar with her and habituated to her, the dazzling brilliance is worn away. It is assimilated, aged, and absorbed by the everyday life-world; it is no longer a living metaphor—the metaphor dies and again vanishes into the disturbing humdrum of life. For instance, "mountainside," "sacrifice," "exploitation," "oppression," "liberation"… we have all forgotten that they too once had a charming image or a startling history. As Goodman says: "Metaphor, with the continual disappearance of the vitality expressed as living speech, comes all the more to seem a truth in the surface sense. What disappears is not its truth but its vividness. Metaphor, like a new mode of representation, becomes all the more matter-of-fact when its fresh, perceptible quality recedes." (4) Metaphor must, after all, plunge anew into the embrace of the everyday life-world; it drowns in the stuffy, languid life-environment, becoming a lifeless, merely shell-bearing, yet quite definite existence. Viewed from the opposite angle, one may also say that a successful metaphor is a defector from the everyday life-world; it contrives to flee the world people are familiar with, leading the human into a new world to explore new mysteries and pursue a shock of the mind. It is also for this reason that metaphor is often regarded as a linguistic version commonly used in literature and art. Clearly, metaphor has a dual character: out of "weariness of the old" it flees one designating relation while seeking a "new love," drawing close to another new designating relation, and trying to maintain the ambiguous, neither-near-nor-far character of this relation. But when the everyday life-world attempts to win it over and incorporate it, when worldly forces attempt to suppress and tame it, and when the new designating relation too is habituated and naturalized, its own impulse to flee is exhausted; metaphor submits, and it merges, docile and lifeless, into the "reality" of the everyday life-world. Metaphor is forever in a cycle of innovation and degeneration, defection and submission, and also in a process of continual migration of the designating relation.

In Goodman's view, the world of literature and art is not opposed to the real everyday life-world, and the distinction between the two is not the difference between fiction and reality (non-fiction). Whether literature and art or the real world, they are all constructed by symbols; from this point, there is no substantive difference between the two. Even between literature and art and science there is no natural gulf. Their distinction does not lie in the opposition between emotion and fact, intuition and inference, excitement and prudence, synthesis and analysis, feeling and thinking, the concrete and the abstract, impulse and action, the direct and the indirect, the subjective and the objective, the beautiful and the true. The age-old effort to prescribe a special component for literature and art, to draw an independent circle for it, and to find a definite answer to the question "what is literature and art" is, in the end, in vain.

However, Goodman does not on that account deny the distinctiveness of literature and art; he only holds that this distinctiveness is actual, concrete, and presentational. He points out: "An object, too, can be a work of art only at certain times and under certain circumstances… It is precisely because the object performs the function of a symbol in a certain way that the object becomes a work of art only when performing these functions." (2) "Only when the symbolic function of things has certain features do they perform the function of a work of art." (2) Therefore, we should not ask "what is literature and art" but should ask "how is literature and art possible" or "when is it literature and art."

Since the world of literature and art, the world of science, and various other worlds are all constructed by symbols, should one then explore the distinctiveness of literature and art from the angle of the symbol? Goodman indeed unfolds his thinking along this line; he tries to view the distinctiveness of literature and art from the differences governed by certain attributes of the symbol. But the problem is that literature and art have no symbol system exclusively their own—for instance, the language and characters used by literature are likewise the symbol system adopted by other, non-literary works, and the colors and lines used by painting are also shared by other applied diagrams; this sets up an obstacle to solving the problem. So Goodman goes on to consider what tendencies literature and art exhibit in the use of symbols, in just what way they perform which functions of the symbol, so as to make literature and art "be what they are" and truly become what people regard as works of literature and art. On this basis he proposes the "five aesthetic symptoms" of symbolic function: syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, the relation of exemplification, and multiple and complex reference. At the same time, Goodman also holds that the presence or absence of one or more of these symptoms cannot ultimately determine a work's aesthetic qualification; they are not the criterion for testing whether an object is a work of literature and art. These symptoms, after all, only provide some clues for solving "when is it literature and art." As Wittgenstein pointed out in analyzing games, you cannot see the common point of all games but can only see resemblances and their connections, and a series of relations. The aesthetic symptoms likewise only point out certain connections between symbolic function and a work's aesthetic quality, point out the possibility-conditions for the existence of works of literature and art. As for the fictionality that not a few scholars stress, Goodman does not approve of it. In Goodman's view, fiction means designating a nonexistent object, and literature and art can be both fictional—for instance, Shakespeare's Hamlet or Dickens's Pickwick, or the unicorn or the winged horse, which indeed have no real designated object—and non-fictional, such as biographical literature, documentary literature, portrait painting, and the like, which do have real designated objects; even lyric poetry can hardly be judged on this basis. Fictionality is not the criterion or symptom for distinguishing literature and art. It is precisely in the above reflection, which reaches no final conclusion, that we see the cautious attitude Goodman holds toward literature and art.

The aesthetic symptoms are closely related to literature and art. So the distinctiveness of literature and art can only first be sought in the symptoms of the function of language signs, and the appreciation of literature and art should also grasp the aesthetic symptoms of language signs, taking these as the starting point and integrating them into the gradually deepening process of appreciative activity—only thus can literature and art be truly understood. Grasping the features of language signs is a necessary premise of the appreciation of literature and art, and also a necessary component of it. Therefore Goodman says: "What most needs attention in a symbol is the moment of sudden, unexpected discovery; and sometimes, at this stage, the symbol turns from the obscure to the clear. But there is indeed an ending and a fresh beginning. A discovery becomes useful knowledge only if it can be understood; a clear and full symbol, when familiar to people, does not become insignificant but is embodied in the basis for further interpretation. And so long as the system of symbols has a certain hierarchy, familiarity will not be complete and final; looking again can always reveal new and meaningful nuances. Not only that: what we read and learn in symbols also varies with what we endow the symbols with. We not only discover the world through symbols but, under the inspiration of developing experience, continually understand the symbols anew and re-evaluate them. The variability and the permanence of aesthetic value are both necessary results of its cognitive character." (4) These expositions vividly display Goodman's personal habit of appreciation. He always appraises literature and art with the preference of a museum curator, (15) placing the emphasis on the symptoms of symbolic function and on the activity of cognitive understanding, treating the activity of understanding literature and art as a mode of the growth of knowledge rather than giving equal weight to experience and understanding. As Goodman himself says, his interest in art is linked with the theory of cognition, and he regards aesthetic experience as a special kind of "cognitive experience."

IV

Goodman, on one hand, holds that science, literature and art, and the everyday life-world are all man-made constructions; on the other, holds that literature and art have their own distinctiveness, and intends to explore the question "when is it literature and art" according to the symptoms of symbolic function. But, likewise setting out from the angle of human symbolic activity, postmodern scholars such as Baudrillard, Featherstone, and Welsch draw entirely different views. Only by comparing their views can we understand Goodman's thought more deeply and clarify literature and art and the theory of fiction.

Baudrillard holds that, with the high development of the commodity economy and electronic media technology in consumer society, we live not only surrounded by things but surrounded by images and simulacra. Various commodities, shop windows, advertisements, film and television, streets and markets, central-square parks, and even every field are meticulously designed, filled with dazzling images and simulacra; these are continually reproduced, overproduced, and their main mode of production has become simulation governed by codes—to the point that "it is no longer a question of forgery, nor of reproduction, nor of imitation, but of substituting the signs of the real for the real itself." (5) Thereby the real becomes the "hyperreal," and reality becomes "hyperreality." (5) This view of remaking the world through symbol-production is consonant with Goodman's. However, in Goodman's view, image-symbols are ultimately absorbed and assimilated by the life-world and, through habit, degenerate into "reality"; but for Baudrillard, the overproduction of symbols has already broken the connection between copy and original, and the symbol becomes a floating simulacrum without a signified. Therefore Baudrillard says: "Simulation means that henceforth all signs exchange among themselves but never with the real (and only on the condition that they no longer exchange with the real can they exchange among themselves smoothly and perfectly). This is the liberation of the sign: freed from the old obligation of designating something, it finally gains freedom and can, according to an arbitrariness and a complete indeterminacy, unfold the play of structure or combination—this play taking over from the former determinate law of equivalence." (6) When the massively produced simulacrum, through continual reproduction, autonomously drifts away from the thing itself, it terminates its connection and exchange with the real, gains its own freedom, and unfolds an arbitrary exchange, combination, and construction among signs, becoming an indeterminate play; and so we come to live everywhere in the "aesthetic" illusion of reality. Featherstone calls this the "aesthetic presentation of everyday life" and holds that this social phenomenon at the same time reshapes the human's sense organs and modes of feeling. Therefore, "with the dissolution of the regularity of social life, social relations become more changeable and less structured through fixed norms, and consumer society too becomes in essence a cultural thing. The overproduction of signs and the reproduction of images and simulacra lead to the loss of fixed meaning and make reality present itself in an aesthetic way. The masses, before this endless, voluminous kaleidoscope of signs and images, are thrown into a daze, unable to find any fixed connection of meaning within it." (7)

Likewise symbolic activity: Goodman holds that it constructs the everyday life-world and that the various symbols will ultimately turn into "reality"; while Baudrillard and Featherstone hold that it will prompt the dissolution of the boundary between art and life and lead to the aestheticization of everyday life. Where lies the cause of these two different tendencies and results? We hold that the root of this difference lies in changes in the nature of the symbol and in the way the world is constructed. In consumer society, the aestheticization of everyday life is in fact an alienation of the symbol and its way of constructing the world: because of the high development of information and media technology, that way of constructing the world which had become unconscious through habit has been replaced on a large scale by another, new symbolic construction method.

Traditional symbols, because they have a referential function, have an inner connection with reality. The human both constructs reality through symbolic activity and refers to reality; construction and reference interfuse. When this relation is habituated and automatized, symbol and thing become one, the symbol merges into the real life-world, and the symbol becomes "reality" itself. (16) Lacking the bridge of the referential relation, the symbol can hardly fuse with reality and can hardly merge directly into the everyday life-world. But in consumer society, because symbols and images are massively, overloadedly reproduced and produced, their connection with the "original" is lost, and the referential function is thereby exhausted. So symbols and images can no longer, as before, easily merge themselves directly into the everyday life-world but maintain a distance from reality, a drifting state, resisting being absorbed, assimilated, and submerged by it. More importantly, these symbols and images have an overly flamboyant form and style and a rapidly expanding value; this in turn, in a new symbolic form, disturbs, dismembers, and conceals the everyday life-world, reshapes it, and makes it float into an illusion, thereby gaining aestheticization—or, one might say, covers the formerly habituated so-called real world with image-symbols, so that reality becomes "hyperreality." If the former everyday life-world had an enormous force of inertia and could, using the characteristic of image-symbols referring to reality, attract, assimilate, and annihilate all sorts of image-symbols, making them merge into its embrace and drowning the aesthetic quality of image-symbols with the force of habit, then nowadays image-symbols, because they have lifted the referential relation to reality, gain another force—an unbridled force of self-construction—and at the same time gain another value, a self-flaunting symbolic value, and with the exaggerated form of the symbol distort the everyday life-world, making reality image-ized, virtualized, and aestheticized. As Achterhuis says, this is the victory of the "culture of signification," which dissolves the difference between the real and the imagined world; or, as Buck-Morss says, the dynamics of industrialism cause a strange inversion in which "reality" and "art" exchange their positions; while Guy Debord calls it the "society of the spectacle" that aestheticizes reality. Goodman's theory of world construction has no substantive conflict with Baudrillard and Featherstone. They are conclusions drawn with respect to symbol-production of different periods and different natures.

However, the aestheticization of everyday life caused by postmodern image-symbol production is still only one aspect of the problem; on the other side, because these symbols always participate in the human's everyday-life activity in a scattered, fragmented way, interwoven with the human's various activities, they in fact also become an extension of the human's everyday life, controlled by the logic of everyday life, and highly technologized and commodified.

On the basis of the aestheticization of everyday life proposed by Baudrillard and Featherstone, Welsch makes a further in-depth exposition. He divides "aestheticization" into several interconnected levels: "First, the icing-on-the-cake aestheticization of the surface layer of everyday life; second, the deeper aestheticization of our material and social reality by technology and media; third, the equally deep aestheticization of our attitude toward life-practice and our moral orientation; and finally, the interconnected epistemological aestheticization." (3) And he holds that among these the epistemological aestheticization is the most fundamental, constituting the actual basis of all the other aestheticization processes.

Welsch uses Kant, Nietzsche, and certain notions in twentieth-century philosophy as his theoretical resources to expound epistemological aestheticization. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant points out that space and time are a priori given intuitive representations, and that human cognition is built on the basis of these a priori sensibilities of the human. He says: "If we remove our subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all the constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, and even space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves but only within us." (8) "It is precisely this subjective constitution that determines the form of the object as appearance." (8) Nietzsche directly held that our knowledge is built on an unstable foundation, as if an infinitely complex dome of concepts were piled up upon flowing water. Our depiction of the world, like the artist's use of fictional means such as intuition, projection, imagination, basic images, and dominant metaphors, is almost entirely aesthetic in nature. Goodman likewise holds that the world is constructed by the human with symbols, and that the human's cognition of the world is a reconstruction of the world, with understanding accompanying creation. All of this shows that cognitive activity cannot do without the human's sensibility, subjectivity, and creativity, cannot do without the factor of fiction. It is precisely on this basis that Welsch proposes epistemological aestheticization.

Just as Welsch's semantic analysis of "the aesthetic" shows, the aesthetic is indeed closely related either to sensibility, or to subjectivity, or to creativity, or to fictionality; but when Welsch, taking certain of the above characteristics as his ground, deduces the conclusion of epistemological aestheticization, he lacks the necessary caution and turns toward error. In fact, whether cognitive activity or aesthetic activity, both are built on the basis of sensibility and of symbolic activity, and they are bound to be related to the above characteristics. Ideology precisely uses the characteristics of symbolic activity and manipulates the symbolic order to insinuate itself in. Therefore Žižek says: "Reality is never 'itself'; it presents itself only through its not-quite-complete failure of symbolization, and the spectral apparition appears precisely in this gap that forever separates reality from the real. For this reason, reality takes on the character of a (symbolic) fiction." (9) Before having defined the fiction that exists in cognitive activity, Welsch took this as the basis for epistemological aestheticization—clearly lacking theoretical persuasiveness, for it precisely confuses two activities of different natures. We oppose the view that sets the human's various activities, including cognitive activity and aesthetic activity, in opposition to one another; in this respect Welsch's view is inspiring; however, this is no reason to efface the differences among different activities.

Compared with Welsch, Goodman is more cautious. He both acknowledges the subjectivity, creativity, and fictionality of world construction and holds that this world is the real world in which we live; he both acknowledges that there is no absolute boundary between science and literature and art and cautiously seeks to verify the question "when is it art." We hold that the human's cognitive activity is always a "reconstruction" of the world or the object. In this process, the human both remakes the world or object and designates it as the "real world" or "real object" in which the human lives, and strives to make this remaking fit the world or object. Only by combining construction and designation does the human's cognitive activity get continually adjusted, making it possible for symbolic construction to fit the world and the object. On the other hand, it is precisely in the process of designation that the designated world is "naturalized" and "objectified." "Designation" is a way of denoting—that is, "a word or a picture or other symbol fitting one or more things." (10) The process of designation is always a process directed at an object; in this process the symbol stands between the human and the designated object, connecting the human with the object and setting up the connection and distance between them, thereby to a certain extent suppressing the wanton intrusion of subjectivity and limiting the arbitrariness of construction. The symbolic construction in cognitive activity is interwoven with designation, and its symbolic construction is always constrained by the act of designation and corrected by the referred object. Aesthetic activity is not so. In aesthetic activity, the human actively throws himself into lively symbol-creation and is intoxicated in the joy of creation; he does not designate the image he creates before him as real but, as John Searle says, temporarily suspends the "vertical principle" of establishing a connection with the real world and interrupts the act of designating the real world. This surging process of creation eliminates the distance between the human and the symbol-world he creates and fuses with it. Clearly, the two activities have utterly different intentional relations: the former is what Martin Buber calls the "I–It" relation—that is, the human and the object are in an objective relation, which separates the human from the object and lets him rise above it, knowing and analyzing the object as object; the latter is the "I–Thou" relation—that is, a non-objective relation, which fuses the human with the object and thereby removes the object's objecthood. It is also for this reason that, although cognitive activity cannot avoid fiction, this fiction is suppressed and strenuously cleared away; it is merely a factor of fiction regarded as "heterogeneous" to cognition. The fiction in aesthetic activity is not so; it precisely gains full freedom, and fiction and imagination are the necessary premise of aesthetic activity. Because the human always habitually views the object as object, only fiction and imagination provide the basis for the non-objective relation (the "I–Thou" relation). Fiction and imagination remake the object into a "Thou" intimate with the human, and also let themselves win unbridled passion and the unfettered power of creation.

On the other hand, because both cognitive activity and aesthetic activity are related to sensibility, subjectivity, creativity, and fictionality, this provides the possibility for mutual transformation between the two—yet this is, after all, a transformation between different activities. In sum: ethical activity requires the human to enter the real world and act directly within it; cognitive activity requires the human to maintain a distance from the real world, to maintain a neither-near-nor-far relation, both remaking the world and designating the world, both split from the real world and closely connected with it; aesthetic activity requires the human to transcend the real world and live in another symbol-world of his own creation. Ethical activity, cognitive activity, and aesthetic activity are mutually distinct and mutually connected, not insulated from one another. Literary-artistic activity is characterized by aesthetic activity, yet continually crosses the boundaries among the three. If one merely stresses the constructiveness of language signs and neglects referentiality, philosophy is bound to fall into agnosticism, and cognitive activity degenerates into aesthetic activity.

On the question of fiction, Goodman's view also differs from Welsch's. Goodman explicitly denies the relation between fictionality and the aesthetic quality of literature and art. In essence, this is related to Goodman's understanding of fiction itself. There have always been all sorts of interpretations of fiction, but from the angle of the speech-act they can be divided into two kinds: the first is that the linguistic-sign statement does not accord with fact, or that the linguistic sign designates an object that does not exist in the real world—this fiction concerns the "statement" and "designation" acts of the linguistic sign and has truth-value; the second refers to the linguistic sign's constructing "another" fictional discourse-world—this concerns the "construction" act of the linguistic sign and has no truth-value. What Goodman stresses is the fiction of "statement" and "designation" meaning, while Welsch's understanding of fiction is vague, simultaneously including the statement, designation, and construction acts of the linguistic sign. As long as it is a statement or designation act, then, whether or not the object exists, it is still an act that attempts to establish a connection with the real world, in an objective relation with the real world—only the object is either absent or distorted, and therefore unrelated to the aesthetic, and unable to display the distinctiveness of literature and art. The construction act of the linguistic sign, by contrast, is closely related to imagination and creation; it precisely changes the real relation, the objective relation, between human and world and constructs a non-real relation, a non-objective relation, thereby winning the aesthetic quality for itself and becoming the salient feature of literature and art. From this angle, Welsch is correct in saying: "The 'aesthetic' ultimately refers to virtuality." (3) But we still need to supplement it: it is not the fiction of the "statement" or "designation" act, but the fiction of the "construction" act, that is closely related to the aesthetic. Virtuality provides a basic premise for the aesthetic.

However, even fiction in Goodman's sense is still indirectly related to the aesthetic. As Goodman points out, for fictional counterfactual sentences, "what we value more is not what is said but how it is said; we obviously make ourselves attend to the form of the sentence." (11) This shift in the way of viewing language weakens the statement and designation acts of language (what is said) and strengthens the construction act of language (how it is said), turning language from the statement and designation act toward the construction act. The transformation of the dominant mode of the act of language precisely makes such aesthetic symptoms as syntactic density, semantic density, syntactic repleteness, and complexity of reference manifest, turning the "designating relation" into the "relation of exemplification." Therefore, fiction in the designating sense is likewise conducive to our giving up the act of designation and turning toward fiction in another sense—that is, toward the construction act and the creation act—while at the same time excavating the aesthetic potential of the language sign and the world it constructs.

Goodman's exposition of the methods of world construction provides us with highly inspiring views for understanding in depth literature and art, as well as the problems of literary fiction and the aesthetic. Only by comparing and mutually elucidating it with the relevant expositions of postmodern scholars such as Baudrillard, Featherstone, and Welsch can we understand literature and art in depth.