The Full Unfolding of the Human and the Cumulative Sudden Creation of Beauty: A Brief Discussion of Jiang Kongyang’s Aesthetic Thought

A salient feature of Jiang Kongyang's aesthetic thought is that it is all-embracing, taking in all rivers and streams and blending Chinese and Western, ancient and modern. He is not only proficient in German classical aesthetics and Marxist aesthetics, widely absorbing Western aesthetic thought since Plato and Aristotle, taking in such modern intellectual resources as Lipps's "theory of empathy," Croce's "theory of intuition," formalist aesthetics, the unconscious psychology of Freud and Jung, Gestalt psychology, reception aesthetics, and analytic philosophy, and even genetic method and cultural anthropology; he is moreover deeply rooted in the soil of Chinese traditional culture, striving to draw nourishment from national culture. This breadth is not arbitrary eclecticism but is founded on profound thought, on a full recognition of the multidimensionality, complexity, and compositeness of the relation between human and reality. The multidimensionality, complexity, and compositeness of the relation of reality produce the richness of the human himself and the richness of beauty. Beauty is the content and form of freedom, the full exertion of the human's creativity, the comprehensive unfolding of the human's essential powers. Beauty necessarily mobilizes the human's psychological and physiological faculties, sense organs, and thinking, emotion, wisdom, and will, forming a cumulative sudden creation. Therefore aesthetics too can and must widely take in plural factors and blend them into a coherent whole.

I. Thinking the Human and Beauty within Multidimensional Relations

In Aesthetics: A New Treatise, Jiang Kongyang points out: "The relation between human and world, or between human and nature, is the starting point of all learning." From this conception, Jiang holds that the fundamental question of aesthetic research is beauty, while the starting point of aesthetic research is the human's aesthetic relation to reality—that is, the study of beauty and art must be placed within the framework of the human's aesthetic relation to reality. Jiang always thinks about the various aesthetic questions in terms of "relation," revealing the richness of the human according to the multidimensionality, complexity, and compositeness of the human-reality relation, and exploring the diversity of aesthetic phenomena.

In speaking of the human's essential powers, Jiang acknowledges that the human is a product of nature and is himself a kind of nature. "The material attributes of nature, the endowments and capacities of nature, the passions and needs of nature, and the vital force and creativity we derive from nature, should all be the human's essential powers, the sensuous foundation of the human's being human." But sensuous qualities do not make the human human. The human must transcend and elevate himself, possess mind and consciousness, and thereby gain strong self-consciousness and spiritual power, including the power of thought to know himself and the world, the will to realize his own wishes and purposes, and the emotional power to feel the world and express likes and dislikes. Only with self-consciousness and spiritual power can the human, through conscious, purposive activity, break through the material bondage of nature and continually move toward the spiritual world of freedom; only then does the human truly become human. Therefore, "the human's essential powers are not single but a plural, multi-level composite structure. In this composite structure, there are not only material attributes but also spiritual attributes; and under the mutual influence of matter and spirit, there form thousands upon thousands of factors that are at once spiritual and material, neither spiritual nor material." Clearly, in Jiang's aesthetic thought, the human's essential powers are not a pure spirit detached from body and nature, still less an abstract, empty idea, but the living, concrete human, who has both the material attributes of nature and the spiritual transcendence distinctive to the human; and the natural and spiritual attributes are not each independent but mutually influence and mutually generate each other in the practice of human social life—the natural attributes stamped with the social and the spiritual, the spiritual attributes permeated with natural and material features, embodying lively life and forming "thousands upon thousands of factors that are at once spiritual and material, neither spiritual nor material." Therefore the human is rich, multidimensional, multi-level, multi-faceted. The human's essential powers are precisely the appropriation of his own richness in a comprehensive way in practical activity. "The human, in a comprehensive way, that is, as a complete human, appropriates his comprehensive essence." Beauty is the full manifestation of the human's vital force and creativity, and the diversity of beauty embodies precisely the human's free unfolding of his richness within the object. Therefore the human is the beauty of the world.

Among all the human's essential powers, the core element that distinguishes the human from the animal is consciousness. With consciousness, there is a conscious object, and the human finally distinguishes himself from nature, regards nature as his own object, frees himself from instinctive activity, and begins purposive labor. Jiang inherits Marx's view, regarding labor as the key to the birth of human consciousness. He says: "The meaning of objectification comes from labor. Labor separates human and nature, nature becoming the object of labor; at the same time, labor unites human and nature: through labor, the human, according to his own purpose and without violating nature, transforms nature, making nature into 'humanized nature.' … The object of objectification is the objective natural world the human is conscious of." Labor focuses the human's need on the target object, and that target object gradually becomes the human's object, distinguished from the human—it is "objectified." In this process, the tool plays an important role; the tool both links and splits human and object, finally prompting the birth of human consciousness and the conscious object. The split of human and object lets the human rise above nature and gain liberation, establishing a free relation with the object-world. When the object no longer merely satisfies the human's direct material desire but extends to spiritual need, becoming that through which the human contemplates his own essential powers in the object and gains spiritual pleasure, the aesthetic relation is generated. Labor both produces the change in the relation of human and object-world, gives birth to the establishment of the free aesthetic relation, and produces the beautiful object, while at the same time shaping the aesthetic human and the human's senses.

But in analyzing and discussing concrete aesthetic problems, Jiang more often addresses social-life practice—that is, he does not limit the answer about beauty to labor production but examines aesthetic problems with a broader vision. In Jiang's view, all of the human's social-life practice influences the relation of human and world, influences the aesthetic relation, influences the aesthetic human and beauty. Comparing the features of Chinese and Western art, Jiang points out that ancient Greece, owing to its unique geography and barren resources, had to develop commerce, which provoked wars among city-states that in turn gave athletics an important place, so that the sculpting of statues of victors was valued; thus the statue became the center of ancient Greek art; while ancient China's small-peasant economy and unified patriarchal society made ritual-music the center of ancient Chinese art. "The origin of ritual-music is, on one hand, inseparable from people's daily life, arising from the needs of daily life; on the other hand, inseparable from sacrifice to the gods, arising from the needs of sacrifice." Among these, extremely important is political-ethical life; the reason sacrifice to gods and ancestors long continued and exerted a lasting influence on Chinese art is that ritual activity was conducive to maintaining the political-ethical order, and ritual-music played an extremely important role therein. For the aesthetic thought of Confucius, Mozi, Laozi and Zhuangzi, Mencius, Xunzi, and others, Jiang also gives convincing dialectical analyses closely combined with the specific socio-historical environment, personal identity, and life experience. The breadth of Jiang's aesthetic thought lies not only in his broad theoretical vision but, fundamentally, in his ability to think about aesthetics in connection with the whole of social-life practice and to refine aesthetic experience in relation to concrete literary-artistic activity.

II. Consciousness and the Unconscious, Subjectivity and "De-subjectivation"

In the introduction to Aesthetics: A New Treatise, when discussing "the production and development of aesthetics," Jiang expounds it on three levels—"the production of aesthetic consciousness," "the development of aesthetic thought," and "the establishment of the discipline of aesthetics"; yet in the main text, it is not "aesthetic consciousness" but "the aesthetic sense" that is set up as a dedicated chapter for discussion. This design is ingenious, because the discipline of aesthetics is the theoretical form of aesthetic thought, while aesthetic thought can only be founded on aesthetic consciousness—without consciousness of beauty, there can be no aesthetic thought or discipline of aesthetics. But in Jiang's view, aesthetic activity is far more complex; as a free creation and appreciation, it cannot do without the human possessing aesthetic consciousness, yet it is not confined to the conscious level and should also include extremely broad unconscious and physiological factors, which cannot be summed up by aesthetic consciousness; therefore he replaced "aesthetic consciousness" with "the aesthetic sense." The human's mode of existence is multidimensional and enjoys a rich, full essence. Beauty is the objectification of the human's essential powers; though the feature distinguishing the human from the animal lies in the human's being conscious and purposive, the human's essential powers are not confined to conscious activity, for the human throws his whole body-mind into aesthetic activity, which at once includes the psychic and the physiological, the conscious and the unconscious.

Jiang holds that the human as a subject possessing the capacity for consciousness is the precondition of aesthetic activity. Without consciousness there is no object, still less the perception of beautiful phenomena, and so no aesthetic relation can form. "The human consciously and intentionally distinguishes himself from nature and takes nature as object, thereby entering into relation with nature. In this relation, on one side is the human as the subject of the relation, and on the other the objective nature as the object of the relation. With the distinction of subject and object, then through practice, the subject-human acts on the object-nature, and the object-nature reacts on the subject-human, thus establishing the relation of human and nature." "The so-called aesthetic relation is the subject-human, through the activity of appreciation or creation, discovering, perceiving, and appreciating in the objective object its beauty and its other aesthetic features."

But the emphasis on the role of consciousness does not exclude the role of the unconscious. Jiang points out that Freud's achievement lies in revealing the domain of the unconscious, letting us see into the black box of the human mind. Literature and art both reflect social life and pour out the secrets of the human mind, expressing the various desires and feelings pressed down in the unconscious. And Jung's "collective unconscious" and "archetype" are sedimented in the deepest layer of the human unconscious, shared by all people and all ages; once certain archetypes are awakened, they may shake our minds and give deep aesthetic feeling. Therefore, "we must unify consciousness and the unconscious, unify the various functions in psychic activity, letting them all become constituent factors of the subjective aspect of the aesthetic subject's aesthetic activity. It is precisely this aesthetic subject possessing a complex, multi-level psychic-conscious structure that, with an aesthetic object equally possessing a complex, multi-level composite structure, under particular spatiotemporal conditions, mutually fuses and permeates, thus forming and creating beauty." The unconscious is not merely a psychic phenomenon but directly links to the body; it is the bodily experience sedimented by the body's engagement in social-life activity, and this experience relates not only to individual experience but inscribes the whole race, even the survival experience of the organism. So Shusterman says: "Our activities are always a unity of the bodily and the spiritual. Although behaviors such as eating and drinking are usually reduced to the merely bodily, they are permeated with social, cognitive, and aesthetic meaning."

In aesthetic activity, consciousness and the unconscious coexist, mutually fuse, and function cooperatively. Correspondingly, while stressing the aesthetic subject, Jiang in fact also acknowledges "de-subjectivation" in the aesthetic process. On one hand, Jiang clearly points out that, from the practical viewpoint, aesthetic activity contains both subject and object, and the human possessing a certain aesthetic capacity is the aesthetic subject. Only the subject has free will, can establish a free aesthetic relation with reality, and can carry out aesthetic creation and appreciation. The aesthetic is by no means a passive reflection; whether literary-artistic creation or appreciation, or even the appreciation of natural beauty, all require the human as subject to fully exert his imagination and creativity. On the other hand, setting out from aesthetic activity, especially ancient Chinese literary-artistic practice, he describes the phenomenon of "de-subjectivation" within it.

Jiang holds that Chinese philosophy values "the unity of Heaven and humanity" and values the "Dao." The grasp of the Dao can be achieved only through the mutual fusion of human and nature, entering the realm of "the unity of Heaven and humanity," to grasp the Dao as a fused whole. Beauty is generated in this fused, holistic aesthetic conception, able to accord with the Dao and return together with transformation. "When the painter conveys the spirit of mountains and waters, or when the painter, through a landscape painting, can let his spirit roam free, they fuse their own life with the life of the mountains and waters." The Dao cannot be spoken, seen, or heard. Only when human and nature accord as one can one embody and apprehend the Dao. And the unity of human and nature, of self and thing, is precisely the realm of no-distinction of thing and self, of no-thing and no-self. At this point, the self as subject no longer exists; self and thing, subject and object, have lost their boundary; the object becomes chaos, becomes "nothing," becomes "non-object"; and the self, having lost its independence, is "de-subjectivated." "The boundary of thing and self, the boundary of other and self, all dissolve like melting ice." Therefore Jiang says: "We who appreciate also melt our whole body-mind, will, and emotion entirely into the aesthetic object as a whole. The subject as a whole and the object as a whole fuse and accord, forming the psychic feature of the wholeness of feeling in aesthetic appreciation." Only when both aesthetic subject and aesthetic object suspend their independence can "the two fuse and accord" be truly achieved. This state differs from Lipps's "empathy." "Empathy" is merely the subject-human projecting his own emotion onto the object, while the self remains itself, subject and object remain subject and object, and the self feels, in the identity of subject, an aesthetic object steeped in its own emotion; "thing-self accord," by contrast, is the self throwing itself wholly into the thing, dissolving into the thing, the self having become the thing, transformed together with the thing. The "thing-ified" self is no longer a subject; it is "de-subjectivated." It is precisely this state of "the two fusing and according" that lets aesthetic activity produce true intoxication and resonance.

The subject always exists relative to the object; so long as there is a subject, there must be an object, and the split of subject and object is unavoidable. Heidegger held that this state of subject-object split precisely conceals "truth"; to change this split state in aesthetic activity, he proposed "de-subjectivation," "de-technologization," and a return to ancient Greece. Jiang did not set out from Heidegger's conception to make his own exposition but, in analyzing ancient Chinese literary-artistic practice, probed the hidden and arrived at his own conclusions; so he did not positively propose the view of "de-subjectivation," yet in his concrete interpretation of ancient Chinese literature and art he in fact tacitly acknowledged "de-subjectivation." Speaking of how Chan Buddhism directly probes the object itself, D. T. Suzuki says: "It is as if one contemplates the thing from within it. To know this flower is to become this flower, to be this flower, to bloom as this flower, to enjoy the sunlight and the rain. When one does this, the flower speaks to me, and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings; that is, I know the whole of the life trembling within it. Moreover, with my 'knowing' of this flower, I know all the secrets of the universe, including the secret of my own self, the secret that until now had eluded my seeking. For I had split myself in two—the seeker and the sought, the object and the shadow." From this, Suzuki further points out: "Merely looking is not enough. The artist must enter into the thing, feel it from within, and live according to the thing's own nature." The aesthetic is the process of directly probing the object itself, the process of directly probing the secret of the universe and the secret of the self; only by giving up one's own subjectivity and living within the object can one experience the mystery of beauty. In aesthetic activity, consciousness and the unconscious cooperate, and subjectivity and "de-subjectivation" alternate. On one hand, beauty as a sensuous object can appear only to the human as subject, and only the human as subject can create and appreciate beauty. Without a subject there is no object, still less beauty as an intuited phenomenon. On the other hand, the human must give up his own independence and subjectivity in order to fully merge into the object, to match Heaven with Heaven, to let the Dao penetrate into one, and thereby experience true meaning (the Dao) and experience soul-stirring beauty. That is to say, only by fully unfolding the human's essential powers can one reach the inner sanctum of beauty.

III. The Transitional, Marginal Character of Aesthetic Activity

The problem is how the above mutually contradictory views are unified within Jiang Kongyang's aesthetic system.

Marx held that the animal is connected with its external environment. That is, the animal cannot yet distinguish itself from its environment or take the environment as its object. The environment is the extension of the animal's body, is the body itself, is "non-object." The animal lives within this familiar environment, responding instinctively and directly to changes in the environment. Humanity likewise retains this instinct of the organism. The human lives directly in his world and can grasp his world through unconscious instinct, through experience and feeling.

The particularity of humanity is that in practical activity the human gradually gained consciousness, and at the same time the world appeared to him in the manner of an object-world. Consciousness is always consciousness of an object. The unified relation of human and world begins to collapse, reconstructed into manifold objective relations. But once the world is regarded as object, in fact the human has already split from the world, and the world has already been dismembered, simplified, abstracted. Though the human transcends nature and wins freedom, it is as a subject standing before and outside the world, rather than dwelling within the world; this is no longer a fish-water relation, and that harmonious, congenial primordial relation has been distorted. In the objective relation, though the human can consciously see, hear, cognize, and speak the object, what he obtains is a dismembered, simplified, abstracted, withered object, even an empty concept; the world is concealed. Wang Bi says: "Where there is division there is non-inclusiveness; where there is a source there is incompleteness; non-inclusiveness greatly departs from its truth; incompleteness cannot be named." Beauty must revive its own vivid life, must invite the unconscious and the body to participate, letting the human re-merge into the object, re-merge into the world, accord with the Dao, transform together with "transformation," and experience in person. "The domain of art and literature can be defined as the characteristic domain in which the 'unconscious' operates."

Consciousness is the premise of the human's gaining subjectivity. With consciousness, the human can distinguish himself from the world, distinguish himself from others, and reflect on and identify the self as "object"; only then is subjectivity gradually constructed. In this process he is also shaped by concrete social life, brought into particular social relations and positions, acquires role-norms, and participates as a subject in social-life practice and aesthetic activity. Different from this, the unconscious is closely linked to the "non-subject." The unconscious can only directly establish a "non-objective relation" between human and world and cannot construct an "objective relation," because once an "object" appears, it must already have transformed into "consciousness" about the object and is no longer the "unconscious." This non-objective relation is precisely the state of thing-self as one, of no-thing and no-self. The object has degenerated into "non-object," and the self becomes "non-subject"; the self is "de-subjectivated," as if returning to the primordial chaotic state. It is precisely within this non-objective relation of thing-self interpenetration that unconscious experience is awakened and wells out, and creativity is fully exerted in an instant. The unconscious is closely linked to the non-objective relation, to the non-object (chaos, nothing) and the non-subject.

By Suzuki's account, the unconscious is a far more fundamental and primitive feeling, pointing to the age of "simplicity," when consciousness had not yet awakened from chaotic nature and no so-called "subject" yet existed; therefore this feeling is a holistic grasp of chaotic nature and the self, letting the finite mind take root in the dim and the infinite, thereby excavating the infinite possibilities stored beneath our "bedrock of life." Likewise, in aesthetic activity, only by letting himself merge into the flower, become the blooming flower, and bathe in sunlight and rain can the human truly experience the flower and, from the flower, experience his own essential powers. To understand the beauty of West Lake, one must let the image of West Lake possess you, and only then can one comprehend it with the heart. Here one may borrow Levinas's "poetics of proximity": "This poetics stresses that poetry or art should become a meridian-like circulation between self and other, going out of the self and returning to the self, settling into being yet transcending being, breaking through space to draw near to 'otherwise than being.'"

The human's subjectivity and "de-subjectivation" are mutually contradictory, yet the two coexist in life-practice, especially in the aesthetic relation. The human is a multidimensional existence, and human nature too has multiple facets. The human participates in the aesthetic as subject, creating and appreciating the aesthetic object; at the same time he effaces his own subjectivity, fully merging into the object, forgetting himself in the object and becoming a "non-subject," while the object too degenerates into a "non-object," the two fusing into one body. This contradictory state determines that the aesthetic can only lie in the transitional, marginal zone of continually transforming relations. Nietzsche stressed that art is the mutual permeation of the "Dionysian spirit" and the "Apollonian spirit." Levinas says: "Participation is a way of being concerned with the other: holding and unfolding its being while at no point losing the link with the other. To interrupt participation certainly still preserves the link, yet no longer derives one's being from this link." This contradictory state, in Wang Guowei's words, is "entering into it" and "standing outside it." Entering into it, the objective relation no longer exists, and subject and object both lose their boundary; standing outside it, the human restores his subject-identity and reconstructs the objective relation. Aesthetic activity always lies in the transitional, marginal zone, in the state of continually transforming relations, and it most fully realizes the human's infinitely various modes of existence.

This transitional, marginal zone is most full of vitality and productivity. Bakhtin held: "The most intense, most fruitful life of culture occurs precisely at the borders of these cultural domains, not in the closed particularity of these domains," and held that aesthetic culture is the "culture of the boundary." The "boundary" or "margin" is the zone where various heterogeneous factors intersect, exchange, collide, and generate, and is therefore the most complex, most active, most creative zone. Because aesthetic activity lies in the transitional, marginal zone, in the most unstable, most changeable, most free state, it most fully releases all the human's essential powers, including body and mind, consciousness and the unconscious, to unfold creative activity; and because aesthetic activity lies in the transitional, marginal zone, the human can gather mutually contradictory modes in one body, throwing himself as a whole into aesthetic creation and appreciation, displaying the human's infinitely various modes of existence and incomparably rich essence, thereby endowing beauty with ever-changing forms. Jiang says: "The so-called multi-layered cumulative sudden creation includes two meanings: first, in terms of the formation of beauty, it is the spatiotemporal composite structure formed by the interweaving of spatial accumulation and temporal duration. Second, in terms of the production and appearance of beauty, it has the sudden change from quantitative to qualitative change: before we can analyze and infer, it suddenly appears before us and seizes us whole in an instant." Beauty is an open system, a free image, in ever-new, ever-changing creation, and this "sudden change from quantitative to qualitative change" occurs precisely in the transitional, marginal zone.

Comparing the differences between Chinese and Western culture, Jiang points out: "They express two different cosmologies, two different attitudes to life. Setting out from the Chinese attitude, one can reach an atmosphere or aesthetic conception of Heaven-human resonance, thing-self interfusion, and the myriad images standing forth in profusion." Surveying Jiang's scholarly research, besides translating, researching, and mastering Western aesthetic thought, he devoted considerable energy to thinking about and discussing Chinese cultural questions, successively writing such monographs and papers as A Draft Discussion of Pre-Qin Musical Aesthetic Thought, The Formation of Tang Poetry and Its Aesthetic Features, The Aesthetic Thought Expressed in Ancient Chinese Painting, and A Survey of Modern Chinese Literature. The conception of the fusion of human and nature in ancient Chinese literature, art, and aesthetic thought gave him important inspiration, enabling him to transcend the dualism and logocentrism in Western thought and construct his own new aesthetic system. Aesthetics: A New Treatise is Jiang's magnum opus; it was precisely in the process of deeply studying and summarizing ancient Chinese aesthetic thought and literary-artistic practice that Jiang gained new theoretical knowledge, blended Chinese and Western, ancient and modern, upheld the correct and corrected the biased, and thereby broke through the framework of Western aesthetic thought, injecting Chinese national wisdom and new vitality into aesthetic research.