A salient feature of Wang Yuanxiang's aesthetic thought is "holding fast" together with "openness and inclusiveness": he always "holds fast" to the spirit of reason, reason becoming a main thread running through his aesthetic thought; "openness and inclusiveness," for its part, lets him continually expand, deepen, and renew his aesthetic thought, forever preserving the vitality and interpretive power of his theory.
I
Wang Yuanxiang's aesthetic thought underwent a process of development from epistemological and practical aesthetics to the aesthetics of human life. Several causes produced this evolution, of which two factors cannot be ignored: first, taking Kant's aesthetics as the foundation, through the mediation of "medieval theological aesthetics," absorbing the Hebrew cultural tradition and combining it with ancient Greek aesthetic thought, he strove to fuse the two great currents of Western aesthetic thought so as to broaden his own aesthetic horizon; second, in his careful reflection on and critique of "post-practical aesthetics," he continually deepened, enriched, and clarified his own aesthetic view.
Wang Yuanxiang points out: defining "aesthetics" as "the science of the sensuous" and defining "beauty" as the perfection of sensuous cognition is merely Baumgarten's "definition of the nature of this discipline from the standpoint and horizon of epistemology and the theory of knowledge; it is not only insufficient to comprehensively sum up the essence of the more than two-thousand-year history of Western aesthetic thought, but has also to a great extent misled the discipline of aesthetics, causing people in aesthetic research to ignore the introspective, transcendent content such as aesthetic experience and reflection, and to seek beauty only in the objects of the external senses. This weakens the humanistic and life-theoretic import of aesthetics and brings it entirely into the system of epistemology and the theory of knowledge, so that it is almost completely assimilated by science." (1) Although Wang had early on made an in-depth study of Kant's aesthetic thought and built his own aesthetics on that basis, owing to the influence of Soviet aesthetic thought, his early aesthetic view also tended toward epistemology. As he made an overall study of the history of Western aesthetic thought and his theoretical horizon expanded, Wang realized that there exist two great currents of thought in Western aesthetics, and the limitation of epistemological aesthetics thereby became apparent.
Wang made a meticulous overall examination of the history of Western aesthetic thought. He roughly divided Western aesthetic thought into two great currents with Plato and Aristotle respectively as their headwaters: "(Plato's) aesthetic is not an experiential, external aesthetic but a transcendent, introspective aesthetic. These ideas exerted great influence on Neoplatonism and Christian theological aesthetics." (2) "On the whole, the Platonic tradition is introspective and transcendent, a life-theoretic, ethical aesthetics; while the Aristotelian tradition is external and experiential, an epistemological, knowledge-theoretic aesthetics." (3) These two great currents exist in a state of mutual waxing-and-waning and interfusion in the history of Western aesthetic thought. This division is to a great extent inspired by the two great traditions contained in Western culture—the Greek and the Hebrew cultural traditions. Throughout history, the history of Western aesthetic thought has paid more attention to the ancient Greek tradition and neglected the Hebrew tradition. As the scholarly world re-evaluated medieval theological aesthetics, Wang deeply studied medieval theological aesthetics and thereby discovered the Hebrew cultural factor contained in Western aesthetic thought: "The Greek cultural tradition, in its basic tendency, is an outward, scientific, knowledge-theoretic tradition, whose emphasis is on exploring the origin and primordial basis of the world… while Hebrew culture opened up an inward, religious, teleological tradition; it originated in Judaism, and later Philo fused it with Plato's theory of 'Ideas,' the Neoplatonic theory of 'Mind,' and Stoicism, developing it into Christianity. Christianity holds that the whole world is created by God, and the origin of beauty lies in God, so literature and art also become the mediation of communication between human and God, and thereby lead the human toward self-transcendence." (4) Wang further points out that Kant, through his interpretation of the "sense of beauty" and the "sense of the sublime," fused these two great traditions. One may say that medieval theological aesthetics is like a mirror, reflecting the connection between Plato and Eastern mysticism, as well as the inner accord between Kant and the Hebrew cultural tradition. It was precisely with the aid of his in-depth study of medieval theological aesthetics that Wang re-combed the history of Western aesthetic thought, reinterpreted Kant's aesthetics, discovered the important influence of Hebrew culture on Kant's aesthetic thought, and revealed the inward, transcendent, experiential dimension within it; at the same time, he used this to enrich himself, thereby breaking through the framework of epistemological and practical aesthetics and promoting the development of his aesthetic view. If epistemological and practical aesthetics give more weight to macro-level socio-historical philosophical reflection, examining aesthetic questions with a third-person external horizon, then the "inward" feature of Hebrew culture highlights the human mind and is inseparable from the first-person inner perspective for carrying out experience and introspection. This gives Wang's aesthetic thought an inclusiveness, opening up and integrating plural research horizons.
Kant's aesthetics absorbed Christian cultural thought. The intellectual foundation of Christian culture is "original sin" and "atonement." Ever since the human fell into the "mortal world," he has been guilty and must transcend the flesh, do good according to God's will, wash away sin and become one of God's "elect," in order to return to the "Kingdom of Heaven." God is the creator of the world, including of beauty. Since beauty originates from God, only when the human achieves transcendence and enters the "celestial realm" can he truly comprehend beauty itself. Therefore, medieval theological aesthetics further strengthened the transcendence in aesthetic activity. In expounding the sense of the sublime, Kant both continued the transcendence in medieval theological aesthetics and made a correction to it, positing the moral law as an "a priori imperative." On this basis, Wang points out: "Kant's proposal that 'beauty is the symbol of morality,' regarding beauty as that which links the empirical world and the transcendent world and lets the human enter the 'highest good,' thereby completing his own ontological construction—this thought is undoubtedly inspired by Christianity and medieval theological aesthetics, and it gives his aesthetics a very strong coloring of moral theology." (5) Wang especially admires aesthetic transcendence. He himself is a spiritual seeker: holding a devout faith, striving through exploration to achieve spiritual transcendence and pursue the sacred.
Spiritual pursuit is the fundamental feature distinguishing the human from other organisms, and it is also the dimension of transcendence stressed by Wang's aesthetic thought. This pursuit of the sacred through spiritual transcendence forms a dialogic relation with the Han people's tradition of "becoming a sage and a worthy." Wang compared the similarities and differences between Wang Yangming's and Kant's aesthetic thought, pointing out that although there are differences of philosophical conception between the two, both are grounded in being people-oriented (the human as end) and advocate moral autonomy (the principle of immanence); this provides a foundation for drawing on strengths and avoiding weaknesses, fusing Chinese and Western, and achieving theoretical innovation. It was precisely in the process of the dialogue of Chinese and Western cultural thought that Wang continually took in the essence of Chinese traditional culture, connected with the Chinese traditional aesthetics of human life, and proposed that aesthetics and literary theory should "advance, on the basis of epistemology, further toward the dimensions of axiology and the theory of human life." (6) Clearly, the aesthetics of human life is the fruit of Wang's absorption of Chinese cultural tradition and his attempt to communicate and combine it with Kant's aesthetics.
II
Regarding the "emotion-ontology" proposed by Li Zehou, as well as other scholars' notions of "post-practical aesthetics" such as "life aesthetics" and "new practical aesthetics," Wang Yuanxiang does not simply negate them but makes an in-depth examination and analysis, both affirming the reasonable core they contain and, with rigorous logic, revealing their limitations. Wang holds that "post-practical aesthetics," by linking aesthetic activity and aesthetic experience with the human's nature of pursuing freedom and transcendence, has positive significance for the development of Chinese aesthetic research from practice-theory toward life-theory. But it sets the "principle of life activity" in opposition to the "principle of practical activity," regards the aesthetic as an abstract subjective psychic activity, and in fact lets the aesthetic human detach from concrete real relations and become an empty human devoid of socio-historical content. The human who participates in aesthetic activity can only be a concrete, holistic human situated in real life, an organic unity of knowing, willing, and feeling, a human who relates to and connects with the world in an all-round, many-sided way through knowing, willing, and feeling. Therefore, while drawing on and taking in the strengths of "post-practical aesthetics," Wang both enters the field of aesthetic psychology and always combines the macro horizon of social history with the inner perspective of the mind.
Wang once envisioned constructing a grand aesthetic system: "'Practical aesthetics,' in its nature, can only be a philosophical aesthetics rather than an empirical aesthetics; it merely provides us with an intellectual foundation for studying aesthetics and does not aim to directly explain the concrete phenomena and experiential questions in aesthetic activity. So, to make aesthetic research move toward completeness, we still have to push further, on the basis of practical aesthetics, toward aesthetic psychology, aesthetic culturology, and so on—and there is still a long road to travel." (7) In this vision, practical aesthetics belongs to the first level, philosophical aesthetics, the philosophical foundation of aesthetic research; correspondingly, one must further enter the second level of aesthetic study, namely aesthetic psychology and aesthetic culturology. Yet in fact Wang did not go on to construct this grand system; rather, he fully brought into play his own advantage in theoretical thinking, taking aesthetic culture as the material of his reflection, taking philosophical reflection on aesthetics as the foundation, and absorbing aesthetic psychology and experience to enrich his own aesthetic thought, striving to fuse these three aspects with one another. To achieve the fusion of these three different dimensions, one needs to find a common logical starting point. This logical starting point is the "holistic human": the human is the subject of socio-historical practice, the human has an extremely rich inner world and mental activity, and the human creates a splendid aesthetic culture. That is, one must concentrate the theoretical footing on the human as a whole and on human life, in order to fuse the inner and outer perspectives. This is the inner logic of Wang's aesthetic thought moving from epistemological and practical aesthetics toward the aesthetics of human life.
Wang says: "What is the theory of human life? Simply put, I think it is the study of the human's existential activity and its meaning and value; its aim lies in how to let the human cast off bondage, transcend necessity, and enter freedom, so that the human becomes a true human with independent personality and the dignity of personality." (8) Wang's aesthetics of human life takes the meaning and value of human existence as its core, places the human in concrete creative practical activity, and combines the broad outer horizon of socio-historical practice with the deep inner horizon of the human's mental activity, so as to carry out a multi-angle, multidimensional examination and strive to display the "holographic panorama" of aesthetic research. When Wang combines the inner and outer horizons, he corrects the abstract, empty nature of the "aesthetic transcendence" and "aesthetic freedom" advocated by "post-practical aesthetics" and endows them with solid historical content. At the same time, precisely because the inner and outer horizons are combined, the human who participates in aesthetic activity is first of all a human embedded in socio-historical practice, who both creates social history through practice and is shaped by socio-historical practice; the aesthetic is one activity within this that has a distinctive nature, and the aesthetic life both transcends the socio-historical context and cannot detach from it. That is to say, aesthetic transcendence is not an unfettered soaring detached from reality.
Although Wang's aesthetic thought stresses the pursuit of the sacred through aesthetic transcendence—a notion mainly derived from Kant, with more emphasis on the spiritual dimension—and thus differs somewhat from the Chinese traditional thought of "becoming a sage and a worthy," which emphasizes "practice" and "self-cultivation," yet because Wang's aesthetics of human life likewise highlights the human's practical dimension, this aesthetics of human life also makes Wang differ from Kant's aesthetics. He says: "In any case, inner transcendence and outer transcendence are always inseparably and organically linked, with outer transcendence as their basis and premise." (9) This brings him close to Chinese traditional cultural thought, able to carry out a dialogue with Chinese traditional aesthetics of human life and fully draw on the essence of traditional culture. It is precisely because Wang's aesthetic thought not only holds fast to his own reason and faith but also possesses openness and inclusiveness that he could, in the process of learning and study, continually absorb the strengths of various other theoretical viewpoints, continually enrich his own aesthetic theory, and achieve a leap of thought. Therefore, there is no early-to-late "turn" in Wang's aesthetic thought; rather, with a broad mind he continually opened new horizons on the original foundation, took in new nourishment, continually renewed and elevated himself, and advanced the development of aesthetic thought.
Embedding the aesthetic human and human life into concrete socio-historical practice means that one must view the human and human life from the whole and from relations. Wang says: "An aesthetic judgment naturally does not belong to a cognitive judgment; it is not conceptual or logical; but in the process of the occurrence of aesthetic emotion, although cognition does not directly participate, it is nonetheless implicit in the evaluation of the aesthetic object." (10) The human ought to become a holistic human, "so that cognition, will, and emotion attain comprehensive development in the human, an organic unity becoming a holistic human." (11) Aesthetic activity is the comprehensive unfolding of the human; through the aesthetic, the human attains completeness and the sacred. In Wang's aesthetic thought, the aesthetic human is both a human in concrete socio-historical activity—a holistic human uniting knowing, feeling, and willing—and one who transcends necessity and, full of passion, pursues the sacred according to free will. Here, the sacred is no longer a theological category but emphasizes becoming a "true human" who reveres the moral law and is self-disciplined: one with independent personality and thought, independent judgment and pursuit; and such a true human needs reason as a guarantee.
III
Wang Yuanxiang's aesthetic thought stresses human reason and advocates reaching the sacred by way of the aesthetic. From epistemological and practical aesthetics to the aesthetics of human life, Wang's aesthetic thought always holds fast to reason as a main thread, and this becomes its distinctive feature.
Speaking of the question of aesthetic education, Wang points out: aesthetic education "aims to cultivate the human's aesthetic emotion; with the aid of aesthetic experience, it joins person to person on the emotional plane, so that one's own experience can become another's experience and another's experience become one's own, in order to cultivate a 'common sense' among people; relying on this 'homogeneity' of aesthetic emotion and moral emotion, it accomplishes, in the absence of a moral purpose, the cultivation of the human's moral sentiment and the perfecting of the human's construction of personality that morality seeks to achieve." (12) In aesthetic education, Wang holds that the education of "beauty" has a foundational status, but under the current concrete social conditions, he seems to value more highly the important value of the "sublime" in elevating the human spirit. This view derives from Kant and is reinforced by the medieval theological-aesthetic view.
Kant holds that a judgment of taste is a "contemplation" not directed at concepts; as a "disinterested and free pleasure," (13) it does not arouse the impulse of possession but has a "common sense" that extends from oneself to others, and this lays a sensuous foundation for "love." Compared with the charming, moving grace, the sense of the sublime is "reverence" and "awe," a "higher emotion" closer to moral sentiment. "All sublime sentiments are more intoxicating than the dazzling charm of grace. His happiness is first of all contentment rather than joy. He is steadfast. For this reason, he makes his feelings obey principles. The more universal the principle they obey, and the broader that higher emotion which also includes the lower emotions within it, the less they thereby submit to the various impermanent changes." (14) In Kant's view, the moral law is an "a priori imperative." The sense of the sublime precisely lets the human willingly and gladly accept this law, revere this law, and obey this law; no matter how impermanent and changeable the environment, he can hold fast to this law. Clearly, Kant inherited the intellectual legacy of medieval theological aesthetics. On the whole, medieval theological aesthetics is an aesthetic history of the sublime. It is precisely the sense of the sublime that leads the human from the empirical world to the transcendent world and prompts the human to attain the "highest good" in the process of pursuing the sacred.
In accord with Kant's view, Wang points out more explicitly: grace is a harmonious, pure, static beauty that prevails by form. Its aesthetic feature is love, including affection, benevolence, and devotion to all beautiful things. But if aesthetic education is confined to the education of love, it may well lead to a softening of personality; therefore a rigorous education is needed, whereby the important status of the sublime in aesthetic education is highlighted. The feature of the sense of the sublime is "reverence" and "awe," the reverence and awe of the law, the spiritual yearning for and unremitting pursuit of a sacred goal. "The sublime can make up for the softening of personality brought by grace, arousing our strength to overcome obstacles and become fearless amid all hardships and dangers; it also lets aesthetic education escape the narrow world of the education of grace and beautiful art, guiding people to receive the power of beauty from the cosmos and from real human life, so that the human becomes brave and resolute because of having faith." (15) Only by combining beauty with the sublime does aesthetic education become a complete whole.
However, although the "a priori imperative" Kant speaks of suspends God, behind it there still hides an anonymous God. Faith in God both endows the human with infinite prospects and inexhaustible strength, endless pursuit and transcendence, and may also lead to blind obedience or confusion. On one hand, Wang inherited Kant's line of thinking; on the other, he made his own new reflection. He rather admires Thomas Aquinas's claim: "to strive to explain and transform faith with reason, so as to unify faith and reason." (16) Once one explains and transforms faith with reason and pursues the unity of faith and reason, faith cannot but descend from the unknowable "celestial realm" to the "human world," transformed into a conviction of the human's social obligations and responsibilities, a conviction of the sacredness of the human's mission, a conviction of the human's own sacredness. "The meaning of (God's) existence is only for people to maintain their firm faith in the sacred, their spirit of selfless dedication and persistent pursuit, so that the human always keeps a necessary reverence for them in his spiritual life, in order that he may have a sense of belonging and of refuge in spirit and not become a homeless spiritual wanderer." (17) It is also from this angle that Wang's understanding of the sacred differs from the Chinese traditional thought of "becoming a sage and a worthy": setting out from the notion that "human nature is originally good," the Chinese traditional thought of "becoming a sage" points to a departed sage, a fixed historical goal of the past; and when the human is unable to bear social (all-under-Heaven) obligations and responsibilities, he can only retreat into his inner heart, pursue the "original mind," and perfect himself in solitude. The sacred that Wang pursues, by contrast, opens toward the future; it is a process of continual self-transcendence, and this transcendence neither returns to the past "sage" nor points to the "celestial realm"; it is always a fresh new departure rooted in social practice, a continual reflection on and setting of one's own social obligations and responsibilities, an expansion and elevation of the human's spiritual realm—and this process itself manifests the human's sacredness.
MacIntyre attaches great importance to the importance of tradition for establishing moral notions. He says: "A living tradition is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods that constitute that tradition. Within a tradition, the pursuit of goods often extends across generations, sometimes through many generations. So an individual's search for the good occurs, both generally and particularly, within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual's life is a part." (18) Here the tradition MacIntyre speaks of also includes the individual's present social-life practice. We may further stress: any individual's search for the good must be grounded in the present actual life; participating in the argument with his present practical experience and standpoint, he both enters the whole tradition, is steeped in tradition and constrained by tradition, and presents a distinct contemporary coloring and personal character. This too destines the "highest good" to be only a process of continual seeking and transcendence.
Beauty is a colorful spectrum, aesthetic culture is a "marginal culture" (in Bakhtin's words), the relation of knowing, feeling, and willing in aesthetic activity is subject to change, and aesthetic theory too can hardly be fixed in a single authority. Yet as contemporary society enters an age of relative material abundance and digital existence, the various consumer cultures bring enormous erosion to human reason, even producing certain tendencies of "dumbing down"; the fragmented state of existence and the loss of faith in the future cause life to feel meaningless and lead to "lying flat." Yuval Noah Harari warns: "Although we all hope that as information technology improves it will bring humanity health, happiness, and power, in fact, after information technology is enhanced, it may instead strip humanity of power while harming humanity's physical and mental health… If humanity is not careful, it may, like soil falling into a surging river, dissolve directly into the torrent of information." (19) Faced with this reality and its potential dangers, Wang's aesthetics of human life, centered on the construction of personality, always stresses reason and advocates realizing the human's own sacredness from the angle of the human's social obligations and responsibilities—precisely a highly targeted remedy.