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The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. By Li Zehou. Translated by Maija Bell Samei. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 257.
Li Zehou is one of the most important Chinese philosophers in the post-Mao era. Although his work on Kant has had an enormous influence on contemporary Chinese philosophy, Li's writings on Kant have been largely unavailable in English. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition begins to remedy this. Maija Bell Samei's translation of Li's Huaxia meixue (Beijing: Zhongwai Chubangongsi, 1989) presents an account of the development of Chinese aesthetics that covers much the same ground as Li's popular The Path of Beauty (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994) but with more philosophical depth and attention to Li's interpretation of Kant.
The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition begins by describing how thousands of years of living in Stone Age communities produced a uniquely human cultural-psychological structure. Li argues that a distinctively Confucian aesthetic tradition emerged from the shamanistic rituals of Neolithic China, a tradition that deepened and strengthened over its long history, but continued to be fundamentally Confucian.
Drawing on such diverse sources as Karl Marx, Clifford Geertz, Susan Langer, prehistoric cave paintings, taotie, the Zhouli, the Shujing, and the etymology of mei ... (beauty), Li explains how a process of "sedimentation" resulted in "the humanization of nature." Millennia of using tools and participating in communal activities changed human senses and emotions. The order and pattern required by cooperative behavior were internalized as logic and concepts; the demands of social cohesion became taboos and morality. The pleasure experienced in emotionally intense shamanistic rituals created the sense of unity with humanity, the natural world, and heaven characteristic of religious ecstasy and aesthetic experience - the selfforgetting, emotionally satisfying experience of beauty.
In China, as the process of sedimentation continued it developed into the rites and music tradition that became the foundation of Confucian thought. The tradition established the importance of harmony between feeling and reason, society and individuals, making the tone of Confucian aesthetics deeply emotional but never so wildly passionate that it threatened the social bonds. Each of the middle chapters of The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition describes how a particular philosopher or poet (Confucius, Zhuangzi, Qu Yuan, and Su Shi) contributed a...