Zhang Jie: "Calling Li Zehou in Front of Your Face"

According to the scholars, mr. Li Zehou, a famous scholar, died at 7:00 a.m. local time on November 2, 2021, at the age of 91. Here is an article by my interlude friend Zhang Jie remembering Mr. Li Zehou. The title is: Zhang Jie: "Calling Li Zehou in Front of Your Face"

One

I remember once, when I didn't have a long time after graduating from college, I went to the "Yanhe" periodical to find Li Guoping, the editor here and also my college classmate, to talk about something, and I was talking, when suddenly someone shouted in my ear: "Li Zehou." We turned our heads to see that the person who came was Mr. Li Xing, the senior editor here, and then the three of them looked at each other and laughed.

The others must be inexplicable.

It turns out that this is similar to an "allusion", it is an interesting thing that happened in the auditorium of Northwestern University.

Two

April 27, 1981.

The Auditorium at Northwestern University was crowded.

Mr. Li Zehou, a leading figure in China's academic circles and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, gave an academic speech here.

However, as they spoke, the number of people became smaller and smaller, and in the end there were about three or four hundred loyal listeners left, mainly teachers and students of the Department of Chinese, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of History, and of course, there were also aesthetic enthusiasts outside the school, such as Mr. Li Xing. In the face of such a situation, Mr. Li Zehou also ridiculed: "I knew that this was the situation, I could change to a more popular topic." ”

After Mr. Li Zehou finished his speech, he set aside time for the students to ask questions.

My classmate Wu Yumin was the first to step up to the podium and ask a question, which Mr. Li Zehou replied.

In the slight cold field, the teachers urged the students to ask questions on the stage in order to show the active thinking of our Northwestern University students. What was particularly impressive was that Mr. Dong Dingcheng, who was sitting in the front row of me, was exactly like this, he turned his body and issued a "up, up, up" encouragement to the students around him.

In this atmosphere, I stood up from my seat and walked to the podium of questions in full view of everyone...

After all, 30 years have passed, and what I said at that time cannot be accurately restored now. I raised a most basic aesthetic question, and then I also briefly introduced the views of several schools in China on this, and the interesting thing appeared at this time, just about to introduce Mr. Li Zehou's views, I blurted out: "Li Zehou ..."

The laughter of the audience in high decibels suddenly rose...

The students who asked questions earlier were all "Mr. Li", and here everyone suddenly heard the direct call of "Li Zehou" daimyo, how could they not be "surprised" and "happy" and laughed.

According to the students at the scene, when Mr. Li Zehou next to me heard the direct call of the name, his expression was first a wave, and then everyone laughed.

In fact, as soon as I called out the name "Li Zehou", I felt inappropriate, and I immediately added the word "Sir", but these two words were drowned in the continuous laughter of the crowd, and the remedy was useless.

After the laughter, I continued to introduce, and finally said that Mr. Lu Ying's views on beauty may be more profound.

After this incident, no teacher or classmate ever blamed me, and when I mentioned it, I was smiling, because they knew that it was a habit of nature. At that time, it was precisely the period when the whole country was rectifying chaos, practice was the only criterion for testing truth, and the students were open-minded, truth-seeking and pragmatic, and they were not afraid of authority and liked to express their own opinions. When students usually discuss literary and art theory and aesthetic issues, they all directly call "Zhu Guangqian", "Cai Yi", "Li Zehou" and other scholars' names, because they are only referred to as "Mr. So-and-so", which is easy to be confused; and adding "Mr." after the name, it seems to be pretentious.

Three

Many years later, at the class reunion, some classmates would ask: "What question did you ask Li Zehou at that time?" ”

What I asked was, "Is beauty really not related to human consciousness?" ”

The reason why I ask this question is because this is the biggest difference between our understanding of beauty and Mr. Li Zehou's understanding of beauty.

In order to understand this more clearly, let us briefly review the actual situation of aesthetic research at that time.

From the mid-to-late 1950s to the early 1960s, China's academic circles launched a great aesthetic debate. After the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the topic of the great aesthetic debate continued, and a new aesthetic fever with a wider scope of research and more in-depth research content appeared. Among them, the "nature of beauty" is one of the basic aesthetic problems that are concerned in both periods.

The essential question of beauty is to answer the question of "what is beauty?" On this issue, four schools of thought were formed during the great debate on aesthetics in our country. A faction represented by Mr. Lü Ying advocates that beauty is subjective; a faction represented by Mr. Cai Yi advocates that beauty is objective; a faction represented by Mr. Zhu Guangqian advocates that beauty is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity; and a faction represented by Mr. Li Zehou advocates that beauty is the unity of objectivity and sociality.

In fact, we can divide these four factions into two categories, one is the beauty view of Mr. Cai Yi and Mr. Li Zehou, and the other is the beauty view of Mr. Lü Ying and Mr. Zhu Guangqian. The former type of Mr. Cai Yi and Mr. Li Zehou have one thing in common, they all insist that their views are materialist views, beauty is the first nature, and have nothing to do with human consciousness; the latter type of Mr. Lü Ying and Mr. Zhu Guangqian have one thing in common, and their views have been criticized as "idealistic" views, because they all believe that beauty is related to human consciousness.

Seeing this, you should understand the origin of my question.

There are many ancient and modern Chinese and foreign definitions of "what is beauty", but none of them can satisfy scholars. Plato, the ancient Greek scholar, wrote "The Great Hippias - On Beauty", and the last sentence at the end of the text is the ancient Greek proverb "Beauty is difficult", saying that it is really undesirable to define "beauty".

It is not well defined, but it is not impossible to make some qualifications. Although Mr. Lü Ying was elected as a representative of the "subjective" faction, he never emphasized the "subjective", but emphasized the connection between beauty and people, the connection between beauty and people's lives, and the connection between beauty and people's consciousness. Its proposition is: divorced from human beings, divorced from human social life, divorced from human social consciousness, everything does not matter beautiful, nor does it matter ugly.

To understand this problem, we need to make some philosophical speculation in our minds.

First ask the question, before there were no humans, were flowers beautiful? Some people will say without hesitation, of course it is beautiful. Actually, this is a wrong view. This is all the curse of the inertia of thinking, thinking that people think that if people think it is beautiful now, it must be beautiful before there are no human beings. Take flowers and the beauty of flowers as a similar thing.

In fact, aesthetic needs are the "patent" of human beings. Meeting the aesthetic needs of human beings requires aesthetic activities, and aesthetic activities are the activities in which aesthetic subjects and aesthetic objects (also known as aesthetic objects) participate together. Without an aesthetic subject, what about aesthetic objects? If there is no aesthetic object, what is the aesthetic subject? Humans are the only aesthetic subjects in this world, and other animals have no aesthetic ability because they do not have the spiritual world of human beings. In this sense, aesthetic activity is an activity of spiritual appreciation and spiritual pleasure unique to human beings. Separated from the subject of human beings, divorced from the spiritual world of human beings, is it still meaningful to talk about the beauty and ugliness of the object?

Aesthetic experience tells us that beauty and ugliness are not static. Those who thought it was beautiful now do not think it beautiful; those who thought it were not beautiful now think of beauty; some people think it is beautiful, while others do not think it is beautiful; and so on, and so on. Spending in human society has always been beautiful? I don't think so. When our ancestor Ru Mao drank blood, a group of men held aloft the "sticks" broken from the forks of the tree, just to pounce on a weak calf running at the back of a herd of bison, and they trampled on the flowers everywhere! Beauty is inextricably linked to human social life, so when answering my classmates' questions about beauty, I like to use the Russian scholar Chernyshevsky's saying that "beauty is life", in a word, what kind of life there is what kind of beauty. The earliest artistic depictions of human beings tens of thousands of years ago were not flowers, but glamorous animals. Also, just using the difference in life to explain the following example may not be straightforward, the five-star red flag, in our opinion, it is the most beautiful, but the old Chiang Kai-shek who went to Taiwan and the millions of Kuomintang people and their families must have the same aesthetic feelings? Can we still say that beauty has nothing to do with human consciousness? Some people will explain emotions here, but on a philosophical level, emotions also belong to the category of consciousness.

Four

After I finished asking, it was time for Mr. Li Zehou to answer.

Mr. Li Zehou's first sentence was: "I didn't expect that there was also a supporter of Lu Ying here." This was followed by a small laugh. Because most of the students sitting here do not know who Mr. Lu Ying is.

Mr. Lü Ying (1915-1969), a native of Anhui. He was admitted to Peking University in 1935 and left Beijing to go south after the July 7 Incident in 1937. In 1939, he resumed his studies at The Southwest United University in Kunming and graduated in 1941. Later, he taught in some middle schools and universities. In September 1950, he was invited to serve as the head and professor of the department of Chinese of Shandong University, where he taught literature and art. In the winter of 1952, he went to Beijing and served as a special translator for the People's Literature Publishing House, and also served as an adviser to the literary and art department of the People's Daily. He has published a number of literary and artistic theory, aesthetic works and literary translations. In March 1969, he died of an unjust illness on a labor reform farm.

Next, Mr. Li Zehou gave an answer.

Shortly thereafter, I met a few classmates on the road, and a classmate of my age said, "There is nothing in Li Zehou's answer to your question." ”

I was nodding my head in agreement with a smile when an elderly classmate suddenly interjected, "How can you say there is no content?" Li Zehou clearly said that matter is the first nature and consciousness is the second nature. And beauty is primary, and the consciousness of beauty is secondary..."

I smiled again and hit the round field. Because this old classmate didn't study aesthetics, if I were to argue passionately, it would be a bit of a fuss.

In fact, this was a major misunderstanding in aesthetic research at that time. There are always those who try to distinguish the various and complex things in society into the first and the second, and then label the corresponding views as "materialism" and "idealism". The question is, on what basis do you think beauty is the first? Although Mr. Cai Yi and Mr. Li Zehou believe that beauty is the first, Mr. Lü Ying, Mr. Zhu Guangqian and we have never thought that beauty is the first, and we have never thought that beauty belongs to the category of matter. That is to say, the beauty of flowers and flowers are two different things, flowers belong to matter, but the beauty of flowers does not belong to the properties of matter, you use physical analysis, chemical analysis and other means, can not find beauty.

In particular, it should be emphasized that the division between materialism and idealism cannot rely on the essential problem of beauty, but on the basic problem of philosophy.

Engels made it clear in his essay "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy":

Philosophers divide into two camps according to how they answer this question. Those who conclude that spirit is intrinsic to nature and thus in the final analysis recognize the creationist doctrine in some way (in the case of philosophers, such as Hegel, the doctrine of creation tends to take a more chaotic and absurd form than in Christianity) constitutes the camp of idealism. Those who believe that nature is primordial belong to the various schools of materialism. (The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 4, People's Publishing House, 1972, p. 220)

What is even more interesting is that Engels expected that there would be people who loved labels among future generations, and he immediately said:

"Apart from that, the terms idealism and materialism have no other meaning, nor can they be used here in any other sense." (Ibid.)

It is clear that when your answer to the fundamental question of philosophy is materialistic, then you are materialist whether you classify beauty in the category of matter or consciousness; and vice versa. We now tell you: Mr. Lü Ying is a materialist aesthetician, and his aesthetic views are materialistic aesthetic views.

Without hiding it, my college graduation thesis discussed this view, entitled: "The Essential Problem of Beauty and the Fundamental Problem of Philosophy."

Some people do not recognize an aesthetic school represented by Mr. Lü Ying, but think that only three aesthetic schools were formed in our country at that time; others do not explicitly erase this aesthetic school, but also say that this school has disappeared because of its very small number and obvious errors. In fact, academically everyone should be more open-minded, and perhaps future history will tell people a completely different conclusion.

Five

People often say: The text is like its person. But my situation is slightly different. Because I am particularly convinced of a teaching by the late economist Mr. Sun Yefang, the gist of which is that as a human being, we must seek common ground with small differences; in our study, we must seek common ground and seek small differences. Maybe I didn't do a good job, giving people the feeling that I was originally kind and tolerant, but when I wrote papers, I always picked other people's thorns, and I especially liked which pot did not open which pot.

To tell you the truth, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Li Zehou. Because he was a leading figure in the philosophical and social science circles in China at that time, his academic contributions and academic status are well known. I only went to seek a small difference after saving Datong, that is to say, I do not agree with a certain aesthetic point of view of Mr. Li Zehou, which does not mean that I do not accept or even reject all his aesthetic ideas. Indeed, like all academics, Mr. Li Zehou will inevitably have his own limitations and deficiencies. Ignoring the role of consciousness on the essence of beauty is the weakest link in Mr. Li Zehou's aesthetic thought. Correspondingly, there is also the understanding of "practice", we talk about practice, talk about people's conscious social activities, and Mr. Li Zehou talks about practice, which eliminates "consciousness". It is puzzling that this flawed view of practice has since been widely promoted and promoted by some. Of course, that's all an afterthought.

After Mr. Li Zehou's speech and answers, several students still gathered around and asked this and that. I did not go far, and when the students left, I quickly stepped forward, smiled and said a few words to Mr. Li Zehou, who also said a few words kindly, and then said goodbye. As for what the two of us said, because we talked privately, it was not made public.