(Courtesy of the author/image)
Wu Chengxue
Professor of the Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
The reading memories of the 1980s are warm. In that era, everything was in ruins, and everything was open and free. We are just young, hungry and thirsty, and have a strong curiosity and digestion for all kinds of books and knowledge in all aspects, just like the fields that have dried up after the great drought, and suddenly encounter abundant rain. At that time, Chen Jingrun became an idol of the people of the whole country because of Xu Chi's reportage "The Goldbach Conjecture", and Li Zehou was the object of worship of many university liberal arts students. The first edition of "The Course of Beauty" was in 1981, and after its publication, Luoyang paper was expensive, and it actually became a bestseller for a reprint. This is not only an academic phenomenon, but also a social phenomenon. People are liberated from long-term repression and show a strong demand for beauty, which is also a wave in the ideological trend of the ideological liberation movement. At that time, Li Zehou was still a young scholar in his fifties. Many college students read and discussed the book obsessively, giving people the feeling of a class of children on a spring trip, following the teacher, observing the spring in the suburbs of flowers. That excitement and excitement is hard to describe.
It is an artistic essay full of passion and imagination. There's a lot of "maybe... Perhaps" such speculation, it is not rigorous, but full of aura and insight, giving people imagination and enlightenment. This book of less than 200,000 words, from the source of Chinese civilization to the Qing Dynasty, involves many issues such as philosophy, art, aesthetics, literature and so on. You can say that he is a dragonfly dotting the water, or you can say that he is the finishing touch. Now that I re-read this book, I feel that many of its comments on ancient Chinese art are still immovable. For example, Li Zehou regards "Du Shi, Yan Zi, and Korean" as an artistic model of the intersection of Shengzhong and Tang Dynasties, "a common feature of them is to incorporate the majestic and majestic momentum of Sheng Tang into the norm." "This summary is quite insightful and provocative.
From the perspective of academic research, "The Course of Beauty" is not Li Zehou's masterpiece. Curiously, since then, he has published many thoughtful works, but he has not been touched by the year. When you think about it, it is not surprising that "The Course of Beauty" coincided with young authors and young readers in the eighties when passion was burning. Now, Mr. Li is old, and his readers are slowly aging. Mentioning Li Zehou and his book, many young people were dazed as if they were hearing about the heavens.
Goodbye, that era that is far away but still romantic and free in our hearts.
Fu Daobin
Professor of the Department of Chinese, Harbin Normal University
Li Zehou's "The Course of Beauty" was published in 1981, and I read this book in 1982, when I was about to graduate from college. Graduation is imminent, the chores are crowded, and the mood is difficult, but "The Course of Beauty" seems to overlook the earth from the clouds, the aesthetic analysis that runs through the ancient and modern times, and the beautiful writing like the flowing clouds, which makes me indulge in it for a long time and forget the restlessness and uneasiness at the time of graduation. College students of the 77th and 78th classes have experienced ten years of ideological closure, are accustomed to dull and rigid academic expression, and suddenly see Li Zehou's flexible and flowing ideological exposition, which has a strong spiritual impact if it is electrocuted.
Li Zehou placed the aesthetic process of ancient China into a grand historical time and space, from the dragon flying phoenix dance of the ancient totem, the fierce beauty of the bronze gluttonous ornamentation, to the rational spirit of the Zhuzi era and the romantic style of the Qusao tradition; from the Wei and Jin demeanor, the Buddha's world appearance, and the sound of the Sheng Tang Dynasty in the Middle Ages, to the rhyme since the Middle and Tang Dynasties, the song and Yuan landscapes, and the sexual spirit charm and sentimental feelings of Ming and Qing literature, "The Course of Beauty" compares the original totem, bronze ceremonial vessel, and "Book of Poetry" with a kind of vertical and horizontal temperament. Zhuzi philosophy, Qu Suo romance, Chinese Jinzi, Buddha lamentations, sheng Tang sounds, Song and Yuan landscapes, sentimentality of the end of the world and other cultural phenomena cast in one furnace, with a highly generalized tone, analysis of the aesthetic meaning of various forms of Chinese culture, breaking the usual stagnant and solemn understanding of Chinese culture, showing a kind of freedom and relaxation based on the spirit of human subjectivity, which is in line with the spirit of ideological emancipation in the early 1980s, so the book quickly spread in society.
"The Course of Beauty" has two theoretical supports: one is that beauty is "meaningful form", and the other is "historical accumulation theory". "Meaningful form" is the famous view of the British aesthetician Clive Bell, starting from Bell's theory, Li Zehou believes that the seemingly pure form in the geometric ornaments in primitive art actually contains rich historical meaning. The fish patterns, bird patterns, frog patterns, etc. on early pottery appear to be pure forms on the surface, but in fact, this is the result of the long accumulation of historical meaning. In aesthetic analysis, "The Course of Beauty" organically integrates "meaningful forms" with "historical accumulation theory", and such ideas are precisely the theoretical cornerstone of the "aesthetic fever" in the 1980s.
Chen Wenxin
Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Wuhan University
Li Zehou's "The Course of Beauty", published in 1981, swept the country, and I was also one of its first readers.
I like "The Course of Beauty" because Li Zehou suddenly pointed out many of my hazy ideas, the windows were open, and thousands of weather suddenly appeared in front of me. With more than a hundred thousand words to outline the overall outline of the history of Chinese aesthetics, such a book, no one will write now.
The characteristic of young people is that once they like it, they can't help imitating it, so I fell into the vast valley where I couldn't find a way to express it. Writing always relies on language, not all languages, but the set of languages with which we are familiar, including familiar terminology, rhetorical techniques, and paths to thinking about problems. Once did an academic game with undergraduates, let them write a paper on "Dream of the Red Chamber", the content is not limited, but can not use the words "feudal society" and "rebellion", there are many students can not write. The reason is that the words "feudal society" and "rebellion" are not just two words, but also a habit of thinking. Along this habit of thought, it is not difficult to find many relevant ideas, examples, and wording, and a paper can always be completed. "The Course of Beauty" took me away from the familiar set of languages, but the new way of language lacks accumulation, and this state is somewhat like what people call "aphasia": as long as it involves expression, it is blank in the head, and I can't find specific ideas and words. This state of affairs lasted for several years, and the immediate consequence was that it was almost impossible to write a paper for a year. This helpless loneliness made me doubt my own qualities, and also made me complain about "The Course of Beauty".
Having said that, although I complained about Li Zehou, my interest in reading remained undiminished, and his "Treatise on the History of Ancient Chinese Thought", including "Walk My Own Road", which scholars were embarrassed to mention, was also found to read. For example, some quotations in Li Zehou's book were not drawn from the original work, but were transferred from the works of Chen Yinke and others. Chen Yinke often quotes without ellipses, and only uses "slight clouds" to explain in the narrative. Li Zehou did not notice this, so he used it as a complete original text. After discovering these omissions, he was once overjoyed and no longer regarded Li Zehou as a mythical existence. However, this euphoria did not last long, for the simple reason that Li Zehou's thinker's endowment and ability to think could not be erased by a few hard wounds. Many of the ideas of people are that you can't help but beat the knot!
(Qin Ying/Photo)
Luo Tao
Senior editor of Yangcheng Evening News
The reading life of the 1970s and 1980s was very nostalgic for our generation. Confucius said, "I have not seen good virtue as a lustful person." It can be said with great shame that we were at least "eager to learn as lustful", or we can simply say: eager to learn is lustful. At that time, the classic Chinese and Western romance novels that had just been unbanned were indescribable to those of us who were just "aware of Shao Ai". Because these books have always been forbidden before. Reading the long-awaited classics that the long-awaited dragon only bought back by the long queue, needless to say, the plot is to smell its ink fragrance, which is enough to be intoxicating. At that time, the most popular was of course a reprint of the classic, what Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Merimer, the queue is all against these "big, foreign, ancient". Speaking of new books, my most memorable memorable ones are Qian Zhongshu's "Pipe Cone Compilation" (1979) and Li Zehou's "The Course of Beauty" (1981). These two books, I think, are the tan art of the two bibi since 1949, Qian is extremely immersed, Li is extremely clever; Qian is based on horizontal communication (I use the word "horizontal" here, referring to Mr. Qian's opening up of various arts, through the East and the West, and Zhang Xuecheng's derogatory word "horizontal through non-communication"), to see the victory, Li is known for his penetration. This is the result of the author's long-term independent thinking. Reading these two books, we can see that although it is not easy to write books, for true scholars, they can temper treasures. This is true of Chen Yinke's "Liu Ru is a Biography", and the same is true of Gu Zhun's "From Rationalism to Empiricism" that came out later.
(The pictures in this article, except for Luo Tao's portrait taken by Qin Ying, are provided by the author)
Wu Chengxue, Fu Daobin, Chen Wenxin, Luo Tao