A Dialog with Li Zehou—The Sensate,¹ The Individual, My Choice

Abstract

I have to admit, in the realm of contemporary Chinese aesthetics, Li Zehou's influence is second to none. Every one of his new works is widely read, many of his viewpoints are frequently quoted, and in particular, his "cultural sedimentation" is, at certain levels, already used as a fundamental tenet and applied to real theoretical research and literary criticism; his evaluations of traditional culture, together with One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Jung's "Archetype Essays," have produced an influence that cannot be underestimated on contemporary literary circles enveloped in "the trend of searching for roots." Like a great number of my contemporaries, I enjoy his writing a great deal, and must read every one of his books that I encounter. However, after just having read A Discussion of the History of Ancient Chinese Thought and Volume One of The History of Chinese Aesthetics, I have suddenly felt that these works aren't to my taste. Is the May Fourth New Culture Movement's thorough negation of traditional culture really as poetic as Li Zehou depicts it? Do today's countrymen really want to promote "New Confucianism" in order to reestablish a unified faith? Is the psychological constitution of the Chinese people actually an unalterable reality? I honestly had not thought that he felt such tenderness and love for traditional culture. In order to clarify my confusion, I reread all of his works and finally realized: when one uses the "sedimentation" perspective to examine tradition, Li Zehou's conclusion is inevitable. "Sedimentation," his theoretical foundation for evaluating tradition, is itself a product of traditional "sedimentation." The proposition that sedimentation is rational, just like Hegel's proposition that reality is rational, is oriented toward the past, is conservative. When one uses sedimentation to formulate the true nature of beauty, this conservative quality becomes even more distinct. From Li Zehou's perspective, traditional Chinese culture has more positive qualities than negative, an attitude just like that of Hegel toward the reality of his contemporary Germany.