Aesthetic humanity and the great world community

Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community: Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun Ban Wang In the last three decades, influential commentators on Chinese aesthetics such as Li Zehou have tended to treat poetics as a distinct topic in its own right and to valorize certain literary forms as if they transcended their sociopolitical environments. In his acclaimed 1981 work, The Path of Beauty, Li, a Marxian aesthetician, defended the lifestyle and writings of literati in the Wei and Jin dynasties (220–266 CE, 265–420 CE) as evoking a “humanist theme.” Though Li was generally a politically engaged writer, he argued that Wei-Jin poetics departed from the imperial ideology of the Han dynasty in a time of state collapse to revel in poetic license and behavioral eccentricity, giving rise to a “pure” mode of philosophy and genuinely lyrical and affective literature.1 This seemingly apolitical aesthetic of the “expressive and affective” gained new respectability in the 1980s in reaction to the highly politicized literature of Mao-era and Cultural Revolution artworks. Indeed the “affectiveexpressive” mode has long been regarded as the hallmark of Chinese poetics.2 This poetics evinces a primary focus on the expression of inner feelings and intents rather than on the representation of dramatic action. Haun Saussy’s reading of Xunzi suggests, however, that the alleged expressive mode turns out to be quite mimetic—of an ideal ritualistic activity. Aesthetics is not about art per se nor about what is beautiful. “Good” music promotes collective ritual and Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Li Zehou, Mei de licheng (美的歷程, The Path of Beauty) (Beijing, 1981), p. 87. 2. Quoted in Haun Saussy, “Music and Evil: A Basis of Aesthetics in China,” Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020): 483. Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020) © 2020 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/20/4603-0003$10.00. All rights reserved. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 3 activity with the goal of purging human nature’s evil and unruly inclinations. More than just sound and patterns, music is aesthetic in terms of a politicalaesthetic nexus: it serves an ideological function that immerses and directs the audience to the right path of social behavior and the right mindsets required by the state. The political-aesthetic nexus in Xunzi’s understanding of music highlights the importance of political enchantment. Traditional Chinese aesthetics addresses the concern that the political order cannot be fully secured and maintained without daily doses of emotional and sensuous enchantment. It maintains that the state is in constant need of cultural and moral replenishment, so as to endow it with an aura of meaning, experience, and the enchantment. Disenchantment would mean the severance of sensual experience from the virtue and ethos of the political order. Ever since Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917), disenchantment has described the draining of meaningful experience in the secular process of modernity—that is, the loss of experiences charged with emotional attachment to community and infused with a sacred aura. Politically, the term describes a condition of technocratic machinery and administrative procedures staffed with “specialists without spirit.” Ethically, it denotes the mindset that prompts individuals to make arbitrary aesthetic and personal choices without a rational basis or shared sensibilities, acting as “hedonists without a heart.”4 Walter Benjamin wrote similarly of disenchantment as the disintegration of aura in the blinding rush of urbanization, industrialization, and commodification.5 Urbanization uproots individuals from the “blood and soil” of community; mechanical reproduction severs artworks from ritual and tradition. China’s recent campaign to revive the Confucian tradition and the ancient rituals is an effort at massive enchantment. In my view, this campaign fails to enchant and shore up China as a political community; for that, a coherent culture and stronger ethics are needed. The disconnect between 3. Ibid., p. 487. 4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, in “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York, 2002), p. 121. 5. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 2007), pp. 155–200. Ban W ang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of The Sublime Figure of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004), and History and Memory (Lish yu jiyi) (2004). He has edited and coedited seven books on cinema and memory, the Chinese revolution, socialism, and the New Left, including the recent Chinese Visions of World Order (2017). 497 498 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community aesthetics and the ethico-political is one reason why leaders and consumers revel in vaunting spectacles of imperial power and glory that are vacuous and irrelevant to the moral fabric of a modern society. A review of aesthetic thinking in China at the turn of the twentieth century, however, may tell us something valuable about the closer ties between politics and aesthetics, crystallized by the term political enchantment. In a bid to overcome transcendental homelessness and return to a communal home, reenchantment searches for a way back to a more intimate and emotive connection between the body and the body politic, between moral sentiment and the engagement of power. In seeking this reconnection, aesthetic theory and practice play a vital role. It is well known that a formal aesthetic discourse was introduced into China along with other Western imports to address urgent social and political crises, as the Qing Empire was crumbling in the face of encroaching Western powers and world markets.6 A century later, theorists like Li rediscovered the transcendent values of aesthetics. Tired of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) grand narrative of collective history, nation, and political movements, theorists suddenly woke up to a modernist aesthetic that severs sense perception and aesthetic forms from concerns of morality, politics, and social transformation. This gesture, seen in the West as well, disenchants aesthetic discourse and deprives it of political consequences, leading to a valorization of mere depthless effect, affect, sensuous intensity, textual jouissance, bodily pleasure, and the focus on pure aesthetic properties. For Raymond Williams, this aesthetic subjectivism “isolates inner-sense perception as the basis of art and beauty,” independent from social and cultural concerns.7 Symptomatic of “the divided modern consciousness,” this focus of subjective perception detaches aesthetics from the totality of socio-political relations, “for there is something irresistibly displaced and marginal about the now common and limiting phrase ‘aesthetic considerations.’”8 In this essay, I attempt to recapture a politicized aesthetics by considering the ways that early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers associated moral questions with aesthetic ideas in the reconstruction of China as a modern nation-state. Instead of transcendent aesthetics, the politicized aesthetics of these Chinese thinkers asserted an intimate tie between aesthetic categories and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and the politics 6. For a detailed discussion of the historical conditions for Chinese readings of Western aesthetics, see Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China (Stanford, Calif., 1997). 7. Ban Wang, “Use in Uselessness: How Western Aesthetics Made Chinese Literature More Political,” in A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Malden, Mass., 2016), p. 281. 8. Raymond Williams, “Aesthetic,” Keywords (New York, 2015), p. 2. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 of nation building. In general, political aesthetics splits into two interrelated strands. As a cultural and intellectual resource, it provides legitimacy to the reform of the emerging nation. This culture-society-politics logic was accepted as part of the rising social order. In the 1980s, however, aesthetic culture’s shoring-up of political order came to be viewed as a handmaiden in the service of communist rule, and it is this submission of aesthetics to politics that prompted Li Zehou’s reassertion of aesthetic autonomy and humanism. But the severance of aesthetics from politics ignores the transformative power of revolutionary arts and literature in building up a new culture and making social change. These two scenarios affirm aesthetic theory and practice as inseparable from politics. As Friedrich Schiller claimed, “If we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom.”9 Political aesthetics in modern China claims that humans are aesthetic beings and political actors, constantly engaged in making and remaking the sensuous lifeworld as the condition of political freedom. Tracing the intertwining of aesthetics with politics, Terry Eagleton has argued that the crux of aesthetics is the human body. In the age of Enlightenment, the biological and laboring body became the new candidate for political concern because enlightened monarchies and bourgeois rulers alike needed to cater to bodily needs, emotional wellbeing, and sensuous pleasure. Addressing the body’s access to the world of practice, the new science of aesthetics is inherently social, moral, and political. Classical aesthetics refers to “the whole region of human perception and sensation” in contrast to conceptual thought and instrumental rationality. Far from elevating art over life, classical aesthetic theory focuses on what is bound up with humans’ creaturely life and engages in “the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.”10 Aesthetic discourse arose in eighteenth-century Germany to reflect on how citizens’ bodily experiences and sensations may be groomed and educated to attain universal subjectivity and achieve a bourgeois social order. Political hegemony could not allow individuals’ freewheeling particulars and discontents to proliferate freely; it needed to rein in minds and bodies by informing, educating, and forging subjects from within and by appealing to individual emotion, taste, and sensibility. In this way, aesthetics emerged as a solution to problems of morality and politics. 9. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, N.Y., 2004), p. 27. 10. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, Mass., 1990), p. 13; hereafter abbreviated I. 499 500 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community If the ruling order resorts to aesthetics to inscribe morality and authority on the body by winning the heart and mind, then making allowance for sensuous needs, feelings, and desires may also give license to revolt and emancipation. Aesthetic considerations make allowance for sensuous gratification and deliver the right to aesthetic freedom, an experience that may gesture toward a space of freedom. Jacques Rancière sees the aesthetic redrawing and redistribution of the sensible as an eminently political act. Aesthetic experience may emancipate individuals from their narrow, divided consciousness and from alienated labor to exercise bodily and mental freedom from the externally imposed rules of production and governance.11 An emotionally rich and creative subject may attain self-rule by following an educational trajectory of Bildung. Individuals may author and internalize their collective rules, “obeying no laws but those which they gave to themselves” (I, p. 19). This aesthetic image harbors a politically constructive potential and projects a cultural means of shoring up a body politic based on sense and sensibility, a republic of free personalities. This is one major reason why Chinese thinkers, frustrated by the political crises around the collapse of the Qing Empire, were drawn to Western aesthetics. In their reception of Western aesthetics, Chinese thinkers drew inspiration from the Confucian notion of wen yi zai dao (文以載道, using writing to carry the Dao). While the Dao invokes the cosmic Way beyond the sensory realm, the suprasensory realm must be fleshed out in sensuous, everyday life and is deemed immanent in mundane social, moral, and political practices, rituals, and family relations.12 This traditional thinking allowed these thinkers to find in Western aesthetics a resonant resource to promote wholesale political reform and to see aesthetic imaginaries as a means of fostering emotional bonds so fundamental to social and political order. Instead of cutting aesthetics off from sociohistorical circumstances, Chinese writers showed a propensity to bring it deeper into an organic discourse that integrates classic tenets, morality, and subjectivity. Liang Qichao, for example, appreciated the importance of aesthetics for reforming the mentality, emotion, and morality of the Chinese populace. To him fiction is an aesthetic means of achieving moral reform among readers. While modern political thinking does not automatically associate politics with morality, Liang’s position rests on the classical premise that morality, far from being restricted to the realm of conduct, manners, and everyday life, is the essence of a political society. His word for politics is qunzhi (群治). Literally meaning “governance of masses of people,” qunzhi aims to articulate a 11. Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33, no. 1 (2004): 10–24. 12. See Pauline Yu and Theodor Huters, “The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature,” in Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader, ed. Corinne H. Dale (Albany, N.Y., 2004), p. 3. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 modern political community of self-rule by citizens. Popular self-rule was absent in the traditional empire, where the political order was built on parochial principles that served the private needs of the ruling monarch, their families, and clans.13 At the social level, men and women pursued their selfinterests and maintained tight-knit communities in a dispersed network. Although the empire honored the mandate of the ruler to care ideally and inclusively for all under heaven (tianxia, 天下), the parochial rule of the imperial house was the order of the day.14 To reform that parochial mindset, Liang resorts to the emotional power of fiction and sees it as the key to the renewal of readers’ personality and sensibility.15 Rather than inculcating traditional moral doctrines, fiction transports readers to the fanciful realm, moves them beyond their own private prisons of self-interest and daily routine, expands their imagination, and allows them to venture out to an exciting world. Fiction’s aesthetic power works effectively in renewing and improving the new citizen’s moral quality. Traditional novels of low taste and private morality corrupt readers and should be rejected. A new fiction, imbued with public morality and commitment to the common good, would take readers on an emotional adventure, with the goal of forging a healthy moral character. Reading fiction is not a means of top-down governance but aspires to the solidarity of minds and feelings required of citizens of a modern nation.16 Liang’s moral-political emphasis has drawn ire from the influential literary critic C. T. Hsia (1921–2013). Dismissing it as just a symptom of the perennial “obsession with China,” Hsia claimed that Liang’s political fiction diminishes the value and autonomy of literature.17 Viewing politics in terms of power struggles and conflict in high places, Hsia sees literature written by politicians to influence public opinion as bad literature: a handmaiden of party and state politics. He thus classifies Liang as a propagandist in rendering 13. See Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” (論小說與群治之關係, Fiction Seen in Relation to the Guidance of the People), in Liang Qichao quanji 21 vols, (Beijing, 1999); 4: 886. Most translations of the title of Liang’s essay turn the phrase qunzhi (群治) into “governance of the people” or “guidance of society.” Qun means “masses,” a term that would subsequently be associated with the communist mobilization of people as a revolutionary force. But Liang’s focus was on the people as citizens. As a journalist and activist in exile, he expected literature to reform people’s minds so they could attain the spiritual, moral quality of a virtuous national consciousness. The people constitute the political community, the state, and government. Thus qunzhi, echoing Liang’s favorite concept of zizhi (自治, self-rule), is an ascending, bottom-up process of moral formation. 14. Tianxia was a moral and political mode of governance that covered all people and regions within the empire. For contemporary discussions of tianxia governance and Chinese cosmopolitanism, see Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, ed. Ban Wang (Durham, N.C., 2017). 15. Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi,” p. 886. 16. Ibid., p. 885. 17. C. T. Hsia, C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature (New York, 2004), p. 237. 501 502 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community fiction a servant of partisan and state politics.18 But it is a mistake to interpret Liang in the light of conventional politics. Liang’s stance alludes to his cherished ideal of civic virtue and character formation, a modern political philosophy that resonates well with Confucianism. Aligned with morality and culture, politics is a matter of moral reform that integrates and involves the population through fostering public ethos and civic virtue.19 A politics driven by the ritual of reading and moral cultivation endorses fiction’s aesthetic-political role. The early Confucian view of morality as an inner quality of the mind and outward virtuous conduct to be built up through constant performance of music, song, and learning is presented in the “Great Preface,” the opening commentary on the Book of Poetry (Shijing, 詩經). Through poetry, the ancient kings “managed the relations between husbands and wives, perfected respect due to parents and superiors, gave depth to human relations, beautifully taught and transformed the people, and changed local customs.”20 Instead of belles lettres and elegant writing, the Confucian aesthetic gives priority to preserving morality and maintaining culture. Politics is a process that regulates, maintains, and renovates morality by working on the senses, sensibility, and emotional structure and by enhancing reciprocity and sociality. In a clear indication of his distance from the modern concept of literature as a separate sphere of individualistic enjoyment, Liang, in the vein of Confucian literati, views literature as an organic part of a holistic package of a moral, emotional, sensual, and political way of life. Conceiving politics in terms of people’s morality, intelligence, and power, Liang believes that a people endowed with these qualities should be able to stand on their own feet. With this educational mission, fiction moves beyond the narrow concept of literature and becomes an ongoing activity for moral reform. Aesthetic activity works to maintain as well as revamp morality, which in turn would enhance the harmony of the political and social order. The celebrated aesthetic thinker Wang Guowei (1877–1927) illustrates a dual mission in politicized aesthetics. He links judgments of poetry to two 18. See ibid. 19. An analogy can be found in Michael J. Sandel’s observation that Aristotelian moral politics lies in “the formative task . . . to cultivate virtue among a small group of people who shared a common life and a natural bent for citizenship.” In modern times, the republican cultivation of virtue appears more coercive. As in Rousseau, the task is “‘to change human nature, to transform each individual . . . into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives . . . his life and his being’” (Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy [Cambridge, Mass., 1996], p. 319). 20. Quoted in Stephen Owen, Readings in Classical Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 45. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 strands of moral-political thought in ancient China. One is imperial, committed to the maintenance of the dynastic order; the other is plebian, individualistic, and reclusive. The political strand, as he reads it, corresponds to the Northern school of poetics, which makes for “the Way of poetry.”21 In contrast, the Southern school of poetics, represented by Daoist-spirited poets with reclusive bent, is imaginative, spontaneous, and aesthetic. Little concerned by politics, the Southern poets are less constrained by social conventions and moral norms, and their works are enjoyable and refined in poetical sentiment and imagery. Between the North and the South, Qu Yuan (340–278 BCE), the poet of the State of Chu in the Warring States period, comes to the fore as a figure capable of conjoining political commitment and aesthetic accomplishment. A poet of the South, Qu Yuan imbibed the ideas and poetics of the North and admired the sage king as the moral-political exemplar. After all, he was an establishment poet highly regarded by the king of Chu for a good part of his career, and was an official charged with giving counsel in political affairs. On the other hand, he wrote poems of romantic exuberance that not only exhibit all the poetic flourishes and imaginativeness unique to the Southern poets but also display creative poetic patterns and aesthetics. Given his position in the political order, Qu Yuan’s poems may be complicit with the ruling regime, disseminating loyalty and values integral to the ruling order. On the other hand, his Southern-flavored poetic accomplishment points to a style akin to that of poetry for poetry’s sake—a perfecting of poetic patterns and aesthetic qualities. This pure poetry flies in the face of Confucian poetics, which views poetry primarily as a vehicle for moral improvement and maintenance of political order. The “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs defines poetry in terms of feng (风, influence), which amounts to instruction and dissemination of moral norms whereby the cardinal ties between husband and wife, father and son, emperors and subjects are inculcated and relationships from small communities to the state are regulated. In Saussy’s analysis, while feng may point to the “‘expressive-affective conception of poetry,’” its aesthetics is sociopolitical. “Here aesthetic judgment,” in Saussy’s phrasing, “defers to political judgment: the poem is as good or bad as the society that produces it, with the added condition that a poet at odds with a bad society can pin his work to the good society he remembers.”22 Creating a work out of memories of a good society opens up the possibility of critique in the present. Thus, matching the top-down influence, whereby “‘those above . . . transform . . . those below,’” is a more critical thrust of feng (讽, 21. Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji (Taiyuan, 1987), p. 31. 22. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif., 1993), p. 84. 503 504 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community criticism), by which “those below” criticize “those above.”23 Critical minds, though nestled within the political order, enjoy the license to admonish; one is not culpable speaking one’s mind and giving one’s opinion (yanzhe wuzui, 言者无罪). The critical feng is a moral, political voice of critique, admonition, and counsel within the political system.24 Within these two versions of feng, it is very difficult to draw a line between a critical poet outside the system and a politically engaged insider. In recovering elements of Qu Yuan’s politicized aesthetics, Wang Guowei raises the possibility of a win-win scenario in which aesthetics and politics become conjoined. Although the feng from below may utter grievances and express spontaneous feelings, it is by no means premised on the poet’s disengagement from the community and her or his relinquishing any responsibility for political order. On the contrary, the critical voice emerges from a deeper concern about moral corruption and political decay. For Wang Guowei, two schools of poetics are reconciled in Qu Yuan. The Northern school worked within the political order and harbored the goal of “changing the old society.”25 This political stance does not mean that the poet is a blind loyalist; Qu Yuan combated and criticized the regime and corrupt officials with integrity and courage. On the other hand, Southern poets may seem to indulge in poetic fantasy and rhetorical perfection, but their poetic values evoke the broader function of literature in projecting political imagination. Their poetic images envision a new social world. Barred from access to political power, poets of the Southern school expressed their ideals and found solace in the utopian enclaves of nature and reclusive haunts. This imaginative and aesthetic gesture, however, does not rule out its underlying politics: projecting a vision of society in image rather than in reality.26 That aesthetic activity could address moral problems and energize politics is most evident in Cai Yuanpei’s arguments for aesthetic education. A scholar of German aesthetics who studied in Leipzig from 1908 to 1911, Cai showed no interest in the idea of a “modern divided consciousness” that separated sense perception from value judgment and history, nor was he interested in the art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic.27 To him, aesthetics was to be harnessed for cultivating humanist worldviews and public morality and for fostering the individual’s affective and rational personality. These qualities he considered prerequisites for citizenship and integral to the new Chinese republic (see MW, p. 71). As minister of education in the first Chinese Republic, Cai 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. Ibid., p. 92 See Owen, Readings in Classical Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 38, 46. Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji, p. 31 See ibid. Cai Yuanpei, Cai Yuanpei meixue wenlun (Beijing, 1983), p. 71; hereafter abbreviated MW. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 was a visionary reformer who pioneered and put modern aesthetic education on a par with physical, intellectual, and ethical programs. Instituted in schools and universities, this aesthetic curriculum was designed to build up the character of the citizen and to foster civic virtue. For Cai Yuanpei, aesthetic activity offered an effective solution to moral decay in the early years of the Chinese republic. As the traditional moral and political order declined, the growth of market society, urbanization, and possessive individualism were thrusting China into successive crises. Things fell apart, and the moral center could not hold. In the Confucian order, the question of morality had been bound up with the individual’s location within an extensive hierarchical network of family and kinship. Local communities and the imperial center were also modeled on the extended family network. However, modern changes cut men and women loose from the village, family, and regions. Atomized individuals emerged on the scene, cut adrift from the communal network and caught up in cutthroat struggles for self-preservation. The advent of modernity brought myriad psychic and moral problems. Following Liang Qichao and a long tradition of debate among the literati, Cai Yuanpei diagnosed moral questions in terms of private morality versus public morality. Acknowledging modern individual rights and protection from external infringement, Cai invokes the classic image of the moral paragon endowed with integrity, uprightness, and virtue, free from improper desires and thoughts. Achieved through a ritualistic program of self-cultivation, this exemplary image links modern individual rights to the ancient image of the righteous person endowed with unassailable virtue. Although the Confucian moral paragon is familiar and favorable, Cai puts it under the sign of negative morality (analogous to Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty).28 Its negativity is well illustrated by the Confucian motto “what you do not want yourself you should not impose on others” (Analects 12.2). Yet in splendid isolation, this attitude signals a singular self with no ties to others, which resembles Immanuel Kant’s disembodied subject stripped of emotional and moral grounding. If our morality is fixated on self-improvement and self-perfection, Cai writes, it is not a complete and satisfying personality (消極道德，囿於獨善範圍). The Confucian moral paragon represents a flawed virtue; it evinces a self-centered ethics unrelated to others. In modern society, this self-centeredness degenerates into the egoistic pursuit of self-interest at the expenses of public goods: “He who is absorbed in self-pursuit is seen by the world as immoral.”29 28. See Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York, 1990). 29. Cai Yuanpei, Zhongguo ren de xiuyang (Chengdu, 2010), p. 160. 505 506 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community Cai rejects this self-interested morality in his diagnosis of social and political ills in China and the world at large. He blames antagonism and rivalry among individuals on the private pursuit of self-interest, manifest in the impulse to amass material gain. The powerful Western nations, with their expansive, colonialist agenda to grab resources and plunder far-flung regions, engage in fights in a style he characterizes as “private feuding” (私鬥) (MW, p. 1). The self-aggrandizing agenda licenses the domination of the strong over the weak and allows those possessed of modern science and technology to lord it over those that are the ill-informed and backward. In the 1920s and 1930s, warlords were tearing the nation apart for private and local gain. They filled their own pockets and bolstered their troops and regional bases by grabbing public funds and local resources. In the international scene marked by the Great Depression and social movements, clashes between capital and labor and the widening gulf between the rich and poor were the dire consequences of the aggressive pursuit of particular and private interest (see MW, p. 148). To address these moral evils, Cai proposed to cultivate a new morality through aesthetic education. The new morality lies in concern and commitment for the public good and wellbeing (gongyi, 公益). To attain that virtue, one must shed one’s self-centeredness in possessive individualism and strive to merge with others and contribute to the common good. Against the negative morality of self-interest, Cai posed a positive one. Crystallized in an updated Confucian motto ji yu da er da ren (己欲達而達人, if you seek to attain moral perfection, you must promote others along with you); this positive morality implies a public morality and civic responsibility. Similar to positive freedom, this morality is well captured by the word gong (公) (MW, p. 25). Gong could be translated as “public” or “commons” or “fairness.” The term encapsulates the utopian image of the proto-socialist community, rediscovered in ancient texts and debated by thinkers of Cai Yuanpei’s generation. In this world of harmony and universal benevolence, everybody is equal, has his or her proper place in society, and is committed to public welfare as a source of private wellbeing. Linking this utopia to the ideals of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the French Revolution, Cai advocates public morality as a requisite of the citizen’s moral profile (see MW, p. 2). For Cai Yuanpei, moral perfection is the basis for building a political community. Instead of power conflict and deal making among conflicted interests and factions, politics means governance and the measures to assure the happiness of the majority of social members. The legitimacy of government is based on public morality. The government should serve the greatest public good. Political measures are designed to attain what the ancient text “Liyun” (The Development of the Rites) from the Book of Rites called da dao zhi xing, Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 tianxia wei gong (大道之行，天下為公, the grand way advances the public good for all under heaven).30 In this utopia, everybody does his or her bit and in turn receives what he or she needs. “Politics has no other purpose than this,” Cai declares (MW, p. 2). Individual rights, public morality, and legitimate authority converge. On the other hand, politics less informed by morality addresses practical issues of everyday life and belongs to the bodily realm of senses and appetites. As a Kantian scholar, Cai distinguished the phenomenal world from the suprasensory realm. Education aims at the suprasensory realm but must work up from the grounds of everyday life. Intellectual and physical education serves the purpose of preparing citizens to adapt, survive, and compete in modern society and hence is grounded in the phenomenal world. But aesthetic education rises up and provides a ladder linking the phenomenal world to the suprasensory realm. As a link to the utopian world of perfect community, aesthetic education is closest to moral education. In Cai’s thinking, aesthetic and moral forms of education often become indistinguishable—a sign of the Confucian unity of morality, aesthetics, and politics (see MW, pp. 3–4). Aesthetic education consists in art, music, and literature curricula in schools and universities. Keenly aware of aesthetics’ capacity to engage the bodily, sensuous life and to regulate the individual’s moral behavior, Cai invokes Confucian education marked by training in ritual and music (see MW, p. 5). Learning ritualistic conduct is moral education, and training in music is aesthetic education. Addressing the moral identity of modern men and women, aesthetic education retains the traditional moral components. The building and enjoyment of museums, theater houses, arts schools, radio, galleries, gardens, and parks and well-designed architecture should be an aesthetic means of fostering civic behavior. These urban infrastructures are not designed simply to provide space for leisure and recreation or to expose urban dwellers to culture and refined taste in the name of civilized life. Instead, they are there to promote new forms of sociality, reciprocity, and community. Instituted to provide a public space and build a life of shared values, common sense, and sensibility, aesthetic educational institutions are all about creating a common life (共同的生活) rooted in public morality, not solitary life. Aesthetic education cultivates broadmindedness so that individuals may transcend the self/other divide and overcome egoistic self-interest (see MW, p. 142). 30. See Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York, 1999), p. 343. 507 508 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community Eagleton claims that bourgeois ideology reduces morality and behavior to mere manners. You have to be good because it looks and feels good. Morality is thus “aestheticized” and stylized out of its content (I, p. 20). Unlike such a stylized morality, Cai’s aesthetic program promotes a public world and a social relation based on the equal distribution of material and aesthetic goods. If possessed by one person as exclusive property, Cai notes, a ladle of water cannot be shared, and others will be deprived of a drink. A spot of land, occupied by one person, leaves no room for others to stand. The material gap between the haves and the have nots is the source of antagonism between self and other and encourages calculating moves for maximum gain at the expense of others. Aesthetic education bridges the gaps. In the aesthetic sharing of beautiful music, painting, or natural landscape, material disparities are overcome, and the private ownership of aesthetic goods becomes invalid. In visits to museums and parks, in appreciating natural beauty and historical monuments, and in touring famous temples in the famed mountains, visual and acoustic messages travel from person to person, reverberating throughout the appreciative public. The moon in the sky is accessible to each and its aesthetic halo is open to everyone looking up; the glory of a sunset is open to any perceiver (see MW, pp. 220–21). By invoking political aesthetics in the ancient doctrine of yu min tong le (與民同樂, shared enjoyment by rulers and subjects), Cai affirms aesthetic experience as universally accessible and shared—the key to political order under the mandate of the Kingly Way (see MW, p. 221). When the king of the state of Qi worried about his indulgence in music, Mencius (372–289 BCE) reassured him: “‘If the king’s love of music were very great, the kingdom of Qi would be close to a state of good government.”31 The response raises the stakes of music in politics. Mencius went on to suggest that it made a huge difference whether the king enjoyed music alone or shared it with other people. In the former case, people would complain that the king, absorbed in private pleasures, ignored their distress and needs. They would frown on other royal privileges and trappings, such as royal plumes, horses, and entourage. But if the king shared music with his people and the high and low had equal access to music, the people would enjoy music as much as the king. They would go on to rejoice in the majestic beauty—the aestheticized politics— of the king’s carriages and other pleasures.32 Much more than entertainment, shared joy in music is both moral and political, because bodies and hearts are connected in emotional empathy, reciprocity, and conviviality. 31. Mencius, The Works of Mencius, trans. James Legge (Seattle, 2010), p. 10; trans. mod. 32. See ibid. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 This may recall the Kantian aesthetic of universalism and disinterestedness. But Cai’s universalism gravitates toward a moral structure of feeling deemed capable of overcoming particular, antagonistic self-interests and utility. If there is disinterestedness, it involves indifference to the individual’s self-interest and calculations. Actual ferocious animals like lions and tigers are dangerous and scary, but everybody enjoys their artistic rendering. The naked bodies of Greek statues, at an aesthetic distance, do not arouse erotic and sexual desire. Aesthetic experience distances one from lowly desire and lifts one from concerns with creaturely impulses and practical interests. Unlike the Kantian sublime premised on the triumph of human reason arising from the collapse of the body, Cai’s reading favors the power of the sublime to reveal human triviality and limitations. Sublime objects and spectacles jolt the viewer out of the private closet, leaving no place for calculations of gain and loss. In Cai’s reading, the sublime is not very different from the beautiful, as the two categories work together in aesthetic education to break the selfother divide and shut down our calculation and self-interest, propelling us toward noble and virtuous feelings (see MW, p. 218). If Cai’s aesthetic education has echoes of top-down feng in forging ideological hegemony, Lu Xun’s aesthetic thinking corresponds to the voice from below. In his “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluo shili shuo, 魔羅詩力說) (1907), Lu Xun revisits Qu Yuan by analyzing the Satanic, romantic poets inspired by the Indian god Mara. Despite his antitraditional stance, Lu Xun’s political aesthetics also owes much to Confucian political philosophy, which sees morality as the source of the state’s legitimacy and authority. Confucian thought regards classical teachings and moral tenets as even more essential to the raison d’état than administration and bureaucratic governance. As a remark in the Analects goes, “The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star which commands the homage of the multitude of stars” (為政以德，譬如北辰， 據其所而眾星共之).33 On the personal level, ritual cultivation of virtue and music training map out a moral trajectory to foster good character and manners, so that morally upright ministers and advisors can maintain social and political order. Writing in view of China’s impending collapse under Western assault, Lu Xun proposed to rejuvenate Chinese culture to build a modern community. Fully aware of the evolutionist schemes where the strong dominate and oppress the weak, he realized that it would be necessary for China to participate in rivalry to keep its culture intact. From this Social Darwinist perspective, classical Chinese literature looks like an expression of self-sufficiency, complacency, peace, and stability, degenerating in modern times into atrophy 33. Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York, 1979), p. 63. 509 510 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community and stagnancy. The empire’s entrenched moral dogmas and repressive order have sapped spontaneous life and vibrant expression from Chinese culture. The dogma in the “Great Preface” that poetry must constrain one’s character and purge improper thoughts suffocates the heart and stifles authentic voices. Following Wang Guowei, Lu Xun sees in Qu Yuan the surge of a genuine and authentic voice. The ancient poet shows aesthetic strength in his exile and near-death experience: “Only Qu Yuan, on the brink of death, when his mind churned with the fury of the waves, could pace by the shores of the Miluo River, looking back upon the mountains of his homeland and lamenting his feelings of isolation in poignant, melancholic lines that depicted his sorrow and wrath.” The aesthetic value is entwined with moral and political criticism. All constraints gone, Qu Yuan could at last voice his rancor at the imbecility of the world and the crassness of society. He was free to sing of his own wasted talent and unappreciated learning, and to question with an unprecedented skepticism and in unabashed detail everything from the most basic myths and legends to creation down to the minutiae of history and all life forms with a fearlessness of tone which none before him dared assume.34 In subsequent centuries, however, Qu Yuan’s aesthetic and moral critique had paled into the realm of the stylistic and canonic, disenchanting morally charged poems into mere aesthetic style. Stripped of moral substance, emotional pathos, and political rancor, the beauty of his poems was no longer motivated by “a will to fight back” (“MP”). Citing Liu Xie’s insightful summary, Lu Xun writes that later poets have only emulated the boldness and novelty of Qu Yuan’s artistic designs and conceits: “Talents appropriated his grand styles. Mediocre versifiers seized upon the beauty of his diction; aficionados savor his images of mountain and rivers, and novices imitate his use of fragrant flora and fauna” (“MP”; trans. mod.). Deploring this tragic loss of meaningful issues in the pursuit of stylistic refinement, Lu Xun calls for radical voices like those of the Mara poets, who deploy their talent to create verses powerful enough to remold people’s character and elevate their thoughts.35 34. Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluo shi li shuo), trans. Jon Kowallis, in Warriors of the Spirit: the Early Wenyan Essays of Lu Xun (forthcoming); hereafter abbreviated “MP.” I use Jon Kowallis’s excellent translation for all passages quoted with his permission. 35. See Lu Xun, “Moluo shi li shuo” (摩羅詩力說), in vol. 1 of Lu Xun quanji (Beijing, 1980), p. 69. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 Qu Yuan and the Mara poets illustrate the critical, constructive feng. Mara poetry displays a radical, subversive energy that combats and shocks the conventional and complacent social order. But to read the poetic revolt only as a dismantling of the cultural status quo would miss the value of the politically constructive in China’s nation-building endeavors. The positive moral imagination fuels not only an oppositional politics but a national politics—one of rising nationalism based on the reconstruction of national character and morally robust subjectivity. Demonic poets like George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, for the young Lu Xun, embody a moral vanguard breaking away from the prevailing moral orthodoxy. They hold onto an ideal of morality in radical literary movements and battle conventions and established order. This iconoclastic energy is welcome, says Lu Xun, as a weapon to combat China’s mainstream poetics. Defining morality as a rhetoric of constraint and control, mainstream poetics declares that the essence of the Shijing, China’s first anthology of three hundred poems, is to promote “thought without immorality” (si wu xie, 思無邪 ) and to hold individuals’ emotions and spontaneous impulses in check (“MP”). Against this regulatory claim, romantic poets argue that poetry is meant to give vent to feelings and sensations. To insist that poetry must never step outside the bounds of propriety runs counter to poetry’s alleged function as the spontaneous and evocative expression of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Chinese poetry is thus split into one school that praises the masters and the powerful, and another that expresses solitary lamentation and pleasures. This second tradition, according to Lu Xun, culminates in Qu Yuan’s poems.36 Lu Xun’s analysis of Qu Yuan affirms a critical relation of literature to morality. Exposed to modern notions of aesthetics from the West, Lu Xun was quite familiar with the concept of art as an object in its own right, enshrined in autonomy and free from utilitarian purposes. Defining art as the power of appeal to readers by means of inspiration or delight, Lu Xun sets literature off from industrial, commercial, and political affairs: “By virtue of the selfsame property,” literature has little to do with the preservation of individual life and the survival of the state; it is purged of practical purposes and utilitarian considerations. Compared with history as a repository of wisdom and with moral discourse with its tenets and precepts, literature seems rather ineffective as a factor in the cultural landscape. Literature does not generate wealth as surely as commerce and industry, nor can it earn social recognition equal to that of an industrialist.37 Yet literature’s uselessness is 36. See ibid., p. 68. 37. See ibid., p. 71. 511 512 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community enriched with a broader, humanist claim. For all its uselessness, literature has the power to launch humanity on the way to fulfillment and completion. Citing the British critic Edward Dowden, Lu Xun deploys a language of bodily exercise, rigorous training, and physical and spiritual energy. The empowering pleasure of literature is compared to the energizing effect experienced by a swimmer in the ocean. Seeing a “boundless horizon open before him,” the swimmer breasts the waves, and comes forth at the end of the swim feeling physically and spiritually rejuvenated. Though the sea is but a mass of surging wave and churning water, devoid of emotion, which has never uttered a maxim or a moral pronouncement, nevertheless, the physical and mental wellbeing of the swimmer has been immediately enhanced by it. [“MP”]38 In practical self-preservation, human activity becomes compartmentalized into fields of industry, livelihood, and improvement, rendering aesthetics irrelevant and useless. Torn between these two extremes, humans are truncated and incomplete. The split of mind from body represents a systematic disjunction between instrumental rationality at the heart of material civilization and the spiritual realm. Literature steps forward to provide an answer and a remedy. Literature is able to nurture the imagination, animate the body with spirit, and restore a positive, robust morality. Though inferior to science in investigating and understanding nature, literature has an edge in its ability to reveal the subtler truths and human meanings that elude scientific logic. Evoking Matthew Arnold’s claim of culture as the key to political order and as a living criticism of life, Lu Xun reconsiders literature as a service provider and a didactic one at that. Literature offers instructions beneficial to human life and gives articulation to vital moral qualities such as self-awareness, courage, and enterprising development. Significantly, he uses the word jiao (教, teaching) to point to religious significance or moral instruction in literature. This brings him in line with Cai Yuanpei, who famously claimed that aesthetic education would take over from religion in modern society and inherit religion’s aesthetic mechanism in disseminating modern values. Aesthetic instruction should work like secular religion and supply moral meaning and belief. From the swimming body on the way to spiritual and ethical revival, Lu Xun envisions a trajectory marked by the tempering of the physical body along with a new form of subjectivity. Propelled by an urgent need to repair the broken moral fabric of society, this body seeks to forge ethical bonds by integrating fragmented individual bodies into a social and political body. It is 38. See ibid. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 instructive to distinguish morality in its inert dogma from emancipatory potential. Citing a sociological definition of literature, Lu Xun shows that literature is grounded in the sincerity of authentic ideas and feelings. Poeticized ideas and feelings “should accord with universal concepts of humanity” (“MP”).39 Morality, in this sense, is constituted by universally acceptable human thoughts and notions, which allow poetry to long endure and to travel across national borders. The universality of morality, however, is often mistakenly equated with qunfa (群法), the law and mores of a particular historical group or society. Confucian thinkers have observed that literature that defies and contradicts the qunfa will not last long. Countering this, Lu Xun cites a host of radical poets inspired by the French Revolution and involved in national independence movements in Germany, Italy, and Greece. A poet in the Byronic mode transgresses “the old limitations and give direct voice to his convictions: his every work resounded with defiant strength and iconoclastic challenge” (“MP”).40 But applauding poets’ radical, anticonventional acts does not invalidate their alternative moral and political pursuits. To the contrary, by breaking out of moral containment, poets project an inspirational vision of society that genuinely accords with universal morality, which is nothing other than the freedom and law of humanity (rendao, 人道).41 Poetry’s emotional power is related to an image of innate yet public morality, consistent with the sharing of moral teachings and enlightenment: Poets are indeed the disrupters of men’s hearts. For every human heart contains poetry within it, and when a poet has written a poem, it does not belong to him exclusively, but to whoever can understand it in their heart. If there is no poetry in their heart to begin with, how could they arrive at an understanding? This is only possible because they themselves have had similar feelings but could not put them into words. Poets say these things for them. As when a musician plucks a note, a response comes immediately from the heart strings of the audience, and the note reverberates throughout the caverns of the soul, causing all men of feeling to look up, inspired as though they were gazing at some new dawn ablaze with light that has the power to strengthen, ennoble, and enlighten. [“MP”]42 The power to “strengthen, ennoble, and enlighten” has everything to do with morality. Rather than supplying physical strength and the thrill of excitement, poetry energizes and uplifts readers with moral ethos and strength. 39. 40. 41. 42. See See See See ibid., ibid., ibid., ibid., p. p. p. p. 72. 73. 79. 68. 513 514 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community Like Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun gravitated toward a more resonant connection between aesthetics and politics. Modernist aesthetic discourse separates aesthetics from politics, privileges form over content, and isolates sensuality and feeling from morality and politics, disenchanting the totality of the political community and civic society. Taking a different path to their aesthetic modernity, the three thinkers above pondered the ways in which the aesthetic becomes part of the project to imagine a new socio-moral order. In Weberian language, they attempted to reenchant the morally depleted polis. In Wang Guowei’s analysis of Qu Yuan, poetry could be an admonitory voice or a utopian gesture. In Cai Yuanpei’s educational program, aesthetic culture is the key to the formation of public morality and civic virtue. By portraying the aesthetic power of the Mara poets to break through the shackles of established moral conventions, Lu Xun proposed that aesthetic experience should inspire the Chinese people with moral sentiments and enlightenment for the rejuvenation of their nation. Instead of a handmaiden of moral and political orthodoxy, much less a vehicle for maintaining the status quo, aesthetic discourse is reconnected with the matrix of social, moral, and political circumstances.