3 - Investigation of Things: Reflecting on Chinese-Western Comparative Everyday Aesthetics

Summary

Abstract

There is a bifurcation between shenghuo meixue and everyday aesthetics. The disparity is observed on critical reflection on everydayness, the recognition of negative aesthetic qualities and experience, and the expectation of defamiliarization. In the Neo-Confucian practice of gewu or investigating things, one may find another Chinese inspiration for dealing with the familiar, ordinary, and routine aesthetically. Gewu offers another possibility of “experiencing the ordinary as ordinary”. It can lead to an aesthetical immersive experience, characterized by a sensuous and intuitive recognition of the appropriateness of everyday things dwelling in their contexts, as well as a cosmic understanding of generative power of the universe that is both profound and poetic. By contemplating aesthetic experience facilitated by gewu, aesthetic experience is typically not individual per se, but collective in the sense that many prima facie private and personal aesthetic experiences are possible only because of the collective underneath.

Keywords: shenghuo meixue, gewu, aesthetic experience, everyday aesthetics

The First Comparison: Everyday Aesthetics vs. Living Aesthetics

The so-called “everyday aesthetics” or “the aesthetics of everyday life,” often seen as a new trend in the twenty-first century academic aesthetic discourse “[that] appeared concurrently in both the West and the East,” has bifurcated from the very beginning. Liu Yuedi 刘悦笛, one of the leading Chinese scholars gaining influence in this movement, points out, shenghuo meixue 生活美学 (literally, life aesthetics) – the dominant Chinese translation of “everyday aesthetics” – is different from its Western counterpart, for it offers “a new aesthetic articulation that is between the ‘everydayness’ and the ‘non-everydayness.’” In the Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West (2014), edited by Liu and Curtis L. Carter, they suggest using “aesthetics of living” instead of “aesthetics of everyday life” in the chapters contributed by the Chinese scholars. The latter extends the discourse of shenghuo meixue in English. Indeed, the English term Liu coined for the purported Chinese tributary of everyday aesthetics is “performing living aesthetics or living aesthetics.”

It is now hard to verify whether or not an initial momentum was gained from an innocent hermeneutic fallacy caused by any cross-cultural misinterpretation within this new trend of aesthetics.