Li Zehou's writings on questions of art and beauty are by now well represented in English and many collections of essays.Footnote ¹The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition goes over some of the same territory as these other works, offering a roughly chronological survey with many quotations from sources both canonical and little known. It also asserts the specifically Chinese character of these aesthetic doctrines and sensibilities. The chapters discuss the rites and music tradition; early Confucianism; “Zhuangzi's aesthetic view of life” (p. 76); the heritage of Qu Yuan; Buddhist influences, especially Chan; and the turn toward modernity. Li sees Confucianism as the core of the Chinese aesthetic, claiming that “whether in real life or at the level of thought and the emotions, it is the tradition of Confucius and Mencius that has proved the mainstay of generations of intellectuals in China” (p. 90). In all dynasties, Li says, “it was the Confucian-educated scholar-intellectuals who produced almost all of Chinese philosophy, aesthetics, art, and literature” (p. 219), and he portrays Daoism and Buddhism as always “absorbed” into this tradition (p. 100).

Li has a gift for apt quotations, persuasive examples, and clarifying definitions. One instance is his pushing aside a great deal of hasty theorizing about Chinese “mimesis” (or its absence) and reframing the issue thus: “The distinctive features and enduring conflicts of Chinese aesthetics are largely unrelated to imitation or representation. They do not surround questions of beauty and truth, but rather center on the conflict between emotional form (art) and the demands of ethical education (politics)—in other words, the problem of the unity of beauty with the good” (p. 37). Another example is his subordinating the devices of several types of art to the figure of “the line”:

Maija Bell Samei's translation is fluent, clear, and accurate. Only a few errors stand out. One such is the description of Zen abbots as teaching by “the case method” (p. 174) for kôan/gong'an; another is the translation of meici as “beautiful criticism” (p. 45), when the context clearly points to “praise and blame.” The translator has added brief notes to clarify references that were brief or absent in the original.

Li's overall argument will surprise no one: Chinese philosophy of art is humanistic and rooted in sensuous, practical interactions:

Lacking a sense of both tragedy and the sublime (pp. 74, 98, 137), and uninterested in “extremely abstract and abstruse speculation” (p. 99), the Chinese literary mind has no higher aspiration than an “aesthetic metaphysics … both transcendent and immanent, both sensuous and beyond the senses” (p. 221). The “severe moderation” that Goethe saw in Chinese manners is for Li “at once a feature of Chinese arts and aesthetics and a feature of the taste and even of the personality of the Chinese people” (p. 46). For Li, the transcendental subjecthood of “the Chinese people” is never in doubt, and he easily grants it a “collective unconscious” (p. 45). At times, aesthetics has a role in shaping the national psyche (p. 155); more often, Li derives the properties of the Chinese aesthetic from those of the national character. When Li contends that “early totemic/shamanistic Chinese culture laid the foundation for the unity of sense and reason, nature and society, that would come to characterize the Chinese aesthetic tradition” (p. 2; cf. pp. 25, 28, 159), the reader suspects that history is being written by a retrospective teleology. But the book's very title says as much: “Huaxia” is not only an honorific term for China, but a label connoting common descent from legendary ancient tribes, including and transcending any historic political unit known as “China.” The waning of Marxist ideology may have left aesthetics in charge of the management of national feeling. For an outsider, the retrospective absorption of all conflict into a “mainstream” achieves too much harmony too fast.