It should be a matter of great rejoicing that Li Zehou's The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition (Huaxia meixue) has appeared in English translation. A momentous and instantly influential publication in China in 1989 – even though it was obscured in the post-June 4th censoring of intellectual life – Li's study of what he calls “Confucian-based Chinese traditional aesthetics” (p. vii) probably represents the major modern work on aesthetics by a Chinese philosopher since Feng Youlan's mid-century studies. Feng's neo-Confucian considerations construed Chinese aesthetics as an anti-materialist contemplation of the ideal world; by contrast, Li Zehou considers Confucian-based aesthetics through Kantian Marxism, as a layered historical mode of emotional engagement with the materialist world. He thus situates aesthetics in the world not above it. Li is fortunate in his translator, Maija Bell Samei, whose fluid rendition of his complex ideas admirably opens up the text, even for a non-specialist such as myself. This is an impressive labour of love and the University of Hawai‘i Press should be commended for seeing it through to publication.

Li begins his account with the Zhou and demonstrates how rites and music came to underpin each other, where ritual instantiated hierarchy in social order, while music (including poetry) created harmony from chaotic human emotion. The real-world mutuality between these yielded a form of sociality inherently driven by the tension between desire/pleasure (emotion) and socialization/reality (political order). In Li's dialectical account the “intertwining” (p. 29) of these over time yielded conflict between “emotional form [art] and the demands of ethical education [politics]” (p. 37). This conflict burst the boundaries of reinforcing mutuality, leaving enduring legacies for the Confucian aesthetic tradition to follow (and for what Li more problematically calls the Chinese “cultural psyche” [p. 37]). Chapter two continues the story and argues that ren, or humaneness, is the core concept of Confucianism. For Li, ren as a social practice conceptually encompasses aesthetics, for it encourages the internalization of the externality of the Zhou rites and music. This internalization “become[s] the proper pursuit of conscious humanity and humanistic emotion” [p. 44] and produces a “subjective personality” type known as the sage-saint. Not an individualistic idea (not a hero nor a god or a knight), this type is the crux of Confucian humanism: he constitutes a “spiritual realization and a freedom to live, in which human wisdom and virtuous behavior are sedimented and transformed into a psychological noumenon…” (p. 52).

At this point, Li begins to elaborate his pivotal concept of historical aesthetics, “sedimentation” [jidian], which I understand as layers of temporality actualized in the social world. Through sedimentation, Confucian aesthetics comes to revolve around the process of becoming rather than being, a focus far different from any Western version of the issue – Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger, for example – which takes the transcendence of being as the object of philosophical aesthetics. For Li, time emerges as a productive dimension of the human experience of the world, rather than a speculative faith or divine promise. This sense of time is encoded in Chinese artistic concepts and forms, where the human element suffuses the focus, without being its centre.

The next chapters explore the Daoist-Confucian synthesis, beauty in deep emotion (Wei-Jin thought), metaphysics (Chan Buddhism) and, finally, the approach to modernity. Li is concerned to show that succeeding strains of thought contributed to the concretization of Confucian-based aesthetics, without ever displacing the centrality of its concern with interpersonal ethics. Confucianism proves endlessly flexible even as it remains wedded to a particular version of ethical sociality.

Li demonstrates first how deep emotion becomes a unifying horizon of noumenal experience (the noumenon – the “thing-in-itself” – is Kantian) through Qu Yuan's choice of suicide over life. With this, the thematic of death is introduced into what had hitherto been an aesthetic philosophy grounded in life. Next, Li shows how the Buddhist concern with metaphysics – particularly in the debate over “the proper object of human aspirations” (p. 160) – ultimately enriches the Confucian aesthetic tradition. In its vigorous challenge to Confucianism, Buddhism forces the question of meaning onto the agenda. With monasticism generally rejected in China (unlike in Japan), Chan Buddhism is “reincorporated into a positive view of life (Daoism) and humanity (Confucianism)” (p. 183). Finally, with the Ming, the emergence of “desire” (yu) as a topos of aesthetic, materialist and philosophical contemplation changes everything. From this point onward, theorists of aesthetics – including Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei – increasingly focus on the relationship between desire and the fundamental Confucian-based spirit of “supramoral aesthetics” (p. 212). Li ends with a hope: that with his retrieval of the Confucian-based tradition “we can get a small taste of what it means to be human” (p. 224).

Reading this elegant book, one certainly is reconnected to a sense of one's own humanity; whether that sense is in any way uniquely embedded in the Chinese psyche is another story altogether.