TY - JOUR
AU - MILLER, MARA
AB - We might expect the audience for a book about Chinese aesthetics to interest China philosophers. But Marthe Atwater Chandler's Expressing the Heart's Intent: Explorations in Chinese Aesthetics is for readers of all traditions and in many fields—everyone who wants to understand art. It is for understanding your aesthetic experiences, but also those you do not quite have but have felt yourself on the verge of. Just what is it that holds you back, anyway? Read this and see. Chandler has taken on a rare and difficult task: explaining the theory of a current Chinese philosopher of art, Li Zehou (b. 1930), then using it to understand aesthetic experience in general and regarding three genres of Chinese art: Northern Wei (386–584) Buddhist sculpture, horse paintings of many eras, and the Song Dynasty (960–1179) poetry and philosophy of Su Shi (a.k.a. Su Dongpo). Chandler accomplishes this in such a way that it is not only an explanation of (several) bodies of philosophical thinking and art work, thereby increasing readers’ knowledge (of China, of art, of philosophy), but it makes possible new ways of understanding how we come to understand works of art—have aesthetic experiences. As an East Asia art historian turned Western philosopher, I found her discussions of the three genres stunningly helpful. Works I had barely understood came alive; puzzles were solved; my own most successful aesthetic experiences became more comprehensible. Somehow Chandler managed something I did not think possible: doing justice to the intricacies of Chinese philosophies and the dramas and complexities of Chinese history while both satisfying China specialists and nudging laymen along comfortably. She achieves this by means of seamless integration of both Western and Chinese art history and theory and Chinese political and cultural history into contemporary aesthetics (both Western and Chinese), focusing on the contributions of Li Zehou. (She and Li discuss Aristotle, Durkheim, Marx, Mill, Nietsche, Plato, Putnam, Wittgenstein, Wordsworth, and others.) The task is difficult. It is hard enough doing philosophy or introducing material from another culture—especially across periods as different from each other as ancient China from the Northern Wei Dynasty, the Tang from the Song, or any of them from our times—much less integrating them. Chandler accomplishes all this gracefully, giving enough background so we can understand why each of these historically new visual and conceptual ways of seeing and the communication of what they perceived at each stage were important—how they changed both art and life. Chapter 1 explores a term, the “mind's [or ‘heart's’] intent” (shi yan zhi), that has been crucial to Chinese aesthetics since the Canon of Shun in the Book of Documents (Shujing, eighth to third centuries BCE), when it probably had shamanistic value: “I bid you Kui, the emperor said, to preside over music and educate our sons, [so … they will be] straightforward yet gentle, congenial yet dignified, strong but not ruthless, simple but not arrogant. Poetry expresses the heart's intent (zhi); singing prolongs the utterance of that expression” (p. 3). Distinguishing it from the Western Expressive Theory, Chandler tracks the changes in how it has been understood over time and in the work of different philosophers. Chapter 2 explores the philosophy of art of Li Zehou, the foundation for which is his recognition that “individuals learn to have a sense of beauty in a fairly complex process involving three levels or states” (p. 45). Li, highly regarded and widely influential, is the author or coauthor of nine books (five in English), including studies of Kant, Marx, and Confucius as well as aesthetics, and is the subject of numerous articles and of Li Zehou and Confucian Philosophy, edited by Roger T. Ames and Jia Jinhua. The first of Li's levels, which he terms “an aesthetic attitude,” is a “strongly sensuous, emotional experience” that is “immediate, intuitive, and sensual… generally passive and often quite transitory.” On the next level, “aesthetic attention,” we “return to it, pay closer attention …, and ask certain questions … focus[ing] on its structure or form—the arrangements of the parts of a painting, the sounds and tones of the words in poetry. Li contrasts aesthetic attention with cognitive, scientific attention … [when] we measure and classify, investigate the history of the object, its causal powers,” search out how was it was produced—activities that are important in art‐historical or ethnomusicological investigation, but distinct from aesthetic attention. In the final level, “aesthetic experience,” “all the elements of aesthetic attention: sensation, emotion, imagination, and understanding, come together in a complex harmony—with different elements predominating in different experiences” (pp. 45–47). Li registers important criticisms of Kant regarding aesthetic attention and aesthetic experience, or pleasing the will and spirit, since “disinterest” can mislead us into ignoring forms of interest that are subtle, complex, and (as I have argued) more closely related to physical and cultural survival: “On Li's theory, the insistence that we enjoy art only for art's sake and avoid consideration of the historical, philosophical, and moral context of a work of art, would limit us to the pleasures of eye and ear of aesthetic attitude and to the emotional pleasure of aesthetic attention. … In the final state … all the elements of aesthetic attention: sensation, emotion, imagination, and understanding come together in a complex harmony—with different elements predominating in different experiences” (p. 47). (Chandler recognizes that such a combination of “elements” or ways of processing the work may be irrelevant or counterproductive regarding some works/schools in which the art is intended to be taken in without reference to politics or other social forces—such intention being exactly the kind of sociocultural information we need for understanding such works.) Li's view makes particular sense with Chinese arts, which have integrated moral and ethical considerations for centuries and which are deepened by, even when they do not require, understanding of the historical concerns their creators referenced either formally or in subject matter. I maintain, however, that it has much broader applicability than Chinese art. Chandler uses the next three chapters to explore such dimensions regarding three persistent motifs in Chinese art, their accompanying themes, and the historical, social, and ethical conditions and beliefs underlying them. Chapter 3 examines those underlying Northern Wei Buddhist sculptures. Chapter 4 contrasts various paintings of horses, contextualizing them and sorting out the widely varying approaches not only to horses, in their full range of symbolic connotations, but to their embodiment(s) of relations to the state. Chapter 5 returns us to the “intimate connection between poetry, philosophy, and the practical concerns of political life” persistent in traditional China, presenting the thought of Song poet and philosopher Su Shi (a.k.a. Su Dongpo, 1037–1101), whose several poetic works on his visit to the Red Cliff permeated subsequent literature and painting throughout East Asia. The Red Cliff was the site of a historic defeat (208 CE) of an until‐then powerful general that changed the course of Chinese history. The defeat was well known not only to military men but to all scholar officials of the governing class and, since that class comprised most of the poets and many artists as well, throughout the cultured elite. Eight centuries later, Su made a series of visits to the site, writing poems in several forms about his visits, the site, the battle, and the meanings of history and geography for both individual lives and kingdoms. His “odes” and prose poems (fu) subsequently were transformed into paintings even more popular than the poems themselves. Chandler's epilogue returns to Li Zehou's conviction that “[a]esthetic experience, like religious and mystical experience, is transforming—one feels part of a greater harmony, a larger community, in a way that is anything but joyless,” connecting it to the need for transformation of our contemporary world in the most prosaic and practical terms. (The joy evident in Confucian‐inspired literati art is one of its most salient characteristics.) Chandler's analyses rely heavily on the groundbreaking and potentially earth‐shattering, or rather, world‐building, framework of insights by Henry Rosemont Jr., Roger Ames, David Hall, Peter Hershock, and others sometimes called the New neo‐Confucianism, although, where necessary or useful, she carefullly distinguishes the varieties of neo‐Confucianism and the reasons for the distinctions. Her scholarship here is reliable and profound, with sources (in footnotes), and with the references needed for either further study or disambiguation of schools and theories supplied. The art historian in me was delighted finally to have several itching perplexities from my studies of Chinese art resolved. Some of them had raised only a vague disquiet. Why are there “flying horses” in bronze‐age art, when the emperor's famous/infamous expeditions to Ferghana did not bring those western Asian horses to China till much later? Others were more important philosophically. Why are Northern Wei Buddhas so important? (They are peculiar—in proportions, posture, facial expression.) Why is the Red Cliff ubiquitous? There are countless renditions of this theme, even in Korea and Japan, where it became popular in the Edo period among “literati” (bunjin; Ch. wen‐ren) in the style called literati art (bunjinga, a.k.a. Nanga, or “Southern painting;” Ch. wen‐ren hua). Why does the Red Cliff play such a large role in this rich but austere ethical and artistic movement? Images are shockingly rare in philosophy of art, and Chandler and SUNY Press should be commended for providing nearly all images the reader needs. And Chandler's practice of persistently referring to Chinese names with both the Wade‐Giles orthographic system and the People's Republic of China's recent pinyin system is enormously helpful to those not devoting their lives to Chinese studies. The Chinese ethico‐aesthetic tradition, which Chandler takes pains to elucidate, proceeds less through rules or codes than by the emulation of exemplars. Since a large part of Chander's project requires explaining the fundamental ways in which the Eastern and Western traditions diverge, it would have helped clarify the philosophical methods at work within Chinese history had she cited even briefly (as she does Dao Qian and a couple others) three such exemplars: Wang Wei, Wang Xizhi, and Dong Qiqang. The sixth‐century poet and painter Wang Wei (699–759), whose painted handscroll of his estate founded the genre of landscape painting in China—not to mention crucial understandings of the possibilities of the garden—and is referenced in thousands of paintings over the last twelve centuries, is one of the scholar officials who retired to his “garden” out of disgust with corruption at court, leaving lasting legacies in ethics, poetry, painting, gardening, and aesthetics. Like Su Shi, Dao Qian, and Wang Wei, Wang Xizhi (303–379) changed aesthetic experience through art. Watching the sky while overlooking a lake (in the famous “portrait” by Qian Xuan [ca. 1235–before 1307] at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), he realized that geese, while flying from “point to point,” as it were, just the way a calligraphy brush moves across the paper, never actually leave the sky, and that their fluid movement is one the calligrapher's brush might emulate, without leaving the paper at the end of each stroke (within or between characters before beginning the next stroke, as had been traditional and continues to be de rigueur in both standard and clerical scripts). Wang Xizhi's realization afforded calligraphy a new fluidity and capacity for expression of the “heart's intent,” which has underlain the expressive possibilities of calligraphy ever since. It is also precisely germane to Chandler's project, while Wang's voluntary retirement established an ethical bulwark, renewing ancient links between ethics and aesthetics. Most glaring is Chandler's omission, in the Red Cliff chapter (a full thirty‐seven pages), of Dong Qiqan (Tung Ch'i‐ch'ang, 1555–1636), the Ming Dynasty (1366–1644) theorist who established the difference between academic or Court (“Northern”) painting and the literati styles, retrospectively dating the distinction back to a putative origin in the Southern Song Dynasty (1160–1279). Apart from his role in art history—both reconfiguring the whole history of painting up to his time and inspiring countless painters, calligraphers, and even potters throughout China, Korea, and Japan for the next three centuries—Dong virtually created literati theory, clarifying political and ethical issues by aesthetic means. Without Dong Qiqan's theory, any discussion of literati poetry and theory seems thin, because literati theory and aesthetics are central to any treatment (including Li's and Chandler's) of Su Shi and his Red Cliff poems. Can a naïve reader even understand the meaning of literati theory without recognizing Dong Qiqan's contribution? To be sure, Chandler's analysis focuses on the relation of Su's poetry to his version of neo‐Confucian philosophy, which, unlike other versions, recognizes poetry as central not only to the arts but to the good life and to the cultivation of an ethical human being. But Dong Qiqan's recognition of a fundamental schism between Northern (courtly and elegantly precise) and Southern (literati, wenjen) “schools,” while named after the division between the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, also reverberates with Emperor Xuanzong's flight south (see below), with ethical echoes for individual lives as well as the welfare of states for centuries. Even a brief mention of these figures crucial to Chinese arts and aesthetics would have helped readers who are still struggling to master the dauntingly complex Chinese tradition (often contestational within itself) orient themselves better within the vast terrain of Chinese philosophy, history, literary and art history, and art theory. It would also have made it easier for teachers to use this book with students. Beyond these practical aspects, these figures have served for centuries to inspire people of many nationalities to emulate them. (On a personal note, when young, and knowing of not a single happy marriage, while writing my master's thesis I took a Japanese literati couple (Red‐Cliff painters, both) as a model for my own marriage.) More importantly—and as with Dong Qiqang, above—such figures and their representations induct the reader into the value system of Chinese aesthetics, while illustrating Li's theory. This process of emulation requires not just learning (information or knowledge) about them, but encountering them again and again in different contexts, many of which will provide aesthetic experience. Chandler's book should have provided just such a context. Even with a work as masterful, profound, exciting, and “reader friendly” as this one, I have a few criticisms. The most serious concern East Asian art. Expressing the Heart's Intent suffers from its lack of images of the Red Cliff. They would not only have illustrated some of Chandler's points about the differences in Su's own experiences of going to the Red Cliff and consequently in his poems about them (with repercussions in his views of aesthetic experience) but would have helped readers understand how pervasive his writing was and the varied means by which it pervaded East Asia. (So many of those Red Cliff paintings are by Japanese literati seven centuries later!) Finally, they would also illuminate for art historians just why those images differ iconographically (some having rocks in the water at the base of the cliffs, others not; some showing a figure playing a flute, others not.) It turns out they depict Su Dongpo's different trips, about which his poems, too, differ dramatically in their emotion. The narrative of Su's life and work would be stronger with just a sentence or two about another of his greatest contributions (which every educated East Asian knows but which is harder for Americans to discover). This is his Song of Everlasting (a.k.a. Unending) Sorrow, about the tragically misguided love of the Tang emperor Xuanzong (712–756) for the concubine Yang Gueifei—an infatuation that led him to ignore official duties and contributed to the rebellion deposing him. The repercussions were not only political (he fled south; Yang Gueifei was executed; the rebels assumed power, though only briefly)—albeit with lasting repercussions for the Chinese psyche—but ethical and moral: Xuanzong becomes the very definition of the bad ruler who lets his personal life and emotion play too large a role—the anti‐exemplar, if you will. Su's poem was influential as literature—reprinted in world literature anthologies even today and made into at least three movies and a television series. The visual arts legacy is also substantial: Xuanzong's journey became an important subject of narrative/landscape painting, and the love affair has been painted on countless Japanese screens and scrolls. But its greater significance is as a cautionary tale for all subsequent rulers in East Asia. It provided the romantic, political, ethical, and social background for the opening of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh‐century psychological novel The Tale of Genji, against which Prince Genji's father's infatuation with his mother is to be understood, an infatuation that similarly causes the tragic destruction of Genji's parents’ love for each other—and that becomes the scaffolding of Genji's lifelong Oedipal Complex, provoking his self‐reflection that leads to his tradition‐shattering moral innovations as an adult. The Northern/Southern division is never strictly geographical or political; it is also always ethical, and this infusion reverberates and is conveyed through the arts. In the contexts of a chapter arguing for the centrality of poetry (especially Su's), and of a book arguing for the possibility of poetry and aesthetic experience as central to philosophical understanding of the human condition (not to mention the role of the arts therein) as well as to Chinese ethics and politics, omission of mention of Su's influential poem in a chapter about him is disappointing. Chandler overstates the case when she argues (p. 69), citing the Dunhuang painted caves as an example, that the Northern Wei Buddhas were “usually [surrounded by] colorful murals representing bloody and tragic events.” Having spent two weeks at those caves, I would say the Dunhuang paintings do so only rarely; most emphasize Paradise and other Buddhist benefits. More serious is Chandler's introduction to the section on meaning, necessarily complex since Chandler is presenting not only Chinese theories but also several competing (Western) philosophical theories—along with, in some cases, several versions of them—and specific (Western) theories of meaning in visual arts. Beginning in media res, as it were, with Putnam's refutation of a theory which is itself presented only afterwards, makes it quite difficult for those not already familiar with the theories to follow. (And the dating regarding the Qin and Han dynasties is wrong, p. 113). Chandler's tackling this set of closely related philosophical problems centered on the single central issue, the meanings of the phrase “the mind's intent” that has been central to Chinese aesthetics for over two millennia, from shamanistic times to the present, will prove invaluable. With admirable clarity, Chandler situates Li's thinking within contemporary Western philosophy of art, Communism, and both traditional and emerging analyses of Confucianism in East and West. More importantly, she makes his philosophy relevant to current questions, theories, and experiences of arts and aesthetics. Being invited to delve into a book as fascinating, as easy to read, as challenging, as penetrating, and as innovative as Chandler's Expressing the Heart's Content is a rare privilege. I now want to extend that privilege to all the readers of this review. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - CHANDLER, MARTHE ATWATER. Expressing the Heart's Intent: Explorations in Chinese Aesthetics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017, xv + 284 pp., 31 b&w illus., $90 cloth.Book Reviews
JO - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12629
DA - 2019-04-23
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/chandler-marthe-atwater-expressing-the-heart-s-intent-explorations-in-0BN8h6gARN
SP - 225
EP - 229
VL - 77
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -