普遍主义,还是历史主义?——对时下中国传统诗学研究四观念的再思考

Universalism or Historicism: Reconsideration of the Four Conceptions in Contemporary Studies of Traditional Chinese Poetics

本文基于历史主义立场,对时下中国传统诗学研究中流行的四个观念提出质疑。作者认为,在今人以文艺心理学讨论“情景交融”和以“优美”界定中国抒情传统的美学性质时,实际上是削华夏之足以合泰西之履,却忽视了作为“情景交融”真正观念基础的相关系统论和传统诗学境界可能既无从以西方美学之优美、亦无从以其之崇高概括的独特性质。此外,在学界以“意境”作为中国诗学之核心审美范畴,以及以“再现”/“表现”之二分法对比中西诗学传统时,有时又不免为寻求对照西方文化“反命题的平行或对应”,而忽略了中国诗学本身的历史脉络。作者将上述两种倾向统称为有违历史主义的普遍主义。而此普遍主义的形成,又皆出于与西方理论之纠结。本文的题旨则在吁求向历史主义的回归。

This paper, in terms of historical position, tries to question the four conceptions that are popular in contemporary studies of traditional Chinese poetics. The author holds that critics today are trying to cut the Chinese feet for the western shoes when they use literary psychology to discuss “the combination between emotion and scenery” and use “beauty” to define the aesthetic quality of traditional Chinese lyrics, neglecting both the real ideological basis for that combination, the relevant system doctrine, and the unique property of the state of traditional poetry which could not depend on western aesthetics and its generalization of the sublime. Moreover, when they use “Yi Jing” (the poetic state) as the core category of aesthetics and contrast chinese and western poetics by using the dichotomy of representation and presentation, they neglect the historical development of chinese poetics proper for the sake of “balance and correspondence of the counter-proposition” with western culture. The author believes these two tendencies are ahistorical universalism whose emergence is the outcome of a large quantity of introduction of western theories. The purpose of this paper is to call for a return to historicism.