走出美学与“否定美学”的困惑——对话当代环境美学家阿诺德·柏林特

Step Out of the Confusion in Aesthetics and Negative Aesthetics——Dialogue with Contemporary Environmental Aesthetician Arnold Berleant

美学学科最初诞生时有两个基本定位,一是感知,二是情感。"感知"本是"美学"一词的词源学内涵,因此理应成为美学研究的首要因素,但西方美学界长期以来却忽略了这一点。美学学科要获得新的发展,不仅应重新恢复"感知"的应有地位,同时也需要在新的条件下对其内涵进一步丰富和更新。"情感"虽然一直处于美学研究的核心,但在美学界却遭到了误解和误用,再加上其本身内涵的不确定性,从而使它对审美经验的解释能力大大降低。而中国传统文化中对"情感"的解释则可能为当今的美学思考提供一些新的启示。由于审美经验的价值既可以是肯定性的也可以是否定性的,在美学中引入"否定美学"和"否定美学价值"便极为重要。这不仅扩展了美学的研究范围,也提高了美学的实践意义。但如何才能使美学在环境干预和环境优化方面真正发挥作用,还需要进一步研究和探索。

Both emotion and perception should be essential for aesthetics as a discipline. But it seems that perception had been forgotten for a long time in the history of Western aesthetics and that emotion has been misunderstood and misused badly until now. If aesthetics wants to step further, it should put perception back to the focal point and update it according to the new conditions. Meanwhile, emotion should be understood in the right way, which traditional Chinese culture would probably give its help to. While aesthetic experience has value, it is not necessarily valuable in a positive sense, it could be negative sometimes. Recognizing the existence of negative aesthetic values is important, because much of negative experience is aesthetic in character. But there is still a lot of work to do to make the theory of negative aesthetics perfect.