意象美学建构：本体论误置与现象学重释

The Construction of Imagery Aesthetics: The Misapplication of Ontology and a New Understanding of Phenomenology

当代美学家叶朗、朱志荣等注重从本体论角度建构中国的意象美学理论,提出"美在意象""美是意象"说,认为"意象"是美的"动态本体",其哲学基础是天人合一,这种嫁接中西方美学理论话语的尝试充满着难于调和的矛盾,"本体—现象"是西方哲学中具有悠久历史的二元对立关系,本体是绝对、静止和恒定的,现象则是动态、生成和过程化的。当借用本体论以界定"意象"时,就混淆了本体和现象的差异,就造成了本体论的误置。实际上,中国美学中的意象是反西方本体论的,是契合于西方现象学而又独具中国民族特征的化感通变思维,其在庄禅美学中体现为以物观物的天人合一的意象创造,在儒家美学统绪中却体现为以我观物的天人关系渐趋裂变中的意象创造。

Contemporary aesthetic scholars,like Ye Lang and Zhu Zhirong studied Chinese imagery aesthetics more from the ontological perspective,and they put forward the theory of beauty in image,and that of beauty being the image,arguing that image is the dynamic ontology of beauty.The philosophical base of such theories is the unity of heaven and man.Such dynamic ontological construction of Chinese aesthetics,with image as the center,revealed the fact that contemporary Chinese aesthetic scholars following the path of Western ontological and epistemological philosophy,while on the other hand,such efforts of combining Chinese and Western aesthetic theories were indeed full of contradictions which were hard to solve.Ontological phenomenon is a dichotomic concept,which enjoys a long history in the Western philosophy.Ontology is absolute,static and constant,while phenomenon is generational,dynamic and processed.When Ye Lang and Zhu Zhirong borrowed the concept of ontology,they defined image as dynamically generated ontology,but the problem is:how to distinguish that from phenomenon?Indeed,the images of Chinese aesthetics are not ontological.They are the revelation and reconstruction of the objects in the mind of artists,and then represented with the help of language or artistic rhetoric.Their mode of thinking is not ontological,epistemological or logical,but rather allelopathic,which is an Eastern mode of thinking.In the aesthetic creation of Zhuangzi and Zen,it was shown as an imagery creation of observing the objects with the objects,or the unity of heaven and man,while in the arts guided by Confucian aesthetics,it was shown as the imagery creation of viewing the objects from the perspective of the author and the fission of the heaven-man relationship.