文艺人学本体论

Literary Humanist Ontology

文艺人学本体论是新时期文艺理论研究中一个颇具影响力的理论潮流。它的发生既是当代中国文艺理论研究自身逻辑运动的必然,也是现代西方人本主义哲学思潮在中国文艺理论研究领域的反响和回声。它既给我们提供了一个新的审视文学艺术的思维视角,同时,它的理论盲点也是我们在建构当代形态的文艺理论时所应当扬弃的。

Among the researches of literary theory in the new era, following the ideology, reflection, subjective theory and form ontology in literary theory, literary humanist ontology in literature offers a new dimension for the study of the nature of literature. It proposes an understanding of the nature of literature out of humanity itself and views humanity as the ontology of literature. This trend of thought came into prominence in the mideighties of the 20th century and faded out in the early nineties. It manifested itself successively in the form of anthropological ontology, life instinct ontology, conscious or spirit ontology, irrational ontology, etc. As for its historical development, literary humanist ontology in literature logically evolved from the study of the literary theory in contemporary China. Philosophically speaking, it was an active response that Chinese literary researchers made in the new era to the philosophical thought of humanism predominating in the modern western world. On the one hand, this ontology in literature holds that humanity should be the focus for the study of literature and arts. It proposed an ontological interpretation of the role of humanity in the creation of literature, which further developed the traditional proposition-'literature is about humanity.' Furthermore, it studies literature ontologically and in a sense serves as another selfadjustment and revolution in the evolution of the newera ideas of literature and stimulates traditional ideas of literature to selfreflection. Besides, literary humanist ontology in literature stresses the senses of humanity, recognizes humanity's intuition, instincts and life impulses. As a result, in the theory of literature, it encourages the expression of the individual.On the other hand, while it views humanity as the ontology in the literary study, its understanding of humanity is confined to anthropology and fails to replace humanity back to social practice and social relations. Therefore, while it dwells upon life impulses, senses, instincts, intuitions, experience and irrationality, it reduces man to an abstract existence and theoretically leads to an abstract and void understanding of man. Secondly, while it recognizes the irrationality in literary creation, it overstates its role, mistakenly thinking of the irrational intuitions, life experience, instincts and naturalness as the ontology of literature. Thirdly, literary humanist ontology in literature ignores the basic laws inherent in literary creation, simply stressing the identity between literary creation and man's life but failing to provide persuasive explanations for the necessary regularities that literary creation demands. All those theoretical blind spots must be discarded as useless while we construct the contemporary literary theory.