走向主体论身体美学的建构

在中西美学史中,身体曾长期被当作客体。然而,这种客体论身体美学陷入了不可解的逻辑困境:倘若精神与身体等实在者是完全不同种类的存在,那么,它如何才能驾驭、观照、言说与它不同质的身体和其他实在者呢?对于这个问题,客体论身体美学始终没有给出圆满的答案。自古希腊起,部分美学家另辟道路,试图证明精神活动不过是身体的功能。这个思路长期被主流美学遮蔽,直到现代性开启时才逐渐显示出其阐释力,并最终在尼采等人那里发展为完整的主体论身体美学体系。后者将身体当作生存实践的主体,使美学回到了其起源和来处,很可能预示着美学未来的建构形态。

Toward the Construction of a Bodily Aesthetics

In Chinese as well as Western history of aesthetics the body has long been treated as an object.However,this position entraps physical aesthetics in a logical dilemma: if the intellectual and the bodily are different categories of being,how can the intellectual master,reflect and inscribe the body and other categories of being that are essentially different from it? Aestheticians that posited the body as object never gave a satisfactory solution to this problem.But some aestheticians since the days of ancient Greece have broken new path,attempting to prove that intellectual activities are merely functions of the body.Although eclipsed by mainstream aesthetics,this idea began to assert enormous interpretive power at the onset of modernity and in the hands of Nietzsche and others came to develop into an entire aesthetic system which treats the physical as a subject of existential practice,thus returning the discipline to its provenance.This construction may plausibly anticipate the future development of aesthetics.