Ban Wang (2020) - Aesthetics, Moralty, and The Modern Community Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun

Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern
Community: Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei,

and Lu Xun
Ban Wang
In the last three decades, influential commentators on Chinese aesthetics

such as Li Zehou have tended to treat poetics as a distinct topic in its own
right and to valorize certain literary forms as if they transcended their socio-
political environments. In his acclaimed 1981 work, The Path of Beauty, Li, a
Marxian aesthetician, defended the lifestyle and writings of literati in the Wei
and Jin dynasties (220–266 CE, 265–420 CE) as evoking a “humanist theme.”
Though Li was generally a politically engaged writer, he argued that Wei-Jin
poetics departed from the imperial ideology of the Han dynasty in a time of
state collapse to revel in poetic license and behavioral eccentricity, giving rise
to a “pure” mode of philosophy and genuinely lyrical and affective litera-
ture.1 This seemingly apolitical aesthetic of the “expressive and affective”
gained new respectability in the 1980s in reaction to the highly politicized lit-
erature of Mao-era and Cultural Revolution artworks. Indeed the “affective-
expressive” mode has long been regarded as the hallmark of Chinese poetics.2
This poetics evinces a primary focus on the expression of inner feelings and in-
tents rather than on the representation of dramatic action. Haun Saussy’s read-
ing of Xunzi suggests, however, that the alleged expressive mode turns out to
be quite mimetic—of an ideal ritualistic activity. Aesthetics is not about art per
se nor about what is beautiful. “Good” music promotes collective ritual and
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. Li Zehou, Mei de licheng (美的歷程, The Path of Beauty) (Beijing, 1981), p. 87.
2. Quoted in Haun Saussy, “Music and Evil: A Basis of Aesthetics in China,” Critical Inquiry
46 (Spring 2020): 483.
Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020)

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Critical Inquiry / Spring 2020 497
activity with the goal of purging human nature’s evil and unruly inclinations.3
More than just sound and patterns, music is aesthetic in terms of a political-
aesthetic nexus: it serves an ideological function that immerses and directs
the audience to the right path of social behavior and the right mindsets re-
quired by the state.
The political-aesthetic nexus in Xunzi’s understanding of music high-
lights the importance of political enchantment. Traditional Chinese aesthet-
ics addresses the concern that the political order cannot be fully secured and
maintained without daily doses of emotional and sensuous enchantment. It
maintains that the state is in constant need of cultural and moral replenish-
ment, so as to endow it with an aura of meaning, experience, and the enchant-
ment. Disenchantment would mean the severance of sensual experience from
the virtue and ethos of the political order.
Ever since Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917), disenchantment has
described the draining of meaningful experience in the secular process of
modernity—that is, the loss of experiences charged with emotional attach-
ment to community and infused with a sacred aura. Politically, the term de-
scribes a condition of technocratic machinery and administrative procedures
staffed with “specialists without spirit.” Ethically, it denotes the mindset that
prompts individuals to make arbitrary aesthetic and personal choices without
a rational basis or shared sensibilities, acting as “hedonists without a heart.”4
Walter Benjamin wrote similarly of disenchantment as the disintegration of
aura in the blinding rush of urbanization, industrialization, and commodifi-
cation.5 Urbanization uproots individuals from the “blood and soil” of com-
munity; mechanical reproduction severs artworks from ritual and tradition.
China’s recent campaign to revive the Confucian tradition and the an-
cient rituals is an effort at massive enchantment. In my view, this campaign
fails to enchant and shore up China as a political community; for that, a co-
herent culture and stronger ethics are needed. The disconnect between
3. Ibid., p. 487.
4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, in “The Protestant Ethic
and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C.
Wells (New York, 2002), p. 121.
5. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York, 2007), pp. 155–200.
Ban W ang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Lan-
guages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the
author of The Sublime Figure of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004),
and History and Memory (Lish yu jiyi) (2004). He has edited and coedited seven
books on cinema and memory, the Chinese revolution, socialism, and the New
Left, including the recent Chinese Visions of World Order (2017).

498 Ban Wang / Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern Community
aesthetics and the ethico-political is one reason why leaders and consumers
revel in vaunting spectacles of imperial power and glory that are vacuous and
irrelevant to the moral fabric of a modern society. A review of aesthetic
thinking in China at the turn of the twentieth century, however, may tell us
something valuable about the closer ties between politics and aesthetics,
crystallized by the term political enchantment. In a bid to overcome tran-
scendental homelessness and return to a communal home, reenchantment
searches for a way back to a more intimate and emotive connection between
the body and the body politic, between moral sentiment and the engagement
of power. In seeking this reconnection, aesthetic theory and practice play a
vital role.
It is well known that a formal aesthetic discourse was introduced into
China along with other Western imports to address urgent social and polit-
ical crises, as the Qing Empire was crumbling in the face of encroaching
Western powers and world markets.6 A century later, theorists like Li re-
discovered the transcendent values of aesthetics. Tired of the Chinese Com-
munist Party’s (CCP) grand narrative of collective history, nation, and po-
litical movements, theorists suddenly woke up to a modernist aesthetic that
severs sense perception and aesthetic forms from concerns of morality, pol-
itics, and social transformation. This gesture, seen in the West as well, dis-
enchants aesthetic discourse and deprives it of political consequences, leading
to a valorization of mere depthless effect, affect, sensuous intensity, textual
jouissance, bodily pleasure, and the focus on pure aesthetic properties. For
Raymond Williams, this aesthetic subjectivism “isolates inner-sense percep-
tion as the basis of art and beauty,” independent from social and cultural con-
cerns.7 Symptomatic of “the divided modern consciousness,” this focus of
subjective perception detaches aesthetics from the totality of socio-political
relations, “for there is something irresistibly displaced and marginal about
the now common and limiting phrase ‘aesthetic considerations.’”8
In this essay, I attempt to recapture a politicized aesthetics by considering
the ways that early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers associated moral
questions with aesthetic ideas in the reconstruction of China as a modern
nation-state. Instead of transcendent aesthetics, the politicized aesthetics
of these Chinese thinkers asserted an intimate tie between aesthetic catego-
ries and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and the politics
6. For a detailed discussion of the historical conditions for Chinese readings of Western aes-
thetics, see Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century
China (Stanford, Calif., 1997).
7. Ban Wang, “Use in Uselessness: How Western Aesthetics Made Chinese Literature More
Political,” in A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Malden, Mass.,
2016), p. 281.
8. Raymond Williams, “Aesthetic,” Keywords (New York, 2015), p. 2.

of nation building. In general, political aesthetics splits into two interrelated
strands. As a cultural and intellectual resource, it provides legitimacy to the
reform of the emerging nation. This culture-society-politics logic was accepted
as part of the rising social order. In the 1980s, however, aesthetic culture’s
shoring-up of political order came to be viewed as a handmaiden in the service
of communist rule, and it is this submission of aesthetics to politics that
prompted Li Zehou’s reassertion of aesthetic autonomy and humanism.
But the severance of aesthetics from politics ignores the transformative power
of revolutionary arts and literature in building up a new culture and making
social change. These two scenarios affirm aesthetic theory and practice as in-
separable from politics. As Friedrich Schiller claimed, “If we are to solve that
political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through
Beauty that we arrive at Freedom.”9 Political aesthetics in modern China
claims that humans are aesthetic beings and political actors, constantly en-
gaged in making and remaking the sensuous lifeworld as the condition of
political freedom.
Tracing the intertwining of aesthetics with politics, Terry Eagleton has
argued that the crux of aesthetics is the human body. In the age of Enlight-
enment, the biological and laboring body became the new candidate for po-
litical concern because enlightened monarchies and bourgeois rulers alike
needed to cater to bodily needs, emotional wellbeing, and sensuous pleasure.
Addressing the body’s access to the world of practice, the new science of aes-
thetics is inherently social, moral, and political. Classical aesthetics refers to
“the whole region of human perception and sensation” in contrast to con-
ceptual thought and instrumental rationality. Far from elevating art over life,
classical aesthetic theory focuses on what is bound up with humans’ crea-
turely life and engages in “the business of affections and aversions, of how
the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root
in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological
insertion into the world.”10 Aesthetic discourse arose in eighteenth-century
Germany to reflect on how citizens’ bodily experiences and sensations may
be groomed and educated to attain universal subjectivity and achieve a bour-
geois social order. Political hegemony could not allow individuals’ freewheel-
ing particulars and discontents to proliferate freely; it needed to rein in minds
and bodies by informing, educating, and forging subjects from within and by
appealing to individual emotion, taste, and sensibility. In this way, aesthetics
emerged as a solution to problems of morality and politics.
9. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola,
N.Y., 2004), p. 27.
10. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, Mass., 1990), p. 13; hereafter
abbreviated I.

If the ruling order resorts to aesthetics to inscribe morality and authority
on the body by winning the heart and mind, then making allowance for
sensuous needs, feelings, and desires may also give license to revolt and eman-
cipation. Aesthetic considerations make allowance for sensuous gratification
and deliver the right to aesthetic freedom, an experience that may gesture
toward a space of freedom. Jacques Rancière sees the aesthetic redrawing
and redistribution of the sensible as an eminently political act. Aesthetic ex-
perience may emancipate individuals from their narrow, divided conscious-
ness and from alienated labor to exercise bodily and mental freedom from
the externally imposed rules of production and governance.11 An emotionally
rich and creative subject may attain self-rule by following an educational tra-
jectory of Bildung. Individuals may author and internalize their collective
rules, “obeying no laws but those which they gave to themselves” (I, p. 19).
This aesthetic image harbors a politically constructive potential and projects
a cultural means of shoring up a body politic based on sense and sensibility,
a republic of free personalities. This is one major reason why Chinese think-
ers, frustrated by the political crises around the collapse of the Qing Empire,
were drawn to Western aesthetics.
In their reception of Western aesthetics, Chinese thinkers drew inspira-
tion from the Confucian notion of wen yi zai dao (文以載道, using writing
to carry the Dao). While the Dao invokes the cosmic Way beyond the sensory
realm, the suprasensory realm must be fleshed out in sensuous, everyday life
and is deemed immanent in mundane social, moral, and political practices,
rituals, and family relations.12 This traditional thinking allowed these think-
ers to find in Western aesthetics a resonant resource to promote wholesale
political reform and to see aesthetic imaginaries as a means of fostering emo-
tional bonds so fundamental to social and political order. Instead of cutting
aesthetics off from sociohistorical circumstances, Chinese writers showed a
propensity to bring it deeper into an organic discourse that integrates classic
tenets, morality, and subjectivity.
Liang Qichao, for example, appreciated the importance of aesthetics for
reforming the mentality, emotion, and morality of the Chinese populace.
To him fiction is an aesthetic means of achieving moral reform among read-
ers. While modern political thinking does not automatically associate politics
with morality, Liang’s position rests on the classical premise that morality, far
from being restricted to the realm of conduct, manners, and everyday life, is
the essence of a political society. His word for politics is qunzhi (群治). Lit-
erally meaning “governance of masses of people,” qunzhi aims to articulate a
11. Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33, no. 1 (2004): 10–24.
12. See Pauline Yu and Theodor Huters, “The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature,”
in Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader, ed. Corinne H. Dale (Albany, N.Y., 2004), p. 3.

modern political community of self-rule by citizens. Popular self-rule was
absent in the traditional empire, where the political order was built on paro-
chial principles that served the private needs of the ruling monarch, their
families, and clans.13 At the social level, men and women pursued their self-
interests and maintained tight-knit communities in a dispersed network. Al-
though the empire honored the mandate of the ruler to care ideally and inclu-
sively for all under heaven (tianxia, 天下), the parochial rule of the imperial
house was the order of the day.14 To reform that parochial mindset, Liang re-
sorts to the emotional power of fiction and sees it as the key to the renewal of
readers’ personality and sensibility.15 Rather than inculcating traditional moral
doctrines, fiction transports readers to the fanciful realm, moves them beyond
their own private prisons of self-interest and daily routine, expands their
imagination, and allows them to venture out to an exciting world. Fiction’s
aesthetic power works effectively in renewing and improving the new citizen’s
moral quality. Traditional novels of low taste and private morality corrupt
readers and should be rejected. A new fiction, imbued with public morality
and commitment to the common good, would take readers on an emotional
adventure, with the goal of forging a healthy moral character. Reading fiction
is not a means of top-down governance but aspires to the solidarity of minds
and feelings required of citizens of a modern nation.16
Liang’s moral-political emphasis has drawn ire from the influential liter-
ary critic C. T. Hsia (1921–2013). Dismissing it as just a symptom of the pe-
rennial “obsession with China,” Hsia claimed that Liang’s political fiction di-
minishes the value and autonomy of literature.17 Viewing politics in terms of
power struggles and conflict in high places, Hsia sees literature written by
politicians to influence public opinion as bad literature: a handmaiden of
party and state politics. He thus classifies Liang as a propagandist in rendering
13. See Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” (論小說與群治之關係, Fiction
Seen in Relation to the Guidance of the People), in Liang Qichao quanji 21 vols, (Beijing, 1999); 4:
886. Most translations of the title of Liang’s essay turn the phrase qunzhi (群治) into “governance
of the people” or “guidance of society.” Qun means “masses,” a term that would subsequently be
associated with the communist mobilization of people as a revolutionary force. But Liang’s focus
was on the people as citizens. As a journalist and activist in exile, he expected literature to reform
people’s minds so they could attain the spiritual, moral quality of a virtuous national conscious-
ness. The people constitute the political community, the state, and government. Thus qunzhi, echo-
ing Liang’s favorite concept of zizhi (自治, self-rule), is an ascending, bottom-up process of moral
formation.
14. Tianxia was a moral and political mode of governance that covered all people and re-
gions within the empire. For contemporary discussions of tianxia governance and Chinese cos-
mopolitanism, see Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, ed. Ban
Wang (Durham, N.C., 2017).
15. Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi,” p. 886.
16. Ibid., p. 885.
17. C. T. Hsia, C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature (New York, 2004), p. 237.

fiction a servant of partisan and state politics.18 But it is a mistake to in-
terpret Liang in the light of conventional politics. Liang’s stance alludes to his
cherished ideal of civic virtue and character formation, a modern political
philosophy that resonates well with Confucianism. Aligned with morality
and culture, politics is a matter of moral reform that integrates and involves
the population through fostering public ethos and civic virtue.19 A politics
driven by the ritual of reading and moral cultivation endorses fiction’s
aesthetic-political role. The early Confucian view of morality as an inner qual-
ity of the mind and outward virtuous conduct to be built up through constant
performance of music, song, and learning is presented in the “Great Pref-
ace,” the opening commentary on the Book of Poetry (Shijing, 詩經). Through
poetry, the ancient kings “managed the relations between husbands and
wives, perfected respect due to parents and superiors, gave depth to human
relations, beautifully taught and transformed the people, and changed local
customs.”20
Instead of belles lettres and elegant writing, the Confucian aesthetic gives
priority to preserving morality and maintaining culture. Politics is a process
that regulates, maintains, and renovates morality by working on the senses,
sensibility, and emotional structure and by enhancing reciprocity and soci-
ality. In a clear indication of his distance from the modern concept of liter-
ature as a separate sphere of individualistic enjoyment, Liang, in the vein of
Confucian literati, views literature as an organic part of a holistic package of
a moral, emotional, sensual, and political way of life. Conceiving politics in
terms of people’s morality, intelligence, and power, Liang believes that a peo-
ple endowed with these qualities should be able to stand on their own feet.
With this educational mission, fiction moves beyond the narrow concept
of literature and becomes an ongoing activity for moral reform. Aesthetic ac-
tivity works to maintain as well as revamp morality, which in turn would en-
hance the harmony of the political and social order.
The celebrated aesthetic thinker Wang Guowei (1877–1927) illustrates a
dual mission in politicized aesthetics. He links judgments of poetry to two
18. See ibid.

19. An analogy can be found in Michael J. Sandel’s observation that Aristotelian moral poli-
tics lies in “the formative task . . . to cultivate virtue among a small group of people who
shared a common life and a natural bent for citizenship.” In modern times, the republican cul-
tivation of virtue appears more coercive. As in Rousseau, the task is “‘to change human nature,
to transform each individual . . . into a part of a larger whole from which this individual re-
ceives . . . his life and his being’” (Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search
of a Public Philosophy [Cambridge, Mass., 1996], p. 319).
20. Quoted in Stephen Owen, Readings in Classical Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992), p. 45.

strands of moral-political thought in ancient China. One is imperial, com-
mitted to the maintenance of the dynastic order; the other is plebian, indi-
vidualistic, and reclusive. The political strand, as he reads it, corresponds
to the Northern school of poetics, which makes for “the Way of poetry.”21
In contrast, the Southern school of poetics, represented by Daoist-spirited
poets with reclusive bent, is imaginative, spontaneous, and aesthetic. Little
concerned by politics, the Southern poets are less constrained by social con-
ventions and moral norms, and their works are enjoyable and refined in po-
etical sentiment and imagery.
Between the North and the South, Qu Yuan (340–278 BCE), the poet of
the State of Chu in the Warring States period, comes to the fore as a figure
capable of conjoining political commitment and aesthetic accomplishment.
A poet of the South, Qu Yuan imbibed the ideas and poetics of the North and
admired the sage king as the moral-political exemplar. After all, he was an
establishment poet highly regarded by the king of Chu for a good part of
his career, and was an official charged with giving counsel in political affairs.
On the other hand, he wrote poems of romantic exuberance that not only
exhibit all the poetic flourishes and imaginativeness unique to the Southern
poets but also display creative poetic patterns and aesthetics.
Given his position in the political order, Qu Yuan’s poems may be com-
plicit with the ruling regime, disseminating loyalty and values integral to the
ruling order. On the other hand, his Southern-flavored poetic accomplish-
ment points to a style akin to that of poetry for poetry’s sake—a perfecting
of poetic patterns and aesthetic qualities. This pure poetry flies in the face
of Confucian poetics, which views poetry primarily as a vehicle for moral im-
provement and maintenance of political order. The “Great Preface” to the
Book of Songs defines poetry in terms of feng (风, influence), which amounts
to instruction and dissemination of moral norms whereby the cardinal ties
between husband and wife, father and son, emperors and subjects are incul-
cated and relationships from small communities to the state are regulated. In
Saussy’s analysis, while feng may point to the “‘expressive-affective concep-
tion of poetry,’” its aesthetics is sociopolitical. “Here aesthetic judgment,” in
Saussy’s phrasing, “defers to political judgment: the poem is as good or bad as
the society that produces it, with the added condition that a poet at odds with
a bad society can pin his work to the good society he remembers.”22 Creating
a work out of memories of a good society opens up the possibility of critique
in the present. Thus, matching the top-down influence, whereby “‘those
above . . . transform . . . those below,’” is a more critical thrust of feng (讽,
21. Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji (Taiyuan, 1987), p. 31.
22. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif., 1993), p. 84.

criticism), by which “those below” criticize “those above.”23 Critical minds,
though nestled within the political order, enjoy the license to admonish;
one is not culpable speaking one’s mind and giving one’s opinion (yanzhe
wuzui, 言者无罪). The critical feng is a moral, political voice of critique, admo-
nition, and counsel within the political system.24
Within these two versions of feng, it is very difficult to draw a line between
a critical poet outside the system and a politically engaged insider. In recov-
ering elements of Qu Yuan’s politicized aesthetics, Wang Guowei raises the
possibility of a win-win scenario in which aesthetics and politics become
conjoined. Although the feng from below may utter grievances and express
spontaneous feelings, it is by no means premised on the poet’s disengage-
ment from the community and her or his relinquishing any responsibility
for political order. On the contrary, the critical voice emerges from a deeper
concern about moral corruption and political decay.
For Wang Guowei, two schools of poetics are reconciled in Qu Yuan. The
Northern school worked within the political order and harbored the goal of
“changing the old society.”25 This political stance does not mean that the poet
is a blind loyalist; Qu Yuan combated and criticized the regime and corrupt
officials with integrity and courage. On the other hand, Southern poets may
seem to indulge in poetic fantasy and rhetorical perfection, but their poetic
values evoke the broader function of literature in projecting political imag-
ination. Their poetic images envision a new social world. Barred from access
to political power, poets of the Southern school expressed their ideals and
found solace in the utopian enclaves of nature and reclusive haunts. This
imaginative and aesthetic gesture, however, does not rule out its underlying
politics: projecting a vision of society in image rather than in reality.26
That aesthetic activity could address moral problems and energize politics
is most evident in Cai Yuanpei’s arguments for aesthetic education. A scholar
of German aesthetics who studied in Leipzig from 1908 to 1911, Cai showed no
interest in the idea of a “modern divided consciousness” that separated sense
perception from value judgment and history, nor was he interested in the
art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic.27 To him, aesthetics was to be harnessed for cul-
tivating humanist worldviews and public morality and for fostering the in-
dividual’s affective and rational personality. These qualities he considered
prerequisites for citizenship and integral to the new Chinese republic (see
MW, p. 71). As minister of education in the first Chinese Republic, Cai
23. Ibid., p. 92
24. See Owen, Readings in Classical Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 38, 46.
25. Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji, p. 31
26. See ibid.
27. Cai Yuanpei, Cai Yuanpei meixue wenlun (Beijing, 1983), p. 71; hereafter abbreviated MW.

was a visionary reformer who pioneered and put modern aesthetic educa-
tion on a par with physical, intellectual, and ethical programs. Instituted
in schools and universities, this aesthetic curriculum was designed to build
up the character of the citizen and to foster civic virtue.
For Cai Yuanpei, aesthetic activity offered an effective solution to moral
decay in the early years of the Chinese republic. As the traditional moral
and political order declined, the growth of market society, urbanization,
and possessive individualism were thrusting China into successive crises.
Things fell apart, and the moral center could not hold. In the Confucian or-
der, the question of morality had been bound up with the individual’s loca-
tion within an extensive hierarchical network of family and kinship. Local
communities and the imperial center were also modeled on the extended
family network. However, modern changes cut men and women loose from
the village, family, and regions. Atomized individuals emerged on the scene,
cut adrift from the communal network and caught up in cutthroat struggles
for self-preservation. The advent of modernity brought myriad psychic and
moral problems. Following Liang Qichao and a long tradition of debate
among the literati, Cai Yuanpei diagnosed moral questions in terms of pri-
vate morality versus public morality. Acknowledging modern individual
rights and protection from external infringement, Cai invokes the classic im-
age of the moral paragon endowed with integrity, uprightness, and virtue,
free from improper desires and thoughts. Achieved through a ritualistic pro-
gram of self-cultivation, this exemplary image links modern individual rights
to the ancient image of the righteous person endowed with unassailable virtue.
Although the Confucian moral paragon is familiar and favorable, Cai puts it
under the sign of negative morality (analogous to Isaiah Berlin’s negative lib-
erty).28 Its negativity is well illustrated by the Confucian motto “what you do
not want yourself you should not impose on others” (Analects 12.2). Yet in
splendid isolation, this attitude signals a singular self with no ties to others,
which resembles Immanuel Kant’s disembodied subject stripped of emo-
tional and moral grounding. If our morality is fixated on self-improvement
and self-perfection, Cai writes, it is not a complete and satisfying personality
(消極道德，囿於獨善範圍). The Confucian moral paragon represents a
flawed virtue; it evinces a self-centered ethics unrelated to others. In mod-
ern society, this self-centeredness degenerates into the egoistic pursuit of
self-interest at the expenses of public goods: “He who is absorbed in
self-pursuit is seen by the world as immoral.”29
28. See Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York, 1990).
29. Cai Yuanpei, Zhongguo ren de xiuyang (Chengdu, 2010), p. 160.

Cai rejects this self-interested morality in his diagnosis of social and po-
litical ills in China and the world at large. He blames antagonism and rivalry
among individuals on the private pursuit of self-interest, manifest in the im-
pulse to amass material gain. The powerful Western nations, with their ex-
pansive, colonialist agenda to grab resources and plunder far-flung regions,
engage in fights in a style he characterizes as “private feuding” (私鬥) (MW,
p. 1). The self-aggrandizing agenda licenses the domination of the strong over
the weak and allows those possessed of modern science and technology to
lord it over those that are the ill-informed and backward. In the 1920s and
1930s, warlords were tearing the nation apart for private and local gain. They
filled their own pockets and bolstered their troops and regional bases by
grabbing public funds and local resources. In the international scene marked
by the Great Depression and social movements, clashes between capital and
labor and the widening gulf between the rich and poor were the dire conse-
quences of the aggressive pursuit of particular and private interest (see MW,
p. 148).
To address these moral evils, Cai proposed to cultivate a new morality
through aesthetic education. The new morality lies in concern and commit-
ment for the public good and wellbeing (gongyi, 公益). To attain that virtue,
one must shed one’s self-centeredness in possessive individualism and strive
to merge with others and contribute to the common good. Against the neg-
ative morality of self-interest, Cai posed a positive one. Crystallized in an up-
dated Confucian motto ji yu da er da ren (己欲達而達人, if you seek to attain
moral perfection, you must promote others along with you); this positive
morality implies a public morality and civic responsibility. Similar to positive
freedom, this morality is well captured by the word gong (公) (MW, p. 25).
Gong could be translated as “public” or “commons” or “fairness.” The term
encapsulates the utopian image of the proto-socialist community, redis-
covered in ancient texts and debated by thinkers of Cai Yuanpei’s generation.
In this world of harmony and universal benevolence, everybody is equal, has
his or her proper place in society, and is committed to public welfare as a
source of private wellbeing. Linking this utopia to the ideals of the liberty,
equality, and fraternity of the French Revolution, Cai advocates public moral-
ity as a requisite of the citizen’s moral profile (see MW, p. 2).
For Cai Yuanpei, moral perfection is the basis for building a political com-
munity. Instead of power conflict and deal making among conflicted inter-
ests and factions, politics means governance and the measures to assure the
happiness of the majority of social members. The legitimacy of government
is based on public morality. The government should serve the greatest public
good. Political measures are designed to attain what the ancient text “Liyun”
(The Development of the Rites) from the Book of Rites called da dao zhi xing,

tianxia wei gong (大道之行，天下為公, the grand way advances the public
good for all under heaven).30 In this utopia, everybody does his or her bit
and in turn receives what he or she needs. “Politics has no other purpose than
this,” Cai declares (MW, p. 2). Individual rights, public morality, and legit-
imate authority converge.
On the other hand, politics less informed by morality addresses practical
issues of everyday life and belongs to the bodily realm of senses and appe-
tites. As a Kantian scholar, Cai distinguished the phenomenal world from
the suprasensory realm. Education aims at the suprasensory realm but must
work up from the grounds of everyday life. Intellectual and physical educa-
tion serves the purpose of preparing citizens to adapt, survive, and compete
in modern society and hence is grounded in the phenomenal world. But aes-
thetic education rises up and provides a ladder linking the phenomenal
world to the suprasensory realm. As a link to the utopian world of perfect
community, aesthetic education is closest to moral education. In Cai’s think-
ing, aesthetic and moral forms of education often become indistinguish-
able—a sign of the Confucian unity of morality, aesthetics, and politics (see
MW, pp. 3–4).
Aesthetic education consists in art, music, and literature curricula in
schools and universities. Keenly aware of aesthetics’ capacity to engage the
bodily, sensuous life and to regulate the individual’s moral behavior, Cai in-
vokes Confucian education marked by training in ritual and music (see MW,
p. 5). Learning ritualistic conduct is moral education, and training in music
is aesthetic education. Addressing the moral identity of modern men and
women, aesthetic education retains the traditional moral components. The
building and enjoyment of museums, theater houses, arts schools, radio, gal-
leries, gardens, and parks and well-designed architecture should be an aes-
thetic means of fostering civic behavior. These urban infrastructures are
not designed simply to provide space for leisure and recreation or to expose
urban dwellers to culture and refined taste in the name of civilized life. In-
stead, they are there to promote new forms of sociality, reciprocity, and com-
munity. Instituted to provide a public space and build a life of shared values,
common sense, and sensibility, aesthetic educational institutions are all
about creating a common life (共同的生活) rooted in public morality, not
solitary life. Aesthetic education cultivates broadmindedness so that individ-
uals may transcend the self/other divide and overcome egoistic self-interest
(see MW, p. 142).
30. See Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York,
1999), p. 343.

Eagleton claims that bourgeois ideology reduces morality and behavior to
mere manners. You have to be good because it looks and feels good. Morality
is thus “aestheticized” and stylized out of its content (I, p. 20). Unlike such a
stylized morality, Cai’s aesthetic program promotes a public world and a so-
cial relation based on the equal distribution of material and aesthetic goods.
If possessed by one person as exclusive property, Cai notes, a ladle of water
cannot be shared, and others will be deprived of a drink. A spot of land, oc-
cupied by one person, leaves no room for others to stand. The material gap
between the haves and the have nots is the source of antagonism between self
and other and encourages calculating moves for maximum gain at the ex-
pense of others. Aesthetic education bridges the gaps. In the aesthetic sharing
of beautiful music, painting, or natural landscape, material disparities are
overcome, and the private ownership of aesthetic goods becomes invalid.
In visits to museums and parks, in appreciating natural beauty and historical
monuments, and in touring famous temples in the famed mountains, visual
and acoustic messages travel from person to person, reverberating through-
out the appreciative public. The moon in the sky is accessible to each and its
aesthetic halo is open to everyone looking up; the glory of a sunset is open to
any perceiver (see MW, pp. 220–21).
By invoking political aesthetics in the ancient doctrine of yu min tong le
(與民同樂, shared enjoyment by rulers and subjects), Cai affirms aesthetic
experience as universally accessible and shared—the key to political order un-
der the mandate of the Kingly Way (see MW, p. 221). When the king of the
state of Qi worried about his indulgence in music, Mencius (372–289 BCE)
reassured him: “‘If the king’s love of music were very great, the kingdom
of Qi would be close to a state of good government.”31 The response raises
the stakes of music in politics. Mencius went on to suggest that it made a huge
difference whether the king enjoyed music alone or shared it with other peo-
ple. In the former case, people would complain that the king, absorbed in pri-
vate pleasures, ignored their distress and needs. They would frown on other
royal privileges and trappings, such as royal plumes, horses, and entourage.
But if the king shared music with his people and the high and low had equal
access to music, the people would enjoy music as much as the king. They
would go on to rejoice in the majestic beauty—the aestheticized politics—
of the king’s carriages and other pleasures.32 Much more than entertainment,
shared joy in music is both moral and political, because bodies and hearts are
connected in emotional empathy, reciprocity, and conviviality.
31. Mencius, The Works of Mencius, trans. James Legge (Seattle, 2010), p. 10; trans. mod.
32. See ibid.

This may recall the Kantian aesthetic of universalism and disinterested-
ness. But Cai’s universalism gravitates toward a moral structure of feeling
deemed capable of overcoming particular, antagonistic self-interests and
utility. If there is disinterestedness, it involves indifference to the individual’s
self-interest and calculations. Actual ferocious animals like lions and tigers
are dangerous and scary, but everybody enjoys their artistic rendering. The
naked bodies of Greek statues, at an aesthetic distance, do not arouse erotic
and sexual desire. Aesthetic experience distances one from lowly desire and
lifts one from concerns with creaturely impulses and practical interests. Un-
like the Kantian sublime premised on the triumph of human reason arising
from the collapse of the body, Cai’s reading favors the power of the sublime
to reveal human triviality and limitations. Sublime objects and spectacles jolt
the viewer out of the private closet, leaving no place for calculations of gain
and loss. In Cai’s reading, the sublime is not very different from the beautiful,
as the two categories work together in aesthetic education to break the self-
other divide and shut down our calculation and self-interest, propelling us
toward noble and virtuous feelings (see MW, p. 218).
If Cai’s aesthetic education has echoes of top-down feng in forging ideo-
logical hegemony, Lu Xun’s aesthetic thinking corresponds to the voice from
below. In his “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluo shili shuo, 魔羅詩力說)
(1907), Lu Xun revisits Qu Yuan by analyzing the Satanic, romantic poets in-
spired by the Indian god Mara. Despite his antitraditional stance, Lu Xun’s
political aesthetics also owes much to Confucian political philosophy, which
sees morality as the source of the state’s legitimacy and authority. Confucian
thought regards classical teachings and moral tenets as even more essential to
the raison d’état than administration and bureaucratic governance. As a re-
mark in the Analects goes, “The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star
which commands the homage of the multitude of stars” (為政以德，譬如北辰，
據其所而眾星共之).33 On the personal level, ritual cultivation of virtue and
music training map out a moral trajectory to foster good character and man-
ners, so that morally upright ministers and advisors can maintain social and
political order.
Writing in view of China’s impending collapse under Western assault, Lu
Xun proposed to rejuvenate Chinese culture to build a modern community.
Fully aware of the evolutionist schemes where the strong dominate and op-
press the weak, he realized that it would be necessary for China to participate
in rivalry to keep its culture intact. From this Social Darwinist perspective,
classical Chinese literature looks like an expression of self-sufficiency, com-
placency, peace, and stability, degenerating in modern times into atrophy
33. Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York, 1979), p. 63.

and stagnancy. The empire’s entrenched moral dogmas and repressive order
have sapped spontaneous life and vibrant expression from Chinese culture.
The dogma in the “Great Preface” that poetry must constrain one’s charac-
ter and purge improper thoughts suffocates the heart and stifles authentic
voices.
Following Wang Guowei, Lu Xun sees in Qu Yuan the surge of a genuine
and authentic voice. The ancient poet shows aesthetic strength in his exile
and near-death experience: “Only Qu Yuan, on the brink of death, when
his mind churned with the fury of the waves, could pace by the shores of
the Miluo River, looking back upon the mountains of his homeland and la-
menting his feelings of isolation in poignant, melancholic lines that depicted
his sorrow and wrath.” The aesthetic value is entwined with moral and po-
litical criticism. All constraints gone, Qu Yuan
could at last voice his rancor at the imbecility of the world and the
crassness of society. He was free to sing of his own wasted talent and
unappreciated learning, and to question with an unprecedented skepti-
cism and in unabashed detail everything from the most basic myths
and legends to creation down to the minutiae of history and all
life forms with a fearlessness of tone which none before him dared
assume.34
In subsequent centuries, however, Qu Yuan’s aesthetic and moral critique
had paled into the realm of the stylistic and canonic, disenchanting morally
charged poems into mere aesthetic style. Stripped of moral substance, emo-
tional pathos, and political rancor, the beauty of his poems was no longer
motivated by “a will to fight back” (“MP”). Citing Liu Xie’s insightful sum-
mary, Lu Xun writes that later poets have only emulated the boldness and
novelty of Qu Yuan’s artistic designs and conceits: “Talents appropriated
his grand styles. Mediocre versifiers seized upon the beauty of his diction;
aficionados savor his images of mountain and rivers, and novices imitate
his use of fragrant flora and fauna” (“MP”; trans. mod.). Deploring this tragic
loss of meaningful issues in the pursuit of stylistic refinement, Lu Xun calls
for radical voices like those of the Mara poets, who deploy their talent to cre-
ate verses powerful enough to remold people’s character and elevate their
thoughts.35
34. Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (Moluo shi li shuo), trans. Jon Kowallis, in
Warriors of the Spirit: the Early Wenyan Essays of Lu Xun (forthcoming); hereafter abbreviated
“MP.” I use Jon Kowallis’s excellent translation for all passages quoted with his permission.
35. See Lu Xun, “Moluo shi li shuo” (摩羅詩力說), in vol. 1 of Lu Xun quanji (Beijing,
1980), p. 69.

Qu Yuan and the Mara poets illustrate the critical, constructive feng.
Mara poetry displays a radical, subversive energy that combats and shocks
the conventional and complacent social order. But to read the poetic revolt
only as a dismantling of the cultural status quo would miss the value of the
politically constructive in China’s nation-building endeavors. The positive
moral imagination fuels not only an oppositional politics but a national pol-
itics—one of rising nationalism based on the reconstruction of national
character and morally robust subjectivity.
Demonic poets like George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
John Keats, for the young Lu Xun, embody a moral vanguard breaking away
from the prevailing moral orthodoxy. They hold onto an ideal of morality in
radical literary movements and battle conventions and established order.
This iconoclastic energy is welcome, says Lu Xun, as a weapon to combat
China’s mainstream poetics. Defining morality as a rhetoric of constraint
and control, mainstream poetics declares that the essence of the Shijing, Chi-
na’s first anthology of three hundred poems, is to promote “thought without
immorality” (si wu xie, 思無邪 ) and to hold individuals’ emotions and spon-
taneous impulses in check (“MP”). Against this regulatory claim, romantic
poets argue that poetry is meant to give vent to feelings and sensations. To
insist that poetry must never step outside the bounds of propriety runs
counter to poetry’s alleged function as the spontaneous and evocative ex-
pression of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Chinese poetry is thus
split into one school that praises the masters and the powerful, and another
that expresses solitary lamentation and pleasures. This second tradition, ac-
cording to Lu Xun, culminates in Qu Yuan’s poems.36
Lu Xun’s analysis of Qu Yuan affirms a critical relation of literature to
morality. Exposed to modern notions of aesthetics from the West, Lu Xun
was quite familiar with the concept of art as an object in its own right, en-
shrined in autonomy and free from utilitarian purposes. Defining art as the
power of appeal to readers by means of inspiration or delight, Lu Xun sets
literature off from industrial, commercial, and political affairs: “By virtue of
the selfsame property,” literature has little to do with the preservation of in-
dividual life and the survival of the state; it is purged of practical purposes
and utilitarian considerations. Compared with history as a repository of wis-
dom and with moral discourse with its tenets and precepts, literature seems
rather ineffective as a factor in the cultural landscape. Literature does not
generate wealth as surely as commerce and industry, nor can it earn social
recognition equal to that of an industrialist.37 Yet literature’s uselessness is
36. See ibid., p. 68.

37. See ibid., p. 71.

enriched with a broader, humanist claim. For all its uselessness, literature
has the power to launch humanity on the way to fulfillment and completion.
Citing the British critic Edward Dowden, Lu Xun deploys a language of
bodily exercise, rigorous training, and physical and spiritual energy. The
empowering pleasure of literature is compared to the energizing effect expe-
rienced by a swimmer in the ocean. Seeing a “boundless horizon open be-
fore him,” the swimmer
breasts the waves, and comes forth at the end of the swim feeling
physically and spiritually rejuvenated. Though the sea is but a mass
of surging wave and churning water, devoid of emotion, which has
never uttered a maxim or a moral pronouncement, nevertheless, the
physical and mental wellbeing of the swimmer has been immediately
enhanced by it. [“MP”]38
In practical self-preservation, human activity becomes compartmentalized
into fields of industry, livelihood, and improvement, rendering aesthetics ir-
relevant and useless. Torn between these two extremes, humans are truncated
and incomplete. The split of mind from body represents a systematic disjunc-
tion between instrumental rationality at the heart of material civilization and
the spiritual realm. Literature steps forward to provide an answer and a rem-
edy. Literature is able to nurture the imagination, animate the body with
spirit, and restore a positive, robust morality. Though inferior to science in
investigating and understanding nature, literature has an edge in its ability to
reveal the subtler truths and human meanings that elude scientific logic. Evoking
Matthew Arnold’s claim of culture as the key to political order and as a living
criticism of life, Lu Xun reconsiders literature as a service provider and a didac-
tic one at that. Literature offers instructions beneficial to human life and gives
articulation to vital moral qualities such as self-awareness, courage, and en-
terprising development. Significantly, he uses the word jiao (教, teaching) to
point to religious significance or moral instruction in literature. This brings
him in line with Cai Yuanpei, who famously claimed that aesthetic educa-
tion would take over from religion in modern society and inherit religion’s
aesthetic mechanism in disseminating modern values. Aesthetic instruction
should work like secular religion and supply moral meaning and belief.
From the swimming body on the way to spiritual and ethical revival, Lu
Xun envisions a trajectory marked by the tempering of the physical body
along with a new form of subjectivity. Propelled by an urgent need to repair
the broken moral fabric of society, this body seeks to forge ethical bonds by
integrating fragmented individual bodies into a social and political body. It is
38. See ibid.

instructive to distinguish morality in its inert dogma from emancipatory po-
tential. Citing a sociological definition of literature, Lu Xun shows that liter-
ature is grounded in the sincerity of authentic ideas and feelings. Poeticized
ideas and feelings “should accord with universal concepts of humanity”
(“MP”).39 Morality, in this sense, is constituted by universally acceptable hu-
man thoughts and notions, which allow poetry to long endure and to travel
across national borders. The universality of morality, however, is often mis-
takenly equated with qunfa (群法), the law and mores of a particular histor-
ical group or society. Confucian thinkers have observed that literature that
defies and contradicts the qunfa will not last long. Countering this, Lu Xun
cites a host of radical poets inspired by the French Revolution and involved
in national independence movements in Germany, Italy, and Greece. A poet
in the Byronic mode transgresses “the old limitations and give direct voice to
his convictions: his every work resounded with defiant strength and icono-
clastic challenge” (“MP”).40 But applauding poets’ radical, anticonventional
acts does not invalidate their alternative moral and political pursuits. To the
contrary, by breaking out of moral containment, poets project an inspira-
tional vision of society that genuinely accords with universal morality, which
is nothing other than the freedom and law of humanity (rendao, 人道).41 Poe-
try’s emotional power is related to an image of innate yet public morality,
consistent with the sharing of moral teachings and enlightenment:
Poets are indeed the disrupters of men’s hearts. For every human
heart contains poetry within it, and when a poet has written a poem,
it does not belong to him exclusively, but to whoever can understand
it in their heart. If there is no poetry in their heart to begin with,
how could they arrive at an understanding? This is only possible be-
cause they themselves have had similar feelings but could not put
them into words. Poets say these things for them. As when a musician
plucks a note, a response comes immediately from the heart strings of
the audience, and the note reverberates throughout the caverns of the
soul, causing all men of feeling to look up, inspired as though they were
gazing at some new dawn ablaze with light that has the power to
strengthen, ennoble, and enlighten. [“MP”]42
The power to “strengthen, ennoble, and enlighten” has everything to do
with morality. Rather than supplying physical strength and the thrill of ex-
citement, poetry energizes and uplifts readers with moral ethos and strength.
39. See ibid., p. 72.

40. See ibid., p. 73.
41. See ibid., p. 79.
42. See ibid., p. 68.

Like Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun gravitated toward a more
resonant connection between aesthetics and politics. Modernist aesthetic
discourse separates aesthetics from politics, privileges form over content,
and isolates sensuality and feeling from morality and politics, disenchanting
the totality of the political community and civic society. Taking a different
path to their aesthetic modernity, the three thinkers above pondered the
ways in which the aesthetic becomes part of the project to imagine a new
socio-moral order. In Weberian language, they attempted to reenchant
the morally depleted polis. In Wang Guowei’s analysis of Qu Yuan, poetry
could be an admonitory voice or a utopian gesture. In Cai Yuanpei’s educa-
tional program, aesthetic culture is the key to the formation of public mo-
rality and civic virtue. By portraying the aesthetic power of the Mara poets
to break through the shackles of established moral conventions, Lu Xun pro-
posed that aesthetic experience should inspire the Chinese people with moral
sentiments and enlightenment for the rejuvenation of their nation. Instead of
a handmaiden of moral and political orthodoxy, much less a vehicle for main-
taining the status quo, aesthetic discourse is reconnected with the matrix of
social, moral, and political circumstances.


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Aesthetics, Morality, and the Modern

Community: Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei,

In the last three decades, inﬂuential commentators on Chinese aesthetics

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Critical Inquiry 46 (Spring 2020)

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

18. See ibid.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

36. See ibid., p. 68.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

38. See ibid.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

39. See ibid., p. 72.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

Critical Inquiry 2020.46:496-514.

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