Li Zehou

Li Zehou was a Chinese philosopher and aesthetician, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, who later lived in the United States. Drawing on Marx, Kant and Confucius, he argued that human nature and the sense of beauty are formed by long histories of practical, tool-using activity, which leave a deposit in the human psyche. His book The Path of Beauty (1981), a survey of Chinese art and literature from prehistoric times to the Qing, set off an 'aesthetics fever' in 1980s China. His later work reinterpreted Confucian ethics for the modern world.

Key ideas

• Human beings are formed through practical activity, above all making and using tools, rather than by a fixed nature.
• Social practice becomes 'sedimented' over history into individual psychology, including the capacity to feel beauty.
• Chinese culture is marked by a blending of emotion and reason rather than a sharp split between them.
• In modern China, the urgent demand for national salvation overwhelmed the project of enlightenment.

Major works

• The Path of Beauty (1981)
• Critique of Critical Philosophy (1979)
• A History of Chinese Aesthetics (1984)
• Four Essays on Aesthetics (2006)

In the Book corner

• The Path of Beauty 1981 · Intermediate
  A survey of Chinese aesthetic history from prehistory to the Qing dynasty by the philosopher Li Zehou, published in 1981. In ten…

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