The Spread of Virtue and the Fallacy of Authenticity in Classical Chinese Aesthetics

This will be the second of a series of four lectures that I aim to write up formally as a book. We will begin with a brief review of the most familiar theory of Chinese aesthetics: works of art are the products of sensitive human beings who cannot suppress their sincere responses to emotional stimuli. Against this background, there were two simultaneous but ultimately incongruent tendencies: the spread of “virtue” (de 德) and the fetishization of “authenticity” (zhen 真). Whereas, in the Bronze Age, only the King was thought to possess “virtue” worthy of communication in writing, over time other classes of persons claimed virtue as well, to the point that any human being, if sufficiently talented and sincere, was recognized as a potential artist. At the same time, however, the insistence on sincerity led to the notion that only certain artists are capable of producing “authentic” art, with the unproductive consequence that art could be dismissed as “inauthentic” (wei 僞) by impugning the artist's integrity.

Further questions may be directed to: prg@sas.upenn.edu