“The Flower's Color Become Lucid Immediately”——The Aesthetic Implications and Modern Reverberations of Wang Yangming's “Mind-Thing Relationship”

Wang Yangming rejected Zhu Xi's ontology "li (理)-as-substance" and proposed "mind as noumenon", instead. Through the lens of the"the world of meaning", he reinterpreted aesthetic phenomena within the mind-thing relationship. His cliff-flower dialogue conveys this:the fusion of mind and object creates an aesthetic world, where in aesthetic activities achieve lucidity and illumination, while perpetual change engenders infinite aesthetic possibilities. Modern Chinese aesthetics was influenced by the opposing ideologies of materialism and idealism in Western philosophy. However, a deeper exploration into viewpoints such as "beauty as the unity of subject and object", "beauty as objective", and "beauty as evaluation" reveals an intrinsic connection with Yangming's theory. Liu Shipei pioneered the transition from the classical mind-thing relation to modern subject-object unity. Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, and Zong Baihua bridged mind-thing and subject-object paradigms. Zhu Guangqian synthesized these into the theory "beauty as unity of subject and object". Li Zehou's "beauty as objective" emphasized materiality but overlooked the mind's role, while theories like "beauty as evaluation", "beauty as experience" and "ontological practical aesthetics" deepened dialogue with Yangming's legacy. This demonstrates the endogenous continuity between classical and modern Chinese aesthetics.