Three characteristics of aesthetic psychology

Ignorance is not free because it is a strange world to him. Hegel's famous saying shows that knowledge and wisdom are indispensable conditions for people to master and conquer the world, and aesthetics separated from philosophy provides necessary weapons for human beings to transform nature and develop themselves. The revelation of the psychological tortuous track of the aesthetic process of the aesthetic subject is undoubtedly of far-reaching significance to our aesthetic research today.

In order to analyze this process, we cut the whole process of psychology into several important stages in order to see the overall characteristics of this process more clearly. In fact, there is no boundary between each stage, and the flow of consciousness is continuous like water. It is divided into several stages: aesthetic feeling, emotion, imagination and comprehension. These different stages are all in the aesthetic process, and together they constitute the rich content of aesthetic psychological activities.

sense of beauty

In 1844' s Manuscript of Philosophical Economics, Marx made a classic exposition on human aesthetic feeling: "It is only because of the objective richness of human nature and the subjective and emotional richness of human beings, that is, the ears that feel music and the eyes that feel formal beauty. In short, those feelings that can feel people's essential strength are either developed or produced. "

"Ears of music" and "eyes of formal beauty" are the necessary premise and foundation of aesthetic activities. According to the anthropological point of view, the whole cultural history of human beings is "accumulated" and "passed down" in human organs such as fingers, ears and eyes; The eyes of modern people are different from those of ancient people, and the aesthetic vision of contemporary people is also different, which forms the diversity and richness of aesthetic activities. When Shakespeare said: "Eyes are the windows of human soul", the modern philosopher Wittgenstein said: Eyes can intimidate each other! People's five senses are the beginning of cognitive process and aesthetic psychological process.

Feeling is a reflection of the individual characteristics of things, but perception is the overall grasp of the complete image composed of different forms, colors, light, space, tension and other elements of things, including the grasp of emotional expression of this image. People's perception is a positive and dynamic reflection. Past experience will accumulate into various schemata in the mind, and the specific expectation caused by the environment and purposeful behavior will determine which schema the aesthetic subject chooses. This expectation and schema always support people's perceptual activities consciously or unconsciously, so that perception chooses one aspect or several aspects of something and suppresses and abandons other aspects.

What distinguishes aesthetic perception from other perceptions is that it does not classify things according to their usefulness or uselessness, but assembles and grafts things according to their emotional expressions. "Dead vine, old tree and faint crow" are different, but their emotional expressions are the same, so the poet put them together to express the sad situation. People will feel ferocious or majestic in the face of steep and tall mountains, and will feel cheerful and relaxed when they see the gurgling streams. On the surface, aesthetic perception is completed quickly and directly, but in essence, it hides the whole life and knowledge accumulation of the aesthetic subject, including his beliefs, prejudices, memories, likes and dislikes, and education. Here, imagination, emotion and understanding are mixed together. The ultimate goal of aesthetic perception is to create and lead to an independent aesthetic world, the unity of a rich external world and a profound internal world.

mood

Emotion is directly produced with perception, and it is always regarded as the objective nature or inherent characteristics of the perceptual object by the aesthetic subject. For example, the "objective naturalism" in the past believed that emotions were determined by the structural nature of things themselves, not by inhuman association or empathy. Sometimes, the aesthetic subject thinks that this is a subjective feeling, such as empathy: the aesthetic subject projects or transfers his personality and feelings into the object in his perception, and becomes one with the object. "The petals have fallen like tears, and the lonely bird has sung a sad song." These two theories have their own merits, both reasonable and biased. Modern Gestalt School put forward the theory of structural isomorphism, which correctly reflected the essence and generation principle of aesthetic emotion. According to this theory, the reason why the external world and art forms have human feelings or cause aesthetic feelings is mainly because the forces of the external world (physical) and the internal world (psychological) are "isomorphic" or "heterogeneous isomorphic" in formal structure. Although the materials and characteristics of the two forces are different, once they are integrated and isomorphic in the physiological electric field of the brain, they will produce aesthetic feelings, and the state of ecstasy will be relaxed and happy.

imagine

Imagination can be divided into perceptual imagination and creative imagination. The former is the imagination in general aesthetic activities and cannot be completely divorced from the immediate things. Creative imagination is an artist's imagination in the process of creation. It can be divorced from the entity, and driven by inner feelings, it can transform, process and create beautiful works of art.

The function of perceptual imagination is that when all psychological functions of human beings actively embrace nature or works of art, when people's mood, love, pain or joy are in complete harmony with nature, people's imagination activities are stimulated. The defect of this kind of imagination is that it is stuck in what you see and contains this thing, which is neither wide nor shallow.

Creative imagination comes from countless perceptions, a lot of observation and rich experience, and of course inspiration. Liu Xie's article "Wen Xin Diao Shen Long Si" describes: "The thinking of literature is also far away, so it is silent and thinking for thousands of years; Sad and moving, see Wan Li; Between chanting, breathing the sound of pearls and jade; Before coming, the colors of the wind and clouds are so profound. " The so-called "thinking" here refers to association and fantasy in literary creation, and can also refer to various creative imaginations. Lu Ji's theory of "being good at swimming" and "caging heaven and earth in shape and frustrating everything in pen" also gives an excellent description of the role of imagination. Only by using creative imagination can writers and artists condense the lifeless material combination and cast it into a perfect artistic image.

Of course, the images produced in imaginative activities are not necessarily real things in real life, especially in romantic literature. In Mao Zedong's poems, the towering Mount Wumeng is just a few small mud balls, "Wumeng Mountain walks in the mud ball". In Bai Juyi's poems in the Tang Dynasty, the sound of music can be "a silver vase suddenly burst, water gushed out, jumped out of armored horses and weapons, collided and struck". Guo Moruo's image of Tian Gou is the embodiment of the May 4th spirit and a successful example of creative imagination.

include

The most basic level of understanding is to understand the "illusory" state different from the "actual" state, in other words, to distinguish the events, plots and feelings in real life from the artistic events, plots and feelings in the aesthetic state. The soldier who wounded Huang Shiren's actor did have a high class consciousness and revolutionary passion, but he had no aesthetic sense, which confused the boundaries between life and art and made a joke.

The second meaning of comprehension generally refers to the understanding of the symbolic meaning, theme, allusions, techniques and technical procedures of aesthetic objects. This requires aesthetic subjects to constantly improve their knowledge and expand the scope of life accumulation. For example, if you don't understand the whole set of stylized meanings of Beijing opera, you can't appreciate its unique aesthetic effect.

The third meaning of understanding, which is also the most important core, is an intuitive grasp of the meaning contained in form, that is to say, it is just like salt dissolved in water. Although there is no trace, the taste is already there. "Words can't express it", "unreasonable" and "words can't express it, which is romance."

In short, understanding is an intuitive appreciation or perception of the object, in which emotional feelings and experiences occupy a prominent position, often mixed with unconscious and unconscious components.

The understanding of artists is different from that of scientists. In the artist's understanding, the sun can be black (sholokhov), it can be thin (Du Fu), the promotion sound can be sharp (Jia Dao's Kesi), the warbler's song is round (Peony Pavilion, a dream, the promotion sound can be sharp) (Jia's Watching the Bee Peak Pavilion), and the cold can be colored (Yang Wanli's Crossing the Single Bamboo Path) In the eyes of scientists, these are close to nonsense, while scientific research needs accurate observation. Based on a large number of experiments and hypothetical reasoning, scientists' understanding is more rational.

Aesthetic activities have mobilized almost all psychological functions and various spiritual forces of people, making them a whole dynamic structure to play a comprehensive role. Aesthetic factors are the starting point of aesthetic experience, understanding points out the direction for it, emotion is its driving force, and imagination adds wings to it. When these four elements are combined in turn in the mind, a pleasant aesthetic experience is produced. That is to say, when the internal structure is actively adjusted and combined and coordinated with the external material structure, the internal mind will operate harmoniously in the rhythm of beauty and eventually form a pleasant aesthetic experience.