Background
Cal, Yl was born in 1906 in Xiao County, Huoan Province, China.
Cal, Yl was born in 1906 in Xiao County, Huoan Province, China.
University of Beijing and Kyushu Imperial University, Tokyo.
Research Fellow, Institute of Literature. University of Peking. Research Fellow. Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Cai came to prominence in 1945 and, in contrast with those providing criticism without an explicit intellectual base, was soon recognized as the leading philosophical theorist of Marxist aesthetics in China. He disputed what he considered to be subjectivist and objectivist aesthetic views, in particular Zhu Guangqian's adaptation of the ideas of Kant and Croce. He claimed that existing aesthetics, based on art, could be accepted only if beauty were subjective. Because the beautiful is an objective reality, a new aesthetics was required, recognizing the beautiful in things as the source both of our aesthetic sense and of artistic beauty. Things are beautiful which best typify species through the expression of the reality and truth of those species. He believed that his analysis justified the claim that beauty is life. Because both species and individuals are subject to change, aesthetic judgement is also open to change. Cai thus bound artistic beauty to natural beauty and understood natural beauty to be subject to the development of Marxist dialectics. In later controversies over problems of aesthetics, he was criticized as a ‘mechanical materialist’ with a naive view of the Marxist context framing his aesthetic analysis. Although his ideas fell out of favour, they did much to establish serious aesthetic theory within Chinese Marxist thought.