ABSTRACT

The “aesthetic” opens up the inquiry to diverse qualities and connections, including artistic design, subjective impressions, sensuous, emotional life, personal taste, artistic style, forms of everyday life, and cultural patterns. Aesthetic experience in culture and the arts may gesture toward a vision of rationally conceived society, where intersubjective feelings resonate and a picture of harmonious community seems tantalizingly close. If Kantian aesthetics is founded on universal reason, Kang Youwei resorts to a Confucian language of Heaven and nature to assert the universal basis for aesthetic communication. An aesthetic hermeneutics allows the concern of one national situation to “achieve contact with the text of another nation by way of mediation of the relationship between two national situations”. In the light of aesthetic humanity enacted by the cultural agent, this nation-based worldview is not a defense of the nation-state.