华人的审美秩序The Chinese Aesthetic order

在西方，再解释宇宙秩序时，他们设想有存在者的存在或普世原理之类的一般特性，这些特性告示我们事务是如何形成秩序的。这些设想的依据是那些有关混乱如何被秩序克服的神话。

在另一方面，中国传统文化很少受到以非理性的混乱与有秩序的宇宙相对比的神话的影响。他们对以理性推理来解释混乱如何被宇宙秩序克服的兴趣不大。反而，中国思想家通过艺术性地处置事务来了解秩序，这是一种参与式的过程，并不假设具有重要特色、事先决定好的原理来当作秩序的超越来源。

传统的中国思想家在自然世界中寻找转化与变动的气之所在，发现周围个体成员差不多是和谐地联系在一起，由此而成为事务的自然状态，因而不需要借助于一个秩序原理或代理人来解释秩序。宇宙被当成是是自发性自我生成的生命过程。

所以事务的秩序并不是神灵安排，也不是一个依据自然科学规律来安排好了的关联性模式。恰恰相反，它是由各自成员自我组织而成的审美秩序。审美秩序并不是事先决定好的，而是由独特与自发性的成员在自然形成的复杂模式中协作。

自然（万物）与社会都是审美产物，它们的秩序是成员们在其境域中的创造物。审美感悟意味着人类犹如艺术家，在不断的演变中的新奇环境的内外有创意地构筑我们的生命。

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In the West, in interpreting the order of the cosmos, it is supposed that there are general characteristics – the being of beings, or universal principles – which tell us how things are ordered. They are grounded upon cosmogonic myths that celebrate the victory of an ordered cosmos over chaos.

The classical Chinese culture, on the other hand, was little influenced by myths which contrasted an irrational Chaos with an ordered Cosmos. There is therefore lack of interest in using rational reasoning to explain how the Chaos was overcome by ordered Cosmos. Instead, the Chinese thinkers sought the understanding of order through the artful disposition of things, a participatory process which does not presume that there are essential features, or antecedent-determining principles, serving as transcendent sources of order.

Classical Chinese thinkers located the energy of transformation and change within a world that is ziran, literally ‘so-of-itself’, and found the more or less harmonious interrelations among the particular things around them to be the natural condition of things, requiring no appeal to an ordering principle or agency for explanation. The universe is seen as a spontaneously self generating life process.

So the order of things is not a rational order based on a divine plan or on scientific laws of nature, a ‘pre-assigned pattern of relatedness’. Rather it is an aesthetic order arising from the self-organization of particular elements. An aesthetic order is in no way predetermined but arises from the uniqueness and spontaneity of particulars in collaboration in an emergent complex pattern.

Nature (‘the ten thousand things’) and society are both aesthetic products whose order is a creation of the elements of the contexts. An aesthetic sensibility implies that human beings, like artists, creatively construct our lives both within and out of always evolving novel situations.