Since ancient times, literati and poets have often endowed natural scenery with human action character, life and thoughts and feelings in their poetry creation, so that natural scenery can reflect the beauty of human and social life. This is what aesthetics calls "empathy" in poetry creation.
The application of "empathy" makes the objective scenery in the poem full of the tremor and beauty of the perceptual life form, and makes the poet's eyes and soul blend into one, which is super-perceptual and inseparable from sensibility. The ingenious use of "empathy" is one of the reasons why poetry has a strong artistic charm for a long time.
As an aesthetic category, the theory of empathy has four main points:
(A) Aesthetic empathy as an aesthetic experience, its essence is an objective self-enjoyment.
(2) The basic characteristics of aesthetic empathy are the integration of subject and object, the forgetting of things and me, the identity of things and me, and the mutual gift of things and me.
(3) Aesthetic empathy is caused by empathy and similar association.
(4) The function of aesthetic empathy is the free liberation of human emotions.
Zhu Guangqian's works, such as Psychology of Literature and Art, On Poetry and History of Western Aesthetics, are all interpreted from the perspective of aesthetics and philosophy. In the history of western aesthetics, he combed the origin and development of empathy theory and discussed the reasons for the rise of this theory. In On Poetry, he mainly explained the realm of situation blending in poetry with empathy theory, and in Psychology of Literature and Art, he discussed empathy in the analysis of aesthetic experience.
He believes that aesthetic experience is a psychological activity when we appreciate natural beauty or artistic beauty. Empathy often occurs when we are absorbed in watching an isolated and insulated image. We often change from forgetting things to being the same, from being the same to touching things, inadvertently shift my interest to things, and shift my attention to me with the attitude of things. Of course, he clearly pointed out that empathy is often accompanied by aesthetic experience, but it is not a necessary condition for aesthetic experience. In other words, he did not equate aesthetic psychological activity with empathy, but regarded it as one of the psychological activities of aesthetic experience. In this way, he properly grasped the characteristics of aesthetic experience, found a position in aesthetics for empathy, and overcame many defects.
Generally speaking, he mainly explains empathy from a philosophical perspective. This is the characteristic of aestheticians, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, and the ultimate level of empathy is the humanization of the universe, from finite to infinite, from fixed to free. The title, opening and ending all contain philosophical hints, which make people feel shocked and curious, and how to humanize infinite and emotionless time and space.