Abstract:
Confucianism pursues an internal transcendence, whose goal is in turn the gentleman’s personality. Confucian personality of the gentleman was not established until it had overcame the paradox between “benevolence” and “propriety” and between “character” and “style”. Confucianists overcame these paradoxes not by thinking abstractly but by doing practically, namely, almost the way a artistic genius or an idealistic critic overcomes the paradox between artistic production and artistic appreciation. It is just in this sense that we think that the paradox of human life in Confucian attainment is actually an aesthetic paradox, which is to be overcome not by science but by the art of human life.
