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86 Chapter 3 Chapter 3 Eloquent Stones Of the critical discourses that this book has examined, one feature is that works of art are readily compared to natural forms of beauty: bird song, a gush- ing river or reflections in water are such examples. Underlying such rhetorical devices is an ideal of art as non-art, namely that the work of art should appear so artless that it seems to have been made by nature in its spontaneous process of creation. Nature serves as the archetype (das Vorbild) of art. At the same time, the Song Dynasty also saw refined objects – such as flowers, tea or rocks – increasingly aestheticised, collected, classified, described, ranked and com- moditised. Works of connoisseurship on art or natural objects prospered alike. The hundred-some pu 譜 or lu 錄 works listed in the literature catalogue in the History of the Song (“Yiwenzhi” in Songshi 宋史 · 藝文志) are evenly divided between those on manmade and those on natural objects.1 Through such dis- cursive transformation, ‘natural beauty’ as a cultural construct curiously be- came the afterimage (das Nachbild) of art.2 In other words, when nature appears as the ideal of art, at the same time it discovers itself to be reshaped according to the image of art. As a case study of Song nature aesthetics, this chapter explores the multiple dimensions of meaning invested in Su Shi’s connoisseur discourse on rocks. Su Shi professed to be a rock lover. Throughout his life, he collected inkstones, garden rocks and simple pebbles. We are told, for instance, that a pair of rocks, called Qiuchi 仇池, accompanied him through his exiles to remote Huizhou and Hainan, even though most of his family members were left behind. Su Shi’s idiosyncrasy was not just the source of his private delight, but also the subject of public display. He wrote poems, accounts, inscriptions, letters and brush notes to praise the virtue of rocks, record their transactions and justify his possession of them. 1 They are catalogued in juan 205, 206 and 207, mostly under the sub-category of “Agricultural Works” (nongjia lei 農家類). On the bibliographical categorisation of pu and lu works in dy- nastic histories, see Martina Siebert, Pulu: ‘Abhandlungen und Auflistungen’ zu materieller Kultur und Naturkunde im traditionellen China (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 90–101. 2 This pair of terms, namely, nature as das Vorbild or das Nachbild of art, is borrowed from Martin Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 11. © zhiyi yang, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004298538_005 Zhiyi Yang - 9789004298538 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:04:42PM via free access Eloquent Stones 87 The pride that Su Shi took in his passion for rocks was built upon the fact that such an idiosyncrasy was an established elite practice. Since Mid-Tang, as Xiaoshan Yang has argued, a new ‘aesthetics of rocks’ differentiated this elite taste for rocks from the more simple kind of appreciation in earlier centuries.3 Rock connoisseurship fed a frenzy of acquisition. Water-eroded porous rocks were fetched from the bottom of Tai Lake (in modern Jiangsu Province) and transported to the capital to furnish royal or noble gardens. Inkstones, an an- cient kind of writing paraphernalia, also gained cult status. The most prized rocks of all were those carved from mountains or water caves, sometimes at the cost of lives. The ethics involved in such practices, however, were not what led Su Shi into soul searching. His particular concern was a type of metaphysi- cal danger. He understood material ownership as a form of slavery to ‘things’ (wu 物),4 a potent threat to his mental freedom. To solve the dilemma, Su Shi argued that one should not force oneself to discard ‘things’, if they were what one was genuinely fond of, because that deliberate effort would hamper the spontaneous expression of one’s innate nature. He further invested the rocks with personality and agency. He transformed their unbelongingness into char- acteristics of divine beings or recluses. His ownership was therefore redefined as friendship. This set of skilful rhetorical devices is seen at play to achieve various purposes: justifying his material possession, elevating his collection, expediting his acquisition and, sometimes, scuppering a potential transaction. If those rocks, as collectors’ items, should be properly considered to be ‘superfluous things’ (zhàngwu 長物),5 their ‘uselessness’ was, for Su Shi, highly use- ful. The Aesthetics of Nature and the Usefulness of Uselessness According to Hegel (1770–1831), aesthetics, by definition, is the “philosophy of fine arts”.6 ‘Natural beauty’ is not a proper field of inquiry because only artistic 3 Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 98. 4 Also noted by Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis, 190. 5 A term used in Xu Zhen’e 徐震堮, Shishuo xinyu jiaojian 世說新語校箋 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 1.27; for the story, see below. For more extensive discussion about this notion in Chinese connoisseurship, see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1991). 6 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (2004 rpt.), trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Penguin Books, 1993), 3. Zhiyi Yang - 9789004298538 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:04:42PM via free access 88 Chapter 3 beauty reflects the freedom of spirit.7 Yet, nature does inspire our feelings of beauty, life and freedom – a fact that begs explanation. Kant asserts that nature in itself is neither ugly nor beautiful, and it is only through the perceptive mind of man that it can be experienced as such. Nevertheless, even a bird’s song seems to have more freedom and offer more aesthetic pleasure than a human voice singing in accordance with the rules of music.8 Arguably, the ‘freedom’ of bird song is simply a result of its externality to any manmade rules. Thus, the admiration for natural beauty often implies a criticism of human art: inso- much that the former exhibits the principles of spontaneity and unintention- ality, the latter is exiled from the realm of absolute freedom, despite its efforts to break rules and boundaries. Yet it is in the nature of ‘thought’ per se to go beyond sheer materiality. Thus, ‘thought’ contains the utopian character of transcendence – and ultimately the transcendence from itself. Highly reflec- tive thought therefore tends to see its redemption in its own elimination – and nature turns into utopia. The heart of man’s relationship with nature is his criticism of his cultured self. The contemporary German scholar Wolfgang Kubin argues that the aware- ness and idealisation of nature in the West appeared parallel to the rise of cap- italism and industrialisation, that is, the large-scale assault on the natural environment. As a result, the idealised nature has acquired interiority. It shares the same function as one’s innermost self to provide an escape from the pres- sures of society and civilisation.9 With this, ironically, the aestheticised ‘nature’ loses its independence and becomes a counter image of human culture. It is a constructed, though indispensable, sanctuary to the civilised space. Nature’s purported externality to art defines its meaning. When critics of modern society strive to divorce art from anthropocentric hubris, they find in nature an inhuman language, free of grammar. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) defines language as the universal capacity for communication, and it is in the nature of all beings to communicate their thoughts. Things ‘speak’ to man. Only through the linguistic being of things can man gain knowledge of them from within himself, namely, by translating the language of things into that of man.10 In Benjamin’s hierarchy of language, however, the naming language of man remains the highest and the most perfect kind. In contrast, Martin 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 73–4. 9 Wolfgang Kubin, Der Durchsichtige Berg: die Entwicklung der Naturanschauung in der chi- nesischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 7–8. 10 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 314–32. Zhiyi Yang - 9789004298538 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:04:42PM via free access Eloquent Stones 89 Heidegger (1889–1976) distinguishes the ‘thing’ (das Ding) from the Kantian ‘object’ (der Gegenstand). According to him, a thing is self-sufficient, while an object is not (the Kantian effort to define a ‘thing in itself’ [der Gegenstand an sich] notwithstanding).11 Following this string of critical inquiry, the question becomes: if the thing is self-sufficient, why should it communicate with man at all? Paul Celan (1920–1970) suggests that ‘things’ murmur in their monologues and ‘the poet’ alone can hear them speaking. He is able to translate the frag- ments of their words into human language, by which he renews the words worn out in daily communications.12 Yet, even so, the ‘thing’ itself remains beyond touch. As Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) observes, it is not waiting to be destined. The ‘thing’ is presence which cannot be presented to the mind, always withdraws from the mind’s comprehension, and does not offer itself to dialogue or dialectic.13 The muteness of nature is a mystery. To emulate its si- lence, Adorno has suggested that ‘the poet’ must write in parataxis, rebelling against the realistic principle or classical harmony.14 Modern art, in its revolt against rules and its emphasis on materiality, appears to be precisely an effort to break into the territory of the absolute spontaneity of things.

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