Abstract Although the research on literary ontology had been hot in literary circles in the 1980s, it has been treated coldly in recent years as many scholars have shifted their interest to new cultural criticism due to the dissemination of post-modernism and the development of popular culture, and they unfurl the banner of anti essentialism and think that systematic basic theory research has been out of date. But we think that ontology shouldn't and can't be out of date in any age, since it explores the meaning of being which is the question of universal and ultimate significance to us, and solves the question concerning the foundation and values of our existence. In a society with moral irregularity and prevalent material or human desires, people are all encountering the serious spirit crisis and belief crisis. In the field of art and literature, for example, the depth has been reduced, the centre has been absent, and meaning has vanished. Considering all these, it is of urgent realistic significanee to enhance the study of literary ontology. For this reason, we invite four experts in this area to state their new points of view. In his article My Views on Literature and Ontology, Prof. Zhu IAyuan makes an etymological study of the term ontology and clarifies the long-standing mistaken conception in this regard, before reviewing the development of ontology briefly and inspecting the important changes that have happened to ontology in modern philosophy. According to him, modern ontology should be the theory of practice, while literature should be regarded as a basic means of existence. In his The Crisis and Hope of Literary Ontology, Prof. Wang Yuechuan thinks that modern ontology has corrected the mistake of ignoring man in classical ontology, and regarded man's existence as the core. The mission of literature and ontology is to examine and establish the value of man's existence, which is of realistic significance for us to overcome today's nihilism and rebuild our spiritual homeland. In his The Art as Technique, Desire andDao, Prof. Peng Fuchun tries to construct asystem of literary ontology. In his opinion, literature is simultaneously the act of technique, the production of desires, and the appearance of Da Dao. There is a waltz of game among them, which makes art become pluralistic. In his How Can Literary Ontology Be Tenable in the Vision of Post-metaphysics, Associate Prof. Su Hongbin thinks that we should regard surpassing metaphysics and the dualistic way of thinking as our methodological precondition today. For this, we must look for an original method of thinking to rebuild ontology. Given this, literature is then regarded as a basic channel by which the meaning of being is made obvious. All these researches have enlightened us from various perspectives. My interest in literary ontology is to extricate myself from the difficult position of the research on literary value (practical value). In my article The Theoretical Value of Literary Ontology, through analyzing the meaning in the history of Kant's thought about ontology, I propose that we should regard human ontology, which is based on the unity of teleology and actinology, as the ideological foundation of our literary ontology, so as to avoid being subjective and random in understanding literature, overcome the relativism which comes from the differences between all kinds of criteria for evaluating literature, and provide the real, objective criterion of truth for literary value. Man is in eternal pursuit of truth. It is only through the full discussion that we will be able to be nearer to the truth. We should like to thank these experts for their great support to this column, while hoping that many more colleagues will join us for a further discussion.
|