Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
“Significant form” is a concept proposed by the British formalist aesthetician Clive Bell in the first chapter, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” of his famous book Art. This concept originally referred specifically to visual art, or was generalized from visual art, as Clive Bell put it: “I call these combinations and relations of lines and colours, and these aesthetically moving forms, ‘significant form’; it is that common quality possessed by all works of visual art.” The aesthetically moving process of “significant form” is the process of arousing people’s “aesthetic emotion,” and in Clive Bell’s view, this is precisely the process of truly experiencing “beauty.” In other words, the process of experiencing “beauty” can be summarized as: “perception of ‘significant form’” — “arousal of ‘aesthetic emotion’” — “experience of ‘beauty’.”
Clive Bell believed: “All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience; that is to say, they must be subjective.” Accordingly, he rejected all aesthetic systems that “pretentiously claim to be founded on objective truth.” However, if aesthetics is to be established as a discipline, it must first study subjective existence with an objective method or spirit; otherwise everything becomes dull and without clues. The “significant form—aesthetic emotion” theory that Clive Bell himself established can be regarded as an objective, abstract generalization of the basic model of “aesthetic experience,” a spiritual activity in which subject and object are unified; it is itself rich in observation and forms a school of its own, laying the foundation for formalist aesthetics. Moreover, this formalist aesthetic definition of “beauty” is extremely strict and distinctive: it cannot be natural beauty, nor the “beauty” toward which general emotions such as sensual desire and utility incline; none of these is “beauty” in the “aesthetic sense” as Clive Bell meant. On the one hand, he frankly admitted that all aesthetic systems must be subjective; on the other hand, when constructing his own aesthetic system, he strove to exclude all subjective factors. This theoretical contradiction led to the circular argumentation of Clive Bell’s aesthetic system: “significant form” arouses “aesthetic emotion,” while “aesthetic emotion” in turn originates from “significant form.” Although “significant form” is objective, it is also “forms arranged and combined by certain unknown, mysterious laws,” and its “significance” ultimately points distantly toward “ultimate reality.” This, in turn, tinges “significant form” with a layer of mysticism. With such influence, Clive Bell’s theory became a source-less, a priori existence: it can neither indicate where “the significance of form” comes from, nor provide a satisfying answer as to what “aesthetic emotion” is, and thus it is not self-sufficient.
On the question of “where does the significance of form come from,” we agree with Li Zehou’s “theory of aesthetic sedimentation,” namely that “the significance of form” comes from sedimentation under long-term historical—social—cultural conditions (here adopting Wang Huning’s formulation). From the perspective of the original form of this sedimentation, this “primitive sedimentation” originates in the long-term interaction between primordial humans and natural external objects in order to seek survival; in Li Zehou’s view, this is the process of transforming the objective world produced by labor production—tool use. Li Zehou pointed out: “In the long process of labor and production, primitive people grasped, became familiar with, and applied the procedures and laws of nature, such as rhythm, order, cadence, and so on, so that the lawfulness of the external world and the purposiveness of the subject were unified, thereby producing the earliest formation of beauty and aesthetic feelings.” “While creating activities of beauty, it also made human senses and emotions form an isomorphic correspondence with external objects… and acquired objective sociality,” that is, the process of “primitive sedimentation.” Therefore, although to modern people, the artistic creations left by primordial humans (if they are such) are merely forms constituted by combinations and relations of lines and colors, at the time of their creation such forms contained the creators’ strong purposes and emotions; through the network of historical time, these were internalized into the social-psychological structures within specific groups, shaping their aesthetic feelings. Once this psychological structure or aesthetic feeling is stimulated by a corresponding form, it will manifest as the arousal of “aesthetic emotion,” and this is precisely where the “significance” of “significant form” lies. In the first chapter of Li Zehou’s The Path of Beauty, the author, drawing on the latest achievements in archaeology, discusses how specific realistic animals such as fish, birds, and frogs evolved into abstract lines, and this evolutionary process caused “content to sediment into form, imagination and ideas to sediment into feelings.” As Li Zehou discusses in later chapters of this book, the reason why the line usage in ancient Chinese calligraphy and painting can embody unique aesthetic significance and arouse viewers’ unique aesthetic emotions is also due to “aesthetic sedimentation.”
It is worth noting that “aesthetic sedimentation” contains a historical time dimension; it is a product of different historical—social—cultural conditions, and thus it determines that the form itself of “significant form” has already departed from imitation and realism—namely, what Clive Bell called non-“representation”—and does not provide accurate “descriptive information.” On the other hand, it also determines that “the significance of form” is not an isolated, static, one-sided concept. From the vividness, liveliness, freedom, and ease of early Neolithic pottery patterns to the rigidity, heaviness, severity, and closure of the late period; the “ferocious beauty” of the taotie on bronze ware; the rational spirit of pre-Qin literature; the romanticism of Chu and Han; the uninhibited style and bearing of Wei and Jin… different historical—social—cultural conditions produced different “aesthetic sedimentations,” and the social “aesthetic feelings” of a given period are often influenced by earlier “aesthetic sedimentations,” appearing complex and diverse in content; yet the historical—social—cultural reality with which “aesthetic sedimentation” forms an isomorphic correspondence is indeed the fundamental source of “the significance of form.” And this “significance of form,” on the basis of the basic internal structure it possesses, will, due to interpretations within different historical—social—cultural frameworks, also embody different meanings, manifesting as distinctive “aesthetic emotions.” Clive Bell believed: “In primitive art you will not find accurate representation, but only significant form.” That is, he ignored the actual state of the original creation of primitive art, using the present to judge the past; taking formalized historical sedimentation as evidence for “significant form” is to fail to see the process of “aesthetic sedimentation” in between. Second, when Clive Bell ultimately reduces all “significance of form” to “ultimate reality,” he again commits the error of treating “aesthetic emotion” as a static, overly general state, which undoubtedly does not conform to the real movement of history. In fact, formalist aesthetics separates aesthetic feeling from natural beauty and from people’s general emotions; that is, it does not examine the subject–object unified aesthetic emotion from the perspective of the “unity of the lawfulness of the external world and the purposiveness of the subject” produced by human interaction with nature, and this is undoubtedly one-sided.
“Where does the significance of form come from?” Our answer is: it comes from the sedimentation of earlier historical—social—cultural conditions. People in different social groups seem to be able to feel “significant form” from the same artwork, thereby obtaining “aesthetic emotion” and experiencing beauty, but the “significance of form” and “aesthetic emotion” they feel may be different; even if similar, it may be similarity in aesthetic experience caused by commonalities existing in different historical—social—cultural conditions. Of course, the appreciation of “the significance of form” also depends on the activation of the viewer’s corresponding isomorphic aesthetic psychological structure; otherwise, “the significance of form” would again come from nowhere.
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