审美与功利(7)

Of course, aesthetic point of view is not limited to art, we can also take that attitude toward life. As long as you have an eye for beauty, you can find beautiful things up hill and down dale: beautiful sceneries, delicious food, people with beautiful minds, unusual buildings and colorful flowers. As long as you take the attitude of "admire it in the distance rather than play and possess it rashly", they can always bring pleasure to you. Subsistence and joy are the most important things for our living beings. Hence utilitarian and aesthetic point of view like our two legs. We can't walk without neither of them and we always call somebody a cripple, an unhealthy man if he lacks any one of them. Having integrated into the group of depressed patients, I found not a few of them had been trained to be utilitarians in current educational environment. In the meantime, their modes of thinking hindered them from changing into another angle to see the world, and in this way they fell into a wrong path and got stuck in the mud of depression. As a matter of fact, they can not only grow up healthily, but be healthier than all the normal people around if they learn to "walk with another leg". How important the aesthetic view of point is that it can cure disease! Generally speaking, we mortal beings need first to survival and then to be happy. Having acquired adequate living resource and could thus lead a favorable living, we have to "focus on the aesthetic leg to walk" and derive pleasure from every beautiful triviality in ordinary life, otherwise we will become the slave of desire and never get a thrill of joy even if we keep running day and night like a machine to satisfy it.