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In the process of modernization, there are obstacles or divorces in the connection between individuals and social groups or the entire society due to the lack of synchronization between individual growth and social development. This phenomenon can easily cause negative emotions such as depression and anxiety, which can have adverse effects on the mental health of the people. The proposal of "Art and Health Management" is in response to the "Implementation of Mental Health Promotion Action" in the context of the "Healthy China Action Plan", with the goal of "whole person" education. Through art, it plays a regulating role in nourishing emotions, relieving stress, cultivating emotions, and strengthening the soul, which are related to health. This comprehensively promotes high-quality development and creates a high-quality life, providing theoretical basis and solutions for realizing the people's aspirations for a better life.
In foreign countries, "Art and Health" and "Art in Health" have begun to be used as proprietary terms, referring to fields related to art and medical treatment, medical education, prevention, public health, and well-being. This concept holds that art is an important component of health. In 2019, the WTO European Region released a report titled "What Is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well being? A Scoping Review," which concluded through research that various forms of art activities can effectively promote people's health. The report comprehensively reviewed five art forms or fields, including active or passive participation, all of which have clear benefits for the physical and mental health of participants. These five art forms include performing arts, visual arts, literary arts, cultural arts, and online arts. The release of this report signifies that the promoting relationship between art and health has been incorporated into an important academic research perspective in the world health industry, and also marks that "art and health management" is an important perspective related to the well-being of all humanity and a high level of quality of life.
In developed countries, the National Organization for Arts in Health (NOAH), headquartered in San Diego, California, USA, was officially established in 2016. The organization believes that art is a necessary component of health and conducts academic activities around art, health, and wellness, aiming to integrate art with medical treatment, medical education, prevention, public health, and wellness, and promote this concept to society.
The above concepts only involve the relationship between art and health, and in these concepts, people are passive participants and lack initiative based on self-management. It is necessary to construct a systematic theory of art and health management.
1、 Interpretation of the Concept of Art and Health Management
There are three key words in art and health management, namely "art", "health", and "management". After understanding these three keywords separately and combining them together, a fundamental interpretation of the concept of "art and health management" can be obtained.
Art itself is the most perfect form of carrying beauty, and it can even be said that 'aesthetics is philosophy of art'. Whether it is from Hegel's process of debating whether his works should be named 'philosophy of art' or 'aesthetics', or from Schelling's result of naming his works on aesthetics' Philosophy of Art', art and aesthetics are inseparable in essence. And when Plato projected the world of self perception twice with the "bed of God," "bed of the craftsman," and "bed of the painter," the "bed of the craftsman" in the real world reappeared as the "bed of the painter" in the self world. Through this result, it is not difficult to infer that the artwork itself is highly likely to be an extension of the self consciousness world, rooted in the self consciousness world, and therefore contains the possibility of presenting, connecting, and understanding the consciousness world. The empathetic function of art is also based on this. In other words, art is the purest form of the self world that can be perceived by us, and this form is conducive to our minimal loss and intuitive understanding of our own spirit and consciousness. Part of the hierarchy.
In the practice and teaching of art, it is evident that "art" is an innate talent, while "technique" is a skill that must be learned and trained. So, as an artist, one can achieve success through talent, but to become an artist, one must master the art. The process of truly mastering "art" is, in form, a process of moving from "technique" to "art", and in essence, a process of moving from the level of "technique" to the level of "Dao". Mastering "art" is a kind of "enlightenment" in the process of learning and practice. After experiencing both formal and essential thinking, this thinking ultimately falls on human perception ability. Therefore, the process of mastering the "technique" breaks away from its objective and cold perspective of existence, and returns to the self centered perspective. This is the transformation process from "instinct" to "function", and in this perspective, human initiative plays a crucial role.
Under this logic, the aesthetic value of art is manifested as a pursuit of aesthetic preference, that is, when we associate "instinct" with Freud's unconscious perception, "function" is consciously and actively constructing some rules or a kind of creation, just like music composition in opera art. Harmony is constantly arranged by composers in a tonal system to produce functions, and composers consciously and actively construct a musical work with tension and depth, which becomes a stable collection system of notes. Composers consciously construct a functional musical vibration system with order from the disordered instinctive musical vibration of notes, so the pursuit of aesthetic preference is... Create an order.
And 'order' itself points to the next keyword 'management'. Management is explained in classic management textbooks as "involving coordinating and supervising the work activities of others, so that their work can be efficiently and effectively completed". So in management, two very important dimensions are efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency serves as a means to integrate the use of resources, while effectiveness directly refers to whether goals can be achieved. Therefore, the goals of management are high efficiency represented by low resource waste and high effectiveness represented by high goal achievement. Under this philosophy, those engaged in management need to possess functions such as developing plans, establishing organizations, conducting leadership and control evaluations. Therefore, with the goal of "moving from disorder to order," the plan manages the steps, the organization manages the personnel, the leadership manages the actions, and the control manages the results. The function of a manager is essentially to ensure that the allocation of resources and the behavior itself and its effects form a stable order, thereby avoiding chaos and arbitrariness.
Management, which is more common and institutionalized in large factory enterprises, historically refers to the management of disordered artisans from a macro perspective, optimizing processes, resource allocation, and even competition in management, thereby promoting the development and progress of the industry and production level. However, in management studies, the objects are all external people and things, turning people into resources for management and allocation. Its scope of application is the real world. When we use art to focus management on the level of our own world, people are no longer objects, and managers face the optimization and configuration of their internal systems. For example, in emotional management, a series of psychological methods are used to reshape understanding or intervene with medication, in order to find a balanced state of chaotic emotions, thereby reducing internal friction and optimizing mentality; In terms of body management, Chinese bel canto is based on the training methods of the Chinese language, which enables people to find a balance between singing and enunciation based on the characteristics of the Chinese language when controlling the vocal system. This methodology itself can also be seen as a systematic management method for the parts of the body organs related to singing and vocalization.
Whether it is enterprise management, organizational management, behavior management, or emotional management, the goal is to establish an order that allows a systematic thing to operate stably and orderly under some systematic methods. This operation points to the third keyword "health", which is "health".
We will examine the character 'jian' in the context of traditional Chinese culture. In the Qian hexagram of the Book of Changes, there is a discourse that goes: "The Xiang says: Heaven is strong, and a gentleman should strive for self-improvement." In the Shuo Gua Zhuan, there is an explanation that "Qian is also strong. Here, the word "health" describes that "heaven" as a subject is positive when it operates on its own, therefore it is strong; 'Jian' describes a state of operation of the yang energy represented by heaven, which is strong and robust. When we associate the word "health" with "human", the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon refers to the material existence formed by the yin and yang of "birth" as "essence". The two essences fight to produce "spirit", while the "soul", which follows the "essence" and enters and exits between heaven and earth, is the physical body. Thus, the two "spirits" in heaven and earth are derived from the movement of the body. It can be considered that in traditional Chinese culture, the operating state of the sky - "health" - corresponds to the "human", indicating that the body's operating function is robust.
In traditional Chinese culture, both Guo Moruo and Lin Jieming believe that the word "Kang" comes from "Geng". In ancient times, musical instruments were often used to represent harmony, and the dots at the bottom symbolize the sound of the instrument shaking. From this, we can reasonably infer that the musical sound produced by instruments, after being related to humans, acts on auditory perception, that is, perception. In the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, after the two spirits fought to produce a "god", the perception that emerged with the interaction of the "god" was called "soul". Therefore, the harmony and joy expressed by the word "kang" is the perceptual state represented by the soul, which is an aesthetic state derived from psychology.
So, in the perspective of traditional Chinese culture, when it comes to understanding "health", we see a life process that focuses on "people", and this process pursues the healthy functioning of the body and the ability to perceive pleasure.
In summary, when the three words "art," "health," and "management" meet and recombine into a new holistic concept, they are connected by three anchor points based on the conscious ability of "people." They are: the pursuit of aesthetics from instinct to function, the construction of a systematic internal stable order, and the pursuit of physical function and perceptual function and happiness in the process of life. So the basic concept explanation of the new theory and concept of "Art and Health Management" can be summarized as follows: Art and Health Management is an interdisciplinary field that studies how art can help people construct a stable sense of order from a management perspective, so that they can effectively obtain health, have the ability and methods, and consciously and actively become the "first responsible person for their own health".
While taking "people" as the subject and object of research, "art and health management" ultimately points to the dialectical ideological system of "life aesthetics" that stands opposite to "life science" by integrating the "aesthetic value" contained in the keyword "art", the "life process" carried by "health", and the method of "management" with the goal of "constructing order".
2、 The Inner Classification of Art and Health Management
After we have a comprehensive understanding of the concept of "art and health management", the next question is to break down this concept and form a specific secondary research perspective.
Firstly, let's return to the concept itself. Health management "is a relatively large concept. In the directory of branches and committees of the China Health Management Association, we can see specific branches and committees that are combined or related to" health management "according to application needs, such as the" Student Vision Health Management Branch "that combines specific physical functions of specific populations as demand characteristics, the" Public Servant Mental Health Management Branch "that combines specific occupational scenarios as demand characteristics, the" Sports Health Management Professional Committee "that combines specific behaviors as demand characteristics, and so on. Therefore," Art and Health Management "itself is formed by extracting parts closely related to art from" health management ", or in other words," art "is used as demand characteristics. The intersection between perspective and health management.
So, art itself will become the perspective basis for our classification, which requires us to examine the classification method of art itself. Wang Yichuan discussed the five main classification methods of modern and contemporary art in his "Outline of Art Studies", including image composition, image perception, image appearance, image reflection, and image media. How should we classify art in order to better serve the interdisciplinary construction of art and health management? We need to return to the conceptual understanding of art and health management.
In the process of interpreting the concepts of art and health management, there is a very important foundation, which is to focus all three keywords on "people". In the process of focusing, it can be seen that an accompanying keyword is "self-awareness". And in the process of self-awareness, Qibo may provide a reference when answering a passage from Huangdi about the original god, which is: "So the person who accepts things is called the heart, the memory of the heart is called the meaning, the existence of the meaning is called the will, the change due to the will is called the thought, the distant admiration due to the thought is called the consideration, and the handling of things due to the consideration is called wisdom." In this process, the ultimate "wisdom" that perceptual ability reaches begins from the heart's acceptance of things, that is to say, all feelings and knowledge should start from the experience in the real world. So, in order to consciously develop wisdom about art and health management, we first need to form feelings from the specific experiences of artistic practice. In this way, based on sensory perception of artistic images, it becomes particularly important for the interdisciplinary field of art and health management.
In the classification of image perception, the book "Outline of Art" divides art into four categories based on perception methods: "First, visual art, including art, design, and architecture; second, auditory art, mainly music; third, audio-visual comprehensive art, including drama, film, television art, etc.; fourth, visual imagination comprehensive art, mainly referring to literature. While taking into account literature as a universal art form, dance, which has an independent disciplinary system, has not been included.
The source of human beauty is based on the "five senses", and among the many forms and genres of expressing beauty in human civilization, art is the highest level of presentation. Therefore, appreciating art based on the sensory system is the highest level of human sensory experience. Further thinking about the five ways of perception, it is not difficult to find that taste and smell mainly act on the body, more as physiological stimuli. The enjoyment of taste and smell is more like a pleasure rather than a beauty. Based on taste and smell, it is also difficult to feel the "charm" that art should have in traditional Chinese culture. Therefore, visual, auditory, and tactile senses are preserved, and of course, there can also be comprehensive art.
Visual art includes art, design, architecture, sculpture, literature (still based on visual imagination), and so on. Auditory art is mainly music, while tactile art encompasses dance. However, there must be a confusion here, that is, how is dance classified as tactile art? With this question, we also need to clarify a question. When we talk about the classification of art in the context of art and health management, from what perspective do we approach this work?
When we examine the different perspectives on the relationship between humans and music and art, we can roughly divide it into three levels: conceptual music, projected into the composer's auditory space, forming concrete musical works that contain music events based on musical language institutions; Music works are projected onto the real world played by performers, forming concrete sound systems that contain performance events; Sound, projected into the auditory space of the listener, forms concrete feelings and interpretations, which contain interpretive events. In this process of multiple projections, people from different positions perceive different levels of the ontology of music when they feel it. These ontology levels are sorted in the order of "conceptual music musical works sound". The lower the order, the more personal and characteristic factors are mixed in their feelings, while those in the first order are closer to the ontology of music.
In the context of dance, compared to music, the identity of the choreographer corresponds to the composer, and the identity of the dancer corresponds to the performer. However, choreographers and dancers are often the same person. Therefore, the distinction between composers and performers in music is merged into dance creators in dance, and the listeners of music become the audience in dance. We intuitively know that the audience does not receive dance through touch, they watch and feel the dance performance visually. However, can dance be considered visual art because of this? Obviously not.
So, returning to the conceptual explanation of art and health management, we have identified three categories based on the importance of sensory perception of artistic images: visual art, auditory art, and tactile art. When determining which category specific art forms belong to in the perspective of art and health management, we need to return to the point of "forming feelings from specific experiences in artistic practice". The specific experience of artistic practice brings us back to the identity of artistic creators. For dance, the creators and performers perceive the possibility and artistry of developing their own bodies through physical touch, and at the same time perceive the extension and shape of their bodies in space through touch. So, in the disciplinary context of art and health management, we discuss the classification of art from the perspective of art creators. From this perspective, music as an auditory art is because it reproduces the orderly combination of art that can be formed in the auditory space. Similarly, dance art is classified as tactile art because it externalizes tactile experience through body language to express a certain artistic order combination.
At this point, we have classified art and health management into visual art and health management, auditory art and health management, and tactile art and health management. Under the framework of these three categories, we can still use the term "specific art categories and health management" to conduct event based and more detailed research and exploration on the relationship between different art categories and health management.
3、 The core objectives of art and health management
The proposal of a new theory clarifies its own characteristics, attributes, and internal logic through conceptual interpretation, while the determination of classification methods provides comprehensive support for corresponding parts and materials. Therefore, it is now necessary to clarify the direction of this theory in order to know our direction of progress. And this requires an introductory theoretical construction of the core objectives of art and health management.
Foucault pointed out in "The Birth of Clinical Medicine" that clinical medicine constructs a "medical knowledge type", in which "the dream of the arithmetic structure of medical language must be replaced by the exploration of some internal scale", and this effort becomes a gaze, "it can scan the entire hospital field, capture and collect every event that occurs; when it measures, as it becomes clearer and clearer, it becomes a discourse of statement and teaching; in the process of repetition and convergence, events outline the contours of truth under its gaze, and truth is preserved in the teaching form because of this gaze and according to its original order, left for those who do not recognize it. Those who haven't seen it yet. Whether it is the statements and teachings formed by Foucault's measurement of events in hospitals, the contours of truth outlined, or the thorough quantification and digitization of life analysis, in clinical medicine and life sciences, knowledge transcends the body. As a concrete material carrier of a person in the real world, the body disappears from the gaze when it is transcended, and this disappearance also leads to the disappearance of the person themselves. The disappearance of such people occurs simultaneously in the field of hospitals, with doctors becoming spokespersons for medical knowledge in Foucault's sense, and patients becoming objects of numerical and indicative symptoms.
So, under the gaze of clinical medicine and life sciences, whether from the perspective of medical knowledge-based spokespersons or from the perspective of digital and indicator objects, humans have become a kind of existence. But the author believes that the birth of life is a stunning creation of the beauty of life, and every living species presents a unique posture of beauty to the world with its unique life characteristics. Human beings are the most advanced, intelligent, and creative species in countless lives, possessing the ability to present, appreciate, and create. Therefore, humans are not only beings, but also the potential to discover, record, study, and create all the beauty of life. Human beings are different from other species in that they can appreciate and create beyond presentation. In this aesthetic sense, "life aesthetics" can be interpreted as follows: "Life aesthetics is an unquantifiable concept. The reflection of the light of life emitted by living organisms is called life aesthetics." In other words, the interaction between life aesthetics and life science is to bring the body and human beings back into view again in the context of human existence under the gaze of knowledge.
When we extend Foucault's thinking on clinical medicine, "nourishing the soul and assisting health" becomes the goal of art and health management that emerged from Chinese traditional culture after reflection. In this goal, the most crucial personal goal is to "nourish the soul", a concept based on traditional Chinese culture. "Soul" and "spirit" are described in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, with the former "following the gods" and the latter "entering and leaving the essence". So the perceptual and bodily functions represented by "soul" and "spirit" sublimated to "essence" and "spirit", thus constructing the "whole person".
The concept of "whole person" is an important part of humanistic educational thought. Whole person education aims to promote the comprehensive development of students' cognitive and emotional qualities, as well as their self realization. It embodies the idea that learning is becoming, and aims to cultivate individuals who integrate their physical, mental, emotional, and mental abilities into one, that is, a "perfect person" or a "functionally perfect person" who thinks emotionally and acts cognitively. In Cai Yuanpei's educational philosophy, the value orientation of humanism is also reflected. "He introduced 'knowledge', 'emotion', and 'will' to reflect on the pursuit of the human spiritual world, and proposed the concept of 'replacing religion with aesthetic education', which emphasizes the important role of artistic education in the cultivation of the whole person. When we follow Cai Yuanpei and return to Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason studies the problem of 'knowledge', that is, exploring under what conditions human knowledge is possible, which belongs to epistemology. Critique of Practical Reason studies the problem of 'intention', that is, exploring what principles people use to guide moral behavior, which belongs to ethics. According to the division of the three aspects of knowledge, emotion, and intention in human psychological functions, there should be a specialized discipline that studies emotions, namely aesthetics." Peng Feng: "Introduction to Aesthetics," page 4.. So "health" and "knowledge" are closely connected, "management" and "intention" are closely connected, and "art" shares "emotions", building a perfect and communicative bridge between "health" and "management". Under such conditions, 'whole person' becomes capable of both pure rationality and practical rationality, and can communicate and improve between the two through aesthetic judgment.
If "art," "health," and "management" are the combination of epistemology and ethics under the communication of aesthetic judgment, then "art and health management" is the way and method of aesthetic judgment communication based on the "beauty" of art, and the form and result of the combination of epistemology and ethics based on "nurturing. 'Yi' corresponds to 'art', 'Yang' corresponds to 'health management', and 'Yi Yang' combines into a whole, which is the operational behavior of 'art and health management'. The goal of "Art and Health Management" is to focus on "Yi Yang" as the core keyword, aiming to achieve the cultivation of "whole person".
After clarifying this concept, we have formed a set of goals in human cultivation, namely: to arouse interest through art, find ways to promote interests in management, and ultimately lead to healthy enjoyment, so as to provide an outlet for stress release while also building an entrance for obtaining enjoyment. The goal of this talent cultivation system is to implement the concept of "three in one", which includes "knowledge" related to understanding new theories and concepts, "goodness" related to innovative content and research and development spirit, and "joy" related to the method of cultivating one's heart and emotions in order. That is to say, in terms of talent cultivation, a systematic knowledge structure of art and health management should be established, understanding what the art of health is, how art empowers and promotes health management, gaining practical experience and feelings through practice, and ultimately applying knowledge and experience to solve practical problems, becoming excellent talents with interdisciplinary knowledge background and thinking about reality from the perspective of all humanity. Under such a goal, pursuing a life of art, not just a life of technology, and becoming a soulful expert has become the essence of the topic.
Therefore, the aesthetic goal of art and health management is to establish the simple artistic functionality and practicality of "life aesthetics" on the opposite side of "life science" through a series of empirical studies on sound energy, healthy ballet, art healing, virtual reality and health management, starting from the four dimensions of human survival world, life world, spiritual world and emotional world. However, the expression of "practicality" should be distinguished from Mr. Zhu Guangqian's distinction between beauty and pleasure, which states that "beauty has nothing to do with practical activities, while pleasure arises from the satisfaction of practical requirements".
In the expression of the aesthetic goals mentioned above, the word "and" are used as connecting words, and the two words "functionality" and "practicality" are connected in parallel. That is to say, "practicality" is at least on the same level as "functionality", and in the current order of word usage, "functionality" can even be considered as the precursor of "practicality". So, there is an obvious logic here that art itself has aesthetic value, and this beauty is also reflected in life. The source of this beauty can be considered as the appreciation of "doing nothing" as Mr. Zhu Guangqian said. However, once the beauty forms a certain value, it is regarded as a holistic symbol, producing a function. The form of this symbol is to exist in the form of concrete art, and the meaning generated by the reference is segmented in the continuity of a system, pointing to a certain function. This is similar to "chords in a tonal system, a certain I-V" The segmentation of art in the system of art and health management is directed towards the function of health and management in a certain aesthetic way, just like the segmentation of "belonging to function". Practicality enters the perspective of discussion after the emergence of functionality. In other words, the practicality we refer to here is an extension of functionality under structuralism, which is not contradictory to Mr. Zhu Guangqian's viewpoint that beauty does not come from practicality. The two discussions are at two different stages. The existence of functionality and practicality is also the core goal of art, health management, and life aesthetics in a larger humanistic system based on "whole person".
After the recognition of functionality and its extended practicality, the goal of "acquiring the ability to consciously and actively enjoy oneself" becomes a functional expression, projected onto the practicality that plays a positive role in personal ability development. It gradually forms a step of first changing cognition through art, then gaining health through experience and cultivating habits, and finally establishing a new order through management. It points to a lifestyle based on the cultivation of hobbies through art and health management, allowing people to enjoy themselves in the process of becoming a whole person. At the same time, four issues have gradually entered our thinking and research perspective, namely: the relationship between art and technique, the explanation of health and wellness, the dual nourishment of body and mind, and the integration of soul and spirit. In this proposal, "training from instinct to function" has gradually become the conceptual foundation for the development, cultivation, and growth of individual abilities. The humanistic care of life sciences and life aesthetics has also become a consistent cornerstone of the concept.
This article is published in the first issue of the Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition) in 2024