The Ethical Nonself

This article reexamines the entanglement of religion and aesthetics in the modern making of China through the question of the ethical demand in the face of suffering and imperial warfare. Taking the pioneering manhua artist Feng Zikai as a central yet liminal figure in the literary history of Republican China, it traces the reinvention of classical Chinese aesthetics in light of the philosophical concerns of post-Kantian German aesthetics. By locating their convergence on the ethical nonself, it then reconstructs Feng's articulation of the child as an antidevelopmental figure and the ethics of the childlike heart. Furthermore, by resituating both the discourse on vegetarianism as a form of moral self-fashioning and the ethical aesthetics of Feng Zikai's manhua within Buddhist discourses on the karmic structure of vegetarianism and a devotional logic of image making as merit making, this article sketches an account of Feng Zikai's ethics of uselessness. In doing so, it problematizes the religious and secular divide in modern China and seeks to illuminate the intersection of the religious and the aesthetic in Republican China.