中國明代距今已經六百多年，然而，當時所產生的許多思想、文化與藝術等活動，至今卻依然潛移默化地影響著我們。例如「文人畫」的風格、「三絕四全」的畫面構成、「尖圓齊健」的毛筆四德等等，這些在書畫學習上常見的專有名詞或用語，都是在明代被當時文人們所整理歸納而來。另外，明代興起的戲曲與白話小說，今日依舊盛行不衰。如李漁所謂的四大奇書《三國演義》、《水辯傳》、《西遊記》、《金瓶梅》，就被翻拍、改寫成不少的電影或戲劇，甚至成爲時下流行的電腦遊戲內容，造成一股《三國演義》的閱讀熱潮。由地方戲曲改良而成的「崑曲」，則在2001年正式被聯合國教科文組織列爲「人類口述和非物質遺產代表作」。2004年由白先勇率領的青春版《牡丹亭》巡演也曾轟動一時。 由此觀之，所謂的世俗文化，經由文人的介入改良而精緻化以後，不僅提升了整體的文化素質，也吸引了更多的文人參與其中。但問題就出在於此。所謂士農工商的等級分別，到了明代已經出現鬆動甚至模糊曖昧的現象。因爲，若要達到世俗與精緻藝術之間彼此通融交流，首先就必須打破傳統固有的階級制度。 因此，本文試圖由社會學的角度，討論明代的政治環境、文人地位的轉變，以及當時社會的經濟、思想與文化，觀察明代畫派形成的背景因素，從而總結出董其昌「南北宗論」有其中國繪畫傳統上的必然性，即文人階級的再認定。並藉此將「南北宗論」的爭議，置入歷史發展的脈絡中，期待以更客觀地思考與判斷繪畫史中的問題。

The Ming Dynasty of China had created many thoughts and cultural or artistic products more than six hundred years ago. Those products remain to change and influence contemporary people's life unobtrusively and imperceptibly. For example, the styles of literati painting; the layouts of ”three extremely competences and four top skills”, including poem, calligraphy, painting, and sigil; and, ”the four virtues of brushes”, including pointed, even, round, and resilient. These terminologies on writing or painting were almost all created by the literati in Ming. Even the dramas and novels written in the Ming Dynasty still remain very popular by now, such as the ”Four Big Novels”, named by Li Yu, including ”Romance of Three Kingdom”, ”Water Margin”, ”Outlaws of the Marsh”, ”The Journey to the West”, and ”The Plum in the Golden Vase”. Those novels had been reversed, rewrote, and even re-edited into many films, dramas, and even computer games, and that gave rise to a trend of reading the novel ”Romance of Three Kingdom”. ”Kunqu opera”, a kind of drama renewed from a local one, had gained an honor label: ”the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity is an international distinction” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2001. Accordingly, the tour performances of ”The Peony Pavilion: young version”, re-created and lead by Bai Sianyong, had also been very popular over many places in China since 2004. According to the above, the literati's interventions and devotions not only enhanced the quality of culture entirely, but also attracted more literati to get involved and to participate the demotic culture activities. But, it also caused some problems. To achieve the interaction and inclusion between popular and elaborative arts, the borderlines must be broken first, therefore the four classes of people tiered as scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants had started to loose their grounds and the borderlines had started to get blur. To sum up, the study was intended to discuss the Ming's styles of painting and the contexts of articulation from the Ming dynasty's political environment, the changing social positions of literati, and the contexts of social economic, thought and culture from the perspectives of Sociology, and to get the conclusion that the ”Theory of the Southern-Northern Schools” proposed by Dong Cichang was historically logical and inevitable on the identification of literati's social status. The author has also tried to revise Dong's theory into the contexts of history, and provide some suggestions about how to think and determine the problems of painting objectively.