Taoist And Confucian Concept Of The Ecological And Aesthetic

This dissertation is intended to take ecology as world view and by it to give Chinese Taoism and Confucianism a new look, and to explore their ecological wisdom and corresponding aesthetic pursuit.Since ecological world view is taken as a key to unlock both Taoism and Confucianism, a brief introduction and carding firstly on background knowledge, developing history and main ideas of ecological world view would be a primary task. In 20^th century, more and more negative consequeces resulting from modern science appeared gradually, so people began to question the values created by science and even to question science itself, and the negative influence also becam an incentive for people to reconsider traditional world wiew on which modern science was based. Furthermore, in early 20s, the traditional scientific world view encountered great challenge from new physics, especially theory of relativity and the quantum theory, which made many traditional ideas inapplicable in subatom level, such as the concept of matter, objective truth and reduction theory, etc. But on the other hand, ecology, as a brand new kind of science, has been developing rapidly, turning from a branch of biology into general subject, and eventually into sort of world view physically. Generally the new world view can be described as organism theory, evolutionism and holism which would not only avoid mechanistic analysis and treating of nature, but avoid absent treatment of ethics, aesthetics and art etc.Essentially, both Taoism and Confucianism can also be regarded as ecological world view, because both of them contain the same two central ideas, that is to say, they both take the world as an organic community and an evolutional process. But as two different cultural patterns, their ecological ideas have little in common. Although both of them regard the whole nature as an organic community, the logical routes they followed respectively are totally different, and even opposite. The Taoist mainly focused on the natural evolutional process, so the logic route they followed is: Tao→Yinyang→everything on earth, in their own words, "Tao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth...