A Study Of Laozi’s Tao And Modern Civilization Construction

In today’s era, ecological crisis both regional and global has posed great challenges to the sustainability of human society. Almost every individual country is thinking of how to meet the challenges and strive for a balance between man and nature. China is in an era of accelerated industrial development, and the situation of its ecological environment cannot be more severe today. The country faces outstanding difficulty in finding solutions to it. Essentially, human beings’boldness to fight against their self-made pollution is just like self-deceit, despite the invention of so called high and new technologies across the world using one thing to overcome another and the strategic emerging industries such as energy-saving and eco-friendly industries, new generation information technology, bioscience industries, hi-end equipment manufacturing, new energies and new materials. Facts prove that it not only needs enormous investment to produce, build and operate the pollution-treating equipment, but there is also great difficulty treating the diffused pollution, which causes secondary consumption and pollution at the same time. Seen from the environmental condition of the world today, the concept of sustainable development people proposed is merely a self-deceiving game with the aim to seek personal gains. The root cause of the environmental problems is in fact people’s boundless avarice and ignorance to the divine law. It can be expected that despite people’s capacity to discover the gravitational waves, the nature will revenge on and even destroy the human society eventually if they don’t fundamentally change their way of life or rethink where human beings have come and where they will go.Based on the summary of the ways of the so called progress of human civilization, the paper comes to a basic conclusion that the industrial civilization dominated by western countries and its ailments in the spiritual, political and ideological domains are still spreading and will not be addressed once and for all. It can be seen from a review of the Chinese civilization from the 21st Century BC to 21st Century AD that the oriental civilization of 5000 plus years by the First Opium War in the 19th century has been maintained thanks to the nation’s innate concept of man and nature being one. People nowadays may condemn the sufferings of modern China mainly caused by the comparatively slow evolution of the feudal society, but history is history, which allows no assumptions. However, the traditional Chinese concept of man and nature being one, cosmology, outlook on life and their values are one of the important reasons why Chinese nation has maintained its continuous development for thousands of years. The power of the industrial civilization is highly recognized, but it has consumed almost all the non-renewable resources buried underneath since the evolution of the earth. If China, a country on its eve of great rejuvenation, fails to recognize this and spurns the rich Chinese civilization and its core origin merely because of the its fast development over the recent 30 years, disasters will befall our generation, so we must seek a new way of development.Chinese nation is a great one advocating the divine law, which was the chaos before the existence of heaven and earth and is the most fundamental law under heaven. According to Herbert Mainusch, a German educator and philosopher, Chinese philosophy is an indispensable element of our spiritual world. To be fair, the spiritual hatchers of the world should be Plato, Lao Zi, Aristotle and their like. It’s a pity, however, that many philosophical works of this era always refer to some ancient European philosophers and ignore Lao Zi and his Laws Divine and Human, unwisely rejecting an important source to the European civilization. The argument of this paper is the divine law of the Chinese nation, pointing out that the divine law is not only in the minds of the philosophers and thinkers, it exists objectively and is the summary of the ancient Chinese scholars about the cosmos, nature, social evolution and its law of development. Lao Zi was the first to name the objective law which reflects the essence, origin and the operation law of the world. Different from the Confucian idea of expounding on predecessors’theories without creating any, Lao Zi elaborated on the essence of the world and initiated Chinese philosophy on the basis of the law. The law was not created by Lao Zi, for it is an objective existence. At the same time, it is the law of philosophy initiated by Lao Zi, cementing a solid foundation of the Chinese civilization in the axial age and exerting a deep impact on the schools of Confucianism, Mohism, Taoism and legalism, which are at the core of the Chinese civilization.Lost in concrete jungles, modern people tend to merely probe into the narrow-minded human law, oblivious of the divine law. It is thus of great importance to re-establish the status of Lao Zi and the divine law as well as to seek its roots and define its nature, for it will provide thoughts and reference to modern China and its people’s pursuit of materials, bewilderment, political ideas and ecological progress, and it is of far-reaching significance in promoting China’s modern civilization, namely progress in material, spirit, politics and ecology.