The Laconic Research On DongZhongshu's Philosophy Of History

In order to eliminate the drawbacks of the current ruling ideology and guide the great unification of Han Dynasty to a more consolidated and brighter future, Dong Zhongshu put forward his philosophy of history that is corresponding with the demands of the times. Based on the deep research and holistic comprehension on the traditional Confucian classics and history and so on, it is his comprehensive review of the ancient academic thoughts since the Pre-Qin Dynasty. Living in a transitional period between the Qin and Han dynasty, Dong Zhongshu had the strong sense of historical mission for the tradition and culture, consciously reflecting the history and reality. His philosophy of history is a melting furnace, which merged philosophical thinking and historical reflection into one body, reflected a profound historical awareness. Such consciousness rooted in tradition, transforming the tradition to his own. His performance of the traditional heritage of Chinese culture's self-integration and self-innovation, his courage and spirit to criticize and pioneer is very clear. This courage and spirit, not only is a distinctive landmark in the history of his thoughts and his reflecting the pre-history, but has been throughout his philosophy system.In particular, Dong Zhongshu integrated every school thoughts into one body, as well as his own several decades of accumulated experience and knowledge of practice, and then explained the "Spring and Autumn Annals "again, carefully analyzing the deep meaning of the history incidents. Therefore, his philosophy of history, not only comes from the reinterpretation of the classical texts, but projects his historical practice. His philosophy system is also rooted in his history practice. Well, how to demonstrate the above meaning is this paper's main mission.In the first part of this paper, firstly setting up the core criteria and standard theory of philosophy of history, according to this we can infer that the Gong-Yang Commentaries on Spring and Autumn Annals can be regarded as a kind of historical philosophy including Dong Zhongshu's thoughts.The second part concretely demonstrates the nature and human being together to form the creator and the pusher of the development of history. During this process, Dong Zhongshu integrated the order of the nature and the development of secular history, which proved that the development of human history should be a more conformity-to-end, namely, human history should be in accordance with the will of the nature to evolve. Therefore, the development of history, also should not be haphazard, but according to a certain pattern started. The evolution process "small cycle, big progress" constitutes Dong zhongshu's view of history development process.The third part integrates the epistemology and methodology into theory of knowledge: since the nature has the absolute authority, and creates human history, then in order to get historical cognition, we can use the method by observing the will of the nature through "no category analog" and so on. Confucius wrote "Spring and Autumn Annals", which was in accordance with the will of the nature. Therefore, it is the most reliable basis of historical cognition.The last part analyzes the Characteristics of Dong zhongshu's philosophy of history from the perspective of annotation, compared with the historical philosophy of Augustine who lived in the Western Medieval. By the comparison, we also found the historical philosophy's similarities and differences between ancient China and the West. Finally, Dong Zhongshu's philosophy of history has a reinterpretation the relationship between the nature and human being, to realize the revival of spirit in the organic unity of history. So the signification of Dong Zhongshu's philosophy of history has been elucidated, which is a perfect achievement of his historical philosophy's construction - this is the conclusion.