Ecological Thought In Ancient China And Construction Of Modern Environmental Ethics

Ancient Chinese philosophy accumulates a lot during past more than 2000 years from Zhou dynasty to Ming and Qing dynasty.Comparing with western ecophilosophy,Chinese one has vivid identity of its own.As the two dominate theories in Chinese culture,Taoism and Confucianism both take Unity of Nature and Human as their utmost goal,both of them put the focus on the environment-human relations,Taoism approach it from the perspective of Tao,which is highly above everything to explore the relations between the nature and human beings.Based on the principle of Natural and Effortless,it advises people to lead lives according to the rules of nature,free from human intervention,obey the orders of nature,treat everything equally,and be a harmonious integral part of nature.To the contrary,Confucianism takes the perspective of Human,painting the color of morality that belongs to human society on nature.It brought forward the concepts of ecomorality of Bhadra-mukha Appreciates Everything and aggressive Man Equals With Heaven and Earth.It wishes to achieve the goal of harmonious integration of human and nature.All these thoughts exhibit characteristics of traditional Chinese ecomorality.This paper intends to starts from the dielmma that contemporary human being are facing,analyse the part about environment-human relations referred in ancient Chinese philosophical works,then further explore its origin to make it modernized.It also have a scan of modern western ecophilosophy.Meanwhile,through the comparsion of the two,the unique values and advantages of traditional Chinese ecophilosophy,as well as its limitations can be revealed.Thus we can fully informed that,traditional Chinese ecomorality have limitations in both theory and practice,because China lagges behind in civilization and Sci-Tech development,and we also lack in instrumental reason.This phenomena urges us to adopt rational attitude towards Chinese ecophilosophical tradition.If we want traditional Chinese ecomorality plays a more important role in modern society and help us back to the state of harmonious unity of human and nature,we must transform its outside form from traditional one to modern,that means we should put it into recoustruction.To achieve this purpose,we must rebulid up ecophilosophy with Chinese characteristics,which is nature and human evolve simultaneiously,value rationlity and instrumental reason mutual-supplementing,spiritual world and environment advancing together.The domain of ecomorality should be clearly defined,and the human activities should be regulated.After traditional Chinese ecomorality finished its trasformation and reconstruction of its tradition,harmonious relations between human beings and nature can be restored,it can make contribution of its own in coordination of the sustainable development of mankind and environment protection.