Ecological Philosophy Of Lao-Tzu And The Enlightenment To The Ecological Ethical Education

Ecological environmental problem has become a global problem of the 21st century, that is affecting the entire human survival and development. The depletion of resources and the deterioration of the environment form a sharp contradiction with uncontrolled development and destruction. With the increasingly prominent ecological and environmental problems, people began to realize the need to handle the relationship between human and nature, the need to form a new kind of human ecological values and ecological morality, and the need for wide dissemination of those ecological concepts. Thus a new kind of moral education activities emerge, namely ecological ethics education.It is primarily a kind of education of worldviews, outlook on life and values that build on the basis of the relationship between human and nature, and is based on the theory of ecological ethics. Therefore, it is the important task of ideological and political education that is to include the ecological ethical education in the ideological and political education in the new period. When human beings in the face of global ecological crisis reflect on their own and explore the countermeasure, the ancient Chinese philosophy has already provided enlightening wisdom to the future. "Tao Te Ching" contains rich ecological philosophy researching by domestic and foreign scholars widely and deeply. On the basis of expounding the core concepts of "Tao", "nature", "inaction", Lao-tzu made brilliant views of ecological philosophy on how to deal with the relationship among the heaven, earth and man. In aspects of objectives, contents and methods, there are many similarities between ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu and modern ecological ethical education.Therefore, this thesis describes the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu, researches how to improve the objective, content and methodology of ecological ethical education, and aims to offer references for modern ecological ethical education. My thesis has four parts:The first part is the historical retrospective of the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu. Firstly it gives the overview of Lao-tzu and his book "Tao Te Ching", and then analyzes the practice and cultural background of ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu. Ecologic philosophy of Lao-tzu was conceived in the late Chunqiu Period which is the transition from slavery to feudalism. In that period, economic, political and cultural environment had undergone tremendous changes. While ecologic philosophy of Lao-tzu absorbed the ecological wisdom of ancient Chinese sages and the "Book of Changes".The second part describes the connotation of the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu. Firstly, it analyses the core idea of "Tao Taking Nature as Its Law" and explains what is meant by "Tao" and "natural". And then, it gives detailed discussion on how to deal with the relationship among the heaven, earth and man, including the holistic view of "the Tao produced everything", the equality view of "everything is equal", the moderate view of" A contented mind is a perpetual feast" and the self-cultivation view of "less selfishness and fewer desires". Finally, it compares several major contents of the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu with modern ecological ethics philosophy respectively to find common characteristics between them.The third part of thesis summarizes the main features of the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu and evaluates their limitations. We result transcendence characteristic from the perspective of the comparison of the ecological ethics philosophy among Lao-tzu and Confucius, modern Western. We result to use integrity and intuitive method from the perspective of mode of thinking. We analyze its limitations from the perspective of mystique, resolution of contradiction and too much emphasis on value rationality in the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu.The fourth part analyzes the enlightenment of the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu to the ecological ethical education. It includes remodeling goals, expanding content and improvement method.Due to the existing problems and the promising expectations in the objectives, content, methodology of modern ecological ethical philosophy, it urgently needs to dig the ecological philosophy of Lao-tzu.