/lit/ - Literature

>Unlike the early Greek thinkers, then, who sought to under stand the question of dike through the confrontation between human and nature, as described by Heidegger, and unlike the Greek rulers, who sought to impose dike in order to overcome the excessiveness of the human, a spirit that we find the ancient Greek tragedies, the ancient Chinese seem to have endowed the cosmos with a profound morality expressed as a harmony which political and social life must follow, with the Emperor as the intermediary between the Heaven and his people: he must cultivate his virtue by studying the classics and through constant self-reflection (by way of resonance with others), in order to put things in their proper order, convenient both to Heaven and to his people:

>I heard that Heaven is the origin of all beings [...] so the sages follow Heaven in order to establish the way [Dao], therefore they have love for all and don’t take any standpoint from their own interest [...] Spring is the vibrant moment of Heaven, when the Emperor will spread his benevolence; summer is the growing moment of Heaven, when the Emperor cultivates his virtue [de]; winter is the destructive moment of Heaven, when the Emperor executes his punishments. Therefore, the resonance between Heaven and human is the way [Dao], from the ancient times to the present.

>Notwithstanding the fierce critique against Dong’s assimilation of Daoism and Yin-Yang into Confucianism, which was seen as a corruption of the ‘pure’ Confucian teaching, the unity between the cosmos and the moral has continued to be affirmed throughout the history of Chinese philosophy. This correlation between natural phenomena and the conduct of the emperor or the rise and fall of the empire may seem superstitious to us, yet it is worth emphasizing that the underlying spirit of such gestures, which continues after Dong, goes far beyond the mere correlation one might imagine, for example in mapping the number of solar eclipses and disasters in the Empire.

>The identification of moral with cosmic order draws its legitimacy not merely from the accuracy of such correlation, but rather from the belief that there is a unity between the Heaven and the human, which can be conceived of as a kind ofIt implies an inseparability of the cosmos and the moral in Chinese philosophy. On this point it is enlightening to turn to Mou Zongsan’s critique of Dong. In Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy, Mou denounced Dong’s thought as a cosmocentrism, since for Dong, the cosmos is prior to the moral, and therefore the cosmos becomes the explanation of the moral. Mou’s critique is no doubt justified; yet is it any more logical to place the moral prior to the cosmos?

i know, samurai are japanese and not chinese. sue me. sometimes a katana is just a katana.