Does the West Know Everything About Nature? (the Image of Nature in the Chinese Tradition)
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article discusses the image of nature in Chinese traditional culture. Preference is given to philosophical (rather than cultural, literary, ethical, aesthetic, ethnological) analysis. However, the material on which this analysis is made comes from different sources of experience and has a different nature - symbolic, conceptual, poetic, literary, historical, linguistic. This is fully correlated with the nature and content of traditional Chinese culture as such, which reveals a well-known, but insufficiently thought-out, and meanwhile, defining syncretism. However, it is very important to note that this syncretism cannot be understood in the generally accepted sense of mythological mixture. Rather, it correlates with the “matrix-network” nature of the Chinese image of nature. The syncretism of nature in the Chinese tradition is, so to speak, almost the syncretism of a mathematical determinant or matrix. So that there are many different elements, but in such a way that each is in its place, and is with each other element in a completely ordered relationship. In this case, these are not only formal elements but also conceptual, actual, pragmatic. From this point of view, another mathematical association of the traditional Chinese image of nature arises – an association with the concept of a group in group theory. Nature, 天上的 ("Heavenly") in the Chinese traditional key can be defined by this analogy as an invariant of a certain group (or many groups) of transformations, the set of all symmetries of the system - mythological, formal, linguistic-written, pictorial, ethical, aesthetic, poetic, political, etc. Yes, there are metaphors in Chinese culture, and moreover, it is full of metaphors. But both in traditional Chinese culture in general and in the Chinese “natural philosophical” doctrine in particular, any metaphor, from our point of view, is, first of all, a metaphor of structure and the regime of structure. The main attention in the article is paid to the analysis of the main features of the immanent way of constructing the idea of nature within the Chinese cultural tradition – anthropomorphism, linguistics, characteristic aestheticization, the specific role of the numerical component, the structure of spatio-temporal meanings, etc., and the corresponding structural and instrumental formations.
Author: Marina Smolyaga
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4408772313