Heaven and Man: From a Cross-Cultural Perspective

The particularist and nationalist “Asian values” argument has a variation in the form of a theory of the “Unity of Heaven and Man,” which makes the claim that Eastern, and particularly Chinese, way of thinking is holistic, synthetic, and advocating the harmony of man and nature, whereas the Western way of thinking is analytic, aggressive, and responsible for the destruction of nature and many ecological disasters. By examining in some detail the theory of the “Unity of Heaven and Man” as famously proposed by the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B. C. E.) during the Western Han dynasty and the European medieval ideas of the Great Chain of Being and the correspondences between man and nature as microcosm and macrocosm, I try to debunk the dichotomous view proposed by some Chinese scholars and argue for the importance of breaking away from stereotypes and prejudices for a better understanding of different cultures and traditions East and West.

ZHANG Longxi was educated at Peking (MA) and Harvard (Ph. D.) and has taught at Peking, Harvard, and the University of California, Riverside. He is currently Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. His major research interest is East-West studies and his publications in English include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005), and most recently, Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007), which is based on his Alexander Lectures delivered at the University of Toronto in 2005.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, the Program in Folklore and Folklife, and the East Asian Studies Program.