Emerson and neo-confucianism
Subtitle: crossing paths over the pacific
By: Yoshio Takanashi ; [with a foreword by Lawrence Buell]
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 193
ISBN-13: 9781137332929
Subjects: Knowledge; Nature; Criticism and interpretation; Neo-Confucianism in literature; Transcendentalism in literature; Nature in literature
Description: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Nature, "The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." The great Chinese synthesizer of Neo-Confucian philosophy Zhu Xi expressed a similar idea in the twelfth century: "In the realm of Heaven and Earth it is this moral principle alone that flows everywhere." Though living in different ages and cultures, these two thinkers have uncanny overlap in their work. A comparative investigation of Emerson's Transcendental thought and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, this book shows how both thinkers traced the human morality to the same source in the ultimately moral nature of the universe and developed theories of the interrelation of universal law and the human mind.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-186) and index.
Table of contents: title: Neo-Confucianism, Japan, and "nature is principle": foundations for a comparison of Emerson and Zhu Xi; title: The fundamental principle and the generation of the universe; title: Cosmic law and human ethics; title: Realization of the self.