UNA CHIAVE DI LETTURA PER LA TRADIZIONE CINESE

Beniamino Ravera

In the present article I take as premise Chinese CASS (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) academist Zhao Tingyang’s work Tianxia de dangdaixing (2016) to propose an essential reading of the role which the political concept of tianxia played in the shaping of Chinese philosophical tradition and historical identity. The paper starts from analysing the philosophical meaning traditionally bestowed to the concept of tian by Chinese traditional culture, showing how in its constituting traits it mirrors a natural, comprehensive reality, in which the opposition and the relations between the different beings are resolved in a nonexclusive frame: this sort of tian is thereby inextricably linked to the ideal of harmony and the metaphysical conception of the world as a living, ever-regenerating flux of becoming. Having thus delineated some traits which characterize tian, the article returns to the political reality of tianxia, describing how it originated from the peculiar situation under which the Zhou dynasty (XI-III century b.C.) unified China, and how this historical circumstance determined it to be a political architecture voted to the maximization of mutual cooperation, whose prestige and legitimacy were fundamentally linked to the concept of the “government of virtue” and to a reflexive form of historical consciousness. In conclusion, I take a step forward into sketching a view which links the political system of tianxia and the various ways of interpreting it to the different schools of thought of Chinese philosophy, suggesting that even after its historical dissolution, the conceptual universe of tianxia played a key role in the shaping of the Chinese ‘nation’.