Author(s)

Verena Xiwen Zhang

Department of Philosophy, Tunghai University, Taichung.

This paper aims at reflecting on our life in contemporary predicament of living in “iron cage” and with “value-fragmentation” proposed from Max Weber through exploiting Chinese philosophical thoughts to synthesize the contribution from different disciplinaries. It intends to explore the issue in the Italian Renaissance but not only limited in that golden age—how could the artistic, cultural achievement in an age be possible? To explore this, issues could easily fall into describing social phenomena by using social scientific terms. When using descriptive language to depict social phenomena, we may find out lots of reasons from a higgledy-piggledy collection of phenomena fragments and social scientists try their best to give reasonable explanations for those phenomena. They have given lots of significant contributions through their research approach. However, in this paper, it aims to discover this issue through interdisciplinary approach to combine the geopolitics, macro-history, and cultural history as well as finally synthesize those perspectives and give more comprehensive picture mapped up by means of Chinese pre-Qin Daoist philosophy and pre-Qin Confucianism. In terms of geopolitics and macro history, this paper firstly attempts to explore how natural environment conditioned and affected economic development and political stability in Renaissance Venice and Florentine. In addition, it discusses whether patronage in Renaissance and Chinese Song Dynasty was merely to show off wealth or not? Furthermore, it introduces pre-Qin Confucianism to enlarge the philosophical aspect on those two questions. In Conclusion, it concludes on how pre-Qin Confucianism maps together with pre-Qin Daoism and how we can benefit from the synthetic perspectives of macro history, geopolitics, social science, and that of traditional Chinese philosophy to be in face of nowadays dilemma.

Italian Renaissance, Geopolitics, Macro-History, Venice, Florence, Pre-Qin Daoist Philosophy, Laozi, Pre-Qin Confucianism

Zhang, V. (2020) Chinese Philosophical Viewpoints on the Natural and Humanistic Conditions of Artistic Achievement in the Italian Renaissance and Its Contemporary Implication. Open Journal of Philosophy, 10, 9-23. doi: 10.4236/ojpp.2020.101002.