Confucianism advocates the unity of man and nature, which has been fundamental to the philosophical thoughts in China for thousands of years. When the whole mankind is facing an ecological crisis due to the rapid industrialization and the unequal development in the world, some important Confucian concepts concerning the relationship of man and the natural environment have been re-interpreted by some leading scholars of new Confucianism, such as Ji Xianlin and Tu Weiming, in dialogue with other relevant religious and philosophical thoughts, especially in Hinduism and Christianity. The essay intends to analyze some of the important texts of new Confucian scholars and to explore their significance in relation to the contemporary ecological thinking. In addition, a comparative approach will be adopted to address the commonalities of different religions and philosophical traditions with regard to their conceptualization of man and its position in the secular and material world.

Organic naturalism is the metaphysical basis of Western aesthetic modernity, the development process of which has always been accompanied by a shift from “mechanical modernity” to “organic modernity”. The paper discusses the intertwining between Chinese culture and Spinoza and Leibniz, who were known as the “ancestors” of the theory of organism, and furthermore points out that there were both external “confluences” and internal “influences” between Confucianism and Western theory of organism. Based on the organism, aesthetic modernity had taken its shape, or, in other words, both of them developed synchronously, and the development process of which were accompanied along with the factual participation of Confucianism. However, this kind of participation, generally speaking, is secretively resonant and difficult to be accurately measured.

Prof. Li Zehou, a renowned Chinese scholar, once proposed to construct some kind of "world philosophy" by integrating the thoughts of Confucius, Marx and Kant. Following this line of thought, a deep comparison and integration of Confucius's Gantong Theory, Karl Marx's Practical Aesthetics, and Immanuel Kant's thoughts of "Sensus Communis" may lead to the generation of some kind of new aesthetics. Confucius emphasized that accepting others with an open mind and obtaining inner peace is the premise of "feeling into the essence of the world." He believed that "fully understanding ordinary people" is a precondition for "world peace", while aesthetic activities, such as poetry learning and appreciation, or Xing Guan Qun Yuan (兴观群怨）are means to understand people deeply. Therefore, Confucius sought to influence others through spiritual communication, and opened up a way to reinforce foundation and promote development through artistic aesthetics. Marx argued that feelings derived from repeated practices could "directly make a person a theorist". That is, a person can directly feel into the essence of all things and people. He emphasized that practice could ultimately liberate and elevate people’s feelings, confirming them as essential forces of human. Marx thus demystified the activity of feeling into the essence of all things and people, and developed a kind of Practical Aesthetics to gain all sensibilities and essential insight of people. Kant, in fact, had already questioned how "feeling into the essence of all things and people" could be possible and proposed "Sensus Communis" as the a priori condition for the phenomenon that"people feel and think about things in much the same way." Both Confucius's Gantong Theory and Marx's Practical Aesthetics should be based on Kant's thoughts of "Sensus Communis"; otherwise the two theories would be dogmatism to a certain extent. There is no doubt that integrating the three thoughts contributes to the construction of a new aesthetic view dominated by Gantong Theory. Moreover, the new aesthetics can not only provide a fresh perspective for interpreting literary works at home and abroad, but also offer new insights for personal arrangement of life, both physical and psychological.

James Joyce put a lot of Chinese images into Finnegans Wake in a fragmentary way. By analyzing those Chinese fragments, this paper demonstrates that Finnegans Wake presents a world history in which various races and cultures blend and coexist. Although Joyce had to use images with racial discrimination popular in Western texts, he uses them fragmentarily to remove their contexts of racialism and mixes them to prevent the discrimination. Joyce frames the Chinese history in Finnegans Wake with a Vico’s structure of Bruno's dialectical unity. Those seemingly random fragments and this structure of dialectical unity together form a universal history both ordered and random, noble and vulgar, opposite and unified, grand and trivial. His fragmentary history breaks the latent hierarchical order in the ordinary world history, and points out a possibility of the integration of different races.