High-Tech Pan-Materialism and Humanist Ethics: From a Chinese-Western Historical Perspective

This book explores how the human-scientific mode of spiritual resources may be reorganized to balance the extremely materialist civilization of today. It discusses the dominance of the high-tech commercialization of the Earth and the serious weakening of rational-spiritual stamina, as well as institutional rigidity in the humanities. The book also considers traditional Chinese intellectual history inspired by the classical Chinese humanist-ethical spirit as revealing the cross-historical universality of humanist-lined ethics rooted in human nature. Although the natural sciences and social sciences have led to the unprecedented progress of material human civilization, the fundamental factor that determines the rational orientation of spiritual civilization should be the modern human sciences that are reorganized in terms of semiotic strategy and humanistic ethics, leading hopefully to a new era of enlightenment for mankind. The book asserts that humanistic ethics, as the central spirit of the humanities, includes both epistemology and action dynamics. The pertinent activation of both depends definitively on the subject’s free willpower.