Abstract
Most of us moderns claim ourselves to appreciate the type of harmony that will possibly conduce to peaceful interaction and coexistence at its best, and dislike the type of conflict that will likely lead to drastic hostility or violent fight at its worst. Consequently, the type of harmony is inclined to provoke harmonism as a way of thinking about how to find out the common ground for peaceful solutions by coordinating differences and even opposites, because it follows the path of the golden mean in essence. In striking contrast, the type of conflict slants towards conflictism as a way of thinking about how to resolve the disputes and clashes once for all by resorting to force or violence, because it insists on the worship of might as the remedy for all issues at large. Hence harmonism can be employed as an alternative to counterbalance conflictism.
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Notes
- 1.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
- 2.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, p. 318.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 321.
- 4.
Confucius, The Analects (trans. James Legge), 15:24. Also see Confucius, The Analects (trans. D. C. Lau, London: Penguin Books, 1979), XV:24, p. 135.
- 5.
Ibid., 6:30. Also see Confucius, The Analects (trans. D. C. Lau), VI:30, p. 85.
- 6.
Plato , The Republic (trans. Desmond Lee, London: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 514a–517b.
- 7.
F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West : An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1946, rep. 1960), pp. ix–x.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 495–496.
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Wang, K. (2019). Harmonism Versus Conflictism. In: Harmonism as an Alternative. Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3564-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3564-8_10
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