Time, Nature, and the Project of Modernity: Eco-dialogism and Huijian Yu’s Paintings

ABSTRACT

If a virtual dialogue among Huijian Yu’s paintings, Goethe’s pondering on the modern concept of time in Faust, and Laozi’s patterning of the interactions between nature and man can be established, the following points will be seen and argued: First, “modernity” is based upon the paradox of time and eternity. It relies on “time” to “accomplish” itself, while the “accomplishment” at the same time means a pursuit of eternity, hence, the nothingness of the “accomplishment” itself. Second, the core question of “ecologism” lies in how to properly come to grips with the complicated relation between nature and man. Ecologism should not be a biased doctrine that superficially favours nature while devaluing human actions on nature; neither should it require a balance maintained between the two in an oversimplified way. Rather, a better form of ecologism would be the formula as prescribed by Laozi: “Man follows Nature”, and in return, “Nature follows Man”. To explain it in a vivid way, nature and human actions create a loop, or an ecological cycle, which knows no end. A desirable form of ecologism lies neither in naturalism nor in the “humanism” as Heidegger imagined, but in the “eco-dialogism” as developed and interpreted in this essay.

KEYWORDS:

• Huijian Yu
• Goethe
• Laozi
• time
• modernity
• nature
• eco-dialogism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have another term called “environmental dialogism” (Jin, 2016) which involves both man and nature as well.

2 An etymologically detailed discussion of the word “nature” in its earliest usage can be seen in Naddaf (2005).