Due to the introduction of the market economy, in the past four decades China has switched from being a “planned country” – planned economy, planned art – into a domestic version of cultural pluralism. Consumerism has refilled the vacuum left by the retreat of Maoist ideology. However, the overwhelming success of mass culture is sided by the progressive marginalization of the intellectuals or elite, featuring a culture that is kitsch in its ideological twist. In China, present-day cultural constructions provide a forum of debate for the identity of the whole nation, no more traditional, and not yet modern. In other words, consumerism and commercialism, triggered by products of market economy, have generated a cultural consumption of redundant bad taste. Kitsch indeed.1
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This manuscript stages the West and China as civilizations rooted in contrasting myths. The Western leading paradigm is the Faustian Man whose ambition created modernity and the tragedy of progress. It is a tragedy already condemned by history but, being Faust’s construction site unfinished, it is a tragedy that everyone seems keen to re-enact. On the other hand, China conceived the concept of stability, rather than competition, the key for a durable success. Behind Zheng He’s voyages and the Ming Dynasty’s choice to go westbound, rather than eastbound, lies an anti-Faustian attitude, the essence of Chinese philosophy, to be read not as anti-modernity but the attempt to shape an alternative modernity.
Tragic characters fight battles they cannot possibly win.That is what makes heroes out of them. However classical and modern tragedies display ontological differences whose fault line is to be found in the philosophical shift from the rationalist principle of sufficient reason to that of insufficient reason. Hence, life ceases to be a necessity imposed by the wrath of the gods and becomes the ordinary outcome of man's failure. Given that, this paper will consider the nature of the shift and its conceptual impact on the Greek term hamartia. Modernity comes with a redefinition of Weltanschauung: it does not have the cosmic range of the classics, and thus it is less about fate than it is about guilt.
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