What is harmony

Since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, ancient Chinese thinkers have studied "harmony" as a philosophical category, and through the study of the category, they have completed the philosophical interpretation of harmony, and revealed the essence, value and operation mechanism of harmony. "Harmony is the law of the existence and development of things. "Harmony" in essence refers to the harmonious unity among different things, and the essence of harmony lies in the difference and coordination of many factors.

Ancient Chinese philosophy expressed the essence of "harmony" in the phrase "harmony and difference," which has two meanings: one is to advocate diversity, and the other is to advocate balance. "It advocates the virtue of generosity, the spirit of "carrying things in harmony with virtue" that embraces all things, accepts all things, is simple and neutral, and gathers different things in order to achieve a balance.

Robert Red Field, a famous American anthropologist, put forward the idea that there are big traditions (elite culture) and small traditions (popular culture) in the more complex civilizations in his 1956 book "Rural Society and Culture". Li Yiyuan used this theory of Redfield's to analyze the large and small cultural traditions in traditional Chinese society, and he pointed out that "the pursuit of equilibrium and harmony, as well as the harmony of the three-level system (the overall harmony of nature, human beings, and society), is the core of the values that ancient Chinese culture, regardless of whether it is a large or a small tradition, ****similar to."

Harmony between man and nature provides an ideal living space for social harmony. From the perspective of individual society, traditional Chinese culture focuses on the self-cultivation and inner harmony of individual society, and takes this as the base point of social harmony. From the perspective of society, the philosophical category of "harmony" has been transformed into social ethical rules and extrapolated to social life, forming the unremitting pursuit of social harmony in traditional Chinese culture. The idea of social harmony in traditional Chinese culture is the highest value principle of the whole traditional culture, which not only plays an important role in adjusting the relationship between human beings and the relationship between human beings and nature, but also has an important methodological significance in its dialectical philosophical way of thinking (He Zhongguo, 2006). From economics, harmony should be the economic and social development to achieve general equilibrium, and efficiency and equity under the Pareto optimization.