The Study On Gehong’s Natural Philosophical Thoughts

Ge Hong was an outstanding Chinese Taoist theoretician and thinker in the JinDynasty. He has an important position in the history of Taoism,Chinese philosophyand culture.Ge Hong’ s natural philosophical thoughts is rich in content, covering a widerange of aspects. The article combed and summarized based on the all aspects ofthoughts background, theoretical sources, main content, historical contribution andinfluence. On Ge Hong’s philosophy mainly in view of ontology, epistemology,dialectics these three aspects, and evaluated comprehensive on the Ge Hong’s naturalphilosophical thoughts. His philosophical thoughts of ontology about the “xuan”、“dao”、“yi” is the central idea of the whole philosophy system, he believes that theoriginal sources should be attributed to the concept of “gas”, everything in the worldis transformed from the “gas”, ultimately everything boils down to the “gas” again. Inepistemology, Ge Hong put forward the thought of “body strained spirit dissipated,gas exhausted life end”, believes that the “body”and the “spirit” is interrelated andinseparable, he believes that everything in nature is objective existence, occurrenceand development according to the objective law, and declared that the world should beunderstood and transformed. Ge Hong opposed the “fatalism” thought thatconsistently uphold by Confucianism, take the practice as the basis of understanding,put forward the view of practice of “make the small experiment, know the big effect”.In Ge Hong’s naive materialism thought also include dialectical view, he put forwardthe change view of “change is the nature of the world”,the change is the core ofdialectics thoughts, from the change view of “change is the nature of the world” andthe dialectics thoughts of quantitative change view of “accumulate small to big,accumulate one to million”, discussed that all substances in nature is in the process ofconstantly changing and developing. Paper from Ge Hong’s philosophical thoughtsformation related to his background of life, times and theoretical, elaborate hisphilosophical thoughts about these three aspects of the ontology, epistemology,dialectics, and then make a comprehensive assessment of his philosophical thoughts,refer to the scientific contribution and the value of philosophy, finally pointed out thehistorical limitations of Ge Hong’s natural philosophical thoughts, he could notcompletely get rid of the religious idealism concept.