chinese moral nature harmony vs western

Chinese philosophy followed, characteristically, a middle way. Neither nature nor our soul was predominant. Rather, humanity and nature must harmonize. Nature is orderly and, regular, as should be the relationship of people one to another. Nature's order is displayed in everyday experience--in concrete things--which we can perceive and rationally know because we our a unity with nature. There is no bifurcation between subjective and objective, nor between abstract philosophy and living. Chinese concepts are concrete, rather than abstract,⁴ and philosophy is a way of life.⁵ An historical keynote of Chinese culture has been harmony between us and nature, and this has been the essence of both Taoism and Confucianism, the two most influential Chinese philosophical systems.
In substance, then, Western philosophy has emphasized describing and controlling nature, Indian philosophy has emphasized our inner soul beneath nature, and China has emphasized harmony with nature. Clearly, nature as a concept means different things among these cultures and historically has varied in meaning within the same culture. Nature in classical (Greek) Western thought was organismic, suffused with life and having intelligence (as were the Gods of Olympus). To the seventeenth and eighteenth century Western rationalist, nature was a machine. And now it is a probabilistic distribution of energy with a tendency toward entropy. In Indian philosophy, nature is the totality of sense perceptions, while in Chinese thought it is both that which we experience and the laws or principles comprising that experience.