Le declinazioni della ‘coscienza’ nella cultura cinese

What seems to have acquired a major role among the manifold aspects of contemporary Chinese cultural landscape is the apparently indiscernible binomial “conscience/consciousness”, which also inhabits the ideological, aesthetic, and common discourses. Notwithstanding, it is an elaborate notion deriving from a philosophical tradition that encompasses a variety of directions and subtle meanings. This paper intends to offer an overview on the multiple declinations of the concept: first, by focussing on the etymology suggested by the Chinese characters, it retraces its philological roots and attempts to reconstruct the enealogy of its use. In the second place, it seeks to contextualize its semantic aspects by elaborating a conventional “ecology” of sense.