How the World Thinks - global philosophy

Summary

East Asia:

Harmony - belief that the highest good is an ordered world in which families, villages and states all stand in the right relationship to each other. Harmony cannot be achieved if all differences are eradicated or if they are so marked as to make common purpose impossible. Hierarchy should be to the benefit of all, the ruled benefited by good rule, students benefited by good teaching, filial children benefited by good parents.
Virtue - enables a person to live well, promoting harmony in all their relationships. Virtue is having good character, and what it means to be good cannot be set down in a manual. It is more of a skill than a list of moral maxims. The virtuous person must become good at quan: weighing up the merits of each case and making discretionary choices about what ought to be done. There is no algorithm to do this, not least because the right thing to do is always dependent on the precise context. Quan requires sensitivity to the proper mean: the appropriate point between two extremes, such as rashness and cowardice, meanness and profligacy, and servility and unruliness. Virtue is achieved by self-cultivation. The main means of this is li, ritual: formal and informal kinds of appropriate social behaviour. By following li, one internalises habits of virtuous action so that being good becomes second nature. The junzi, the exemplary person who succeeds in this, becomes a kind of moral paradigm, leading others to act well by example. The end result is wu-wei, a kind of effortless action that nonetheless requires years of conscious effort before it becomes instinctive. It is not possible to express in words what the person who exhibits wu-wei knows and indeed much of the deepest knowledge we have is ineffable. Language is an imperfect net in which to catch the world and practice is more important than theory.
Metaphysical agnosticism - We can’t know the nature of ultimate reality and that doesn’t really matter. The tradition is more way-seeking than truth-seeking, interested primarily in what we need to live well, not in achieving knowledge of ultimate things for its own sake. To the extent that there is a metaphysics it is one of change and dynamism. Yinyang reflects the sense that everything is in active interrelation, creating a dynamic system in which nothing is ever settled for long. The concept of qi captures this sense that everything is flowing, that energy is constantly moving, and it requires skill to channel it and use it well. The religious impulse finds its expression not in gods and heaven but in a sense of reverence for ancestors and for nature, as well as in an ideal of personal change that could be seen as a kind of spiritual transformation. The focus is very much on this world. Tian, heaven, is not another realm we might move on to after death but a kind of principle that regulates the physical world and is immanent in it. The absence of any idea of final salvation links with a view of time that sees our golden age in the past rather than in the future. Maintaining tradition is important because it keeps alive the wisdom of the great sages. There may be material and technological progress, but morality and ethics are more likely to regress.
Relational self - we are who we are because of how we stand to others. There is no atomic self that can exist in complete isolation from the world. Self is empty, not least because there is a sense in which everything is empty. The world is impermanent, everything in it transient, devoid of any unchanging, inherent essence. Hence proper understanding of the world and ourselves is found as much in the spaces between things as it is in the things themselves, as the relations are more fundamental than the items related.
Emptiness and impermanence - The watching of the cherry blossom also reflects an ideal of harmony with nature, as something that stands not in contrast to human culture but at the heart of it. We are as close to nature when we use computers as we are when we walk along the coast because nature is as much in silicon and steel as it is in sand and sea.
Relating through aesthetics, not intellectually - We are more likely to see truth by direct, attentive experience of the world than we are to conceptualise it by detached reasoning. In such experience the distinction between subject and the world disappears.

India:

Direct perception of reality - Reason only leads us so far before we need perception to show us how things really are.
Philosophy intertwined with philosophy - Philosophers almost invariably see themselves as carrying the torch of a tradition, where their role is not to come up with new ideas but to better explain old ones. The glory of Indian philosophy, however, is that commentators have interpreted old texts with such ingenuity and creativity that there has never been a shortage of originality and innovation.
Soteriological focus - every school has a conception of what salvation is and how to achieve it. A common theme is that the world of appearances is not the world of ultimate reality and we are led astray by our senses. By practices of meditation we can still our minds, silence our senses, attend more carefully and see things as they really are. This is often as much a bodily discipline as an intellectual one: posture and breathing are all-important if we are to get into the right state of mind to see through illusion.
Illusory self - Self is merely a stream of experiences, a bundle of perceptions that has no persisting essence. Most orthodox schools believe that our true self is Brahman, the one universal self of which we are just part. Buddhists, in contrast, believe that there is no Brahman either. Arguably, however, their agreement on the illusory nature of the common-sense self is more distinctive of the Indian tradition than their disagreement about what the truth really is.
Cosmogonic philosophy - Everything is rooted in a conception of how the universe is fundamentally structured. That is why each school offers a holistic vision of reality in which ethics, metaphysics and epistemology combine into an allencompassing system of explanation. A key feature of almost all cosmologies is a principle of karma in which actions, thoughts or both (depending on the school) generate good or bad consequences for the agent, either in this life or in a life to come, since belief in rebirth is also widespread.
Material detachment - The belief in the illusion of the material world and a liberation to come fosters an ethics of detachment. While material prosperity is not always bad in itself and often deemed appropriate at certain times in life, it is never good to place too much importance on wealth or fleeting pleasures.

Majority-Muslim cultures (Arab, North Africa, South East Asia):

Religion intertwined with culture - Islamic philosophy has for the most part been impossible to divorce from theology. The idea that the battle between ‘philosophy’ (falsafa) and ‘theology’ (kalām) led to the victory of theology over philosophy understates the extent to which kalām has engaged with philosophy and plays down the extent to which those falāsifa also had unshakable religious views. It also conflates philosophy in general with the particular revival of ancient Greek thought by the falāsifa. It is more accurate to see the debate as one played out within Islamic philosophy about how large a role independent reasoning, itjihād, was permitted to play. For the devout Muslim, religion impacts on every aspect of life. The notion of secular ethics barely makes sense: morality comes from God. Ethics is inherently religious. Even the self is primarily defined by its relation to God. ‘Human selfhood is based upon a dynamic relationship with the Creator, grounded in gratitude and reciprocal love,’ as Asma Afsaruddin puts it. To deny this relationship by disbelief is to do an injustice to oneself.
Tight limits of reason - The Qur’ān, being the complete and final revelation of God to humankind has an authority that no secular reason can challenge. Philosophical speculation about the nature of God is limited, for instance, because we can only know of God what God chooses to reveal of himself to us. God’s control is such that nothing happens unless he wills it, which results in a strong strand of belief in predestination.

The West:

Truth-seeking - Primary task is to understand the world as it really is. It upholds the ‘autonomy of reason’, valuing truth and knowledge for their own sake. Reason’s autonomy also means it is secular, working without supernatural assistance to deliver us understanding of the world and ourselves. It can do this because the natural world is taken to be scrutable and the way that it operates can be described by laws which require no assumption of divine agency.
Aporetic philosophy - identifies contradictions generated by our imperfect understanding and attempts to remove them. It does this by seeking precise definitions and measurements, then proceeding to draw out their implications by sound steps of reasoning. This had led to many achievements, but it is a method which tends to result in adversarial either/or debates. It also focuses attention away from that which is unclear or ambiguous and tends to encourage a tidying up of reality to make the world as amenable to clear explanation as possible. One major manifestation of this approach is the reductionist tendency to understand things by breaking them down to their smallest possible units and to see these, rather than the wholes to which they belong, as the fundamental foci of explanation. Ethically, this has tended to generate rule- and principle-based ethics which have impartiality as a central value.
Free, rational, autonomous, individualistic, atomic self - Individuals are not primarily parts of societies, societies are collections of individuals. This has led to an egalitarian and democratic ethos, but it has also arguably contributed to the fragmentation of society and a decline of respect for legitimate hierarchies of expertise or seniority.

Logic

Defenders of Western philosophy argue that its emphasis on logic has given it a unique robustness, while critics say it has trapped the Western mind in crude, inflexible, dichotomous either/or ways of thinking.

You could then summarise the modus operandi of Western philosophy as an attempt to remove from the world as many breaches of the Law of Excluded Middle as possible, leaving us with a clear distinction between propositions that are true and others that are false.

By this logic, if ‘a son is sure to be produced as a result of performing the sacrifice’ but a son is not produced, it can only follow that the sacrifice was not performed correctly, however much it seems that it was performed properly. By such argument, the Nyāya Sūtra can safely conclude, ‘Therefore there is no untruth in the Veda.‘

Science, for example, could not exist without the Law of Excluded Middle. Yet when we are dealing with values and preferences, different visions of the good life, even if there is some ultimate sense in which only one view is correct, in practice we cannot determine one and only one winner. A dualistic culture can get around this if it maintains an equilibrium between both opposites, granting as much to one as to the other.

An antagonistic spirit of inquiry is antithetical to cooperation, compromise and seeking common ground. It is also more focused on winning arguments than achieving the best outcome.

Logic is founded on the idea that reasoning should proceed by strict deductive steps, giving argument a kind of quasi-mathematical rigour.

Our reasoning is not deductive, by incontrovertible steps from premise to conclusion, but inductive, from past experience to general cases.

The East has tended to stress the extent to which attempts to understand things in terms of exclusive either/or categories often fail, while the West has stressed the progress that can be made when we bring out contradictions in our common-sense ways of thinking and replace them with new distinctions that preserve logical consistency. Nicholas Rescher describes this as the ‘aporetic’ nature of philosophy. An apory is ‘a group of contentions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent’. Philosophy exists because our pre-philosophical understanding of the world constantly generates such apories. In ethics, for example, the principle of impartiality seems compelling, but so does the apparent duty to put our families first. These two principles are ‘individually plausible but collectively inconsistent’. In epistemology, it seems that we have knowledge and that knowledge implies certainty, but when we look for the grounds of our certainty there don’t seem to be any. Again, it seems plausible both that we have knowledge and that we have none, and both can’t be true. As a final example, take the apparent existence of free will and the belief that everything in nature operates according to strict laws of cause and effect. The claim that we both have free will and can’t have it seems plausible, and only one can be right.

When faced with an apory, we could just throw up our hands and say it’s beyond our comprehension. Western philosophy is based on the conviction that this is defeatist. We can’t be sure that we will be able to resolve the apory, and indeed many of the problems of philosophy that persist have stubbornly resisted solution for millennia. But we have to try. Even if we can’t entirely remove the contradiction, we might at least understand it more clearly or dissolve parts of it.

You could then summarise the modus operandi of Western philosophy as an attempt to remove from the world as many breaches of the Law of Excluded Middle as possible, leaving us with a clear distinction between propositions that are true and others that are false. This is the truth in the claim that Western philosophy is ‘binary’ or ‘dichotomous’, based on ‘either/or’ rather than ‘both/and’ thinking. It’s a way of thinking that has clearly permeated the culture and is particularly evident in many political structures. Elites have been educated to be fierce debaters, adopting clear for and against positions, skilled at exposing flaws in opponents’ arguments. As a result, parliaments are organised rather like university debating chambers, with laws debated as though they were motions and decisions reached by majority vote.

To Westerners, this seems so natural that it is hard to imagine alternatives, especially since the Western model has now been adopted by so many other countries. But whatever its philosophical merits, it is an approach that has several disadvantages. An antagonistic spirit of inquiry is antithetical to cooperation, compromise and seeking common ground. It is also more focused on winning arguments than achieving the best outcome. This dynamic can be seen in all corners of the culture, often with negative consequences. For instance, as a legal process, divorce has tended to be even more antagonistic than it needs to be because it is conducted in adversarial terms, where one of the partnership must sue for divorce and attribute blame. Only relatively recently has the idea of ‘no fault’ divorce, with mediation rather than litigation, become popular.

The dichotomous mindset is also implicated in recent political problems. In Britain, America and several other countries we are seeing a new polarisation, with liberal, largely urban cosmopolitans pitted against conservative communitarians in smaller towns and villages. Such divisions were most evident in the US presidential election contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and in the referendum on EU membership in the UK, both in 2016. In each case the margin of victory was tiny but it is the nature of plebiscites with only two choices that all is given to the majority and nothing to the minority, even though they were very close to equal in size. The votes exposed the limitations of a dualistic culture which allows for only true or false, winner and loser.

Secular reason

God may or may not be dead, but for the project of acquiring knowledge he is redundant. The human mind works without supernatural assistance to deliver an understanding of the world and ourselves. I call this a belief in the power of secular reason.

The technical names for these two types of knowledge express this difference neatly: knowledge can be gained either prior to experience (a priori) or post-experience (a posteriori).

Pragmatism

What’s more, having a religious belief appears to work. It has a cash-value in terms of giving people meaning, purpose, values and a sense of belonging. ‘Religion says essentially two things,’ wrote James. ‘First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.’ This is ‘an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all’, but this does not matter because ‘the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’.30 In other words, religion is true because it is useful, and since that is the same as saying it is useful because it is true, it is true, period.

Tradition

As John C. H. Wu points out, ‘The East generally puts the Golden Age at the beginning, the West at the end.‘

The past is vividly present to the Chinese in a way that is astonishing to foreigners. Although it is probably not true that the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai told Richard Nixon in 1972 that it was ‘too early to say’ what the impact of the 1789 French Revolution was, the story stuck because it accurately reflected something about China’s long view of history.

Metaphysics

As we have seen, the Buddha, like Confucius, was explicitly not concerned with ultimate questions of metaphysics, reflecting a fault line that runs through the world’s philosophical traditions. David Hall and Roger Ames describe this as the difference between ‘truth-seekers’ and ‘way-seekers’. Western philosophy is characteristically truth-seeking. It seeks to describe the basic structure of reality, logic, language, the mind. One example of this is the Western emphasis on science for science’s sake. For truth-seekers, disinterested learning is the best kind, while for way-seekers to be disinterested is as nonsensical as driving a car without caring where you end up.

Philosophy in the West has always aspired to be more of a science: rigorous, precise, describing reality as it is. In the East it is more of an art of living.

Time

His indigenous friends talk less of time or place independently but more of located events. The key temporal question is not ‘When did this happen?’ but ‘How is this related to other events?” That word ‘related’ is important. Time and space have become theoretical abstractions in modern physics, but in human culture they are concrete realities. Nothing exists purely as a point on a map or a moment in time: everything stands in relation to everything else. So to understand time and space in oral philosophical traditions we have to see them less as abstract concepts in metaphysical theories and more as living conceptions, part and parcel of a broader way of understanding the world, one that is rooted in relatedness. Hirini Kaa says that ‘the key underpinning of Māori thought is kinship, the connectedness between humanity, between one another, between the natural environment’. He sees this as a form of spirituality. ‘The ocean wasn’t just water, it wasn’t something for us to be afraid of or to utilise as a commodity, but became an ancestor deity, Tangaroa. Every living thing has a life force.‘

In Chinese thought, wisdom and truth are timeless, and we don’t need to go forward to learn, only to hold on to what we already have. As the nineteenth-century Scottish sinologist James Legge put it, Confucius did not think his purpose was ‘to announce any new truths, or to initiate any new economy. It was to prevent what had previously been known from being lost.

Thinking of time cyclically makes especial sense in pre-modern societies, where there were few innovations across generations and people lived very similar lives to those of their grandparents, their great-grandparents, going many generations back. Without change, progress was unimaginable.

T. S. Eliot is supposed to have said, ‘Although it is only too easy for a writer to be local without being universal, I doubt whether a poet or novelist can be universal without being local too.‘20 To be purely universal is to inhabit an abstract universe too detached from the real world.

Karma

Any romantic notion that this is a simpler way of life that the ‘spiritual’ Indians enjoy living is contradicted by the endless posters and billboard adverts for schools, many emphasising maths and preparation for jobs in banks and teaching. There is a widespread aspiration for a more materially comfortable life for the next generation.

Belief in karma is very deeply rooted in India, but we can perhaps expect it to lose some of its fatalistic edge as people embrace Western ideas about the possibility of fulfilling individual potential in this world, not the next.

Emptiness

In its art and philosophy, Japan offers a lesson in how to appreciate ephemeral riches in the emptiness of existence.

The psychologist Richard Nisbett has conducted a memory test in which Americans and East Asians are asked to look at a picture of a fish tank and then try to spot any changes when it is presented back to them. Americans tended to notice only changes in the fish, while East Asians were sensitive to changes in the background. This fits in with other tests and cultural observations which suggest that East Asians (for cultural, not genetic reasons) are more attuned to the relationships between things and their ‘backgrounds’.

‘It is of deep significance and highly appropriate that […] the Japanese should be symbolised by the cherry blossoms, for they flower abruptly, showily and almost in indecent haste, but the blooms have no tenacity - they fall as abruptly and disinterestedly as they flowered.‘20 Nothing could be more apt to symbolise the fleeting, brief nature of life.

Emptiness is a concept as alien to Western philosophy as it is central to many East Asian traditions.

Naturalism

The Way has an essence and can be trusted. But it takes no action and has no form. It can be passed on but not received, gotten but not seen. It is its own trunk, its own root. Before Heaven and earth existed, it spiritualised the ghosts and gods, and gave birth to Heaven and earth. It is above the supreme ultimate but not high, below the six limits but not deep. It was born before Heaven and earth but does not age.19 The Dao here is said to exist before either heaven or earth and would therefore appear to be outside nature. However, its connection with nature is more intimate than this. It is after all a principle of how nature works, not something invoked to override nature. It is not before or underneath nature but a life force that creates and sustains nature. It is difficult to be more precise than this because the ultimate nature of the Dao is beyond language.

Chinese thought is therefore not typically naturalistic in the Western sense of the word. Rather, it does not distinguish between the natural and the supernatural and is focused on the needs of humans here and now.

‘Nature is not a paradise,’ says Kobayashi, as it is for occidental romantics. ‘We have no idea of paradise. Nature may be bad, may be disturbing, violent, like tsunamis, like volcanoes.’ Japan has around 1,500 earthquakes every year. Showing respect and gratitude to nature is in part a way of trying to ensure it doesn’t disturb us too much. It also means that what in the West is often disparagingly called trying to ‘tame’ nature is no more than good sense. Of course nature has to be tamed. This isn’t a battle between humanity and nature, though, but a struggle for humanity within nature. We don’t do things to nature, from the outside, but with nature, from the inside. As Kasulis explains it, ‘If we join Shintō in considering human beings as part of nature instead of separate from it, even human inventiveness can be natural.’ A tatami mat, for example, ‘is not natural in that it is not found in nature […] yet much of the sensory experience of straw remains.’ There is no distinction here between the natural and the artificial because everything is a part of nature.

Think of a top tennis player in action. It is not possible to react quickly enough and choose the right shot by thinking things through rationally and consciously. Rather, through years of effort and practice, the goal is to intuitively sense where to be and how to hit the ball. Looking with your qi, you become so sensitive to the dynamics of the situation that you can tune in and harmonise perfectly.

Too often, living for today becomes a shallow pursuit of fleeting pleasure that always leaves us starting each day empty, needing another ‘experience’. We are constantly dissatisfied, forever grasping at moments that elude us. Instead, we need to learn to savour without grasping, to caress the moment rather than to grab it. If we look east, we might find models for living as mortals in a natural world from cultures that have been doing just that for millenia.

Dualistic thinking is a hard habit to break, but if it is ditched distinctions assumed fundamental disappear. Take away the mind/body distinction and you also take away the interior/exterior distinction, because there is no matter for the immaterial mind to be housed in. Muecke told me that in indigenous Australia, ‘Nobody’s interested in what goes on in the mind, because the mind may not even be a concept. Any notion of psychological interiority or souls is not part of their vision. Everything is exterior, that’s what matters.

Where the West tends to contrast natural with ‘human-made’, in China humanity does not stand apart from nature but is fully part of it, albeit a tiny part dwarfed by mountains and forests.

To see the world in terms of qi is not to commit yourself to beliefs about the fundamental forces or building blocks of reality but to see the world in terms of its dynamic interrelations. For instance, Wang says that ‘In art, the movement of qi is what weaves together the painter, the painting, and the viewer into a single unified experience.‘

At least since the time of Confucius, in China there has been no God or focus on the afterlife. ‘For the Chinese, philosophy takes the place of religion’

For example, tian needs to be respected and if you offend it you will be punished. This is not the indifferent nature of Western science, but nor is it the purposeful, conscious will of Western theistic religion. Tian is a fundamentally natural force but has a moral dimension.

Cosmogonic traditions tend ‘to be driven initially by the question “What is there (really)?”’ while ‘Chinese philosophy tends to ask “What should be done?“’

Unity

When reformists like Ramadan call for ‘Islamic renewal’ and ‘an intellectual and psychological revolution’, they are not calling for Islam to conform to secular ideals. Islamic modernity is a particular vision of Islamic principles at their best, a ‘rediscovery of the way’, not the taking of an alternative path.

Similarly, the concept of dharma, which concerns a harmony between the cosmic order and your own personal duty, draws on an assumption of fundamental unity. Dharma refers to the cosmic order as a whole (ṛta) but also to the duties of the individual. Right action is therefore that which upholds the fundamental unity and oneness of the whole.

Of course Islam accepts that there are many facts about the world that were not known at the time of Muḥammad and many more still to be discovered. But these new facts are in an important sense mere details. The growth of knowledge is like colouring in and embellishing a canvas rather than expanding the picture. The Qur’ān expresses a complete world view and nothing that comes after it can alter those fundamentals.

Reductionism

It has been said that everything good, but more usually bad, about Western culture can be found at a McDonald’s. When people complain of Western cultural colonialism, they point to the globally ubiquitous golden arches. When people talk of poorly paid, menial work, they talk of ‘McJobs’. When health campaigners lament the poor Western diet, a Big Mac and fries is Exhibit A.

Credible research even suggests the same amount of saturated fat from a diary source might have a different effect on cholesterol depending on whether it comes from cheese or cream. The reductionist response is that we must reduce further, to be more specific in what we analyse. While there may be some truth in this, it seems certain that without looking at the context in which food is ingested, including the specific features of the individual eater, the reductionist picture will always be incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Behind this information is a deep philosophical assumption that has informed Western ways of thinking for centuries: reductionism. This is the idea that the best way to understand anything is to break it down into its constituent parts, emphasising these over wholes.

The reductionist tendency blinds people to the complex effects of whole systems and leads to an overconfidence that the key to solving problems is identifying discrete elements.

Conclusion

Although Kant said that ‘the time for the collapse of all dogmatic metaphysics is undoubtedly here’ he was right to add, ‘There will always be metaphysics in the world, and what is more, in every human being, and especially the reflective ones.‘

No-self

In Buddhism, one of the purposes of meditation is to attend carefully to the nature of your consciousness so as to see that there is no abiding self, merely thoughts and feelings that arise and fade.

Observe yourself, your own consciousness. What do you find? A thought here, a sensation there, a catchy tune that you can’t get out of your head, a desire for some of that cake you can see out of the corner of your eye and so on. What you observe are particular thoughts, perceptions and sensations. ‘I never catch my self, distinct from some such perception.‘

The relational self

’In the Western tradition individuality is part of your relationship between you and God,’ he said. This is a point which has often been made by Christians who argue that supposedly secular enlightenment values are in fact deeply rooted in religion. Individualism starts with Christianity, which stressed personal salvation, the individual’s relationship with God, the fact that God cares for each one of us. For the Chinese, the sacred is found in society and your peer group, says Xu. That’s what defines Chinese individuality and also in a sense its religiosity. Religion is usually thought of as a set of creeds, but perhaps more fundamentally it is a source of transcendence: something which takes us beyond our mundane lives and allows us to partake of something greater. Westerners transcend themselves through belief in a God; transcendence for the Chinese comes from wider society, the group.

The nature of any individual is determined by how that individual stands in relation to others. Take away those relations and you are left not with a self stripped down to its essence, but a self stripped of its essence.

When she got to know them, however, she found they were much more diverse than most Westerners, who went to great lengths to express their individuality but were all remarkably similar in their tastes, political views, even shopping habits.

Westerners do seem to appreciate this, but in a lopsided way: families feel pride in the achievements of their members, sharing the glory, but rarely take any responsibility for their failures.

The atomised self

His famous slogan ‘Existence precedes essence’ captures the idea that human beings are born into the world without any unchanging core of being and we must create our own identities for ourselves.5 Yet this denial of essence if anything puts even more focus on the individual than the Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) doctrine it replaces. Value, meaning, purpose, identity - all are determined by individuals for themselves.

This view of the soul - ‘uniform’, ‘indissoluble’, ‘immortal’, ‘divine’ - arguably shaped the Western conception of self for the millennia that followed. Its impact is most striking on Christianity. It was no mere detail that Christ’s resurrection was a bodily one. Jesus’s soul didn’t ascend to heaven; he did, body and all. The idea that the soul was separate from the body was a later Platonic corruption of original Christian thinking but one which had a profound influence.

Much of the rise of populism and nationalism in the West is a backlash against the gradual erosion of belonging.

Individuality is not opposed to intimacy. We are who we are because of our relations to others. We do not subsume our identities into the whole, but rather express our identities by finding our own place in that whole. The individual needs the group, autonomy needs belonging.

Harmony

Confucian virtue ethics places great importance on the moral exemplar over enforcing laws. It is not that Confucians don’t see laws as important. Mencius approved of the old saying, ‘Virtue alone is not sufficient for the exercise of government; laws alone cannot carry themselves into practice.‘76 There has to be a balance of law and virtue, and if a law has to be enforced it already shows that harmony has broken down.

In this analysis, social inequality is the result of environmental degradation caused by social disharmonies. For example, when water supply is good, everyone gets a decent share, but water shortages create tensions between those who can afford to buy in supplies and those who can’t. This suggests that harmony promotes equality rather than that equality promotes harmony, or at least that harmony is a prerequisite for equality and that trying to achieve greater equality in the absence of harmony is going to be a difficult, if not impossible, task.

This is difficult, because on the face of it yinyang is full of binary distinctions. Wang lists at least thirty-five pairs of opposites in the Daodejing, such as beautiful/ugly, good/not good, presence/non-presence, difficult/easy. And yet she insists that ‘the distinction of oppositions like yin and yang is not a matter of seeing reality through a dualistic or atomistic lens’. The very word for ‘things’ in Chinese, wu, does not mean ‘entities in isolation’, says Wang. Wu are better seen as ‘phenomena, events, and even histories’ which have stages and ‘are always becoming’. In Chinese thought, the principle is not so much ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ as ‘parts become less when artificially isolated from the wholes to which they belong’. When a thing is only what it is when it is in relation to others, no items in any list of pairs can be seen as mutually exclusive or discrete.

Rules are readily discarded if they are seen to create more problems than they solve. As Pieter Boele van Hensbroek explains, ‘Why are you going to apply some general principle when you see with your eyes that the practical result is creating animosity? So then they would say maybe the principle can be a bit less a principle and we’re going to bend and work with this to come to a kind of settlement.’ For traditions that value the rule of law, this looks like compromising justice. But bending of the rules in Africa is often rooted in commitment to a deep moral principle and is not always corruption.

Even in Daosim, which exalts the natural state, the Daodejing says, ‘In government, the good lies in orderliness.’ The Daoists take the idea of the natural flow of harmony even further, suggesting that when government is working at its best, it does as little as possible: ‘The more dull and depressed the government, the more honest and agreeable the people. The more active and searching the government, the more deformed and deficient the people.’ In a metaphor that would delight modern-day libertarians, the Daodejing says, ‘Ruling a great state is like cooking a small fish.’ In other words, the more you meddle, the more it falls apart.

Clear laws make everything work well: ‘When handing out rewards, it is best to make them substantial and dependable, so that the people will prize them; when assigning penalties, it is best to make them heavy and inescapable, so that the people will fear them; when framing laws, it is best to make them unequivocal and fixed, so that the people will understand them.‘

Virtue

Li fits neatly with the Aristotelian ideal of hexis or habit. In both Confucius and Aristotle, by repeatedly doing the right things one becomes a more virtuous person. ‘Wear the clothes of Yâo, repeat the words of Yâo, and do the actions of Yâo, and you will just be a Yâo,’ writes Mencius. As with Aristotle, once practice has been embedded, good actions become almost automatic. ‘The great man does not think beforehand of his words that they may be sincere, nor of his actions that they may be resolute; - he simply speaks and does what is right.‘

So we should talk not of ‘moral virtue’ but of ‘ethical excellence’, the kinds of habits and dispositions that enable us to live well.

Virtue ethics can never result in rigid rules because the good person cultivates the wisdom and sensitivity to judge each case on its merits.

The Zen master Dōgen found the biblical imperative ‘Thou shalt not kill’ inadequate as it sets out an imperative to obey. The objective, however, is to become the kind of person who is simply no longer capable of killing. This transforms the order ‘Thou shalt not kill’ into a description, ‘You are such a person that you will not kill.‘

Doctrine of the Mean. Aristotle defines the mean as the virtue which stands ‘between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect’. So generosity is the mean that falls between the excess of profligacy and the deficiency of meanness. Bravery is the mean between the deficiency of cowardice and the excess of rashness. ‘Vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.‘

Because virtue is a matter of having the right habits and dispositions (hexis), it must be cultivated and nurtured by right actions.

However, the reward of virtue in Indian philosophy is mokṣa (salvation). This differs significantly from Chinese and Aristotelian virtue in which living virtuously is its own reward, not the path to something else, which is why it is valued even over life itself.

Moral exemplars

In China the emphasis is on right conduct first, from which all else follows, whereas Buddhism strives for an inner transformation which leads to better action.

Liberation

Nirvāṇa in the Mahāyāna sense,’ says Abe Masao, ‘is simply the realisation of saṃsāra as really saṃsāra, no more, no less, by a thoroughgoing return to saṃsāra itself. This is why, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is often said of true nirvāṇa that “saṃsāra-as-it-is is nirvāṇa”.’ Similarly, Karaki Junzō writes, ‘We should not think that the impermanence of birthand-death is followed by the permanence of nirvāṇa. Rather, impermanence is nirvāṇa; birth-and-death is nirvāṇa.’ Nirvāṇa in this sense is not a place or a state we achieve after death. It is, as Ram-Prasad puts it, ‘simply (!) a switch in our perspective on ourselves and the world’.

Transience

However, Okakura captures beautifully sensibilities behind the tea ceremony which endure beyond it. He shows the aesthetic rather than the intellectual appreciation of emptiness and impermanence in action. ‘Teaism,’ he says, ‘is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. […] It is essentially a worship of the imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.‘

But even in these traditions, it is more important to really feel what emptiness, impermanence or nothingness means than to define it or analyse it conceptually. As a merely abstract idea, it is almost useless. Anyone can intellectually understand that everything passes. But for this idea to affect how you live, you need to feel it. This is what the Japanese do. When crowds gather to watch the cherry blossoms as they disappear, blown away by the wind, they appreciate a beauty that is of its nature fleeting, not eternal.

Japan exerts a particular fascination for many in the West. On the one hand, it seems so modern, so Western in its infrastructure, and on the other, it seems utterly exotic, alien in its cultural superstructure. Yet for all its otherness, it has in many ways a philosophical tradition that is easier to learn and borrow from than many others. It is not tied to any particular religious metaphysics but is essentially rooted in an appreciation of and attention to the immanent world of nature. It is reflective but not purely or even mainly in a logical, analytic way. Its philosophy offers an opportunity to deepen and enrich other systems of philosophy without requiring them to give up anything essential of their own.

Thought framework

Most Americans and Europeans, for example, assert the value of individual freedom and liberty without any deep knowledge of how these concepts have been justified and explained by their philosophers. Millions of Indians live their lives according to principles of karma without an in-depth knowledge of the rich and complex literature articulating what precisely this involves. Ordinary Chinese assert the importance of harmony with little more than a cursory knowledge of the Confucian and Daoist texts that analyse and describe it. There is nonetheless a relationship between high scholarship and everyday living, which is why harmony, freedom and karma play very different roles in different parts of the world.

Understanding the philosophical framework of a people is like understanding the software their minds work on: ‘If you don’t know their software there will always be this gap in terms of understanding in conversation.

A historical overview from the Axial to the Information Age

In China, in the absence of a strong religious culture featuring gods or other-worldly heavens, the new philosophies were more naturalistic than those of India. Confucius (551-479 BCE) based his teachings on the cultural norms of order, respect for elders and tradition. The other major tradition, Daoism, valued harmony with nature above all else and its foundational text, the Daodejing, was written between the fourth and third centuries BCE.

In contrast, Greece had to accommodate its gods. But since these were often portrayed as human superheroes in myths, interacting with mortals in the same physical spaces, there was no fundamental problem in explaining the universe in terms of principles that would apply to gods and humans equally.

Assuming a kind of unity is a prerequisite for any serious attempt at systematic understanding.

In the West, philosophy took a step back. The major challenge of medieval philosophy was to negotiate between the claims of Christian faith and the demands of rationality.

Only in Greece, with the creation of logic, was systematic reason developed to any great degree. In India, emphasis was placed on knowledge attained by seers in states of heightened awareness and on revelations in the sacred texts, the Vedas. In China, history and everyday experience provided the benchmarks for truth. The Buddha walked a middle path, arguing that the only evidence available to us is that of experience, which makes speculation as to the nature of ‘ultimate’ reality fruitless.

The schools of Indian philosophy that maintain the validity of the Vedas are known as orthodox or āstika. Those that do not are known as heterodox or nāstika.

With that caution in mind, the orthodox schools are Nyāyá, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mimāṃsā and Vedānta; and the heterodox schools are Buddhism, Jainism, Cārvāka, Ājīvika and Ajñana.

Chief among these is the idea that ultimate reality is Brahman, an infinite, unchanging, universal soul. The individual self, ātman, only has the illusion of independence. Our ultimate goal is to dissolve the ego and return to Brahman.

Insight

The ‘charm of Japanese philosophical thought’ is that it is about being touched by what is near. ‘The most important thing happens not over there but in this present,’ he told me. ‘The important thing is to feel, not to conceptualise. Concepts always indicate something over there, it’s very abstract.‘

A clue is in the traditional word for philosophy in India: darśana. Darśana comes from the root dṛś, meaning ‘to see’. It means both philosophy and to see, or to look at. It has these dual meanings because to a large extent philosophy has been conceived in India as a kind of seeing. For instance, the original poets of the Vedas were the first ṛṣis (rishis), meaning seers. It was believed that the route to understanding involved not so much reasoning as learning practices of ānvīkṣikī – looking at – which enable us to attain direct realisation (sākṣāt-kāra) of reality as it is. That helps explain why one of the giants of Indian thought, Śaṅkara (sometimes Śaṅkarācārya), who is believed to have written in the eighth century CE, used the terms māya (illusion) and avidyā (ignorance) interchangeably. Ignorance is a failure to see correctly, the flip side of the view that seeing and knowing are identical.

Its basic definition in the Yoga Sūtras sounds very calming, being ‘the cessation of the functioning of ordinary awareness’. However, the purpose of this mind-calming goes beyond mere relaxation. The basic principle behind it is that in daily life we are led astray by our senses and the mind is kept busy with ordinary, everyday things. By stopping this activity, we not only regain calm and control but can see things as they really are.

One difference is that in Japanese philosophy perception is primarily aesthetic and this-worldly rather than spiritual and other-worldly.

Although every school understands the pramāṇas differently, there are essentially six which they either reject or endorse. It’s impossible to make sense of them by their names alone, but even a cursory overview shows that there is much more to Indian philosophy than mystical insight. The six pramāṇas are: pratyakṣa (perception), anumāna (inference), upamāna (comparison and analogy), arthāpatti (postulation, derivation from circumstances), anupalabdhi (non-perception, negative/cognitive proof) and śabda (word, testimony of reliable experts). Of these, anumāna is almost as ubiquitous as pratyakṣa, making it clear that for many schools at least forms of reasoning are as much a part of the Indian philosophical tradition as any insight.

Such a first-person approach is as natural in a philosophical culture that emphasises first-person experience as it is alien in a Western tradition that emphasises third-person objectivity.

In the hierarchy of sources of knowledge, the testimony (śabda) of the greatest seers (ṛṣis) usually trumps the perception (pratyakṣa) of even great minds, which in turn trumps the most impressive rational argument.

the main purpose of advaitic philosophy is to guard its revealed truth against all possible doubts and criticisms as well as to demonstrate its possibility to our reason. […] By no amount of logical thinking about the facts of experience, you can ever come to the conclusion which denies all facts. The nature of ultimate reality is revealed by scriptures and accepted on faith.‘

Robert E. Carter contrasts the Western tendency to make philosophy a ‘purely cerebral affair’ with the Japanese assumption that ‘knowledge is also an experiential affair which can be achieved and honed through practice rather than reason alone’. This is evident in the historical importance placed on martial arts, flower arranging, archery, calligraphy and the tea ceremony, all of which help us to achieve a kind of enlightenment by attending rather than ratiocinating.

kenshō, a seeing into nature as it really is, by aesthetic rather than rational means.

Insight without analysis and critique is just intuition taken on faith. But analysis without insight is empty intellectual game-playing.

The ineffable

If some of Daoism’s paradoxical statements sound a little like jokes, that is no coincidence. Daoism celebrates humour and is often funny, which Joel Kupperman says is for a good reason: ‘Because one never has a final truth, or a final “take” on anything, or a final adjustment to the world - Zhuangzi’s philosophical training appears designed to encourage the ability to laugh at oneself. The philosophy is not intended to lead to a comfortable “complacency”.’

Words are like ‘a finger pointing at the moon’. ‘Guided by the finger, the other person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why, because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.‘

But as Kant suggests, a view from nowhere is no view at all. Hence the title of Thomas Nagel’s contemporary classic The View from Nowhere, in which he criticises this notion of objectivity.

The relative unimportance of asserting doctrine helps to explain the syncretic nature of religion in Japan, where a common expression is ‘Born Shintō, live Confucian, die Buddhist.‘

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ As Shidō Bunan put it less violently, ‘The teachings of the Buddha are greatly in error. How much more in error it is to learn them.

The deep respect for words in Japan is reflected in the Shintōbelief in kotodama, a compound of ‘word’ and ‘soul’: the soul of a word. From this belief flow superstitions around words that sound like other, ominous ones.

Extraordinary states may be more powerful than ordinary ones, but that is not evidence that they reveal truth better than ordinary ones. ‘Heightened’ experiences may simply be ones where our feet lose touch with the ground, not ones that take us closer to the heavens. The irony is that the attempt to go beyond experience to how things really are depends even more on the particularities of personal experience than ordinary knowledge of the everyday world, which can at least be corroborated by objective, third-party observations.

In my experience, the West tends to see all limits to knowledge as an affront, a border to be crossed. The unknown presents the challenge ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. Elsewhere, human limits are not just accepted but celebrated.

Doctrines are less important than they are in Western Christianity in part because it is believed that the purest knowledge of reality comes from direct experience and so the most fundamental truths cannot be captured in language. They are ineffable, literally unsayable.

Because of its ineffability, the Dao is better understood by doing than by thinking. Look for it and it cannot be seen; Listen for it and it cannot be heard; But use it and it will never run dry!

You could say that it is because Japanese have such respect for words that their poets and thinkers use them so sparingly. It is not so much a mistrust of language as a reverence for it. Maeda Naoki, a junior priest from the Shingon sect of esoteric Buddhism, recently said, ‘Speech is the silver medal. You get a gold medal for not speaking.‘

In Zen, language and rationality are both intellectual straitjackets. ‘Language is a product of intellection and intellection is what our intellect adds to, or rather, subtracts from, reality,’ wrote Suzuki. Language adds to reality in that it creates an extra layer on top of it, and this in turn subtracts from reality by obscuring its fullness. ‘Meanings and judgments are an abstracted part of the original experience, and compared with the actual experiences they are meagre in content,’ said Nishida. One of the purposes of some paradoxical koans – such as ‘What is the colour of wind?’ or ‘When you can do nothing, what can you do?’ – is to draw our attention to the inadequacy of words and how apparently perfectly well-formed sentences can nonetheless be meaningless. ‘Those who find Zen foolish are still under the spell of linguistic magic,’ said Suzuki.

Theology or philosophy?

However one resolves the dispute in Islamic philosophy, it is certainly true that in separating theology from philosophy the modern West is the global exception, not the rule.

In Buddhism, religion and philosophy are like a tree that forks into two from its base. Both stem from the same roots and are nourished by the same sap. […] There have been times in the long history of Buddhism in which a pruning of the philosophical branch has helped the trunk to flourish, and other times at which the philosophical branch stood in full bloom while the trunk had become hollowed out.

Philosophy and religion have a somewhat paradoxical relationship, ‘inseparable yet distinct, complementary yet opposed, or in Nishida’s words, self-contradictory and yet identical.‘

Religion in the Japanese context has a different character from that in the West. ‘Generally, religion in Japan is not about belief,’ says Carter. ‘Instead, religion in Japan is about consciousness transformation.’ It seeks to help people experience the world differently, not to change their beliefs about it. This distinction between belief and consciousness transformation is also found in Buddhism more generally. ‘The Buddha himself often warned his disciples against confusing the religious search, the “noble quest”, with philosophical and metaphysical questions,’ says Takeuchi. Hence philosophy and religion have a somewhat paradoxical relationship, ‘inseparable yet distinct, complementary yet opposed, or in Nishida’s words, self-contradictory and yet identical’.

Dualistic thought

Further resources:

Ayurvedic doshas: https://youtu.be/tRWX21lW_bU?feature=shared
Hinduism and Buddhism
Chinese philosophy
Japanese philosophy

Dr K on clinical therapy and coaching/spirituality, clinical and non-clinical:

Therapists are trained to do specific procedures, to treat illnesses
Clinical way tends to reduce solutions down to the average: science shows that drug X has been effective on average. Thus it is nonindividualistic by nature, does usually not solve problems on personal level, does not account for individual differences
Spirituality/coaching is not about treating anything, it is about understanding oneself
Example: therapy treats depression, spirituality/coaching works on unhappiness - two very different things. Therapy seeks a clear distinction: you are depressed or you are not, you need treatment or you do not, you need support or you do not. Spirituality/coaching does not concern itself with dualism, it is about finding a good way in life with and/or without depression, with happiness and unhappiness together.
One does not replace the other, it is not one or the other, they have their own strengths and weaknesses

Dr K’s Guide - Anxiety, Dr K’s Guide - Meditation, Dr K’s Guide - Depression

The old pond

A frog jumps in -

The sound of the water.

For Nishida, the haiku evokes the sound of splashing without actually attempting to mimic it. The poem works because it conveys to the reader the pure experience of the frog entering the pond, perhaps even better than watching it without sufficient sensitivity.48 Takeuchi Yoshinori interprets the poem differently, saying that what is evoked is not the sound of the water but the stillness that the splash disrupts. A similar effect is sought in an old Chinese poem which says ‘A bird gives a cry - the mountains quiet all the more.‘49 (This is also perhaps the real meaning behind Hakuin Ekaku’s famous eighteenth-century-BCE koan ‘What is the Sound of the Single Hand?’: it is an invitation to attend to the silence, the emptiness.50) These interpretations differ, but they share something more important in common: a belief that the purpose of the poem is to facilitate kenshō, a seeing into nature as it really is, by aesthetic rather than rational means. As D. T. Suzuki put it, ‘We must accept the fact that the intellect has its limitations, and that things or facts belonging to our innermost experiences are altogether beyond its domain.‘51 Koans are ‘to be meditated upon in order to break the hold of rationality on the self,’ says Edward Slingerland, to ‘fast away the mind’.52

One important way in which this kind of insight differs from intellectual understanding is that it breaks down the barrier between the known and the knower. ‘To understand reality one must grasp it in one’s own hands, or, better, one must be it,’ says Suzuki.53 Nishida’s explanation of this is that ‘the seeing in the experience of kenshō is not dualistic or dichotomous, because there is no separation here between the object of sight and the seeing subject, because the seer is the seen and the seen is the seer, the two are completely identical’.54 Nishida believes this aspiration to dissolve the dualities of subject and object is typically Japanese. What Japanese people ‘strongly yearn for’, says Carter, is ‘to become one with things and events’,55 collapsing the distinction between knowing and doing, thought and action. Nishida explored this idea in his late work through the concept of ‘action intuition’, the sense that we get to the heart of reality better by acting rather than by reflecting. True, complete awareness is not merely intellectual but actively experiential.56

Faith in the power of logic and reason was perhaps never as strong as it was during the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Arguably, however, the stress on logic has been the most distinctive feature of Western philosophy throughout its history and has shaped the entire culture. Logic is founded on the idea that reasoning should proceed by strict deductive steps, giving argument a kind of quasi-mathematical rigour. Aristotle first set out the basic principles of logic, and his rules would be followed until the emergence of symbolic logic in the nineteenth century. Defenders of Western philosophy argue that its emphasis on logic has given it a unique robustness, while critics say it has trapped the Western mind in crude, inflexible, dichotomous either/or ways of thinking. Ironically, sometimes this criticism itself betrays crude binary thinking. Tom Kasulis, for instance, once heard a Japanese scholar say, ‘Unlike you Westerners, we Japanese are not dualistic.‘4 Western philosophers are not the only ones who make sharp distinctions.

Although I said the Law of Excluded Middle was uncontroversial, many find themselves resistant to it, claiming that the world is more complicated than this. Some people are both very clever and very stupid, for example, while hermaphrodites are both male and female. But the Law of Excluded Middle does not deny this. Aristotle makes it very clear that for the either/or logic to work it is essential that there is no ambiguity, and that meanings are precise and have only ‘one significance’. These conditions are not met when we colloquially say that something is true and not true. Someone who is both clever and stupid is clever in some ways or contexts and stupid in others. They are not clever and stupid in exactly the same way at the same time. For instance, someone can be a genius novelist and a complete fool in love. Even the precise same action can be clever in one way and stupid in another. A tactically brilliant military victory might be a strategic disaster, such as a successful operation to oust a dictator that creates a toxic power vacuum.

I would bet that it is impossible to come up with an example of something that appears to contradict the Law of Excluded Middle which on closer examination does not involve ambiguity (where the meaning is unclear) or equivocation (where more than one meaning is possible). The only real controversy about the law is how useful it is, given that the world is often ambiguous or unclear. This is the power behind traditions that might superficially appear to reject the principle. Both Daoism and Zen, for example, are replete with apparent paradoxes that assert that something is both true and not true. For instance, the Daodejing says, ‘Sometimes diminishing a thing adds to it;/Sometimes adding to a thing diminishes it.‘7 You might parse this as meaning that losing can be not losing and gaining not gaining. But it doesn’t take long to see that there is no logical contradiction here. There are two possible interpretations. One is that what first appears like a loss can actually turn out to be a gain. (‘I have not so much lost a daughter as gained a son,’ as the tired old father of the bride speech goes.) The other is that a loss might be part of a process that leads to a gain. (If I hadn’t lost that job I wouldn’t have got this much better one.) Neither means that an actual loss is in reality not a loss at all.

Or take the Zen saying ‘The Bodhi tree is not a tree, and the bright mirror is not a mirror.’ Here, the central idea is that there is a difference between ultimate reality and perceived reality. There is in one sense a Bodhi tree, but since nothing has a fixed essence, in another sense there is nothing that makes it a tree. Again, we have not a breach of the Law of Excluded Middle but a deliberate attempt to use the law to make us attend to the fact that there are different senses of ‘exist’.

Remember also the description in Advaita of Brahman as ‘not this, not that’ (neti neti). This again might superficially appear to be an assertion that something both is and is not. But the point is to show how language cannot capture the nature of Brahman. We end up in a paradox when we try to describe the indescribable, not because ultimate reality is contradictory but because it defies the neat categorisations of our limited words and concepts. Indian philosophy does not embrace true contradiction, and even has something close to the Law of Excluded Middle in the concept of vipratisedha, defined by the third-century-BCE grammarian Patanjali as ‘mutual prohibition’.8

The difference between the dominant ways of thinking in Western philosophy and in Asia is not that the West embraces a Law of Excluded Middle which the East rejects. Rather, the difference is the extent to which this law is foregrounded and taken to be practically important. There is plenty of what could be seen as logical argument in Chinese philosophy for example, but there is no development of logic as a specific discipline in the classical tradition. Perhaps the closest we get is the third-century-BCE White Horse paradox of Gongsun Long, in which it is argued that a white horse is not a horse since ‘horse’ names a shape, ‘white’ names a colour and ‘what names the colour is not what names the shape’.9 No substantive point seems to be made in this passage and Ram-Prasad suggests it is probably best understood as a ‘refined joke’.10

The East has tended to stress the extent to which attempts to understand things in terms of exclusive either/or categories often fail, while the West has stressed the progress that can be made when we bring out contradictions in our common-sense ways of thinking and replace them with new distinctions that preserve logical consistency. Nicholas Rescher describes this as the ‘aporetic’ nature of philosophy. An apory is ‘a group of contentions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent’.11 Philosophy exists because our pre-philosophical understanding of the world constantly generates such apories. In ethics, for example, the principle of impartiality seems compelling, but so does the apparent duty to put our families first. These two principles are ‘individually plausible but collectively inconsistent’. In epistemology, it seems that we have knowledge and that knowledge implies certainty, but when we look for the grounds of our certainty there don’t seem to be any. Again, it seems plausible both that we have knowledge and that we have none, and both can’t be true. As a final example, take the apparent existence of free will and the belief that everything in nature operates according to strict laws of cause and effect. The claim that we both have free will and can’t have it seems plausible, and only one can be right.

When faced with an apory, we could just throw up our hands and say it’s beyond our comprehension. Western philosophy is based on the conviction that this is defeatist. We can’t be sure that we will be able to resolve the apory, and indeed many of the problems of philosophy that persist have stubbornly resisted solution for millennia. But we have to try. Even if we can’t entirely remove the contradiction, we might at least understand it more clearly or dissolve parts of it.

You could then summarise the modus operandi of Western philosophy as an attempt to remove from the world as many breaches of the Law of Excluded Middle as possible, leaving us with a clear distinction between propositions that are true and others that are false. This is the truth in the claim that Western philosophy is ‘binary’ or ‘dichotomous’, based on ‘either/or’ rather than ‘both/and’ thinking. It’s a way of thinking that has clearly permeated the culture and is particularly evident in many political structures. Elites have been educated to be fierce debaters, adopting clear for and against positions, skilled at exposing flaws in opponents’ arguments. As a result, parliaments are organised rather like university debating chambers, with laws debated as though they were motions and decisions reached by majority vote.

To Westerners, this seems so natural that it is hard to imagine alternatives, especially since the Western model has now been adopted by so many other countries. But whatever its philosophical merits, it is an approach that has several disadvantages. An antagonistic spirit of inquiry is antithetical to cooperation, compromise and seeking common ground. It is also more focused on winning arguments than achieving the best outcome. This dynamic can be seen in all corners of the culture, often with negative consequences. For instance, as a legal process, divorce has tended to be even more antagonistic than it needs to be because it is conducted in adversarial terms, where one of the partnership must sue for divorce and attribute blame. Only relatively recently has the idea of ‘no fault’ divorce, with mediation rather than litigation, become popular.

The dichotomous mindset is also implicated in recent political problems. In Britain, America and several other countries we are seeing a new polarisation, with liberal, largely urban cosmopolitans pitted against conservative communitarians in smaller towns and villages. Such divisions were most evident in the US presidential election contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and in the referendum on EU membership in the UK, both in 2016. In each case the margin of victory was tiny but it is the nature of plebiscites with only two choices that all is given to the majority and nothing to the minority, even though they were very close to equal in size. The votes exposed the limitations of a dualistic culture which allows for only true or false, winner and loser.

Until recently, the flaws in the system appeared to be merely minor or theoretical, given how successful Western civilisation and its democracy had been. Churchill’s quip about democracy could be complacently generalised to the whole culture: ‘Western thinking is the worst form of philosophy except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ It is not as though other models had generated prosperous, stable, peaceful civilisations. China, which has no philosophical tradition of formal logic, had given rise to a totalitarian state, while Africa, with its political values of consensus and agreement such as ubuntu, was the least developed continent on the planet. If rich and happy Europe, North America and Australasia were what you got from ‘crudely dichotomous thinking’, then it couldn’t be all that bad.

Now political instability across the democratic West makes that attitude seem complacent. It turns out that only an unspoken spirit of compromise was tempering the tensions caused by the binary choices of two-party politics. For decades, there was a kind of tacit agreement that neither side would hold on to power indefinitely or undo everything its predecessor had done. In Britain, this took the form of the ‘post-war consensus’, which assured that from 1945 to the Thatcher government of 1979 both Left and Right supported a welfare state and a mixed economy of state-owned and privatised businesses and utilities. Once that consensus broke down, polarisation became inevitable.

The problems of Western democracy are a kind of allegory for the problems of Western philosophy. Its pursuit of the clear distinction between true and false creates a default either/or mindset. When only one thing can be true and we can know what it is, the distinction works. Science, for example, could not exist without the Law of Excluded Middle. Yet when we are dealing with values and preferences, different visions of the good life, even if there is some ultimate sense in which only one view is correct, in practice we cannot determine one and only one winner. A dualistic culture can get around this if it maintains an equilibrium between both opposites, granting as much to one as to the other. But there is always the risk that such an equilibrium will not be reached and that the logic of either/or turns into the logic of the zero-sum game, in which only one side can win. And when there are several plausible views, a binary mindset finds it hard to manage the complexity that creates.

Walk around a museum of Western art that is organised chronologically and you’ll find many centuries are represented only by religious scenes, apart from portraits of the great and (as it often turns out) not so good. Only in the nineteenth century did landscape painting really take off, after which secular themes increasingly became predominant.

In China, however, the most popular subject has always been nature. Not the idealised, untouched nature of Western Romanticism, but one where small signs of human life, like a hut or a farmer, are often tucked away in the corners.1 At the Shanghai Museum, I saw a painting by the Ming dynasty artist Jin Dai (1388-1462), Dense Green Covering the Spring Mountains, which is dominated by steep, tree-lined mountains; two small figures walk along a path in the bottom left-hand corner and two roofs discreetly peek from above the treetops. In Yuan dynasty painter Wang Meng’s (c. 1308 -85) Secluded Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains, a small retreat hut is easy to miss unless you examine the picture closely. Where the West tends to contrast natural with ‘human-made’, in China humanity does not stand apart from nature but is fully part of it, albeit a tiny part dwarfed by mountains and forests.

To anyone familiar with classical Chinese philosophy, this would come as no surprise. At least since the time of Confucius, in China there has been no God or focus on the afterlife. ‘For the Chinese, philosophy takes the place of religion,’ says Charles Moore.2 All the important questions are about the here and now, our duties on earth, hence Chinese philosophy is often characterised as practical and humanistic. There are none of the sharp divisions between mind and spirit, heaven and earth, that are found in many other traditions. Mencius reminds us, ‘All who speak about the natures of things, have in fact only their phenomena to reason from, and the value of a phenomenon is its being natural.‘3 Chinese philosophy is profoundly non-dualistic: yin and yang represent two aspects of the same whole, not two things that need to be reconciled.

This account might appear to contradict the recurring centrality of heaven, tian, in Chinese thought. Confucians talk about following the ‘way of heaven’, while legitimate emperors are said to govern under the ‘mandate of heaven’. But ‘heaven’ is a loose and misleading translation of tian, even though it has come to be the standard one, for lack of a clearer alternative. As Philip Ivanhoe and Bryan Van Norden explain it, ‘Heaven is not primarily thought of as a place, and is not connected with any explicit views about an afterlife.’ It does seem to be about a kind of ‘higher power’, but this is not generally personal or purposeful. Tian literally means ‘sky’ and is a part of the whole world, tiāndì, the sky and the earth (di). ‘In ancient Chinese philosophy,’ says Yao Xinzhong, ‘tiāndì, heaven and earth, is the origin of everything, of human beings, human knowledge, human law, human morality, everything.‘4 In the Axial Age, only the Mohists talked about tian as a personal being with will and emotion, but Mohist philosophy didn’t have much influence over later developments.

This separation is at the root of one of the most enduring puzzles in Western philosophy, the ‘mind-body problem’: how can inert matter give rise to conscious thought and subjective experience? Galen Strawson, one of the most eminent contributors to the contemporary debate, sees panpsychism as the most credible solution on the table.30 The idea that everything has at least a spark of mind could yet gain traction in Western philosophy.

For all its dominance in the East, naturalism is practically unheard of in classical Indian philosophy. Of the heterodox and orthodox schools, only Cārvāka embraces materialism, arguing that the four elements - earth, fire, water and air - are ‘the original principles; from these alone, when transformed into body, intelligence is produced. […] therefore the soul is only the body distinguished by the attribute of intelligence, since there is no evidence for any soul distinct from the body’.31 Cārvāka, however, is the least influential of the six orthodox and five heterodox schools.

Dualistic thinking is a hard habit to break, but if it is ditched distinctions assumed fundamental disappear. Take away the mind/body distinction and you also take away the interior/exterior distinction, because there is no matter for the immaterial mind to be housed in. Muecke told me that in indigenous Australia, ‘Nobody’s interested in what goes on in the mind, because the mind may not even be a concept. Any notion of psychological interiority or souls is not part of their vision. Everything is exterior, that’s what matters.‘

In the modern secular West, most of us are officially naturalists, reflected in the constant calls to ‘seize the day’, to live ‘the one life you have’. That we need reminding points to naturalism’s historical novelty. Nor have Westerners yet learned how best to follow their own advice. Too often, living for today becomes a shallow pursuit of fleeting pleasure that always leaves us starting each day empty, needing another ‘experience’. We are constantly dissatisfied, forever grasping at moments that elude us. Instead, we need to learn to savour without grasping, to caress the moment rather than to grab it. If we look east, we might find models for living as mortals in a natural world from cultures that have been doing just that for millennia.

The mean is a powerful and simple idea which counters the tendency we have to resort to dualistic thinking in ethics, where virtue and vice are opposites. It takes a realistic view of human dispositions in which they are always exhibited to a certain degree, sometimes too little and sometimes too much.

The mean in Confucianism is pretty much identical. It’s illustrated in the Analects by the story of Tsze-kung asking which of Shih or Shang was the superior man. Confucius did not answer the question directly, but said, ‘Shih goes beyond the due mean, and Shang does not come up to it.’ Tsze-kung concluded that ‘the superiority is with Shih, I suppose’. Confucius corrected him: ‘To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.‘51

The mean is dependent on context. What might be brave in one situation could be rash in another. It is also person-specific. So whereas a mathematical mean is equidistant between two extremes, the mean in relation to us, says Aristotle, is ‘not one and the same for all’.52 Just as the right amount of protein-packed, energy-rich food for a bodybuilder is too much for a desk-bound writer, the right amount of courage for a racing driver would be too much rashness for a taxi driver. It is particularly important to consider idiosyncratic factors when working to develop our characters. In the Analects, for example, Zihua protested that when Zilu asked whether or not one should immediately take care of something upon learning of it, Confucius told him he shouldn’t, as long as he had family. But when Ran Qiu asked the same question, Confucius said he should. ‘I am confused and humbly ask to have this explained to me,’ he replied, understandably. Confucius told him, ‘Ran Qiu is overly cautious, and so I wished to urge him on. Zilu, on the other hand, is too impetuous, and so I sought to hold him back.‘53 To train ourselves to act well, we need to err on the opposite side of where we tend to err, pushing towards an excess when we tend to be deficient or towards a deficiency when we tend to excess. Aristotle said something more or less identical: ‘We must notice the errors into which we ourselves are liable to fall […] and we must drag ourselves in the contrary direction; for we shall arrive at the mean by pressing well away from our failing - just like somebody straightening a warped piece of wood.‘54

The Doctrine of the Mean is connected to broader ideas of harmony and equilibrium. This is explicit in the text The Doctrine of the Mean, which was said to have been passed down orally in the Confucian tradition until Tse-sze wrote it down for Mencius. Complete equilibrium, it states, is only possible ‘while there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy’ in the mind. However, once stirred, as long as they ‘act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of Harmony. This equilibrium is the great root from which grow all the human actings in the world, and this harmony is the universal path which they all should pursue.‘55

In practice our task is often to bring things that are off-balance back to the centre. Xunzi writes, ‘For unyielding qi, soften it with harmoniousness. For overly deep thinking, simplify it with easy goodness. For overly ferocious courage, reform it with proper compliance. For expedience-seeking hastiness, restrain it with regulated movements. For small-minded narrowness, broaden it with expansiveness …’ The list goes on.56

One insightful passage in the Xunzi applies this idea to philosophy itself: ‘Almost always, the problem with people is that they become fixated on one angle and are deluded about the greater order of things.’ Philosophers identify something that is important and then fixate on that to the exclusion of other equally important things. All Xunzi’s notable predecessors’ faults and strengths are analysed using this model:

Mozi was fixated on the useful and did not understand the value of good form. […] Shenzi was fixated on laws and did not understand the value of having worthy people. Shen Buhai was fixated on power and did not understand the value of having wise people. […] Zhuangzi was fixated on the Heavenly and did not understand the value of the human.

All had focused simply on one aspect of the Way, but ‘No one aspect is sufficient to exhibit it fully.‘57

Mencius gave a similar analysis of the failings of the amoralist Yang Chû and the consequentialist Mozi, both successors of Confucius. Mencius objects that Yang’s principle ‘each one for himself’ does not acknowledge the claims of the sovereign, while Mozi’s principle ‘to love all equally’ does not acknowledge the particular affection due to a father. Both are half right and half wrong, since ‘to acknowledge neither king nor father is to be in the state of a beast’.58

These passages suggest that it is not simply a matter of finding the right mean and sticking to it. Because the mean is a matter of balance, even the mean itself must be held lightly and flexibly. The spirit of the mean is to avoid all extremes, and to stick too rigidly to any position, even a moderate one, is extremist. ‘The reason I hate holding to one point is the injury it does to the way of right principle,’ wrote Mencius. ‘It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others.‘59

Although The Doctrine of the Mean is a Confucian text, its central idea appears throughout Chinese thought. The Daodejing uses quintessentially mean language when it says, ‘The Way of Heaven takes from what has excess and augments what is deficient.‘60 Perhaps the more fundamental concept is that of zhong, usually rendered as centrality or equilibrium. Li says it is ‘a stance against extremes’ and it also means ‘unbiased’. It has connotations of being both upright and central. In Confucian philosophy, ‘centrality and harmony are mutually dependent concepts’.61

Yao for one believes the doctrine of the mean holds sway in contemporary China. ‘The majority of Chinese do not like extremes,’ he told me. ‘They use the image of the pendulum. I believe this is why China is so comparatively stable. They couldn’t go to extremes. When they get to a certain point they begin to return to the other side. Of course today we have extreme nationalism, extreme liberalism, extreme conservatism, but it’s always a small minority. The majority of the people don’t go to extremes.’

🧠 JamBrain

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