The Western Blindness to Non-Western Philosophies :: Philosophy China Culture Papers

The Western Blindness to Non-Western PhilosophiesWestern philosophers still tend to think that philosophy, in a sense that they can take with professional interest, does not hold out in non-Western traditions. To persuade them otherwise would require them to make an effort that they prefer to evade. I attempt to begin to persuade them by closely paraphrasing a few arguments by the early Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu and a few by the Indian skeptic and mystic Shriharsha (about 1150 CE). One of Chuang Tzus arguments has some resemblance to Platos Third-Man argument, another with the impossibility of distinguishing amid waking reality and dream, and a third with the impossibility of objective victories in debates. The skeptic Shriharsha, in a way that can be taken to fit Wittgensteins attack on conventional philosophy, shows that philosophical definitions cannot be rigorous enough to fulfill the task that philosophers set for them. The rest of this paper is devoted to the problem of commensurability. I contend that philosophies are either commensurable or incommensurable depending on the light in which one prefers to see them. Each way of seeing them involves a loss of a possibility that may be considered precious, but the Westerner who continues to insist on the full incommensurability of non-Western philosophies with his or her own is losing a grand vision that might be rationally helpful. We have always been and remain insular. The insularity I am referring to is our professional blindness to any but Western philosophy, which fills our hearty professional horizon. Insularity tempts us by its overestimation of whatever we have learned wherever we happen to have grown up, but it is no intellectual birthright. There have been more than a few great thinkers who have done their best to resist it. Kant and Hegel, both conscientious, omnivorous scholars, took the trouble to learn what they could of Indian and Chinese melodic theme, even though, as has become clear, they were not informed well enough to allow them to make plausible judgments. Schopenhauer was extraordinarily favorable to Indian thought but wildly subjective (or egotistical) in his use of it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, eager to understand the nature of languages, made an often painstakingly detailed study of a great number of them-Greek, Latin, Basque, the languages of Central America, Sanskrit, North-American Indian, Chinese, Polynesia, and Malaysia. (1) What Humboldt learned convinced him that the Indo-European languages the Sanskritic ones, as he called them were the best for methodical reasoning.