| Major World Philosophies |
| Philosophy in Major Culrures |
| World Philosophiccal Discourse |
Vincent Shen
When the world is entering an era of globalization, two interrelated questions concerning the future of philosophy emerge to our attention: First, how could each philosophical tradition draw the best of its cultural resources for the benefit of other philosophical traditions in the world? Second, how could each philosophical tradition achieve self-understanding by facing impartially other philosophical traditions and, furthermore, let philosophizing become indispensable for the mutual understanding of all cultural traditions in the world? Facing the challenge of these two questions, we’re led to put more and more emphasis on intercultural philosophy.
It is an undeniable fact that philosophy was, and still is, culturally bound. Western philosophy was very much related to the long cultural heritage from ancient Greece, through Rome, to Medieval and modern Europe. In other cultural traditions, for example, in China, we find other traditions of philosophy, such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. As Martin Heidegger has well pointed out, Western philosophy has developed from a decisive choice made by the Western culture in the time of Parmenides and Plato. Until now, many works in the history of Western philosophy are still unjustly entitled “The History of Philosophy,” yet it is regrettable for us to say that this kind of exclusiveness and arrogance does set aside arbitrarily many other possibilities.
In this context, to study intercultural philosophy means not to enclose one’s own vision of philosophy within the limit of one’s tradition, especially that of Western philosophy. This is particularly necessary today when the type of rationality that has been given foundation by Western philosophy and that has been essential for the development of modern Western science and technology is now much challenged and even collapsing. Now the world is open to other types of rationality, or better say, to more comprehensive function of human reason.
It is well recognized that we live now in an age of multiculturalism. As I see it, the concept of “multiculturalism” should mean, of course, but not only, a request for cultural identity and respect for cultural difference, as Charles Taylor has well argued. Unfortunately Charles Taylor’s position limits his own concept of multiculturalism to a kind of “politics of recognition”.1 For me, multiculturalism means, for sure at the start, that each and every culture has its own cultural identity, and that we should respect each other’s cultural differences, but it should mean, above all, mutual enrichment by cultural differences and unceasing search for universalizable elements embodied in various cultural traditions. I understand that we can attain this “upgraded” meaning of multiculturalism only through conducting dialogues between different cultural worlds. In this context, different ways of doing philosophy in different cultural traditions could enrich our vision of the multi-layered and multi-faceted reality. Especially in this time of radical change, any philosophy capable of tackling this challenge has to include in itself an intercultural dimension.
But what is an intercultural philosophy? This should not be limited to only doing comparative philosophy, as is in the cases of comparative religion, comparative linguistics, etc., which are often limited to the studies of resemblance and difference between different religions or languages. Although doing comparative philosophy in this manner could lead to a kind of relativism in philosophy, it could not really help the self/mutual understanding and practice of philosophy itself.
For me, the real target of doing intercultural philosophy is therefore to put into contrast between, rather than sheer comparison of, different philosophical traditions. I understand “contrast” as the rhythmic and dialectical interplay between difference and complementarity, continuity and discontinuity, which leads eventually to the real mutual enrichment of different traditions in philosophy.
I have proposed a philosophy of contrast as an alternative to both structuralism and Hegelian Dialectics. Structuralism sees only elements in opposition but not in complementarity. Also it overemphasizes synchronicity to the negligence of diachronicity; therefore, human historicity is reduced to structural determinism. On the other hand, historical movement is essential to Hegelian Dialectics. Hegel sees dialectics as both methodology and ontology, that is, as the historical movement of reality. It moves by Aufhebung understood in a negative way and tends finally toward the triumph of negativity, thus overlooking the positivity in dialectical movement. But my concept of contrast rediscovers the dynamic tension of both difference and complementarity, structurality and historicity, and it integrates both negative and positive forces in the movement of history as the process of Reality’s unfolding and manifestation.
The wisdom of contrast has its origin in Chinese philosophy. There is no need to mention so many resources in the Book of Changes, the Lao Tzu, and other Chinese philosophical texts. It suffices to mention that the diagram of the Great Ultimate seems to give us a concrete image of philosophy of contrast, though apparently it represents only what I call “structural contrast.” Still, we can put it into movement on the axis of time and thereby we have an image of “dynamic contrast.”
By “structural contrast” I mean that in any moment of analysis, the multiple objects appearing in our experience is constituted of interacting elements, different yet related, opposing yet complementary to each other. It is synchronic in the sense that these elements appear simultaneously so as to form a structured whole. Being different, each element enjoys a certain degree of autonomy; being related, they are mutually interdependent.
On the other hand, by “dynamic contrast” I mean that on the axis of time, all individual life-stories, collective histories, and cosmic process are in a process of becoming through the continuous and discontinuous interplay of the precedent and the consequent moments. It is diachronic in the sense that one moment follows the other on the axis of time to form a history, not in a discontinuous or atomic succession but in a contrasting way of development. As discontinuous, the novel moment has its proper originality never to be reduced to any precedent moment. As continuous, it always keeps something from the precedent moment as residue or sedimentation of experience in time. This concept of dynamic contrast could explain all process of becoming such as the relationship between tradition and modernity.
The wisdom of contrast reminds us always to see the other side of the story and the tension between complementary elements essential to creativity in time. The wisdom of contrast reminds us of the contrasting situation between concepts such as agent and system, difference and complementarity, continuity and discontinuity, reason and rationality, theory and praxis, understanding and translatability, process and Reality, etc.
Let us consider now shortly what are the epistemological strategies we can adopt in view of an intercultural philosophy. Two consecutive strategies could be proposed here: First of all, the strategy of appropriation of language, which means more concretely speaking/learning the language of/understandable to other cultural and philosophical traditions. Ever since our childhood, learning a language, through interacting with the generous act of those who take the initiative to speak to us, opens up to us a world of meaningfulness. Later, when grown up, we learn the languages of different disciplines, cultural practices, different linguistic communities, which open us up to ever enlarging worlds. As Wittgenstein says, different language games correspond to different life-forms; therefore, appropriation of others’ languages would give us access to the life-forms implied in those specific languages. By appropriating different languages of different cultural and philosophical traditions, we could enter into different worlds and thereby enrich the construction of our own world.
The strategy of strangification, proposed by Fritz Wallner as an epistemological strategy for interdisciplinary research, is now enlarged by me to intercultural exchange and inter-religious dialogue, and it could become thereby a strategy of intercultural philosophy. By “strangification” (wai t’ui) I mean the act of going outside of oneself and going to the other, from one’s familiarity to one’s strangers, from one’s cultural context to other cultural contexts. This is to say that, in doing intercultural philosophy, we have to translate philosophical discourses or propositions in one’s own philosophical tradition into the language of or understandable to other traditions, so as to make it universalizable. If it could be thus translated and thereby made universalizable, we could say then that it contains more truth-content in itself. If it could not be thus translated, this means it is in some way or other limited within itself, no matter how precious and eloquent it is, and should therefore submit itself to critical examination, in respect to its own principle as well as its methodology.
With language appropriation and strangification, we can avoid the inner difficulties of absolute universalism on the one hand, which presupposes the existence of universal essence, and absolute relativism on the other, which is self-contradictory. We propose instead the concept of universalizability through language appropriation and strangification.
Reference:
Vincent Shen. 2003. Some thoughts on intercultural philosophy and Chinese philosophy, ‘Journal of Chinese Philosophy’, 30:3&4 (September/December) 357–372.