So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?
I have a non-polemical question: What did you read within what you call “non-Western thought”? If the list is extremely short compared to what you know of Euro-American philosophy (say, less than 100 titles), or if it focuses on a special field (say, Confucian ethics) then it’s easy to have a less diverse impression. The problem is that scholars or students who speak of “non-Western thought” as being “less diverse” have at most taken a single class on anything other than Euro-American philosophy.
Do you think you would have an idea of Euro-American philosophy as very diverse and interesting if you had studied, say, Sanskrit philosophy for decades, and had taken a single class on French existentialism and German phenomenology?
More in general, many Philosophy departments think that diversifying means adding a single class on anything that is not Euro-American mainstream philosophy (it can be Maori political thought, ubuntu ethics, Confucianism, Sanskrit epistemology…).
The result is often implicitly suggesting that there is a single world of “non-Western” thought and that everyone can teach it, because it does not go very deep.
For instance, I am routinely asked to answer questions about, e.g., the Zhaungzi, as if my expertise should extent to the whole of “non-Western thought”, because it is implicitly assumed to be very limited.
I ask students on the first class on Sanskrit philosophy how many texts do they think were composed in Sanskrit philosophy if compared to Greek philosophy and they are ridiculously wrong, guessing anything between 30 and 300 texts.
I don’t know which of the 3 traditions of Philosophy in the strict sense of the word is more diverse. What we find only in the Greek-origined tradition is the stage of modern philosophy, which has not happened elsewhere. The phenomenon of modernity happened in Europe, and then it spread all over the world. Maybe this gives a special novelty and diversity to Western philosophy from the Renaissance on that we do not find in other traditions.
Which Sanskrit do you mean, elisa? I ask this having long attended to the discourse that became Prakrit, served for the Jain scriptures and then passed on through another fringe, of the early Buddhist movement. Already in ancient times, Paul Thirme remarked on ‘early Prakritisms’ marking the concourse on the Ganges where the earliest Fordmakers pioneered the crossing and thereby north-south trade. Later Jains pioneered the routes to the South, making the earliest inscriptions there, and meanwhile extended the caravan routes to the Mediterranean and Africa.
Serving these diverse practical interests were the intricate calculations of dates in various calendars, as also on the Elephantine island at the southern border of Egypt, These calculations posee a grand puzzle to modern commentary, resolved by Leonard Euler in Switzerland, as I remarked early in this debate. And now that breakthrough marks a substantial contribution to the modern developments in philosophy, thoughtfully highlighted by Javier Ruiz Calderón.
To make full philosophical sense of this, one can take the notion of a *sixth sense distinctive if human or rational intelligence, which is simply proverbial in modern English, yet historically derivative of the Jain *Manas, their notion of mind variously shared with Yoga and Buddhism. Manas is taken to be a material capacity which must pass with the living individual, and now at the very forefront of the modern movement we have Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff arguing for quantum consciousness realized in microtubules in the membranes of nerve cells. Yet in the perspective here, this *cannot be the consciousness that rises to spiritual horizons, for it must be rooted in the material *Manas; unless of course one opts for the reductive trivialization of all things spiritual which gnaws at the heart of modernism.
Here I take a step back in search of more dispassionate insight, and take a lead from Euler, who showed that when any material comes under load , as in a process of work, it’s form is somewhat distorted in a proportion measured as *strain. This *strain is not a physical variable, rather a coefficient *without dimension, a pure ratio, rather in the sense of Kant on pure reason. And to me the microtubules are not improbably hosting any quantum computation process, but *do modestly serve the mind as a *strain gauge, for gauging the * effort of work. And that theme of *mental effort was importantly taken up by Kant in his early essay on Negative Magnitudes in Philosophy: he took the strain as such, as a cost or overhead in performance. Kant’s essay now enjoys a revival of interest in Western universities, showing philosophy straining to accommodate the rising authority of natural science, which has just recently consolidated on a Standard Model, very largely free of controversies. Such are the current concerns which may motivate the rising generation of students.
I. The Indic Modern Movement. This is a long story, so I’m planning a sequel to show where Indic science now illuminates epistemology and the enigma of consciousness.
Modern times saw a sharp turn in Sanskrit literature through literary theory to the Puranas, and the problem of integrating the heritage in consistent form. Here we see what I call *philosophy as text in the making*: and the outcome was eventually a classic like The Subject as Freedom, sharing Kant’s concern to find a place for God, Freedom and Immortality.
So there was a modern movement within India, and the leading lights of Indian physical science, Satyen Bose and Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, found their place in the firmament of western natural science. But Eddington tried to ridicule Chandra’s calculations, and he left Britain for the US. The collaboration started by Sommerfeld lecturing in India was not sustained.
Meanwhile a great deal of Asian heritage was reviewed in the West ~ Arabic science, Confucian ethics, Indic literature ~ serving missionaries making their own dogmatic texts. It was an ironic mix of intellectual hospitality and patronizing prejudice, which made for a sometimes toxic metaphysical mix.
Indo-European linguistics prospered, and gave us Structuralism, but natural science followed Functionalism for more precision in logic, and mathematical reasoning. Both Hume and Kant engaged mathematics directly, and we’re read in India accordingly. Here Jonardon Ganeri gives sophisticated argument to show that late Navya-Nyaya offered a kind of graph theory instead, which certainly did serve comprehending Panini. But the technical language he sought was not to be found, supplanted by the regular Jain mathematics of the Kerala school which attained everything Newton and after him Maclauren would offer.
So Indic students can now usefully read Frege’s (functionalist) Sense and Reference, and look to John Dewey for commentary. I was glad earlier to help with this insight. But across the board in intellectual life we face a situation where dogmatic interests and metaphysical aspirations easily feed through the resources of rhetoric and disputation into alluring strains of science fiction, featuring space travel and Aliens. Thus also the notoriously untestable Superstring theory in western physics; while Inationalist rhetoric in India and China alike is feeding into films depicting heritage in mythical form.
I routinely told my first-semester students in Munich to imagine the full diversity of European philosophy, from its beginnings to the present – and then to accept that India has all that and more, and often had it much earlier. E.g., the Indians already had ‘Postmodernism’ (with ‘deconstruction’ etc.) in the early middle ages – and it died out. (I am waiting for this to happen in the West too. It’s overdue.)
But in all fairness, the converse holds good too: a European would be astonished to see Indian universities where no other European language other than English is taught (etc. etc.; expand the list for all cultural subjects). Geographical distance seems to lessen the urge to have a close, more differentiated look at what is far away.
Good points, Robert!
In India there was not modernity, which is a phenomenon peculiar to the West -neither, therefore, “post-modernism”. Deconstruction seems similar to the negative dialectics of Madhyamaka, etc.; but the ideological context is completely different. Not everything that is in the West was there before in Indian Philosophy, nor viceversa. Otherwise, it would be enough to study one of the philosophical traditions. Arya Samaj and BJP would be very happy with what you say.
Sorry, but that critique is not acceptable. A Jaina thinker would label it as a one-sided application of śabdanaya (see: that is how seriously I take Indian philosophy, that I think in such terms!).
I am not writing about a mere label, but about the intellectual content behind the label. Even if the historical context is different (obviously; what can one expect?), the ideas behind Indian māyāvāda / śūnyavāda and postmodernism (the idea that there is no such thing as objective knowledge; that everything is relative; that if you analyse anything thoroughly enough – of course in their manner, according to their rules – nothing remains but māyā / śūnyatā, and everything becomes a word game) are strikingly similar. (It seems not coincidental that the most prominent prophet of postmodernism, Foucault, became a Buddhist toward the end of his life. – And now I do not want to hear anyone say that postmodernism has no prophets because prophetic religions arose in a different context, etc. Everybody knows what I mean.)
And by the way: if we were to take your etymological emphasis on terminology absolutely seriously, then this weblog should not exist – if only because the Indians had no word for ‘philosophy’, as e.g. Wilhelm Halbfass pointed out in great detail in his seminal book _India and Europe_. (I am now discounting modern neologisms like ‘tattvaśāstra’.)
There was a scholar of religion in Turin, Italy (I forgot his name) who claimed that there is no religion in India – because the term ‘religion’ arose in western Europe under certain specific circumstances, etc. etc. I believe we can agree that this stance is silly.
No single comparison of any two matters gives a 100% congruence (because if that were the case, we would have identity – or a clone –, and not two distinct matters that are being compared). The mere act of comparing presupposes that there are distinctions at some level or the other.
We should be able to separate the abstract quality and the intellectual workings of philosophical ideas from the historical and social settings in which those ideas became textually and terminologically expressed. Otherwise all comparative philosophy would be meaningless. (And _that,_ by the way, is what hypernationalist extremists in India really want: that the whole of what they consider to be Indian culture becomes incomparable, untouchable and beyond discussion!)
But I am immediately willing to confess that I have not read “everything” in European philosophy (nor in Indian philosophy), hence there is a possibility that somewhere in Europe an idea arose that has no counterpart in India. I just cannot think of any example. (This also depends on the level of abstraction on which one is discussing.)
Claiming that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than non-Western thought is a narrow and biased perspective, ignoring the richness and complexity of Indian, Chinese, African, and Islamic philosophical traditions. Such a view risks perpetuating intellectual colonialism and a limited understanding of philosophy. At the same time, I commend the author for their careful research and effort, which encourages readers to reconsider assumptions and explore global perspectives.
Thanks for your long reply.Mayavada and Shunyavada are peyorative terms, mainly used by the adversaries of Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamaka. Mere ideas -propositions, sentences- mean almost nothing separated from their ideological context, from the text they belong to. Madhyamaka negative dialectics is more similar as a doctrine to Pyrrhonism than to Deconstruction. But even in that case, it is not, at all, identical. Each tradition have peculiarities, differences. We have to assert there is real Indian (and Chinese) philosophy (identity). But at the same time we have to assert that each of the traditions have elements peculiar to it and irreductible to the other traditions (difference). I find the Ontology (and, therefore, the Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Methodology, etc) of identity-and-difference is the most accurate. The case is similar with Feminism: women are human beings (identity), but are not men (difference).
Robert, you say there was a Deconstruction and Postmodernism in India, but it died out. I find that spirit in Brahmagupta the mathematician and astronomer, who wrote in a relentlessly critical manner, and yet threw his own system open to advances in observation. That spirit was kept alive in astronomy, through the Kerala School onto modern times; but that’s clearly not what you mean. Was it that the philosophy of language lost touch with mathematics? Varahamihira could bridge that gap, and later Vacaspati Misra, but they were pretty unique.
@Orwin:
I must confess my near-total ignorance about classical Indian mathematics; and about astronomy I know only very little too, only in connection, to some extent, with astrology. My remark about Indian ‘postmodernism’ was intended with reference to epistemology, ontology, metaphysics.
The perception that Western thought is more diverse than “non-Western thought” often stems from limited exposure, as many critics argue that non-Western traditions, such as Sanskrit philosophy or Confucianism, possess immense, often overlooked complexity and depth. Rather than one being inherently superior, both traditions offer distinct perspectives: Western philosophy emphasizes individual autonomy, while Eastern traditions frequently highlight relationality and self-cultivation.
I see your point, but to be honest I disagree with its latter part. I don’t think that there is any uniform “Western thought”, nor uniform “Eastern traditions” that would all highlight “relationality and self-cultivation”. I don’t think it makes sense to group there, e.g., Confucianism and Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā.
Elisa, I agree with your reply -except with the examples chosen: Confucianism is a huge and tremendously diverse family of traditions. It may be compared to Hinduism, not to Prabhakara Mimamsa.
Very good point, thanks! But Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā is also very internally diverse!
There certainly are strains of thought, interest and influence which have run over the East/West boundary from ancient times already. The ratio 22/7 which marks the geometry of the Great Pyramid in Egypt c. 2600 BCE, marks a step (by continued fractions) in the approximation of the ratio Pi as given in the Āryabhaṭīya astronomy (with the method) as written in India around 510 CE.
And this text, in it’s brevity and enigmatic expression resembles above all the Yogasūtra. Underlining that connection, we have a legend of Patañjali spending long years observing the heavens on Mt Sumeru, perhaps in ancient Sumeria. And in a more philosophical vein, these two texts share the term saṃskāra, which is fundamental how the problem of liberation or enlightenmen is posed in yoga.
Saṃskāras also show up as rites of passage across the whole range of Indic traditions, not excluding the Sikhs. So we have stark evidence here of thought diversifying over long thousands of years around a core of scientific insight, which marks the prospect of modernity. And with just continued fractions, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan found his place in the firmament of modern thought.