World Philosophy and the Crisis of Technology
© 2021 by Harold P. Sjursen. Draft, please do not cite without permission. Versions of this paper were presented at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Renmin University, both in Beijing, in June, 2019.
Introduction
The comparative study of philosophy and its more specific variant East-West philosophy seem securely ensconced somewhere deep within the groves of academe. A student who indicated an interest in such studies on her resume would not find her job prospects improved greatly on that account. The place of philosophy in modern life, except when it is being lauded for its purported effectiveness at instilling analytical skills and critical thinking within the hearts and minds of ordinary students, is minimal. Any reference to Eastern philosophy is likely to conjure up images of quiescence thoroughly out of step with the modern temper. In what follows the attempt will be to dislodge that image by showing the many entanglements of philosophy with the threads spun by scientists and statemen weaving the fabric of modernity.
The cohabitation of philosophy, science and technology in the folds of modernity may be largely the impact of early modern science in Europe, but antecedents returning at least to Plato shaped the inherent receptivity of philosophy to its willing subordination to its masters wielding the cudgels of mathematical science. This theme opens upon another aspect of the diminutive status usually granted to comparative philosophy: Unless it has descended from the Greek, it’s not actually philosophy.
World Philosophy and the Crisis of Technology
The journal Philosophy East and West has been published since 1951. It was founded during the Cold War, name for the American policy to contain the Soviet Union with which it was believed no authentic, free and open relationship was possible. The term was coined by George Orwell in a 1945 essay on the social and political implications of the atomic bomb. The United States’ defeat of Japan in World War II was widely attributed to the use of atomic weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The response among scientists and philosophers to this act combined a sense of horror with the recognition of the need to find a discourse to counter the cold war policy of containment and to foster genuine East-West dialogue. In 1950 U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that American foreign policy had lost China. He meant that rather than the pro-American and pro-Christian attitudes of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石= Jiang Jieshi), China was allying with the Soviet Union in what he stated was a threat to American values and freedom. Thus the founding of Philosophy East and West was part of an effort by American intellectuals (along with other publications such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) to obviate the barriers against philosophical and scientific discourse from divergent points of view.
Nearly seventy years later the Journal describes itself in the following terms:
“Promoting academic literacy on non-Western traditions of philosophy, Philosophy East and West has for over half a century published the highest-quality scholarship that locates these cultures in their relationship to Anglo-American philosophy. Philosophy defined in its relationship to cultural traditions that broadly integrate the professional discipline with literature, science, and social practices. Each issue includes debates on issues of contemporary concern and critical reviews of the most recent publications.”
The language of this declaration speaks of Anglo-American philosophy on the one hand and non-Western cultural traditions that broadly integrate literature, science and social practice on the other. What seems implied is that philosophy in the Anglo-American sense is a specific discipline in its own right and that its non-Western counterpart is a broader, cultural tradition whose value is that it integrates literature and science with culturally determined behavior. In the Journal, Anglo-American philosophy is the proxy for Western philosophy, imposing a limitation and methodological asymmetry. But if this is the meaning, it still suggests an openness to proto-scientific attitudes within Eastern thought that were not acknowledged by prominent philosophers earlier in the 20th century and before.
Yet it is hard to avoid the assumption in this declaration that Anglo-American philosophy will use its own precise and meaningful standards to critique and evaluate non-Western thought. To be sure Anglo-American philosophy in the first half of the 20th century was a distinctive enterprise that saw philosophical thought in terms of limited set of particular problems to be solved; and this approach was a far cry from the major thought traditions in China and India, those traditions most prominently thought of as non-Western. This asymmetrical perspective raises several important questions. Was the purpose to elucidate or critique traditional Chinese or Indian thought in categories amenable to the epistemologies of Anglo-American philosophy? If so, was this necessary to clarify or in some way improve understanding? Or, was the anticipation that a dialogue between heterogeneous traditions was likely to produce a new type or level of understanding? And how would this be possible if the traditions really were grounded in different modes of thinking? The fact that university philosophy departments in Europe and United States did not generally include classic texts from China or India in their programs of study suggests that they were not regarded as philosophical in the same sense as those that informed the Anglo-American approach and therefore were not for some reason acceptable as sources of philosophical understanding. Was the Journal hoping to broaden philosophical discourse or to add another layer of legitimation to the preferred methodology of Anglo-American philosophy?
Today this notion of heterogeneity and the division of philosophy into East and West is being challenged and replaced with the idea of global or world philosophy, a new conception under which the terms of dialogue are revised. This move toward inclusivity is widely celebrated but also lamented by some who see it as a move away from methodological rigor. I shall consider the question of whether the abrogation of the West-East (or West – non West) paradigm in philosophy, laying emphasis on Chinese thought, represents a change in the idea of philosophy itself or is rather a shift in what is thought to be important for philosophers to understand.
My title suggests questions of method, perspective, pedagogy and standing within university curricula. These questions are all important and point to an underlying question, What is philosophy? Philosophers and historians of philosophy have struggled with this fundamental question which bears both a striking similarity to and simultaneously a profound difference from questions such as What is chemistry? or What is physics? In the case of the latter questions what is sought is a succinct delimitation of the purview of the discipline as well as a principle of differentiation between them. Physics and chemistry both study, analyze, describe and explain the natural order; physics does so from one perspective, with its own organizing principle, epistemic standards and intent, and chemistry does the same but from its particular perspective, organizing principle, epistemology and intent. Issues of complementarity and mutuality arise. The question about philosophy, on the other hand, might best be described as a question about questions, i.e., about what can be asked and what does it mean to ask. Philosophy is also explicit about the ontological and epistemological status of the questioner and acknowledges the positionality of inquiry.
The three formulations in the title assume, tacitly if not explicitly, alternative attitudes about the significance of cultural positionality. Roughly speaking one can characterize these alternative attitudes as:
(1) East-West Philosophy: In this approach cultural differences make a difference such that the philosophy of the East (and what does that include?) represents an alternative construct or way of understanding, contrasting with the philosophy of the West, of what is real and the status of humanity within that reality.
(2) Comparative Philosophy: Comparative philosophy considers the evident differences among various philosophical outlooks as nominal, perhaps rooted in method and/or cultural and historical contingency. Thus the relationship between different philosophical approaches is seen as a matter of translation in a simple sense where the terms in the one tradition are supposed to correspond more or less explicitly to terms in another. The task of comparative philosophy in this sense is to map the terms from one context to another and to assess the relative valences.
(3) World Philosophy: This non-reductionist approach eschews both cultural differentiations and systematic efforts to transpose one philosophy to another. It recognizes differences, of course, but does not try to derive ontological or epistemic differentiations from cultural differences which are rather regarded as the manifestations of the multiple states of mind that produce philosophical theories. Nor does it assert that there is a lingua franca in which all philosophical propositions, intuitions and valuations can be equally well expressed.
East-West philosophical discourse has often fortified the notion that philosophy originated in Greek antiquity and continues as an elaboration of those foundational insights. There has been a tendency to declare the ultimate superiority of Western scientific philosophy, rooted in classical Greek thinking, and to see Chinese (and Indian) thought, for example, as inferior due to their alleged lack of scientific rigor and mathematical precision. This kind of judgment presupposes that a general theory must be formulated in that fashion in order to avoid subjective bias.
The rise of the special sciences, both natural and social, stressing empirical and mathematical methods, has rendered the claim of philosophy as a source of knowledge and understanding less compelling, reducing it in some versions of the Anglo-American approach to the project of disambiguating metaphysical speculations, but not a source of positive knowledge. In this way one might see philosophy as a heuristic validated by its close alliance with mathematical science. From this perspective the question of how philosophy uses its past, the history of philosophy, takes on a new significance. It is in this context that the notion that genuine philosophy began in Greek antiquity and is the true antecedent to modern science is put forth.
The most familiar statement of this notion that true philosophy originated and is transmitted from the classical Greeks is probably the comment of A.N. Whitehead near the beginning of his Process and Reality (the Gifford Lectures of 1927-1928, published as a book in 1929):
“… so far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavoring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions that express the authority of one, or the other of some supreme master of thought – Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writing. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion …”
The theme of Process and Reality is universal and, especially given some of Whitehead’s writings on education wherein he asserts the wisdom of poetry and advocates the inclusion of Chinese literature in the curriculum. It is indicative of how for him philosophy is conceived that he does not acknowledge any non-Western contributions. For Whitehead, other civilizations may have contributed wisdom, but philosophy is the unique contribution of the West. In other words, Greek philosophy is seen as a precursor and the Western philosophical tradition as a complement to the explanations of modern science.
A few years later Edmund Husserl goes further in placing the origins of philosophy in Greek thinking, and asserting the inferiority of non-Greek thinking. In Phenomenology and the Crisis of European Man (1935, Lecture to the Vienna Cultural Society) Husserl states:
“Before anything else, the attitude of these two kinds of "philosophers," the overall orientation of their interests, is thoroughly different. Here and there one may observe a world-embracing interest that on both sides (including, therefore, the Indian, Chinese, and other like "philosophies") leads to universal cognition of the world, everywhere developing after the manner of a sort of practical vocational interest and for quite intelligible reasons leading to vocational groups, in which from generation to generation common results are transmitted and even developed. Only with the Greeks, however, do we find a universal ("cosmological") vital interest in the essentially new form of a purely "theoretical" attitude. This is true, too, of the communal form in which the interest works itself out, the corresponding, essentially new attitude of the philosophers and the scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). These are the men who, not isolated but with each other and for each other, i.e., bound together in a common interpersonal endeavor, strive for and carry into effect theoria and only theoria. These are the ones whose growth and constant improvement ultimately, as the circle of cooperators extends and the generations of investigators succeed each other, become a will oriented in the direction of an infinite and completely universal task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks.”
Unlike Whitehead, Husserl would not have endorsed the study of Chinese classics as a needed element in European education as their inclusion could possibly cast shadows on the theoretical attitude. There seem to be two issues at stake. On the one hand is the notion that philosophy is a pure form of rationality best achieved through scientific and mathematical theory. On the other hand, is the potentially more pernicious view that such rational and perhaps theistic thinking validates European thought and its embrace leads to a better people.
This attitude, although for different reasons, is straightforwardly discussed by Leibniz in the preface to his Novissima Sinica of 1697 – 1699.
1. I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation
and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two
extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tshina (as they call it),
which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life. I do not think it an accident that the Muscovites whose vast realm connects Europe with China and who hold sway over the deep barbarian lands of the North by the shore of the frozen ocean, should be led to the emulation of our ways through the strenuous efforts of their present ruler and their Patriarch, as I understand it, in agreement with him.
2. Now the Chinese Empire, which challenges Europe in cultivated area and certainly surpasses her in population, vies with us in many other ways in almost equal combat, so that now they win, now we. But what should I put down first by way of comparison? To go over everything, even though useful, would be lengthy and is not our proper task in this place. In the useful arts and in practical experience with natural objects we are, all things considered, about equal to them, and each people has knowledge which it could with profit communicate to the other. In profundity of knowledge and in the theoretical disciplines we are their superiors. For besides logic and metaphysics, and the knowledge of things incorporeal, which we justly claim as peculiarly our province, we excel by far in the understanding of concepts which are abstracted by the mind from the material, i.e., in things mathematical, as is in truth demonstrated when Chinese astronomy comes into competition with our own. The Chinese are thus seen to be ignorant of that great light of the mind, the art of demonstration, and they have remained content with a sort of empirical geometry, which our artisans universally possess. They also yield to us in military science, not so much out of ignorance as by deliberation. For they despise everything which creates or nourishes ferocity in men, and almost in emulation of the higher teachings of Christ (and not, as some wrongly suggest, because of anxiety), they are averse to war. They would be wise indeed if they were alone in the world. But as things are, it comes back to this, that even the good must cultivate the arts of war, so that the evil may not gain power over everything. In these matters, then, we are superior.
It is worth noting that all three thinkers, Leibniz as well as Whitehead and Husserl, were mathematicians and saw mathematics as the natural vehicle for philosophical thinking. It is not surprising that they found Chinese philosophy on these terms inferior. Although Leibniz did recognize in the Chinese notational system for expressing the dynamic balance of yin and yang (陰陽 —the broken and unbroken lines in the trigrams and hexagrams in the Yi Jing) a powerful tool for calculation and the transmission of information -- arithmetic calculated on base 2 as is the case in modern computers, he did not see this technique as an indication of scientific thinking. Leibniz did credit Chinese philosophy with a useful conjunction of cosmological speculation and practical mathematics, but he did not think that this indicated an approach whereby mathematical reasoning elucidated the structure of the natural order or cosmos. Rather, as Karl Jung would do later, he put it down to an anti-scientific predilection on the part of the Chinese. As Jung wrote in his 1949 Forward to the Wilhelm translation of the Yi Jing (易經):
“The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.”
Before Leibniz Descartes saw his invention of analytic geometry as the precursor to a perfect “language of relations and proportions” and perhaps Leibniz saw the Chinese Yi-Jing as a contribution to that objective, however not one that was realized within Chinese philosophy.
In any event, the absence of an explicit mathematical standard should not preclude the admission of non-Greek thought to the family of philosophy. One strand of classical Indian thought, for example, maintains that complex mathematical expressions of relation and proportionality are embedded, although not discussed in those terms, within the poetic transcriptions of the Vedas. In other words, ancient texts (originally transmitted orally) addressing social and religious questions can present in poetic and admonitory language, a cosmological worldview that is at its heart fundamentally mathematical. Moreover, this way of doing philosophy was to an extent practiced by Plato (see: Robert S. Brumbaugh, Plato’s Mathematical Imagination, 1954), suggesting that texts that are not focused on issues recognized as explicitly scientific or mathematical should not be demoted to an inferior status.
One asks the question, therefore, if the characterization of Chinese philosophy as non-scientific or even anti-scientific is due to any extent to the limitations inherent in the translations of the Chinese classics or the early interpretations of the Chinese classics by Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci who attempted to demonstrate intrinsic commonalities between Confucian and Christian worldviews. Indeed, the source of much of Leibniz’s understanding of Chinese philosophy was derived from his correspondence with Jesuit missionaries. Is it possible that embedded within the Chinese classics, but not thematized directly, is an esoteric discourse on proportionality, number and the foundations of the cosmos?
Although it was not always recognized in the West, China has a long and impressive history of science and technology. Some of the discoveries of the European scientific and ontological revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries were not unknown outside of the West, but they did not conform to the mechanistic picture of the universe drawn by Newton and others, and thus could be dismissed as non-scientific. The basic question is, Was classical Chinese thought, like ancient Greek thought, proto-scientific?
On this account it is interesting to consider the views of one of China’s pre-eminent philosophers in the 20th century. The question of the status of Chinese thought in comparison to Western scientific philosophy intrigued Feng You-lan (馮友蘭) in the early 20th century. In a paper entitled “Why China Has No Science,” (published in 1922) he asks:
What keeps China back? It is a natural question. What keeps China back is that she has no science. The effect of this fact is not only plain in the material side, but also in the spiritual side, of the present condition of Chinese life. China produced her philosophy at the same time with, or a little before, the height of Athenian culture. Why did she not produce science at the same time with, or even before, the beginning of modern Europe? This paper is an attempt to answer this question in terms of China herself.
He continues, “China has no science, because according to her own standard of value she does not need any.” His argument in defense of this assertion involves a distinction, taken from Zhuangzi (莊子), between nature and human.
"What is nature? What is human? That ox and horse have four feet is nature; to halter the head of a horse or to pierce the nose of an ox is human."
This distinction, similar to Aristotle’s, is between what is natural and what is artificial or we might say technological. At the end of the Zhou dynasty, during the Warring States period, according to Feng, these terms represented opposing schools of thought, cf. Daoism, Moism and as a kind of compromising middle way, Confucianism. This balance gave way after the Qin dynasty:
After the Chin Dynasty the "art" motive of Chinese thought almost never reappeared. Soon came Buddhism, which again is a "nature" philosophy of the extreme type. The Chinese mind oscillated among Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism for a long time. It was not until the tenth century A. D. that a new group of men of genius succeeded in combining these three, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, into one, and instilling the new teaching into the Chinese national mind, which has persisted to the present day.
The new teaching he mentions is now referred to as Song (dynasty) neo-Confucian thought. It was with this school, according to Feng, that the Chinese attitude toward scientific philosophy was set. Feng cites the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi’s (朱熹) interpolation of the classic “Great Learning” (Da xue, 大學), on the virtue of “investigating things”:
“Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things (zhi zhi zai ge wu 致知在格物). Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.”
However, the Neo-Confucian philosophers did not agree about what “things” to investigate. Some took “things” as external, but did not pursue the investigation of the empirical world. The other, prevailing view took “things” to refer to the mind. Feng states:
“China, ever since the disappearance of the "nature" line of her national thought, has devoted all her spiritual energy to another line, that is, to find good and happiness directly in the human mind …”
This neo-Confucian view that correlates the interior state of the active mind with the structure and harmony of the cosmos adds a depth of meaning to Jung’s reading of the Yi-Jing. If this is indeed, as Feng maintains, the essential mindset of Chinese philosophy, then it is clearly not scientific in the terms of Newton or Descartes. Feng accepts Bergson’s judgement (in Mind Energy, 1920).
"Therefore science, had it been applied in the first instance to the things of mind, would have probably remained uncertain and vague, however far it may have advanced; it would, perhaps, never have distinguished between what is simply plausible and what must be definitely accepted.”
Feng’s argument is that Chinese philosophy was a response to what China needed and that the neo-Confucian version, which to a degree assimilated Daoist and Buddhist concepts into a generally Mencian version of Confucianism, privileged the nature side of the dichotomy over the human (artificial or technological), whereas mainstream Western philosophy did the opposite. It is not due to an inherent conceptual lack in Chinese philosophy that has made it non-scientific in modern, Western terms.
A somewhat different analysis was advanced by Joseph Needham. Needham a brilliant biochemist who was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing (重庆市) from 1942 to 1946. During this period he began to research the history of science and technology in China leading to publication of the monumental Science and Civilization in China (currently 27 volumes). He focused on the problematic question of why the revolution that transformed scientific disciplines in Europe did not take place in China. In his words, "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo [but] had not developed in Chinese civilisation or Indian civilisation?" The debate Needham’s question fostered has tended to focus on the mathematization of science and whether the procedures of the official Chinese court astronomers were in that sense scientific. These debates have been very influential, but do little to clarify the relations between the origins and development of the sciences in China and Chinese philosophy. He marveled at the originality of Chinese technology, noting that the three devices that Francis Bacon stated (in 1620) were world changing -- printing, gun powder and the magnetic compass -- were all invented in China. Needham does not think that an explanation for the absence of a modern scientific revolution in China can be found in the nature of classical Chinese thought. The bifurcation Feng You-lan makes between nature and the human does not serve as an explanation for Needham who on the contrary found Daoism to be a kind of proto-scientific thought.
Needham’s approach to the history of science in China was to try to fit the Chinese scientific tradition into the categories of twentieth-century western science. The richness and diversity of Chinese science both does and does not support Feng You-lan’s interpretation. According to Needham, the development of science and technology in China was thwarted to a large extent by political choices and economic necessity rather than primarily by a neo-Confucian inward turn. Needham also disparages residual superstition which he thinks retarded the development of modern science in China.
Needham’s method and point of view enabled him to engage the wealth and variety of the many Chinese sciences from a perspective that took them seriously as contributors to an ongoing and universal history of science and allowed him to consistently and coherently refute “orientalist” claims that science was the sole property of a European tradition extending backward in time to ancient Greece, with little or no influence from any other cultural tradition. Needham’s student and critic, Nathan Sivin, objected to the universalist approach and observed that Chinese science was conceived, not as science as such or a universal science, but as qualitative and quantitative sciences and each of these into a number of methodologically different disciplines. Moreover, Sivin finds much more complexity than Feng You-lan’s account allows.
The divergent explanations of Feng You-lan and Joseph Needham alike refute the notion that Greek philosophy established a unique and superior path to a penetrating and rigorous modern, scientific and mathematical, philosophy. Feng’s argument that science was not pursued in China because it was in the time of the Song not what China needed has its peculiar parallel although opposite version in the West. Europe needed a scientific corrective to Medieval thinking. This was found in the re-introduction of Aristotelian thinking and the scientific revolution. Ultimately scientific technology became the way of the West, leading to the atomic bombing of cities in Japan and then, aware of the frightening power its technology had released, to the agōnistēs of the cold war. Needham with his appreciation of Chinese scientific tradition and accomplishments, was during the cold war blacklisted by the United States.
So how should philosophy today redress the legacy of the mathematization of nature, the industrial revolution, the rise of techno-science and a precarious global balance of power based on the threat of warfare? At the dawn of the cold war the founders of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Philosophy East and West proposed a global dialogue based upon Western paradigms. The crisis of today calls for a new paradigm.
Whitehead sees philosophy descending from Plato, intrinsically allied to mathematical thinking, and essentially Western. Feng You-lan suggests that the Confucian vision in many ways resembles the Platonic and emerges eventually to subordinate science. The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers saw origins of philosophy in the roughly contemporaneous figures of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus, examples of thinking characteristic of what he called the axial age, a period when there was a shift away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence. This may be indeed the best way to think about philosophy today: as a mode of thinking that turns away from local concerns to investigate the nature of nature and the nature of humanity. The terms East-West Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy truncate this endeavor and so perhaps the best designation should be World Philosophy.