Benoît Vermander (Fudan University), "The Encounter of Chinese and Western Philosophies"
De Gruyter, 2023
Philosophizing (philosophieren) is by no means a laudatory term in Kant’s vocabulary. It is synonymous with “repeating one’s lesson”. Kant’s criticism of philosophical learning, which led him to formulate the “conceptus cosmicus” (Weltbegriff) of a philosophical endeavor and to contrast it with the “scholastic concept” (Schulbegriff), maintains a relevance that goes beyond the schools and traditions he had in mind at the time. Philosophy, says Kant, cannot be learnt. Whereas the “scholastic concept” is turned towards the logical perfection of a given system of knowledge, the cosmic concept orients the philosopher towards the ultimate ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae) so she may operate a breakthrough through the dense forest of knowledge systems (KrV, B867/AA 3: 542.26f.).
At least in the Chinese-Western context, “Comparative philosophy”, I suggest, has evolved into a scholastic endeavor. Let us not immediately take the term in too pejorative a fashion. Scholasticism is concerned with the formal perfection of a domain of cognition, even if it does not operate the jump that (Kantian) philosophy dares to make when it enters its “world concept”: to investigate the source, the nature and the boundaries of all cognition from an architectonic perspective. However, some expressions of “comparative scholasticism” mostly argue over terms and textual interpretations, hindering our access to investigative, unfettered thinking.
In the grand narratives of intellectual history sketched in a number of Western and Chinese accounts, “Western thought” effectively starts (begins its journey towards world prominence, so to speak) around the time of Plato, to whom Aristotle offers both correctives and continuation, and then develops in an almost straight line that runs through Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes … before finding a kind of double apex in Kant and Hegel. The latter may constitute the “apotheosis” of Western thought, both in the sense that it signals a further culmination just after the one already achieved by Kant and in that it announces an inevitable “decay”, which may also be described as a welcome metamorphosis, though Heidegger is sometimes tasked with the same role. Thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Dewey or Bergson (and, later on, Foucault/Deleuze, at least for some of the authors whom we will comment) testify to a (praiseworthy) work of deconstruction within the Western tradition itself. From its origins onwards, the latter would have relied upon the building-up of an ontology, which not only presupposes the existence of a master-category (Being, induced by the features of the family of languages within which Western thought developed), but also its assumption into a substantialist view of reality that puts “relations” and “processes” into a subordinate position. The same view explains the primacy given to the autonomy of individual beings, including human subjects. Various thought systems extended these premises into the logical, theological or yet political realms.
In contrast, according to the same meta-narrative, ancient Chinese thought originated from divinatory speculations that led (a) to stress the fluidity of all phenomena and forms of life, (b) to focus on the relationships governing the passage from one state of matter (and one state of affairs) to another, (c) to describe the patterns of cosmic and social existence by establishing correlations among the various spheres of existence, and ultimately (d) to determine how to best adapt (individually and collectively) to these overarching patterns. Challenged by the irruption of a thought syntax (and a correlated lexicon) imported from India, Chinese thought was eventually able to rephrase its original intuitions. It did so partly thanks to the fact that Buddhist thought was also arguing for the inanity of all substantified “beings” (though by following another path than the one traveled in ancient China), and, for another part, thanks to the inventiveness displayed in the use of ancient concepts such as li 理 (patterns), and qi 氣 (energy, fluid, or even matter). Chinese thought thus progressively systematized its intuitions and concepts into syntheses embracing all the levels of existence and intellectual speculation. The political and gnoseological commotions brought in by the shaping of unbalanced relationships with the West led two or three generations of Chinese philosophers to reconsider their own tradition primarily through concepts and methods rooted in Western philosophy. The current task rather lies in recapturing the premises proper to Chinese thought, so as to build upon the resources they offer or, at least, to live and think in the tension that the reference to a “dual ontology” necessarily triggers.
This meta-narrative deciphers texts, partly in function of concepts that it extracts from their reading (but sometimes takes out of context), partly according to notions that are not found in these texts and are superimposed over them. It constructs syntheses, equivalences and oppositions that are somehow too well balanced for not triggering questioning. Besides, the concept of “Chinese philosophy” supported by the said vision sometimes refers to the thought developed until around the demise of the Western Han (2000 years ago), sometimes to the various stages of intellectual reformulation that China underwent after it entered into contact with Buddhism and, more largely, with Indian texts and reasoning. In the same way, “Western philosophy” may refer to the Greek source and its Roman subsidiary, or else to the philosophical developments that occurred from Augustine onwards, as if Greek and Semitic sources had entered naturally into fusion. In such reconstructions, Indian and biblical ways of sensing and reasoning are extremely difficult to appreciate and assess independently, due to the fact that they are primarily located vis-à-vis the “Chinese” and “Western” sources that they have respectively contributed to renew and shape.
As I see the task at hand, the critique of such positions is a preliminary for tackling the following question: in today’s context, what style of cross-cultural philosophical engagement should be imagined and fostered? Cross-cultural philosophical dialogue is indeed indispensable to the revival of philosophies that could be both local and genuinely dialogic.
This book endeavors to revive “Otherness” within each of the traditions put to the test by contemporary Chinese-Western comparative philosophy. Not a form of “Otherness” that would be merely a “minority opinion” inside a dominant tradition – a minority opinion conveniently discarded when drawing overarching syntheses – but an “Otherness” that points towards the philosophical impetus of each of the traditions considered, forbidding the system in which it is inserted to close upon itself. Such distancing of each tradition from itself resonates with the way Zhuangzi considers “differences”:
Looking at things from the viewpoint of difference, the liver and the gallbladder look {as distant as the states of} Chu and Ye. But when looking at them from the viewpoint of sameness, then all the myriad things are one. When you consider things this way, you do not know them in the fashion they fit eye and ear, [but rather] you release your heart-mind in the harmony of all manifested potentialities.
(Zhuangzi 5.1)
The myriad things are one in that they originate from the same source and similarly return to it. Somehow, the variety of their manifestations testifies to the unity of their production and destiny. Philosophical productions are subject to such reversal of perspective. Pascal observes that what is seen at a distance as a township appears, as you get closer and closer, as an agglomerate of houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grasses, ants, ants’ legs, ad infinitum… Still, once the agglomerate has been considered in its dizzying heterogeneousness, you may want to ponder what ultimately constitutes its Oneness.