Pillaging the east

[As we struggle towards the end of the semester at 'Atenisi, cramming lessons about everything from Eastern philosophy to Tennessee Williams to sociology into the drowsy heads of students, Dr Maikolo Horowitz and I have taken to sitting in on each other's lectures, and helping or hindering each other with sage words from the back of the class. I give Maikolo a hard time about his affection for the Tibetan Book of the Dead; he ridicules my romantic pseudo-Marxism.

This is an excerpt from some notes I recently made for a student in one of Maikolo's papers who is writing, or attempting to write, an essay about the relationship and differences between the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. I'm putting my comments, which probably reveal more about my own obsessions and oversights than they do about either Eastern or Western philosophy, on this blog in the hope that some learned reader might like to offer his or her own thoughts. I'll be sure to pass on any comments.]

Hi T,

I think that your attempt to define a Western philosophical tradition beginning with Thales and other pre-Socratics and then to compare and contrast that tradition with Eastern forms of thought makes a sort of sense, but I do wonder if it doesn’t risk becoming a little abstract.

By defining the Western philosophical tradition, with its myriad schools and controversies and schisms, in terms of a couple of characteristics – a commitment to rational argument, a distaste for appeals to the authority of the supernatural – you risk obscuring as much as you reveal. How does the Diogenes the Cynic, who repudiated rational thought, lived in a barrel, and ran through the Athenian marketplace naked, fit your definition? What about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Derrida, who in their different ways insisted on the limitations of reason?

There are also problems inherent in any attempt to make a general definition of Eastern thought. What does Hinduism, with its swarm of luridly coloured gods, have in common with Zen Buddhism, a religion so austere that it has sometimes been mistaken for atheism? What does Confucius, a thinker so focused on the problems of life in this world that he dismissed the supernatural almost entirely from his mind, have in common with Siddhartha, who gave up worldly power and tried to starve himself to enlightenment?

If you were worried that your approach might be too abstract, you could complement your attempts to define Western and Eastern thought by looking at some of the concrete ways that ideas from the East have influenced individual Western thinkers.

Consider, for instance, the influence of certain Eastern ideas on Martin Heidegger, a man generally considered, in spite of his odious personality and disastrous politics – as the Rector of Freiburg university in the 1930s he sauntered about in a Nazi uniform, and presided over the burning of books by Freud and Thomas Mann – as the most innovative philosopher of the twentieth century.

You have studied Descartes in the past; Heidegger’s philosophical career can be considered as an extended struggle against the influence of Descartes on Western thought. Descartes brought a radical individualism to philosophy. In his famous meditations he tried to doubt the existence of everything in the universe, including himself, before deciding that the reasoning part of his mind was the only object whose existence he could ascertain with certainty. From this minimalist beginning Descartes built up his philosophy piece by piece, proposition by proposition. He took for granted the notion that the individual mind is an isolated unit of rationality, and the view that statements about reality have to be assessed individually as true or as false. 

We can see Descartes as the father of a sort of ‘philosophical atomism’ that reached its peak early in the twentieth century, when analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell tried to build up complete pictures of the universe one logical proposition at a time.

Karl Marx argued that Descartes’ approach to philosophy was linked to the rise of capitalism. Just as capitalism encourages us to see human societies as aggregations of individuals, each of which makes rational independent decisions in the economic marketplace, buying this and selling that, so Descartes encourages us to consider human minds as discrete units of rationality, and to consider human knowledge as the sum of the efforts of those individual minds.

More than any other thinker, Heidegger overturned the Cartesian approach to philosophy. He did so by shifting the focus of philosophy from epistemology, which examines the basis for our beliefs, to ontology, which examines the nature of being. Heidegger insisted that human beings had to be understood not as isolated rational minds, but as the products of the worlds around them. Human consciousness is, he argued, formed by culture, language, and nature.

Because the individual human is born and raised in a particular place and time, he or she is made by a particular culture and language, a culture and language which is itself rooted in a particular natural ecosystem. Whenever we think, feel, or speak, we do so in the context of ‘primeval’ presuppositions given to us by our human and natural environment. It therefore makes no sense to consider the individual human as an abstract unit of rationality, or to imagine that human knowledge can be built up piecemeal by a series of disinterested, rational observations.

Heidegger used the phrase Dasein, or Being in the World, as a synonym for human, because he believed it summed up the situation of the human being. We exist not in our own minds, but in a world of objects and relationships. Our consciousness is not a cell closed off from the world, but a ‘clearing’ where the creatures and objects of the world manifest themselves. Arguably, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein and of human consciousness as a clearing echo Marx’s claim that ‘in humanity nature becomes conscious of itself’.

In a famous passage of his early masterpiece Being and Time, Heidegger picked up a hammer and used it to illustrate what he saw as the absurdity of the individualistic, Cartesian approach to thought. How, Heidegger asked, can we grasp the nature of a hammer? If consider the hammer in isolation – by examining it from every angle, or weighing it, or placing it under a microscope – then we can never hope to understand it.

We can only comprehend the hammer if we consider it as part of a set of human relationships and practices – relationships and practices which occur inside a larger natural environment. The hammer’s shape makes sense when we consider that it must fit snugly into the hand of carpenter; the hammer’s head of steel is explicable when we remember that it must strike nails; and the hammer’s importance becomes clear when we consider the necessity of human beings sheltering from the elements.

Just as we cannot understand a hammer without grasping a whole set of relationships – without grasping what Heidegger’s early mentor, Edmund Husserl, called the ‘lifeworld’ – so we cannot understand more abstract concepts, like being and truth, in isolation.

In Europe, especially, Heidegger’s ideas revolutionised philosophy. Instead of considering humans as individual units of rationality, thinkers influenced by Heidegger began to consider the self as something inextricably tied up with the wider world. They developed an approach to the self which is sometimes described as ‘philosophical anti-humanism’.

Instead of considering philosophical propositions in isolation, philosophers influenced by Heidegger began to consider how the meanings of these propositions were determined by  complex cultural and linguistic contexts. They developed an approach to the study of meaning which is sometimes called ‘epistemological holism’.

Heidegger was an egotistical and compulsively evasive man, who often covered up his borrowings from other thinkers. It is only in the decades since his death that scholars have realised what a debt he owed to certain Eastern philosophical traditions. We now know that Heidegger was fascinated by both Taoism and Zen Buddhism, that he spent years working on a translation of the Book of Tao, and that he hosted and conversed at length with Zen philosophers visiting Europe. In his 1989 book Ex Oriente Lux, Reinhard May argued that Heidegger’s borrowings from the East were extensive, and faulted him for never admitting them.

It is apparent that the Taoist and Zen traditions helped Heidegger to develop his alternative to Cartesian thought. As Maikolo Horowitz has shown you this semester, and as Richard Von Sturmer emphasised during his recent visit to Tonga, Zen Buddhists reject the notion of a discrete self, insulated from the world. Many Zen practices, like meditation and the writing of haiku and koan, are intended to make students realise that the self is an illusion.

(As I said when I sat in on Maikolo’s class, I think the notion that the self is an illusion is extreme, and can have negative practical consequences, when it is exploited by charismatic and unscrupulous religious leaders, like the fanatical Zen masters who trained Japan’s kamikaze pilots, and the leaders of New Age cults. I’d like to think that we can reject Descartes’ notion of a very isolated self without embracing the Zen position, and I’m not sure if Heidegger himself goes as far as Zen.)

Taoism and Zen Buddhism ask us to view the creatures, objects and acts that make up the world as inextricably connected, and thus suggest the sort of epistemological holism that Heidegger developed.

When Heidegger acknowledged other thinkers, he tended to look not to the East but to the very early days of Western philosophy. He believed that Western thought had taken a wrong turn when Plato and Aristotle had started trying to categorise and systematise reality in their great and weighty books. By doing so, he thought, they had forgotten about the pre-rational ‘lifeworld’ that grounds all thought. Later philosophers like Descartes were, Heidegger insisted, simply adding to the mistakes made by Plato and his students.

Heidegger presented his work as an attempt to revive the spirit of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who had supposedly remained free of the rationalism that tainted Plato.

It is worth noting, as an aside, that Heidegger’s attitude to the pre-Socratics is radically different from that of Futa Helu. Where Futa Helu believes that Heraclitus laid the foundations for the whole tradition of Western thought, from Plato to Descartes to Einstein, Heidegger sees him as an alternative to the route taken by later Western thinkers.  Your own attempt to make Thales and the other pre-Socratics the fathers of the Western tradition implies an acceptance of Helu’s perspective.

Personally, I think both points of view are equally plausible. I think that Heraclitus’ writings have come down to us in such a fragmentary form, and that so little is known about his life, that one can make him exemplify almost any philosophical position. But my mate Ted Jenner, who knows a good deal more than me about Heraclitus (he can actually read Greek), and about many other things, likes Futa Helu’s angle!

Cheers,

Scott