Topics Philosophy

Question Why is there such a rigid division between the Western Tradition of philosophy and Eastern philosophy? Early and Medieval Indian philosophy was just as rich, and varied, and deep as the Greek tradition. They addressed similar problems, often with slightly different trajectories of thought. And we now have justification to believe that there was cross-cultural intellectual "pollination" between the two. So when I read something from the Western canon that presents itself as novel, I stop and say to myself "Gee, I thought Dharmakirti said that a few hundred years ago." Sure, the Western philosopher may have done a more thorough exploration of the idea, but it's hard to resist the urge to go, "Duh!" One piece of advice that someone once gave me as encouragement to study philosophy was no matter how brilliant or novel or unique something I was thinking about seemed to me, someone else has probably already thought of it. So to rephrase my question, in an age where information and communication are global, why do the traditional divisions between the Occident and the Orient remain? Why don't I find any Western philosophers taking up Nagarjuna's treatise on Sunyata and examining it critically? Why isn't anyone looking into Buddhist phenomenology (which IMHO has some unique insights into the mind/body problem)? And if this is happening, where is it happening?

Accepted:
October 23, 2008

Comments

First of all, let's distinguish two issues that seem to be interwoven in your question: what do/should historians of philosophy study, and what do/should actual working philosophers study? Taking the latter first, it is very true that Western philosophers tend to give little or no thought to folks like Nagarjuna. But there's nothing remarkable about that: they tend to give little or no thought to Plotinus either, or to Eriugena, or even to Descartes. Most working philosophers, although they might occasionally enjoy showing off a certain erudite awareness of the historical origins of their current debates, will rarely actually read and engage with works that are more than twenty years old. I suppose the idea is that newer works will preserve all that was good about earlier attempts at solutions to the problems in question, while also ironing out their flaws and generally pushing things forward. Giving "a more thorough exploration of the idea", as you put it. And maybe it would be a little naive to push that line too forcefully: but there's surely some truth in it. Current philosophers concern themselves with current philosophy. They will engage with any new work that they regard as addressing the topics that interest them and as being adequately rigorous and insightful, regardless of the tradition out of which such work might be emerging; but they won't delve back into works that were written hundreds of years ago, and there is no good reason why they should. One wouldn't expect a working chemist to go and study the writings of Medieval alchemists.

Admittedly, in that assessment of the relevance and quality of work -- even new work -- that might be emerging out of different traditions, there is inevitably going to be a certain bias. Some of this will arise out of prejudice at the individual level, which is of course to be lamented: but most of it, I think, is just down to the fact that, in order to be able to communicate, philosophers need to speak the same language. I don't so much mean English versus Sanskrit -- though that is obviously going to create problems! -- but more that philosophers might fail to spot the relevance of a work that, although it might be in English, nevertheless applies a different conceptual scheme to its problems and dresses itself in a different lexicon of technical terminology. But, short of a radical restructuring of the entire global education system (and who is going to get to decide which conceptual scheme should be imposed globally?), I can't see that there's a whole lot that can be done about that. So maybe current philosophers in the West are missing out on what could potentially be useful contributions to their debates; and current philosophers in the East are probably doing so too. But, after all, there's already far too much material out there, even within a tradition, for anyone to read and learn from all of it. And, by and large, contemporary philosophers seem to be doing just fine as they are.

But then there are the historians of philosophy. Now, a few of those, even in the West, do work on Eastern philosophy: but only very few, I'll certainly grant you that. So should the rest of them be paying more attention to Nagarjuna et al.? Well, I think it comes down to the issue you raise, of cross-cultural pollination; and I'm afraid I'm not persuaded that there was as much as you suggest. There does seem to be some evidence that certain notions from classical Greek philosophy might have crept into the early Indian tradition: but it's not clear just how much and, in any case, it probably didn't reach to more distant regions such as China. And then it wasn't until the seventeenth century that Eastern philosophies began to be communicated back into the West; and, even then, Western philosophers' grasp of them was really very poor indeed, and they had little or no impact on shaping their own systems. To say that Hume or Spinoza, say, developed ideas that are close to certain Buddhist teachings is perhaps worthy of a footnote: but the fact is that they came to them independently, and a large part of the work of historians of philosophy is to explore the development of ideas by tracing patterns of genuine influence.

The case of India might be contrasted with that of the Arab Middle East. Early Medieval philosophers in Baghdad and elsewhere knew the works of the ancient Greeks inside-out, and these were absolutely crucial in shaping their own thoughts; and then, at least from the fifteenth century onwards, the works of those Arab philosophers themselves became well known in Western Europe, and European philosophers engaged with them closely. That simply wasn't the case for Indian philosophers, and for Chinese ones still less so. So, whereas someone who works on the history of Western philosophy does need to have a fair awareness of the history of Middle Eastern philosophy, they can get by perfectly well without a comparable awareness of the history of philosophy in the further East. The history of Indian or Chinese philosophy as such is an eminently valid field of study, just as is the history of Western philosophy: but the fact is that the two are largely independent of one another, historically even if not always thematically.