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Question Some people seem to think that it is fundamentally impossible to understand another culture. For example, they say that no matter how we think about and conceptualize Chinese thought and philosophy, we will always be interpreting it as though it were Western, and that we will therefore never understand it. Can this really be true?

Accepted:
February 2, 2011

Comments

You do touch on a very important issue here which occurs to those of us who work in the philosophy of cultures that are not directly our own. How much do we miss since we are not the original audience, as it were, of the philosophers from that culture? On the other hand, it also seems to me that we are very far from the original audience that Plato and Aristotle had in mind, yet many of us think we can get some grasp of Greek philosophy. How far is philosophy all the same and how far is it culturally specific? It is remarkable how similar ideas crop up irrespective of culture, so most philosophers are interested in similar issues to do with truth, value, knowledge and so on, although it is certainly true that different cultures emphasize different issues in different ways.

There was a debate on this topic over a thousand years ago in the court at Baghdad. One philosopher argued that Greek philosophy was irrelevant to Muslims since it is based on Greek culture, and that has nothing to do with Islam. His opponent suggested on the contrary that philosophy deals in entirely general and abstract ideas which have nothing culturally specific about them, so Greek thought, translated into Arabic (his job) was perfectly useful. We are still having the debate today.

One thing that can be said about the issue, I think, is that anyone who works in the philosophy of a culture not his or her own should be aware of the danger of just assuming that if an idea in that culture looks like an idea in one's own, then it is. Often it is not.