Tags
At the SACP, South Asian (Indian, Tibetan) and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese) thought both have a central place, with Western thought on the margins. At the vast majority of philosophy conferences, Western thought has a central place, with both South and East Asian thought on the margins. I say this not to complain about the general marginal status of Asian philosophy; that’s not news. Rather, I’m increasingly beginning to wonder whether there is anything to “Asian philosophy” at all.
SACP members often lament that the South Asianists and the East Asianists don’t talk to each other much. Douglas Berger, a thoughtful and erudite scholar I had the pleasure of meeting at the SACP, recently started the interesting email list ASIAN-THOUGHT-L with a main objective of encouraging cross-Asian discussion. My own categories on this site are organized the same way. But does all of this make any sense?
In terms of areas of concern, at least, South Asian and East Asian philosophical thought each seem much closer to the West than they are to each other. (“Western” philosophy here refers to the stream of thought originating in Greece, including the Islamic world.) South Asian thought is preeminently concerned with psychology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and transcending the everyrday world, which have all been topics of central concern in the West since Plato – but are relatively little discussed in East Asia. East Asian thought, in turn, is concerned above all with politics, human relationships and social ethics – major concerns in the West but less so in South Asia.
The obvious constant between South and East Asia, of course, is Buddhism. But Buddhism here starts to look like the exception that proves the rule, for Buddhist thought changes drastically as it enters East Asia. East Asian Buddhist thinkers were much more concerned with worldly affairs and politics than their South Asian predecessors had been, and the elaborate structures of South Asian theoretical philosophies got dramatically pared down in systems like Ch’an/Zen.
So is it worth talking about Asian philosophy at all? Perhaps only as a move in intellectual politics – joining forces to carve out a space for philosophical reflection that is not Western. As for my categories, well, they seem a fitting organization for now given how much I talk about Buddhism. But I could imagine changing them on these grounds on the future.
EDIT: “a main objective of encouraging cross-Asian discussion” was originally “a main objective of encourage cross-Asian discussion.” That’s what I get for trying to blog on a layover.
I find it more profitable to denote particular textual corpora than nebulous entities like “Chinese phil” or “Indian phil” etc. This is because the corpora that people study when they self-designate as a field are not always similar in size, contexts, genres, etc.
I can speak with greatest assurance about “Chinese philosophy”: when people adopt this label and join this debate group, they are overwhelmingly likely to focus on a half-dozen texts from between 500 and 200 BCE. In fact, the default view of the field in the past few decades is that Chinese thought changes so radically after those centuries that many of the traditions we’re directly interested in effectively die off. The opinion exists in respectable strength, though I would not call it quite mainstream, that the political changes China went through in its transition to empire constituted a tragedy for intellectual culture. Even those who do not hold this view very seldom study or teach texts from the four centuries following 200 BCE. “Dead zone”. Interest picks up again for the post-Han centuries, mostly around Xuanxue–but thereafter Buddhism becomes so powerful that scholars need a different skill-set and textual experience to evaluate what’s going on. “Buddhist studies” and “Chinese philosophy” have never cohabited easily in practice. Neo-Confucian thought, another few centuries after that, gets some attention by people trained in philosophy, but the overwhelming weight of secondary work at this point is on 500-200 BCE. That means “Chinese philosophy” is very textually self-isolating. (See my guest posts on Manyul’s blog for more of the issues I see surrounding this.)
I get no comparable sense for the self-designation “Indian philosophy”.
Additionally: as someone who has continued to focus on Chinese philosophy while ensconced in a program with overwhelming focus on Indian (specifically Buddhist) thought, I have found the conceptual overlap rapidly approaching zero. Many insights arise from studying both, but these are mainly insights of contrast rather than comparison.
Additionally additionally: I do not think it is optimal to characterize (early) Chinese thought as “concerned above all with politics, human relationships and social ethics”. I think a more comprehensive characterization would be that it is concerned to generate discourses that optimize action in the world. To the extent that the writers develop meta-level reflections on what they are doing as professional intellectuals, those reflections focus on the results they hope their discourses can help bring about, at both individual and collective scales. The chief concern of a Warring States “master” is to *bring about* social order, pragmatic efficacy, individual health and satisfaction. They engage in recognizably philosophical debate with that priority consistently in view.
I have some difficulty with the typical characterization of early Chinese thought as “ethical” in its orientation – I am not sure that this holds even for the most moralistic schools. I think the orientation is better expressed as simultaneously ethical, pragmatic, and aesthetic. The early writers interlace discourses of ethical, pragmatic, and aesthetic import in ways that I think are still poorly-digested by philosophical scholarship.
Thanks for the insight, Stephen. It’s interesting to think about aesthetics as a common interest for the two: it emerges later in Indian tradition, but becomes an increasing object of concern at that point. And there is a common concern, too, with living the good life, though in Indian tradition that’s more likely to mean transcending everyday life – but then that common concern is part of what makes both traditions (or rather all three traditions) philosophy.
As for whether “Chinese philosophy” is a coherent unit: well, each tradition has its dead zones of sorts, in which the concerns and vocabulary afterwards are very different from those before. Western philosophy pretty much dries up between Boethius (early 6th century CE) and the rise of Islamic falsafa and kalam (9th-10th century CE) – and the concerns after that are quite different from before. India’s dead zone comes later still, after the Turkic/Persian conquests; very little is done in the indigenous Indian traditions after Caitanya and Rupa Gosvami in the 16th century, and Indian Muslims were relatively unphilosophical overall. That dead zone ends with Rammohun Roy, the Bengal Renaissance and modern Hinduism in the 19th century – but of course the newly emerging philosophy is hugely different there as well (some have claimed almost unrecognizable).
All that having been said (by both of us), I do think that “Asian Philosophy” ought to exist as an available category, mainly for the support and solidarity of people working in South Asian, East Asian, and Buddhist traditions. What we all have in common is that we use methods proper to Philosophy departments to analyze and engage with texts written in cultures with little or no historical connection to the heritage of Western philosophy. Some of those texts are not, I think, any more inescapably foreign than many Western texts that *are* accorded the status of “philosophy”–take a lot of Greeks before and after the much-favored 4c BCE, for instance. It is simply the case that Western philosophers have been interacting with those texts for so long, if not explicitly than as part of a recognizable intellectual landscape, that they consider those texts digestible and intelligible by comparison to products of India and China. I, for one, am far less concerned with whether a given text counts as “philosophical” or not, and far more concerned with how well philosophically-engaged scholars understand what is going on in the texts to begin with.