Comparative Philosophy

Is it worth doing?

Without really meaning to, I’ve recently been moving into the sub-discipline of philosophy known as “comparative philosophy”. I didn’t do it on purpose, and I didn’t have any awareness of the various debates, ideas, and ideologies around the project of comparative philosophy. But, post facto, I’ve started to think that comparative philosophy is a worthwhile enterprise, and I think I might be willing to defend it, almost as if I did this deliberately.

What happened was this: I started seeing resonances between the philosophy I know a bit about—Spinoza and Cartesianism—and philosophies that I know nearly nothing about—the philosophical interpretations of the Zhuangzi, certain readings of the work of Ibn ‘Arabi, and, most recently, the fascinating tradition of Acehnese Sufism, which I stumbled upon accidentally. The resonances with Spinoza interested me, but so did the ideas—particularly metaphysical and ethical ideas. I found ideas there that feel useful to me and seem to run very hard against the conventional wisdom of both the prevailing culture and the consensus in academic philosophy.

In metaphysics, I was intrigued by a way of thinking about basic reality that starts without firm commitment to the Aristotelian Law of Identity—or, more technically, without presuming the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Suppose it possible that, at least in some cases, one thing, x, can have a certain quality, and one thing, y, can lack that same quality, and yet x and y be numerically identical. Then intriguing possibilities open up for looking at the world in a very different way to how we are used to looking at it. In the early 2000s the conceptual artist Jonathon Keats ran a petition to legislate the law of identity in California. The response was generally hostile, not because of resistance to the law but for the opposite reason: people were not open to the idea that the law could even possibly be violated. Chenyang Li suggests that this idea is perfectly natural in certain cultural contexts, even if the cultures linking back to Aristotelian tradition have the Law of Identity so entrenched as to find its opposite unthinkable.

In ethics, I was intrigued by two things.

One relates to the metaphysical point: Keats’s stunt highlights something that does seem to happen in our culture, without the need for overt legislation. People are put under enormous pressure to define themselves, to pin themselves down to distinct identities: to announce to the world who they authentically are, and to “be true to themselves”—to that announced identity—through hell or high water. The scholar of Daoism, Hans Georg Moeller, has a whole YouTube channel devoted to exploring the ten thousand ways this plays out in contemporary culture. The philosophical readings of Zhuangzi run hard against this, building on the sentiment expressed in the first chapter of the Zhuangzi: “zhi ren wu ji 至人無己”: the perfect person has no identity. The ethical pursuit of identitylessness is central to Guo Xiang’s commentary on the Zhuangzi, as understood by Brook Ziporyn.

The other is amoralism. We live in an vigorously moralistic age, perhaps partly due to the cultural hegemony of a nation founded on Puritanism. After sharing photos, people’s favourite activity on social media appears to be telling each other off. The normative parts of philosophy—moral philosophy and epistemology—appear to me to be the big growth areas in the discipline, promising to arm you with justifications for your value-judgements about action and belief. I find in Spinoza a strong amoralism and a touch of antimoralism: not only do our value-judgements not correspond to anything real, the habit of making them turns us against each other and ends up making us miserable. Cultivating a more non-judgemental attitude makes us more open to the world, more capable of genuine innovation, kinder, and happier. It would be self-defeating to say that this is good, but there is no contradiction in saying that practising it could help us all to live in the world together more joyfully and peacefully, and to hypothesise that deep down this is what most of us really want. In Zhuangzi I find much more than a touch of this antimoralism, and so my encounter with Zhuangzi allowed me to experience the few scattered notes in Spinoza expanded into a full symphony.

This, it turns out, qualifies as comparative philosophy as defined by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Comparative philosophy—sometimes called ‘cross-cultural philosophy’—is a subfield of philosophy in which philosophers work on problems by intentionally setting into dialogue various sources from across cultural, linguistic, and philosophical streams.”

Consciously, I thought I was doing this purely out of a desire to understand Spinoza—or, rather, to provide myself with tools for bringing out the elements in Spinoza I found the most idiosyncratic, fascinating, and attractive. The Western tradition—let alone the traditions currently dominant in philosophy—do not provide much space for these ideas; there is a dearth of language for expressing them and examples to illustrate them. The tradition of philosophical Daoism provides in abundance what the prevailing traditions lack.

Unconsciously, there was probably a lot more going on. I have an Asian mother and spent some of my childhood in Southeast Asia—the meeting point of so many of the world’s great cultural traditions. So I’ve always been aware of the richness of the world’s cultural tapestry and was genuinely surprised when I entered academic philosophy and found how much of a monoculture it remains. In defining “comparative philosophy”, the Internet Encyclopedia goes on: “The ambition and challenge of comparative philosophy is to include all the philosophies of global humanity in its vision of what is constituted by philosophy.” I don’t know about all—that’s a big ask. But I suppose I think philosophy should at least try to do justice to the range of global cultures.

More than this, I find it a constant struggle to feel useful doing philosophy. In 2016 I published a book, The Philosophy of Debt, in which I tried to use philosophical analysis to address some confusions that plague public discourse concerning financial matters. Today, the discourse is as confused as ever. Decades of helpful interventions from public economists and others don’t seem to have elevated the level of discourse one iota. Probably there are too many vested interests who benefit from maintaining the current level of confusion, and there’s nothing that an academic philosopher can do about it. I can’t think of a case where confusion wreaks more political mischief than this one, so I stopped believing there is much scope for philosophy to be useful by clarifying anything.

Philosophers also give the appearance of intervening in public affairs by making compelling arguments about whether various things are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy, given the logical implications of some “moral intuitions” we’re all meant to share. Besides being rather culturally imperialistic (who is the “we” of “our intuitions”?), all we’ve learnt from this project, I think, is that whatever drives people to act, it certainly isn’t an overriding desire to render their actions logically consistent with “our” moral intuitions. It can be an interesting intellectual exercise to find such consistencies, but only insofar as logical exercises like this are generally interesting. Some people find it fun to work out things like whether, if all worbles are weebles, and every wurgle is a wumble, and wurgles who are not weebles are worbles, we can conclude that no worbles are wumbles. I’m all for people having fun, but this is not the way I hope for philosophy to be useful to the world.

But comparative philosophy might help to achieve something useful, which is cultural cross-breeding. I know that this is a very unpopular idea—so unpopular that populations around the world are willing to elect buffoons into government to stop it happening. Chen Guying has an interesting essay on how Zhuangzi can be used to defend the value of intercultural dialogue. Comparative philosophy at its best, I believe, should serve the purpose of changing philosophical traditions by bringing them into contact with alien influences. It should lead philosophers to question starting points that they hadn’t thought to question before because they hadn’t even considered there might be other starting points.

People today seem to feel the same about mixing cultures as earlier generations felt about mixing races. They fear contamination and dilution. Even trying to extend these fears as much sympathy as I can, I think they’re misguided. The idea of a pure-bred culture is a myth, of course, but cultures that actively avoid cross-breeding suffer the same problems as pure-bred animals. They develop exaggerated features in one particular direction, making them extremely well-adapted to one environment and close to helpless when that environment changes. They concentrate susceptibility to particular pathologies over time. They begin to atrophy in terms of internal variation and thus fail to benefit from randomly-occurring, sporadic innovations.

It is very difficult, from within a culture, to bring in elements from the outside. One side of politics will accuse you of being a race traitor; the other side will accuse you of cultural appropriation. Even those on your side will be wary of the consequences of saying so openly: I was once told by somebody who worked for a charity supporting immigrants that it was better not to make the argument that immigrant communities culturally enrich a nation, since immigrants are only tolerated when the domestic population believes they will culturally assimilate. Those of us who have the good fortune to straddle cultures can, I think, try to help to break down some of these barriers.

Advancing the goal of cultural exogamy might not seem like much, but it is a contribution that philosophy can make to the world, by pursuing comparative philosophy. And I think it might be more significant than it seems. Ellen Marie Chen presents an interesting contrast between Aristotelian thinking, which endorses what she calls a “form motive” and Daoist thinking, which endorses a “matter motive”. The form motive is this: “By becoming a fixed form immune to change and dissolution, finite individuals hope to escape swallowing by the Infinite”. The matter motive holds that “a living universe is one wherein the many finite forms are ever coalescing, interpenetrating, appearing, and disappearing”.

Our world today is driving itself mad with the form motive. Individuals, nations, and cultures are all alike terrified of the idea of losing their identity—of being so modified and shaped by external things as to lose their deep authentic essence, of losing all form and integrity and getting “swallowed up in the Infinite”. This fear drives them inwards, insulating themselves from all external influence, the result of which is not perfect preservation but atrophy and internal decay.

The matter motive sees things rightly: interpenetration and the mutual transformation of one thing by another is nothing to fear; it is the ultimate character of the universe. Things don’t derive their life and power from some deep authentic essence. They derive it from the constant overflowing of the boundaries between themselves and others: “Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there had to be a boundary. And this is known as the transformation of things.”