Philosophy’s Diversity Problem: The Exclusion of the East.
Philosophy has a diversity problem. As well as a saddening lack of women and people of ethic minority backgrounds taking up the discipline, there is also a diversity problem in that many Western universities and philosophers have trouble even classifying Non-Western thought as philosophy. In modern Western universities as Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden show in their thought-provoking 2016 opinion piece for The New York Times, most Western philosophy departments teach only philosophy done by Europeans and those of European descent from the United States and elsewhere. This inherent Euro-Centric bias in Philosophy is incredibly unfair and betrays an astonishing ignorance of all the great Non-Western traditions and thinkers that have contributed to the amazing diversity of human thought.
In a world in which we are becoming increasingly interdependent and interconnected with each other, where contact with people around from around the world is an every-day occurrence, this balance needs to be addressed. As a PhD philosophy student specialising in Eastern, specifically, Buddhist philosophy, I will first examine why two main arguments, normally cited as reasons for excluding Eastern philosophy do not stand up to scrutiny and then I will make the case for why Eastern philosophy and Eastern philosophers deserve more recognition and why Western universities need to expand their curriculums.
I will mainly focus on Eastern Philosophy here but what I say could equally be applied to other Non-Western philosophical traditions that are not taught either such as those from Latin America, Africa and Indigenous peoples. Here I will use ‘Eastern Philosophy’ in the sense of the traditions originating in South and East Asia such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Taoism. I will not be including other great traditions such as Jewish and Islamic philosophy which, although are misrepresented, are often classed as coming under ‘Western philosophy’. I will do another article on them if anyone wants me to, however and their absence is due to lack of space rather than any intentional reason, for I love these traditions also. I am also indebted to other scholars who have made similar arguments and have influenced me and they will be cited at the end.
1.Philosophy came from Greece and so is exclusively Western.
This is one of the main arguments that people, professional philosophers and otherwise, give for why they deem that Eastern philosophy is not philosophy, because philosophy came from Ancient Greece and therefore it is a completely Western discipline. This view is wrong for a number of reasons, firstly, whilst philosophy indeed did emerge from Greece (The word itself comes from the Greek ‘Philo-Sophia’ meaning ‘love of wisdom’) it did not appear out of nowhere and it did not arise only in Greece. There is evidence that the Greeks themselves were influenced by Non-Greek thought such as that from Babylonia, Ancient Egypt and India. Thomas McEvilley demonstrates this in his brilliant study of comparative philosophy The Shape of Ancient Thought in which he argues that Ancient Greece and India exchanged philosophical influences through the medium of the Persian Empire and thus there was Indian influence on the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Even later on than this though, at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, we have examples of influence. Pyrrho of Elis, founder of the skeptical school of Greek philosophy known as Pyrrhonism travelled to India with Alexander the Great during his campaigns there. He is widely acknowledged by modern day scholarship as having been influenced by Buddhist ideas which he then took with him on his return to Greece.
Secondly, many of the most well known and important Greek philosophers were not even from mainland Greece itself but were from the many Greek colonies dotted around the Mediterranean and later on, came from various parts of the Roman Empire. For example, Thales of Miletus is considered the very first philosopher in the Greek tradition, yet he came not from Athens but from Ionia in Asia Minor, modern day Turkey as did his fellow Pre-Socratic Heraclitus. Parmenides came from a Greek colony Elea in Southern Italy. Later on, the Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, whose philosophy had a massive influence on ideas and doctrines in Christianity, Islam and Judaism came from Lycopolis in Roman Egypt. His student Porphyry came from Tyre which is now in modern day Lebanon.
Thus the idea that philosophy is an exclusively Greek discipline alone is not supported by the historical evidence. Whilst it did emerge (At least in the Western tradition) in the midst of Greek culture, the Greeks were influenced by other cultures and traditions themselves and many of the most important Greek thinkers as I have shown came from Greek and later Roman colonies far from Greece itself. Whilst these colonies were obviously subject to massive cultural and intellectual influence from the mainland, the influences of other cultures among which these thinkers lived can not be ruled out completely.
2. Western philosophy is based purely on reason, Eastern thought is more “mystical”.
Another worn out cliché is that Western philosophy is “rational” whereas Eastern thought is “mystical” and therefore can not be classed as philosophy. This assertion is not only incredibly simplistic but if true, would also cancel out many influential philosophers in the Western tradition from being called philosophers. As Pierre Hadot has shown in his great book on this subject Philosophy as a Way of Life, the goal of Greco-Roman philosophy was to achieve an inner transformation of the self that would result in inner peace and tranquillity, through practice and what he terms ‘spiritual exercises’:
“It is a concrete attitude and determinate lifestyle, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down changing the life of the person who goes through it. It raises the individual from an inauthentic condition of life darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry to an authentic state of life in which he attains self-consciousness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace and freedom”. (Page 83)
Does this description not sound slightly more ‘mystical’ than the reason-orientated Western philosophy that we are used to? It also sounds incredibly “Eastern” in character too. Neo-Platonists, especially the aforementioned Plotinus expounded an incredibly mystical philosophy that taught that reality is the self-expression of a creative principle or deity called ‘The One’. As Edward Moore writes in his article about Plotinus’ idea of ‘The One’
“The One transcends all beings, and is not itself a being, precisely because all beings owe their existence and subsistence to their eternal contemplation of the dynamic manifestation(s) of the One.”
From ‘The One’ came emanations of the universe as lesser beings and the goal of life was for the immortal human soul to return to ‘The One’ through philosophical contemplation. Does this again not seem against the spirit of a totally ‘rational’ conception of philosophy? Plotinus’ doctrines as already stated were incredibly influential on later religious and mystical thought including on many Christian thinkers, the status of which as philosophers is not debated. A prime example is Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Byzantine thinker who wrote under the name of an Athenian converted to Christianity by Saint Paul in the Book of Acts. As Eric D Pearl says in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages:
“The starting point of Dionysius’ philosophy is the doctrine that God is “beyond being” (hyperousios), the ground of all being but not himself any being and so absolutely unknowable and ineffable”.(Page 540).
Clear influence from Plotinus can be seen as well as the fact that this is also ‘mystical’ in character. Yet Dionysius is defiantly seen as a philosopher as Kevin Corrigan and Michael L. Harrington state in their piece on him for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:
“All of this looks so alien to the spirit of modern philosophy that we may well ask if there is anything really philosophical in Dionysius’ practice? The answer has to be affirmative, for there is a perfectly reasonable pattern to the whole of Dionysius’ works.”
Another, this time a Western thinker influenced by Neo-Platonic thought is Ireland’s John Scotus Eriugena (800–877 C.E) who knew Greek and translated Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin. Eriugena’s philosophy, as it was influenced by the previous two thinkers was a result also incredibly mystical in nature (though it must be said that Eriugena also allowed a place for reason in his philosophy). Carlos Steel and D.W Hadley write in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages:
“The most original feature of his thought is his demonstration that the distinction between the creative and created nature can never be absolute. To begin with, the creation could never exist in itself; it is but a participation in (or a manifestation of) the divine nature”. (Page 399)
Is John’s status as a philosopher contested? No. As stated by Dermot Moran and Adrian Guiu in their article also in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:
“ He is generally recognized to be both the most outstanding philosopher (in terms of originality) of the Carolingian era and of the whole period of Latin philosophy stretching from Boethius to Anselm.”
Therefore, I have shown quite clearly that Western philosophy, despite claims by some to be entirely based on reason, has had its fair share of influential mystical thinkers who are all considered to be amongst the most important of the tradition and whose status as philosophers is not in dispute. Therefore, whether a thinker is “mystical” or not should not be grounds for their exclusion as a philosopher and if this is the case, why can’t the mystical thinkers of such traditions as Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism be considered as philosophers?
Lastly for this point, the idea that Eastern philosophers never make use of rationality in their thought is also completely disproven by a look at some Eastern thinkers. For example the Indian Buddhist philosophers Dignaga and Dharmakirti are regarded as the founders of the school of Buddhist logic and epistemology (the study of how we know things) known as pramāṇavāda in Sanskrit. The school is described by Tom Tillemans as :
“…the Buddhist school that provoked the most sophisticated and most important philosophical debates with non-Buddhist rivals. It represented Buddhism in the pan-Indian debates on problems of universals, philosophies of logic and language, and issues of justification, and had an enormous influence on Mahāyāna Buddhism in Central Asia, especially in Tibet.”
As well as this, we have the example of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy which similarly focused on logic, epistemology and rational thought to come to truth. As Matthew R Dasti writes about the activities of the school:
“It also extensively studies the nature of reasoning in the attempt to map pathways which lead to veridical inferential cognition. Nyāya’s methods of analysis and argument resolution influenced much of classical Indian literary criticism, philosophical debate, and jurisprudence.”
Therefore from these two examples alone (and there are many more), how can it be said that Western philosophy is “rational” and Eastern philosophy “mystical” when there are examples of extremely mystical thinkers in the Western tradition and entirely rational philosophers in the Eastern one? What is more, even if it were the case that Eastern philosophy were entirely mystical, why should that entail that it is not philosophy if, as we have seen, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena were all mystics of a sort and are still called philosophers? Thus this second argument for excluding Eastern philosophy also falls apart when one looks properly at examples of both streams of thought.
Apart from these two arguments above and my responses to them, if one actually reads Eastern philosophers and their works, one would hopefully come away with the conclusion that it really is just basically unfair that they are excluded from the so-called philosophical cannon. If we do a short comparison of individual Eastern thinkers with Western ones, we can see why Eastern philosophy deserves more recognition.
For example in China, where philosophy, unlike in the West, usually focused on practical and political manners as opposed to answering abstract questions because as Roel Sterckx writes, due to the constant warfare going on around them, the thinkers of China had:
“…little time to dabble with abstract theories or toy with questions to which there was no immediate answer”. (Page 19)
Chinese thinkers asked things like how to govern a state effectively or how people best function in society for example. Should Confucius then, whose ideas on society and morality, as well as that of his successors Mencius and Xun Zi, influenced the entirety of Asia be excluded because they had a different idea of philosophy to us? Should their ideas of how to construct society, and how to govern it, not be studied and examined as are the writings of such Western political thinkers as Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau today? What about other Chinese thinkers like Mozi, or the Taoists Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou whose thought also profoundly influenced East Asia? If we cross to other parts of East Asia such as Japan, we find Buddhist thinkers such as Rinzai Zen master, Hakuin Ekaku, Shingon’s founder Kukai or the founder of the Soto School of Zen, Dogen said by Bret W Davis in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy to be:
“Undoubtedly one of the most philosophically original and profound thinkers in Japanese history” (Page 200)
In India, was the Buddha not as significant a founder of a tradition of philosophy as Socrates? Buddhism is recognised as the first world religion and reached from Afghanistan all the way to China and Indonesia at its height. Were the debates between the diverse Buddhist schools of thought that existed in India and elsewhere on such issues as the personhood of the Buddha and the nature of enlightenment not just as philosophically sophisticated and as complex as the Christian debates in the fourth century Roman Empire about the nature of the divinity of Jesus Christ? Was the logic and epistemological analysis of the aforementioned Dignaga and Dharmakirti any less rigorous than that of Thomas Aquinas? Is the position of Nagarjuna who is regarded as arguably the second most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself any less deserved than the status of Augustine in the Western Christian tradition? What about the various important Hindu thinkers such as Adi Shankara, founder of Advaita Vedanta, or the philosophers of the Jain tradition such as Mahavira, and the sophisticated Jain doctrine of ‘Anekantavada’ (Many-Sidedness) which states that the ultimate truth and reality have many aspects? What about the countless other thinkers that have made a big contribution to philosophy’ such as from Africa, Latin America or from amongst Indigenous peoples that are not really known about? Do all these thinkers not deserve to be studied too?
The point here is that the philosophers of the East have engaged with the exact same deep and profound questions on human life and existence as have philosophers in the West. They have answered these questions in their own unique ways that deserve study and above all, recognition for their achievements and their ideas. They have all contributed to the wonderful, massively diverse mosaic of human thought. As I said at the beginning, the world is becoming ever more interconnected. We have to learn and accept that people other than Westerners have given valuable contributions to humanity and that doesn’t just go for philosophy either. This is not to say that Eastern thinkers should be studied over Western thinkers and I do not seek to diminish the monumental contributions of Western philosophers in any way whatsoever. It is to say that Eastern philosophers deserve a seat at the table with all the great Western philosophers who have had one for centuries already.
Philosophy is often said to be a global discipline that seeks universal truth applicable to all human beings and which studies the thought of humanity as a whole. If we, as philosophers, take this to be true then we have to make it so and practice what we preach. Philosophy courses at Western universities have to be expanded to take note of the extraordinary contributions of these Eastern thinkers. We need to start with actually recognising Eastern philosophy as philosophy. I would go so far as to say that it is indefensible for this not to be done. Why, indeed, would people from ethnic minority backgrounds be inclined to apply for philosophy courses if they think that every valuable contribution was done by white European men? It would surely make the subject more attractive to them if they see that important milestones in philosophy have also been achieved by people who are from their own cultural background and look like them? Not just that even, but it would be good for Western students to see how other cultures and traditions philosophise, for them to learn that our culture and way of looking at things, our way of interpreting and understanding the world in which we live is not universal.
As I hope to have shown, at least two of the arguments for excluding Eastern philosophy are extremely poor. So are all of the others, and the status quo in Western universities where Eastern and other Non-Western traditions are barely even acknowledged to exist, let alone taught, is untenable. If we do not expand what is taught, then we may as well stop saying that our discipline is universal in scope because it won’t be. As Garfield and Van Norden say in their New York Times Article, we may as well rename philosophy departments ““Department of European and American Philosophy”, as that is all that will be taught. A deeper appreciation of, and an engagement with, Eastern philosophy will allow us to connect more with other cultures and will therefore result in greater harmony and understanding between different peoples, which is something that the world sorely needs at the moment.
To conclude, I leave a statement reportedly said by the Arab Muslim philosopher Al-Kindi, often regarded as the ‘Father of Arabic Philosophy’, quoted by Peter Adamson in his article on him. What he says is something that Western philosophers and universities need to take to heart.
“We must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples, there is for the student of truth nothing more important than the truth, nor is the truth demeaned or diminished by the one who states or conveys it; no one is demeaned by the truth, rather all are ennobled by it.”
If we agree with this statement, and I believe that it encapsulates what philosophy really should be about, we have to start proving it.
The time to start is now.
Bibliography:
Note: Since I have already linked all the articles I have used within the text, I will only be citing the books I have used here.
Davis, B. W.(editor) (2020) The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. P. 200
Steel, C and Hadley, D.W (2006) ‘John Scotus Eriugena’ in: J J.E, Gracia and T,B Noone ed. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages 1st ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 397–406
Hadot, P (1995) Philosophy as a way of life. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing P. 83
McEvilley, T (2002) The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press.
Perl, E (2006) ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ in: J J.E, Gracia and T,B Noone ed. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages 1st ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Sterckx, R (2019) Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding. London: Penguin Random House UK. P.19
I’d also like to thank Bret W Davis, whose excellent discussion of this issue in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy inspired me to write this article.
