Notes from: How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini
We cannot pretend that we can understand the world's philosophies in a matter of a few years, let alone by reading one book. My more modest intention has been to find out what we need to understand in order to begin to understand. Searching for this philosophical entry point is like looking for the secret doors in an ethnographic theme park that allow us entry into the real thing.

Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us.

Part 1: How the World Knows

It is perhaps no coincidence that insight as a source of knowledge is stressed most in the traditions the West finds least philosophical. Western philosophy's self-image has largely been constructed by distancing itself from ideas of the philosopher as a sage or guru who penetrates the deep mysteries of the universe like some kind of seer. This distancing has blinded it to the obvious truth that all good philosophy requires some kind of insight. There are innumerable very clever, very scholarly philosophers who can pick apart an argument better than anyone but who don't have anything worthwhile to contribute to their discipline. What they lack is not an ability to be even more systematic in their analysis, but an ability to spot what is at stake, what matters. Insight without analysis and critique is just intuition taken on faith. But analysis without insight is empty intellectual game-playing. The world's philosophies offer not just insights but ideas about how to achieve them, and we would profit by sympathetically but critically engaging with both.

The relative unimportance of asserting doctrine helps to explain the syncretic nature of religion in japan, where a common expression is 'Born Shinto, live Confucian, die Buddhist.'

Doctrines are less important than they are in Western Christianity in part because it is believed that the purest knowledge of reality comes from direct experience and so the most fundamental truths cannot be captured in language. They are ineffable, literally unsayable.

The founding myth of Zen is that the Buddha silently held up a flower, twirled it and winked. It is the only major religious or philosophical tradition that didn't begin with an utterance of some kind.

...a refusal to confuse the world as it is with our conceptual categorizations [is an enduring strength] of philosophy across all asia. In my experience, the West tends to see all limits to knowledge as an affront, a border to be crossed... Elsewhere, human limits are not just accepted but celebrated...
     The million dollar question raised by an embrace of the ineffable is whether, having seen that the world is not the same as our linguistic conception of it, we can then see how it really is. many Eastern traditions say we can. I remain unconvinced. Even if we can perceive reality unframed by concepts, it will still be framed by our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. You can take off the glasses of language, but our experience of the world still has to come through the lens of human nature. The idea that we can completely dissolve our human-specific ways of experience and see or become one with reality is itself incoherent. There cannot be a view from either nowhere or everywhere: every view has to be from somewhere. To escape our human perspective altogether would be to cease to be human and thus cease to exist not only as we know it, but as we could know it...
     Kant's solution was to question the basic assumption about what knowledge must involve: that we must conform our knowledge to the way objects are. Why not consider the possibility that objects must conform to the way we are?... 
     Kant does not deny that there is a world independent of human experience, the phenomenal world of things-in-themselves. But he thought it senseless to believe we could ever know it. In that way he is closer to Confucius and the Buddha, both of whom advocated silence on the ultimate questions of metaphysics. From a kantian perspective, all the other Asian philosophies that claim the possibility of concept-free, ineffable experience of the world as it truly is are clinging to an impossible dream of being able to escape our human cognitive apparatus...
     ... Kant's basic insight... explains to me why certain mystical or meditative experiences cannot be taken as reliable sources of knowledge of the world as it is... The Kantian response is that all such experiences are still just experiences.

We must acknowledge that the strict secularization of philosophy is itself a philosophical position that requires justification. To simply stipulate that Faith separates you from philosophy is as deeply un philosophical as stipulating that a sacred text must have the last word. 

The East has tended to stress the extent to which attempts to understand things in terms of exclusive either/or categories often fail, while the West has stressed the progress that can be made when we bring out contradictions in our common-sense ways of thinking and replace them with new distinctions that preserve logical consistency.

You could summarize the modus operandi of Western philosophy as an attempt to remove from the world as many breaches of the law of excluded middle as possible, leaving us with a clear distinction between propositions that are true and others that are false... The dichotomous mindset is implicated in recent political problems... it is not as though other models had generated prosperous, stable, peaceful civilizations. China which has no philosophical tradition of formal logic, had given rise to a totalitarian state, while Africa, with its political values of consensus and agreement such as ubuntu, was the least developed continent on the planet. If rich and happy Europe, North America and Australia were what you got from 'crudely dichotomous thinking,' then it couldn't be all that bad... now political instability across the Democratic West makes that attitude seem complacent... Although the West places the most important on it, there is also a very strong rule for logic in the classical Indian tradition.

Secular reason has been a powerful tool for scientific and intellectual development. But complacency about its benefits needs to be challenged, perhaps by traditions that have maintained at philosophy and science exist only to serve human flourishing. If our ultimate goal is human good, the autonomy of reason cannot be absolute. Who would want to build and stock the finest libraries in the world without caring if they stand amidst desolate streets?

[On pragmatism, America's home-grown philosophical system, John Dewey wrote:]
"We do not solve [philosophical problems]: we get over them."
"Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men."

Pragmatism's non-metaphysical bent perhaps explains why it has had some impact in China and Japan. 
[Sean says: I think Chinese thought has been pragmatic for a long time, but perhaps was not formally laid out in the useful way that the American pragmatists did it.]

For Rorty... "the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one." The function of belief is to bind us together, to make collective endeavor possible. 

The West honors progress, innovation and novelty. As John C. H. Wu points out, 'The East generally puts the Golden Age at the beginning, the West at the end.'

[After discussing the Buddha's parable of the arrow...]
As we have seen, the Buddha, like Confucius, was explicitly not concerned with ultimate questions of metaphysics, reflecting a fault line that runs through the world's philosophical traditions. David Hall and Roger Ames describe this as the difference between 'truth-seekers' and 'way-seekers'. Western philosophy is characteristically truth-seeking. It seeks to describe the basic structure of reality, logic, language, the mind. One example of this is the Western emphasis on science for science's sake. For truth-seekers, disinterested learning is the best kind, while for way-seekers to be disinterested is as nonsensical as driving a car without caring where you end up.

It is easy to assume that each tradition offers a different answer to the same question, when often they are asking different questions.

Part 2: How the World Is

Cyclical time is the most intuitively plausible way of thinking about eternity. When we imagine time as a line we end up baffled: what happened before time began? How can a line go on without end?

The distinction between linear and cyclical time is not always neat.

The tradition of Western philosophy in particular has driven for a universality that glosses over differences of time and place. The Western university, for example, even shares the same etymological route as 'universal.' In such institutions, 'The pursuit of Truth recognizes no national boundaries,' as one commentator typically observed. Place is so unimportant in Western philosophy that when I discovered it was the theme of the quinquennial East-West Philosophers' Conference I seriously wondered if there was anything I could bring to the party at all.

Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the complaints of anti-universalists are not generally about universalism at all, but pseudo-universalism, 'Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism.'

Karma is one of the earliest philosophical concepts in human history and it still exerts a powerful influence.

Westerners only started saying 'What goes around, comes around' in the 1960s, as hippies borrowed promiscuously from Buddhism. But nearly two millennia before, St Paul wrote in his Letter to the Galatians, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.'

there are also hints of something karmic in classical Chinese philosophy, where ['tian', AKA heaven, acts as] some kind of cosmic regulative principle.

Emptiness is a concept as alien to Western philosophy as it is Central to many East Asian traditions.

Kasulis' concept of 'intimacy' involves the idea that in Japanese thought, every part contains the whole. Many thinkers have expressed something like this idea. Nishida says, 'In a painting or melody... there is not one brush stroke or one note that does not directly express the spirit of the whole.' 

Betweenness is a way of seeing emptiness as a presence as well as an absence.

The Buddhist idea of the impermanence of everything is not merely a negative statement about absence of unchanging essence. Because everything is related, there can be creation.

"For the Chinese, philosophy takes the place of religion." - Charles Moore

Mencius reminds us, "All who speak about the natures of things, have in fact only their phenomena to reason from, and the value of a phenomenon is its being natural."

"Nature is not a paradise," says Kobayashi, as it is for occidental romantics. "We have no idea of paradise. Nature may be bad, may be disturbing, violent, like tsunamis, like volcanoes." ... What in the West is often disparagingly called trying to "tame" nature is no more than good sense. Of course nature has to be tamed... As Kasulis explains it, "If we join Shinto in considering human beings as part of nature instead of separate from it, even human inventiveness can be natural."

Given the completeness of the Quran and the oneness of all things, there's no possibility of progress in the modern, Western Enlightenment sense... The growth of knowledge is like coloring in and embellishing a canvas rather than expanding the picture. The Quran expresses a complete worldview and nothing that comes after it can alter those fundamentals.

Predestination features heavily in Islamic thought... In the Quran itself numerous passages suggest God decides in advance who is good and bad, who is saved or damned... Not as universal, but nonetheless common, is the idea that God's will in... disasters is to punish.

The completeness of the Quranic revelation has another implication: that reason is of limited use.

Scientific progress has depended on reductionism, but it creates weaknesses in a culture where it becomes the default frame of mind. The reductionist tendency blinds people to the complex effects of whole systems and leads to an overconfidence that the key to solving problems is identifying discrete elements.

Reductionist explanations are too often taken to be the only ones that count.

The philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards... [distinguishes] between debunking and non debunking explanations. A debunking explanation replaces one explanation with another... too often reductive explanations are assumed to be debunking...

Part 3: Who in the World Are We?

[In the words of John Locke, the Western self or soul is] 'a thinking intelligent being that has reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places." However, "atman" is a depersonalized self or soul... The price we pay for returning to union with Brahman is a loss of all our individuality.

A pro-social culture, which is evident in some form all over East Asia... is best understood by examining the very way in which selves are conceived of in the region, something most scholars describe using the concept of 'relationality.' The nature of any individual is determined by how that individual stands in relation to others. Take away those relations and you are left not with a self stripped down TO its essence, but a self stripped OF its essence.

David Wong wonders whether cultures that encourage more overt expressions of individuality are actually more deeply conformist. He had this thought after reading the reflections of the anthropologist Arlene Stairs. She spent some time with the Inuit, who like the Japanese feel comparatively little need to assert their individual identity in public. When she got to know them, however, she found they were much more diverse than most Westerners, who went to great lengths to express their individuality but were all remarkably similar in their tastes, political views, even shopping habits. Whether such an inverse correlation exists or not, the observation certainly shows that we should not conflate assertions of individuality with the possession of individuality, a point made with great comic concision in 'Monty Python's Life of Brian,' when a crowd of people are told they are all individuals and they respond as one, "Yes, we're all individuals!" The joke has an even better second punchline when one person pipes up, "I'm not."

[Regarding the individualistic conception of the self in the West,] the fundamental atomization happened as soon as selves were conceived in Platonic terms. Unlike the relational selves of East Asian thought, such cells are discrete, self-contained.
     ...this is reflected in the way in which individuals are always placed at the heart of intellectual, political or social history. Christianity is the only major world religion named after its founder... in philosophy, you can be a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Kantian, Spinozist, while in other cultures schools like Daoism, Ruhia, Sāmkhya,Yoga, Nyāyá, Vedanta, Kalām and Falsafa are typically not named after people.

The intimacy-integrity distinction [from Thomas Kasulis] is the most useful one I've come across in my foray into comparative philosophy... It seems to me that a lot of what is going on wrong in the West is a breakdown of a stable equilibrium between intimacy and integrity. Consider the distinction in terms of autonomy and belonging. More of one inevitably leaves us with less of the other, and in the West the autonomy culture has become so dominant it has squeezed out belonging.

Much of the rise of populism and nationalism in the West is a backlash against the gradual erosion of belonging. What I find powerful about this way of understanding the problem is that it suggests the deep causes are cultural, a matter of the West becoming too 'Western'. What allowed it to rise is now what is making it weak. A creative energy was released when we unshackled ourselves from the constraints of class and culture, but after years of wandering we find ourselves too alone.

Part 4: How the World Lives

There is arguably no more important concept than harmony (he) for understanding how China thinks and lives.

One [Chinese] woman told me about her five years spent in Edinburgh... she said that the Chinese wish always to please other people while Brits please themselves. The word she used unprompted to describe this value was 'harmony'.

It is not bland uniformity but balanced diversity... In the fifth-fourth-century-BCE classic Gouyu, the politician-scholar Shi Bo says, 'A single sound is not musical, a single colour does not constitute a beautiful pattern, a single flavor does not make a delicious dish, and a single thing does not make harmony.' ... Harmony actually depends upon division... The misunderstanding has also arisen within China. Mozi, the great dissenter of Chinese classical philosophy, criticized Confucian harmony precisely because he thought that it required people to share and follow the same idea.

For a son to report a crime committed by his father was actually a crime for much of China's history.

...in some respects traditional Confucian ideals of familial harmony are patriarchal and out of date... Optimists, however, believe that the basic framework is robust and can contain something more progressive. Key to this are the twin facts that, ... 'Confucian Harmony requires differences' and 'Differences can exist without oppression.'

Could it not be that one of the problems of the contemporary West is that it has come to see hierarchy as a dirty word and has failed to appreciate how social harmony requires fear, just hierarchies? An academic workshop on the issue persuaded me that this was in large part true.

... what we might call just hierarchies, which have three key features...
     First, they are domain-specific... 
     Second, they are dynamic. Someone's place in the hierarchy is determined by merit or experience, which means that others might acquire such experience and move up the hierarchy, or lose it and slip down...
     Third, they are empowering. What ultimately justifies the superior position of the teacher over the student is that the student can benefit from their relationship to acquire some of the teacher's skills and knowledge. If the teacher is not teaching, then their position is not merited and the hierarchical relationship loses its purpose.

The seventh-century classic Guanzi pisses the question, "What is yinyang?" and answered, "Timing." In other words... yinyang reasons appropriately to the precise situation as it is now, not as it was or will be... By attending to the relationships between things one is able to respond to them in such a way that the desired outcome flows naturally from the situation. This is true in virtually every aspect of human life, including sex. A man's penis is called yangjiu (yang equipment) and a woman's vagina yinhu (yin house). In skillful sex, the yangjiu picks up yin energy from the yinhu, without its own yang energy being extinguished too early or too fast. "This sexual intercourse is sometimes called caiyinshu, the art of picking yin."

Virtue requires a balance between deficiency and excess, which is another of the remarkably similar ideas found in both Confucius and Aristotle. Indeed, the name of the idea came to be identical: the Doctrine of the Mean.

Yao for one believes the doctrine of the mean holds sway in contemporary China. "The majority of Chinese do not like extremes," he told me. "They use the image of the pendulum. I believe this is why China is so comparatively stable." ...How then do we explain Mao's Cultural Revolution, one of the most extreme events in 20th century world history...? It is significant that during this time the doctrine of the mean was explicitly rejected. For instance, Lin Biao, a one-time ally of Mao who was subsequently denounced as a traitor, was criticized for advocating the doctrine of the mean, "a reactionary philosophy used by Confucius more than 2,000 years ago in stubborn defense of the slave system."
     The mean was not the only traditional belief to be completely thrown out by Mao. More shocking still, children were encouraged to denounce their parents, the very antithesis of Confucian values. Although no one claimed to be able to fully understand this, the general view among philosophers I spoke to seems to be that rare, violent changes are the price China pays for its more typical stability.

The Analects tell us that 'there were four things from which the Master was entirely free. He had no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no obstinacy, and no egoism.'

'Even the gods envy him whose senses are subdued like horses well tamed by the chairioteer,' says the Dhammapada.

The fact that the ideal of impartiality can be used to justify both government intervention and a laissez-faire, libertarian State illustrates how pervasive it is. There is no clearer evidence that a philosophical assumption is deeply embedded in a society than the observation that people with very different substantive views all feel the need to justify their positions by reference to it.

It is easy to treat the world's philosophies as offerings in a global supermarket of ideas, putting anything that takes your fancy in your basket. Picking and mixing, however, doesn't work when it plucks fruit off the plant which it needs to grow. Ideas are parts of living ecosystems and when you try to move them to a strange context they can wither and die. If we transplant them carefully, though, grafting them onto robust local trunks, sometimes they can flourish abroad. 'Concepts can travel,' says Bruce Janz, 'but not intact.'
     The most helpful metaphor I can offer for cross-cultural learning about values is that of the mixing desk... the volume of each track can be increased or decreased.
     The moral mixing desk works in much the same way. Almost everywhere in the world you'll find the same channels: impartiality, rules, consequences, virtue, God, society, autonomy, actions, intentions, harmony, community, belonging and so on. The differences between cultures is largely a matter of how much each is turned up or down. It is unusual for any channel to be completely turned off, but sometimes - God, for instance - it isn't in the mix at all. Cross-cultural thinking requires a good ethical ear and this is hard to develop if you are not attuned to the whole range of moral concepts. It also requires the wisdom to realize that it is impossible to turn everything up to 10: some values clash with others, at least when they are at equal volume. Similarly, when some values are turned down low they become inaudible, which may be the price to pay for a harmonious overall balance.
     ...Pluralism is often mistaken for laissez-faire relativism, but just as in the recording studio, it simply isn't the case that anything goes. More than one moral mix can work but many more than one won't.

Part 5: Concluding Thoughts

[Western philosophy's] primary mode of reasoning is based on logic. Philosophy in this mode is aporetic: it identifies contradictions generated by our imperfect understanding and attempts to remove them... it focuses attention away from that which is unclear or ambiguous and tends to encourage a tidying up of reality to make the world as amenable to clear explanation as possible. One major manifestation of this approach is the reductionist tendency to understand things by breaking them down to their smallest possible units and to see these, rather than the wholes to which they belong, as the fundamental foci of explanation.
     Ethically, this has tended to generate rule- and principle-based ethics which have impartiality as a central value. just has given ethics, like all Western philosophy, and Aura of placeless universalism, so much so that the qualifier 'Western' is hardly ever used. Philosophy is just philosophy, even though what comes under its umbrella is clearly geographically and historically located in one corner of the globe. Its universalist aspiration has actually made it unwittingly parochial. This has sometimes been exacerbated by a belief in progress which conveniently puts the Western World at its vanguard.

The world's classical philosophical literatures leave out huge swaths of the globe where the written word has only recently been embraced. Collectively these are often called 'traditional societies,' but of course what is traditional varies from place to place. nonetheless, attempts to understand the philosophies that have been transmitted orally in such cultures have identified several ways of thinking that, although not universal, are widely shared.
     Perhaps the most significant is thinking about a place and a time. Western philosophy is in many ways a work of abstraction and universalization, the quest for ideas that hold for all people at all times. Whatever the merits of this, it goes hand in hand with a loss of connection with the specifics of our own local lands and cultures. Oral philosophies, in contrast, see an intimate connection between land and people, so much so that there is no real distinction between them. A vivid example of this was when the Whanganui River, New Zealand's third longest, was declared illegal person in March 2017.

Russian philosophy has self-consciously stood as a kind of bridge between Europe and Asia while not belonging to either.

Descartes's cogito goes strongly against the Orthodox Christian ideal of kenosis, a self-emptying necessary to make oneself ready to receive God. Kenosis entails the belief that the individual does not have the resources to reach ultimate truth and that to attempt to do so alone and by reason is huberistic. The self is therefore not to be elevated but chopped down to size. 'One must wholly annihilate one's personal ego,' wrote Mikhail Bakunin, 'annihilate everything that forms its life, its hopes and its personal beliefs.'
     The place of rationality in the Cartesian system was taken in Russian philosophy by intuition. Truth is not so much understood as felt.

There are three ways in which taking multiple perspectives can give us a better understanding. The first is when different perspectives combine to give us more information than anyone could provide alone... Consider the parable of the blind men and the elephant... Call this "the cubist perspective." 
     The second way multiple perspectives can be illuminating is when they reveal that there is in fact more than one issue at stake. I think this is the best way to think about the question of what it means to be a person or a self. It is easy to think there is a single question here. In fact, it disguises myriad questions, such as: What is the self made of? Is the self-permanent? How do relations to others fashion the self? ... Call this "the disaggregating perspective."
     A third benefit of taking multiple perspectives is when we realize that there is more than one legitimate way of either understanding the world or constructing norms... There is more than one way for humans to flourish and trade-offs are inevitable... This is "the pluralist perspective."