These are my notes on Ben-Ami Scharfstein's A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant. This is one of the things I'm reading more for fun than anything else, sheer curiosity alone is the motivating factor here. I'm reading from a physical copy so I'm hoping to make my notes a bit more sparse and only keep what I want to save for later.
But though I have depended so much on others, for my part and, I hope, the reader's, what lies ahead is a genuine quest.
Adventure Time, come on grab your friends, we'll go to very distant lands.
The author proclaims that there are three great philosophical traditions, Indian, Chinese, and European, and will begin to make his case as to why it's necessary to study all three together rather than separately. He'll also take care to define what he thinks a philosophical tradition is.
He defines a philosophical tradition as, a chain of persons who relate their thought to that of their predecessors and in this way form a continuous transmission from one generation to the next, from teacher to disciple to disciple's disciple. [...] A tradition is by nature cumulative and it progresses in the sense that it defines itself with increasing detail and density.
I need to go back and reread the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ecclesiastes.
[...] Maat, who unites in her person the values of order, equilibrium, truth, and wisdom, and so keeps the world tolerable to the human beings who tenant it.
By their refusal to regard monotheism or polytheism as exclusive of one another, the Egyptians expressed their tacit conviction that nature has a certain unity but cannot be summed up in a fixed number of gods or forces.
A healthy ear can stand hearing sick words.
- African proverb
One belief I hold that I must begin to analyze is that I consider philosophy inextricably linked to any particular society's development of its productive forces. The more developed the productive forces, the more developed its philosophical literature.
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standing in opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism.
- Mao Zedong, Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle
As I read this, one thing I'd like to work on at some point is a comparative history of materialism as it finds its expression in Indian, Chinese, and European philosophy. I'll have to start with the Fragments of Democritus. Charvaka for India. I've yet to discover the origins of Chinese materialism.
Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Latin and Greek, the languages of the 3 great philosophical traditions.
It's necessary to study the three traditions together because the author argues that it's necessary to avoid philosophical provincialism.
[...] And if the three are learned together, it is easier to explore to possibility that there are philosophical positions and arguments that are truly universal or that, taken together, make up a kind of periodic table of the elements of philosophy.
Our human limitations are such that it is an accomplishment to learn even a single philosopher really well.
I am confident, however, that once the philosophical classics of each of the three traditions are more widely known, their strangeness in the other two traditions will wear off and the easier texts will be as accessible in translation as the easier native ones. The denser or more technical texts, whether native or foreign, will always need elaborate commentaries.
Commentaries I hope to work on!
Reminding myself to pick up a copy of the Analects.
The author considers a number of Jewish and Muslim scholars part of the European tradition because of their respective relationships and indebtedness to Aristotle and Neo-Platonism.
Marx is conveniently missing from his Chronology chart, although Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche remain.
The author doesn't deal with the Buddhists Hui-neng, Fa-tsang, or Dogen and considers them comparable with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, labeling them under post-metaphysical irrationalists. He then states that Fa-tsang would make a particularly interesting pair with Hegel.
A rather interesting set of paragraphs is as follows:
Now, to begin with, look not at the names of the particular philosophers but at the way in which the names cluster at some points and are absent in others (Figure 1.1).
The names we see clustered at the top of the three columns express the fact that all three traditions went through an early period in which there was enough conflict and enough freedom to encourage the simultaneous appearance of many quite different points of view. Competition between these points of view stimulated the intellectual self-assertion that constitutes philosophy. In all three traditions, this was a time of the breaking and building of social structures that encouraged adventurous intellectuals to think aloud, to play, pray, and dream in the mode of reasoning. In response to their own ambition or the urging of their disciples or rulers, they dueled with neighbors of like philosophical or other ambitions, neighbors who varied, according to the distinctions then already drawn, from hidebound conservatives to wild radicals and damnable sophists.
However religious or traditional India and China may appear to later eyes, everything sacred and everything profane could then be mocked by those of a turn for mockery, or debated with those of a mind to debate. These wars waged with reasons led to the development of thought about thought, by which I mean about the hows and whys of reason and reasoning. Not only do we find the beginnings of an almost formal logic but, along with it, a conscious playing about with paradoxes, the players happy as children with glittering new intellectual toys, and a readiness to demonstate virtuosity as such in the logic or rhetoric of debate.
[...] It was through the now sophisticated Buddhist philosophy that India made the thought of China, Japan, and Tibet far more varied and subtle than before.
In China, the first great outside influence, which came from India in the form of Buddhism, was quite peaceful. By about the fourth century C.E., Buddhism had been transformed from a foreign into a native, Chinese religion. However, in the eyes of orthodox Confucians it was offensive and even dangerous because, they argued, a Buddhist was encouraged as such to transfer allegiance from the family and from the Confucian hierarchy of teachers and officials to the Buddhist monastery, and was encouraged, at least in principle, to renounce marriage and even the most usual and innocent animal pleasures--all the goals that most ordinary humans pursue without question. As it was actually lived, Buddhism proved far more compliant than such orthodox complainants could admit, and many individuals were Confucian and Buddhist (or Taoist) at once, with a feeling, attested to by poets and artists, of inward wealth rather than inward contradiction.
[...] the Indian and Chinese traditionalists were unable to conceive that there could be languages equal in refinement or exactness to Sanskrit--taken to be utterly sacred and beautiful--or, in the case of China, to classical Chinese--taken to be incomparably superior in every way--and unable to conceive that there could be other philosophical cultures that might at all approach the richness and rightness of their own.
Francis Bacon was one of the first Westerners to be adopted to a Chinese context.
It soon becomes evident that the Sanskrit or Chinese terms that Westerners have perhaps thoughtlessly used to translate philosophy or school of philosophy have meanings that are unique to their own languages.
anvikshiki - 'a source of light for all sciences, an instrument for all activities, a foundation for all religious and social duties.' Since the term was associated with logic, the term could also be associated with sophistry and with secular, antitraditional points of view, and its nuances were sometimes unfavorable.
In the nineteenth century, when the Indians began to study European philosophy, they used darshana to translate philosophy.
There was a Japanese 'Center for the Investigation of Barbarian Books.' Amazing.
Nishi Amane tried to approximate the Greek meaning of philosophy by abbreviating the Japanese words science of questing wisdom into the term kitetsugaku. But then he had applied the word to philosophy in the Western sense alone. Now he decided to coin a more general word. To this end, he analyzed the Western concept of philosophy and found a possible Chinese analogue, an old word composed of a character of two hands and an axe (meaning perhaps, to break open, as with an axe) and another character, for mouth (meaning by using thought or speech). As a whole, the word means, roughly, to speak with deliberation or to conceive. Having discovered the concept of philosophy, as he thought, in classical Chinese, Nishi felt justified in abbreviating his earlier term to tetsugaku, to be applied to philosophical thought universally, Sino-Japanese (Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, etc.) and Western alike. Invented in 1874, the term proved very successful and was widely adopted in East Asia, including China, though only, of course, in its ideographic, pictorial form...
Now if the basis of explicitly logical thinking is the law of contradiction (of a pair of contradictory statements, one is true and the other false) then all three traditions are philosophical because they all not only recognize the law implicitly but use it at times in different conscious variants.
vipratishedha - contradiction
The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said, 'Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.'
- Mao Zedong, On Contradiction
What the hell is Mohism?