Bridging the Great Philosophical Divide: Philosophies in Dialogue
Philosophy East and West
(4.588 words)
Corpora that talk to Each Other
by Riccardo Pozzo
Abstract
Intellectual history and philosophy do not talk to each other. Diverse methodological approaches, very little literature in common, diverse even the footnotes. The subjects are nonetheless the same ones: thought and its history. Looking for an intercultural model to the history of philosophy begins from a critical consideration of this nonspeaking. The idea is that the relation between historical and philosophical history of philosophy has always been and it is worth being questioned decade after decade. In this paper I shall talk of the history of philosophy, then, which encompasses both an appreciation of diversity as well as shared experiences, values, and aspirations. In this paper I will putforward examples of corpora of philosophical texts that talk to each other, which is a new trend made possible bythe advances of state-of-the-art lexicography. With migration among the key issues at the top of public and academic agendas worldwide a re-consideration is urgent of the migrant practices of transfer of organizing principles and conditions for developing competences to act in multicultural settings, and ideas, which—wrote Arthur O. Loveyoy—“are the most migratory things in the world.”
1. Three Cases at Hand
Intellectual history and philosophy do not talk to each other. Diverse methodological approaches, very little literature in common, diverse even the footnotes. The subjects are nonetheless the same ones: thought and its history. Looking for an intercultural model to the history of philosophy begins from a critical consideration of this nonspeaking. The idea is that the relation between historical and philosophical history of philosophy has always been and it is worth being questioned decade after decade (Pozzo 2014).
In this paper I shall talk of philosophy, then, which encompasses both an appreciation of diversity as well as shared experiences, values and aspirations. With migration among the key issues at the top of public and academic agendas worldwide a re-consideration is urgent of the migrant practices of transfer of organizing principles and conditions for developing competences to act in multicultural settings, and ideas—wrote Arthur O. Loveyoy—“are the most migratory things in the world” (Lovejoy, 1990: 2), not simply Geistesgeschichte (Spitzer, 1990: 42). In fact, the idea of multiculturalism as a social and political project appears, at first sight, to be a latecomer to both public debate and the social sciences (Baumann and Vertovec, 2011: 1). Let me point to three exemplary cases.
First, let us think of what happened to Bayle, who compared Confucius with Spinoza on the basis of nothing more than a superficial knowledge of Oriental philosophy (Westseijn 2007: 539). It was the time Confucius begun to be known in Europe (Étiemble, 1988; Mungello, 1998) by means of compilations such as Confucius SinarumPhilosophus (1686). As a matter of fact, though, the Jesuits who translated and studied Chinese philosophy confused ideas from three different periods of Chinese millennial history; their reports gave the West a distorted image of Confucianism, while Buddhist texts remained largely unknown in Europe (Westseijn, 2007: 540). To complicate the matter, Sinasreferred to the peoples inhabiting a region including modern-day China, Japan, and Korea; while the three periods mixed together were: (1) the ancient past of classics like the Yi Jing, (2) the traditional Confucianism of the Kongzi period, (3) and Neo-Confucianism, which is started by Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073) and finds its establishment in Zhu Xi (1030-1100), whose synthesis sought to refute both Daoism and Buddhism by selectively adapting certain elements from both traditions into Confucian philosophy (Wang, 2005: 323; Ching, 2000; FungYulan, 1983).
Second, in the libertine anonymous manuscript composed around 1700,De tribusimpostoribus (Ernst, 2006), Moses was declared to be the grandson of the Egyptian magician Hermes Trismegistus, who tricked the Jews by letting them believe the young Moses had a divine mission. In 1690, Jacques Basnagede Beauvalestablished an Asian pedigree for Greek philosophy: Plato and Pythagoras had not only visited Egypt, but Pythagoras had been a pupil of the Chaldaeans; beyond the Chaldaeans might be glimpsed not only the Magians and Zoroastrians, but also the Brahmins or Gymnosophists of India (Westseijn, 2007: 554).
Third, imagine a second-generation Chinese immigrant who attends today high school in Italy. At a certain point, he or she might be asked to read a text by Plato, e.g. the Apology of Socrates, which he shall first do in Italian and later perhaps also in the Greek original or in MarsilioFicino’s Latin rendering. The point is that the student shall be given the chance of accessing the same text also in Chinese, for he or she ought to be able to start in his or her Chinese-speaking family a discussion on Socrates. Inversely, schoolmates might seize the opportunity for appropriating, e.g. the Analects of Confucius on the basis of the references indicated by our student and start thinking together on dong (movement), jing (rest), renji (human being) and eventually come to grasp the motto of Neo-Confucianism: “Restoring the Heavenly Principle and diminishing human desires” (Wang, 2005: 320).
2. A New Frontier
At the end of the twentieth century, anew frontier of intellectual history was the effort to understand cultures not only past but also alien. We are talking of the point of view of the “Other,”which is not only blacks and women excluded from male cultural monopolies but also colonial victims of the expansionist spirit of the western powers, which point of view can only be inferred from the outside—“the eternal dilemma of anthropology” (Kelley, 2002: 307-08). There is nothing new in principle about scholarship in the history of philosophy concerning itself with philosophy around the globe, says Jerome Schneewind, the question then is “what if anything might be new about working on the history of philosophy in the era of globalization” (Schneewind, 2005: 170).
The Chinese student mentioned above is a practical example of both theory and practice of intercultural philosophy (Mall, 2000: xi). What the student is doing is nothing more and nothing less than rethinking the discipline of the history of philosophy within an intercultural framework. In the twenty-first century neither is history of philosophy an issue for philosophers alone, nor are migratory phenomena issues only for statisticians, demographers, and economists. In the twenty-first-century the history of philosophy is not an issue for philosophers alone, nor are migratory phenomena issues only for statisticians, demographers and economists. An intercultural history of philosophy provides an effective case study for migrants that are bound to keep their own cultural identity while mingling with the cultural backgrounds of others.
There is no utopia in this view, for even today we can think of high-school students delving into multilayered multilingual hypertexts—like the ones envisaged on the basis of the reciprocal guidance made possible by social reading tools (Darnton, 2009). A well organized structure of social reading ensures an ongoing exchange of information, debate, and knowledge among students of all faculties and scholars, thus helping to increase knowledge and appreciation among citizens—especially young people—of their shared yet diverse cultural heritage. What is needed are ground-stones for a new paradigm for content organization that draws upon the book culture but opens it by incorporating multilayered content, community-based social reading tools and multimedia. The new readers take up the task of building strong, complex, self-consistent narratives or arguments, favoring the freedom of movement within a rich but granular landscape of content.
3. Intercultural History of Philosophy
Intercultural philosophy started with the 18th World Congress of Philosophy Düsseldorf, at whichAlwinDiemer(1981) organized a symposium on Philosophy in the present situation of Africa, which found its continuation in 1982 by a further congress on this theme (Diemer and Hountondji, 1985). Meanwhile, it has become a worldwide undertaking. Already in 1990 Franz Martin Wimmer(1990) published his InterkulturellePhilosophie: Geschichte und Theorie. In 1991, Heinz Kimmerle(1991) issued his Philosophie in Afrika—afrikanischePhilosophie: Annäherungen an eineninterkulturellenPhilosophiebegriff. These two books have to be seen as the explicite beginning of this approach, followed by the works of Ram Adhar Mall (1995; 2000), PhilosophieimVergleich der Kulturen: InterkulturellePhilosophie—EineneueOrientierung, and Intercultural Philosophy. The 20th Word Congress of Philosophy Boston 1998 featured a session that was later published under the title of Intercultural Philosophy (Dawson and Iwasawa, 2000). Further books to be mentioned are Transformación intercultural de la filosofía (Fornet-Betancourt 2001) and Mündliche und schriftlicheFormenphilosophischenDenkens in Afrika: GrundzügeeinerKonvergenzphilosophie (Mabe, 2005). Currently, William Sweet is coordinating the committee on intercultural philosophy of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (Sweet, 2009). Last but not least, the issue of an intercultural history of philosophy has been recently raised in connection with the preparation of the 24th World Congress of Philosophy Beijing 2018 (Pozzo 2015).
Philosophy has been intercultural since its beginnings in a non-relativistic sense in as far as it has thought of itself in relation to others. Owing to its nature, philosophy—like all languages—is a dynamic reality in continuous evolution, in which the datum of tradition is preserved and reformulated in a process of constant reinterpretation. In his inaugural lecture upon conferral of the degree honoriscausa at the University of Padua on 14 December 2006, the secretary general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Ekmeleddinİhsanoğlu made it clear that different cultures may or may not share the same values. They certainly share, however, a number of problems and strategies for their solutions. For example, the problem of defining mankind was first investigated in religion (e.g. in Psalm 8), then in philosophy (e.g. by Socrates), and in the last five centuries in the natural sciences (e.g. by James Watson and Francis Crick). According to the ancient notion of philosophiaperennnis, “the one philosophical truth is available to various philosophical traditions” (Mall, 2000: xiii). Hence, “the total purity of culture is a fiction” and there ought not to be any such things as “African philosophy” or any other national or regional expressions (Hountoundji, 1983). Intercultural philosophy is no new discipline. It is the just “the name of a philosophical attitude, a philosophical conviction that no one philosophy is the philosophy for the whole of humankind” (Mall, 2000: xii).
At stake is the development of cultural terminologies and interdisciplinary ideas, which arise from the necessity of “establishing the continuity of a cultural tradition by transcribing it into new contexts” (Gregory, 2012: 6). This is what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called a “fusion of horizons,” which is based onboth the “experience of tradition” (Gadamer 1975: 304, 321; Buck, 1978; Kelley, 2002) and the language spoken at the center of the horizon, in as far as human subjects speak, inquire, judge and interpret in a world of alien objects (Kelley, 2005: 157). Putting it in German: Ideengeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, Problemgeschichte, Traditionsgeschichte ought to be part of Philosophiegeschichte (Gadamer, 1970; Kelley, 2002: 229-33, 263-87).
4. Intellectual Space
The center of the intellectual space locates the historical subject (conscious, intentional, or even unconscious), or perhaps a single act of discovery, creation, or conceptualization—a pure spiritual or phenomenological moment that becomes a target of philosophical inquiry. The surrounding space encompasses the contexts of the central subject—the preconditions, influences, possibilities, resonances, connections, and effects involving other fields of cultural activity, states of disciplinary questions, and “climates of opinion”—the “past” being represented by residues in the present signifying otherwise inaccessible bygone experience. Beyond the circle of experience, beyond perhaps even the resources of language, we may imagine a transition from intellectual and cultural history to philosophical speculation and metahistorical criticism. In any case this is the only way of imagining the problem from the standpoint of a human agent: intellectual history is the inside of cultural history, cultural history the outside of intellectual history; but in both cases “ideas” must be brought down to a human level (Kelley, 2002: 5).
It is true: sticking to the centrality of texts is an enterprise worth of the most exquisite humanism (Pasquali, 1988). “The history of ideas may seem to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, but this is an illusion to the extent that these ideas are already (‘always already’) incarnate in conventional language” (Kelley, 2002: 4). To restore the original document as far as possible is a duty of an editor who tells us as much as he can discover about the composition and making of the text and about the likely alterations that have been made by “the author, the publisher, and the successive editors, including himself, including an exhaustive account of the typography of the book itself, its signatures, type size, running titles, misprints, corrections, and the like” (Levine, 2005: 195, 197). This is European Renaissance Humanism, of which a new form was reborn in China in the thirties of the last century in the school of Wu Mi (Megill, 2005: 181). Tuan Yifu (1976) has introduced the notion of “humanistic geography” as a perspective that discloses “the complexity and ambiguity of relations between people and place, qualities eclipsed by the positivist perspective of much human geography” (Daniels, 2012: 165). Humanists reject “the reduction of space and place to geometrical concepts of surface and point; humanistic conceptions of space and place are thick with human meaning and value” (Entrikin, 1976: 623).
Locating culture defines a new issue of anthropological geography, which embraces thematic categories such as embodied spaces, gendered spaces, inscribed and contested spaces, transnational spaces, and eventually spatial tactics (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003: 13). In this comprehensive setting it is useful to establish “the field of proxemics, the study of people’s use of space as an aspect of culture” (Hall, 1966; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003: 16). Especially, the notion of “inscribed spaces” implies that humans “write” in an enduring way “their presence on their surroundings” (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003: 25).
The issue is no trifle. It requires finding a common denominator among the nebulous exchange of thoughts, speeches and debates on texts that have been transmitted through centuries. Texts mediate between context and ideas, which explains why scholars that work on lexical analysis are the best mediators between the history of ideas and the history of philosophy. Twentieth-century Neapolitan philosophers had a point, which go back to Vico’s historicism: the pluriversum of a history of facts and ideas, whereby ideas are historicized and the history of philosophy is history (Piovani, 2000). But today’s humanities need to “change in order not to change.” As seen in the Chinese characters of humanities, which mean “the culture of mankind” (Kim, 2014: 397). Humanities take up the task “as a control tower that realizes convergence,” actively pursued in Korea (Kim, 2014: 403).
The future of the history of philosophylies in a new model that considers both the internal aspects of an oeuvre that grows, and which can be investigated first and foremost in a lexical analysis, and the external aspects of the paratexts that have presided at the constitution of that oeuvre. The future is the history of philosophy that makes cultural innovation, which it does when it accounts for the fact that our culture has grown through hybridization with the cultures of our neighbors, alongside what has been known as the cultural melting pot already spoken about by Plato in the Timaeus (23c) “when the Egyptian priest explained to Solon the translation of the art of writing from Atlantis to Egypt and from Egypt to Greeceas the forerunner of alltranslationesstudiorum, the translation into Greek words, that into Latin, Arab, the great circle of Mediterranean culture that was eventually constituting vernacular scientific languages” (Gregory, 2012: 9).
Today, it is not enough for a good book of the history of philosophy to be a good book of the history of philosophy. It ought also be based on solid lexical and historical considerations. Researchers in history of philosophy ought to have the gift of multilingualism. A new sociolinguistics of multilingualism is now being forged: one that takes account of the new communicative order and the particular conditions of our times, while retaining a central concern with the processed involved in the construction of social differences and social inequalities (Gardner and Martin-Jones, 2012: 1). Good historians of philosophy are trained from the beginning of their career into reading texts and literature in a number of languages. The future lies thus in the development of disciplinary lexica. This prefigures the translation of Greek words, culture, and thoughts into the Latin renderings of Cicero and Boethius, and the dynamics of the great Mediterranean cultural transmission of philosophical, religious, and medical texts from Greek and Hebrew into Arabic, Latin, and the vernacular languages of Europe.
When Boethius set out to translate Aristotle into Latin, “he was motivated to do so in order, first, to keep alive the Latin classical tradition and, second, to modernize it by through transcription into the new contexts opened up by the paradigmatic acceptance of Aristotelianism” (Gregory, 2006: 39-40). When Kant chose to re-propose Greek terms such as phenomenon and noumenon“he did so because he wished, first, to keep up the tradition of writing on philosophy in German, a tradition that had its classical references in Master Eckhart and Martin Luther, and second, to revitalize it by transcribing it into the new context of his own Copernican Revolution” (Gregory, 2006: 57-58).
Today, we have to look for texts collected in the currently operating research infrastructures for the humanities: Chinese Text Project (), Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (), Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities (), Europeana (), European Cultural Heritage Online (), LessicoIntellettualeEuropeo: Bancadati di testifilosoficidell’etàmoderna (), Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Library (), Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Online (), and World Digital Library (). Let us wait for a tide of Ph.D. thesis based on them. In fact, the project started by Marco Sgarbi, the first European Research Council Starting Grant assigned to an historian of philosophy ever, Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early-Modern Intellectual History (c. 1400–c. 1650) is a forerunner in this direction. It is no surprise, then, that it was awarded by a panel of intellectual historians, not by a panel of historians of philosophy.In the globalized world of the near future, the idea of translatiostudiorum makes mutual enrichment possible. We must learn to embrace an intercultural identity rather than an arbitrary “thick” cultural identity (Geertz, 1973: 3-30; Vertovec 2010).