An Example of Unnecessary Sophistication
In NPR’s “13.7 Cosmos and Culture”, a post has me thinking, but probably not about what the author, astrophysicist Adam Frank.
Of course, because the label of Western versus non-Western philosophy, an unnecessary rational constraint is put on the entire discourse.
With an individualist, atomic, egoist construction of philosophy, it is obvious that “there are a wealth of profound and profoundly original conceptions of nature that simply do not appear in standard discussions”. It is obvious because of all of the people suffice as philosophers in their own right - people (everyone) who are curious about life, self-aware of the world around them, and form their own understandings of the world. Think of all the people that are able to find enjoyment in life and how there is little public discussion about this sort of micro-philosophic interpretation.
The comments themselves are additionally instructive - it is incredibly interesting to ponder how people fall on the empirical-rationalist dualism. If you are content with your own understanding, and understand that you are heavily influenced by Western ideology, you will be skeptical of anything else has to offer. Yet if one understands that even the progress of Western philosophy is influenced by everything that comes before, including Eastern and other philosophies. You could be a rugged American individualist, influenced by the 19th Century’s Emersonian “self-reliance”, examined through a Thoreauvian naturalism (who was influenced by Eastern philosophies). This isn’t the Great-Man Theory of history, or the conceptual development of epistemology, or even the integral-calculus concept, but an all of the above approach, something else entirely.
Of course there are other philosophies and ideologies in the world that can provide us with the interesting information about the world - if you have not been inspired by Buddhism, Sikhism, or Sufism, then your understanding of the world does not allow for any notion of mysticism, spirituality, or the metaphysical. In short, you choke experience for reasons.
I try to be a rational philosopher - for me, it means not being open to every single line of philosophy out there. I am not open to every single line of philosophy, if that philosophy does not enhance my understanding of the world. I am also a rational philosopher that rationally understands the everyday importance of experience to our lives as humans. Dissecting philosophy as being Western and non-Western is becoming increasingly unnecessary (to do both the diversity of complex global society as well as the imperialist, monopolizing attitude of Western philosophy itself).
My response, and the empirical-rationalist dualism, has its place in history as a pragmatic philosophy. And I believe that we need a little bit more pragmatic responses out there. The world has become incredibly complex and diverse and we, as humans (the only animal able to reason with abstract complexity), need to be able to have a minimum amount of skills to avoid wasting away, and we need to be able to pass these skills on to our next generation. And not only to these skills need to be passed on, they need to be radically innovated to match the increasing complexity of society.
