How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy by Julian Baggini
5 of 5 stars
The world is shrinking fast and most of us are in the throes of multiculturalism interacting with neighbours, work colleagues and friends from different regions and religions almost on a daily basis. Most of us at work, are part of global teams with members from different corners of the world, each following different belief systems and having a completely different outlook to life and work problems. To become successful in this diverse environment, it becomes imperative for us to gain insight into how different cultures and regions operate, their commonalities as well as their differences. There is an added advantage in that gaining greater knowledge of how others think is the first step to a better understanding of ourselves. If you’re looking for answers such as why team members from varied regions of the world perform differently in the team not necessarily for good or bad, then Julian Baggini’s book “How the World Thinks” is a must read for you.
Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we’ve in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life means that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others points of view, we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own. We’re often told we should put ourselves in the shoes of others but that is as difficult as it gets because we’ve to get beyond imagining from an unfamiliar viewpoint and really try to understand how they look to others for whom that landscape is home.
Julian Baggini’s book is a fascinating and a dazzling kaleidoscope of the philosophies of West, Japan, India, China and the Muslim world, as well as the lesser-known oral traditions of Africa, Australia and Russia. It’s an ingenious and open hearted book and can be used as a guide on the art of living well, gaining self awareness, acuity and moving away from parochial myopia and towards productive dialogue. As he writes in his introduction of the book that it’s an unexplained wonder of human history that philosophy first flowered entirely separately in different parts of the world at more or less the same time. The early Upanishads, the foundational texts of Indian philosophy were written between eight and sixth centuries BCE more or less around the same time when Confucius, Socrates, Buddha propounded their own distinctive philosophies in China, Greece and Greater India. These early philosophies have had a profound impact on the development of distinctive cultures across the world. Their values and tenets have shaped the different ways people live their lives and conduct their business. This book covers the selective history of global philosophy, one which excavates the often hidden foundations of how the world thinks today.
The book covers the ideas and ideals found in classical Chinese philosophy still resonating in east Asia home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Prime among these is harmony, a belief that the highest good is an ordered world in which families, businesses and state all stand in the right relationship to each other. Because harmony requires each person to fulfill his or her own role, society is inherently hierarchical, but not necessarily top heavy but to the benefit of all. Then there is virtue which enables a person to live well, promoting harmony in all their relationships. Virtue is having a good character, enabling one to become good at “quan”: weighing up the merits of each case and making discretionary choices. Quan requires sensitivity to the proper mean between two extremes like courage and rashness. This virtue can be achieved by self cultivation, by following “li” which are ritual habits so that being good becomes second nature. The “junzi”, the exemplary person who succeeds in this becomes a kind of moral paradigm leading others to act well by example. Ethical self cultivation reflects a broader emphasis on practice and habit in achieving excellence. The end result is “wu-wei”, a kind of effortless action that nonetheless requires years of conscious efforts before it becomes instinctive. It is not possible to express in words what a Junzi who exhibits wu-wei knows as language is an imperfect net in which to catch the world and practice is more important than theory. The East Asian thought across China, Japan, Korea is characterised by a kind of metaphysical agnosticism i.e. nature of ultimate reality cannot be known and it really does not matter. It is more important to seek way than seek the truth, interested primarily in what we need to live well and not in achieving knowledge of elusive ultimate really for its own sake. “Yinyang” reflects the sense that everything is in active interrelation, creating a dynamic system in which nothing is ever settled for long. The concept of “qi” captures this sense that everything is flowing, that energy is constantly moving and it requires skill to channel it and use it well. The religious impulse is focussed on this world, “Tian”, heaven is not another realm but a kind of principle that regulates the physical world and in immanent in it. The absence of any idea of final salvation makes the east Asian culture see the golden age in the past rather than in the future. The world is impermanent, everything in it transient, devoid of any unchanging, inherent essence. The watching of the cherry blossom with the kind of religious observance reflects the ideal of harmony with nature and seeing the flowers blown by the wind reflects the ideas of emptiness and impermanence of world. Hence proper understanding of world and ourselves is found as much in the spaces between things than the actual items or events. That explains why experiments show that while Western audience attend almost exclusively to foreground items in pictures and videos, East Asians see backgrounds as equally important.
Another quarter of world’s population inhabits the Indian subcontinent which has its own classical philosophy called “darshana” which literally means to look at or to see. It has a full arsenal of philosophical tools in the traditional taxonomy of “pramanas” (valid sources of knowledge), “pratyaksha” (perception), “anumana” (inference), “upamana” (comparison and analogy), arthapatti (postulation), anupalabadhi (non-perception) and sabda (word or testimony of reliable experts). Reason only leads us so far before we need pratyaksha to show us how things really are but as not all are that capable so sabda of sages, ancient Rishis are highly valued creating a culture of deference. Indian philosophy is so intertwined with Hindu religion that is does not make sense to separate the two. A key characteristic of Indian philosophy is its soteriological focus. Every school has its conception of what “moksha” (salvation) is and how to achieve it. The common theme is that the world of appearances is not the world of ultimate reality and we are led astray by senses. By practices of meditation we can still our minds, attend more carefully and see things as they really are. Language is itself a framing of experience which like the senses, packages it up into units that we can get a hold of, but in so doing language transforms and distorts it. That’s why Indian philosophers went full length to produce the most structured language in Sanskrit with the sole purpose to reduce that distortion of reality. The conventional reality that we perceive has an appearance of solidity even though it is really impermanent and in flux. The concept of self itself in Indian cosmos is illusory as it is considered merely a stream of experiences, a bundle of perceptions that has no persisting essence. Our true self is “Brahman”, the one universal self of which our individual self “Atman” is just a part. A key feature is a principle of “Karma” in which actions, thoughts or both generate good or bad consequences for the agent in this life or in the lives to come.
Nearly a quarter of world’s population is Muslim, but being a new religion the culture of muslim countries differ considerably. Whatever in a given culture, did not contradict a tenet of Islam was integrated into the religious substrate of their culture. making it extremely difficult to distinguish between religion and culture. In the early formative years of Islam, the battle between philosophy (falsafa) and theology (kalam) led to the victory of theology over philosophy resulting in falsafa also having unshakable religious views though there is a role for independent reasoning “itjihad” permitted in some cases. Reason has tight limits in Islamic philosophy because of the unity and completeness of Islam. The notion that Quran being the complete and final revelation of God has an authority that no secular reason can challenge. Philosophical speculation about the nature of God is limited, for instance, because we can only know of God what God chooses to reveal of himself to us. God’s control is such that nothing happens unless he wills it, which results in a strong strand of belief on predestination, “kismat”. The notion of secular ethics barely makes sense; morality comes from God. Human selfhood is based on a dynamic relationship with the Creator, grounded in gratitude and reciprocal love. To deny this relationship by disbelief is to do injustice to oneself.
Western Europe and North America together house less than twelve percent of world’s population but have been dominant force around the globe in recent centuries. And that is the reason why people in West have become so used to seeing their culture as the default global one. Western philosophy is essentially truth-seeking and cosmogenic. That is to say it assumes that its primary task is to understand the world as it really is. It upholds the autonomy of reason., valuing truth and reason for its own sake. Reason’s autonomy means that it is secular, working without supernatural assistance to deliver us right understanding of the world and ourselves. Its primary mode of reasoning is based in logic. Philosophy in this mode is aporetic, it identifies contradictions generated by our imperfect understanding and attempts to remove them. It does this by seeking precise definitions and measurements, then proceeding to draw out their implications by sound steps of reasoning. 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. Ethically, this has tended to generate rule based ethics which have impartiality as a central value. The reductionist tendency combined with autonomy of reason has generated a conception of free, rational, autonomous selves which is individualistic and atomistic. Individuals are not primarily parts of society but societies are collections of individuals. This has led to egalitarian and democratic ethos but arguably resulted in fragmentation of society with a decline of respect for legitimate hierarchies of expertise or seniority.
By becoming philosophical explorers, we can build a more complete picture of the world and more objective understanding of it by taking multiple perspectives. There are three ways in which taking multiple perspectives can give us a better understanding of the world and ourselves. The first is that different perspectives combine to give us more information that any could provide alone. The second is that multiple perspectives can be illuminating when they reveal that there is in fact more than one issue at stake. The third benefit of taking multiple perspectives is when we realise that there is more than one legitimate way of either understanding the world or constructing norms. The values of autonomy, harmony, community and individuality all have a legitimacy and if we can find a way to live that allows us to maximise all of these values that would be the ideal way of leading a good life.
Tarun Rattan
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