Western thought is Western, not universal

After I graduated from high school, I chose to study Philosophy. I wanted to know the heights of human understanding. I wanted to pick history’s greatest brains, all the way from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, Enlightenment and modern times. And from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and from Rousseau to Nietzsche, it appeared that the most brilliant thinkers of all time had all been born in Europe.

When I became president of the study association of the Philosophy department, the first thing I did was organizing a series of lectures about Eastern philosophy. I invited professors of the neighboring department of Area Studies to talk about Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism “in order to somewhat fill the gap in our studies”, I wrote in our association’s newsletter.

What counts as philosophy?

The lectures were a great success. Yet, for me and my fellow students it probably didn’t truly feel like an addition to our curriculum. It rather was like an anthropological excursion outside of the realm of philosophy. We were confronted with systems of thought that were fundamentally foreign to us; views that our rational Enlightenment minds dismissed as spirituality or religion; ideas that were too different for us to be able to acknowledge their value.

The Western assumption is that learning about non-Western thinking helps us understand the specific peoples of China or India, but not the universal human condition. That’s why we study it in the department of Area Studies, and not Philosophy. Western thought determined the rules of what we accept as true; what doesn’t fit that lens is not knowledge. And as students born and raised in Europe, we had never learned to appreciate anything that didn’t fit the epistemological framework we knew.

Fundamentally different ways of thinking

The centuries-long global dominance of the West has brought many non-Western people in touch with a system of thought that is different from their own. But from a dominant position, many Westerners have never even considered the idea that their thinking is not universal but specific. What is more, it is even highly peculiar: Harvard professor Joseph Henrich coined the acronym WEIRD to describe the very small subset of people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.

In his book How The World Thinks, philosopher Julian Baggini shows how fundamentally different some of the world’s systems of thought are. He underlines the importance of his academic endeavour with his thesis that understanding the philosophical tradition of a culture helps us to understand how that culture is today. Human thinking created histories, countries, buildings. And as products of their societies, today’s individuals think, see and experience the world in profoundly different ways.

Social psychologist Richard Nisbett offers in The Geography of Thought a parade of examples of how ancient philosophies are reflected in the perception and reasoning of ordinary people today. Following in the footsteps of Confucius, East Asians focus on relationships between events and people and live in societies characterized by interconnectedness and harmony. And claiming intellectual inheritance from Aristotle, Westerners focus on objects and individuals in isolation from their context and have a greater sense of personal agency.

Learning from other cultures

Ignorance is a handicap in an interconnected world with a multitude of perspectives. Unfortunately, when we do learn about other cultures, we often only look at the directly visible surface features of the cultural iceberg. The do’s and don’ts may seem silly to us, because we don’t investigate the underlying values and system of thought. Such an approach to culture may do more damage than good because we emphasize differences without understanding them.

A couple of years after my lecture series about Eastern philosophies, the department started offering a brand new Bachelor’s degree called Philosophy: Global and Comparative Perspectives. To this day, it is still one of only a few Philosophy programs in the world that include non-Western thought. Initiatives like this and the work of scholars in different disciplines like Henrich, Baggini and Nisbett are steps toward more openness to learn from wisdom no matter where it originated. And in the process to learn to understand our own thinking.

Bibliography

Joseph Henrich – The Weirdest People in the World (2021)

Julian Baggini – How the World Thinks (2019)

Richard Nisbett – The Geography of Thought (2004)