All cultures have different way of thinking

Julian Baggini explores philosophical traditions worldwide, and understand western traditions, methodologies. According to Baggini, if it is western philosophical inquiry, which is predominantly  “Truth seeking”  and Eastern philosophies  “ way seeking”.

Hindu Philosophy is based on observation and invokes six sources of knowledge, including testimony based on reliable witnesses, and also anupalabdhi ( non-perception: seeing there is no cheese in the fridge for instance). It continually enunciates what it says cannot be said – precisely what western philosophy is trying to obviate different sorts of absence including non-existence before existing, and non-existence after having existed.

“Neti Neti” is perhaps the Indian theoretical equivalent of their  head-wobble. Baggini distincts their embrace of contradictoriness and paradox with narrow western binary thinking.

According to Baggini one of our presuppositions, we should start without any and any phenomenon or concept is best investigated by  first dismantling it into its parts. But many things are only what they are  as integrated systems, and analysis may distort even nullify them.

In Japanese Philosophy, the concept of “Yinyang” ( timing) expresses how what something now is good or beautiful – is not a “ fixed essence” but a matter of process and context. The sharp intersection of a particular situation  of qualities that may,  elsewhere and in themselves, be ugly or bad.

Baggini says “ Yinyang”  resembles Heraclitus’ notion of harmony plucked from conflict, just a fine tuned balance between deficiency and excess in Confucian ethics strangely  approximates to Aristotle’s “mean”.

However, the Chinese notion of harmony  is so  elusive that it has easily been used to supress dissent. Baggini criticise the way westerners differentiate philosophy from religion and moral codes.

There is a fashionable tendency to downgrade western achievements by exaggerating the similarity and significance of vaguely equivalent non-western ones.

The “Woke” regard western philosophers as uniquely arrogant in purporting to  embrace reality as a whole, to speak for about everyone, not just their own compatriots.

The mystical contradictions developed by eastern philosophers can often seem more assertively categorical than western attempts to sidestep contradiction. Westerners have ignored hierarchy but ignores how we should re-embrace it.

“Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation., no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in way that can never be put right” Baggini

How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy by Julian Baggini, Granta £20, 432 pages.