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Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving. East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way. Formal logic plays little role in problem solving. In fact, the person who is too concerned with logic may be considered immature.
Each of these orientations—the Western and the Eastern—is a self-reinforcing, homeostatic system.
The Greeks, more than any other ancient peoples, and in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of personal agency—the sense that they were in charge of their own lives and free to act as they chose.
Our word “school” comes from the Greek schol, meaning “leisure.” Leisure meant for the Greeks, among other things, the freedom to pursue knowledge.
While a special occasion for the ancient Greek might mean attendance at plays and poetry readings, a special occasion for the Chinese of the same period would be an opportunity to visit with friends and family.
The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony.
The individual was not, as for the Greeks, an encapsulated unit who maintained a unique identity across social settings.
there would have been a sense of collective agency.
Chinese society made the individual feel very much a part of a large, complex, and generally benign social organism where clear mutual obligations served as a guide to ethical conduct. Carrying out prescribed roles—in an organized, hierarchical system— was the essence of Chinese daily life. There was no counterpart to the Greek sense of personal liberty. Individual rights in China were one’s “share” of the rights of the community as a whole, not a license to do as one pleased.
The Chinese have been credited with the original or independent invention of irrigation systems, ink, porcelain, the magnetic compass, stirrups, the wheelbarrow, deep drilling, the Pascal triangle, pound locks on canals, fore-and-aft sailing, watertight compartments, the sternpost rudder, the paddle-wheel boat, quantitative cartography, immunization techniques, astronomical observations of novae, seismographs, and acoustics. Many of these technological achievements were in place at a time when Greece had virtually none.
Greek philosophy thus differed greatly from Chinese in that it was deeply concerned with the question of which properties made an object what it was, and which were alterable without changing the nature of the object.
Human relations and ethical conduct were important to the Greeks but did not have the consuming interest that they did for the Chinese.
the Greeks “became slaves to the linear, either-or orientation of their logic.”
Confucianism has been called the religion of common sense. Its adherents are urged to uphold the Doctrine of the Golden Mean—to be excessive in nothing and to assume that between two propositions, and between two contending individuals, there is truth on both sides. But in reality, Confucianism, like Taoism, is less concerned with finding the truth than with finding the Tao—the Way—to live in the world.
Unlike most of the world until very modern times, there was substantial social and economic mobility in China.
Confucians have always believed, far more than the intellectual descendants of Aristotle, in the malleability of human nature.
The concern with abstraction characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy has no counterpart in Chinese philosophy.
in effect, objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation.
The Greeks’ focus on the salient object and its attributes led to their failure to understand the fundamental nature of causality.
The notion that events always occur in a field of forces would have been completely intuitive to the Chinese.
The Chinese conviction about the fundamental relatedness of all things made it obvious to them that objects are altered by context. Thus any attempt to categorize objects with precision would not have seemed to be of much help in comprehending events.
their lack of interest in categories prevented them from discovering laws that really were capable of explaining classes of events.
Only the Greeks made classifications of the natural world sufficiently rigorous to permit a move from the sorts of folk-biological schemes that other peoples constructed to a single classification system that ultimately could result in theories with real explanatory power.
The Greeks were focused on, you might even say obsessed by, the concept of contradiction.
Like the ancient Chinese, they strive to be reasonable, not rational.
Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu made serious strides in the direction of logical thought in the fifth century B.C., but he never formalized his system and logic died an early death in China. Except for that brief interlude, the Chinese lacked not only logic, but even a principle of contradiction.
the Chinese translations of Indian texts were full of errors and misunderstandings.
The Chinese dialectic instead uses contradiction to understand relations among objects or events, to transcend or integrate apparent oppositions, or even to embrace clashing but instructive viewpoints.
Dialectical thought is in some ways the opposite of logical thought. It seeks not to decontextualize but to see things in their appropriate contexts: Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves.
Greece differed from all contemporary civilizations in the development of personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought.
unlike in China, education was not a route to power and wealth. The drive toward education was apparently the result of curiosity and a belief in the value of knowledge for its own sake.
For any Greek living near the coasts (and that would have been the great majority), encountering people representing other ethnicities, religions, and polities would have been common. Athens itself would have been rather like the bar in Star Wars.
The critical factors influencing habits of mind are social and important social facts can be generated and sustained by forces that are not economic in nature.
Settled agriculture came to Greece almost two thousand years later than to China, and it quickly became commercial, as opposed to merely subsistence, in many areas.
Their relations with others provided both the chief constraint in their lives and the primary source of opportunities.
Dialectics and logic can both be seen as cognitive tools developed to deal with social conflict.
in terms of intellectual and cultural achievement, Europe had become a backwater. While Arab emirs discussed Plato and Aristotle and Chinese magistrates displayed their proficiency in all the arts, European nobles sat gnawing joints of beef in damp castles.
By the fifteenth century, Europe had awakened from its millennium of torpor and began to rival China in almost every domain—philosophy, mathematics, art, and technology.
This lack of curiosity was characteristic of China. The inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom (China’s name for itself, meaning essentially “the center of the world”) had little interest in the tales brought to them by foreigners. Moreover, there has never been a strong interest in knowledge for its own sake in China.
An implication of the idea that economic factors can affect cognitive habits is that agricultural peoples should be more field dependent than people who earn their living in ways that rely less on close coordination of their work with others, such as hunting animals and gathering plants.
In general, East Asians are supposed to be less concerned with personal goals or self-aggrandizement than are Westerners. Group goals and coordinated action are more often the concerns.
For Asians, feeling good about themselves is likely to be tied to the sense that they are in harmony with the wishes of the groups to which they belong and are meeting the group’s expectations.
the Western-style self is virtually a figment of the imagination to the East Asian.
the notion that there can be attributes or actions that are not conditioned on social circumstances is foreign to the Asian mentality.
The person participates in a set of relationships that make it possible to act and purely independent behavior is usually not possible or really even desirable.
Easterners feel embedded in their in-groups and distant from their out-groups.
When North Americans are surveyed about their attributes and preferences, they characteristically overestimate their distinctiveness. On question after question, North Americans report themselves to be more unique than they really are, whereas Asians are much less likely to make this error.
Americans are much more likely to make spontaneous favorable comments about themselves than are Japanese.
The goal for the self in relation to society is not so much to establish superiority or uniqueness, but to achieve harmony within a network of supportive social relationships and to play one’s part in achieving collective ends.
Westerners are likely to get very good at a few things they start out doing well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades.
