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“The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can’t understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of
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.
different cultures differ in their “metaphysics,” or fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world.
The collective or interdependent nature of Asian society is consistent with Asians’ broad, contextual view of the world and their belief that events are highly complex and determined by many factors. The individualistic or independent nature of Western society seems consistent with the Western focus on particular objects in isolation from their context and with Westerners’ belief that they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the objects’ behavior.
One definition of happiness for the Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints.
A strong sense of individual identity accompanied the Greek sense of personal agency
Our word “school” comes from the Greek-scholē, meaning “leisure.” Leisure meant for the Greeks, among other things, the freedom to pursue knowledge. The merchants of Athens were happy to send their sons to school so that they could indulge their curiosity.
The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony. Every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives—the clan, the village, and especially the family.
For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others
The Chinese were concerned less with issues of control of others or the environment than with self-control,
a sense of collectiveagency. The chief moral system of China—Confucianism—was essentially an elaboration of the obligations that obtained between emperor and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother, and between friend and friend. 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.
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.
The principle of yin-yang is the expression of the relationship that exists between opposing but interpenetrating forces that may complete one another, make each comprehensible, or create the conditions for altering one into the other.
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.
The Chinese are disinclined to use precisely defined terms or categories in any arena, but instead use expressive, metaphoric language.
Similarly, the Way, and not the discovery of truth, was the goal of philosophy. Thought that gave no guidance to action was fruitless.
Greece differed from all contemporary civilizations in the development of personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought.
The sense that the self was linked in a network of relationships and social obligations might have made it natural to view the world in general as continuous and composed of substances rather than discrete and consisting of distinct objects.
difference between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement.
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.
Westerners—and perhaps especially Americans—are apt to find Asians hard to read because Asians are likely to assume that their point has been made indirectly and with finesse. Meanwhile, the Westerner is in fact very much in the dark.
To set aside universal rules in order to accommodate particular cases seems immoral to the Westerner. To insist on the same rules for every case can seem at best obtuse and rigid to the Easterner and at worst cruel.
The combative, rhetorical form is also absent from Asian law. In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most part, of a contest between opponents. More typically, the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction—by seeking a Middle Way through the claims of the opponents. There is no attempt to derive a resolution to a legal conflict from a universal principle. On the contrary, Asians are likely to consider justice in the abstract, by-the-book Western sense to be rigid and unfeeling.
modern Asians also tend to see the world as consisting of continuous substances, whereas modern Westerners are more prone to see objects.
substance vs objects
Just as the social attitudes and values of continental Europe are intermediate between East Asian and Anglo-American ones, the intellectual history of the Continent is more holistic than that of America and the Commonwealth. The big-picture ideas are much rarer in Anglo-America than on the Continent.
anglo american / continental european/ east asian
the hypothesis that Asians view the world through a wide-angle lens, whereas Westerners have tunnel vision. He
Ancient Greek philosophers were powerfully inclined to believe that things don’t change much or, if they really are changing, future change will continue in the same direction, and at the same rate, as current change. And the same is true for ordinary modern Westerners. But like ancient Taoists and Confucian philosophers, ordinary modern Asians believe that things are constantly changing; and movement in a particular direction, far from indicating future changes in the same direction, may be a sign that events are about to reverse direction.
the world - continuity vs change
For the Greeks, things belonged in the same category if they were describable by the same attributes. But the philosopher Donald Munro points out that, for the Chinese, shared attributes did not establish shared class membership. Instead, things were classed together because they were thought to influence one another through resonance.
is it possible that it is merely language that is driving the differences in tendency to organize the world in terms of verbs vs. nouns? Are the findings about knowledge organization simply due to the fact that Western languages encourage the use of nouns, which results in categorization of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, with the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized? More
East Asians, then, are more likely to set logic aside in favor of typicality and plausibility of conclusions. They are also more likely to set logic aside in favor of the desirability of conclusions.
The three principles of dialectical reasoning are related. Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states.
eastern dialectical reasoning
commitment to some logical principles that conflict directly with the spirit of Eastern dialecticism. These include the law of identity, which holds that a thing is itself and not some other thing, and the law of noncontradiction, which holds that a proposition can’t be both true and false.
In the West, the goal is satisfaction of a principle of justice and the presumption going into the arena of conflict resolution is typically that there is a right and a wrong and there will be a winner and a loser. The goal in Eastern conflict resolution is more likely to be hostility reduction and compromise is assumed to be the likely result.
Rhetoric The resistance to debate is not merely a social or ideological one, nor is it limited to purely quantitative outcomes, such as the number of scientific papers produced. The reluctance extends to the very nature of communication and rhetoric.
Western rhetoric, which provides the underlying structure for everything from scientific reports to policy position papers, usually has some variation of the following form: • background; • problem; • hypothesis or proposed proposition; • means of testing; • evidence; • arguments as to what the evidence means; • refutation of possible counterarguments; and • conclusion and recommendations.
western rhetoric form and structure
For the Chinese, any conception of rights is based on a part-whole as opposed to a one-many conception of society. To the extent that the individual has rights, they constitute the individual’s “share” of the total rights. When Westerners see East Asians treating people as if they had no rights as individuals, they tend to be able to view this only in moral terms.
human rights in west vs east
People hold the beliefs they do because of the way they think and they think the way they do because of the nature of the societies they live in.
The two Western vices of separation of form and content and the insistence on logical approaches often operate together to produce a lot of academic nonsense.
Debate is an important educational tool for learning analytic thinking skills and for forcing self-conscious reflection on the validity of one’s ideas.
