The Music in the Heart, the Way of Water, and the Light of a Thousand Suns: A Response to Richard Shusterman, Crispin Sartwell, and Scott Stroud

In organizing this discussion, Scott Stroud has opened up an important topic that, I hope, will be further seriously explored. We are at the beginning of a potentially significant dialogue between “East(s) and West(s),” in which even our misunderstandings may be illuminating. Aside from whatever views of “pragmatism” there may be outside of the West, it is not very well understood even on its home ground. And the aesthetic dimension of “pragmatism”—its living heart, I maintain—is not well understood by those who comprehend it as utilitarianism or even as enlightened technology.¹ That its aesthetic side might be where it is actually most open to Asian schools of “the art of life” is further indication of the need to rethink pragmatism itself. And this also means being able to see pragmatism itself within the Western tradition, in terms of themes it reacts against as well as those upon which it draws. But more important is the general issue of Western philosophy of whatever stripe breaking out of its cultural parochialism to engage in world philosophy.

Preface: The Origins of Western, Chinese, and Indian Philosophy

Since the papers presented by Stroud, Shusterman, and Sartwell go to the very roots of conceiving what philosophy itself is, before engaging them directly I will begin with some general observations about the predispositions of the three great philosophical cultures: European, South Asian, and Chinese. The origin of philosophy is quite different in each of these cultures, and this has affected the very nature of what philosophy itself is understood to be. Greek philosophy begins with the cosmological speculations of the Milesians. They ask “What is the archē (origin, source, principle) of nature (phusis)?” The primordial gods and goddesses of traditional Greek myth and religion have been banished from the outset and, when not ignored, are open for criticism from the likes of Xenophanes and Heraclitus. Philosophy in the West, then, begins with what will become the concerns of science and as a result engages in a radical rethinking of the nature of popular ethics, the most extreme utopian example of which is Plato’s Republic. In this process there is an initial separation of philosophy from popular religion and a criticism of traditional morality. Not only does Greek philosophy begin with a set of questions that have given a “scientific” orientation to our conception of what philosophy is, but philosophy is at odds with popular culture, the most consummate symbol of which is the trial of Socrates.

A Confucianist would consider Socrates to be a very rude, disrespectful man. Chinese philosophy does not begin in wonder at the cosmos but with a collective political crisis: the old feudal order of the Zhou Dynasty had failed and from its dismembered body warring states emerged. The ceremonial chivalry of the Zhou disappeared with increasingly brutal warfare, ending in the brief triumph of the state of Qin. (The tough, harsh faces of the terracotta soldiers buried with the emperor of Qin tell a story of regimented, illiterate, pitiless fascism.) Chinese philosophy begins with the political question: “How may the Way (Dao) be recovered?” (Even the seemingly apolitical Daoists take their stance in relation to this question: the Dao De Jing is a political treatise.) Confucius, looking upon the degenerating political chaos and brutality of his day, turned toward the vision of an ancient ideal society at peace with itself and with “Heaven” (Tian), one in harmony with the “Way.” He thought he found evidence that such a society had existed in the “classics”—records of the old Zhou empire—The Book of Poetry, The Book of Changes, The Book of Rituals, The Book of History, and The Spring and Autumn Annals. Plato, facing the political chaos of his day, yearned for an untried ideal—for, like Socrates, he had rejected the past. Confucius thought that history proved we had lived beautifully in harmony and therefore could so again.² Confucius looked to the ancient books from the “golden age” and saw in...