The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy (review)

This book is a competent, scholarly comparative study of several important philosophical issues such as being, truth, language, morality, rights and duty, religion, and democracy. It offers a critical comparison of the fundamental positions held by major thinkers of both the Chinese and Western traditions—for example Zhuang Zi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Aristotle, Heidegger, Kripke, feminists, and liberal philosophers. On the basis of this comparison, Li concludes that although different value systems are incompatible or even contradict each other in their ontological and logical grounding, they can to some extent still coexist and complement each other.

The book has seven chapters that can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters deal with questions that are of a more theoretical nature. In the last four, Li attempts to answer the question of whether the theoretical differences in ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of language could and should affect our attitudes with regard to value, family responsibility, religious beliefs, and politics.

Chapter 1 compares the "substance ontology" of Aristotle and the "contextual perspective ontology" of Zhuang Zi. According to Li, "substance ontology" holds that "for each individual entity (or at least a natural entity), there is only one essence and one primary being" (p. 14). In contrast, Zhuang Zi's "contextual perspective ontology" views things at two levels: the level of Tao and the level of entities. At the level of Tao, "Everything in the world has its root in the Tao. In this sense, all are One" (p. 15). At the level of entity, "each individual entity can be both a 'this' and a 'that.' An entity's being a 'this' does not exclude its also being a 'that'" (p. 15). These two levels are related in such a way that "an individual's being a 'this' and being a 'that' are ways of the Tao's presenting itself" (p. 15). Li uses Zhuang Zi's well-known stories of the ox and the butterfly to illustrate his point. Then he concludes that "to say an entity is essentially or primarily a man or a butterfly is already to be misled. For him [Zhuang Zi] an entity can be both a 'this' and a 'that'; it may remain the same entity while transforming from one category into another" (p. 29). Because there is no substantial essence in an entity as the primary being, as Aristotle claims, there should be no single objectively right answer to the question of what, essentially, an entity is.

This leads to the question of the essence of truth, which is the main topic of chapter 2. In this chapter, Li starts with a discussion of Heidegger's criticism of the correspondence theory of truth, which is traced back historically to Aristotle. According to this theory, Li says, "the essence of truth lies in the agreement of the assertion with what is being asserted," that is, "with an object or reality" (p. 37). Heidegger challenges the Aristotelian substance ontology and the Cartesian dichotomy of subject/object as the grounding of the correspondence theory of truth. In Heidegger's view, "truth cannot possibly have the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the object). Correspondence between the statement and the thing cannot signify a thing-like approximation between dissimilar kinds of things" (p. 37). Rather than the correspondence theory of truth, Heidegger proposes the essence of truth as aletheia, an early Greek word for truth, and interprets it as disclosing a way of human existence, that is, a way of being of Dasein or a way in which Dasein is "to be." Li finds that this radical existential and non-epistemic interpretation by Heidegger of the Greek concept of truth...