Eastern and Western Philosophy?

Recently a friend asked me about the relationship between Eastern and Western culture. Of course that is an enormous question, one I also ask myself and one that, of course, no one can really answer. But I want to formulate a few thoughts:

Distance From an Imagined Center

Facing the ‘Western’ world, based on classical antiquity, Christianity, the Enlightenment and materialism, is the Occidental world of the Assyrians and Persians, of Islam and the conception of a divinely guided polity. This is a perspective arising from a historical conflict shaped, from the Western viewpoint, by Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire and the Crusades. It is a Eurocentric, colonial perspective that avoids the dialogue of the Occident with the ‘other’. The Eastern world shaped by Islam today, the Orient, likewise had a missionary agenda (jihad).

Of course the whole is much more complex, but my concern here is to point to this field. Geographically, this predominantly confrontational relationship plays out between the so-called Western hemisphere and the Near and Middle East. North Africa is regarded as collateral from this perspective. This entire description arises from 19th- and 20th-century thinking and does not do justice to the realities of the 21st century. What does not appear here are the cultural spheres of China and India. In a brutal colonial tradition of thought, that is merely the Far East. So we have a geographical line of distance along which cultural hemispheres are arranged, and for which distance from the center (Rome, Constantinople, the Greenwich meridian) is decisive. This is absurd, but nonetheless ideologically real. Actually we should not think further along these lines at all. This is an old ideology that belongs, at best, in a museum.

Metaphysical Systems

More fruitful is an ordering into metaphysical, that is, philosophical and spiritual systems:

• monotheism (largely accompanied by a purely dualistic worldview originating in the Mediterranean region)
• a thinking of immanence (which quietly runs through all epochs and cultural spheres)
• the capitalist, scientifically shaped materialism of the 19th and 20th centuries (whose limitations and ignorance are currently threatening the planet)
• the wisdom of the Rishis in the Rigveda and the Upanishads in India
• what the Communist Cultural Revolution has left behind.

My wording already shows a personal preference very clearly. These are worldviews, outlooks on the world, ways of relating oneself to the world. They are highly subjective. Since these are only apparently systems of knowledge, and are not systems of religion or ideologies either, but fundamental attitudes toward life, the engagements here are particularly exciting.

The future is often described as a struggle over the distribution of resources such as water, climate consequences, fundamentalists, geopolitics, flows of capital, scientific utopias and dystopias. But the 21st century concerns what is truly essential: our relationship as human beings to the world, and ultimately whether we want to remain in it, and if so, how. I become very conscious of the urgency of this question here in India; in the West this question is still smiled at dismissively. Here, it seems to me, lies the truly exciting difference.

The Origin of Language

To put it differently once again: Nor is mathematics the universal language. It is indeed astonishing how effective mathematics and the natural sciences based on it are at explaining things. And the empirical sciences also have a certain explanatory power, since they formulate observations in theories. But they are an abstract level of description of the physical world.

The real mystery remains language itself. In the beginning was the Word, says Genesis. In the Upanishads, sound has a central role. The vibration that produces sound, which in turn grasps a conception and produces a form, is a central connecting link between our senses and our mind. The spiritual sound OM is a deep exhalation that ends with the closing of the lips and encompasses the core of our existence. Language, the production of meaning through sounds, connects perception, expression, mental representation, conception and communication. In the beginning was not the word, but sound. From it arises the word, whose medium is the mind.

Who Has an Answer?

It can really no longer be about preserving a status quo, and the idea of progress, too, has now finally become obsolete. What might answers look like?

• The dominant variant is to think about how we can improve the system of globalization.
• A more individual answer concerns orienting one’s own life toward maxims.
• Another is the transformation of consciousness: individual, collective, universal.

Here again, it seems to me, the wisdom of the Upanishads already has an answer. For these three essential levels of a search for answers belong together. They are reconciled in the insight of the Rishis. Only if we unite our material existence with our ideals of life and the insight that consciousness does not exist in isolation do we have a chance.

The mantras of the Rishi are the oldest spiritual texts handed down to us. They bear witness to a beginning that was not one. They bear witness to a universal consciousness that draws not on personal motives but on the human mind, a meditative introspection. The solution lies within ourselves. As trivial as that sounds, it is at the same time the highest wisdom.