Comparative philosophy

[TraineeHuman]

Comparative (i.e., East-West) philosophy is an extraordinarily broad and multi-faceted topic. I first became familiar with it in 1974, when an academic journal called The Journal of Comparative Philosophy: Philosophy East and West began. Perhaps the title was quite unfortunate, though, because a quarterly publication called Philosophy
East and West (from the University of Hawaii) had already been running since 1951.

However, by 1975 I found out that comparative (meaning East-West) philosophy had already established itself in the academic world as one of the four or five current branches of contemporary philosophy. The reason these were considered to qualify as "contemporary" was that a philosopher could basically be guaranteed to win any argument against anyone employing conceptual worldviews and conceptual strategies from any philosophical approach coming from a prior time. (The philosopher only had to turn the issue into a clash between different underlying worldviews in order to achieve that.)

I remember that one of the four major reasons the Chief Editors gave for starting that journal in 1974 was how the public and the press had demonstrated their apparently complete ignorance of comparative philosophy, at the time, by the kind of reception they gave to Robert Pirsig's best-selling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

That book was written as a detective story of ideas. Mr Pirsig dwelt initially on Western society's apparent great unwillingness to reconcile or integrate the romantic with the classical, the subjective with the objective. The trouble was, though, that Mr Pirsig kept declaring how he was the first person to seriously attempt, in his book,
to do this, But in fact the subject of how to do it (in various different ways) was, in many respects, the very most central topic in the current academic study of Indian philosophy. And that also included in various ways that Mr Pirsig had apparently not even thought of, at least in his book.

One reason why I found comparative philosophy interesting was then fact that in most Asian countries there were continuous periods, lasting for a substantial number of centuries or more, where the peasants in the field would give over a very substantial part of their conversation time to discussing philosophical questions. And much of
that discussion would be at what today would be considered a graduate level of sophistication.

Another interesting feature is that in such discussions, philosophy would often be seamlessly integrated with psychology and with spirituality, and with practical living. In fact, psychotherapy is itself originally an Asian invention, because in their advanced forms the spiritual traditions usually were, among other things, psychotherapies.

By contrast, Western society has undergone centuries of dominance by Christianity. Very unfortunately, Christianity is the only major world religion whose original followers were mostly illiterate. The word "bishop" comes from the Greek word for someone who can read. And up until at least 240 AD (or maybe 290 AD), the great majority of the bishops were in fact ex-Pharisees who decided that Yeshua had been their true High Priest.

Fortunately, though, there have been many individual philosophers and philosophical movements in the West that can be compared to Asian counterparts. In fact, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance we see frequent quotes from Thoreau, who was an American Transcendentalist, and I think the quotes are intended to link up with the Taoist concepts the book eventually builds up to.

On the other hand, whereas most contemporary Chinese individuals, at least those living abroad, still consider they have an intimate soul-connection with Taoism (and Buddhism, and Confucianism), I wonder if most Westerners consider they have a similar connection with Christianity or Judaism or whatever. Two of the three founders and initial Chief Editors of the Journal of Comparative Philosophy were Chairmen of Comparative Philosophy departments. A number of months after the Journal began, one of them mentioned that near the end of the academic year, some of his students came to him with an (entirely unsolicited) announcement. This was that, although they had started the course as devout Christians or Jews, the majority of the class had now decided to "convert" to Buddhism. The other Chief Editor who was also the head of a Comparative Religion department then said that although he had not mentioned this before, the same thing happened, quite unsolicited by him, with his first year class every year.

[mozo33]

all religions are a crooked path of a serpent ...

thing is they all have one thing in common, which is to attain to what one perceives they do not have, and therefor a coming to something perceived as separate from oneself ...

there are many pictures of this, one of the most common is a stairway one ascends into a higher realm, which is a coming to something by steps which speaks to coming to something by ones own labor/reasoning ( be it a doing or a not doing ) and this more narrowed down is one and the same as coming in ones own name as in ones own measurement/judgement etc which is akin to building a city and naming it Enoch ...

you see this in a serpent and how it moves from side to side, its path not straight but crooked, which in picture relates to our reasoning between left & right, good & evil etc, understanding that to reason between two points of reference is a measurement between them and this confusion being a mixture and why you find the tower of Babel as a spiraling staircase of confusion that leads nowhere ...

of interest Jacobs ladder had steps, but Christ's did not ....

i have researched just about every religion there is and found that all of them have this serpent/dragon in their midst, and the chief of these being Christianity ...

[TraineeHuman]

I guess I need to clarify a little about what "philosophy" is. In this Forum I see a substantial amount of
conceptual analyzing. Well, it so happens that conceptual analysis is a very major part of contemporary philosophy.
Individuals such as Joseph Farrell, and various others, are extremely good at applying conceptual analysis to
uncover what probably underlies, or is implied by, various contemporary socioeconomopolitical events or statements
or posturings. Actually they are then doing applied philosophy.

Also, philosophy creates and examines the (conceptual) foundations and underlying principles of everything. For
instance, such a thing as "architecture" only came about on a large scale because first of all philosophers (or de
facto, practical philosophers) clarified why and how those to be known as "architects" might be necessary and what
they should be expected or required to do and how and exactly when they would fit in with the creation of
buildings, and who they should interact with at various stages and what they should have skills in and expert
knowledge of beforehand, and so on. That was all philosophy, folks, until architecture started to become a fixed
discipline.

"Comparative" philosophy certainly isn't the same thing as comparative religion. However, religion of some kind
has had a dominating effect on many aspects of almost any given major culture. Because of that, one of the roles
of comparative philosophy is to unravel the cultural entanglements and extract, and evaluate the merits of, what
are the underlying conceptual (as distinct from religious) ideas that that culture has developed. I'm not greatly
interested in religions at all, except to the extent that they embody interesting and fairly unique and universally
applicable and, indeed, enlightened and very sophisticated worldviews (which most versions of JudeoChristianity and
Islam, and various other religions, largely don't seem to me to be, overall, I'm afraid).

[Ernie Nemeth]

It is interesting to consider that as philosophical concepts are absorbed, the tone of the fundamental tenet becomes more important than the actual philosophy.

It is much like Persig's Lila, in which he explores the concept of quality.

In many ways philosophy has an esoteric component that cannot be denied. Where the beauty of a rose can elicit the most profound connection to the ineffable.

Much like the golden rule of philosophy, and the sciences: simplicity is key, and often offers the most satisfying solution.

[mozo33]

interestingly wisdom ( philosophy - love of wisdom ) which brings knowledge, is pictured as a tree bearing two fruits ...

speaking to comparison ... the tree to the masculine is a tree of life, but to the feminine a tree of knowledge of good and evil ... and when one does a study of the symbolisms depicting this tree of life, it is always depicted in the feminine as seen in Babylon, Samaria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Assyria to name a few widely known ones, albeit this tree can be seen far and wide as it appears in many forms ...

so to keep this short ...

there are two kinds of wisdom as there are two paths one can take ... one leads to death and one to life, which more narrowed down appears as a choice between them, but one can not choose between them unless one understands what they are in relation to self, as in one must experience them, understanding that we are the truth and it is the lie/image of self seeded from without which defines us as this truth, just as the darkness defines the light etc

all philosophy and religion is rooted in the reasoning between heaven and earth, as a place/perception caught between two where Truth is crucified ...

[TraineeHuman]

Various leading figures, such as Chomsky, and certain French sociologists such as Saussure, among others, and others whose names I don't remember offhand, many in the world of linguistics, became aware, each from a slightly different point of view, that there is a type of higher intelligence that isn't robotic but nevertheless has the deep (abstract, mental-world) structures of language and meaning as its (outer) body, and that it's also not a machine but an intelligence. This has also been known to quite a few of the greatest Indian and other Asian spiritual masters, so that, for instance, there is a whole lot more to the world of mantras (or underlying it somehow) than we ordinarily imagine. Also, every language is semi-infinite, in the sense that the creation of ever more new words and meanings is indefinitely large, and pretty open-ended.

Going even further, language is the "hand-held mirror" out of which the whole phenomenon of consciousness of ourselves arose. Think about it. Without reliable ways to "see" our own reflection, how could we ever have learnt to become conscious of ourselves at all, and hence to have reliable consciousness at all? Also, how else could we ever clearly know or imagine what power we have or may have, if we didn't have the "hand mirror" of language or symbol or sign systems to roughly "describe" it to ourselves?

So yes, Ernie, I would say that primarily for this reason, rather than only because the beauty of poetry or whatever points to something with some degree of higher consciousness, language is a living vehicle of (the soul level, also known as the intuition level of) consciousness. Language not only contains words but it captures all the nuances of our intuitions' perceptions and even perhaps flashes we are given of divine knowledge (and by "intuition" I don't primarily mean psychic abilities but intuition as a method of direct knowing, that we usually don't realize we have and sometimes make use of).

[ExomatrixTV]

My best friend Rinus from Beverwijk, The Netherlands told me: ... "When I went to a course (workshop/class) in philosophy ... I asked the teacher if any of the profound wisdoms or insights can help me getting laid with a nice girl faster".

• To me, that was funny & hilarious ... guess what the answer was ...

cheers,
John

[Ernie Nemeth]

Was the answer...Take a shower and brush your teeth?

It is a very interesting idea: that language has allowed our consciousness to expand.

It is much a chicken or the egg question, isn't it? Firstly, the language we use developed from our need to communicate more accurately. More specifically, the need to carry out commerce lead to the expansion of our vocabulary.

It might have been that the beginnings of language was organic, in that certain grunts were formally interpreted. And symbols were probably first used to adorn art, after being drawn in the dirt for a thousand years first. The symbols were interpreted as well and later used as the first writing.

But once a certain amount of language developed organically, there must have come a time when words were added by individuals that gained favour and were used universally.

I would say that the human condition by itself lead to a larger vocabulary. The social interactions probably lead to the need to be more accurate with language. The subtle nuances of life between members of the growing clans would require the ability to be understood. If small problems could not be addressed, every argument would threaten the coherence of the entire group.

It is hard to imagine how language came into being even with these obvious mechanisms exposed. But if one considers that the sense of beauty is innate in the human family, and the contemplation of a rose requires no language at all, it might be realized that language, the ability to communicate, is very much a question of quality.

The value of communication is in the unique quality of the experience.

Another avenue of consideration would be mammals in general. They are intelligent, cooperative, mostly social animals. Mammals have a propensity for play, both as a means of practice and to forge relationships. In many ways play is a precursor to experiment. So it could be said that mammals are wired for learning and innovation. It is only another step from there to invention by intention...

[mozo33]

God has His own language, but its not a hearing, but a seeing ...

one can not know a language until we think in that language and Gods language which only He can define is a pure language void of all measurement, as it is not bound between two pillars of reason ...

take any word, like word, and you find in the language of God other words can be used in its place and yet convey the same meaning, for example: words of God or sons of God and then one can expand on this as in the sons of God, which can be seen as the stars of heaven which are one and the same truth of which there is also the anti of as in sons of man and grains of sand of the beach etc ...

words/sons/stars in the language of God are one and the same, understanding He is speaking to us where we are and so everything in the creation part of His language He is not separate from, or said another way God is His language ...

[Mike Gorman]

My intuition tells me, Ernie, that you have experienced some academic course work with Philosophy, I recognise the Saussure/linguistic elements, I did not like these thinkers very much, their Structuralism foundations gave rise to today's 'post modern' ideas of the absence of meaning, and the devaluing of creative work in general, consigning everything to a vague political notion of 'power' location'; I experienced a strong revulsion to linguistic structuralism.
Robert Pirsig I like very much, I eagerly absorbed both of his novels, of course there was a considerable time between their releases.
Philosophy for me is the great grandfather of Science. Scientia/Philosophia both refer to a love of knowledge and a desire to know, Philosophy became 'Natural Philosophy' which developed into 'Physics. Pirsig's examination of 'Quality' is incredibly important I feel, because this concept of 'Quality' refers to ALL aspects of our human cultures, what we determine to be valuable, and what is injurious and low quality: for example I see Biden'Harris and the evolution of the American 'Deep State' as being the result of low quality choices, and the inaccurate comprehension of what is 'Liberal and freedom'-these people are apologists for power/greed and ascribe moral virtue to a low quality understanding of political objectives. The Trump camp while definitely imperfect, is at
least a higher quality school of moral/political philosophy!

[Ernie Nemeth]

I took one class in philosophy. I got 97% and was invited to an elite group of student and teachers meeting. A round table discussion group. I did not like it and never took another class.

I am glad I made that decision. This way I got to examine the world of philosophy for myself at my leisure, without being influenced by other peoples' ideas. I have never stopped learning, it is one of my greatest joys. If I were to have gotten this amount of knowledge in school I'd have a few doctorate degrees, not that that is saying anything impressive - it's not.

In a practical sense, I do lean towards structuralism because I am very interested in how things work.But I am also keenly aware that structuralism does not paint the picture of reality. With structuralism all you get is a cartoon caricature of reality. A facsimile that is as close as we can get with our limited understandings.

No, I know better than that. There is something we have missed and that something will change the entire viewpoint of our sciences and philosophies. In material terms, I believe the answers are hidden behind our ignorance of the 'stuff of space' - the ether.

But far more important is our relationship to our Creator. Whatever that is, it is the way forward. Without a spiritual connection to the universe, without flexing our morality muscles, without searching for meaning, without valuing our human family, without love and compassion...we are merely animals with an inbuilt abnormal psychosis brought on by a brain not moderated by heart.

[TraineeHuman]

It's generally agreed, by Western philosophers at least, that the birth of modern philosophy was Descartes' method, or approach, that one simply needs to start by doubting everything. Have you folk ever truly done that? (I'm not saying you haven't. I'm saying that's the true starting point.) Only then will one know how much one really doesn't know. But also one will hopefully then also truly and indubitably discover at least some of the spiritual ("sacred") beauty of what lies at one's own core. This is a kind of method, but it's a matter of not starting with any dogma, which I claim will always be or become a prison wall around you. If philosophy starts from "the love of wisdom", then I feel we should all individually start from looking honestly within ourselves and coming clean about how profoundly we just don't know -- about almost everything. But, as they say, don't assume, because it always makes an ass out of u and me. This is also deeply implicit in the foundations of almost all forms of ancient Eastern philosophies. Come to your own conclusions, your own positions. But always start naked, from not-knowing, from deep honesty.

To quote Sri Aurobindo (who was one of the most famous Indian masters):
"There are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. Silence acts, speech gives the impulse to action. Silence compels, speech persuades. The immense and inscrutable processes of the world all perfect themselves within, in a deep and august silence, covered by a noisy and misleading surface of sound--the stir of innumerable waves above, the fathomless resistless mass of the ocean's waters below.

"Men see the waves, they hear the rumour and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God's intention; but in nine cases out of ten they misjudge. Therefore it is said that in History it is always the unexpected that happens. But it would not be the unexpected if men could turn their eyes from superficies and look into substance, if they accustomed themselves to put aside appearances and penetrate beyond them to the secret and disguised reality, if they ceased listening to the noise of life and listened rather to its silence.

"But there are two kinds of stillness--the helpless stillness of inertia, which heralds dissolution, and the stillness of assured sovereignty which commands the harmony of life. It is the sovereign stillness which is the calm of the Yogin. The more complete the calm, the mightier the yogic power, the greater the force in action.
In this calm, right knowledge comes. The thoughts of men are a tangle of truth and falsehood, satyam and anritam. True perception is marred and clouded by false perception, true judgment lamed by false judgment, true imagination distorted by false imagination, true memory deceived by false memory. "

[mozo33]

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
It's generally agreed, by Western philosophers at least, that the birth of modern philosophy was Descartes' method, or approach, that one simply needs to start by doubting everything. Have you folk ever truly done that? (I'm not saying you haven't. I'm saying that's the true starting point.) Only then will one know how much one really doesn't know. But also one will hopefully then also truly and indubitably discover at least some of the spiritual ("sacred") beauty of what lies at one's own core. This is a kind of method, but it's a matter of not starting with any dogma, which I claim will always be or become a prison wall around you. If philosophy starts from "the love of wisdom", then I feel we should all individually start from looking honestly within ourselves and coming clean about how profoundly we just don't know -- about almost everything. But, as they say, don't assume, because it always makes an ass out of u and me. This is also deeply implicit in the foundations of almost all forms of ancient Eastern philosophies. Come to your own conclusions, your own positions. But always start naked, from not-knowing, from deep honesty.

To quote Sri Aurobindo (who was one of the most famous Indian masters):
"There are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. Silence acts, speech gives the impulse to action. Silence compels, speech persuades. The immense and inscrutable processes of the world all perfect themselves within, in a deep and august silence, covered by a noisy and misleading surface of sound--the stir of innumerable waves above, the fathomless resistless mass of the ocean's waters below.

"Men see the waves, they hear the rumour and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God's intention; but in nine cases out of ten they misjudge. Therefore it is said that in History it is always the unexpected that happens. But it would not be the unexpected if men could turn their eyes from superficies and look into substance, if they accustomed themselves to put aside appearances and penetrate beyond them to the secret and disguised reality, if they ceased listening to the noise of life and listened rather to its silence.

"But there are two kinds of stillness--the helpless stillness of inertia, which heralds dissolution, and the stillness of assured sovereignty which commands the harmony of life. It is the sovereign stillness which is the calm of the Yogin. The more complete the calm, the mightier the yogic power, the greater the force in action.
In this calm, right knowledge comes. The thoughts of men are a tangle of truth and falsehood, satyam and anritam. True perception is marred and clouded by false perception, true judgment lamed by false judgment, true imagination distorted by false imagination, true memory deceived by false memory. "

love it ... this falls under Paul's, Let your women keep silence in the churches ...

interestingly Adam starts out naked, covers his nakedness and yet still hides himself because he still sees himself as being naked ...

[Ernie Nemeth]

All things are in motion in this universe. There is a reason for that. All things are substantial as we say. All things are objects and all interactions possess energy. Matter and energy. Both require movement. Constant movement. There is a reason for that too.

Those things only secondarily in existence must keep in motion to have beingness. If they were somehow to stop still they would cease to be. That is how one can tell the real from the imagined.

Only the real can stand still. Only the real can stand being still.

[TraineeHuman]

"All things are substantial". So, then, Ernie, according to your philosophy,"all things are substances -- which
usually is taken to mean, as you say, that in the end they're purely objects (or they're former objects which
have been ground up or whatever), and nothing else." Well, that's the mainstream view of reality in Western thought.
Though it does seem to require flatly ignoring the implications of various quantum phenomena. To give one example,
if light sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle, then surely common sense says its true nature is
really neither of these altogether?

Ditto regarding the view in much of Western philosophy. "To be real is to be an object." But that's certainly not
the view of most (nearly all) of ancient Eastern philosophy, which factors in and emphasizes the "data" (for lack
of a better word here), and the interactiveness, of our direct experience and of the Now moment. (After all, life
is not a parlor game one plays while sitting in an armchair remote from its actions.)

"All things are objects"? Then you must be (just) an object. Which, if true, would raise seemingly unsolvable
problems about how to get to "I" from "me". How do you get to the other side of "me"? And when I say "you" getting
to that other side, I assume that "you" would only be a (passive) object, not an (active) pure subject?

[mozo33]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
All things are in motion in this universe. There is a reason for that. All things are substantial as we say. All things are objects and all interactions possess energy. Matter and energy. Both require movement. Constant movement. There is a reason for that too.

Those things only secondarily in existence must keep in motion to have beingness. If they were somehow to stop still they would cease to be. That is how one can tell the real from the imagined.

Only the real can stand still. Only the real can stand being still.

our substance being the holy seed ( seed of the women ) within us is revealed when we cast our leaves, which is one and the same as Bruce's words
"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless" ...

one of my favourite pictures of this is the merchant in search of fine pearls, when he found one very precious pearl, he went away and sold all he had and bought it.…

[Ernie Nemeth]

I meant the scientific paradigm of the day is that 'all things are objects.' It is the principle component of the particle precept: that when all things are reduced to the irreducible they display a grainy nature - even energy. So the world is viewed as a slurry of sub-atomic particles, each distinct and whole and separate from the rest, assembled into odd combinations and proportions representing every interaction and object in the universe.

The concept of the quanta is derived from this very fact as well. Yet it was observed that because of Planck's Constant there is a disconnect between the world of the very small and the world of ordinary objects. This 'disconnect' boils down to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and results in the Niels Bohr school of thought: that when all things are reduced to the irreducible they display a smooth, continuous, and holographic nature.

[Chester]

That which inspires my own philosophy -

This is my currently held "creation myth" upon which I draw everything that has informed my operational assumptions and which have inspired my operational protocols:

For me, there's a primal realm of emanation. And from that emerges a Path that is not 'the common path' followed by most SoEBs over the most recent millennia. 'She' is championed by an arising 'identity' I prefer to see as the Prince.

And then there's "the light and darkness" sometimes lorded over by a well meaning but often deluded sort... the champion of 'the common path.' It is to this being so many give their heart and soul. It is from this being so many draw their metaphysical cosmological world view. And (sadly), of this, most have little conscious awareness.

When things get "complicated" the Prince's Bride, from out of this primordial 'nothingness' (best represented as darkness) arises from the abyss to "stir things up a bit" ie. inject a little chaos into the mix, to get the attention of 'the lost' that they might once again, through creativity, return to the basics, the principles upon which Life thrives. This, is my Trickster and, of course, The Princess of my myth.

I see myself as nothing but one of Her knights... in essence, one of Her princes... She has many.

[TraineeHuman]

Ernie, for me personally the most interesting thing about Eastern philosophy and East-West philosophy is the light it throws on spiritual experience and on how spirituality, or its fruits, can be more fully embedded in daily life. Since you're interested in the notion of "object" (or "particle") as it relates to quantum physics, though, let's consider that a little.

It so happens that Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's book The Dancing Wu Li Masters both had a profound or at least significant impact on many Western professional philosophers. I believe those books did so because they revealed, or at least suggested, that many extraordinary spiritual and metaphysical insights regarding the nature of reality from ancient Eastern spirituality had been "echoed" (or even deliberately followed) in the metaphysical implications of various discoveries of quantum physics.

I also know that Tom Campbell, himself a physicist with strong New Age-type inclinations, has gone into great detail to argue that the spiritual/metaphysical implications of many discoveries from quantum theory have some extraordinarily profound implications for our lives generally. I don't wish to repeat his or Zukav's or Capra's insights in detail.

But I think it would be reasonable to start by looking at something Zukav explains at around the beginning of his book. He points out that the location of any electron supposedly belonging to a particular specified atom can be literally anywhere in the physical universe, at any time. So, even if a given electron is considered to be an object (or particle), if we want to specifically locate it (not that that's always possible) we are always dealing with a field of possible locations for it that's literally as big as the entire physical universe. But that fact alone, surely, stretches the meaning of "particle" or "object" well beyond the normal boundaries of meaning of that word. So, I think that it would be more accurate to refer to every electron as a "field" (with indefinite boundaries) rather than as an "object".

On another subject, I consider that the reason AI doesn't seem able to have any soul is to do with the fact that AI was developed in an object-centered framework, and not in a foreground/background, contextual framework as we humans are.

[mozo33]

John Van Vleck, Nobel Laureate Physics, 1977, said, you should always think of any question involving quantum
mechanics as being a question of probabilities. In that sense, in quantum mechanics 2 + 2 never = 4 with any certainty.