Before we have taken a step...
...on the path to wisdom, what baggage do we carry with us? Is it possible to lighten the burden we have had limbered upon us, from parental teaching, from state schools, from utopian propaganda solutions (advertising), from entertainment, and from the structure of thought we are born into, known as our culture! I think so.
Crossing cultures to understand our own
To try and understand ourselves we should strive to understand others, to create a contrast of our similarities and differences. The cultural barriers that threaten this understanding are great, but not impassable. We run the risk of imposing our world view on another culture (an intellectual violence) if we are too arrogant and of exoticizing them if we are too romantic.
It is a challenge, but one that is worth it. For initially we will look upon the cultural mirror of another from a western mindset, but as we grow more familiar with 'the other side' through our interpretation of their ideas, we can start to think like 'the other side', and soon it is not so unfamiliar!
Here are two simple examples of how understanding chinese philosophy can help us realize ourselves and expand our minds.
The alphabetic greek language was more suited to abstract thinking and the development of theory, whereas the pictoral chinese language lent itself to creating 'concrete images'. Now at present I do not understand chinese and so cannot say how the language conditions a person to think in a different way, yet I can realize through this that our way of doing things is not the only way, and that if I were to learn a pictographic language my mind could be greatly expanded (and vice versa).
The second example concerns a thinker considered the father of western philosophy - Plato. The great man would have us lost in a cave, staring at shadows on a wall created by the light behind us. We are ignorant creatures by birth, who require an understanding of perfect transcendent forms (beyond our mundane realm) to gain true knowledge and to stare at the light at the mouth of the cave. There is in the west a distinction between two absolutes, two great opposites; in this case ignorance and knowledge. This highlights a general theme of the western human, as an unsettled creature within nature, unable to trust itself and searching for proof of truth beyond itself. The briefest look at chinese philosophy on the other hand, will reveal a mindset of belonging to nature, of being a part of nature. Yin and Yang are one combined whole. There is no cave here and no need to 'discover' transcendent forms because the thinker has already taken it for granted that we are already part of any greater philosophical truth.
By realizing that people think differently, we can see the 'intellectual strings' dangling above our heads and feel that our freedom is actually closer to puppethood, as we have accepted so much as obvious, that is not so obvious after all. Not everyone in the world takes for granted what we do - and we do not take for granted what they do!
Forward is not quite so simple...
Before we have taken a single step how many have we taken backwards?
- Dogmatic thinking (of an optimistic or pessimistic nature) funnels truth into perverse shapes and moulds the world around an idea, rather than moulding an idea around the world.
- We must constantly be on guard - against ourselves! Forever renewing or discarding old contracts and interpreting ourselves in a new way every so often can be an effective defence against our prejudices.
- Just observing things as they are is an exciting philosophical adventure and impossible to take for granted: Are you seeing things that exist outside of you, or are they only given solidity by your observing them (are they even there at all, or a creation of our minds?). It is so complex, so many layers surround everything.
-To get to the stage we are at now, we had to overcome superstition - our default world view was not - 'it is what it is', but 'it is because some supernatural force made it so'.
- How many of us think we are better than everyone else, for having some special piece of information?
More importantly, where are all of these threads leading to! It is time to knot them together. The truth of the matter is we are all sometimes victims of self-deception, and we have all been branded by hideous stamping machines trying to convince us to move in certain directions at the threat of force, religious doom, social exclusion, and so on.
Before we can take a single step on the path to wisdom we must realize this weight of baggage upon our backs. Is it discardable? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? That is for you to decide.
By Selim 'Selim' Talat
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30
