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AMBIVALENCE IN WESTERN THINKING, AN ECHO TO THE EASTERN WAY OF THINKING?
Martine Van Goubergen
Brussels, 5 October 2010
Abstract
What can we learn from the classical debate between the universalist and the relativist approaches
of reality, from the eternal conflict between rationalism and religion, from the canonical opposition
between being and moving, from the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, from the
encounter between East and West? My questioning, already, betrays me: I think and order my
thought in a bivalent, typical Western way, suggesting that one pole excludes the other. Another way
of thinking, keeping the ambivalence in balance, is probably more familiar to Eastern thinking, but is
not unknown in our Western philosophical tradition. What I intend to do in this presentation is to
roughly trace the main outline of the alternative western interpretation of the world where
ambivalence prevails against bivalence. This western second voice, always present, but maybe less
authoritative than the first one, can, to a certain extent, help us to better understand the Eastern
way of thinking. But comparing has always been a dangerous enterprise. One can either impose
one’s own framework, or, on the contrary, turn the other into the absolute otherness- the guru who
is going to give us all the answers to our unsolved problems. Two well-known European sinologists the Flemish Ulrich Libbrecht and the French François Jullien - trying to avoid this two-fold trick, have
worked out two very different comparative models, which I shortly present in the conclusion of this
paper.
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Since the beginning of the Western thinking the philosophical debate has been pervaded by the
opposition between the universalist and the relativist approach. We probably do not take a major
risk when we postulate that in this debate universalism has always been the final authority. The
search for some deep universal truths and values always seemed to be the most appropriate way of
explaining the world and of convincing the others of one’s own explanation. The voice of the
relativists has always been reduced to silence by the logical conclusion that their viewpoint
undermines the value of knowledge and thus the intellectual debate.
Also in the intercultural debate to which has been given considerable attention over the past
decades, the Western voice tends to impose, willfully or not, its universal standards. This attitude,
resulting from the assumption that we are all basically the same, has often been a source of irritation
for other countries and cultures. This is for instance the case of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, a concept which, as we know, is not necessarily taken as standard in the whole world.
The fear of the Western thinking to drop reassuring universal principles can be understood by its
conviction that communication is only possible on the base of some universally accepted data. From
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this perspective a relativist viewpoint looks threatening, as if some walls divide the different cultures
and mentalities. But the wish to establish a real encounter with the other may result in an
underestimation of difference and otherness and, consequently, in a lack of true communication.
An old Latin quotation from the Roman playwright –Terence - could help us out of this deadlock. One
of Terence’s character claims: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, or I am a man, I consider
nothing that is human alien to me. This assertion is close to the belief of the universalists and, yet,
presents an important difference: it is put in the first person singular and this changes the whole
perspective: the encounter is no more due to some universal abstract idea but is drawn from the
depths of a concrete particular entity.
The Flemish philosopher - Max Wildiers - defines culture as the realization of the uninterrupted
dialogue we have with nature. But nature, he says, is so mysterious and offers so many different
facets that we can never see it in its fullness. The image people shape of the reality gives culture its
originality and its cohesiveness.
Taking as a starting point of our reflection Wildiers’ definition of culture and Terence’s concern about
all that touches humanity we propose today to have a look at Western thinking without highlighting
the usual issues, but by picking up the lost opportunities. And perhaps we will recognize in these lost
opportunities some facets of a reality picked up in Eastern thinking.
Indeed, what orientation would Western thinking have taken if Ancient Greek Philosophy had not
followed the way pointed out by Parmenides of Elea (4th and early 5th century BC), but the one
pointed out by Heraclitus (535-475 BC)?
Parmenides claimed that thought and being are the same and that being is, but nothing is not,
introducing herewith a binary style of thinking and the principles of bivalence and of contradiction.
Precisely these principles were used as foundation for Aristotelian logic (384-322 BC). These thoughts
and their developments have strongly influenced the whole of Western Philosophy.
And yet, it was not the only track Ancient Philosophy proposed to mankind. Much closer to the
Eastern way of thinking, Heraclitus of Ephesus insisted on the ever-changing reality. Where
Parmenides argued that change is an illusion and that everything is fundamentally static, Heraclitus
believed that change is real and stability illusory. The world is involved in a perpetual process
governed by a law of change and of opposites. His well-known sayings All things are in motion and
nothing is at rest. ... You cannot go into the same river twice and the path up and down are one and
the same remind us of dao’s yin and yang, the opposite but complementary and inseparable
principles of life and death, male and female, day and night, low and high-pitched,…
But the highway of Western philosophy was already drawn by Parmenides’ approach and Aristotle’s
developments of Parmenides’ ideas. Heraclitus’ insights did not disappear but traveled through
secondary roads. Not the philosophers took over his ambivalence approach of the world but
literature did, to begin with the Greek tragedians. Greek tragedy, as Nietzsche (1844-1900) puts it,
presents a strange mixture and ambiguity in the emotions, […] whereby pain awakens pleasure while
rejoicing wrings cries of agony from the breast and whereby from the highest joy there comes a cry of
horror. From the beginning of Western thinking Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy went in
different directions. Western philosophy chose the way of the bivalent “either…or…”, Greek tragedy
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that one of the ambivalent “both … and…”. And since, philosophy and literature have been
considered as two completely different entities. Literature, to the extent that it is appreciated in
Western culture, is considered mainly as aesthetic enjoyment and philosophy as a search for truth. In
Russian culture - one first step further to the East - this difference is already much less emphasized
than in European culture. Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Tolstoy (1828-1910) are seen and treated as
philosophical mentors no less than the Russian philosophers – Solovyov (1853-1900) or Berdyaev
(1874-1948). And that is because the world of poets, the world of metaphor, the world of
ambivalence always has been a partner of equal merit in Eastern cultures, while in Western culture
these values always remained the poor man of the intellectual game.
However for some philosophers, the Western “either… or…” path, driven to its extremes, became a
real straitjacket from which they sought to escape. The few voices of the Ancient world which went
into the direction of ambivalence, searching for a way out of the simplifying binarity of thought, were
very soon seen as manifestations of ill-will: this is the case of the Sophists (5th century BC) who
centered their efforts on the ambiguities of language, introducing a relativistic view on cognition and
knowledge. This was also the case of the Skeptics (3th, 2d, 1st centuries BC) who questioned the
validity of logical argument, introducing an attitude of doubt towards knowledge. Both doctrines,
that of the Sophists and that of the Skeptics, became synonymous for “wrong thinking” or “negative
thinking” and did never obtain any serious recognition.
But not only did these minor philosophical schools raise some questions about the ‘forked order of
the universe’ (Hesiod 8th century BC). Also one of the last major Greek philosophers – Plotinus (204270) -, who inherited the right way of thinking from his masters, Parmenides (4th and early 5th
century BC), Socrates (470-399), Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), whilst showing on
almost every page of his writings all the necessary respect towards “reason”, tries nevertheless to fly
off beyond being and not being, beyond the contradictions of the natural world.
“To see and to have seen that Vision,” says Plotinus, “is reason no longer. It is more than
reason, before reason, and after reason, as also is the vision which is seen. . . . And perhaps
we should not here speak of sight: for that which is seen is not discerned by the seer—if
indeed it is possible here to distinguish seer and seen as separate things. . . .Therefore this
vision is hard to tell of: for how can a man describe as other than himself that which, when he
discerned it, seemed not other, but one with himself indeed?” (En.VI, 9, 10)
This passage among others cannot but remind us of the Vedanta and of Hindu religion or of Taoism
and Chinese Buddhism with their interplay between yeou and wou. Put in other words with Plotinus
the Ancient Greek Philosophy came to an end with a question mark hanging over it. But the Middle
Ages did not notice this question mark. On the contrary, faced with a new ambivalent insight coming
from the Middle East , medieval scholastics put all their energy in trying to reconcile Christian
Theology with Aristotle’s scientific method and its rigid separation of concepts. The whole medieval
discourse is one huge struggle to reduce the biblical message to some rational categories making use
of the logical disjunction “either… or…”. This almost impossible task is still carried through and with
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), rational thinking emerges as a winner from the struggle between
bivalence and ambivalence. And again, not Heraclitus, not Greek tragedy, not the Sophists nor the
Skeptics have been the models to be followed, but Aristotle and Plotinus, but Plotinus without his
painful doubts concerning reason and reasons’ power.
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The Renaissance, the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment (16th, 17th and 18th centuries), still
the final reference for most of our Western intellectuals, are usually represented as being a reaction
against the Middle Ages, seen as the Dark Age of Faith, but if we take a closer look, the Middle Ages
are simply the long preamble to this period. The Age of Enlightenment symbolizes and celebrates the
final victory of Reason .
But the discomfort provoked by the excessively sharp neon light of the Age of Enlightenment led of
course to a reaction in Western thought. In the 19th century Nietzsche represents the most explicit
voice searching a way out of binary opposition. He wants to break out of the chains of Western
civilization and go beyond what this civilization claims to be good and evil. After Nietzsche, the
existentialists expressed their own profound feeling of malaise about the mathematical-like
discourse of Western Philosophy. But again, these voices are not authoritative in the world of
philosophy.
This quick survey of Western thought was necessary to illustrate the two different approaches to
Chinese Philosophy I want to confront in my conclusion.
The Flemish sinologist, Ulrich Libbrecht, is a staunch believer in comparative philosophy. His way of
practicing this kind of analysis is to design what he calls a comparative model. His models are based
on universal questions: How do we explain the world? How do we explain man and mankind? How
do we explain death? He then tries to formulate what he calls an algebraic response or general
proposition and finally enters the different concrete answers into the general propositions. The
three cultural patterns he usually works on are the rational one (Christianism), the natural one
(Taoism) and the mystical one (Buddhism). If the universal question concerns the concept of “being”,
for instance, he distinguishes three algebraic responses: the rational culture will focus on “being”,
the mystical culture on “not-being” and the natural culture on “becoming”. If the universal question
concerns the concept of “Godhead”, the rational culture will see God as the eternal and immutable
substance, the mystical culture as the sunyata, the void, the non-existent, the unintelligible mystery,
and the natural culture will see God as the dynamics of the nature itself or the Tao.
By these comparative investigations, Libbrecht tries to reach a context of similarities beyond culture,
he tries to search for a common deep structure behind the cultural differences that in this case are
reduced to surface phenomena.
This kind of search for some universal underlying values may well reinforce the idea of a rational preexisting organization and patterning of the human mind configuration. And again universality and
rationalism – Western rationalism – are given as an absolute standard and as a starting point for
comparing.
A complete different approach of comparative philosophy is the approach of the French sinologist,
François Jullien, who likes to say that he learned Chinese to better understand Greek, and means that
the complete different approach of Chinese thinking can help the western thinker to discover
unexpected aspects of the own patterns of thought – and, of course, the same is also true in the
opposite sense. From the very first steps in the learning of Chinese language Jullien’s expectations
were faithfully answered when he was told that the way to say “What is this thing?” is in Chinese
“What is this East-West?” “shi shenme dongxi”. If in Chinese one uses a relation or a polarity to
express what in the West is referred to by a unifying term, it means that there is indeed another
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possible entry into reality. Having in mind this deep-rooted difference between the two modes of
thinking, François Jullien starts a step-by-step comparison, not by using a common framework, as is
usually done when one decides to compare two things, but by looking for possible connections and,
at the same time, acknowledging the dissimilarity between the two terms. That is why he speaks of a
process of comparing and “un-comparing”. This way he tries to avoid the twofold trick of
ethnocentric universality and its opposite, the trick of exoticism and of particularism. Exploring other
sources of coherent thinking, which he finds in the Chinese approach of reality, François Jullien
discloses other folds of the mind, other intelligibilities. The point he wants to make is that by
comparing with another pattern of thinking, we can reexamine the bias hidden in the European
rational thinking and we can go return to the “not-thought” lying in our own thought.
I would like to conclude with the widely known lines of Rudyard Kipling. Although they are probably
too often quoted, rightly or wrongly, they still do not miss their goal, rendering in a poetical form
the essence of what has been said in this presentation.
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
Literature
Jullien F., Philosophie comparée. Grèce, Inde, Chine, Paris, Vrin, 2005
Libbrecht U. , Inleiding comparatieve filosofie, 4 vols., Van Gorcum, Assen, 1995
Nietzsche F., Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872). trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage, 1966.
Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Medici Society, 1917-1930.
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), Heautontimorumenos , 163 BC
Wildiers M. , Het verborgen leven van de cultuur. Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1988
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