Peter Adamson recently wrote on why he’s not troubled by the lack of a word for “philosophy” in Chinese and other non-European philosophical traditions. Adamson hosts History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and co-hosts History of Philosophy in China with Karyn Lai. You can find the full essay here and the opening paragraph below the fold.
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently in which people challenged the use of “philosophy” in contexts outside of the European tradition, like pre-modern India and China.* Basically the worry is that if these traditions didn’t have the word “philosophy,” or a word that can directly be translated with “philosophy,” then it is illegitimate, and maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them. Rather we should talk more loosely about “intellectual traditions” or “thought,” or something like that (at least I guess this would be the alternative). Obviously I don’t agree with this; and since I have encountered the point quite a few times over the past years, I thought it might make sense to explain why.
I thought that I should add just a bit more clarification about the historical context in China, for what it’s worth!
Imagine two people, Samuel and Thalia, who live in the early 20th century and don’t use the words “depression” or “recession” to refer to economic phenomena, as we do today.
Samuel doesn’t talk about (economic) “depressions” and furthermore, has very little grasp of concepts that could be use to account for economic depressions. He has little interest in economic explanations of things, and wouldn’t be able to explain why, in some periods, it is much harder for people like him to find a job or afford regular meals. He just assumes that these things are due to God’s will or fate or something.
Thalia doesn’t talk about (economic) “depressions” either, but she understands how major events like bank runs (or even rumors of bank runs) can lead to belt-tightening and downward trends in spending, with knock-on effects for employment. She never utters the word “depression” to explain how these processes work, but she does say things like “I can’t find a job on account of the times being hard” and then goes on to explain that employers are reluctant to hire because the see consumers buying fewer and fewer things and expect the trend to continue. In other contexts, she might refer to a long period of unemployment as being due to the “lean years, when money was tight in our country.” But it’s clear that she has roughly the same explanatory mechanisms in mind, and is trying to capture roughly the same concepts in slightly different language. Furthermore, she has a good grasp of all of the concepts that we now use to distinguish economic depressions from mere recessions, and from better or more normal economic periods.
The lack of a single word that translates as “philosophy” in China is much closer to Thalia’s lack of an analogous word for (economic) “depression” than to Samuel’s. The longer history of Chinese intellectual discourse is full of cases where someone tries to distinguish the philosophical enterprise that they are engaged in from other, less philosophical enterprises. One example made famous by Yu Ying-shih 余英時 focuses on the phrase yili zhi xue 義理之學, which translates roughly as “the learning of [ethical and political] norms and [metaphysical and normative] patterns.” Philosophers at various points in history (Yu focuses narrowly on the mid-Qing) used this phrase to distinguish much more philosophical approaches or methodologies from, say, mere text-based exegesis or predictive cosmology or the like. That’s just one example, and I’m sure that many of the people reading this can think of their own historical examples and phrases.