Comparing Husserl's Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World

A Journey Beyond Orientalism

Jingjing Li

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350256927
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Eastern Philosophy

While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava ). How is constructive cultural exchange possible when traditions hold such contradictory views? Answering this question and positioning both philosophical traditions in their respective intellectual and linguistic contexts, Jingjing Li argues that what Edmund Husserl means by essence differs from what Chinese Yogacarins mean by svabhava, partly because Husserl problematises the substantialist understanding of essence in European philosophy. Furthermore, she reveals that Chinese Yogacara has developed an account of self-transformation, ethics and social ontology that renders it much more than simply a Buddhist version of Husserlian phenomenology. Detailing the process of finding a middle ground between the two traditions, this book demonstrates how both can thrive together in order to overcome Orientalism.

Part One

The Journey

The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250) once referred to his opponent as the one who rides on horseback but forgets about the horse (T30N1564, P33a26–7). The horse here is a metaphor for methodology. Reminding his interlocutors how their mistakes can be found in the premise of their argumentation, Nāgārjuna likewise reveals to us the danger of overlooking the underlying implications in our approach to the philosophical study of ideas. Bearing in mind this warning, we will not jump directly into a comparative study of Husserl’s phenomenology and Chinese Yogācāra in our project. Rather, we must first ask what is involved when a comparison is made across a cultural, historical, and linguistic divide as major as this one. As such, by examining our own approach to comparative studies and explicating our methodologies, we can remain mindful of the horse we are on when we begin our journey.

After decades of development, comparative philosophy has faced several critiques and challenges, in no small part owing to the field’s tangled history with Orientalism. As a discourse popularized since the time of colonization, Orientalism epitomizes a way of thinking that overgeneralizes the world into the East and the West. If comparative philosophy can furnish people with a method to go beyond the Orientalist bifurcation, it then retains the potential to showcase the ways in which we engage in intercultural dialogues in the era of globalization. And so, against this backdrop, we hope to foreground three questions. First, how can comparative philosophy promote multiculturalism without perpetuating Orientalism and its related cultural imperialism? Second, why are we continuing to adopt the comparative approach in this book given the recent developments in the field? And lastly, what do we mean when we refer to our project as “comparative philosophy”?

To remind us of the horse we are riding for our journey, the first part of this book is dedicated to examining our methodologies. After scrutinizing how the approaches employed by comparative philosophers were once imbued with different versions of Orientalism, I propose the “both–and” approach that refuses to treat intellectual traditions as being mutually exclusive and realizes the correlative non-duality of these traditions. To be more specific, this approach will both maintain the distinctiveness of each tradition in its own context for exploring their middle ground and manifest their interconnectedness in the broader shared space of meaning for conversations and collaborations. The purpose of this approach is threefold: first, to avoid assimilating traditions into a third entity; second, to refrain from treating these traditions as polar opposites; and third, to expand their shared horizon. Sources of inspiration for the term “both–and” come from the phenomenological as well as the Buddhist traditions. Hans-Georg Gadamer envisions the expansion of the shared horizon through the traveler analogy, in which a traveler with the capacity of entering different lived realities remains “both here and there” (Gadamer 1989: 458). In Buddhist terms, “both–and” encapsulates the idea of the middle path in its stress on the irreducibility and interdependence of binaries (T30N1564, P33b11–12). We will further the discussion of methodology in Chapter 1.

In Chapters 2 and 3, we position Husserl’s phenomenology and Chinese Yogācāra in their respective contexts. For intercultural dialogues, contextuality is important in that ideas are cultivated—though not always produced—by the greater sociopolitical climate in which they came to be. In contextualizing phenomenology and Yogācāra, we distance ourselves from synthetization and juxtaposition to enter a plurality of lived realities different from our own. Traveling between these realities, we will secure a middle ground for our journey. This middle ground transpires when we introduce the framework for comparison. It is a three-level framework—the three levels being the descriptive, the explicative, and the prescriptive—which can be inferred from and therefore applied to both Husserl’s phenomenology and the Yogācāra philosophy articulated by Xuanzang and his disciples. Far from being mutually exclusive to one another, these two traditions can be brought into constructive conversations on multiple levels. It is therefore possible for people coming from these traditions to collaborate with one another in a multicultural world.

1

Overcoming Orientalism with Multiculturalism

In 2016, an editorial entitled “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is” sparked a heated debate on the position of world philosophies inside academia.¹ The authors of this editorial, Jay Garfield and Bryan van Norden (2016), expressed a deep concern about the fact that most philosophy departments in Europe and North America constrain their scope to—and only to—Euro-American traditions. As a follow-up, Van Norden published the monograph Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto to expound on how the absence of world philosophies bespeaks a lack of recognition and representation of intellectual traditions outside Europe and North America (Van Norden 2017). Thus, what has been pinpointed by Garfield and Van Norden is the importance of recognizing and representing the diversity of philosophical traditions inside and outside the public domain, which matters not only for academic studies of philosophy but also for cross-cultural exchange in general.²

Most scholars come to engage with world philosophy first by means of comparative studies. Throughout the history of comparative studies between European and Buddhist philosophies, two approaches have been proposed, which I refer to as the “synthetic” and the “juxtapositional.” Scholars in favor of the synthetic approach perceive different philosophical traditions as manifestations of one underlying universal system, whereas those endorsing the juxtapositional approach treat philosophical traditions as polar opposites. These two approaches illustrate and encapsulate two different versions of Orientalism. Borrowing the terminology utilized by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1992),³ I trace how the synthetic approach involves an extreme form of the politics of universalism whilst the juxtapositional approach indicates an extreme form of the politics of difference. After scrutinizing both modes of politics, I explore how comparative philosophers can rethink recognition as that of the equal, irreducible value and worth of philosophical traditions. Drawing upon this notion of recognition, comparative philosophy can facilitate the redistribution of discursive resources and the representation of diverse voices inside the field,⁴ which promotes multiculturalism as an endeavor to eschew both Orientalism and cultural imperialism. Hence, I put forward the “both–and” approach that moves away from synthetization and juxtaposition, with a capacity of appreciating and celebrating the difference between and the interdependence of cultures and their philosophies.

Synthetization and Juxtaposition⁵

Few comparative philosophers are satisfied with a list of similarities and dissimilarities. Some turn instead to the synthetic approach and propose to synthesize various traditions into a new architectonic of knowledge, in the hope of closing the divide among said traditions. Such a new architectonic inevitably yields a third, culture-neutral entity.

In the comparative studies of European and Buddhist philosophy, the synthetic approach could be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, Max Müller (1823–1900) promoted the synthetic approach in his comparative study of the philosophy of religion. Müller found it pressing to renew methodologies for the field because he was deeply disappointed by how comparative studies were conducted in his time (Müller 1870: 92). He largely deemed these studies to be superficial because they only enumerated similarities between traditions (Müller 1870: 92). To bring about a non-superficial study of comparative philosophy, he initiated the project of “universal religion” (Müller 1870: 92). In this project, he aimed to reveal the universal truth foundational to all philosophies of religion by comparing similar accounts of morality, faith, and ritual practices (Müller 1870: 92). For Müller, all doctrinal philosophies, despite having developed across time and place, derived from the same broad foundation of the ultimate truth of reality (Müller 1872: 46). Articulated in this manner, these philosophies were depicted as manifestations of the third culture-neutral entity qua the universal foundational truth in his project of universal religion (Müller 1872: 51). During the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Müller repeated the need for a universal religion that could resolve what he discerned as the “disturbing and distressing” situation of treating different intellectual traditions as divided (Müller 1893: 350). As envisaged by Müller, “above and beneath and behind all religions there is one eternal, one universal religion, a religion to which every man, whether black, or white, or yellow, or red, belongs or may belong” (Müller 1893: 350). Müller was confident that such a universal religion, which was by no means superficial, could enable humans to bridge the cultural gap and bring harmony to the world.

In Müller’s idealized presentation of the project of universal religion, it seems that he is impartial to all philosophies, be they Asian or European. Nevertheless, closer scrutiny exposes why and how his project is problematic. First, Müller acknowledges only eight philosophies of religion, which he refers to as Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mosaism, Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism, Confucianism, and Daoism (Müller 1872: 32). More importantly, these traditions are construed as manifesting the foundational truth in varying degrees, some being more rational and thus revealing a higher level of truth whilst others being less rational and therefore conveying a lower level of truth (Müller 1872: 44). Subsequently, a spectrum is opened with Christianity on one end as the most rational tradition and all the remaining less advanced traditions on the other end (Müller 1872: 44). Contrary to Christianity that is “to become more and more exalted the more we appreciate the treasures of truth” (Müller 1872: 22), Buddhism draws humans far away from the truth (Müller 1872: 113). Chinese Buddhism is deemed to be even less desirable in that it consists of the Chinese corruptions of earlier Buddhist teaching (Müller 1872: 37). At this point, it is clear that the issues related to the project of universal religion stem not only from the ways in which Müller overgeneralizes philosophies of religions as manifestations of a third universal entity, but also from how Müller formulates this universal entity in Christian terms with a Eurocentric undertone. As remarked by Victor Hori, Müller’s project of universal religion, in its pursuit of proving the superiority of Christianity, comes to define all the other intellectual traditions in terms of a Christian prototype (Hori 2016: 46). If a comparative study of the philosophy of religion that aims to list similarities is dangerous because it is superficial, the project of universal religion is even more precarious due to its teleology of assimilating all other traditions into a Christian philosophical framework.

Instead of trying to uncover a universal foundation, some scholars turn to the juxtapositional approach that opposes Buddhist philosophy with its European counterparts. Here, they affirm the East–West contrast but argue for the superiority of Buddhism. Suzuki Daisetsu Teitaro (鈴木大拙貞太郎 1870–1966), commonly known as D. T. Suzuki, can be considered as an exponent of this approach. Almost fifty years after Müller’s proposal of universal religion, Suzuki rearticulated Zen teachings, contrasting Buddhist philosophy with European philosophy to justify the superiority of Zen. Similar to Müller, Suzuki identified rationality as the salient feature of European philosophy. Yet, different from Müller, Suzuki continued to reveal the limits of rationality.⁶ For Suzuki, it was rationality that entrapped Europeans in dualistic thinking as well as the related crisis of meaning (Suzuki 1927: 6). By the force of dualistic thinking, a rift appeared between the self and the other, between the subject and the object. As scrutinized by Suzuki, knowledge was produced only when a subject was able to represent and objectify things to the mind, but dualistic thinking was far from being able to provide perfect knowledge (Suzuki 1927: 17). He delineated how philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel consistently constructed their edifices of knowledge, only to be demolished and remodeled by their successors (Suzuki 1927: 18). In Suzuki’s description, the intellectual pursuit never ended, which cultivated a false hope in reason and aggravated the egocentric worldview. Eventually, when selfhood transformed into an “ego-shell” and was closed from the outside, a person would find it hard to meaningfully relate to the world and to others (Suzuki 1927: 16). For Suzuki, this was how European philosophy ultimately put Europeans in the grip of an existential crisis.⁷

Suzuki argued that, unlike European philosophy, the salient feature of Buddhism, and particularly Zen, was non-rationality (Suzuki 1927: 8). Indeed, Zen went beyond dualistic thinking and presented sentient beings with the immediate wisdom (Suzuki 1927: 24). Suzuki was certain that Zen was not only able to offer this wisdom as perfected knowledge devoid of all differentiations but also capable of remedying issues caused by duality (Suzuki 1970: 73). In Suzuki’s proposal, Buddhist philosophy became the antidote to egocentrism and the modern existential crisis in Europe by closing the subject–o...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on Usage and Convention
• Prologue
• Part One The Journey
• 1 Overcoming Orientalism with Multiculturalism
• 2 Contextualizing Chinese Yogācāra
• 3 Contextualizing Husserl’s Phenomenology
• Part Two The Road
• 4 Intentionality in Husserl’s Phenomenology
• 5 Intentionality in Chinese Yogācāra
• 6 Intentionality and Non-conceptualism
• Part Three The Tracks
• 7 Essence in Husserl’s Phenomenology
• 8 Essence in Chinese Yogācāra
• 9 Essence in Comparative Philosophy
• Part Four The Destination
• 10 The Gate of Practice
• 11 The Path Towards Awakening
• 12 Revisiting the Process of Awakening
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright