A Few Thoughts on the Possibility of Intercultural Thinking

in a Global Age

Kai Marchal

Philosophy East and West, Volume 70, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 238-246
(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2020.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749600

[ Access provided at 25 Oct 2020 03:19 GMT from Lulea University ]

 A Few Thoughts on the Possibility of Intercultural Thinking in a
Global Age

Kai Marchal
Department of Philosophy, National Chengchi University
marchal@nccu.edu.tw

Introduction

Until recently, most humanities scholars (including philosophers) in North

America and Europe lived in a world where China was notable for its absence.
In the great debates of the 1990s and early 2000s on postmodernism, the end
of history, the legacy of Marxism, and the future of liberalism, no Chinese
contributions were heard, nor were they in the more recent debates on the
relationship between Islam and the West, the post-secular age, genetic
engineering, the digital age, or Speculative Realism. Only most recently, with
the changed geopolitical situation, are Chinese thinkers starting to receive
more attention. In this context, Eric S. Nelson’s book Chinese and Buddhist
Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought makes an important
contribution to further opening up the West to Chinese discourses. Nelson’s
book is a historical study about the reception of Chinese philosophy by
German-speaking philosophers in the early twentieth century. However, it
quickly becomes clear that his book is actually much more ambitious;
spanning more than three hundred pages, it covers vast periods of Chinese
philosophy (from Confucius and Laozi to the late Heidegger), but also seeks to
bridge immense historical and cultural differences. The real thrust of Nelson’s
book, however, may be found in the implicit claim that the adherents of
Western philosophy, as the French Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien
has famously asserted, do not need to appropriate Chinese thinking through a
form of historical-transcendental self-criticism; rather, the Other has long been
embedded in the history of Western (especially German-speaking) philosophy
and can thus be brought into effect at any time. The history of Western
philosophy, Nelson writes programmatically in his introduction, “is historically
already interculturally and intertextually bound up with non-Western philoso-
phy” (p. 3).
Philosophers are seldom good historians. Since Plato first elevated the
death of Socrates to an almost mythical narrative about the birth of
philosophy, many Western thinkers have engaged in writing historical
narratives about the development of philosophy with the intent of educating
other people on the basis of their philosophical perspective. The way
philosophers write histories of philosophy reveals hidden philosophical

238 Philosophy East & West Volume 70, Number 1 January 2020 238–246
© 2020 by University of Hawai‘i Press
commitments and reflects particular commitments that, with hindsight, often
appear quite arbitrary. As Nelson demonstrates convincingly, the exclusive
identification of philosophy with Europe, argued for most famously by G.W.F.
Hegel, is itself a result of cultural interaction, or, as Nelson puts it, “a relatively
recent modern invention” (p. 13). In the age of globalization, Nelson’s case
studies on how different philosophers in the German tradition (Edmund
Husserl, Rudolf Eucken, Hans Driesch, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, and
others) interacted with Chinese thought undermine the still widespread idea
that philosophy is of Greek origin and can be practiced only in European
languages. Particularly convincing is Nelson when he detects “constellations”
of intercultural philosophizing that have long since been forgotten, such as the
exchanges between Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai 張君勱) and Eucken and
Driesch in the 1920s or Georg Misch’s further development of Dilthey’s
hermeneutics in the form of a historical-critical reflection regarding the global
origins of philosophy (chapters 2 and 5).
Reviewers have already highlighted the numerous strengths of this volume.
It is a landmark study in intercultural philosophy that will shape the research
field for years to come. In my essay, I would like to describe a few difficulties
that, in my understanding, still hamper a project like Nelson’s. I want to focus
on two aspects: (1) the relationship between philosophy and its history and
(2) Heidegger and the “hermeneutic primacy of interpretation.”

The Relationship between Philosophy and Its History

There can be no doubt that philosophy has a highly problematic relationship

with its own historicity. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that
historical approaches in philosophy often run counter to problem-oriented
ones. Students who take seriously the claims to knowledge of the natural
sciences will not necessarily feel the desire to work through the doctrines of
philosophers like Plato, Rousseau, Kant, or even Husserl, but rather engage
with the ongoing debates among contemporary thinkers and neuroscientists.
Nelson’s monograph lives on the conviction that dealing with past forms
of thought has in itself philosophical value. By working through a long
history of intercultural philosophy we are said to be able to better
understand the present. To put it differently, Nelson seeks to enable
contemporary philosophizing to reopen the vast body of voices and
discourses with which people in East and West have sought to lend meaning
to their existence through the centuries. Dilthey’s philosophy of worldviews
(Weltanschauungen), to which Nelson devotes many pages, is said to be a
favorable starting point for intercultural philosophizing (p. 254). Instead of
taking a definite position regarding the question of what philosophy is and
what it is for, Nelson largely follows Georg Misch in his attempt to “speak
pluralistically of ‘philosophies,’ or to think ‘philosophy’ as intrinsically plural
instead of giving into the temptation that there can be an exclusive measure

Kai Marchal 239

 of what is and what is not philosophy” (p. 33). More specifically, Nelson
argues against the Eurocentric skeptics that philosophy can occur anywhere
and everywhere, not only in the West, and it is not a mere worldview or set
of opinions of a person or a people because it is critical and reflective.
Critical reflection means that philosophers can revise traditional discourses
and transform pre-existing communities.
In the age of multiculturalism, many readers will be sympathetic to such
a strategy. Nelson’s book, I think, is aimed at recovering the very openness
with which German thinkers like Herder first discovered the multiplicity of
non-European worldviews. According to the Italian philosopher Giacomo
Marramao, today we live in the “age of Herder” (Marramao 2012). This
is an apt description of our time, I believe, and I also agree that the
undertaking to develop new languages of philosophy is both urgent and
legitimate. This said, I wonder what this contemporary form of intercultural
philosophy actually would look like.
Classical Chinese texts, their arguments, metaphors, and problems, are
alien to most people in Europe and North America and, arguably, to most
contemporary Chinese people as well. It takes a lot of time to bridge this
disconnect; unlike Plato’s dialogues, Spinoza’s Ethics, or Kant’s three
critiques, most readers in Europe or North America share no cultural
continuity with these texts; neither are they part of the existing philosophical
discipline with its very peculiar practices (e.g., reconstructing an argument,
drawing out its systematic implications, and writing a critical monograph).
For a long time, however, Classical Chinese texts have been researched by
Sinologists trained primarily in philology and history; quite a few, though,
also have a background in philosophy (compare, e.g., Shun 1997, Defoort
1997, Ching 2000, Denecke 2010, Kern 2010, and Perkins 2014). But such
studies usually abstain from linking Chinese discourses explicitly to the
European languages of philosophy. One important reason is that Sinologists
are all too aware of the peculiarities of Chinese texts; arguments in Plato
and Zhuangzi are formulated quite differently—or, as two Sinologists
recently put it: “Both traditions face entirely different constraints to posit
their philosophical ideas” (Meyer and Gentz 2015, p. 6 n.d.). On top of this,
the ideas are not necessarily similar, and may be completely unrelated.
One may want to argue that such awareness of intercultural differences,
and the resulting hesitance to read Chinese texts as philosophy (i.e., as valid
alternatives to our own contemporary philosophical beliefs), can be traced
back to German philosophers like Hegel, Dilthey, and Gadamer. Ideas are
always the products of particular individuals living in certain historical
contexts, influenced by the ideas of their contemporaries and bound by the
limits of their age; therefore, the meaning of ideas is also always defined by
their history. Sinologists may want to further press this point: philosophers in
the German tradition like Hegel, Schleiermacher, Jaspers, Heidegger, and
others, who mostly commented on Classical Chinese texts in the fashion of

240 Philosophy East & West

amateur readers, may actually have mispresented the others’ views by
assimilating their concepts and beliefs to their own, and, knowingly or
unknowingly, they may also have transmitted certain Orientalist myths about
Chinese thinking that have been successfully challenged by contemporary
Sinological research.1 Why should the history of the German reception of
Chinese philosophy, in view of the immense spatial and temporal distance,
actually help us to understand the latter better? And should not Classical
Chinese texts rather be studied on their own terms, beyond an explicitly
intercultural horizon? Finally, what if the conceptual differences between the
Chinese and the German philosophical traditions were far too deep for
the hermeneutic model favored by Nelson to be able to bridge them?
(Compare the discussion in Ma and van Brakel 2016, pp. 46–49, 246–250.)
Nelson may counter these objections by arguing that they still rely on an
overly essentialist, ultimately Eurocentric, understanding about the nature of
philosophy and the interpretation of philosophical texts. And I do have
sympathy for such a defense. The goal of intercultural philosophizing, like
any philosophizing, should be to start new debates. In fact, as the German
philosopher Michael Hampe has put it recently, one goal of philosophy has
always been to create various forms of “dissident speaking” (Hampe 2018,
p. 92). But I worry that the wish to philosophize interculturally could also
overstrain contemporary philosophy in Europe or North America. Every
philosophical discourse must assert itself in the present and be judged by it,
and above all else remain bound to specific cultural narratives and its own
social and political contexts. Thus, one may want to argue that numerous
past forms of philosophizing no longer seem to be relevant to present
philosophers because the social, political, and cultural conditions of their
societies have changed or because certain arguments simply do not appear
to be convincing to us anymore (Berkeley’s version of subjective idealism
could be an example, but also Jakob Böhme and Thomas Aquinas). Nelson
sometimes addresses the different historicity of Chinese texts; for example,
he writes that texts like the Linji yulu 臨濟錄 are not “as exclusively
demythologizing or secularizing as a modern reader might wish” (p. 239).
But I wonder if the tension between the past and present of philosophizing
should not have been addressed more directly.2
To give another example: Nelson criticizes Heidegger’s project of
“formal indication” (formale Anzeige) as “inadequate” and contrasts it with
the supposedly superior hermeneutic model contained in the Chinese classic
Book of Changes (Yijing 易經), arguing that the latter is more appropriate to
the openness and complexity of human existence (p. 140). Yet, some readers
may wonder whether this claim is convincing. How can it be that a text
authored between 1000 and 750 B.C. is better able to capture human
existence as it is revealed through the complex reality of a modern society
than a twentieth-century thinker? How can the very content of the
modern experience (including cafés, newspapers, secular forms of life, and

Kai Marchal 241

 committees on gender equality, but also mathematics) have been anticipated
by a divinatory manual? Or, more precisely, how can a premodern text
enable us to bracket these very modern experiences? I fear that Nelson, who
provides his readers with a subtle and very nuanced analysis of the
phenomenological notion of lifeworld (Lebenswelt), may be demanding too
much from a text written in a very different lifeworld than ours. Last but not
least, even admitting that a text like the Book of Changes, in the long
interpretative history in China and East Asia, may indeed have fulfilled the
three criteria for genuinely philosophical discourses as spelled out by Nelson
(difference, mediation, and diagnostic critique), I have difficulty in seeing
how such text could do as much today. The conceptual apparatus of this
text, its central problematique, may be simply too far removed from our
presence that it could effectually challenge current epistemic practices. I fear
that attempts to re-articulate this text in the language of contemporary ethics,
evolution theory, biology, or quantum physics must remain purely specula-
tive or academic, since it is unclear how a link between this text and the
Chinese-speaking lifeworld could be re-established.

Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Primacy of Interpretation

It is well known that Heidegger’s thinking plays a central role in intercultural

philosophy; in Nelson’s book, three chapters alone are dedicated to various
facets of his thinking. With Heidegger’s interest in Daoism and Buddhism,
but especially with images such as the “intermingling scent” (Ineinanderduf-
ten) of East and West, the German thinker has anticipated many later
developments. Nelson seeks to distance himself from the darker aspects of
Heideggerian thought; he thus retraces how Misch and Plessner challenged
Heidegger’s “pure historicity and existential decisionism” (p. 139), clearly
favoring a return to Dilthey’s model of the human sciences, namely a
philosophically reflected historicism, which recognizes the multiplicity of
human life forms and cultural contexts and attributes an intrinsic value to
thinking that is not reducible to the philosophical question of being (as
understood by Heidegger). Nelson also mentions the publication of the
“Black Notebooks” (p. 155) and is well aware of the limitations of
Heidegger’s knowledge of Asian thinking. Still, Heidegger’s influence looms
large. In particular, I wonder whether Nelson has not accepted the
“hermeneutical primacy of interpretation” (Umberto Eco), that is, the belief
that there are no facts, only interpretations, a belief that is shared by many
postmodern followers of Heidegger (Eco 2014). This would imply a moral
and epistemic relativism, which in many respects must be unsatisfactory.
Philosophers like David Wong and J. David Velleman have defended
moderate versions of moral relativism, but few are willing to embrace a
position of epistemic relativism—and for good reasons.

242 Philosophy East & West

 As I am not convinced by Nelson’s reconstruction of the philosophical
relevance of the Book of Changes, I also worry that a historicist, and arguably
even relativistic, narrative about global philosophy may be too weak to
challenge today’s societal trends (just think of the neoliberal onslaught on
universities worldwide or the ongoing transformation of humanistic knowledge
into social media content). Nelson’s version of Dilthey’s philosophy of
worldviews may remind readers of Nelson Goodman’s theory of worldmaking
(Goodman 1978); yet, in my understanding, neither can Nelson’s historicist
account answer the question how different worlds are individuated, nor does it
provide convincing reasons to think that the worlds of Ancient China are still
viable options today for people both inside China and beyond. It may not be a
coincidence that the Hong Kong philosopher Kwok-ying Lau, in his review of
Nelson’s book, has criticized a position of “uncritical relativism” as insuffi-
cient: “The question of universals remains: how can a concept born within a
determinate culture overcome its particularity and ascend to the status of
universal? Nelson is fully aware of the necessity of posing this problem, but
seems to let it remain open” (Lau 2018).
Finally, Nelson may also underestimate how easily Heidegger’s desire to
differentiate himself from a philosophy characterized as “Western” and his
critique of bourgeois modernism and the Enlightenment project leads to a
“yearning for hardship and gravity” (Sehnsucht nach Härte und Schwere)
(Franzen 1987, p. 88). In present-day China, we are observing an unimagin-
able abuse of philosophy by an increasingly aggressive anti-Western and
anti-liberal nationalism. Many Chinese philosophers adopt Heidegger’s
thinking in such a context—or turn to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, who
have aimed, arguably even more radically than Heidegger, at a withdrawal
from the mainstream of Western thinking (compare Marchal and Shaw
2017). Precisely because Nelson, in order to demonstrate the intercultural
nature of philosophy, frequently disentangles philosophical discourses from
their cultural (and political) contexts, his narrative risks leaving out crucial
differences between German and Chinese intellectual history. One important
difference is undoubtedly the renewed emphasis on modern rationality and
liberal, democratic values in postwar Germany (as exemplified by Jürgen
Habermas’ thinking). And perhaps only a sharp awareness of such differ-
ences can enable us to take a clear position on the nature of contemporary
Chinese discourses. Nelson, in his concluding remarks, emphasizes the need
for “taking into consideration the complex and plural fabric of divergent and
conflicting claims, perspectives, and tendencies at work in each lifeworld”
(p. 258). In my understanding, intercultural philosophy, if it wants to engage
with Chinese texts, needs to be anchored in detailed descriptions of Chinese
forms of life, both in the past and the present. Obviously, this is an
extremely difficult task. But I want to argue that it needs to be done before
any substantive claim about intercultural differences can be formulated. I am
looking forward to hearing more on this issue from Nelson.

Kai Marchal 243

 Conclusion

Behind my criticism are questions to which there are probably no simple

answers. In any case, among the numerous merits of Nelson’s book, it
should not be the least that it will be more and more difficult in the future
to simply demarcate a so-called European or German philosophy from a so-
called Chinese philosophy. Still, much depends on how one interprets these
philosophical texts from East and West.3 In principle, I agree with Carine
Defoort (see her discussion in this issue): “Nelson tries to liberate Europe
from its universal pretensions by granting it a degree of provincialism.” This
said, I think the differences between the histories of European and Chinese
philosophy should not be given up too fast in favor of an overarching
narrative of global philosophy. To promote Chinese texts as philosophy in
the social and political environment of today’s People’s Republic of China is
certainly different from doing so in Germany or other European countries.
My criticism should be understood as an incentive to think more deeply
about such differences. And it is, in itself, an admission of how much I have
learned from Nelson’s important book.

Notes

I am thankful to Eric Nelson for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of

this essay. Many thanks go also to Theo Poward for carefully polishing my
English.
All unattributed page numbers refer to the book by Nelson under
discussion.
Notes

1 – On the difficulty of reading Ancient Chinese “masters” (zhuzi 諸子) as

philosophers, compare Denecke 2010, pp. 23–38. Kwong-loi Shun
recently warned us once again against the forced imposition of
Western concepts onto Classical Chinese texts (Shun 2018). Compare
also Møllgaard 2005 and the controversy around Edward Slingerland’s
recent book (Slingerland 2019).
2 – Nelson’s method recalls the “constellation research” of Dieter Henrich:
Philosophical theories of the past are to be re-examined by focusing on
the interaction of people, ideas, theories, and problems—except that
Nelson’s research does not focus on one nation or one continent.
Nelson’s subject matter is “encounter, dialogue, and exchange—and
lack and failure thereof—between ‘Eastern’ Chinese and ‘Western’
German thinkers and discourses” (p. 2). Unlike Henrich, Nelson cannot
simply presuppose a common “space of thought”; the thinkers he deals
with were often not in close communication with each other (Driesch

244 Philosophy East & West

 and Carsun Chang are exceptional); they did not even use the same
philosophical language and were located in different cultures and
thought universes. The intercultural philosopher has to focus on certain
contexts in order to motivate his or her intercultural narrative;
however, this is where intercultural research risks overlooking deeper,
less visible differences.
3 – Compare Vittorio Hösle’s recent statement regarding the history of
German philosophy: “Despite all the remarkable variety among German
philosophers, I do indeed maintain that there are certain features that are
common to many of them and that had an enduring impact on the
German spirit. What are they? To my mind, the most striking are
rationalist theology, a commitment to synthetic a priori knowledge
(ultimately based on the thrust that God has created the world in a
rational way), a penchant for system building, the foundation of ethics in
reason and not in sentiment, and the combination of philosophy and
philology” (Hösle 2016, p. xvii). Viewed in this way, there is no reason
to think that the German and the Chinese traditions have much in
common at all.

References
Ching, Julia. 2000. The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Defoort, Carine. 1997. The Pheasant Cap Master (He guan zi): A Rhetorical
Reading. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Denecke, Wiebke. 2010. The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese
Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
Eco, Umberto. 2014. “Gesten der Zurückweisung: Über den neuen
Realismus.” In Markus Gabriel, ed., Der neue Realismus, pp. 33–51.
Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Franzen, Winfried. 1987. “Über die Sehnsucht nach Härte und Schwere:
Über ein zum NS-Engagement disponierendes Motiv in Heideggers
Vorlesung, ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik’ von 1929/30.” In
Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, edited by Annemarie Geth-
mann-Siefert and Otto Pöggeler, pp. 78–92. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch Verlag.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hampe, Michael. 2018. What Philosophy Is For. Translated by Michael
Winkler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kai Marchal 245

 Hösle, Vittorio. 2016. A Short History of German Philosophy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Kern, Iso. 2010. Das Wichtigste im Leben: Wang Yangming (1472–1529)
und seine Nachfolger über die «Verwirklichung des ursprünglichen
Wissens». Basel: Schwabe Verlag.
Lau, Kwok-ying. 2018. Review of Eric S. Nelson, Chinese and Buddhist
Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought. Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews. Accessed April 1, 2019. https://ndpr.nd.edu/
news/chinese-and-buddhist-philosophy-in-early-twentieth-century-ger
man-thought/.
Ma, Lin, and Jaap van Brakel. 2016. Fundamentals of Comparative and
Intercultural Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Marchal, Kai, and Carl K. Y. Shaw, eds. 2017. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss
in the Chinese-speaking World: Re-Orienting the Political. Lanham, MD:
Lexington.
Marramao, Giacomo. 2012. The Passage West: Philosophy after the Age of
the Nation State. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. London: Verso.
Meyer, Dirk, and Joachim Gentz. 2015. Literary Forms of Argument in Early
China. Leiden: Brill.
Møllgaard, Eske. 2005. “Eclipse of Reading: On the ‘Philosophical Turn’ in
American Sinology.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 4, no.
2:321–340.
Nelson, Eric S. 2017. Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-
Century German Thought. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi,
Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Perkins, Franklin. 2014. Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem
of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana State
University Press.
Shun, Kwong-loi. 1997. Mencius and Early Chinese Thought. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 2018. “On the Idea of No Self.” Proceedings and Addresses of The
American Philosophical Association 92 (November): 78–107.
Slingerland, Edward. 2019. Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond
Orientalism and the Myth of Holism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Additional Sources
Tugendhat, Ernst. 2016. Egocentricity and Mysticism: An Anthropological
Study. Translated by Alexei Procyshyn and Mario Wenning. New York:
Columbia University Press.

246 Philosophy East & West