Might not be obvious, but this is the next in a series of “dialogues” with Dave Snowden. An example of the “dichotomies” Dave warns against.
Every choice of word is a binary chop, this not that. And however well defined (or not) the word is symbolic short-hand for whatever we have in mind in the dialogue in which we’re using it. One thing is clear East and West are not about being either side of some #Good Fence of longitude. It’s not about spatial geography.
“West” means the traditions of thought that came to us from Plato via Aristotle (and via the Islamic world) and Europe and hence everywhere else via conquest and empire. Obviously there are zillions of schools of thought, not to mention three distinct monotheistic-sibling religions, all footnotes to Plato, in that one “West” classification.
East simply means “not-West” in that sense. Outside that distinct boundary, the other side of that #GoodFence. As well as a collection of many distinct geographically Eastern / Asian schools of thought, more or less “religious” philosophies, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism and more, it also includes any number of aboriginal / indigenous / native world-views, anywhere in the world, as far “West” as north and south America.
Apart from a wide sprawling collection of sets of classes that fall under those two globally-exhaustive paragraphs, any “definition” of West and not-West can only be about some essential distinguishing feature(s) at that level, even though the many distinct subclasses within each share and differ by many other distinguishing features, enough to fight religious wars over.
The essential feature is the objective, logical, “scientific” facts-based view on the one hand and the subjective, intuitive, “wisdom” values-based view on the other. The latter generally being excluded or denied or redefined to fit, the former. (That’s a whole book or ten.)
But it’s historically recurring many times over:
the recurring philosophical division between
the explicit / objective / classical and
the intuitive / implicit / romantic
Systems thinkers might see (say) Capra as the obvious “hippy” introduction of Eastern – Zen Buddhist – ideas to 20th century Western (US) living, but the doyens of the new physics, Heisenberg and Schrodinger (say) were there before the hippies and the beat generation, not to mention the romantic poets and transcendental philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and that’s just recent history of 21st century mindful – bodily & moral – engagement with our local environment and global ecosystem.
It ain’t a new fashion. It’s an eternal and universal truth.
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