Theme: Decidability

COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY: ACTUALLY ITS EASY

(from elsewhere)

ALL HUMAN PHENOMENON IS COMMENSURABLE, and ALL HUMAN DIFFERENCES ARE DECIDABLE.

METHODOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL

Chinese: create ‘woo’ with humbling riddles about the world.(inaction) Westerners: create ‘woo’ with power over the world (action)

–“Daoism and Confucianism, at least after a certain stage in the development of these schools, exemplify the way that a set of interests intertwine with beliefs about the world. Both schools exemplify in different ways a conception of understanding the world that is inseparable from the interest in coming into “attunement” with it, to use a felicitous word from Charles Taylor (1982). To become attuned to the world is to see its goodness and to know one’s place in the order of the world. “—

The west: transform the world for the better for having lived in it (evolve). The east: live in harmony with it (stagnate). Or worse, islam there is no new knowledge (devolve).

Extremely poor civilizations adopt a mono-philosophy. The east and west adopted class philosophies. The west even developed methods and languages for those philosophies. We tolerate nearly infinite challenges to the dominance hierarchy and lionize creativity that increases group competition.

IMO: the present problem remains monopoly: that people are not only unequal but vastly unequal. People are not only not equal in worth to one another, but a large number force others to pay a painful cost for their existence. Not only are capitalism and socialism both failures, but so is the median: social democracy. Why? Because just as we need different philosophies we need different economies. And so far, we have tried ‘all aristocracy’ in the west and failed, ‘all middle class’ in europe and failed, ‘all family in china and failed’, all commoners under the communists, and failed. When the more obvious solution is military (slavery), ‘WPA’, (serfdom/labor), guilds(unions/craftsmen), managers(small business/inventors), professionals(calculators/investors), and jurists (deciders).

So far, the attempt to create monopolies instead of the church, state, burgher, laborer, serf/slave/prisoner system has been a temporary luxury good made possible by a rare technological leap primarily the result of the harnessing of fossil fuels.

EPISTEMIC

chinese language is quite primitive, relying on high context, and low precision. their wisdom literature is likewise, high context, low precision. they insert ‘woo’ into their wisdom literature through contradiction. the monotheists inserts ‘woo’ through supernaturalism. The west inserts ‘woo’ through extension of perception – power over nature. Explanatory power.

The difference in our virtues is limited. however the difference in truthfulness, disruption of the dominance hierarchy, and dominating the universe couldn’t be any more opposite. In other words, ‘all high trust cultures are the same, all other cultures are different. All happy families are the same, all dysfunctional families are different. All domesticable animals are the same, all un-domesticable animals are different. All intelligent people are similar, all unintelligent people are different. All desirable people are the same, all undesirable people are different. The reason being that any number of criteria must coincide to produce excellence, but if any one fails, not so. The chinese insularism was smart in retrospect. the western threat to the dominance hierarchy was smart in retrospect. had each of us chosen that one property from the other we would both have been safer. the west from conquest, the east from stagnation.

IS COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY HARD?

Not at all. You just have to stop denying (a) costs, (b) darwinian consequences over time (c) vast inequality of people, and (d) the fact that every person at the bottom is six times as costly as your most productive person. (e) we cannot create social economic and political orders for people we wish we had, but those for whom we do have.