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

Abstract

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 philosophy” (p. 3).