The Significance of Chinese Philosophy

[5-minute speech]

What comes to mind when you think of the word “philosopher”?

Socrates? Aristotle? Sartre?

Without realising, you have unknowingly reduced philosophy in its entirety to purely Western philosophy (which is what’s mainly taught in schools), as opposed to the much older and often equally as interesting philosophies of the Eastern world. It is almost as if we are naturally inclined to believe that Eastern philosophy is not the “proper” way of philosophizing. According to the postcolonial theorist Edward Said in his book Orientalism, this is largely due to Western culture’s false romanticisation of Eastern cultures and ideas, often viewing them as “exotic and inscrutable."

In this speech, I will be exploring one of my favourite Eastern philosophical traditions – Chinese philosophy. In fact, I think this is a very important topic because the popularity of Chinese philosophy has significantly gone down (as you can see in the map), yet Chinese philosophy is something that doesn’t deserve to be unpopular at all, and there are three reasons for that: its practicality and its simplicity and its poeticism.

Western philosophy can often be seen as too abstract and too vague, traditionally dealing with questions like “what is the meaning of life?” or “can we know the world as it really is?” This means Western philosophies will mostly have no real practical use and therefore derail from its original track of examining life so it can be better lived. In fact, ethics and practical philosophy only became popular in Western academia after the start of the modern era. However, this is not the case with Chinese philosophy, which concerns itself primarily with being practical. Chinese philosophy is said to have begun in around 500 B.C., and shortly after, the four philosophies of Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism emerged, proceeding to dominate Chinese thought for the next two millennia. And guess what? All of these philosophies are centred around being practical (with Confucianism concerned with how to act towards other people, Daoism concerned with how to live in balance with the universe, Mohism concerned with how to act rationally, and Legalism concerned with how governments should align their policies with the human psychology). This means that Chinese philosophy is much more practically useful than Western philosophy, so should be valued.

Nevertheless, to truly be practical, Chinese philosophy should also be accessible. This accessibility lies in two elements – not being too theoretically complex and not being too difficult to read. With regard to theoretical complexity, Chinese philosophies are typically very simple, as it is generally agreed that the world shouldn’t be made more complex than it is, and simple explanations tend to be more accurate than overly complicated ones which have many ontological assumptions. An example of this is how all Chinese philosophies presuppose the existence of an objective reality we all experience in the same way, which is in contrast to Western philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who believe that we can never know the world in the way it really is, and that we all interpret and experience it differently. With regard to not being difficult to read, Chinese philosophy is often written in a way that is concise and easy-to-understand, and which lacks the complicated jargon of many Western philosophers that make it inaccessible to the general public. To illustrate this, let us compare two extracts (one from Hegel, a Western philosopher, and Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher). These two extracts both essentially discuss the same idea – that opposites define each other, but let’s see how they compare with each other.

Raise your hand if you thought the version from Tao Te Ching is much easier to understand than the version from the Science of Logic. This emphasises the idea that Chinese philosophy is very accessible.

This remarkable writing style of the Chinese philosophers also ties into my final reason: poeticism. Most works of Western philosophy are presented in the form of long books or dense essays, yet Chinese philosophy is the opposite, often expressing itself in brief aphorisms, anecdotes or poems, which brings out the literary and artistic element of philosophy. For example, the Confucian scholar Mencius is famous for discussing the cultivation of human virtue through the metaphor of the sprouting of a plant, whereas the Western philosopher Wittgenstein expresses his views on truth and logic in this impenetrable way. Therefore, it can be said that Chinese philosophy’s poeticism is also a defining factor in why it should be valued.

Thus, to conclude, I believe that Chinese philosophy, and Eastern philosophy in general, is a very significant branch of philosophy that is often ignored, yet definitely should not be.