Does Comparative Philosophy have a Fusion Future ? Responses * Fusion , Comparative , " Constructive Engagement Comparative , " Or What ? Third Thoughts on Levine ' s Critique of Siderits

We have been invited to contribute a short assessment of Levine's response to Siderits’ position in the emerging debate between "fusion philosophy" and "comparative philosophy." Perhaps a brief word is in order regarding our backgrounds: Michael Nylan is a student of early China, with strong inter-disciplinary training and interests, who has attempted work in both philosophy and translation. Martin Verhoeven is a historian by training, a translator by avocation, and a Buddhist practitioner. Both of us have committed ourselves for decades to past traditions that can only be accessed through classical Chinese language, and that surely colors our views. At the same time, those views are not identical, but stereophonic.


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Michael Nylan, On Comparative, Constructivist, Fusion, and Diagnostic Philosophy Levine's paper begins with Siderits' contention that fusion philosophy and its proponents have "superseded" (i.e., outdone) comparative philosophy and its proponents.Levine counters that fusion philosophy both is and is not one form of comparative philosophy.It is one in form, insofar as it attempts "constructive engagement" with one or more strains of thought found in other cultures outside the Western tradition. 1At the same time, fusion philosophy, unlike comparative philosophy, denies the utility of long training in non-Western cultures and sustained reflections upon methodological problems, resting content with isolating ideas from their embedded contexts.But without any training in context and method, how is one to be sure that one has even understood the extracted bits, their logics, their rhetorical strategies, or their inherent appeals, then and now?How can we be sure that decontextualized ideas and arguments can be "transposed in meaningful and useful ways to a contemporary context" or are even intelligible (Levine 2016: 219, 222)?What available tricks or strategies insure both "integrative" and "creative" philosophical approaches of the sort that Neville and Deutsch call for?(cited ibid.: 220-21) For many reasons, we worry about the dangers of ignoring the historical settings for pronouncements in the early literature, while glossing over the implications of vocabulary nuances and changes within a given culture. 2 We regard knowing a language to be a necessary, if hardly sufficient condition for deep engagement with a text.Above all, philosophy should teach and apply the arts of questioning, since the refinement of normative theories is of little relevance to a world in constant flux and replete with contending traditions.If that is somewhere near the truth of things, comparative philosophy would then employ the texts of one culture to interrogate texts from another (and premodern texts in Western languages sometimes perform as well in querying modes of modern life as those from China and India).The goals are two: to engender a sense of participation in a continuing conversation about the shape of life in the future, grounded in a relentless curiosity toward present and past; and to articulate what might otherwise remain tacit presumptions about individuals, societies, and the cosmos, since comparison typically precedes diagnosis and intervention. 3Caroline Bynum in history (comparing India and medieval Europe) and Ralph Weber in philosophy (comparing several systems) are but two of the scholars who have discussed the potential pitfalls in undertaking comparative projects.Surely there are better and worse ways to do comparative philosophy and history responsibly, but there are no easy ways, for insights about the character of inquiry itself, not to mention the nature of reality, come only incrementally, so far as we know, to those with the requisite stamina, dedication, patience, and luck.
Fusion philosophers generally see themselves as "broadening" analytic or Continental philosophy.Hence their propensity to equate the central task of modern philosophy with "problem-solving" (Levine 2016: 214), with the problems tending to be very narrowly centered on problems generated within European language contexts heavily inflected with Christian theological terms or Kantian metaphysics.A skeptic might argue that fusion philosophy risks becoming yet a new form of neocolonial extraction of resources (ideas and arguments) by the same group of philosophers who have, in the main, disdained non-Western ways of thinking as "not philosophy" and "not rational."Meanwhile, many smart philosophers today, inside or outside of comparative philosophy, would prefer to discuss "therapies for the soul" or consider how we are to "know what to do," ethical problems of longstanding interest to "lovers of wisdom."Frankly, we two authors are less enamored with "problem-solving," believing many of the central human problems, e.g., loneliness, old age, and death, to be incapable of "resolution."As Zhuangzi remarks, "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none."We aim to work slowly away at the "untying of knots." At worst, the fusion philosophers, in Levine's characterization, choose an idea or an interpretation "off the rack, one that appears to fit their present concerns, and thus advance a view that is [already] their own" (ibid.: 219).Put another way, cherry-pick the evidence and surprise!surprise! it will tend to confirm one's own presuppositions, given the human propensity to notice only what we already expect to see.Simmering just below the surface of the Levine-Siderits debate, if unacknowledged, are much older debates pitting universalists versus relativists on the topic of the human mind, its capacities, emotions, and modes of rationality-debates to which the current appeals to the natural sciences and to quantification, however fascinating, have so far brought little clarification to the practices of everyday life. 6It is only (perhaps) within the human sciences, the study of human practices as they have evolved in different times and places, that we can reasonably look for glimmers of guidance.Hence the recent decision in some quarters of philosophy to make a "diagnostic turn," which necessarily entails the rejection of "timeless" perspectives and ahistorical views, impatience with "pure" or "comprehensive" theorizing, and concern with developing better ways to formulate self-aware ways of acting within highly circumscribed situations. 7very reading of a book or chance conversation with another person may immerse us in a sort of fusion philosophizing, where the juxtaposition of familiar and new ideas has the potential to stimulate.But more thorough acquaintance with a demanding text or set of texts (my own preferences being the Analects, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi, plus Yang Xiong's Exemplary Figures) may foster more transformative experiences, though there are no guarantees. 8Of course, such acquaintance can never end in "coming to think like a native" (Siderits 2015: 2) since no modern ethnic and national background confers substantial advantages upon avid learners of classical languages and civilizations.Can we assume, even after years of arduous study, that such texts are ever "sufficiently well understood" 9 as to be easily accessible and therefore ripe for exploitation?Some passages in the Analects can now be better appreciated, thanks to Fingarette's work, while many passages in the Zhuangzi continue to rouse feelings while eluding near categories. 10But why would we expect that a single "meaning" can be wrested from complex and subtle texts with layers of meaning?Indeed, any failure to discern in the products of other cultures glimpses of a "foreign country," where they "do things differently" and even may "see different things" 11 is to lose valuable opportunities to reflect upon the various peculiar and distressing ways that human beings have arranged themselves within social orders over time.Alertness to the huge range of human possibilities would seem to offer potential benefits not only for those seeking to reformulate philosophical positions but also for those who aim to be more fully alive.For to stand humble and often uncomprehending before a text or set of texts is to refrain, howsoever briefly, from business-as-usual.Thus, only sustained engagement with a body of materials outside the usual frame of reference is likely to spur any genuine rethinking of presuppositions, supplying a vantage point from which to begin to question the "regimes of truth" 12 which modern nation-states, East and West, would foist upon all of us.Repeated questions may prepare the person to notice her most destructive impulses and ideas. 13Decades of reading the Chinese classics at least prompt the idea that "Knowing what is enough" and "Treating each person as a dignitary" may be compelling signposts, even if daily failures in such endeavors occur.To "become fully human" is to accept slow progress.Right now, some philosophical quarters seem to be in an endless loop of their own construction.Is it time to hit a reset button?

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Martin Verhoeven, Does Philosophy Have a Buddhist Future?
i. What is This Thing We Call "Buddhism?" A particular bias of Western thinking can lead us to see Buddhism as a "philosophy" created by Gautama himself.Instead, what we call "Buddhism" is more of a phenomenon within an evolving and cumulative tradition with a different sort of validity to it.By contrast, a "philosophical" framing of Buddhism tends to presuppose three things: that (1) the Buddha was a systematic philosopher; (2) the first form of this cumulative tradition is the best and the most genuine form of it; and (3) "religion" is a systematic doctrine, from which all else derives as the logical consequence.The late M. G. S. Hodgson, eminent historian of Islam at the University of Chicago, persuasively argues that none of this is true of Buddhism.The Buddha's teachings were more of an "event," a sequence of dialectic responses pragmatically concerned with ending human suffering by liberating the mind from attachments.He concluded, "That we accept the fact that this is not (and, as an expression of the Buddhists' ultimate concern, could not be) a philosophical conception about which we may calmly converse in sovereign detachment will indicate that we are at the gateway to an understanding of it." 14odern philosophy is decidedly text-centered, but Buddhist texts are not primarily philosophical, at least as the field is presently conceived-"from a Western, customary, traditional, scholarly perspective" (Levine 2016: 213).The text-oriented approach to knowledge in modern Western disciplines poses particular problems for those of us who wrestle daily with attempts to retrieve meaning from texts, so as to answer questions, such as "what did the Buddha teach?" or, more importantly "what did the Buddha think?"By design, the Buddha did not write anything down.The earliest scriptures were written centuries after his passing, and even the words attributed to him, by his own estimation, were not his, but the teachings of many Buddhas past and yet to come.Put more succinctly: the Dharma is an "open canon."It is not limited to what this particular Buddha taught, but embraces what any 'buddha' might teach.
The seeming indeterminacy of an open vs. closed canon is problematic from a philosophical point of view, as it makes it difficult to nail down the teaching, or to grasp any particular formulation of the Dharma to the exclusion of others.How can you analyze, compare and contrast, what refuses to jell or even stand still?As translators and presumptuous interpreters, we are confronted with a Sisyphean task: a vast sacred canon, representing a long teaching career, to which many discourses were added posthumously.(Actually, all the teachings were "posthumous" since nothing was put into written form until centuries after the Buddha's death.)The size of the canon alone is daunting, but is further complicated by the plastic nature (pariyaya "indirect route," or upaya) of the teaching.Different things were taught to different people based on their differing sensibilities, prejudices, questions, and capacities.Dharma was never intended as an exposition of systematic thinking and reasoning on the nature of reality, existence, knowledge as such, but more as a make-shift raft to be dispensed with once its purpose of crossing over a dangerous river has been served.(See the famous "Parable of the Raft" in the Alagaddupama Sutta).But inconsistent does not mean incoherent; nor does it mean incomprehensible to the ordinary mind (i.e."mystical").
Buddhist texts are primarily operative and catalytic, rather than final and consistent.Dharma is not Dharma unless it "works," that is to say, appropriately serves to transform the afflictions (klesa) into insight, liberation, unbinding, tending toward an end to suffering (bodhi; nirvana).As with chemical catalysis, the Dharma teaching acts merely as an agent of change; it "dissolves and releases."Once the desired transformation occurs, the teaching can, indeed must, be let go of, or it ceases to be a teaching.This helps us understand the enigmatic statement of Huineng (638-713) when asked for the definitive Teaching, the philosophy of the Buddha: "If I said I had a teaching to give others, I would be deceiving you.Depending on the situation, I merely use expedients to untie people's knots, and provisionally call it 'samadhi.'"

ii. What is This Thing Called "Philosophic Buddhism?"
Other challenges present themselves to someone taking a purely philosophical reading of a text in the canon.First, the Buddha was quite original, so he did not always follow the unspoken rules of conventional Vedic discourse, nor even ask the same questions with which orthodox thought was concerned.Second, he played with familiar terms to give them new meanings to engage his opponents (largely brahmanas and sramanas) 15 .Third, this strategy led to employing metaphor and irony to get across his points-tough sledding for the literalminded.The foregoing means that the Buddha was not asking the same questions in the same way as his peers, nor perhaps the same questions that we continue to ask. 16Sometimes we are left to infer meaning not so much

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from what the Buddha said, but in what he did not say, as in the Ananda Sutta: "Having taken a seat to one side, Vacchagotta the wanderer said to the Master, 'Now then, Venerable Gotama, is there a self?' When this was said, the Master was silent" (SN 44.10).
This brings me to a question raised in Michael Levine's thoughtful essay "Does Comparative Philosophy Have a Fusion Future."Levine asks, "What is behind the insistence of Buddhism as philosophy as opposed to a religion for the fusionists?" (Levine 2016: 230) I would maybe pose the question differently: "What is behind the insistence of Buddhism as religion, philosophy, science, or any other shoe we wish to fit it into?"I am reminded of an E.E.Cummings poem:

O sweet spontaneous Earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophies pinched and poked thee has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring)
Cummings' belief that the natural world cannot be fully explained by either religion, philosophy, science or any other discipline might hold true for our approach to Buddhism.If the "prime objective of comparative philosophy [is] to learn from other philosophies and cultures and to take them on board, scrutinize and respectfully critique them, synthesize them, and even make them a part of one's own" (Levine 2016: 230), we must ask how, exactly, we are we to learn from the other.Additionally, to "respectfully critique, synthesize, […] and make them our own" (ibid.)presumes we have the appropriate tools for this task already in hand.But do we?Is it possible that our modern religious, philosophical, and theological lenses are themselves not the neutral tools of discovery we imagine them to be, but already constitutive of the very reality (or illusion) that we purport to observe?After all, attempting to treat the Buddha's teachings as a "philosophy" or academic discipline can have an iatrogenic effect (an "illness" or disorder inadvertently induced by the diagnosis or treatment), as Dharma is fitted, pared, and reduced to make it more comfortably manageable. 17rly Western interpreters of Asian thinkers asked, "What can we learn about them?"In the early twentieth century a more enlightened group of scholars began to ask, "What can we learn from them?"This is the more philosophical or "problem-solving" stance mentioned in Levine, inquiring into "universal questions and problems […] and transposed in meaningful and useful ways to a contemporary philosophical context" (Levine 2016: 219).A new approach, however, might ask: "What and how can we learn through them?" by fully engaging the entire paradigm, and taking seriously its precepts, spiritual and philosophical methods, and rigorous mindbody training.What is being proposed is not "philosophy" as we know it, nor theology as we know it, nor even science as we know it, and perhaps something unlike anything we are accustomed to.But that does not mean the subject matter is unknowable, mystical, irrational, historically or culturally-bound, nor only accessed by "going native."What the Buddha taught and thought rested on presuppositions of what the world was like, and used methods of inquiry uncommon, and in some cases unfamiliar, to modern philosophy.Studying these ideas and methods can itself be a fruitful philosophical enterprise.But the Buddha should not be read as a philosopher, nor be seen as such.
A French philosopher, the late Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), could provide a fresh comparative approach, at least from the Western side.Hadot argues that ancient philosophers aimed less at imparting systems of thought and ready-made knowledge, than in cultivating an enlightened way of living, and in providing training that would allow their students to achieve this.The texts themselves were "therapeutic"-intended, in the first instance, to form people and to transform souls.Rather than aiming at the acquisition of a purely abstract knowledge, the combined study-with-training-the "doing of philosophy"-aimed at realizing "a transformation of one's vision of the world and a metamorphosis of one's personality."Philosophy as a way of life entailed study, lively dialogue, existential challenge, and spiritual exercises-exercises in learning to live the philosophical life, not just learn about it, or even from it, but actually through it.Hadot explains, "Spiritual exercises were exercises, because they were practical, required effort and training, and were lived; they were spiritual because they involved the entire spirit, one's whole way of being."The exercises did not generate a theory of logic (meaning the art of thinking and speaking well); nor did they produce a theory of physics (i.e. ideas about the workings of the cosmos); let alone set forth a theory of acting well.But, Hadot asserts, the spiritual exercises "concerned actually speaking well, thinking well, acting well, and being truly conscious of one's place in the cosmos." 18he text-oriented approach to knowledge in the modern West, and in the field of philosophy, poses a particular problem to someone trying to retrieve meaning from Buddhist texts.On the one hand, the texts are mostly all that remains of the direct oral and aural experience.They are what we have to rely upon.At the same time, by their own proclamations, they are not to be relied upon.How can we hope to recover the "sense" and the spirit of the spoken word, the residue of orality, as we stand so removed from it in time, place, and person?When a "teaching" is written down, it loses its immediacy, the particularity of the lively interactive oral event.
Our "reading" goes from fluid to solid, open to closed.Buddhist texts can and obviously were adapted, revised, elaborated according to differing contexts, and across generations."In studying these compositions in the form of printed texts one inevitably imposes a degree of uniformity, consistency, and univocal stability that may have not been present in the plastic and dynamic transmission of the teachings in their original, oral context" (King 2009b: 64). 19Moreover, the early learning milieu surrounding the Buddha was not textual "study" per se, but learning in relationship-as apprentice, disciple, and by listening, participating, embodying.This calls for a different way of "reading" Buddhist sources and probably others.
Precisely because they are a direct or indirect echo of oral teaching, Buddhist texts, as Hadot proposes for early Western philosophical works, might best understood as a set of exercises intended to make one practice a method, rather than as doctrinal expositions.More than simply asking "What is the text trying to say? we need to ask, "What is the text trying to get us to do?"For such texts direct us to act, to feel, to live in a certain way.Thus the aim of the text is not simply to transmit knowledge, but to produce a certain psychic effect in the reader that both forms and informs.Buddhist texts (and I suspect Confucian et al.) mean to stimulate the reader to take up a practice, a spiritual engagement, rather than to believe in a doctrinal exposition, however cogent and credible.
Hadot laments that much "philosophy" as we now have it before us (especially as it appears in the university) has been stripped of its original purpose: therapeutics.He insists that, It is therapeutics that is offered to us.Philosophy is an illness of language […].The true philosophy will therefore consist in curing itself of philosophy.Ancient philosophy presented itself as a "therapeutics" and that this goal meant doing philosophy.In this study/practice more than theses, one teaches ways, methods, spiritual exercises, and dogmas have only a secondary aspect (ibid.).
By "suspension" and "learning through" I am proposing we allow "Buddhism" to remain a little strange and different from anything to which we have been accustomed-at least until the "mud settles," or as Hadot urges, we recover and explore the primary aspect of "doing philosophy." We strongly believe that: (a) every act of careful reading and teaching involves substantial comparative work, whether we acknowledge it or not; (b) thoughtful comparativists take the time they need to develop the skills to go beyond superficial similarities to delve deeper into the underlying structures generating conversations and concept clusters, to facilitate understanding of the pieces marked out for special notice; and (c) the hard work of comparison is worth doing, no matter what philosophical rubric it goes under, to the degree that it offers new vantage points from which to rethink basic questions concerning the human condition, rather than reaffirming the old truisms.
Michael Nylan (Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley) is the author of many books and articles on early China and the modern reception of the distant past.She is currently at work on three projects: a translation of the Documents classic known through its earliest traditions; a comparison of the historical methods and themes deployed in ancient Greek and classical Chinese sources (with Suzanne Said), and a book on pleasure theories in early and middle-period China.
Martin J. Verhoeven is currently Prof. of Buddhist Classics at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, as well as well as Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley.His was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford under a Ford Fellowship in the 1970's, and later became a Buddhist monk for 18 years, traveling and studying throughout Asia.He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-