10 Schools of Philosophy that should be better known (in the West) | Julian Baggini | Granta
1. Mohism
In fifth-century BCE China the philosopher Mozi argued that ‘the business of a benevolent person is to promote what is beneficial to the world and eliminate what is harmful.’ This is remarkably similar to the utilitarian principle formulated by John Stuart Mill in the eighteenth century: ‘Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.’
Mohism is more austere than utilitarianism, in that it considers pleasure too frivolous to count as something which is beneficial to society. Mozi doesn’t even see a point in musical performances, at least not those that ‘divert such vast resources that could be used to produce food and clothing for the people.’ Very similar arguments are heard today by those who object to state subsidies for the arts when health and education services are in such dire need.
Mohism is perhaps most noteworthy for its unequivocal commitment to absolute impartiality. ‘It is those who are partial in their dealings with others who are the real cause of all the great harms in the world,’ said Mozi. ‘Impartiality gives rise to all the great benefits in the world and partiality gives rise to all the great harms in the world.’ And most pithily: ‘Replace partiality with impartiality.’
4. The Kyoto School
The Kyoto School is the name given to a number of philosophers who never formally formed a group but shared a geographical and philosophical proximity to the early-twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida. The school engaged with Zen, Shintō and Western philosophies, developing distinctive ideas about the self and society. At the heart their philosophy was nothing, or rather ideas of nothingness (mu) and emptiness (ku) which have been central to East Asian thought before even Nāgārjuna.
To say reality or the self is empty is not to say that it does not exist. It simply means that it lacks a discrete essence, something that makes it what it is independent of what makes other things what they are. This is most evident when it comes to the self. To be an individual is to be in relation to others. There is no self independent of other selves.
Tetsurō Watsuji used one of the Japanese words for a person, ningen, to illustrate this. The word is made up of nin, meaning ‘human’ or ‘person’, and gen, meaning ‘space’ or ‘between’. Ningen are hence both individuals and interdependent, essentially defined by their relations to others. At a time when we are questioning whether individualism has gone too far in the West, such an understanding of the self is especially timely.
7. Modern Russian Philosophy
Russian philosophy has self-consciously stood as a kind of a bridge between Europe and Asia while not belonging to either. It rejects the centrality of the individual, rational mind in Western philosophy as a kind of hubris, arguing it does not have the resources to reach ultimate truth.
The place of rationality in the Cartesian system was taken in Russian philosophy by intuition. Truth is not so much understood as felt. At the same time the place of the individual was taken by the collective. Russia embraced the myth of the obshchina, a peaceful, harmonious peasant community of souls that was wilfully naive so as to avoid the corrupting atheism, competition and individualism that Western rationality had unleashed.
Russian philosophy also seems unconcerned with traditional notions of truth. Even the Russian language helps maintain the elasticity of truth, for which it has two words. Istina is natural truth, the truth of the universe and is immutable. Pravda, in contrast, describes the human world and is a human construction.
A permissive attitude to truth, a rejection of decadent Western values, a sense of national exceptionalism, the unimportance of the individual compared to the collective destiny: the connections between these ideas and the actions of Russian political leaders of all stripes is plain to see.
9. Cārvāka
The cliché of India as an inherently and exclusively spiritual nation is challenged by one of the major dissenting schools of the subcontinent’s philosophy. Cārvāka is rigorously materialistic, rejecting the idea accepted by every other school that the ultimate goal of life is mokṣa, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. It asserts instead that the only purpose of life is pleasure, and that with the death of the body follows the death of the self.
Cārvāka has no time for the testimonies of seers (ṛṣis), claiming that the only valid source of knowledge is sense perception. It not only rejects the claim that the ancient sacred texts, the Vedas, contain revealed truths, it mocked their authors as ‘buffoons, knaves, and demons’.
The fourteenth-century Cārvāka thinker Mādhavācarya articulated a problem that has also been central in Western philosophy. Our knowledge of how the world works requires us to generalise from particular experiences to general rules, such as ‘wherever there is smoke, there is fire’. But we only ever observe particular instances, never general rules so rationally speaking our generalisation in ungrounded, as his very choice of example helps suggest. No one with any knowledge of arguments such as this could dismiss Indian philosophy on the basis that it is not philosophy as we know it.
