Philosophy East and West

Ever since Robert Carter mentioned the topic of his latest work to me a few years ago, I have been looking forward to reading it. It has been worth the wait. In Encounter with Enlightenment, Carter evokes a plethora of religious and philosophical traditions within Japanese intellectual history to counter forcefully the prejudice, perpetuated far too long on both sides of the Pacific, that Japan does not have an ethics. More precisely, Carter chooses as his main counterfoil and methodological hook Arthur Danto's contention that "the West has nothing to learn from the East, ethically speaking at least." Carter proceeds to challenge the two basic assumptions of Danto's argument: the belief evoking a fundamental if not essential difference between "East" and "West" on the one side, and the assumption that worldviews are static and "unable to undergo modification in the light of encounters with 'alien representations,"' (p. 7) on the other. He does so by marking the supposed difference between "East" and "West" as one in tendency rather than in essence, by indicating the transitions that encounters between traditions engender and by tracing ethical theories and practices in the various intellectual traditions in Japan in direct application to the more fundamental ethical questions humanity faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Setting up the perceived differences between "East" and "West" as cultural representations open to transformation rather than as irreconcilable, static world-views, Carter takes an interesting stance. In one sense, he echoes much of recent scholarship, which has criticized orientalism for, to use J. J. Clarke's words, setting up "East" and "West" as "quasi-entities" separated by a "glass curtain," which deludes the onlooker into believing that direct understanding of a foreign culture is possible without actually entering it. Clarke's terminology of the "glass curtain" brings out the paradox underlying the orientalist position, which postulates a radical difference between one's own culture and that of the other without, at the same time, recognizing that this very position implies knowledge of that which is presumably so absolutely different. Carter does not fall into this trap. On the contrary, he takes pains to point out the generalizations in his argument and to add consistently that every generalization has its counterexamples and thus indicates nothing but a cultural mainstream. Using his own experience, Carter makes sure that the reader understands that he talks about tendencies within and not essences of intellectual traditions, about cultural ideals and not uniform realities. He thus slowly [End Page 411] chips away bit by bit at cultural stereotypes perpetuated by word of mouth, travel reports, and academic discourse over the centuries.

However, it is not clear to me how far Carter is willing to take his challenge to the orientalist dichotomy and the deconstruction of stereotypes without which the goals he envisions cannot be accomplished. I wholeheartedly support Carter in his project to break out of the incompatibility thesis proposed by the orientalist discourse and, at least as far as ethics is concerned, by Danto. It is important to reject the talk of cultural essences in order to allow for cultural exchange and to break down the artificially constructed barriers between cultures. A further benefit of Carter's study is not only that it shows what the former colonial powers from Europe and North America can learn from the traditions of the countries they colonized—or, as in the case of Japan, tried to colonize not too long ago—but that it also complements the traditional European curricula by including the philosophical and ethical traditions of, for example, East Asia. But to accomplish this, I think the use of terminology of ethical or cultural ideals, which Carter uses for the most part in his argument, might be more fruitful than his occasional evocation of a "Japanese character," which could easily be interpreted to reinforce Danto's prejudice rather than to undercut it.

Carter's second main point—proposing that cultural encounters transform rather than alienate—is...