Philosophy East and West

I am truly humbled and astounded to find myself the grateful recipient of the wise insight, critical engagement, and creative elaboration provided by the three readers of my book, Boram Jeong, Martina Ferrari, and Eric S. Nelson.

I begin with Boram Jeong's attention to the decolonizing trajectory of the book. Throughout my writing process, I sought to enact the provincialization of Europe¹ by decentering Eurocentric discourse and, at times, actively ignoring it. The result, I suspected, would be that my very theories and methods would become unintelligible to the academic philosophical mainstream. At times, I worried to myself: does this book contribute to a "cross-cultural" philosophical project if other philosophers do not recognize it as philosophy? But, as Jeong points out, keeping philosophy recognizable is part of the problem. As she says, attempts to diversify philosophical practice may serve only to reinforce Eurocentrism by translating Asian, African, Indigenous, or Latin American traditions into Euro-American philosophical language. In contrast, my project, at the risk of unintelligibility, attempts the reverse: re-inscribing existential discourse to conform to East Asian models. I am especially gratified and validated by Jeong's appraisal that this "counter-mapping," as she says, serves the decolonizing purpose toward which I intended it.

Jeong goes on to raise questions that remain, for me, unanswered and still urgent at the end of the book. As she asks, how are we to understand sociopolitical change under the speculative philosophy proposed in my project? Or, how does radical interconnectedness affect our understanding of our responsibilities under conditions of systemic injustice? Undoubtedly, many of the authors I engage—from the twentieth-century Buddhist nun Kim Iryŏp to the Song dynasty Ruist Zhu Xi—are confident that mental cultivation does exert an impact on the world. But, as Jeong reminds us, this impact is not necessarily liberatory. Presumably, the current conditions of inequity under which we live are, by my own analysis of "petty-mindedness," co-constituted by our mutually realized social orders. To the extent that liberatory change can be enacted, or new social conditions can be realized, the book's claim about pairing practice with theory cannot itself remain theoretical. Jeong concludes that educational and institutional reforms must be part of the conversation on self-cultivation practices as methods for existential transformation. Her focus on the confluence of the personal and the institutional enriches the political dimension of my overall project. [End Page 290]

Following Jeong's attention to decolonizing trajectories, I am deeply inspired by Martina Ferrari's engagement with Mariana Ortega's notion of "hometactics" or "microtechniques" related to everyday activities: how we arrange our living spaces, how we prepare our food, how we speak (especially via multilingualism and code switching). As Ferrari points out, these hometactics are precisely such embodied practices of meaning-making that I seek in the book. Ortega's attention to specific contexts, to everyday choices in home, food, and speech, reminds me of Ruist attention to ritual practice, which is sometimes stereotyped as fastidious or overly rigid. But, as Ferrari reminds us, everyday choices matter—seemingly trivial decisions regarding what to wear, what to say, or how to eat present us moment to moment with options for world-making that have a direct impact on self and other. Ruist attention to detail is not trivial but asks us to take such live options seriously.

Acknowledging and developing the ritualized aspects of these everyday microtechniques can help concretize one of the prevailing currents of the book, which is its tendency to blur Eurocentric divisions between the philosophical, the religious, and the spiritual. Along this line, Ferrari's turn to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa at the end is equal parts brilliant and arresting. As Ferrari says, even those theorists who claim to resist mind/body dualism rarely broach the most transgressive aspects of Anzaldúa's "spiritual activism" via her engagement with shamanistic practice. This topic demands attention. As someone who frequently is called upon to teach introductory religion courses, I am routinely disappointed by the quasi-Hegelian ordering of textbooks according to so-called "world religions." As Tomoko...