Philosophy or religion?

Did philosophy really originate in Greece?

In previous posts – What is philosophy and what is it for? – Philosophical Schools – Part 1 you must have realized that, in philosophy, what exists the least is consensus. Therefore, I begin with a very current controversy concerning the emergence of philosophy itself. It has always been a fait accompli that it was born in Ancient Greece, even though non-Western thought is vast and much older. So why do not they consider what was done in the East and Egypt as philosophy?

In a broad sense, the search for wisdom is not something exclusive to the Greeks, nor to Western civilization. In a narrow sense, there is a tendency not to recognize Eastern philosophy, seen only as a manifestation of Western reason that was not made in the East and North Africa. That is, what was done outside Greece, or the West was religion and not philosophy.

Jonny Thomson, professor of philosophy at Oxford and author of several books on philosophy, is one of those who openly opposes it. According to him, many of the non-European traditions were not considered "proper" philosophy and this reveals an ignorance of these traditions. Religion and philosophy have always overlapped, regardless of their origins.

Eurocentrism is a way of classifying your own history and culture as the “right” or the “best.” So, people tend to view philosophy through this same kind of narrow lens. Philosophy courses and introductory books will feature European and American thinkers. There may even be a reference to Confucius or Avicenna (both names in Latinized versions.), but their jarring inclusion only shows that Eastern and African philosophies are inferior, if philosophy at all.

There is nothing new in calling another culture's ideological heritage "primitive" or "simplistic." For millennia, no Chinese ideas were considered barbaric within China. For centuries in India, all philosophy was thought to be contained in six great systems, known as darshana. But, since Ancient Greece, and through the European university system, philosophy came to be identified almost exclusively as the rational or analytical search for answers, and preferably true ones. And so, definition fanatics may say, "Only that which can be attributed to Plato is adequate philosophy."

This is supposed to have started with the Greeks, where logos (rational logic) was the best, if not the only, form of debate. After that, 17th-century philosophy found a new idol in René Descartes, who proved the entire universe (as well as God) simply using reason. Finally, this rational pursuit was perfected by philosophers like Gottfried Leibniz and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote their philosophy in mathematical lists.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Soren Kierkegaard always appeared a little odd in this story. In some modern institutions, this sort of “continental philosophy,” with its readable prose and emotionally engaging content, is still seen as an embarrassing cousin. Since these philosophers also studied and knew “proper” philosophy, they are loosely tolerated under the narrow description of philosophy as rational. It helps that they are all white and European.

Even if we accept this rational-analytical definition of philosophy (which is extremely debatable), it still raises an important question about “non-Western” thought. This is because anyone who insists that non-Western traditions do not use rational arguments is only saying that he knows truly little about those traditions. The Chinese Mohists, the Dignaga Buddhists, the Vyakarana Hindus (a tradition of studying Sanskrit grammar and is one of the six Vedangas or obligatory subjects for the study of the Vedas), and the Islamists Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina are all a small sample of logical examples and rational of “logos”. Indeed, in some cases, major philosophical ideas are expressed better and earlier in other traditions than in many of their European counterparts.

The problem, historically, is that many of these ideas and thinkers are also steeped in certain religious beliefs. Philosophers who are also monks, imams and shamans are denied the title of philosopher because a delineation is often considered impossible – the “East” has faith, and that is not philosophy!

However, this is also hypocritical. ManyEuropean philosophers (until just the last few centuries) were almost always religious. This is explicitly true of the likes of

Saint Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley – both figures heavily in the grand philosophical canon. But also, religion and God play important roles for other great philosophers.

God serves to guarantee the authenticity of our ideas, according to Descartes, and we must believe in God if we are to be motivated to act morally, according to Kant. The now popular Epictetus was deeply religious, and the idea of a providentially ordered universe is central to traditional stoicism. For most of the biggest names in philosophy, their religion or faith played important and central roles in their “philosophy”. For what reasons, other than tradition and prejudice, do we deny hindu, buddhist, or islamic beliefs a role in philosophy?

The problem of self-identity

The point is, whether philosophy is described more broadly as “asking the Universe questions” or something similar, there is no obvious way to differentiate between theology, philosophy, or even the sciences. Indeed, the more philosophy is defined in the broader terms of curiosity and "love of wisdom", the less distinct it becomes as its own discipline. Philosophy, left without borders and criteria, dissolves into a sub-department.

The fact is that most Western philosophers and writers, including Jonny Thomson, uneducated in philosophical traditions outside the standard Greek model for Europe and America. But ignorance of something does not mean that it does not exist. As with so much prejudice or historical ignorance, the problem is self-propagating. If it is easier to read, learn, and talk about “traditional” Western philosophers, it becomes easier to write, teach, and create programs about them.

But the internet is making that excuse much harder to legitimately appeal. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has long been a reference for philosophers and students of philosophy. It is now much more diverse and inclusive in its entries. However, we define philosophy, the fact is that non-Western thought is so vast, so ancient, and so comprehensive that it will be impossible to deny it a place at the philosophical table.

Influences of Eastern thought on the West

Although I am not a philosopher, I do not believe that philosophy is restricted to the West. By expanding its horizons to all continents, philosophy can only benefit from this. The interesting thing is that, even though it is considered minor philosophy or non-philosophy, Eastern thought influenced many Western philosophers, such as the three great masters of Greek philosophy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, whose thought appears directly connected with metaphysical issues, although devoid of dogmas and religious rituals. Socrates and his daimon; Plato and the world of ideas; Aristotle and the first unmoved mover.

In the work Phaedrus, in his first speech, Socrates despises the delirium of love given by Eros to lovers and receives a warning from the daimon, the inner voice that warns the philosopher about what should not be done. In philosophy, daimon would be associated with archaic Greek culture in general, or that is what at least will try to be exposed during the analysis. According to Darcus (1977, pp. 185-186) the word daimon “derives from the root dai-, meaning 'to divide' or 'distribute'.”

Socrates is, like Eros, a “call”, a “possibilities that open up”, a kind of “call to existence”. Such is the capital function of the daimon in his thought: to demarcate dissatisfaction from human incompleteness.

For Plato, the origin of this world is the world of ideas, a transcendent and spiritual world. For the first time in Western thought a philosopher says that the origin of everything may not be in this physical world. The Myth of the Cave is Plato's most famous metaphor, which tries to demonstrate that this world is just a shadow of the world of ideas, which can only be reached through reason that elevates man to the contemplation of true reality.

The First Mover or Unmoved Mover, which Aristotle deals with, is responsible for the principle of motion given in the efficient or final cause. The Motor is what moves without being moved. According to Aristotle, the Prime Mover is the cause of the motion of the stars and celestial spheres. For the philosopher, the first immovable mover is the perfect being, pure act, immutable and absolute first cause of all movement. Its immobility does not result from an inability to act, but rather from the absence of potentiality to undergo any alteration in its being. From this, but not necessarily, it can be deduced that the Unmoved mover be God.

Perhaps it could be said that Eastern thought is much more religion than philosophy, but from there to denying a philosophical character to Eastern thought goes a deep distance, since in the East we do not find only questions of a religious nature (albeit linked to this).

Just as ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with man and his relationship with society, ancient Indian philosophy is also concerned with man and his relationship with society; and just as Greek insights are still useful today, Indian philosophy can also contribute a lot to our understanding of the individual's inner and outer universe (BELUZZI, 2015, p. 101).

Greek philosophers who had contact with the East

For those who defend an orthodox way of thinking about philosophy (that there is only philosophy in the West), it is not too much to remember how Eastern thought influenced, in some way, Western thought, and this since the origins of philosophy. Philosophers like Pythagoras, who traveled to Babylon and Egypt and had a remarkably close relationship with the East, especially India. Democritus, whose atomistic doctrine resembles that of the Indian sages.

Naked Sages (Gymnosophists)

During the trips that Pyrrhus of Elida (360 BC – 270 BC) made, accompanied by Alexander the Great, he met the “naked sages” of India, the so-called Gymnosophists, the name given by the Greeks to a certain ancient Indian philosophy who pursued asceticism to the point of regarding food and clothing as injurious to purity of thought and even naked Ethiopian priests.

Plutarch (46 AD – 120 AD) makes references to the Gymnosophists in his Life of Alexander, in addition, “Among the first references to the Gymnosophists in ancient philosophy, we have the denomination of 'barbarian philosophers', which goes back to the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (180 A.D. – 240 A.D.), in his Lives and Doctrines of Illustrious Philosophers.

The naked sages originated from jain thought, had an ascetic doctrine, and sought to live according to nature, in addition to having broken with the hindu social caste system (they were, therefore, ex-brahmins) and with religious tradition.

It was from the contact with the naked sages that Pyrrhus inaugurated skepticism: his denial of any dogmatic affirmation about the divinity due to the difficulty of defining what the truth was, which resulted in his agnosticism and suspension of judgment (epoché ). Plotinus is another philosopher, now from the period of neoplatonism, who also suffered the influence of the “naked sages”.

Know yourself

The famous know thyself, an inscription engraved in Delphi on the temple of the God Apollo, who so influenced Socrates, was a comparable way of thinking about reality that is related to the buddhist view. Know thyself was the path that the Greek philosopher indicated as necessary in the search for good and truth.

Leibniz's Writings about China

Considering Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as the first German philosopher to have written about Chinese philosophy, Antonio Florentino Neto, doctor in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, is a collaborating professor in the doctoral program in social sciences – China/Brazil area – at Unicamp and member of the research group on Japanese thought and the Brazil/China study group. highlights the publication of the collection Novissima Sínica and the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese – the latter written in the form of a letter – as Leibniz's main writings in China.

Contemporaneity, in turn, was the stage for an advance and openness between the two cultures, Eastern and Western, which expanded the possibility of dialogue between thinkers from both traditions, as is the case of philosophers of the stature of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Varela, Thompson and Rosch (2003, p. 39) even speak of a second renaissance in the history of Western culture with the rediscovery of Asian philosophy.

Features of Eastern philosophy

Generally, Eastern philosophy sees the "me" as an illusion. Eastern religions believe that we are all interconnected and are part of a greater universal whole. Hindus believe that the atman, or human soul, is a part of brahman, the soul of God. Atman is part of brahman and therefore cannot be a separate entity or “me”. Buddhists believe that we are all so interconnected that there can be no distinctions of "me" between us, and the "me" is an illusion.

Eastern philosophy believes that "the self", composed of each person's personal identity, conscience, and core philosophies, is an illusion. They deny the existence of the self-independent entity that Westerners postulate exists.

Many eastern currents give special attention to meditation as a point of inspiration to build a personal reality of optimism and well-being. Therefore, it is a philosophy of interiority that currently arouses great curiosity in the West, where a lifestyle marked by haste and stress shows a tendency that opposes this search for calm and serenity.

Buddhism, confucianism, taoism and hinduism

One of the leading thinkers in Eastern philosophy is Confucius. The center of Confucius' thought, for example, is to work directly as an essential axis of happiness. Through his thought he invites human beings to practice virtue as a form of constant improvement.

Confucius' thought is connected to the value of happiness as a personal quest that every human being begins with autonomy and independence. He advises that each person places elevated expectations on himself and that he does not place them on others, thus enhancing the freedom not to be frustrated by expecting something that cannot be fulfilled.

The tao concept refers to the success of doing good through kindness. Confucianism is the most historical philosophical school in Chinese culture. The name of this chain is associated with its author. Confucius was born in the sixth century BC in the state of Lu.

Taoism, also called daoism, is a philosophical and religious tradition originating in East Asia that emphasizes living in harmony with the tao. The Chinese term "tao" means "way", "via" or "principle", it can also be found in other Chinese philosophies and religions.

Hinduism is the official religion of India and one of the oldest religious traditions in the historical record. It is the third largest religion in the world, second only to christianity and Islam in number of followers. It is one of the first religions to have as its foundation the belief in reincarnation and karma, as well as in the law of action and reaction - which thousands of years later, in the 19th century, would be embraced by spiritism (but this, a religion "positivist"). For Hindus, everything reincarnates.

Likewise, in buddhism we have a doctrine of spiritual growth that includes the practice of concentration and meditation. By developing a meditative practice of observing our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, we conduct a true work of self-knowledge, so necessary for the path of self-transcendence and enlightenment.

In the next post, we will begin studies on these philosophical schools of the East.