Steven Burik

The light metaphor is a perpetual favorite for philosophers, both East and West. I seek to revaluate its opposite, darkness. I claim that there are good reasons to favor darkness over light, or at least to not see them as mutually incompatible or in hierarchical fashion. In recent Western philosophy, both Heidegger and Derrida argue that what the light metaphor represents, the promise of clarity and objectivity, is exactly what makes Western metaphysics problematic. In Chinese philosophy, classical Daoism offers a thinking that does not favor the light metaphor over its opposite. Daoists have the good sense to acknowledge darkness as a positive contribution to human life, at the very least on par with light. I argue that both the Western criticism of the light metaphor, and the Daoist approach to light and darkness, can be read as challenging the metaphysics of presence and providing an alternative way of thought.

Eric Nelson has written a very comprehensive study of the reception of Chinese and EasternBuddhist philosophy in Western thought, with a special focus on the German thinkers of theearly twentieth century. Nelson shows great erudition in bringing together a wide variety ofthinkers from both East and West, including importantly some lesser known, but very relevantthinkers from both the Western tradition and Eastern philosophy. Although Nelson focusesmostly on the encounters and interactions between German philosophers and Chinese thinkers,his aim with this commendable book is wider. Nelson employs the encountersbetween German and Chinese thinkers in the wider context of comparative and/or interculturalphilosophy, and his aim is therefore stated as being an attempt to consider ‘whether amore nuanced and historically appropriate conception of philosophy can emerge through criticallyengaging and reflecting on the modern encounter between Western and non-Westernphilosophy, and articulating its intercultural and intertextual dynamics’.

The brief response by Rui Zhu provides an interesting take on the perennial problem of what comparative philosophy is or should be. While Zhu makes some interesting observations about and suggestions for comparative philosophy, he chooses contributions to the thinking about the possibilities and methodologies of comparative philosophy that are rather old, though, and my first wonder is: why these two papers, and not more recent contributions to the development of the methodology of comparative philosophy, as can be found in numerous recently published work? Such more recent publications tend to take a more nuanced approach to the idea of commensurability than the two essays from 1991, given the...

It is often argued that comparative philosophy is afflicted by an inherent contradiction. For in order to be truly comparative, it needs to assume some over arching position with regard to the thinkers or thoughts under comparison, to somehow stand above or beyond what is being compared. In other words, it must transcend the things under comparison. If the comparative philosopher does not undertake at least the transcendence of her own culture, then she is in danger of imposing her own standards on foreign ways of thought.