PHILOSOPHY -- One Man's Overview

Most people’s lives include a material side and a spiritual one. But for the majority most of the weight is on the material side because of the sheer necessity of having to survive. The squirrels in the backyard spend almost all their time looking for food,but most of us would agree that this kind of mentality does not, for a human being, enhance one’s quality of life. Most of us would say that the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness. Happiness depends on one’s values—what one considers most important and worthwhile.It differs for different people with different temperaments and upbringing. So how do you decide on your values?
You can follow your natural impulse,or choose rationally with thought.The former,natural to most animals,may at times lead to exciting experiences,even ones wildly so, but is fraught with pitfalls in which none wishes to be trapped.For the latter,there is no need to reinvent the wheel;it is more efficient to learn what our predecessors with the best minds thought and acted, and what the results were. Then we make our own judgment on them and decisions for ourselves. To get to the preceding step of making judgment and decisions is what learning and education is all about. That is why college programs, even for those majoring in science or technology, include such subjects as history and literature that often introduce elements of philosophy.

The colloquial meaning of the word philosophy is an attitude or perspective. For example, it is often used in the term “philosophy of life” meaning an attitude such as “it is all about making money,” or “it is all about enjoying tranquility and nature.” For this book, the word is associated with its formal meaning—as a discipline of learning (many colleges have a department of philosophy and offer degrees in it). Its usual definition is “love of wisdom” (philo means love; sophy means wisdom.) The description seems too general to be of real help. To be more specific, every writer on the subject seems to have his own definition (sometimes more than one by the same author). However, they usually don’t convey much to a beginner either. I would think of philosophy as signifying “thoughts at a higher plane that provide a broader and farther view regarding important subjects of human concerns.” Its concerns may be divided into two kinds. One involves subjects of more specific and limited domains, such as philosophy of history and philosophy of economics. They involve considerations of the principles of the individual disciplines. For example, we would consider, for history, such questions as whether “heroes make history” or “history makes heroes.” For economics, the philosophical questions of justice in welfare policies would be discussed.
Apart from such specialized areas, philosophy unspecified, deals with human life in general. Again here there are two aspects: (1) the meaning of life (what) and (2) the living of life (how). Roughly speaking, the first is related to the boundless “heaven,” and the second is concerned with the bounded “earth and man.” These are questions of general philosophy, which deals with such concepts as the universe, its purpose, reality, knowledge, and what constitutes a good life—subjects that, on the one hand, the intellectual side of a person finds alluring, and on the other, the practical side (in or after the workday grind at the office) has little patience for. Such thoughts do not help him to get a raise or a promotion, or to come up with a quick solution to the problem he has been assigned to work on. Philosophy, it seems, is a waste of time. For some people this may be true. For others, it may not be. Probably philosophy is beneficial to those who are pre-disposed to benefit from it; that is, people who are inclined to be thoughtful and contemplative. Philosophy does not deal with short-term goals. It helps to provide you with points of view by raising the elevation from which you take your view. The height enables you to see farther, and the “breeze” blows off the dust from your mind. It does not help you to make money, but its benefits cannot be bought with money either. It is a disposition that may be endowed by nature, but for most, it is the result of learning and thought. The study of philosophy would help you be less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life and more self-confident without requiring you to submit to the dogmas of a religion that your intellect may struggle with, nor keeping you from believing in a religion if you are so inclined. Even if your appreciation of philosophy does not change your outward life, it can make you a different person.

The book covers a wide range of the different philosophies of the world in a synoptic manner. Philosophy at bottom is always anthropocentric (centered on men, thus not always cosmically objective). The existence of so many different philosophies arises from the fact that men have different perspectives, and objects (including material things and abstract ideas) have different aspects (as reflected in the poem by Su Shi on the Prologue page). For example, we have the contrast between of the Taoist’s seeking of man’s contentment in nature and the Confucian sense of one’s responsibility to other people; and that between the strictness of David Hume’s definition of knowledge and the generality of William James’ pragmatism that we ought to seek “what is good for us instead of what is true.”
For simplicity, the main coverage of the book will be the three world philosophical traditions. Here a “tradition” has the qualities of continuity and self-reference. This means that the philosophical discussions within a tradition contains certain basic ideas, nomenclature and patterns of thought which hold over a long period of time, and which generally an insider understands easily and an outsider would have to learn to understand. The three traditions are the Western (in the main European and North American), Indian, and Chinese. The practice of limiting to these three has been recognized, and in some cases justifications given by a number of writers, although there are other significant culturally identified philosophies, such as the Jewish and Japanese ones, that could be recognized as independent traditions rather than being lumped or subsumed within the Western for the former, and within the Chinese for the latter.
The covered philosophies are reviewed in synoptic form based on materials gleaned from published works authored by established professional philosophers in each tradition. Thus, the basis of literature review in here is mostly second-hand.
The book is organized into five parts. Part I: Preliminaries, which contains introductory material including definition of terms, and synopses of the three philosophical traditions. More detailed presentations of the Western, Indian, and Chinese philosophies comprise Parts II, III, and IV, respectively. Part V contains comparisons of the three traditions and some thoughts of mine. The comparisons are summarized from several books specifically on the topic. As they are connected with the regionalism of the world, they naturally induced associative thoughts of the practical or geopolitical relations between the nations in the regions. Hence they are followed by a section (Section 15.3) on world peace that expresses some views of mine on the relations between the East and West from philosophical and historical perspectives. The final chapter contains my notions of a life philosophy. The fundamental idea is essentially one of naturalism modified with a unifying and centralizing concept of a single supernatural being as a kind of a divinity without a religion...