Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Western philosophy > Reading the other traditions > Open interest

Open Interest

The early modern histories of philosophy inherited a question from Diogenes Laertius. “There are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians”, he began, naming the Persian Magi, the Chaldaeans, the Indian Gymnosophists and the Druids, and answered that “the achievements which they attribute to the barbarians belong to the Greeks, with whom not merely philosophy but the human race itself began” (Lives I.1–3, tr. Hicks). The seventeenth-century historians divided over it. As Wilhelm Halbfass reports them, Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–60) began with Thales and put the Oriental philosophy at the end; G. Hornius’s Historiae philosophicae libri VII (Leiden 1655) “portrayed Adam as the first philosopher”; and G. J. Vossius’s De philosophia et philosophorum sectis (1657) held that philosophy “derived from the Orient”.

Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān reached Europe in Pococke’s Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus (1671), the self-taught philosopher, and in Ockley’s English from the Arabic (1708), subtitled “by the meer Light of Nature”. How the tale reads in its own tradition is on al-Andalus.

China entered the question through the Jesuit missionaries. In 1687 four fathers of the Society, Intorcetta, Herdtrich, Rougemont and Couplet, published at Paris, by order of Louis XIV, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinensis Latine exposita, Confucius the philosopher of the Chinese, or the Chinese science set out in Latin: a translation of three of the Four Books, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Analects. The dedication to the king calls Confucius Moralis Philosophiae pariter ac Politicae Magister & Oraculum, master and oracle of moral and political philosophy alike. The order did not speak with one voice. Four years earlier the Jesuit Andrea Lubelli had written to his General in Rome that “in China there is no philosophy in whatever form, unless one takes into account some philosophical sayings” (as quoted by Yijing Zhang, tr. Eager).

Leibniz, in the preface to his Novissima Sinica (second edition 1699), set Europe and China side by side as the two ends of the continent where fate had gathered maximus generis humani cultus ornatusque, the highest culture and refinement of the human race. Europe excels in logic, metaphysics and mathematics; the Chinese “seem to have been ignorant of that great light of the mind, the art of demonstrating”, ignorasse magnum illud mentis lumen, artem demonstrandi. But certe practica philosophia (quod propemodum fateri pudet) victi sumus, id est Ethicae et Politicae praeceptis: in practical philosophy, which it is almost shameful to admit, we are certainly beaten, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics. It seemed to him almost necessary that the Chinese send missionaries to Europe qui nos Theologiae naturalis usum praxinque doceant, quemadmodum nos illis mittimus qui Theologiam eos doceant revelatam, to teach us the use and practice of natural theology, as we send them those who teach them revealed theology.

Christian Wolff took the case into the university. On 12 July 1721, stepping down as prorector at Halle, he gave an oration on the practical philosophy of the Chinese (Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica) that upheld the compatibility of Confucian moral philosophy with the acquisition of virtue, and so denied that revelation was indispensable for morality. He refused to submit the text to the theology faculty. On 8 November 1723 the king removed him and ordered him to leave the lands of Electoral Brandenburg within forty-eight hours on pain of hanging.

Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig 1742–44) kept the other peoples in and ranked them below the Greeks. He divided the first period in philosophiae barbaricae et graecae partes duas, into two parts, barbarian and Greek philosophy. The barbarian was simplex admodum, very simple, held to the first rules of wisdom and handed down traditione magis, quam demonstratione, more by tradition than by demonstration, until it reached the Greeks, and those who dream that the first men were great philosophers are wonderfully deceived. His last volume ends with a book de philosophia exotica, on exotic philosophy, with chapters on the peoples of Asia in general, the people of Malabar, the Chinese, the Japanese and De philosophia Canadensium, the philosophy of the Canadians. On the Chinese he set the admirers, the Jesuits, Vossius, incomparabilis Leibnizius, Wolff and Bülfinger, against the deniers, among them Renaudot and the Jesuit Le Comte, and preferred Renaudot and Minorelli as freer a praeiudicio peregrinae admirationis et credulitatis, from the prejudice of admiration for the foreign and of credulity. In Halbfass’s summary, Brucker “ultimately finds philosophy in its complete sense and with the ‘correct manner of philosophizing’ only among the Greeks and the traditions which followed”.