On Seeing Our Deepest Intellectual, Educational and Practical Traditions from a Non-Western Perspective

Abstract

In journals like Interchange and in countries like Canada, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, or the United Kingdom we tend to trace out intellectual beginnings and our academic approaches to the Greeks. This means essentially the ways and thoughts of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, and a host of lesser lights still shine brightly for us and are the official beginning of the traditions to which we still hold. Thus our sense of the literary, of plays, poetry, of history, of philosophy, of mathematics, physics, and the sciences are all determined if not exhausted by Greek models carried on to us via the Romans and later the Christian church centred in Rome or its Greek Orthodox counterpart in Athens. The papers in this journal still tend to follow the academic writing pattern of Aristotle, the scholarly, professorial pattern. The logic is the logic of Aristotle. The rhetorical forms are the rhetorical forms we can see in Plato’s characterization of Socrates’ arguments with the great men of his day. We tend to take these sorts of things as true and see Greece as the origin of practically all our intellectual traditions and see the traditions of others as either feeble in comparison or indeed not really existent. In their article Sriraman and Benesh challenge this. Although they do not quite put it this way, they see Western science as essentially a third person, common object tradition whereas Indian or Vedic tradition is essentially a first person tradition or science aimed at nature as object as compared to science aimed at mind as subject. The Dalai Lama has written in a similar vein from a Buddhist perspective. It is hard for us to imagine that there are other intellectual traditions and other ways than our own and even when we acknowledge them it is equally hard for us to see any particular merit in them. Yet the Chinese, the peoples of India and indeed our own aboriginal peoples have their own traditions and ways of great historical,