East-West Dialogue Research Articles

Exploring Fearism in Literature: A Critical Study on Select Women Writers of the North East India

The present paper aims to study some of the prose fictions of the select Northeast women writers from a very new perspective in literary theory that is ‘The Philosophy of Fearism’. Fearism , propounded by Desh Subba ,is regarded as the first east-west dialogue, an emerging philosophy that deals basically with the issues of fear and its impact in human life. Mamang Dai from Arunachal Pradesh, Temsula Ao from Nagaland and Arupa Patangia Kalita from Assam have been so vocal female voices from this region and this paper will study some select works by them from a fearist perspective. Their works highlight the concern about ecology, social issues and the traumatic conflicts in human life; nonetheless, we can delineate these philosophical visions of Fearism in the portrayal of characters. Desh Subba, the founder of Fearism asserts that human beings go through fearmorphosis, they are being watched by panopticans and sometimes man himself scapegoat not only the innocent people, even the nature with arms and gun powder. This paper will study ‘Stupid Cupid’ by Mamang Dai, ‘The Curfew Man’ by Temsula Ao and Arupa Patangia kalita’s ‘The Girl with a long Hair’ and will try to interpret with this perspective because the characters dwelling in different situations are the victim of a fear Sisyphus, who are always under the multiple eyes of fear and this fear destabilizes their life being.

John C. Polkinghorne and Chen Ning Yang on the Dialogue between Science and Religion

John C. Polkinghorne (1930–2021) (FRS 1974) was an English theoretical particle physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. Professor Chen Ning Yang (ForMemRS 1992) is a theoretical physicist. Polkinghorne visited the Hong Kong Baptist University in November 2006. The present article gives an account of his visit, in particular his public lecture, a dialogue with Yang, and their responses to questions from the audience. Polkinghorne’s trip to Hong Kong introduced the interdisciplinary field of science and religion to the people of Hong Kong and mainland China, and opened an East-West dialogue on this topic. Polkinghorne’s view that “Science and religion are basically friends and not foes because they are both concerned with the search for the truth” is an inspiration for many. The same goes for Yang’s point that “Science and religion belong to one family from the beginning.”

East-West Dialogue on Reconfiguring Shakespearean Gender Identities in the 19th-Century Theatre

East-West Dialogue on Reconfiguring Shakespearean Gender Identities in the 19th-Century Theatre

International Fair of Plovdiv in Bulgaria’s Trade Relations with Underdeveloped Countries in the Second Half of the 1950s

Abstract Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 was the cause of a change in the policy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Eastern bloc. If this led to a tentative détente on the European continent in East-West dialogue, Nikita Khrushchev’s new policy toward the Third World strained competition with the United States for strategic influence over postcolonial countries. Eastern European states were encouraged to increase their contact with the former colonies at all levels. Therefore, participation of underdeveloped countries increased at the International Fair Plovdiv in the 1950s. Research curiosity, however, was sparked by the following questions: What was the place of the International Fair Plovdiv in the context of struggle for Third World countries and markets? Did Bulgaria use it only as a weapon in the Eastern bloc’s common diplomacy, or did it have economic benefits for expanding trade relations with underdeveloped countries? This article tries to answer these questions by referring to archival documents, reports in periodicals, and Bulgarian and foreign publications on the subject.

China as Method: Methodological Implications of François Jullien’s Philosophical Detour through China

François Jullien’s theoretical construction of China as a “philosophical tool” signifies an important methodology, namely presenting China not as an object of study, but as a method of reflection. By advocating a strategy of “detour and access,” he proposes to (re)interrogate the European culture and tradition from China, perceived as the “outside,” to unveil the “unthought-of” of Europe. In this sense, Jullien’s approach has pushed China studies out of a marginalized field to the foreground of more general philosophical debates, and yields methodological implications for not only studying China but also theoretical inquiries in general. From an “object” to a “method,” this shifted role of China suggests reversing the Eurocentric theoretical and epistemological framework, leading to the construction of a transcultural research paradigm based upon cultural pluralism and communicability, in which China becomes a nexus of East-West dialogue and a method to understand the world.

The East-West dialogue: methodical diversity and frailties of feminist accounts

This paper investigates the commonalities and differences of contemporary feminist theories by proffering a comprehensive comparative analysis of the Western feminist agenda and Chinese woman’s concerns in relation to the philosophical discourse on global justice. Interpretation of feminist accounts delineates the persistent gender inequalities presented by Western feminist thinkers, such as Maria Lugones, Elizabeth Spelman, and Sally Haslanger, while highlighting the historical and constitutional approach to understanding the roots of gender distinctions and norms in Chinese culture through the philosophies of Ruism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as the Civil Code of marriage. Reflection assesses the extent of translatability concerning feminist matters given the dissimilar social contexts and political circumstances between China and the United States. This paper draws attention to the need for embracing the historical and cultural heterogeneity of grievances of women from all over the world to acknowledge the cross- and multi-cultural conditions regarding the life prospects of both men and women. Such initiatives encourage mutual engagement in promulgating the multiplicity of feminist voices to prompt more productive conversations about the identities and meanings of masculinity and femininity instead of expecting or imposing a universal consolidation of woman’s experiences.

East-West Dialogues on the Ethics of Sex Robots.

The purpose of this essay is to review and evaluate chapters in Fan and Cherry's Sex Robots: Social Impact and the Future of Human Relations. In this edited volume, the authors of the various chapters present dialogues from the East and West to explore the social and cultural implications of sex robots. They also discuss whether sex robots have a positive, negative, or neutral impact on society and human relationships. This essay examines the key ideas presented in the book's chapters, evaluates their arguments, and identifies research directions for the ethics of sex robots in the future. Specifically, this essay provides a detailed analysis of certain schools of thought, including the capability approach, Confucianism and Daoism, and their relevance to the topic of sex robots.

Passage to the Orient (1993): Re-assessing the Role of the ‘Orient’ as ‘Avant-garde’ during the Rise of Globalisation

Of the several exhibitions that composed the 1993 Venice Biennale, Passage to the Orient has received the most commentary. Its fame is doubtless linked to its display of works by fourteen Chinese painters, exhibited for the first time in Venice. However, the exhibition was not devoted solely to Chinese art. It was rather intended as the manifesto for a new, international approach by the Biennale, significantly announcing its commitment to East–West dialogue, with East intended as both geographical and symbolic. From the curator’s perspective, the concept of the Orient evoked the unknown and the new; in Said’s terms it was ‘Orientalist’. Moreover, the symbolic figure of Marco Polo, who inspired the exhibition’s title, recalled the idea of ‘trespassing’, of moving beyond personal, geographic, political, and historical boundaries. Through an investigation around the use of the concept of ‘Marco Polo Syndrome’, the layered meaning of the term avant-garde in Bonito Oliva’s jargon and his broader scope in rejuvenating the Biennale’s international vocation, this essay aims to redefine how the term Orient was used during the rise of globalisation at the beginning of the 1990s. Finally, such analysis proves helpful in framing continuity between the concepts of historical avant-garde and contemporaneity during the transitional period of the 1990s.

Beckett and Buddhism

Beckett and Buddhism

Zen as everyday praxis

In Italo Calvino’s works, dialectical oppositions engender a creeping sense of nervous tension, which this article retraces in its multifarious narrative forms. Contextually, this study addresses the relevance of Calvino’s encounter with Zen praxis as an alternative to nerve-wracking dichotomous choices, towards a harmonious fusion of opposites. Palomar (1983), Calvino’s last major work of fiction, serves as a prism to restore to the author’s writing the cross-cultural dynamics of East-West dialogues and to illuminate the fruitful potential of the interaction between Zen and psychoanalysis. A Zen reading of Palomar shows that Calvino not only reflects on the outward appearance of the real in order to understand it, but allows his own work to be transformed by the thoughts that sustain this process of understanding, thus making the book, and in particular its end, a mystical fusion of theory and practice and of Western analytic rationality and Eastern meditative experience.

On the Way to Salvation: A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit

On the Way to Salvation:A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit Tony See (bio) The relationship between Heidegger's thought and East Asian philosophies has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. While these discussions are diverse and varied, they may be classified into three approaches (Ma and van Brakel 2006). The first approach is characterized by the study of how Heidegger's philosophy may have influenced East Asian philosophers, or how Heidegger's philosophy may have been influenced by East Asian philosophers. Reinhard May's work on Heidegger's "hidden sources" is a good example of the latter approach (May 1996). The second approach is characterized by scholarly observations that there are congruences between Heidegger's philosophy and East Asian thought. This is usually done by drawing analogies between the two. A good example of this is Joan Stambaugh's "Heidegger, Taoism, and the Question of Metaphysics" (1987). The third approach addresses the relevance and critical importance of Heidegger's philosophy in initiating intercultural dialogue (Ma 2005). It is sometimes characterized by a sense of pessimism with regard to whether such projects can be meaningful at all, for the linguistic and philosophical distances that have to be bridged is great. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, for instance, argue that while Heidegger was genuinely interested in East–West dialogue, he questioned whether such dialogues can be meaningful, since the philosophical barriers between the two seem to be insurmountable. I believe that a more significant reason why such dialogues seem to be impossible is that we are already engulfed in an age of planetary Ge-stell, or enframing. Scholars in East Asia are likely to have been trained in Western-style academies and to possess modern subjectivities, and hence their access to East Asian thought is likely to be enframed by Western categories. To be sure, this does not mean that it is impossible to have a dialogue, but rather that any meaningful dialogue demands a high degree of self-reflexivity so that we may avoid imposing our prejudices and presuppositions on the Other. This paper adopts the second approach and is interested in the resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and the philosophy of Shinran. [End Page 169] The choice of engaging in a comparative study of Heidegger and Shin-ran may seem odd, given that the two thinkers come from vastly different philosophical backgrounds. However, a closer examination of their ideas reveals something in common, namely, what constitutes the right mode of comportment and what sort of experience we can expect. While there are scholarly studies in this area, such comparative East–West studies, which have become more and more important in recent years given the rise of intolerance, they remain a small minority in the field of Heidegger studies. This is why Dennis Hirota's "Shinran and Heidegger on Dwelling: Reading Shinran as a Phenomenology of Shinjin" (2014) is a welcome contribution to this area and deserves more scholarly attention. In this paper we will examine Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit and temporality and their relationship with Shinran's idea of tariki and its relation to salvation. Gelassenheit is usually translated as "letting be" in modern scholarship. This refers to a comportment of no longer trying to overcome but to be in a relationship of "letting be" with Western metaphysics. This comportment of "letting be" resonates with Shinran's well-known recommendation to give up on "self-power" (jiriki) and to turn toward "other-power" (tariki) for salvation. For Heidegger, when we turn away from "overcoming" to "letting be" we begin to enter a different dimension of time, which he calls "temporality." In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1988), Heidegger already analyzed this experience of temporality in terms of an intensive awareness of one's present existence which encompasses the past and the future. Shinran likewise describes a new temporal experience when we place our faith in the saving power of Amida Buddha. To be sure, Shinran did not use the same terminology as Heidegger, nor should we presume that he referred to the same phenomenon, but he does describe this new dimension of time as being fundamentally distinct...

Dialogical Ethos of Trinitarian Theology, East and West: Theological and Political Implications

ABSTRACT: In this article I will deal with the dialogical ethos of Trinitarian theology, its theological and political implications, including the revival of that theology during the second half of the twentieth century, and its ecumenical significance. I will expose the basic elements of a Trinitarian-based theology of personhood and communion, followed by a discussion of the meaning of the key concept of communion/ koinonia in politics. In this context I will offer a theological reflection on the political significance of the Trinitarian image in human beings and the Trinitarian dialogical ethos as derived from the fiat of creation. The article will conclude with a brief theological meditation on and critique of the authoritarian mind, thus contributing to the East-West dialogue and to the encounters between Orthodoxy and modernity and between Orthodoxy and democracy.

Locating Heidegger’s Kotoba between Actuality and Hollowness: the Way towards a Thinking Conversation with Japanese Philosophy

What is the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese notion of kotoba (言葉) for Japanese philosophy? Was his conversation with Tezuka Tomio a real dialogue or not? To answer to these correlated questions, I elucidate Heidegger’s 1954 essay “A Dialogue on Language” by following a topological mode of thinking, and I inquire into the way-making of a “thinking conversation”. First, I problematize whether Heidegger engaged in a genuine dialogue with Tezuka. To that end, I distinguish the hermeneutic horizon of the actual encounter between Tezuka and Heidegger from Heidegger’s essay which places Tezuka (the Japanese) and Heidegger (the Inquirer) in a fictional philosophical conversation. Second, I argue that Heidegger’s topological method of interpretating kotoba can be read as a poetic means of thematizing East-West dialogue. Third and finally, exploring the topological sense of kotoba, I engage with third generation Kyoto School thinker Ueda Shizuteru’s idea of “hollow words” of language, situated in a twofold view of the world. I conclude that the true character of Heidegger’s conversation with Tezuka can be identified neither in Heidegger’s “actual” encounter with Tezuka, nor merely in Heidegger’s “hollow” essay. Departing from Ueda’s account of kotoba, it appears that a genuine conversation with language can be located in the dialogue of actuality and hollowness, which finds it expression in poetic language.

Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht

Reviewed by: Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht Arina Rotaru Caroline Rupprecht. Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde. Peter Lang, 2020. 259 pp. Paper, $63.95. In her latest foray into postwar and contemporary literary productions, comparatist Caroline Rupprecht chooses the contested culinary metaphor of fusion to characterize desirable forms of contact between Germans and racialized others, especially Asian Germans. The author takes issue in particular with representations of Asians as Semitic, orientalized Jews, a conflation she places at the root of contemporary forms of neofascist violence. Through a “call-and-response” metaphor with roots in “African-American slave songs, Indian kirtans and Jewish liturgical services” (6), which she borrows in turn from Tsitsi Jaji’s work, the author foregrounds a dialogic narrative of generations bound to one another within the German-speaking space. In this space, the generations create “new forms of solidarity,” which Rupprecht finds to be an effective mode of engagement with the emerging discipline of Asian-German studies, beyond the postcolonial studies paradigm current in anglophone contexts (14). Rupprecht pairs authors whom she labels “Asian-Germans” with post-war authors who have situated representations of Asian culture in relation to German history. She constructs the book’s chapters as a sequence of would-be intergenerational exchanges around memory, history, and identity between Yoko Tawada and W. G. Sebald, Pham Thi Hoài and Peter Weiss, and Anna Kim and Joseph Beuys. In addition to discussing canonical names, the book also covers authors less known to the wider public—including Pham, a resident of Berlin, and Kim, who grew up in Vienna and now also lives in Berlin—providing welcome additions to any university curriculum. [End Page 129] The book’s theoretical framework is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed his dialogic theories to counter Stalinist aggression, as well as by Emmanuel Levinas and French sinologist François Jullien, from whom the author borrows the idea of a Daoist-informed “in-between” space to counter violent assimilation of the Other. Rupprecht might have considered responding as well to the problematic ascription of the in-between space to the migrant figure as subsisting in a vacuum. Rupprecht’s use of scale and topography to comment on sites of memory, in particular when focusing on Sebald and Tawada, represents an original contribution. As Rupprecht demonstrates, Sebald uses the Chinese gendered prop analogy to describe the destruction caused by the Holocaust. According to Rupprecht, Tawada’s spaces transcend national identification and engage with subjects that operate outside the human-centered Western philosophical model. Whereas Weiss uses Vietnam as an analogy for German history, Pham tells stories of contemporary Hanoi from the perspective of a male narrator in order to reflect on gender stereotypes and defamiliarize reality through masks. Rupprecht explicitly deconstructs the Eurocentric perspective of postwar German authors against the voices of Asian German writers and their reluctance to “translate” one historical period into another (146). I commend the diversity of the author’s interpretive perspectives: she draws on insights not only from food studies but also from gender and translation studies, memory studies, avant-garde studies, and space studies. The chapters on “discordances,” which bring Beuys and Kim together, highlight several discrepancies in Beuys’s engagement with his National Socialist past and interpret his representation of Eurasia as a substitute for his own fantasies involving expiation of National Socialist guilt. As Rupprecht notes, Eurasia has nothing to do with “Eurasia” as a real space but everything to do with Beuys and Germany. These chapters in particular initiate an important discussion of Beuys’s legacy, which may involve historical whitewashing and instrumentalization of the East–West dialogue. The book is in some respects wanting in its rather marginal references to the avant-garde itself, for instance to the primitiveness of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and the engagement with Fluxus of Beuys and Tawada, the impact of surrealism on Weiss, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s impact on Pham. Rupprecht supplements the book’s fragmented treatment of the avant-garde with additional critical perspectives that resist the embrace of a happy fusion through “new encounters,” drawing [End Page...

Tourism studies is a geopolitical instrument: Conferences, Confucius Institutes, and ‘the Chinese Dream’

Tourism scholarship can advance the multifarious geopolitical projects of state actors and aligned commercial entities. Such effects are achieved not only through tourism itself, but through the production and circulation of politically-inflected forms of knowledge. Such work is conducted by tourism scholars and allied industry and state actors. A first-person account of a 2017 tourism studies conference held at an Australian university demonstrates the argument by examining the ways in which scholars, industry, and state actors navigated and facilitated the geopolitical and geoeconomic agendas of not only domestic but potentially contentious international regimes. The conference received financial and administrative support from state, industry, and academic agencies from both Australia and China. Hosted by the Griffith Institute for Tourism (GIFT) and the Griffith University’s Tourism Confucius Institute (TCI), the conference was the third in a series of ‘East-West Dialogues on Tourism and the Chinese Dream’. By actively positioning the international collaboration within the rhetorical bounds of the ‘Chinese Dream’, and by conducting the conference in collaboration with the Tourism Confucius Institute, a quasi-educational operation directly managed by the Chinese party-state, the Australian and international tourism academy implicitly supported the geopolitical designs of the Chinese Communist Party. Renewed attention to academic ethics and increased areal expertise are a necessary response, especially in a time of global geopolitical instability and structural economic transformation in the academy.

To the Ideology of East–West Dialogue: The Reconciliation of Zhen Jiu Theory and Western science

To the Ideology of East–West Dialogue: The Reconciliation of Zhen Jiu Theory and Western science

To the Ideology of East–West Dialogue: The Reconciliation of Zhen Jiu Theory and Western science

The theoretical foundations of the ideology of reconciliation of Eastern and Western paradigms in science, are considered with the use of examples of Chinese Zhen Jiu approach and Western medicine. It is demonstrated that the discrimination between Eastern and Western science has purely ideological nature and may be overcome to achieve the integrity of scientific thought.

“In the beginning was the place…”: an east–west dialogue of Creatio ex Profundis

This study will compare Neo-Confucian Zhang Zai (張載)’s taixu (太虛, the vast vacuity) and process ecotheologian Catherine Keller’s tehom (the chaotic depth in Hebrew) in light of the ultimate spatio-temporal place of creation, using the Korean term teum (in-betweenness) to connect these two resonant concepts. Both Keller and Zhang develop a nondualistic cosmology as opposed to the Augustinian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (the creation out of nothingness). Keller rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo which was inherited by Augustine where God is the unilateral agent of creation while the multitudes (萬物, wanwu) are subalternized; and for Zhang, taixu is the ultimate place where cosmos and the multitude are born from the same fluid vital force (氣, qi) resonant with Keller’s creation ex profundis (creation out of the deep). The great vacuity is not nothingness but the fullness of vital force (氣, qi). Creation is the manifestation of the endless becoming(s) of taixu becoming myriad things by convergence of qi while myriad things become taixu by a diffusion of qi. Both Keller and Zhang Zai’s harmonious cosmology offers us today a new and healing paradigm of creation that this planet is one organic body of the myriad thing events in which we are all interconnected and which nothing is left out.

Guide to the Perplexed: An Attempt to Make Sense of the Tillich-Hisamatsu Dialogues

The 1957 Harvard encounter between Paul Tillich and Zen master Shin’ichi Hisamatsu contains a wealth of information on the overlap and discrepancies between the two systems of thought, both individually and in regard to the larger East-West dialogue. This paper was written with the intent to mine the somewhat chaotic content of this historical document for elements leading to a systematic philosophical and theological investigation of underlying themes. In particular, it takes into account insights from Tillich’s early German period to highlight the profound difference in his approach to the notion of paradox when compared to that of Zen Buddhism, a tradition he admired but was never fully able to penetrate

Conceptualizing “Prayer” for an East–West Dialogue and Beyond

Early in the American psychology of religion, prayer was a central topic, emphasizing the “self” (James in Varieties of religious experience. Longmans, Green, New York, 1902) and social activity (Strong in The psychology of prayer. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1909). These writings, and contemporary efforts as well, typically conceptualize prayer as a theistically directed activity of communication, locating the work firmly in Western faith traditions. While this orientation captures a portion of the practice within those traditions, it is difficult to carry that definition over into comparative studies with Eastern practices. The present paper explores alternative ways to think about prayer and analogous activities that may facilitate an East–West dialogue. In addition, non-theistic formulations may help extend the conversation to encompass the spiritual practices of people not associated with any sort of traditionally bounded belief system.