Eastern Thinkers Research Articles

THE INFLUENCE OF FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS ON PARENTING IN THE HERITAGE OF EASTERN THINKERS

This article discusses the role of Eastern thinkers in the family, interpersonal relationships in the family, as well as the role of parental responsibilities and their role in the present. KEY WORDS: Education, philosophical, moral-psychological, ideological, Avesto, upbringing, knowledge.

Tagore’s “rooted-cosmopolitanism” and international mindedness against institutional sustainability

ABSTRACT Cosmopolitanism is often seen as a western concept associated with liberal individualistic values. It is also associated mostly with the urban educated middle-class. However, cosmopolitan thinking has been also prevalent in the East. Scholars in the twenty-first century are increasingly arguing that, there are multiple ways of thinking about cosmopolitanism originating from different regions of the world. Among Eastern thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore from colonial British India has been considered by many as one of the most cosmopolitan thinkers. The uniqueness about Tagore’s cosmopolitanism is that, it did not uproot him from his rural Bengali roots and sense of ethnic identity. He was very much a “rooted-cosmopolitan”. In his book, ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers’, Kwame Anthony Appaiah had agued that, a “rooted cosmopolitan” is someone who was rooted in his own cultural context while having an open-mind to feel literally at home in the world. This article draws on archival research at Rabindra Bhawan in Shantiniketan and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library archives to further this argument and demonstrates how Tagore’s school and university were built drawing on his “rooted cosmopolitan” ideals and international mindedness. In conclusion, this article highlights some of the challenges of sustaining the reformist educational institutions led by Tagore’s unique personality traits, social and pedagogic reform movements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century colonial British India.

IMPROVEMENT OF PEDAGOGICAL MECHANISMS OF OBSERVANCE OF CONSISTENCY AND CONTINUITY PRINCIPLES IN DEVELOPING OF YOUTH HEALTHY LIFESTYLE CULTURE

The current article reveals pedagogical mechanisms of interaction among families, mahallas and educational establishments with civil society institutions in the process of developing of the culture of the youth healthy lifestyle; it substantiated the role and significance of national pedagogy, the heritage of eastern thinkers of the Middle Ages in developing the culture of the youth healthy lifestyle; exposed the content of special course for master degree students, forming their conviction for the necessity of operating the culture of healthy lifestyle.

Al-Mashani and Islamic Philosophy

The birth of Kazakhstan was great and worthy. The researchers have analyzed the historical significance of scientific works of al-Mashani in Heritage Research eastern thinkers, as well as his great...

Self-Management and World Development

Self-management can be considered as an instrument for world development. Charity begins at home; likewise, management begins with self. Similarly, world development begins with self-management and self-development. In modern management, the primary or even an exclusive emphasis is laid on the management of externals like men, machine, material, money, market, method, organisation, environment, etc. But as eastern spiritual thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, right management of the internal self is the key to the successful management of the outer life and environment. Someone who cannot manage his own-self cannot effectively manage others or anything in the outer life. So self-management is the key to life management and ultimately world development. Man is the primary input to the management process. Man is not merely a mass of flesh, blood and bones. He is a mental creature in a physical frame. A worker as a man is a pack of feelings, emotions, sentiments, likes and dislikes priorities and preferences. He has his physique, his vital mind, heart, spirit and soul. Knowledge emerges from the inner being. Hence, the inner being of the man has to be suitably developed in order to make him creative and responsive. Thus, it becomes necessary to understand and know the management of self.

Modal Philosophy East and West

The notion of ‘non-dual’ philosophy has recently enjoyed a resurgence, on the positive side for its doctrinal avoidance of dualistic literalism, on the negative for its continuing tendency to deny duality itself, a la idealism. I propose that the investigation of binaries – specifically of unity and duality with respect to each other – be denominated ‘modal’ philosophy (within that context, ‘modality’). Though ‘modal philosophy’ is presently recognized, reprising of the concepts involved would suggest the need to reconfigure its core in order to stress in particular the methodologies illuminating binaries of all kinds. Thus, for example, interacting pairs of dualities at a metaphysical level will, in a modal model, frequently appear empirically as triadic. This distinction and its evaluation, analytically rather than phenomenally considered, is under-represented in non-dual approaches, but is central to modal philosophy once reconfigured to emphasize binary analysis. The principal Eastern and Western modal thinkers will be identified and their systems described. The two Chinese founders of modal philosophy, Laozi and Zhuangzi, are compared and contrasted with the two Western thinkers most responsible for modal and paradigmatic concepts, Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. Also mentioned are the philosophers Aristotle and Schopenhauer, and spiritualists Śankara and Eckhart, who brilliantly used modality but without fully formulating its core principles. All alike, however, as well as all who follow their lead, speak to a common truth that has been broadly acknowledged in spiritual terms even as its analytical interpretation has met fierce opposition from many empiricists and most all positivists.

Logos and Revelation: Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics by Robert J. Dobie

BOOK REVIEWS 485 In sum, Miner's study of Thomas helps us better understand how the passions in general and each passion in particular contribute to human flourishing and prepare the way for a felicity that transcends (but does not leave behind) the passions. Readers who work their way through this lovingly and carefully nuanced exposition of Thomas will find their efforts richly rewarded. EDGARDO COLON-EMERIC Duke Divinity School Durham, North Carolina Logos and Revelation: Ibn 'Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics. By ROBERTJ. DOBIE. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University America Press, 2009. Pp. xii+ 313. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8132-1677-5. This inquiry proposes and sustains the thesis that both Ibn 'Arabi and Eckhart were steeped in their respective revelational traditions, and from that vantage point engaged in a mode of philosophical theology using reason to order and clarify the revelational sources, as well as using those sources to expand standard philosophical categories to negotiate the known perils of discourse regarding divinity. Moreover, both ofthese thinkers, while working in disparate traditions, proceed dialectically to allow reason and revelation to illuminate each other fruitfully. They accomplish this in four areas-revelation itself, existence, intellect, and the ideal human paradigm-in such a way as to allow each tradition to illuminate the other, yet never eliding difference, especially where difference itself may further illuminate the comparative inquiry. But let us first position the respective authors. Ibn 'Arabi represents what I like to call the "second phase" of Islamic philosophy, wherein the center of gravity retuned east from Andalusia, while a fresh set of protagonists sought ways to relate revelation with reason rather than contrasting one to another (see my "Islamic Philosophical Theology and the West," Islamochristiana 33 [2007]: 75-90). That would explain why students of philosophy in the West might not recognize Ibn 'Arabi as a philosopher, habituated as they have become to the story that al-Ghazali's critique of Averroes effectively terminated any hope of philosophical inquiry in Islam. That judgment reflects modernist assessments of properly philosophical inquiry, however, rather than attending to the contours of philosophical theology in the wider Muslim world, comprising Shi'ite as well as Sunni perspectives. On a more accurate reading, al-Ghazali's critique 486 BOOK REVIEWS represents a dialectical moment in Islamic philosophical inquiry, not an end to it, much as recent scholarship finds Averroes to be less a "rationalist" than one who seeks ways to reconcile faith with reason (see Avita! Wohlman: Al-Ghazali, Averroes and the Interpretation ofthe Qur'an: Common Sense and Philosophy in Islam [London: Routledge, 2009]). A trio of Eastern thinkers form the vanguard of this "second phase" of Islamic philosophy, introducing a properly philosophical theology: Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabi, and Mulla Sadra. (For leads to them, see Oliver Leaman and Sayyed Hossain Nasr, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 1996]. For Ibn 'Arabi, the most comprehensive treatment can be found in William Chittick's trilogy: The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-'Arabf's Metaphysics of Imagination [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1989]; The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-'Arabf's Cosmology [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997]; and Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al- 'Arabfand the Problem ofReligious Diversity [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995]; see also Salman Bashier, Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh: Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2004). These secondary sources converge to help readers discover the philosophical acumen of Ibn 'Arabi. Though he is often dubbed a "mystic" (or even a "pantheist"), his work is better appreciated when read as a sustained attempt to articulate what Robert Sokolowski has identified as the crucial "distinction" between creator and creatures in a universe founded on free creation (The God of Faith and Reason [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996]). Now we begin to suspect why Dobie sought to compare Ibn 'Arabi with Meister Eckhart, who has been saddled with similar incomprehension. Yet applying the Sokolowski test allows us to capture Eckhart's intent as well: to show how a focus on Aquinas's masterful account of creation as "the emanation...

Review of Wei Zhang, Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers: A Hermeneutic of Cross-Cultural Encounter

Review of Wei Zhang, Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers: A Hermeneutic of Cross-Cultural Encounter

Heidegger, Rorty and the Eastern Thinkers: a hermeneutics of cross-cultural understanding. By Wei Zhang. pp. 127. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2006.

Heidegger, Rorty and the Eastern Thinkers: a hermeneutics of cross-cultural understanding. By Wei Zhang. pp. 127. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2006.

Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-first Century (review)

Reviewed by: Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-first Century Vasanthi Srinivasan Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-first Century. By A. L. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 245. Community, Violence and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-first Century, by A. L. Herman, explores the concept of community and the belief that it can resolve the problems of violence and insufficient peace in the twenty-first century. A. L. Herman examines four visions of community exemplified in the works of two Western thinkers, Aldo Leopold and Martin Luther King, Jr., and two Eastern thinkers, Gandhi [End Page 425] and Gautama the Buddha. The author approaches these thinkers with three questions: first, what kind of sharing is constitutive of a community? Second, how does one belong to a community? And third, can the problems of peace and violence in the twenty-first century be solved through the path of community? Chapter 1 begins by presenting the key premises of the arguments for community as an antidote to violence and as a harbinger of peace. Using Socrates' defense in the Apology, Herman puts forth two versions of the community argument. First, no one would intentionally do violence to oneself; one's self is shaped by one's community, and no one would intentionally do violence to one's community (p. 45). The second version, called the "community peace argument," proceeds from the premise that everyone would intentionally do peace to themselves, and since one's self is shaped by one's community, everyone would intentionally do peace to one's community (p. 46). The author claims that the second premise, which assumes a close relationship between oneself and the community, is borne out in all four of the thinkers just mentioned. But what is a community? How do individuals come to recognize themselves as belonging to a community? Chapter 2 focuses on the eco-mystic Aldo Leopold's notions of a "biotic community" and the "land ethic." The "biotic community" extends the boundaries of community to include soils, plants, and animals. Viewing the land as not simply a "resource" but a "fountain of energy" flowing through a "web of interdependent parts," Leopold calls for a "responsible and respectful use" that preserves the "integrity, stability and beauty" of the environment. This "land ethic" is predicated on an "ecological conscience," by which Leopold means the "extension of the social conscience from people to land" (p. 64). Such an ecological conscientiousness does not require supernatural grace or the aid of a divine savior; it evolves from an "intellectual intuition" and "self-transformation" whereby the individual comes to recognize his or her close relationship to the biotic community (p. 65). While giving a sympathetic account of Leopold's "land ethic," Herman points to some crucial theoretical problems. First, the inclusion of "trees, ponds, and wildlife" within the "biotic community" gives rise to "outrageous rights"; second, Leopold does not specify the criteria for distinguishing between "responsible use" and exploitation; and third, the emphasis on the "integrity and stability" of the biotic community threatens to subordinate "human rights" to a larger whole. Chapter 3 turns to Gandhi's experiments in an "ashramic community" beginning with the Phoenix Farm and ending with the Sevagram Ashram. Attempting a synthesis of John Ruskin's ideas and Hindu ideas, Gandhi built "ashrams" or communal retreats wherein members shared common meals, manual labor, and a set of moral and spiritual practices such as nonviolence, celibacy, and nonpossession. Far from being mere retreats from the world, these ashrams were centers from which Gandhi conducted the Indian struggle for independence. In the process of fusing spirituality and politics, Gandhi evolved the technique of Satyāgraha or nonviolent resistance toward unjust laws and customs. Herman explores the limits and possibilities of Satyāgraha through an imaginary lecture/personal recollection by Professor George P. Conger, who had visited Gandhi at Sevagram. After reassuring his students that [End Page 426] this "stuff...

Destructive emotions

This paper discusses the problem of destructive emotions by comparing Eastern and Western assumptions about emotions. In the case of anger, for example, Eastern thinkers straightforwardly posit that it is entirely possible to cultivate attitudes in which anger is naturally absent. In the West, by contrast, it is generally assumed that anger is a “basic” emotion that can be suppressed or managed, but not eliminated from one’s basic emotional constitution. Thus, in the Eastern way of thinking, emotion is a force that more easily harmonizes with rational approaches to life and to the specific problems in life.

Abe's Buddhist Realization of God

Our greatest modern Western thinkers from Spinoza through Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Whitehead have continually posed the problem as to whether pure thinking is possible apart from the primal presence and realization of God, and this problem is magnified all the more if Eastern thinkers, in absorbing Western thinking, inevitably thereby absorb the category, if not the name, of God. Masao Abe would appear to be such a thinker, and perhaps most so in his very understanding of Buddhism, for, if that understanding here occurs in the perspective of Western thinking, it thereby occurs under the shadow of God. Abe knows full well that the deepest manifest difference between Buddhism and Christianity occurs within the arena of time and history, but, in attempting to give witness to a Buddhist understanding of time within that context, he would appear to be giving indirect witness to a specifically and uniquely Western apprehension of God. So it is that, in speaking of that aspect of wisdom in which time is overcome, Abe can declare: Through the off and the opening up one goes down or transdescends into the bottomless depth of the and realizes eternity right 'below' the present (The Emptying God[Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 1990], p. 191). Now, even if here eternity is rather than above, it is nevertheless clearly a transcendent eternity and an eternity transcending time itself; hence, its realization makes possible the overcoming of time. This, I would suggest, is a Western rather than an Eastern understanding of time and one that is alien to the Buddhist tradition that Abe would embody. Abe calls for a process of living-dying concentrated into this moment, but this moment apparently has a depth that is below it, and that depth is clearly a transcendent depth, even if Abe attempts to understand it in wholly immanent terms. Accordingly, Abe can resist my suggestion that Buddhism divests time of all positive identity by insisting that Buddhism is grounded in the trans-temporal depth of eternity, a ground making possible a cutting through the temporal dimension (p. 194). While it may be possible that this language has a nontheistic meaning in an Eastern context, it certainly does not in a Western context, and that is the context that Abe is here addressing. Nor can Abe escape the forward and backward grounds of a Western understanding and vision of

The Possibility of Reincarnation

Man has always hoped to survive his bodily death, and it is a central tenet of many religions that such survival is a reality. It has been supposed by many that one form such survival might take is reincarnation in another body. Subscribers to this view include Pythagoras, Plato sometimes, and a large number of Eastern thinkers. Other thinkers have, of course, disputed that reincarnation is a fact, and some have even denied that it is a possibility. But seldom has it been claimed by its opponents that reincarnation is a logical impossibility.

Islamic Liberalism

Islamic Liberalism Shaul Bakhash (bio) Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies by Leonard Binder. University of Chicago Press, 1988. 399 pp. The recent Islamic revival in the Middle East has often taken the form of cultural assertiveness, hostility to the West, and rejection of Western forms of economic and political organization, including capitalism and democracy. Exponents of the Islamic revival argue for the superiority of the "Islamic" way (variously defined) of organizing polities, economies, and societies. In Islamic Liberalism, Leonard Binder, professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, sets himself an intriguing and significant task: to examine whether liberal democratic regimes may nevertheless emerge in the Middle East in spite of—or even partly as a result of—the Muslim awakening. Binder's underlying assumptions deserve a brief summary. He notes that the Islamic resurgence is taking place in the Middle East at a time when power tends increasingly to be concentrated in the state. Middle Eastern states, moreover, have tended to be dominated by petty—bourgeois interests (for example, bureaucrats and small shopkeepers)—not the most fertile ground for liberal democracy. But Binder also argues that these strong states, if they are not "autonomous" (that is, insulated from pressures from their various constituencies), may advance the interests of the emergent entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. He notes that in Turkey and more dramatically in Egypt, the state-dominated economy is in partial retreat, and that a similar, if less pronounced trend is evident in Syria and Iraq. He argues that some states in the region may already be described as bourgeois states, or at least as "embryonic bourgeois states," [End Page 117] even if the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in these countries remains politically weak. But the emergence of bourgeois states does not guarantee the emergence of liberal polities. In some forms, bourgeois or capitalist states can also be authoritarian and antidemocratic. Since secularism is in decline and is thus unlikely to serve as a basis for political liberalism, Binder believes political liberalism will not succeed in the Middle East without "a vigorous Islamic liberalism." "At the moment," he writes, "the Islamic resurgence and the rise of capitalism appear about to converge or clash. The question is whether their confluence can lead to the establishment of liberal government, or whether it is more likely to lead to an anticapitalist authoritarianism of the state, to an obscurantist rejection of modernity and capitalism, or to the emergence of a repressive, authoritarian, capitalist state." Binder seeks to answer this question by examining the manner in which Arab and Islamic thinkers, and a number of Western scholars, have treated such issues as the relationship of Islam and politics; the capitalist and Marxist roads to modernization; the possibility of a third, "Islamic" route to economic development; the encounter of Islamic societies with the West; and the thorny problem faced by Muslim societies that wish to accept Westernization without surrendering their unique cultural identity. He examines these issues from a number of perspectives (secularism, Islamic fundamentalism, Marxism, Islamic "authenticity," Islamic liberalism, and Edward Said's critique of "orientalism"), concentrating on one or two major authors for each perspective. For example, Ali Abd al-Raziq, whose 1924 book arguing for a separation of religion and politics caused an uproar in his native Egypt and earned him a rebuke from the chief clerics, is the prism through which Binder examines the secular approach to politics. Similarly, the work of Abdallah Laroui, a leading Moroccan intellectual, serves to illustrate the attempt to conceive of a liberal polity that incorporates and draws on the Islamic tradition. But Binder does more. He ushers us into the debate that such writers and their work have engendered within the Arab world, allowing us to listen in on the dialogue of Middle Eastern thinkers not only with the West, but among themselves. He also enters into a dialogue with these thinkers himself, attempting to expose the philosophical underpinnings of their ideas, seeking out those elements in their thought that might further (and those that might impede) the emergence of a liberal politics. Binder is explicit about his own "prejudices": He is eager to see political liberalism—which he defines as embracing pluralism...