Why playing safe is dangerous in today's economy
Andrew Sheng looks at how understanding crisis helps bridge Eastern and Western thinking
Browsing through my books during the holidays, I came across one on comparative Western and Chinese philosophy that had an old saying: "Every Chinese person is a Confucian when everything is going well; he is a Taoist when things are falling apart; and he is a Buddhist as he approaches death."
Chinese culture is like a pyramid of worldviews. The earliest was animism; the Book of Changes taught two sides to every story; Confucianism was about knowledge of self; Taoism about following the natural way; Legalism about ruthless pragmatism and order; Buddhism about letting it go. In the 20th century, China imported Western influences, from Marxism to science.
It is commonly believed that the Chinese think differently from Westerners. Western minds are considered logical and scientific, whereas the Chinese mind is supposed to be elliptical, contextual and therefore relational.
Chinese thinking tends to sees things within context and history, probably because the fount of its philosophy is the Book of Changes, which is dialectic in essence, seeing the world as emerging from the conflict and synthesis of opposites.
Western intellectual tradition stems primarily from Greek Aristotelian logic, which is linear and reduces complex ideas into principles that could explain and predict the future. Aristotelian logic prevailed in the West until the German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel developed dialectics based on the concept that everything is composed of contradictions, with gradual changes becoming crises.
Karl Marx built on this, viewing historical change through class struggle and dialectic materialism, whereas Mao Zedong fused Marxism into Chinese agrarian reality to form a theory of revolutionary knowledge through practice.