Philosophical synthesis East-West.(Book Review)

Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture, by G.E.R. Lloyd; Oxford University Press, 2004, $82.95.

OCCASIONALLY one comes across a philosophical expose that by its brevity, clarity and succinctness challenges staid viewpoints and excites one to wider horizons. G.E.R. Lloyd's Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections brings together various strands of our understanding of ancient Greek and Chinese science and culture to create a synthesis where one informs the other.

One of the key purposes of a comparative approach is to highlight the presuppositions which each culture is more or less blind to, and to bring out the shared and diverging aims and consequences that each cultural setting gives rise to. Once the sense of novelty or strangeness that a foreign civilisation arouses upon first contact is laid aside we can begin that quest of assimilation and recognition that leads to a more thorough understanding. A foreign civilisation, whether distanced from us geographically or by time, can make us aware of our own innate perspectives and lead us to a better understanding of both the civilisation under examination and our present standpoint.

Lloyd begins by raising the various questions that a study of ancient and foreign cultures must face if the enquiry is not to be "merely the reflection of our own ideas and preoccupations", and offers not so much answers to theoretical problems but a pragmatic approach that keeps the questions and problems alive while enabling us to proceed with care. Ultimately the problem of how we can ever grasp the nature or essence of ideas that belong to another culture "as if either other ideas will be reduced to our own, or they will remain forever unintelligible" is resolved by pointing out that "it actually does happen" and:

 
   that it is essentially no different from the processes 
   of learning that we have constantly been engaged 
   in, since childhood, in our own society, in all its 
   diversity, acquiring and using our own natural 
   languages. 

The key is to take into account the "diversity" of the frameworks of our own beliefs. What can seem strange and paradoxical in a foreign culture need not baffle us beyond due measure when we take into account some of our own paradoxes; be it the notion of the wave-particle duality of light, or "the doctrine that God is three and God is one".

Among the observations that Lloyd brings to his study of ancient Greece and China are the different modes and styles of enquiry practised in those civilisations. The aggressive adversarial tradition of Greek oratory, born from the practice of the law courts and political assemblies where the speaker aimed to persuade the audience of the true, against the false, interpretation of facts; whereas the Chinese imperial system gave rise to a mode that relied on reaching consensus: