In many respects the formal, academic philosophy of the West has come to a dead end, having confined itself to a method of inquiry that compels it to move in a vicious circle. This is especially true in epistemology, which, because it involves the whole work of self-knowledge, is really the central problem of philosophy. As the West understands it, epistemology is really the task of trying to “think thought”—to construct words about words about words—since philosophical thinking is, for us, not a changing but a verbalization of experience.
The inquiring mind is perennially fascinated with the problem of the mind’s own nature and origins—not only to know just by way of information what knowing is, but also to employ such information for the greater control of the knower, for is it not frequently said that the problem of modern man is to be able to control himself as effectively as he can control his environment?
But there is a basic contradiction in the attempt of reason to transcend itself. To know the knower, to control the controller, and to think thought implies a circular and impossible situation, like the effort to bite one’s own teeth. It is for this reason that modern logical philosophy tends to dismiss such inquiries as “metaphysical and meaningless” and to confine philosophy to the investigation of relatively pedestrian problems of logic and ethics. This situation has arisen in the West because, for us, “to know” really means “to control”; that is, to see how events may be fitted to consistent orders of words and symbols so that we may predict and govern their course. But this mania for control leads ultimately to a barren confusion, because we ourselves are by no means separated from the environment we are trying to control. Western man has been able to pursue this mania only so far because of his acute feeling of individual isolation, of the separation of his “I” from all else. Thus, in philosophy, in technology, and in the whole ordering of our society, we run into the ancient problem of Quis custodiet custodies?—who guards the guard, polices the policeman, plans the planner, and controls the controller? The logical end of all this is the totalitarian state of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the nightmare of mutual espionage.
On the other hand, such major Oriental philosophies as the Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism arise in cultures far less concerned with controlling the world, and in which the whole notion of the dominance of the universe by man (the conscious ego) seems palpably absurd. For all these philosophies it is a first principle that the seeming separateness of the ego from the world, so that it could be its controller, is an illusion. Individual consciousness did not contrive itself and, not being sui generis (un-born, anutpanna), can never be the directive source of life.
Thus, for Oriental philosophy, knowledge is not control. It is rather the “sensation”—the vivid realization—that “I” am not this individualized consciousness alone, but the matrix from which it arises. This knowledge consists, not in a verbal proposition, but in a psychological change, similar to that which occurs in the cure of a psychosis. One in whom this change has come to pass does not attempt to control the world, or himself, by the efforts of his own will. He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventers in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic relaxation.”
It is obvious that a philosophy, a wisdom, which offers deliverance from the vicious circle of “controlling the controller” is of immense value to cultures, like our own, which are hopelessly confused by their schemes to organize themselves. However, it will be extraordinarily difficult for a wisdom of this kind to come within the scope of Western philosophy unless the latter can admit that philosophy is more than logic, more than verbalization, to the point where philosophy can include the transformation of the very processes of the mind, and not simply of the words and symbols that the mind employs.
From Philosophy East and West, 1953, 3(2), 99–100. Copyright © 1953 by University of Hawaii Press. Reprinted with permission of University of Hawaii Press.