Western Versus Chinese Thought

Some may say this individualism can’t possibly be a requirement for formal thinking in our current age, when scientific reasoning and modern educational institutions have spread around the world. Granted, it is not easy to apprehend this individualism in the fields of logic and science, which have been formalized and institutionalized in many nations, unlike other attributes that go by the phrase “stuff White people like,” such as a peculiar love of nature, bird watching, enjoyment of multiple hobbies, love of animals, and high creativity in the arts, literature, and humanities. It can’t be denied, however, that the highest quality scientific research is still happening in Western nations,404 and that high IQ East Asians continue to lack individual creativity. According to Lawrence Mead, Chinese-American students retain their “quiet and submissive” state of mind, “repeating what teachers say on their tests and papers, rather than making personal arguments.” “Even successful Asian immigrants . . . are less individualistic
than the American norm . . . they tend to adjust to the expectations around them.  .  .  . In school and then college, they expect to be rewarded for repeating what teachers tell them.”405

It may be that it is only a matter of time before East Asians start exhibiting high levels of creativity in formal thinking. This is not the view, however, of a well-known article, “Culture and Systems of Thought:

Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition,” about how Asians and Westerners think very differently.406 The authors counter the claim that Piaget’s theory can be universalized to all modern humans, arguing that “fairly marked differences in knowledge about and use of inferential rules exist among educated adults.” They first contrast the ancient ways of thought of the Greeks and the Chinese, and then provide data contrasting current ways of thinking in the West and China. Their research shows that,  

to a remarkable extent, the social and cognitive differences that scholars have reported about ancient China and Greece find their counterparts among contemporary people. Moreover, these are not mere parameter differences, but in many cases differences that are quantitively very large and even qualitatively different.

  East Asian thought tends “to be holistic,” taking account of the “entire field,” making “little use of categories and formal logic.” East Asians take contradictions as part of the nature of things, and instead of trying to reach a precise definition, a point of certainty, they look for “multiple perspectives, searching for the ‘Middle Way’ between opposing propositions.” In contrast, “Westerners are more analytic,” using rules, including formal logic, to differentiate objects and thereby explain and “predict its behavior.”

This article, however, can only take us so far with its PC insinuations about how “holistic” Asian cultures are and how cold-blooded and narrow-minded Westerners are. The difference, as I will explain in detail in the next chapter, is that the Chinese mind is embedded in its cultural surroundings— the norms, rules, and habits of the society, which educated Chinese follow without critical reflection, and so their reasoning has less individual autonomy from the “entire field.” It is not that the Chinese have, as Nisbett wishes us to believe, a broader, more comprehensive outlook. The “multiple perspectives” they express are an expression of the multiple norms, circumstances, and bodily impressions surrounding them and unconsciously coalesced with their reasoning. Their minds have remained lodged in the world, trapped to their surroundings and their millennial customs. The East Asian self is determined by the flux and fusion of inside and outside forces.

Their minds have not been fully differentiated from the world around; the qualities of self and person, as known in the West, are not present in Chinese civilization.

In contrast, it is not only that the ancient Greeks “developed a sense of personal agency,” as the authors of this paper recognize; it is directly that since ancient times, Westerners have been aware that each individual has a mind that is the seat of knowledge, which can be differentiated from bodily appetites, subjective emotions, and external objects.
Searching for a fixed, supra-temporal ground, an objective method, requires a self capable of identifying itself apart from everything that is outside itself, an awareness of the individual self as the locus of reasoning, and the only agent capable of postulating axioms and developing methodologies that draw a distinction between knowing and believing, thought and object, mind and body. Only Westerners came to apprehend reason as the one faculty that can be conscious of its own actions, and thus understand the nature and role of other forces and surrounding circumstances.

Greatness and Ruin:
Self-Reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization
RICARDO DUCHESNE