Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference

"This is the kind of book that I always bore people with, telling them, ‘This is great! You should read it!’ Tom Kasulis is a comparative philosopher. In other words, he works in more than one tradition and his real expertise has been in Japanese philosophy, which he’s written books on. This book came out of a series of lectures, the Gilbert Ryle lectures. Now, you can’t overgeneralize about Eastern and Western philosophy. He makes his point really strongly, that whenever you’re looking at cultural differences, it’s never binary, ‘the West is like this, the East is like that.’ But there are differences in what is foregrounded or backgrounded. He argues that what is foregrounded in one culture or tradition is backgrounded in the other, and vice versa. So these differences are real. He says that the most important difference at the moment is the ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’ of the title, which are actually unfortunate words, since they don’t evoke what they mean. What he means by the ‘integrity’ approach is a way of looking at the world, in which you see the individual components as being primary. What is society? It’s comprised of individuals, individuals are primary, society is the collection. What is a table? Well, the atoms and then they come together. So you can see how this way of thinking is associated a lot with reductionist science. It has been very, very fruitful, it’s worked well. He’s not denigrating or idealizing either. It’s one way of looking at the world, and it has its benefits. The other way of looking at the world is one in which you don’t focus on the elements in isolation as primary, what you’re looking at is relations, if you like. This is what the ‘intimacy’ refers to. We all know everything is related. But when you see the world primarily through the relations, it’s like a gestalt shift. You see things very differently. Typically the western individualistic, liberal tradition, encourages us to see human beings primarily as individuals. The alternative way of looking at it is to see ourselves as essentially socially situated, you can’t make sense of who you are unless you understand the culture you came from, your family members, your peers, etc. These are two different ways of thinking, and what he shows is that these different orientations manifest themselves in the way we think about all sorts of different things. I really want to stress the point is not to say that one is right and one is wrong. They both generate their insights. But if you end up thinking too much through the lens of one, we miss out things you see from the other. It’s one of those books where people say, ‘This book will change the way you think forever.’ This is a book that could do that. It’s really powerful. He explains it very well. He is an academic, I don’t think I’m being rude by saying it doesn’t have that popular style to it. But it’s very clear. And it’s so interesting. If you are unfamiliar with non-Western thought, to me, this would be almost the first book I’d suggest you read, heaven forbid, even before my own. Yes, and of all the stuff I came across researching my book, this is the one that was most important for me. It really was. It nailed it. It’s really nice when you read a book and you think it’s nailed something because philosophy is slippery, and people don’t often nail things. I think one of Dennett’s books did that too, his first book on free will, Elbow Room . It really got that idea that when people talk about free will, there are different conceptions out there and you’ve got to identify which one you’re talking about. If you do that, you’ll recognize that the kind of free will which people routinely say we don’t have, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have it, because there are other kinds of free will which are the ones worth having. That book is also one of my wife’s favourites. When I had a chance to meet Dennett once I took her copy and got him to sign it. As he was signing it, he said something like, ‘I’m fond of this book because I think with this one, I think I really did nail something.’ I think he’s right."