Choi Young-jin · in three parts
East and West
From the Dao and God to the AI revolution: two civilisations compared from the roots up.
Late in his life, in Tahiti in 1897, Paul Gauguin gave one of his paintings the title “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” The three parts of East and West carry similar titles: “Where do we come from,” “Who are we,” and “Where are we going.” These three questions ask about humanity’s past, present and future. Many answers have been offered, and none has lasted. This book, too, is no more than one attempt at a question that has no answer.
Why East and West? It is in the comparison of Eastern and Western civilisation that I have tried to find answers to these questions. Until the early modern period of the fifteenth century, East and West lived in separate worlds. While there was no exchange between the two civilisations, comparing them meant nothing. Then, at the end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gama found a direct sea route, and exchange between the civilisations of East and West began. In the seventeenth century Leibniz placed great hopes in Eastern civilisation. He saw the two civilisations as complementary, each with much to learn from the other: the West, he judged, was ahead in geometry and the natural sciences, the East in moral ethics and in political and social life. He pictured a harmony between the civilisations of East and West in which each would complete the other, and believed that all humanity would gain when the scientific rationality of the West was joined to the moral wisdom of the East.
The book in three parts
Where do we come from, who are we, where are we going. Three questions after the title of a Gauguin painting, about our past, present and future, make the book’s three parts.
Why did the East choose the Dao and the West God? Not, the author argues, because either was chosen, but out of the self-preservation every human is born with. The East grew for millennia inside the closed world of the East Asian continent; the West went out to sea, from the Aegean to the Pacific. Each took the absolute truth that served it best.
The three parts
The Dao and God are the only two absolute truths there are in the world, standing for nature and for the supernatural.
Because instinct is the source of light and mind the reflector, a utopia that ignores instinct cannot be achieved in human society.
“The more laws, the more thieves”: this line of the Daodejing holds the core philosophy of Eastern political economy.
If the Industrial Revolution was a “muscle revolution,” the AI revolution is a “mind revolution.”
About the author and this book
A comparison of the two civilisations from the roots up: how each saw the origin of the cosmos, how each saw human nature, and the political economy and the twenty-first century those views have led to. Three parts.
The text runs up to events of 2025. This is a translation of the author’s manuscript, which the Korean pages reproduce with only typos and verified factual slips corrected. 494 notes run through the text.