This comparison of Eastern and Western civilization began with East and West (동양과 서양), published by Jisik Sanup in 1993. Understanding the Rise of China followed in the United States in 2000, and East and West: Taoism vs Judaism in 2002. The book on Taoism and Judaism was published in Polish translation in Poland in 2015, and in Chinese translation in China in 2017. For six years, from 2013 to 2019, the author taught a course on “A Study of Eastern and Western Civilizations” at the Graduate School of International Studies of Yonsei University. Students from Korea, China, the rest of East Asia, Europe and the United States took part, and much of what we discussed in class has found its way into this book.
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 civilization 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 civilizations, comparing them meant nothing. Then, at the end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gama found a direct sea route, and exchange between the civilizations of East and West began. In the seventeenth century Leibniz placed great hopes in Eastern civilization. He saw the two civilizations 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 civilizations 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.
But after the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, as the West came to dominate the world, this generous view disappeared. Western philosophers put forward new theories and led the way in “degrading” Eastern civilization. Hegel “systematized” the world’s civilizations by how far their spirit had developed. Eastern civilization, with its low level of spirit, had in his philosophy never left the earliest stage of world history, while Western civilization, which put spirit and freedom first, stood at its head. Many agreed with Hegel’s philosophy of history and fell under Hegelianism, a way of thinking that placed the East below the West as a civilization.
An exception then arose in a Western-centered paradigm that had lasted some two or three centuries. In the late twentieth century East Asia achieved economic growth remarkable enough to rival the West. With it came a growing interest, in the West as well as in the East, in East Asian civilization and its political and economic systems. As the rise of the East has continued into the twenty-first century, that interest has only grown. Now that the earth has become one world, comparing the civilizations of East and West has become essential for the future.
Comparing Eastern and Western civilization is full of difficulties. A grand narrative invites objections, interpretations and rival theories. Many readers may object that this book divides and simplifies Eastern and Western thought too sharply into two. Such an approach can seem to overlook the complexity and diversity of both civilizations and to do too little justice to the debates and changes within each. It may also be said that the book explains too little of how Western systems of thought were the fruit of efforts to reach ideal ends. The criticism that, to explain the fundamental difference in thought between the two civilizations, it confines the features and concepts of Western philosophy within a particular frame and then criticizes them, is also fair. Dichotomous simplification, narrow interpretations of concepts, its reading of human nature, the limits of Western institutions and of the theories behind them, and the comparison of revealed religion with natural philosophy may all be named as this book’s main weaknesses.1
Even so, for all the weaknesses of dichotomy and simplification, we cannot go on avoiding the comparison of Eastern and Western civilization. When we begin to compare them, we must leave behind the Hegelian, Western-centered point of view. The two civilizations differ in essence: in how they see the cosmos and nature, in their cosmologies, in how they interpret human affairs. Hegelian opposition falls into the error of analyzing one civilization while standing inside the other. Since the Industrial Revolution the world has lived in an age of Western expansion, and in that age such Hegelian theories were in fashion. But the twenty-first century is an age in which East and West mix as equals. What it needs is not Hegelian opposition but a worldview of complementarity like that of Leibniz.
There are many ways to explain the concepts that represent the civilizations of East and West. The most convincing is to see them as expressions of the instinct of self-preservation with which human beings met the geopolitical environments in which East and West found themselves: to see them, that is, as the workings of the human nature we all possess. Seen this way, the thought and philosophy of the two civilizations show us two possibilities of what human beings are capable of.
As we function as human beings, depending on the situation we sometimes show the traits of Easterners and sometimes those of Westerners.2
If we were to name the strengths of the two civilizations, we might point to the West’s enterprise and the East’s inclusiveness. From Greek and Roman times to the Industrial Revolution and the age of world conquest, Western civilization has made enterprise its strength. The East, through inclusiveness, has successfully managed relations between individuals and between states. Not forcing its own ways on others, not being drawn into wars of religion or of ideology: this inclusiveness is the strength of Eastern civilization. Each of us has both inclusiveness and enterprise, and depending on the times and on our own circumstances we use both. Let us now look at these traits.