Below one will find the “Epilogue” I recently appended to my latest iteration of the bibliography on Comparative Philosophy.
“A comparative philosophy that is worthy of both its constitutive terms cannot be simply about comparison. Simply comparing philosophies but not comparing them philosophically will not do. This is why fusion philosophy decidedly demands of the comparative philosopher not to be satisfied with the role of the comparatist. The comparative philosopher should aim beyond comparison at a philosophical argument (strictly or loosely understood) that can stand on its own, that is, it does not rely on the distinctness of the comparanda. The borders that any comparison necessarily erects should not be left intact as if untouched. Fusion means that borders that separate are at least de-emphasized, perhaps even torn into tatters, but in any case transcended.” — From the “Afterword/Afterwards” by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber, co-editors of the volume Comparative Philosophy without Borders (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
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“There are recognizable barriers from which men have always sought to emancipate themselves, in order to obtain access to something, and appropriate something, that is conceived time and again in the ideas of freedom, joy, happiness, etc., which no cynical irony can expunge. The inexhaustible possibilities of human nature, which themselves increase with cultural progress, are the innermost material of all utopias, and moreover a very real, and in no way immaterial material at that. They inevitably lead to the desire to transform human life.” — Rudolf Bahro
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“The hypothesis proposed in Eunomia* suggests that a society constitutes itself not only in the form of law and legal institutions and not only in the real-world struggles, political and economic and personal, of everyday life, but also in society’s struggle about ideas. The self-constituting of the international society of the twenty-first century will be no different. The infrastructure of international social consciousness is now very substantial. [….] Among the ideas which help to constitute a society are ideas of a particular kind, ideas which have been referred to traditionally as ideals. Our ideals allow us to say what is wrong with our world and to imagine ways in which it could be made better, and they inspire us to want to make a better world. In the 1990s it was possible to see the emerging of something which might be construed as the universalizing of human ideals. The pathos of that development lies in the fact that it was accompanied by something which can only be called the universalization of social evil. [….]
Theory [and philosophy] is a form of practice, since practice at any given time inevitably takes the form which theory [or philosophy] makes available at any given time. We see the world in the form in which our ideas present the world to us. Since the world, the natural and the human world, is the arena of our action, our action is formed by the form of the world formed by our minds. We enact the drama which our minds have composed. We speak the language which is available to us, seeing our potentiality and our purposes in the reality which we are able to speak. To change our idea of our world, to speak about the world in a new way, is to change what our world will become. The road from the ideal to the actual lies, not merely in institutional novelties, or programmes and blueprints of social change, but also, and primarily, in a change of mind. A revolution in society is also and, above all, a revolution of the mind.
Eunomia suggests that a society forms itself through a three-in-one process of self-constituting, an unceasing interaction between ideas and practice and [after Seana Shiffrin, democratic] law, a society’s ideal, real, and legal constitutions. It follows that changes in any one of its forms of self-constituting affect the total process of a society’s self-constituting, and that large changes are liable to have large effects on that process. The history of human social progress suggests that new ideas have what may be called a prevenient effect on the self-constituting of society. New social theory [like utopian imagination and thought] cannot, by and in itself, cause a fundamental change in the institutional structure and the everyday practice of a society, social change being the effect of so many other causes, physical and organic, and practical, which go far beyond the self-contemplating of the human mind. What theory can do is to provide a framework into which social change flows, an available mould or matrix, enabling us to understand, to control, and to shape social change. Social philosophy cannot dictate the form of the new social institutions [hence Marx’s reluctance to specify the various components of a communist society in a manner that would satisfy social scientists and politicians, as well as impatient revolutionaries and reformers alike]. New social institutions arise as new social philosophy meets actual and potential social reality in a given society. New social philosophy is an organism waiting for life to be breathed into by new social [democratic] practice [which is participatory, deliberative, and representative]. New social practice needs new social philosophy to determine the form of its organic growth.
To change international social reality, we have to break the mould in which that reality has been formed. To take power over the future of international society, we have to take power over its self-constituting. To change the function and the functioning of the international social institutions which have been formed over recent centuries [largely thus not exclusively through the global entrenchment and incessant destabilizing, destructive, and demoralizing effects of the latest form of hyper-industrialized capitalism, which has finally and fully revealed itself as intrinsically hostile to equal liberties and freedom, humane and spiritual forms of community, as well as the natural world; undemocratic forms of political power have directly and indirectly aided and abetted these increasingly malign forces]. To take power over the social power which has caused so much social evil, so much human suffering over recent centuries, we have to use the form of power most readily available to us, the power of ideas. To bring order to the new world disorder which we have inherited from the twentieth century, we must use the ordering power of the human mind, its power to re-order its own order, and to bring order to disorder, the mind’s wonderful power to transcend itself and to cure itself.
And who are ‘we’? We are the people, nameless pawns in the game of diplomacy, human sacrifices in the rite of war. We are the people, permanent victims of the abuse of public and economic power—shackled in serfdom and slavery, herded like cattle into mines and factories and slums, into concentration camps and refugee-camps, driven at gun-point from our families and our homes, dehumanized by poverty and famine and disease, by the new slavery of consumerism and the mindless hedonism of popular culture. We are people with a permanent revolutionary possibility, the power to make a revolution, not in the streets [in which many of us would be slaughtered like factory farm animals] but in the mind. And the long journey of revolutionary change begins with a single revolutionary step. We can, if we wish, choose the human future. We, the people, can say what the human future will be, and what it will not be.” — Philip Allott, Eunomia: New Order for a New World (Oxford University Press, 2001)
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Epilogue (to the bibliography on comparative philosophy)
Comparative philosophy can be more than a well-motivated philosophical, intellectual, and theoretical or speculative exercise, more than just a genuine “meeting of minds,” however significant that alone happens to be within the conditions of multiculturalism and pluralism, conditions defined and shaped by religious and secular worldviews in conjunction with cultural and political traditions and philosophies, conditions conspicuous for the perseverance of varying degrees of episodic and intransigent conflict that at times descends into famine, war or genocide. In other words, on occasion comparative philosophy can be part of if not central to a utopian or idealistic endeavor in the best sense, one with cosmopolitan pretensions that have profound and far-reaching political consequences capable of transcending the moral weaknesses and limits of political realism and raison d’état, thereby achieving a Rawlsian-like “overlapping consensus” with world-historical ramifications, as was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this instance, comparative philosophy was in some respects an unintentional by-product of the Human Rights Commission which met with and overcame considerable skepticism, uncertainties, and various obstacles that arose from “facts on the ground” (including great power politics and anti-colonialism):
“Was it really possible for a fledgling organization to produce a document acceptable to delegates from all the countries in a constantly expanding United Nations? By 1948, when the Declaration was put to a vote, the United Nations had fifty-eight member states containing four-fifths of the world’s population—twenty two from the Americas, sixteen from Europe, five from Asia, eight from the Near and Middle East, four from Africa, and three from Oceania. Could any values be said to be common to all of them? What did it mean to speak of certain rights as universal?
Anticipating such questions, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recruited some of the leading thinkers of the day for a Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights. This blue-ribbon panel, chaired by Cambridge historian E.H. Carr, included University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon as rapporteur and French social philosopher Jacques Maritain, who became one of its most active members. In January 1947, as this group was coming together, UNESCO’s director, noted scientist Julian Huxley, had sent the poet Archibald MacLeish to the Human Rights Commission’s Lake Success meeting to apprise the commissioners of UNESCO’s interest in their work and its desire ‘to be as useful as possible.’ The philosophers’ group began its work in March by sending a questionnaire to statesmen and scholars around the world—including such notables as Mohandas Gandhi, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Benedetto Croce, Aldous Huxley, and Salvador de Madariaga—soliciting their views on the idea of a universal declaration of human rights. [….]
In 1948 the framers of the Universal Declaration achieved a distinctive synthesis of previous thinking about rights and duties. After canvassing sources from North and South, East and West [emphasis added], they believed they had found a core of principles so basic that no nation would want to openly disavow them [the General Assembly of the UN eventually adopted the Declaration without a single dissenting vote]. They wove these principles into a unifying document that quickly displaced all antecedents as the principle model for the rights instruments in force in the world today. [….]
The story of the parent document of the human rights movement [i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is the story of a group of men and women who learned to cooperate effectively despite political differences, cultural barriers, and personal rivalries. It is an account of their attempt to bring forth from the ashes of unspeakable wrongs a new era in the history of rights. [….] [It] is to a large extent the story of a journey undertaken by an extraordinary group of men and women who rose to the challenge of a unique historical moment. The brief interlude between the end of World War II and the definitive collapse of the Soviet-American alliance lasted just barely long enough to permit major international institutions such as the UN and the World Bank to be established and for the framers of the Universal Declaration to complete their task. The members of the Human Rights Commission were well aware that they were engaged in a race against time: around them, relations between Russia and the West were deteriorating, the Berlin blockade raised the specter of another world war, the Palestinian question divided world opinion, and conflict broke out in Greece, Korea and China. [….] They had to surmount linguistic, cultural, and political differences and overcame personal animosities as they strove to articulate a diverse set of principles with worldwide applicability. [….]
With the exception of Eleanor Roosevelt, most of the members of the committee that shaped the Declaration are now little remembered outside their home countries. Yet they included some of the most able and colorful public figures of their time: Carlos Romulo, the Filipino journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles predicting the end of colonialism; John P. Humphrey, the dedicated Canadian director of the UN’s Human Rights Division, who prepared the preliminary draft of the Declaration; Hansa Mehta of India, who made sure the Declaration spoke with power and clarity about equal rights for women before they were recognized in most legal systems; Alexei Pavlov, the brilliant nephew of the conditioned-reflex scientist, who had to go the extra verst [the Russian equivalent of the ‘extra mile’] to dispel suspicions that he was still bourgeois; and Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz, an impassioned man of the Left who helped assure that social and economic rights would have pride of place in the Declaration along with political and civil liberties.
Among the Declaration’s framers, four in particular played crucial roles: Peng-chun Chang, the Chinese philosopher, diplomat, and playwright who was adept at translating across cultural divides; Nobel Peace Prize laureate René Cassin, the legal genius of the Free French, who transformed what might have been a mere list or ‘bill’ of rights into a geodesic dome of interlocking principles; Charles Malik [a Lebanese academic, diplomat, philosopher, and politician], existentialist philosopher turned master-diplomat, a student of Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger, who steered the Declaration to adoption by the UN General Assembly in the tense cold war atmosphere of 1948; and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose prestige and personal qualities enabled her to influence key decisions of the country that had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. Chang, Cassin, Malik, and Roosevelt were the right people at the right time. But for the unique gifts of each of these four, the Declaration might never have seen the light of day. [….]
For everyone who is tempted to despair of the possibility of crossing today’s ideological divides, there is still much to learn from Eleanor Roosevelt’s firm but irenic manner of dealing with her Soviet antagonists; and from the serious but respectful rivalry between Lebanon’s Charles Malik and China’s Peng-chun Chang. There is much to ponder in the working relationship between Malik, a chief spokesman for the Arab League, and René Cassin, an ardent supporter of a Jewish homeland, who lost twenty-nine relatives in concentration camps. When one considers that two world wars and mass slaughters of innocents had given the framers every reason to despair about the human condition, it is hard to remain unmoved by their determination to help make the postwar world a better and safer place.” — Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, 2001)
As Jack Donnelly has argued, this international consensus on human rights came about as (or prefigured) something much like—if not identical to—John Rawls’s later idea of an “overlapping consensus,” which provides a “descriptively accurate and morally attractive explanation” of how this particular international legal agreement emerged as a definitive expression of the “normative universality of human rights” (of course Rawls envisioned the possibility of this overlapping consensus arising on the political terrain of a liberal democratic nation-state, not in the international arena of nation-states). In other words, individuals and states, arguing from the premises of or taking a perspective generated from within their different “comprehensive doctrines” or religious and secular worldviews, were able to arrive at a consensual endorsement of the model of human rights embodied in the Universal Declaration, and thus this groundbreaking international human rights instrument was not founded upon or derived from any one particular religious or secular philosophy or worldview or “comprehensive doctrine.” This is one inspiring and ennobling exemplification of comparative philosophy enlisted on behalf of exemplary (and cosmopolitan) political and emancipatory values and purposes for the general benefit or welfare and well-being of individuals and humanity itself.
In addition to the Glendon title cited above, please see Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 2003) as well as Johannes Morsink’s The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). For further research, one might consult my bibliography, Human Rights: Philosophical, Legal, and Political Perspectives.
* “In Greek mythology, Eunomia was a minor goddess of law and legislation (her name can be translated as ‘good order,’ ‘governance according to good laws’), as well as the spring-time goddess of green pastures (eû means ‘well, good’ in Greek, and nómos, means ‘law,’ while pasturelands are called nomia).”
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