ABSTRACT
In this chapter, it has been argued that Adam Smith and Confucius are philosophically concerned with emotions and make emotions a cornerstone of their social philosophy. Smith’s and Confucius’ approaches can be considered similar, are based on the moral self-development of individuals in a society. These respective philosophies see in emotions the link from the individual towards society, considering that social harmony is essential and inherent to the system. It has also been argued that there are two differences between the philosophers.
Although both acknowledge emotions and sympathy to be pivotal for the individual as well as for social morality, Confucius considers ren to be the origin of emotion and life. Based thereon, he develops an original ontological approach. Smith, on the other hand, has no such aspirations. Although moral sentiments can be read as ontological facts as well as epistemic conditions, he does not see them separated from human life as such or from society. He also does not provide the mechanism to explain how sentiments necessarily link individuals to society. Smith’s solution for achieving social harmony – an interest that runs throughout his various works – includes the use of prudence and what we generally call intuition; Smith called it sympathy and the impartial spectator. Does this make Liu’s (2010) argument wrong? Considering that Liu was
contrasting Confucian moral ontology with ‘Western’ thought in general, the point made in this paper does not falsify Liu’s main theme, whereby ‘Western’ philosophy opts for a ‘rationalist’ approach in social philosophy, while Confucians opt for an ‘emotional’ path. Holding to this frame of interpretation, this chapter has drawn attention toAdam Smith’s philosophy as possibly unique and as similar to Confucian thinking. This does not challenge Liu’s argument concerning ‘Western’ thought, but explains an exception to his overall considerations. There may be, however, another point in answering to Liu’s thesis. By focusing
this argument on one philosopher’s work, this chapter has opted for a methodological approach to comparative philosophy based on individual concepts and their similarities. Liu chose another concept: comparing general traits attributed to ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ philosophy. His approach is prone to three different types of difficulty. First, at an ontological level, Liu’s approach might entail the claim of a ‘unifying entity’ that makes ‘western’philosophy ‘Western’ and ‘eastern’ philosophy ‘Eastern’. This, however, leads to the task of identifying and proving the existence of this ‘unifying entity’; a task that might seem too difficult to fulfil. The comparison of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy can also take a less problematic path by claiming only an epistemic similarity within both groups. Still, this might be too difficult to hold, since there is little epistemic similarity between, for example, the logical-analytical philosophy of Saul Kripke and the thinking of Plato. Depending on what ‘Eastern’ is supposed to mean, it seems difficult to subsume India’s Vedic philosophy into the same group as Chinese Mohism (see Harrison 2013). The third type of difficulty may be encountered even by the weakest claim, namely a practical separation of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ for the sake of schematization or simplicity. Here again, the criteria for such can be critically challenged. Even if creating such groups is practical, there still is the
need to describe how it advances research, especially since the outcomes of such a research cannot be extrapolated to the whole group, since the groups are created artificially. For example: even if ‘Chinese Philosophy’ is a practical label, finding out that some ‘Chinese philosophers’ believed in the Way does not allow for a generalization of the sort ‘all (or most) Chinese philosophers believe in the Way’. The methodology of this chapter, however, addresses this last difficulty.
Claiming some sort of practical similarity is useful, if it is taken simply as a point of departure. Comparative philosophy would, therefore, mean comparing two (or more) philosophers (or even two ideas) of different philosophical backgrounds, whereby assigning a background to the authors would base on the practical criteria grouping them. The outcomes of a comparison, however, cannot be extrapolated to the whole background. The outcomes are only valid in the direct comparison of the authors; the practical criteria are just employed as ‘background identifiers’. By applying this methodology, comparative philosophy would avoid ontic or epistemic generalizations and therefore would lose much of its ambition, but it gains in insight and granularity by directing research to deeper analysis, gaining, thus, in academic rigour.
