It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, seriously to practise philosophy without finding oneself drawn to thinking about meta-philosophical questions: questions such as ‘What does it mean to practise philosophy?’, ‘What are the goals of philosophy?’, or, even more basically, ‘What is philosophy?’. To ask these kinds of questions is to engage in what might be called the philosophy of philosophy. Interest in such meta-philosophical questions invites investigation of a range of world philosophical traditions. The approach to meta-philosophical questions adopted here involves considering the deep conceptual structures underlying the ways in which the sense of what it is to know something is brought to conceptualization within different intellectual and cultural traditions. My hope is that this approach will open up a framework for discussion that will shed genuine light on the global philosophy of philosophy, and thereby contribute to the development of a genuinely inter-cultural form of the philosophy of religion.
What does it mean to practise philosophy? In attempting to provide an answer to this question it is easy to be distracted by the Greek origin of the English word ‘philosophy’. Philosophia denoted something very specific in the early Western intellectual tradition – love of wisdom – and we lack clear analogues of this term within the pre-modern intellectual traditions of East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Nonetheless, the kind of intellectual activity that the early Western philosophers engaged in was surely not dependent on the use of a specific term to describe it. It would therefore be unwarranted to conclude that no philosophical activity was taking place in regions where, and during times when, this particular term was not in use. On the other hand, it seems unnecessary to argue that ‘philosophers’ in different parts of the world, and during different eras, were doing exactly the same thing when they practised philosophy. Philosophy looks different in different parts of the world and in different historical periods (we can see this even in our own day if we consider the different styles of philosophy that are often casually referred to as analytic and continental), so we should not set out on our inquiry into what it means to practise philosophy with the expectation of finding lovers of wisdom in the Greek sense within non-Western traditions.
I will argue that different conceptual metaphors underlie the practice of philosophy within different cultures and that appreciating this can illuminate the marked differences in the philosophies that we find within those cultures. A conceptual metaphor is a metaphor that has a structural effect on our thought, experience, and on our everyday activity. In this article I focus on conceptual metaphors that structure our understanding of what it is to know something because the notion of knowledge lies at the heart of philosophical activity wherever it is found. In what follows I draw attention to a way of conceptualizing what it is to know something that lies at the core of the Western philosophical tradition and I suggest that, while this conception is also found in the Indian tradition, it stands in sharp contrast to the dominant conceptualization of knowledge found in traditional East Asian philosophies.Footnote 1
My argument draws on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on conceptual metaphors (1980 and 1999). They have claimed that we understand something metaphorically when we understand it in terms of a structure borrowed from our understanding of something else that is more directly accessible to us. My core claim will be that the concept of knowledge is metaphorically structured, but so is the activity of knowing and the language that we use to talk about that activity. Before proceeding with my own argument, in the following section, I provide a brief account of conceptual metaphor theory.
Conceptual metaphor theory
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that conceptual metaphors (these are sometimes also referred to as ‘cognitive metaphors’) play a significant and irreplaceable role in the way we think and that vast areas of our language are structured by them. In their influential book entitled Metaphors We Live By (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980), they seek to undermine the widely held view that literal language is primary and that metaphorical language is dependent upon it. Indeed, they go further than this in arguing that what many people take to be literal language actually only functions within a conceptual system that is deeply structured by metaphor. They make the bold claim that: ‘[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (ibid., 3). Given these convictions, it is unsurprising that Lakoff and Johnson insist that the notion of metaphor should be recognized as a central philosophical concept.Footnote 2 It is the key, they claim, to comprehending how conceptual systems are related to our experience, and to how understanding emerges from this relationship.
Lakoff and Johnson's primary interest is in our conceptual systems – in other words, in the ‘concepts that structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people’ (ibid.). They assume that we cannot simply look inward and thereby study our conceptual system, but that it can nonetheless be studied indirectly by means of the language we habitually use. Because our language, they claim, is based upon our conceptual system, the structure of our language provides evidence regarding the structure of that conceptual system. The linguistic evidence, they maintain, establishes ‘that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature’ (ibid., 4). A tenet of the cognitive linguistic approach pioneered by Lakoff and Johnson is that the processes of human cognition are independent of language use and so what we can observe in the way a language is used are ‘merely the surface manifestations of deeper cognitive processes’ (Slingerland (Reference Slingerland2004), 9).
The force of Lakoff and Johnson's argument largely derives from the many examples they provide in support of their view. One of the most compelling, and widely discussed, of these examples is the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR.Footnote 3 Lakoff and Johnson deploy this metaphor to explain their understanding of what conceptual metaphors are and how they function. They begin by drawing attention to a variety of commonly used expressions in English that are subsidiary to the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR and which, themselves, form part of our ordinary way of talking about arguments. Consider, for example: ‘Your claims are indefensible’; ‘He attacked every weak point in my argument’; ‘His criticisms were right on target’; ‘He shot down all of my arguments’. Commenting on these common ways of speaking, they claim:
It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument – attack, defense, counterattack, etc. – reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing. (Lakoff & Johnson (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980), 4)
In understanding arguments in terms of war, then, we stipulate what arguments consist in within a particular intellectual culture. Anyone who did not employ this metaphor (whether reflectively or unreflectively) would not experience ‘arguments’ in the way that those who employ the metaphor clearly do. In fact, such a person would be unable to engage in arguments as they are conceived within such a culture.
Hence, Lakoff and Johnson aver, the activity of arguing and the experience one has while doing it are metaphorically structured. Without the metaphor one cannot engage in the activity, and hence one cannot have the experience that goes with it. It is because conceptual metaphors, like ARGUMENT IS WAR, have the function of structuring our thought, activity, and experience, that metaphor cannot simply constitute the peripheral feature of our language use that traditional theories of metaphor had presumed.Footnote 4 On the contrary, if Lakoff and Johnson are correct, conceptual metaphors consist in structuring concepts that control whole networks of our thought and activity. Moreover, there are numerous conceptual metaphors, and together they structure most of what we think, say, and do. Only within such networks, Lakoff and Johnson argue, does literal language function.
Lakoff and Johnson insist that a large number of our activities are ‘metaphorical’; in other words, our performance of those activities is structured by metaphor. In the following section, we shall see that the practice of philosophy can be illuminated by regarding it as one of these metaphorically structured activities.
Conceptual metaphors and philosophical practices
Lakoff and Johnson make the key claim that we can understand the sense in which reason is universal if we consider it as a capacity shared by all normally functioning human beings (like the capacity for language). The capacity to use reason is thought to be grounded in commonalities in the way our minds are embodied (Lakoff & Johnson (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999), 4). Moreover, they argue that, as a result of our common bodies, brains, and environments, ‘much of a person's conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures’ (ibid., 6). Humans employ this capacity to use reason in a number of ways that are informed by the different conceptual metaphors they use to perform the abstract processes of thinking and understanding. So, following Lakoff and Johnson, we can say that while the human capacity for reason is universal, reason is exemplified in practice by means of different metaphors that have a structuring role on conceptual systems.
Conceptual metaphor theory is closely associated with (some would say ‘based upon’) a theory known as ‘embodied realism’, the core idea of which is that conceptual metaphors arise out of embodied minds. The similarity of human bodies, physical environments, and experience gives rise to similar primary conceptual metaphors. All normally functioning humans, irrespective of their culture, share the same core range of experiences: visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic, and kinaesthetic. Such basic similarities at the embodied experiential level can be expected to have an impact on abstract thought. Conceptual metaphor theorists argue that primary conceptual schemas arise from these very fundamental and universal forms of embodied experience. Visual experience, for example, yields a whole complex of metaphors concerning sight, while, as I will explain later, locomotive experience yields a different but related set of metaphors focused on finding one's way.Footnote 5
With respect to the practice of philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson's key contention is that:
In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take. (ibid., 7)
Given conceptual metaphor theory, we would expect to find that philosophizing, wherever and whenever it occurs, is a complex activity structured by a range of (not necessarily consistent) metaphors. My view is that different world philosophical traditions have developed and matured around particular conceptual metaphors, giving rise to distinctive conceptions of both the practice and the goal of philosophy (see Harrison (Reference Harrison2012), 178–183). Exploring these metaphors involves looking at the way language is used in various philosophical cultures, but the concern in doing so is not primarily to understand the ways in which language is used to express metaphors. Rather, particular patterns of language are investigated and deployed to provide windows onto the basic cognitive processes that ground philosophical practices. If conceptual metaphor theory is broadly correct, we can get access to these processes by attending to what our language reveals about the structure of our thought.
In what follows I focus on two conceptual metaphors: KNOWING IS SEEING and, more briefly, KNOWING THE WAY (or, to express it in an expanded and more obviously metaphorical formulation, KNOWING IS KNOWING THE WAY). As I will explain, each of these metaphors is grounded in universal human experience and each generates a network of linguistic expressions. These expressions are clustered into what we might identify as families – in which the expressions are related through a common conceptual schema. I will first consider KNOWING IS SEEING – a metaphor that is directly related to the traditional Western conception of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom, a central component of which was thought to be the attainment of a particular breadth and quality of vision (see Hadot (Reference Hadot, Davidson and Chase1995)).
KNOWING IS SEEING
Conceptual metaphor theorists regard KNOWING IS SEEING as a primary metaphor because it is based in our common human visual experience. The importance that this metaphor assumes in our understanding of what it is to know something is underwritten by the origin of the metaphor in this core human experience of vision. In fact, learning about the world through our visual faculties is universal and fundamental to all normally functioning human beings, irrespective of their cultural background or the time in which they live or lived. Wherever one is from in the world, a fundamental aspect of one's experience will be visual. Because of this universal dimension we would expect to find the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor at play in all cultural and philosophical traditions (see Billeter (Reference Billeter and Galey1984)). With respect to the Western tradition, Lakoff and Johnson note that:
The Knowing Is Seeing metaphor defines the core of a folk theory about how the mind works that is so widely shared in our intellectual tradition that it virtually defines our public understanding of intellectual operations. That this conceptual metaphor should be so pervasive makes perfectly good sense, given that vision plays such a crucial role in so much of our knowledge of our world. (Lakoff & Johnson (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999), 394)
As explained earlier, according to conceptual metaphor theory, the structuring role of a primary metaphor in our deep cognitive processes is indicated by clusters of metaphorical expression. These are not just fixed linguistic conventions but are markers of largely unconscious conceptual structures. It should not surprise us then that, as Lakoff and Johnson point out: ‘Our language about mental activity is thus pervaded with expressions based on this underlying vision metaphor’ (ibid., 394). Consider a small sample of the linguistic markers in common use that indicate the structuring role of the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor in the way we think and talk about knowledge in English.
Light of reason
Clarity (a quality of light, of an argument, of an idea)
Clear ideas, clear writing
Illuminating ideas
Shed light on
Enlightening, enlightenment
View something in the light of
Perspective, angle, viewpoint (a person is looking from somewhere)
I see what you are saying
Bring an idea into focus
Discover a theory
Philosophical insight
All of these expressions, and many others, point to the tight conceptual connection between knowledge and vision embedded within Western and, as I will soon explain, Indian philosophies. What it is to know something, within these philosophical traditions, is conceptualized by means of an understanding of knowledge that is based on the more directly accessible experience of visual perception.
Conceptual metaphor theorists claim that, as a general principle, we understand abstract aspects of our experience by means of mapping them onto domains of experience which are more concrete. Knowing is an abstract activity and it is difficult to articulate in literal language what we are doing when we know (compare the difficulty incurred when we try to talk about our emotions: we might find ourselves resorting to terms like ‘warm’, ‘cold’, or ‘hot’ to describe our feelings). According to conceptual metaphor theorists, we can map abstract activities, such as knowing, onto more concrete ones. This both gives a structure to our abstract activities and provides us with ways to talk about them. When we use the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor we unconsciously structure our mental activity as if it were the concrete activity of visual perception (recall how understanding argument according to the metaphor of war shapes the practice of it – what counts as success, and so on). Lakoff and Jonson conclude that:
The Knowing Is Seeing metaphor is so firmly rooted in the role of vision in human knowing and is so central to our conception of knowledge that we are seldom aware of the way it works powerfully to structure our sense of what it is to know something. It is the commonality and experiential grounding of this ubiquitous metaphor that makes it an ideal candidate for sophisticated philosophical elaboration in a wide variety of theories of mind and knowledge. (ibid.)
The mapping of the abstract domain of knowing onto the more concrete domain of seeing within a sophisticated philosophical system can be seen especially clearly in Descartes's epistemology (see Descartes (Reference Descartes, Haldane and Ross1970)). In analysing the deep structure of Descartes's conceptualization of knowledge, Lakoff and Johnson map items within the domain of knowledge onto items within the visual domain as follows (Lakoff & Johnson (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999), 393–394):
As explained, above, KNOWING IS SEEING is a primary metaphor (and hence is so widely shared) because it is based in our common human visual experience. It can be elaborated in a rich variety of ways into complex philosophical systems, of which Descartes's is just one particularly clear example.
Lakoff and Johnson's discussion, as we have seen, is focused on Western philosophy. However, the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor was also important within the various Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophies that developed on the Indian subcontinent (see McMahan (Reference McMahan2002) ). This is the explanation for the close conceptual affinity often remarked upon between Indian and Western philosophies: within both philosophical families the conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING plays a key structuring role.
A frequent motif within pre-modern Indian philosophies is that of the veil which interferes with our perception of what is ultimately real. The basic conceptual connection between knowing and seeing also ramifies into the way truth is often discussed in terms of covering or uncovering aspects of reality (depending on whether the truth being referred to is ultimate, which uncovers, or conventional, which covers). For instance, one common Mahāyāna Buddhist term for ‘conventional truth’ is saṃvṛti. This derives from the verbal root meaning to ‘cover, screen, veil, conceal, hide, surround or obstruct’. Conventional truth is taken to be truth about the world as we experience it, not as it really is; the idea is that conventional truth can serve to conceal what is actually the case. Moreover, most Indian philosophical traditions regard ignorance as a fundamental philosophical problem, and ignorance is often described in terms of illusions. Our mental illusions are clearly being understood in terms of more concrete, and hence more readily describable, physical ones.
Furthermore, the Sanskrit word darśana – which literally means ‘perspective’, but is often translated into English as ‘school’ (as in philosophical school) – is derived from the verbal root ‘to see’. In the earliest traditions of India the philosophical model was the ancient seer, a person whose vision was thought to be reflected in the Vedic literature. Consequently, a widely held view was that philosophy was practised in order to clear away the obstacles to a true vision of the genuine reality lying behind the way things appear to us. Given that the philosopher's goal was to arrive at the correct perspective (darśana) from which things could be seen as they really are, philosophical disagreement in Indian traditions focused on the issue of which perspective was the most revealing: epistemology thus was of paramount importance within most Indian philosophical systems. Testing rival philosophical perspectives in the open context of public debate, not surprisingly, became central to the practice of philosophy in classical India (see Ganeri (Reference Ganeri2001)). The culmination of this trend was the development by Jain philosophers of a logical method which sought to incorporate apparently rival perspectives within a larger vision.
In Sanskrit the term for knowledge, vidya, means both to know and to see. Likewise, not to know, avidya, amounts to not being able to see. The term avidya is often translated as ‘ignorance’ or ‘delusion’. These Sanskrit words are connected to the Latin videre through a common Indo-European root, weid, meaning ‘to see, to know truly’ (the same applies to the Pāli equivalents of these Sanskrit words). The English words ‘vision’ and ‘wisdom’ are also derived from weid (see McMahan (Reference McMahan2002), 57). A cognate derivation led to the Greek term eidos, which came into English as ‘idea’. Such linguistic evidence indicates just how deeply embedded is the link between knowing and seeing within both Western and Indian conceptual systems, derived as they both are from a common proto-Indo-European root.
While Indian and Western philosophies are typically structured by the same primary metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, they nonetheless often seem very different in practice.Footnote 6 To explain this we can appeal to wider cultural differences as well as to Pierre Hadot's well-known analysis of the bifurcation which took place within Western philosophy when, under the influence of Christianity, it lost its practical dimension and was left with only the domain of theory (Hadot (Reference Hadot, Davidson and Chase1995)). Had this bifurcation not occurred, it seems likely that later Western philosophies would have retained even more similarities than they actually do to traditional Indian philosophies – many of which still consisted of fusions of theory and practice into the modern era. Despite this important difference, consideration of the shared conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING indicates that a common sense of what it is to know something underlies the various more or less elaborate philosophical theories of knowledge that emerged within both Indian and Western thought. This similarity at the deep structural level suggests that philosophy of religion, although it developed with an exclusive focus on Western religion, could easily be expanded to include Indian philosophical traditions within its ambit. Indeed, Buddhist philosophy now frequently appears within courses on the philosophy of religion.
While the conceptual affinity between many Western and Indian philosophies is difficult to deny, it is also frequently observed that the traditional philosophies which developed in East Asia are strikingly different from those found in the West. Traditional Chinese philosophies of the classical era (that is, until approximately 200 bce) do not seem to be rooted in the conceptual system that Indian and Western philosophies share. The lack of a basic common conceptual system makes inter-cultural philosophical work extremely difficult even today, and explains why Chinese material so rarely appears within courses or books on the philosophy of religion (there is a much deeper issue here than the fact that the concept of God does not play a central role within classical Chinese philosophies, for the same can be said of the Indian traditions).
The extent of the conceptual dissimilarity between traditional Chinese and traditional Western and Indian thought can be disguised by the translation of classical Chinese texts into European languages. However, there is a growing sensitivity to the fact that the real problem is not one of translation, whether of classical Chinese into modern Chinese or of either of these into European languages. Translation is, of course, important; but it is even more vital to seek to understand the conceptual structure underlying the classical philosophical texts. There is now wide agreement that the Sinitic conceptual structure is different in key respects from that conceptual structure underlying Western and Indian philosophical traditions. As the Sinologist and philosopher Brook Ziporyn (Reference Ziporyn2012) has recently observed, if basic concepts, such as ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, have different ranges of meaning within Chinese and Western thought, then – until this is understood – cross-cultural philosophical understanding will be seriously compromised.
One explanation for the real differences at the level of conceptual system between classical Chinese philosophies and those of the West and India might be that in East Asia the basic sense of what it is to know something, which sophisticated philosophical theories elaborated upon, was structured by a different primary conceptual metaphor than the one which, as I have shown, structured the sense of what it is to know something prevalent in Western and Indian traditions (see also Slingerland (Reference Slingerland2004, Reference Slingerland2006, Reference Slingerland2011)).
Nonetheless, because, as explained above, the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor arises from universal human experience, we would expect to find it at play in all major intellectual traditions. It should not surprise us then to find that this metaphor is also present within Chinese conceptualizations of knowledge (see Ghiglione (Reference Ghiglione2010)). As Edward Slingerland notes, in classical Chinese traditions, ‘[i]gnorance, for instance, is often analogized to not being able to distinguish black from white and compared to blindness, while (in contrast) a common metaphor for the sort of understanding that accompanies wu-wei activity is ming (“illumination”; “clarity”; brightness”)’ (Slingerland (Reference Slingerland2006), 287 n. 3). Let me now draw attention, then, to a few obvious linguistic indicators of the ongoing presence of the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor within Chinese thought. The following commonly used Chinese characters and character combinations reveal a conceptual connection between light, vision, and understanding.
However, despite abundant linguistic evidence for the conceptual connection between vision (light) and understanding within Chinese thought, KNOWING IS SEEING plays a secondary role to a different primary structuring metaphor, one that arises from another basic and universal human experience. A clue to what this metaphor might be is found in another extremely high-frequency Chinese character combination:
知 (zhī) by itself can mean ‘know’ but it is most frequently used in combination with 道, dào – way, path, method (or, if used as a verb, speak, say, tell). The absence of 日 (rì, sun) from this character combination clearly suggests that the kind of knowledge at issue here is not principally a matter of abstract discernment (it does not require intellectual vision). There is no implicit appeal to the connection between knowledge, light, and vision; instead, we are pointed in the direction of a different way of knowing.
KNOWING THE WAY
Given conceptual metaphor theory, we would expect to find that in East Asia – as in India and the West – the sense of what it is to know something will have been brought to conceptualization metaphorically. Folk theories about knowledge as well as various more sophisticated philosophical theories will have been informed by a metaphorical conceptualization of what it is to know. Whatever the characteristics of the central conceptual metaphor for knowledge deployed within Chinese culture, we would expect it to structure ways of thinking about knowledge, and by extension ways of practising philosophy, that are widely shared by those within this culture.
Discussing the classical Chinese philosophical material, and drawing on the earlier work of David Hall and Roger Ames (Reference Hall and Ames1998), Edward Slingerland contrasts two models of knowledge, one typically Western (relying on the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor) and the other typically Chinese:
Thus, in place of the representational model of knowledge exemplified by the ‘gaze’ of the subject acquiring theoretical knowledge of an eternal order behind the phenomenal world, the Chinese instead emphasize the sort of knowledge appropriate to a subject already engaged in the world through the medium of ‘the act’. This is the import of David Hall and Roger Ames's well-known contention that thinking (si 思) in the Analects is ‘not to be understood as a process of abstract reasoning, but is fundamentally performative in that it is an activity whose immediate consequence is the achievement of a practical result’. (Slingerland (Reference Slingerland2006), 4)
In his work with the classical Chinese texts, Slingerland sought to identify a primary conceptual metaphor that functions within the Chinese intellectual context in the same comprehensive way that the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor functions within Western (and, I would add, Indian) thought (ibid., 5). In elaborating what he takes to be the typically Chinese way of conceptualizing what it is to know something, Slingerland focuses on the conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS ACTING. This leads him to examine the notion of perfected action, which, in the context of Chinese intellectual traditions, he argues, should be interpreted as effortless action, wu wei.
I agree with Slingerland's general approach; nonetheless it strikes me that it should be possible to identify within classical Chinese traditions an even more basic metaphor by which to understand knowing than KNOWING IS ACTING. Acting is not as closely linked to our basic sensory experience as seeing (or hearing, which has also been exploited metaphorically in a variety of cultural contexts), and this indicates that there may another primary metaphor that is cognitively prior to KNOWING IS ACTING. I suggest that we look for a cognitive metaphor, and recall that this is not primarily a linguistic question, that is grounded directly in the universal experience of locomotion. Given the dominance of the notion of Dao道 in East Asian intellectual traditions, it seems natural to suggest that the conceptual metaphor we seek is KNOWING THE WAY.
If what it is to know something is predominantly conceptualized by means of a metaphor that maps knowing onto the more basic human experience of moving, finding one's way, then the ideal state of knowing might be aptly characterized, using Slingerland's term, as ‘perfected action’. As Slingerland remarks, for the early Chinese thinkers,
the culmination of knowledge is understood not in terms of a grasp of abstract principles but rather as an ability to move through the world and human society in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet still fully in harmony with the normative order of the natural and human worlds – the Dao 道 or ‘Way’. (ibid., 4)
In spite of the rich variety of philosophies that flourished within early China (the late-classical period is sometimes referred to as the period of ‘one hundred schools’), it is possible to make the general claim that early Chinese philosophers, unlike many of their counterparts in Greece and India, sought a way of living within this world rather than knowledge of a supposedly deeper impersonal reality behind the world of our experience. In classical China, the philosopher's model was the Sage-King: a highly cultivated person who combined personal virtue and the ability to rule well. Although different schools of thought developed their own more or less theoretical characterizations of it, the philosophers of classical China were united in following the Way. (For an influential study of ‘Dao’ in Chinese thought, see Hansen (Reference Hansen1992).) This ubiquitous emphasis within East Asian intellectual culture on the Way (Dao 道), which, as I have suggested, is aligned with a tendency to conceptualize knowledge in terms of locomotion, implies an understanding of successful philosophical practice in terms of perfected movement. A philosopher should know how to move through the natural and social worlds.
I have conjectured that classical Chinese philosophy is based on a locomotive metaphor rather than on an ocular one and I have claimed that in early Chinese traditions knowledge is predominantly conceptualized in terms of the ability effectively to find one's way in the natural and social worlds. All of this suggests that the ideal of knowledge so conceived can be characterized as perfected action. Of course, perfected action doesn't seem much like wisdom in the Greek sense, but that is exactly what we would expect given the approach outlined here. Philosophy looks very different in classical China than it does in pre-modern Western or Indian traditions; hence the difficulty, noted by many current philosophers of religion, of including East Asian material within the ambit of the subject. Yet, perhaps there is hope.
Seeing the Dao
Despite the differences between the philosophies of India, the West, and those of China, differences that are partly the result of the conceptual metaphors structuring them at a largely pre-reflective level, there remains some commonality that can be uncovered by attending to the shared physical basis of human cognition. At the most fundamental level, this commonality is grounded in universal human experiences that flow from our embodied natures. We move and we see. Moreover, given that primary metaphors arise from our embodied experience, we would predict that the same primary metaphors would be found to some degree wherever there are beings like ourselves. This may give us grounds for optimism with respect to the prospects of inter-cultural understanding and of philosophical work that cuts across traditions. The ubiquity of the same primary metaphors within different cultures also suggests the possibility of cross-fertilization between different conceptual metaphors. Could a Sinitic conceptual metaphor of KNOWING THE WAY and an Occidental conceptual metaphor of KNOWING IS SEEING be combined? This is the question behind the title of this article: Seeing the Dao.
There are in fact some notable historical instances of highly elaborate philosophical systems arising from just such a cross-fertilization of conceptual metaphors. Consider, for example, the encounter between Indian and Chinese philosophies that was set in train by the transmission of Buddhism from India to China and which led to the emergence of highly intellectualized and distinctively Chinese forms of Buddhism, such as Chan (which eventually became Zen). Chan, and other forms of Chinese Buddhism, combined key elements from both Indian and Chinese philosophies and transformed them into a novel conceptual system (see Liu (Reference Liu2006)). Another notable cross-fertilization of philosophical systems that were based on different primary conceptual metaphors can be discerned in the evolution of neo-Confucianism from the eighth century ce. This development occurred as Confucians responded to the philosophical and political success of Buddhism in China. During this process of evolution Confucianism assimilated and transformed many Buddhist concepts that had come into Chinese intellectual culture already imbued with ocular metaphors (on neo-Confucianism, see Ivanhoe (Reference Ivanhoe2009)).
In Chinese forms of Buddhism and in neo-Confucianism, then, a melding can be discerned of the two conceptual metaphors prevalent within the philosophies of Asia (namely, KNOWING IS SEEING, which had structured an understanding of philosophical activity as aimed towards correct vision, and KNOWING THE WAY, which had structured an understanding of philosophical activity as seeking the Way). In Chan Buddhism, what the enlightened one sees is nothing other than the world of our everyday experience, the world which we know by moving through it; and Chan practice is designed to facilitate that unobstructed vision and movement. The neo-Confucians, likewise, combined that view with the insight that the ultimate nature of things was available to us through introspection, looking within. The person living according to the Way was thought to have become perfected and so to have access to the deeper reality of things because his inner and outer experience is completely harmonized with all things in the universe. The neo-Confucians even adopted the Buddhist term ‘enlightenment’, reflecting the impact of the ocular metaphor that was dominant in India, but they understood it to refer to a ‘vision of the Dao’. Combining these two metaphors thus gave rise to a new one which to some degree blended the theoretical and practical aspects of philosophy. The new metaphor was, in fact: SEEING THE WAY.
Conclusion: philosophy of religion and analysis
Given that philosophy of religion is a particular development of Western philosophy, as is analytic philosophy more generally, we can ask to what extent both of these remain tied to the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor. If they are found to be outworkings of this metaphor, there would seem to be an especially acute problem facing an analytically inclined philosopher of religion who wanted to interact with East Asian philosophical traditions; if, that is, I am correct in holding that these traditions are shaped by the alternative primary conceptual metaphor of KNOWING THE WAY.
The linguistic evidence reviewed above strongly indicates that philosophical thinking in the Western tradition is still an outworking of the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor; so it does not seem implausible to claim that the conceptual link between knowledge and sight continues to structure philosophical activity today.Footnote 7 It is significant that much modern and pre-modern Western philosophy was structured around the ideal of knowledge as a vision that is transcendent to any particular perspective. Even (and perhaps especially!) analytic philosophy has inherited this view, with its emphasis on universality and detachment from the contingent details of experience (see Chase & Reynolds (Reference Chase and Reynolds2011)). Philosophical success is still connected with clarity, insight, and illumination even when the philosopher is focused on the logical connections between abstract propositions with no obvious practical application. The logical connections between concepts that concern the analytic philosopher are usually thought to be independent of any particular cognizer, and analytic philosophy can be understood as seeking an impersonal non-perspectival vision (akin to a God's eye view, or a view from nowhere).
Given the inescapability of the conceptual metaphors underlying our cognitive processes and all of our systems of philosophy, a philosopher can still seek to become aware of the way in which primary conceptual metaphors, such as KNOWING IS SEEING, influence her thought and her understanding of the thought of others. At the very least, the awareness gained will alert her to the depth of misunderstanding possible, especially when attempting to think philosophically across East Asian and Western traditions. Moreover, such investigation at the deep cognitive level would seem to be a necessary step if we are to move forward towards a global philosophy of philosophy, one which might in turn facilitate the development of a genuinely inter-cultural form of the philosophy of religion.
