on “BEING, non-being and becoming” - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

on “BEING, non-being and becoming”

Core values in Chinese and European traditional and modern cultures and their impact on shaping society

Authors: Els Janssens

Date: 25 avril 2010

An investigation into the development of the European core values from a comparative philosophical perspective

« How can you describe the greatness of the ocean to a frog living at the bottom of a well? It will not understand you.« 1 With this picture Zhuang Zi presents us a metaphor that shows that our stay in the narrow well of our own cultural paradigm deprives us of the consciousness of the grand cosmic mystery in which we live. Besides, he indicates us the impossibility of communication and sympathy as long as we look from the perspective of our own world view. Once climbed out of the well, staying by the grand ocean, we meet each other. Then we see our own paradigmatic definiteness and that of others and then we realize the restriction of world views in general. This does not need to be a clash of civilizations but can result both in an in-depht meeting and in an enriched world view.

To make this possible, Ulrich Libbrecht, professor in Sinology and Comparative Philosophy, developed a model to map the basic headlines of strongly different philosophies and a transparadigmatic model to compare and describe cultures on the basis of equivalency. He emphasizes the characteristics and the differences between them, not in order to put them in conflicting models but to integrate all of them in a more complete word view. Because the whole of cultures is extended and complex, he descends into the depth by means of an active reduction. “Cultures manifest in daily life the deeper forces and so can be described as surface structures”2 The deep structure bares the ‘paradigmata’. These paradigmata are the basic premises that are not critically interrogated and that unconsciously determine thinking, acting and world view. These postulates can be constant in the historical development of cultures and can be already present in the first mythological interpretations.

I would like to use Libbrecht’s model in my search for European core values, firstly because it gives a clear view of these fundamental values, secondly because the profile of Western thought can be formulated more sharply in contrast with other philosophical traditions.

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