Between Psychology and Philosophy East-West Themes and Beyond

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE EAST-WEST PHILOSOPHY Between Psychology and Philosophy East-West Themes and Beyond Michael Slote Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy Series Editors Chienkuo Mi Philosophy Soochow University Taipei City, Taiwan Michael Slote Philosophy Department University of Miami Coral Gables, FL, USA The purpose of Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy is to generate mutual understanding between Western and Chinese philosophers in a world of increased communication. It has now been clear for some time that the philosophers of East and West need to learn from each other and this series seeks to expand on that collaboration, publishing books by philosophers from different parts of the globe, independently and in partnership, on themes of mutual interest and currency. The series also publishs monographs of the Soochow University Lectures and the Nankai Lectures. Both lectures series host world-renowned philosophers offering new and innovative research and thought. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16356 Michael Slote Between Psychology and Philosophy East-West Themes and Beyond Michael Slote Philosophy Department University of Miami Coral Gables, FL, USA ISSN 2662-2378 ISSN 2662-2386 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy ISBN 978-3-030-22502-5 ISBN 978-3-030-22503-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22503-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. 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Cover illustration: caia image / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE First some acknowledgments. This book expands on a set of three lectures I gave in May 2018 at Nankai University in Tianjin, P.R. China. The lectures inaugurated the series Nankai University Lectures in East and West Philosophy, and I want to thank Nankai University for inviting me to deliver the lectures, which were given under the title “Philosophy East and West.” I am grateful to the Friends of Soochow and Archie Hwang (Chairman and CEO of Hermes-Epitek Corporation), who generously sponsor the Nankai-Soochow Lectures in East-West Philosophy. I also want to thank Chienkuo Mi, who convinced Nankai University to initiate an unprecedented lecture series devoted to philosophical issues East and West. Mi also kindly persuaded them to invite me to be the first lecturer in the biennial series. The present book is the first in a series involving East- West themes that Palgrave Macmillan will be publishing. I would like to thank Philip Getz for organizing the series and acting as its editor at Palgrave. Chienkuo Mi and I will serve as its academic editors. Now to the book itself. The three chapters that follow the introduction correspond roughly to the lectures I gave at Nankai University, though Chap. 2 greatly extends what was said in the original first lecture. The three chapters and the lectures they reflect were all on the East-West theme. But I believe they also demonstrated that more attention to issues of psychology is needed if we are to learn the most interesting possible lessons from the philosophical interactions between China, particularly, and the West. However, the chapters in the present book that follow Chap. 4 don’t sound any major East-West themes and mainly take the earlier idea of interaction between v vi PREFACE psychology and philosophy into new areas. They don’t so much continue what was done in my East-West Nankai lectures as place those lectures in a larger philosophical context. The many ways in which philosophy can learn from psychology constitutes that larger context and is the overarch- ing theme of this book as a whole. I was a joint major in philosophy and psychology as an undergraduate, and the present book certainly continues those earlier interests. But it is not the only place where those earlier interests surface in new philosophical contexts. Most of my 2014 book A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind also connects philosophy and psychology, and my 2016 book Human Development and Human Life does so almost exclusively. You don’t have to read the latter book in order to understand what is going on in the present book, but anyone who has read or does read it will recognize the way in which the present book continues the explorations of the interface between psychology and philosophy that were the main business of the 2016 book and in great part of the 2014 book as well. The reader needs to understand too that the interest in psychology as related to philosophical issues focuses on those areas of psychology that especially concern emotion, empathy, and, more generally, human development. You won’t find much discussion of cognitive psychology in any of my recent work, though one theme of Chap. 2 of this book is that cognitive psychologists and analytic philosophers alike fail to realize how essential emotion is to all processes and states of a functioning mind. Some recent researchers like Antonio Damasio relate emotion to ordinary ratio- nality in important ways, but they rely on findings of neuroscience in a way my arguments won’t. I think one can give a priori conceptual/philosophical arguments to show that the West is mistaken to think that cognition and reasoning are (metaphysically) possible in the absence of all emotion. In any event, the reader will see that the title chosen for this book is accurate to its overall subject matter. Finally, the present book has a less immediate purpose that concerns the present state of Chinese and of world philosophy. Right now, Western philosophers pay almost no attention to traditional Chinese thought, and Chinese thinkers are largely divided between two forms of self-regarding philosophical pessimism: one group thinks all philosophical wisdom is embodied in the great Chinese classics and devotes itself to interpreting those classics without allowing that we might still, today, do good work in philosophy. The other group thinks there is nothing philosophically important to be learned from those classics and seeks to do philosophy PREFACE vii after the Western example and in a strictly Western mode. But there is another possibility that from the Chinese standpoint would be far from pessimistic. The possibility involves trying to integrate Chinese and Western philosophy at a foundational level. Doing this would or could revitalize Chinese historical philosophy in a contemporary and (therefore) international mode, but such an effort would also presuppose that Chinese thought has something important to teach Western philosophers and that it still has something important and new to teach the Chinese themselves. Chapter 2 of the present book makes an initial down payment on an attempt to bridge Western and Chinese thought in a way that avoids present- day Chinese philosophical pessimism and that seeks to show Westerners that they have much to learn from the Chinese philosophical tradition. Another work of mine—the book The Philosophy of Yin and Yang, which has just been published with side-by-side English and Chinese texts by the Commercial Press in Beijing—attempts this effort at persua- sion in a more detailed and synoptic way. However, the main purpose and content of the present book concerns the lessons philosophy can learn from psychology, even if my (at this point) long-term attempt to philosophically integrate China and the West functions as a kind of background or introduction to what is being done here. Coral Gables, FL Michael Slote CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Yin-Yang, Mind, and Heart-Mind 5 3 Moral Self-Cultivation East and West: A Critique 27 4 Philosophical Deficiencies East and West 49 5 The Many Roles of Empathy 61 6 How Justice Pays 93 7 The Impossibility of Egoism 115 8 Further Connections 135 9 Conclusion 157 ix x CONTENTS Appendix A: Philosophy’s Dirty Secret: What Philosophy of Science and Virtue Epistemology Need to Learn About Human Irrationality 161 Appendix B: Care Ethics, Empathy, and Liberalism 183 Appendix C: Yin-Yang, Adult Identity, and the Good Life 201 Index 211 CHAPTER 1 Introduction This book begins with questions about the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy, but its overall emphasis is on the relationship, the essential intellectual relationship, between philosophy and psychology.

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