西洋哲学の特徴 (第五百號記念特集號)

Abstract

Taking philosophy in a broad sense as is found in the phrase ‘from myth to philosophy’, the Greek tradition of it is only one among the three, the other two being ancient Indian and ancient Chinese sources. It is to be noted that these three traditions started approximately at the same time, i. e. six or seven centuries B. C. The Greek feature in contrast with the other two consisted in seeking after logical and mathematical exactness. Socrates in Plato draws a sharp line between ‘rhetorikē’ and ‘dialektikē’. Plato actually would put whole philosophy into a strictly logical system, which aspiration of Plato seems to have added to the Socratic method of question and answer the demand for thoroughness in every philosophical argument that it should ascend up to first basic principles. But Aristotle, in founding formal logic, seems to have givenup the Platonic demand for strictness in point of philosophical arguments, so that the dialectics(including philosophical arguments)was put midway between exact demonstrative reasoning and rhetoric as a ‘dialectical’, probable sort of reasoning. After all a sharp distinction between rhetoric and logic is what we find characteristic of Greek tradition and what we miss in Indian and Chinese ones. (Indians developed in its own way a formal logic only at a much later date, while with the Chinese rhetorical forms refined themselves so as to be of use even in philosphical arguments.) This is the first feature of Western tradition of philosophy as I find it. The second feature recurs to the relation between myth and philosophy. My opinion is that in the West a higher myth than the ones transcended in Greek, Indian and Chinese tradition appeared again in the form of Christianity and exercised a veritable impact upon philosophical tradition. Western philosophy had to cope with the tension between myth and philosophy for the second time in the form of ‘faith and reason’ during the whole medieval and modern period. As students of comparative religion would say, the problem of faith and reason is peculiar to Islamic and Christian world and is not found in similar strength in Indian and Chinese development of thought. We do not find, e. g. in Chinese reception of Buddhism into its own Confucian realm, no such strong tension between religion and philosophy as we find it in the West. Hence the development of Western philosophy from the middle age on shows in its formal aspect a process of again going through the course from rhetoric to logic. The rhetorical stage of philosophy we find in early middle age, the dialectical stage we notice beginning in 12. or 13. century (scholastic philosophy), and the much more demanding aspiration for ‘mathesis unversalis’ we find in 17. century. These three stages roughly correspond with Aristotelian distinction of rhetoric, dialectical reasoning and the demonstrative one. And those two features of the tradition of Western philosophy, i. e. the demand for logic in contradistinction to rhetoric and the renewed impact of a higher myth upon philosophy, seem to allow us to derive, historically and even rationally, a number of traits we find in modern Western thought. The most important, among others, is the origination of science in the West. Western science might roughly be regarded as a product of Greek demand for exactness and also of the effort to be radically free from evaluation in point of knowledge of the world, which effort began to appear in the late middle age on account of the strong tension between reason and faith.

Another trait which strikes us is a clear-cut differentiation of Weltanschauungen. Christianity when secularized would produce forms of dualistic philosophy (e. g. Descartes, Kant). Naturalism, even the scientific variety of it, carries with it the stamp of Christian heresy. Pantheism which comes to flourish in the form of romanticism might be regarded as derivative of the mysticism oppressed in the middle age. Christianity have had the merit of sharply distinguishing types of Weltanschauungen in a way we miss in the other two traditions. At last we may scarcely need to note that the 18. century naturalism gave to the Westners the clue to understand Chinese thought, and that the romantic philosophy since the end of 18. century has served as basis for the Western understanding of Indian and other oriental pantheistic thought.