Indigenizing globalization and the hydraulics of culture: taking Chinese philosophy on its own terms
Title:
Indigenizing globalization and the hydraulics of culture: taking Chinese philosophy on its own terms
Author:
Ames, Roger T.
Appeared in:
Globalizations
Paging:
Volume 1 (2004) nr. 2 pages 171-180
Year:
2004-12
Contents:
The term globalization has taken on two competing senses. The dominant sense is that associated at the ideological level with the dissemination of a rational and moral consensus born of the European Enlightenment and, at the practical level, with rights-based democratic institutions, free enterprise capitalism and rational technologies. Beyond the provincial, decidedly Western, sense of globalization, there is a competing meaning that recognizes the potential contributions of non-Western cultures. In this second sense, globalization simply refers tothe mutual accessibility of cultural sensibilities. I use these two modes of 'globalization' to outline the recent history of comparative philosophy, where professional philosophy over recent decades has been complicit as a cultural companion to the more often noticed political and economic forces that promote the homogenization of the human experience. Fortunately, globalization as the mutual accessibility of cultural sensibilities is a symbiotic pressure in our cultural hydraulics that is pushing indigenous philosophical traditions to the surface and reinforcing their worth. The outcome, hopefully, will be local traditions reinvigorated by challenges introduced from their periphery.
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