Communing and Relating: Part II-The Mind Structure of East and West

I HAVE ALLUDED to differences in the mind structure of East and West, the guiding principle in the former being juxtaposition and identity, and in the latter unity in variety. By mind structure is meant an inherent guiding principle that shapes the perception of people in how they see the world and live in it, and ask and answer all the big questions, such as Who am I? What am I? What is life? What is death?

In this discussion I follow Haas, from his provocative book, “The Destiny of the Mind: East & West.”¹ Haas is not the first Westerner—or Easterner—to attempt to increase mutual understanding between East and West; another such effort by Northrop has influenced and moved me. In his “The Meeting of East and West,”² he states that the basic assumptions of the viewpoints of East and West are essentially philosophical. The philosophy of the Orient pays attention to things in their aesthetic immediacy, while in the West emphasis is placed upon the theoretically designated and inferred factors in things. Concepts that refer to the aesthetic component, he terms concepts by intuition and those referring to the theoretic component, concepts by postulation. By epistemic correlations—epistemic from the science of epistemology, or knowledge— he attempts to relate these two components in a two-term relation. Quite clearly his method is philosophical, as philosophy is understood in the West.

But therein lies the difficulty, Haas says, because the terms and notions inherent in philosophy in the West are not only inapplicable, they in fact obscure and falsify the spirit of Eastern thought. The main idea in the West is that all wisdom can be expressed in concepts, in conceptual thought. The East by contrast “attempts to establish immediate contact with the Real.”¹ The Greek word for essence is ousia, and to bring into clear contrast Western philosophy with its love of wisdom and the Eastern “desire for essence or Is-ness,” Haas suggested the term philousia. He says philosophy and p