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Not even close.

Rice was not the reason, at all.

They used rice as an example of how the philosophy works, they weren't saying "it's this way because of rice".

I have no idea how you read it that way, no one else did, which is why you're being downvoted so hard, your take makes no sense.

The original comment was very, very easy to read and made sense, it very clearly wasn't what you think it was, at all.

The entire point of the original comment was a brief explanation using farmers as an example, rice is the most common grain there, so using rice farmers made the most sense.

Do you think it would've made sense to talk about Chinese society and how it works using olive farmers as an example? No. Because the most common grain is rice.

You took it to a racist place yourself, for whatever reason.

You decided it was racist because you read rice and Chinese in the same sentence and created your own narrative.

the only one here who was racist was you.

Also; yes, their philosophy does differ from western philosophy, because Chinese philosophy hinges very heavily on everyone helping eachother. Western philosophy hinges very heavily on everyone helping themselves.

The claims being made in the parent comment to which I originally responded appear to include:

1. Chinese philosophy differs from Western philosophy in some way (action is “collective” or some crap)
2. Rice has something to do with this.

I challenged anyone to provide something resembling a sensible explanation for this which isn’t as stupid as it appears on its face. In fact, it strikes me as racist because it laughably seeks to explain important, complex, very studiously and intentionally developed differences in human thought to be reducible to some crap about a plant which one of the ethnicities in question happens to cultivate for food. That argument is so stupid, it’s amazing.

In response to my critique, someone in a parent comment suggested that the original commenter intended the rice reference to be a metaphor.

This makes no sense, of course. The original commenter was clearly making literal claims about rice-based agricultural practices leading somehow to different philosophical output among the rice-farming population when compared to non-rice-farming populations. If you re-read what he wrote, you can see that he plainly states that, because of the nature of rice farming, you won’t find Chinese people “hoarding water”.

…

Nonetheless, here we are, with you trying to explain the original commenter’s use of rice as some sort of a metaphor which explains the difference between Chinese and Western philosophy…by reference to…helping people..or something?

Does that seem like an accurate summary to you?

Regarding the, “natural state of man.” What would the natural state of humanity be? What morals would be bind ourselves to and what social contracts would be formed? How?

No? Wtf?

The example is "people help eachother because if one fails, they all fail"

Rice is the most common grain over there, it's absolutely not racist to use that as an example.

It's like saying "in Europe, people focus entirely on their wheat farms, and will hoard water to make others fail so they can gain more profit."

That's not a racist thing to say, and I don't see how you couldn't see the example, it's pretty racist of you to make that leap tbh.

So the answer to my question, then, is: “No.”

The book documents the many different ways Eastern thought patterns and Western thought patterns (not just philosophy, but at the level of very basic cognitive processes) differ. THAT these differences exist are well supported by decades of empirical research and makes up the bulk of the book.

Only a minor part the book delves into his explanation FOR these cognitive differences: it involves differences between the primary mode of economy of ancient Western societies (i.e. Greek)—hunting and gathering, which favors a competitive approach—and ancient Eastern societies (i.e. China)—agricultural, which favors a more cooperative approach. He’s a psychologist by training and this part of the thesis is weaker by comparison but nevertheless interesting, and has SOME empirical support when comparing within culture between farming vs ranching regions (e.g. US north vs south, Cohen et al 1996

Richard Nisbett thinks Chinese philosophy differs in content from Western philosophy because Chinese people farm rice?

Because they farm rice?

The idea that you call “racist” is the exact premise of Richard Nisbett’s “Geography of Thought,” which I think is an excellent book (and also what got me back into school to do cultural psychology research). I highly recommend it before you dismiss the ideas—that basically started the whole field of cultural psych—completely.

> I like the concept, but to filter every possible action through the lens of society is ultimately self destructive. Just as individuals should make room in their considerstion for the society, society too should make room in its considerations for the individual. Just as each of us should work to make life better for everybody, the collective should also serve to benefit each individual. Otherwise, what is the point?

We just need to collectively pull together enough commonality of purpose to provide an impetus for the next epistemological leap to unfold (refold?).

It’s not so much that you have to find a balance between individualism and collectivism, as much as a person should realize that individuality should be preserved because it’s an irreplaceable and part of the collective.

Because they are; Western individualism is ontologically wrong.

Implying that eastern philosophy is geared towards collective reasoning rather than individualistic and overly competitive reasoning?

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As someone who has studied classical Chinese philosophy (i.e., I took a class on it given in Chinese), I think the author's summary of things is pretty good. I do not like the vaguely orientalist turn at the end where the upshot of all this is that "Western individualism bad. Asian collectivism oooh exotic." It seems the rest of the comment section is also stuck in this mode.

I'm reminded of the excerpt from Zhuangzi, quoted in the preface of Bertrand Russell's book on China, which says something to the effect of (apologies to any scholars of classical Chinese thought for the following tenuous English paraphrase) "Us humans have orifices for speaking, hearing, seeing, etc. Let us dig some such orifices into Chaos, so they may also have such functions. And so, Chaos died." Differentiation, categorization, stratification (the preferred term of Deleuze) is difficult not only from a hermeneutic perspective but in some sense may be intrinsically damaging. This I think is what the interesting idea of "co-action" is that the author is going for, and is a sentiment that really sticks out when reading these works in the original Chinese, as Chinese (and particularly classical Chinese) lacks a lot of the definite noun/verb/adjective/preposition/etc. delineations that you find in Western grammars. (EDIT: another such observation which is purely linguistic is the lack of articles in the Chinese language, which means references to nouns are inherently generic and not specific.)

To read this as some sort of "and this is why China is communist" hot take or similar hot takes on Asian collectivism is just boring and anachronistic. Also doesn't make much sense even from the purely sociohistorical lens: Confucianism created an extremely rigid social hierarchy. So much for social collectivism.

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I mean it was just a metaphor brother. Not meant to be the answer to all

Lex Friedman’s podcast with Michael Levin sort of shows that in biology cells and systems basically work as collectives and become one intelligence by the interaction of gap junctions, where essentially cells forget about their individual barriers and meld together as one collective. In that Levin mentions how each level of biology has an agenda to follow and for every level the parts sum to the higher level of the collective. Essentially you add to a collective regardless of what level you’re on, the question is simply what direction you’re eventually going. He also mentions xenobots, where they removed skin cells from tadpole eggs and the cells eventually turned into little bio machines that can navigate mazes and self replicate, which isn’t the method of production of frogs. The cells outside of a collective develop their own methods. So it’s as if they’re always programmed with a direction, so individual actions can occur as well separate from the collective. Tough to make heads or tails with it.

What would that point be? Remember to include:

1. The alleged universally-recognized “collectivity” of action (whatever that means) throughout “Classical Chinese philosophy”
2. The relationship of the above to the social implications of rice cultivation (as distinct from other plant cultivation taking place outside of China, I guess)

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You must the point by a mile

And how, exactly, does that have anything to do with the distinction between Chinese and Western philosophical or religious thought?