VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

4. A Complementarity of Civilizations: East and West is Best

Zhu, Ying and Shihui Han. Cultural Differences in the Self: From Philosophy to Psychology and Neuroscience. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. 2/5, 2008. Apropos to the arising concept of a person not as a man alone out of any context, but truly a reciprocity of individual and community, Peking University psychologists contribute a historical and current realization of such a “relational self” (aka African ubuntu), so long in coming. The paper is available from Dr. Han’s website, and see also “Understanding the Self: A Cultural Neuroscience Approach” by Han and Georg Northoff in Progress in Brain Research (178/1, 2009).

Different thinking styles in Westerners and Chinese (analytic vs. holistic) lead to disparities between the two cultures not only in perception and attention but also in high-level social cognition such as self-representation. Most Western philosophers discussed the self by focusing on personal self-identity, whereas Chinese philosophers emphasized the relation between the self and others. Dissimilar philosophical thinking of the self is associated with distinct cognitive styles of self-representation (i.e., the independent self in Westerners and the interdependent self in Chinese). (1799)

The cultural difference in self-related processing can be understood in the framework that Western sciences emphasize on atoms, molecules, fundamental particles, and biological molecules in order to find ultimate cause underlying things, whereas Chinese notion about the nature is based on ‘relation’ which hypothesized a self-organized physical world in order to keep its balance. (1811)

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