Culture and Self: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives, East and West

by Douglas Allen

Traditional scholars of philosophy and religion, both East and West, often place a major emphasis on analyzing the nature of the self. In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in analyzing self, but most scholars have not claimed knowledge of an ahistorical, objective, essential self free from all cultural determinants. The contributors of this volume recognize the need to contextualize specific views of self and to analyze such views in terms of the dynamic, dialectical relations between self and culture. An unusual feature of this book is that all of the chapters not only focus on traditions and individuals, East and West, but include as primary emphases comparative philosophy, religion, and culture, reinforcing individual and cultural creativity. Each chapter brings specific Eastern and Western perspectives into a dynamic, comparative relation. This comparative orientation emphasizes our growing sense of interrelatedness and interdependency.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

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Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an edited volume of papers that compares Eastern and Western philosophical and theological definitions of the self (ego). The introductory essay by the editor, Douglas Allen, is particularly weak. It begins strongly contrasting the Cartesian model of the self with Hindu and Buddhist conceptions o the self, then it descends into a facile New Left parody of Marxism and a superficial discussion of Feminist critiques. His conclusion reveals him to be a bourgeois arm-chair revolutionary crusading against -isms and -tions. He seems stuck in the academic world of 1974-2001.

The same criticism applies to a weak feminist criticism of Confucianism in Chapter 4, as if it were compatible with feminist sensibilities from 1990's America. The paper was frankly downright silly.

Chapter 2 is the strongest, perhaps because it is by a practicing psychoanalyst rather than an academic. It deals with the issue of whether psychoanalysis is even applicable to Eastern cultures, given its European Enlightenment version of the self as an autonomous unit.