My experience reading ancient Greek philosophy has been indeed that many philosophers use allusion and metaphor and are focused on leading a good life.

Yeah, the ancients Greeks are a mix. Plato in particular finds a way to do both well.

But then with Aristotle we have the foundation of writing to excess. Documentation instead of communication.

To be fair, it's far easier in written Chinese[1] to have allusion and metaphor because of the multifaceted nature of meaning in the characters. For instance, 行 (pronounced xing or haeng in Mandarin) has an absolute laundry list[2] of meanings even though originally it meant an intersection of roads. It's also possible (but to my knowledge less common) to play with the actual character shapes to induce other meanings, or to use replacement characters that are direct (or close) homophones to construct a play on words. The example that immediately pops to mind is the use of "river crabs" (河蟹 or héxiè) to replace "harmonized" (和谐 or héxié) in order to evade censorship.

I'd honestly be willing to say that there is no real accurate translation of the Dao de Jing into English. Ancient Chinese commentators (including Confucius) note the difficulty of understanding the Dao de Jing, and they could read and speak the language! Not to say that it's impossible, but it's just extremely difficult to replicate. I look at it as being akin to translating Shakespeare into Mandarin. Even English speakers struggle with Shakespeare and when translated it loses the lyricism and a lot of the underlying meaning.

[1] Noting here that when speaking the context will generally make it less ambiguous. Additionally, Mandarin and ancient Chinese at the time of Lao Zi share very little in common phonetically. [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...

This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mistakenly assume that it is representative of the entirety of Western philosophy. It's not.

Likewise, we in the west are in a period when certain specific Eastern philosophies, notably Buddhism and Taoism, have become widely known and popular for the first time in the West. It's easy to mistakenly assume that they are representative of the entirety of Eastern philosophy. They're not.

Western philosophy has a deep and broad mystical and esoteric tradition that routinely does what you describe as an essentially "eastern" practice. More recently, postmodernism discards all that analytic precision in favor of vague impressionistic primacy for one's personal experience, and has become by far the dominant philosophy in many parts of the west. Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger, who was incidentally a Nazi) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has its own well-developed "excruciating pedantic detail" traditions such as Legalism[1] (among others) that routinely do what you describe as an essentially "western" practice. They have been profoundly influential in Asian thought, yet they are not currently popular in the West, so we just don't think about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)

That is correct. You are very correct with this. I was using the 'common' understanding.

I was really surprised how much of Descartes and Leibniz were really about religious arguments. Completely about mystical metaphysical ideas. Surprised because I thought Western Philosophy would be all 'sciencey' and about logic. But really it all had a lot of religious reasoning in it.

And then also surprised that in India, with Buddhism, with Nagarjuna, extreme analytical logical arguments. There were centuries of extreme logical arguments.

So guess, if you try to make a quick summary on the internet, it will be wrong. Because if you go back over the centuries, at some point in time everything was done before by everyone else. Everyone went through similar phases at some point.

I want to upvote this for its good points about the relationship between Eastern thought and "Eastern thought" in the "West", but man, what is this?

> Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger...) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

- Heidegger as the "progenitor of postmodernism" is... contentious, at best.

- Even if he was, he never defined "postmodernism" himself; mostly his critics associated him with it.

- As far as I know he never explicitly said any particular program was influenced by Taoism (although he definitely was). I would even say this is a specific case of what you're criticizing, as that influence came from his dialogue with the Kyoto school, a syncretic form of Buddhism that itself (IMO somewhat tenuously) claimed it represented also Taoism.

Maybe just a German influence? The zeitgeist of the time?

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influenced by Buddhism. Think so was Kant, and Hume (Scottish).

In general, during that time period, a lot of philosophers were discussing Buddhist ideas, don't think it is stretch that Heidegger had been 'influenced'.

I'm explicitly not contesting that Heidegger was influenced by Taoism! I said "he definitely was". I'm contesting that you'll find a statement by Heidegger like "my work, as extended by postmodernism to which I also lay some intellectual claim, grows out of Taoism," which doesn't check out for at least those three major reasons.

I think we are agreeing on Tao. And on postmodernism. I don't know enough to have an opinion.

I asked GPT 4 and it seemed GPT 4 also agrees Heidegger was NOT a postmodernist.

"No, Martin Heidegger was not considered a postmodernist. He was a German philosopher who is generally associated with phenomenology and existentialism, and he is best known for his work "Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit"), published in 1927. His philosophical work laid some of the groundwork for postmodern thought, but he himself belonged to an earlier philosophical period.

Postmodernism as a philosophical movement didn’t emerge until after World War II, and it is characterized by skepticism toward grand narratives, doubt about objective reality, and a focus on the relative and the subjective. Heidegger's work, particularly his exploration of "being," language, and hermeneutics, influenced many postmodern thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, but he was not himself a postmodernist.

Heidegger’s own philosophy is complex and cannot be easily categorized. It includes elements of existentialism, hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation), and phenomenology (the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view)."

"Marrying" the eastern and the western mindsets is a big, maybe even the biggest, goal of this age. There is a saying that, freely translated, means "the east is where the wisdom was born, the west is where it will assume a definite shape."