Epistemic and Agathological Solidarity in the Normative Foundations of Global Political Philosophy

The paper follows up on a debate that informed the newly published Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Justice and East Asian Philosophy (edited by Janusz Salamon and Hsin-Wen Lee), in which 12 East Asian and 12 'Western' political theorists attempted to explore the potential for a cross-cultural philosophical discourse about political issues. Two dominant methodological orientations emerged from this exercise which can be labeled as 'comparative philosophical approach' and 'Western philosophical approach'. The former builds upon the recent advances in the philosophy of language and warns of the dangers of the universalistic pretensions of particular philosophical traditions (especially that of the West), highlights the challenges of linguistic, foundational and evaluative incommensurability of concepts employed in various traditions, and tends to arrive at irreducible pluralism as the conclusion of the cross-cultural comparison (which arguably limits its usefulness in the context of global political philosophy as a species of ‘practical philosophy’). The second approach – the one that has dominated the scholarly discourse on global justice since its inception in John Rawls's "The Law of Peoples" – could only be described as 'Western philosophical approach', although the reason why its leading practitioners unapologetically employ it despite its non-comparative methodological character is precisely because they believe in the universality of the Western political theory as if it was the only philosophical lingua franca on offer. In this paper, I will outline a third methodological option – I label it simply 'global philosophical approach' – that differs from the previous two, while appreciating the plausible theoretical motives behind them. This approach, while drawing on the constructivist lesson learned from the analytic and poststructuralist semantic inquiries, and resisting all kinds of 'essentialist' and ‘finalist’ temptations, insists on the ability of human communication that may transcends particular identities, cultural or otherwise, precisely because they are humanly constructed. A proponent of 'global philosophy' argues that if variety of 'local' discourses could be established in the history of humankind that allowed individuals to succeed in sharing (humanly constructed) meanings by employing (humanly invented) concepts, it is hard to see why 'global discourses' could not be so constructed. By way of illustration of how such global philosophical can be grounded, I will outline how by starting with universally shared and universally observable human phenomena of epistemic and agathological (pertaining to human good – ‘to agathon’ in Attic Greek) limitations, one may proceed by inventing new concepts (such as ‘agathological solidarity’) and investing them with globally shareable meanings. Such methodological move allows the discourse to aim at globally acceptable conclusions (instead of giving up any hope of going beyond “contrasting and comparing” various traditions and “leaving things as they are”), while inviting insights from the semantic treasure-trove of various existing cultures (by relating the newly invented ‘global concept’ to the existing ‘local concepts’, such as ‘ren’, ‘karuna’, ‘agape’, etc.), thus avoiding the undesirable consequence of imposing the traditional Western philosophical vocabulary on everyone else as the default philosophical lingua franca without even considering the merits of other modes of thinking.