Unlearning Cartesian consciousness: On the source of Anglo-American prejudice towards East Asian education

What blocks the dialogue across cultures and traditions in education, a project long hoped for and yet unrealized? Our focus herein is the Western Enlightenment’s version of self and understanding, forged from Cartesian skepticism and its underlying ontology. This stand-alone self is antithetical to dialogue, tradition, and (self-)transformation. To affect the shift from Cartesian to Hermeneutical Consciousness, this piece first discusses Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics, specifically the less-engaged ‘negative’ quality of experience he emphasized. In the next move, we interpellate Gadamer’s account with alternative onto-hermeneutical models derived from East Asia tradition(s). The focus here is on a Zen-inspired ‘unlearning’ model, offered as a potential pedagogical archetype for cultivating Hermeneutical Consciousness. Here we engage with the work of Cheng Chung-Ying, who first opened this path, but highlight that Cheng overlooked the Madhyamika Dialectic. In this Madhyamika mode, seemingly insoluble contradictions at the level of thought come to be resolved in practice through self-transformation and harmonization with the world. Throughout this piece, we intermittently refer back to the long-standing apathy, disdain, and ‘prejudice’ Anglo-American scholars have shown toward East Asian education as a practical illustration of how Cartesian Consciousness stalls mutual learning and sidelines fields such as comparative philosophy and comparative education.