1. Core Identity: A Personal Intellectual Project
This is not a large institution or a well-known publication. It is essentially:
A Blog: eastwestsharing.blogspot.com is a personal blogging platform site.
A Self-Published Book: Fall or Rebirth of the West is published through Lulu and Kobo (print-on-demand and ebook platforms), not through a major academic or commercial publisher.
A One-Person Endeavour: Olivier Lichtenberg is the sole author, researcher, and promoter.
Such projects typically fly under the radar of major search engines unless they gain viral traction or significant backlinking from more established sites.
2. The Central Thesis: A Synthesis of East-West Thought
Lichtenberg's work is ambitious, attempting to diagnose modern Western crises and propose solutions through Eastern philosophy. The key argument, drawn from the "Key Themes," is:
The Problem: The Western mind and society suffer from a harmful "schizophrenic split"—a fragmentation rooted in philosophical dualism (traceable to figures like Parmenides), amplified by fear and power structures, and neurologically hinted at by Iain McGilchrist's hemispheric brain research.
The Contrast: Eastern (particularly Chinese) thought, with its practical, contextual, and holistic approaches (like Laozi's Dao or Confucian ethics), offers a corrective.
The Historical Angle: The book traces how material conditions, economics, and colonial history created and entrenched this East-West epistemological divide.
The Goal: To move beyond colonial attitudes and fragmentation toward a "new global humanism" or "ethossphere" that synthesizes the strengths of both traditions.
3. Who is Olivier Lichtenberg?
His biography is crucial to understanding the project's perspective:
A Cultural Hybrid: European education (Strasbourg, Berlin) coupled with over a decade of living and teaching in Asia (Beijing, Hanoi, Manila, Kuala Lumpur).
Career Shift: From marketing in Europe to teaching and then to nine years of private, interdisciplinary research. This is a classic autodidact or independent scholar path.
Key Influences: His synthesis relies heavily on:
Iain McGilchrist: For the neuroscience of hemispheric differences.
Paul Mus & Tran Duc Thao: French-Vietnamese scholars bridging Eastern and Western thought.
Heraclitus & Laozi: As early philosophical counterparts representing a philosophy of change and flow.
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