Fall or Rebirth of the West: The Emergence of Global Humanism
Fall or Rebirth of the West The Emergence of Global Humanism
Fall or Rebirth of the West: The Emergence of Global Humanism is an ambitious and deeply interdisciplinary inquiry into the historical and philosophical divergence between the Western and Eastern worlds—and a call for a new civilizational synthesis.
Olivier Lichtenberg traces the roots of modern global tensions to a fundamental split between two civilizational epistemologies, beginning with ancient Greece and China. This divergence is not merely cultural or political, but ontological and epistemic—grounded in radically different ways of knowing, being, and organizing human life. Where Western thought, inspired by Heraclitus, came to emphasize flux, conflict, individual autonomy, and analytical mastery, Eastern philosophy—exemplified by Laozi—developed around notions of harmony, balance, relational identity, and attunement with nature.
The book unfolds in three main parts. The first part explores the historical foundations of this divergence, beginning with a comparative study of material conditions, economic structures, and early philosophical developments in Greece and China. It shows how differing geographic, economic, and political contexts fostered distinct ontologies. Greek city-states, shaped by trade and fragmentation, produced a worldview of dualism, abstraction, and competitive individualism. Chinese civilization, rooted in agrarian stability and bureaucratic order, cultivated a more holistic, integrative, and cyclical view of life.
The second part examines the modern implications of this epistemological divide. From Enlightenment rationalism to the scientific revolution and capitalist industrialization, the West’s epistemology matured into a powerful system of technological and economic control. But it also gave rise to alienation, ecological degradation, and what the author calls the “schizophrenia of the West”—a profound inner split between meaning and efficiency, ethics and economics, being and doing. Meanwhile, Eastern societies, though increasingly modernized, still wrestle with reconciling inherited traditions of harmony and social ethics with imported Western frameworks of development and progress.
Rather than treating this divergence as permanent or oppositional, Lichtenberg argues that the current global crisis—ecological, existential, cultural—demands a new phase of integration.
Drawing on thinkers such as Leibniz, Iain McGilchrist, Paul Mus, Tran Duc Thao, and others, the author maps the intellectual terrain necessary to bridge these paradigms. The key lies not in compromise but in a dialectical synthesis: an emergence of Global Humanism that honors the depth of both traditions while transcending their limitations.
In the third part, the book turns toward implementation and integration. It outlines practical paths toward a cross-cultural philosophical and ethical renewal, including education, governance, technological development, and economic systems that combine Western analytical clarity with Eastern relational wisdom. The final chapters introduce the concept of the Ethossphere—a speculative but grounded vision of an emergent, global ethical awareness that goes beyond the mere cognitive layer of global consciousness (the Noosphere) and aims toward a shared, dialogical ethos capable of navigating our complex planetary future.
Written in a sober, lucid style, Fall or Rebirth of the West is both diagnosis and proposition. It is not nostalgic for a lost past nor utopian about the future. It recognizes the achievements and limits of both East and West, and offers a framework for mutual recognition and synthesis. More than a philosophical treatise, it is a civilizational reflection aimed at readers who sense that the challenges of our time—climate change, social fragmentation, ethical disorientation—cannot be solved by the same paradigms that created them. At once analytical and visionary, rooted in history yet oriented toward the future, this book invites us to consider not only where we have come from, but where—and how—we might still go.
Details
Publication Date
Apr 18, 2025
Language
English
ISBN
Category
Social Science
Copyright
All Rights Reserved - Standard Copyright License
Contributors
By (author): Olivier Lichtenberg
Specifications
Pages
460
Binding Type
Paperback Perfect Bound
Interior Color
Black & White
Dimensions
US Trade (6 x 9 in / 152 x 229 mm)
About the Author
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Olivier Lichtenberg, born at the intersection of borders, languages, and cultures, studied German language and culture, specializing in both linguistics and economics at universities in Strasbourg, Berlin, and Lille.
After an initial career in marketing for the luxury hospitality sector in Brussels and London, he developed an academic career as a German language instructor and IB Diploma Programme teacher of German and French at international schools across Asia—in Beijing, Hanoi, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur. This was followed by nine years of private research across diverse fields, culminating in the production of this book.
Olivier has been fascinated his whole life by the Far East and the contrasting philosophical intuitions it evokes. His focus gradually shifted from language and culture to the deeper mechanisms of epistemology. During his years in Asia, he encountered Eastern thought, which prompted him to intensively investigate the structural differences in how civilizations perceive knowledge, value, and reality.
His research was informed by thinkers such as Heraclitus, Laozi, Leibniz, Iain McGilchrist, Paul Mus, and Tran Duc Thao, whose insights paved the way for an innovative synthesis. Iain McGilchrist's hypothesis of hemispheric asymmetry, in particular, offered the final key to unlocking an epistemological impasse that had fascinated him for decades. His work represents both a culmination and a continuation of this age-old dialogue.
He also shares his ideas on his own website, East West Sharing: https://eastwestsharing.blogspot.com
Statement of the Central Axis
A Post-Cartesian, Post-Reductionist, Relational Framework
This work is grounded in a post-Cartesian, post-reductionist, and relational axis, articulated in response to the limits of modern epistemology and ethics.
By post-Cartesian, this project rejects the primacy of the isolated, self-transparent subject as the foundational unit of knowledge and responsibility. The subject is understood instead as situated, relational, and historically embedded, constituted through interactions rather than preceding them.
By post-reductionist, it refuses the explanatory sufficiency of mechanistic causality, formal systems, or purely quantitative models when addressing meaning, ethics, and responsibility. Scientific rationality is neither dismissed nor absolutized; its internal limits—as demonstrated by modern mathematics, physics, and systems theory—are taken seriously as epistemic facts with ethical consequences.
By relational, the project affirms that reality, knowledge, and responsibility arise between entities rather than within isolated substances. Relation is not secondary but ontologically and ethically primary. This relationality is not merely social, but structural, encompassing nature, cognition, history, and action.
The axis therefore displaces certainty, mastery, and control as ethical foundations, and replaces them with responsiveness, resonance, and responsibility under conditions of irreversibility.
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Conclusion at the Threshold
Responsibility After Certainty
This work begins where many conclude: not with foundations secured, but with foundations withdrawn.
The contemporary intellectual landscape is marked by a paradox. Never has rational knowledge been more powerful, more formalized, or more technically effective—yet never has the question of responsibility appeared more fragile, deferred, or externalized. Scientific rationality advances, while ethical orientation fractures; systems grow in reach, while accountability dissolves into abstraction.
The guiding claim of this work is simple, and its consequences demanding:
Once epistemic certainty can no longer serve as an alibi, responsibility becomes unavoidable.
This conclusion is not asserted as a moral exhortation, but emerges as a structural necessity from the internal limits of modern rationality itself.
1. The End of the Cartesian Shelter
Modern epistemology, shaped by the Cartesian separation of subject and object, promised mastery through clarity, certainty, and formal control. Yet this promise has gradually undermined itself.
From within mathematics, Gödel demonstrates the impossibility of complete formal closure. From within science, modern physics destabilizes absolute frames of reference. From within philosophy, phenomenology reveals the dependence of objectivity on lived meaning. These developments do not negate reason; they reveal its boundaries.
What collapses is not rationality, but the belief that rationality can exempt the subject from responsibility by delegating judgment to systems, methods, or procedures.
This work therefore adopts a post-Cartesian position: the subject is no longer the sovereign origin of meaning, nor a neutral observer, but a node within relational processes, exposed to consequences it cannot fully calculate or control.
2. Beyond Reduction: Ontology as Relation and Process
If certainty cannot be total, reduction cannot be sufficient.
Mechanistic and reductionist explanations remain indispensable within their domains, but they fail to account for emergence, meaning, and ethical implication. Against substance-based ontologies, this work aligns with a relational and process-oriented understanding of reality.
From Heraclitus to Whitehead, from Daoist thought to the Kyoto School, a convergent insight emerges: reality is not composed primarily of isolated entities, but of events, relations, and transformations. Being is secondary to becoming; control is secondary to participation.
Within such an ontology, ethics cannot be appended from outside. It is not a superstructure placed atop neutral facts, but arises immanently from relational exposure and irreversibility.
3. Ethics Without Foundations, Not Without Force
A central risk of post-foundational thought is ethical indeterminacy. This work rejects that outcome.
The withdrawal of absolute foundations does not abolish normativity; it reconfigures it. Normative force no longer derives from transcendent rules or universal abstractions, but from situated responsibility within relational fields.
Confucian ethics, phenomenological responsibility, process philosophy, and contemporary theories of resonance converge on this point: ethical action is not rule-first but relation-first. One responds not because one possesses certainty, but because one is already involved.
Ethics, in this sense, is not weakened by uncertainty; it is intensified by it.
4. Tension as Method, Not Failure
This work deliberately integrates thinkers who introduce friction: Nietzsche, Marx, Said, and critical theory more broadly. These voices do not destabilize the project; they protect it.
They prevent the reconstitution of moral idealism, expose hidden structures of domination, and remind us that responsibility is always entangled with power, history, and material conditions.
Coherence here is not achieved by eliminating tension, but by ordering it.
5. Orientation
This opening conclusion therefore defines the trajectory of the work that follows:
Not a synthesis of traditions, but a reorientation of responsibility
Not a rejection of science, but a recognition of its ethical implications
Not a return to foundations, but a disciplined engagement with limits
What follows is an exploration of how responsibility becomes thinkable, unavoidable, and actionable after certainty.
Toward a Relational World After Certainty
Ethical Exposure in a Geopolitical World
Power, Responsibility, and Relational Asymmetry
1. From Moral Agents to Geopolitical Actors
Geopolitics is often framed as the domain in which ethical considerations must yield to necessity. States, unlike persons, are presumed to operate under imperatives of survival, interest, and power that suspend ordinary moral judgment. This presumption rests on a residual Cartesian model: the geopolitical actor is treated as a rational unit, external to consequences except insofar as they affect its own continuity.
Once epistemic limits and relational ontology are acknowledged, this framing becomes untenable. States, institutions, and blocs are not sovereign substances acting upon a neutral field; they are relational formations, historically embedded, structurally asymmetric, and causally entangled with the environments they transform.
Geopolitical action, therefore, does not escape ethical exposure—it amplifies it.
2. The Illusion of Strategic Neutrality
Modern geopolitics frequently invokes neutrality in the language of strategy, deterrence, balance, or realpolitik. These concepts function analogously to epistemic certainty: they promise control through abstraction.
Yet geopolitical decisions unfold under conditions of radical non-closure. Long-term consequences, second-order effects, ecological repercussions, and cultural destabilizations cannot be exhaustively calculated. Strategic models, like formal systems, are internally coherent but externally incomplete.
The ethical failure of geopolitics does not arise from cynicism alone, but from the misrecognition of this incompleteness. When models are mistaken for reality, responsibility is displaced onto necessity: “there was no alternative.”
This work rejects that displacement. Ethical exposure persists precisely where alternatives cannot be fully known.
3. Relational Asymmetry and Power
A relational ontology does not imply symmetry. On the contrary, it foregrounds asymmetrical interdependence.
Geopolitical responsibility is intensified, not diluted, by power differentials. The greater an actor’s capacity to shape relational fields—economic, ecological, informational, military—the greater its ethical exposure.
This principle disrupts both moralism and relativism:
It rejects moralism by recognizing structural constraints.
It rejects relativism by refusing equivalence where asymmetry exists.
Responsibility is not evenly distributed; it is structurally weighted.
4. Civilizational Plurality and the End of Universal Templates
Geopolitical modernity inherited the belief that a single rational model—political, economic, or legal—could be universally exported. This belief persists, often unconsciously, in development paradigms, alliance systems, and normative interventions.
Comparative civilizational analysis challenges this assumption. As Joseph Needham demonstrated in science, and as postcolonial critique confirms in politics, rationality itself is plural in its historical forms, even when converging in technical domains.
A relational geopolitical ethic does not deny universal values, but it resists universal templates. It recognizes that ethical exposure occurs within historically sedimented worlds whose internal logics cannot be overridden without consequence.
This does not justify cultural relativism. It imposes epistemic humility as a condition of responsibility.
5. Diagnostic Tensions: Power, Ideology, and Critique
Critical theory plays a decisive role at this level.
Marxist analysis reveals how economic structures constrain political agency. Critical theory exposes how instrumental rationality colonizes political imagination. Postcolonial critique demonstrates how claims of universality mask asymmetrical domination.
These critiques are not external objections to relational ethics; they are internal safeguards. They prevent the language of relation from becoming an alibi for accommodation, inertia, or complicity.
Ethical exposure, in geopolitics, requires not only responsiveness but discernment—the capacity to distinguish between unavoidable constraint and avoidable harm.
6. Tragedy, Responsibility, and Non-Absolution
Geopolitical ethics is often framed in tragic terms: every choice entails loss, every action produces harm. Tragedy, however, must not become absolution.
The recognition of tragedy deepens responsibility; it does not suspend it. To act under tragic conditions is not to act beyond ethics, but to act without guarantees.
A relational framework refuses both moral purity and moral exemption. It insists that even when outcomes are constrained, how one constrains them matters.
7. Toward a Non-Sovereign Geopolitical Ethic
The ultimate implication of ethical exposure in geopolitics is the erosion of absolute sovereignty as an ethical shield. Sovereignty remains a legal and strategic reality, but it no longer functions as a moral firewall.
Geopolitical actors are increasingly enmeshed in ecological systems, informational networks, and economic interdependencies that render isolation impossible. Responsibility extends beyond borders because consequences do.
This does not imply a utopian global ethic. It implies a situated, asymmetrical, relational responsibility calibrated to power, history, and exposure.
8. Orientation Forward
This section reframes geopolitics not as the suspension of ethics, but as its most severe testing ground.
What follows will examine how institutions, technologies, and economic systems mediate responsibility—often diffusing it, sometimes amplifying it—and how ethical exposure can be institutionally recognized without being neutralized.
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