The New paradigm of order: from the comparison of Kitaró Nishida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the search for strategies for Lithuanian philosophy

ENWhy should a Lithuanian author be concerned with comparing the thinking of Nishida and Merleau-Ponty, representatives of the traditions seemingly very remote from his own? Could s/he employ the popular myth that Lithuanian and Japanese “love of Nature”, reflected in the similarities between the indigenous pre-Christian Lithuanian pagan religion and Japanese Shinto, can bridge the mentalities of two nations? Or, perhaps, she could decide that belonging to the realm of “Western Christendom” both of Lithuania and of France could be a more promising “common ground” for comparison? Beyond any doubt, such an enterprise would be interesting, yet, not without some naiveté, for closer examination reveals obvious cultural differences. There is also a third way: to hope, as Merleu-Ponty had hoped, that there is such thing as “a unity of the human spirit” and that by comparing them s/he is not dealing with traditions that are remote and superficially known, but participating in what Nishida called “the world philosophy”. [Extract, p. 193]