OCCASIONALLY one comes across a philosophical expose that by its brevity, clarity and succinctness challenges staid viewpoints and excites one to wider horizons. G.E.R. Lloyd's Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections brings together various strands of our understanding of ancient Greek and Chinese science and culture to create a synthesis where one informs the other.

One of the key purposes of a comparative approach is to highlight the presuppositions which each culture is more or less blind to, and to bring out the shared and diverging aims and consequences that each cultural setting gives rise to. Once the sense of novelty or strangeness that a foreign civilisation arouses upon first contact is laid aside we can begin that quest of assimilation and recognition that leads to a more thorough understanding. A foreign civilisation, whether distanced from us geographically or by time, can make us aware of our own innate perspectives and lead us to a better understanding of both the civilisation under examination and our present standpoint.

Lloyd begins by raising the various questions that a study of ancient and foreign cultures must face if the enquiry is not to be "merely the reflection of our own ideas and preoccupations", and offers not so much answers to theoretical problems but a pragmatic approach that keeps the questions and problems alive while enabling us to proceed with care. Ultimately the problem of how we can ever grasp the nature or essence of ideas that belong to another culture "as if either other ideas will be reduced to our own, or they will remain forever unintelligible" is resolved by pointing out that "it actually does happen" and:

that it is essentially no different from the processes
of learning that we have constantly been engaged
in, since childhood, in our own society, in all its
diversity, acquiring and using our own natural
languages.

The key is to take into account the "diversity" of the frameworks of our own beliefs. What can seem strange and paradoxical in a foreign culture need not baffle us beyond due measure when we take into account some of our own paradoxes; be it the notion of the wave-particle duality of light, or "the doctrine that God is three and God is one".

Among the observations that Lloyd brings to his study of ancient Greece and China are the different modes and styles of enquiry practised in those civilisations. The aggressive adversarial tradition of Greek oratory, born from the practice of the law courts and political assemblies where the speaker aimed to persuade the audience of the true, against the false, interpretation of facts; whereas the Chinese imperial system gave rise to a mode that relied on reaching consensus:

Chinese advisers often envisage a situation of
persuading the person whose opinion really
counted, namely the ruler (or his ministers), even
when the advice they offered was not on affairs of
state (as it so often was).

As Lloyd points out in a chapter on "Searching for Truth", the adversarial tradition led to the demand of a single abstract theory of truth, whereas in ancient China the overriding quest was for finding a way or mode of approach that would lead to a morally correct life where truth was seen as relative to a pragmatic context.

In the final analysis it is such observations that answer the basic question that set in motion the present study:

Why--to ask a naive question--do we not find
more uniformity in the study of the heavens and
the human body (for instance), given, first, that the
subjects investigated--the stars and our physique
--are essentially the same, and secondly, that
human cognitive capacities the world over, and
through history, may be presumed not to differ
substantially?

The examples that Lloyd offers on the ancient science that combined astronomy and astrology illustrate the point well. Both China and Greece saw the heavenly bodies as divine and looked to the heavens to read divine messages. The Chinese, who sought to determine if the calendar and state affairs were in balance, searched the sky with a keen sense of observation, and their records of phenomena in the heavens are "the most complete we have down to the seventeenth century". The Greeks, on the other hand, looked to the sky for signs of order and regularity of divine beauty that might inspire men to a nobler ethical standard, thus "many of the exceptional events noticed by the ancient Chinese passed unremarked by the ancient Greeks, in part, no doubt, because of their expectations that the heavens should exhibit exceptionless order".

It is only when we take into account the aims and ambitions of a science, or an enquiry in general, that we can begin to understand a culture. Both Greeks and Chinese sought to "read" the sky and in the process formulated geometrical and arithmetical models to account for the regularities of planetary movements and came to be able to predict various phenomena such as eclipses, but the differences in approach led to some radically differing interpretations of reality.

Lloyd's work is one of those rare studies that brings together the various debates of the East-West dialogue without favouring one side. His twelve short chapters bring out "the relevance of ancient cultures for modern dilemmas" by looking at various cultural and scientific approaches that were instigated in ancient China and Greece, and the ensuing reflections on the underlying worldviews bring out the practical and ethical implications of different belief systems within and across cultures.

The last three chapters--"Universities: Their Histories and Responsibilities", "Human Nature and Human Rights", and "A Critique of Democracy"--bring the purpose of a historical comparison of ancient civilisations into a sharp focus of modern-day relevance. Aware that he is "open to the charge of excessive idealism", Lloyd's call for a critical appraisal of our own culture that does not shy from an analysis of the self-interest that drives it, is pertinent.

Only by being aware of the weaknesses of our cultural institutions and systems can we hope to bring about a dialogue aimed at redressing the weaknesses that we are usually blind to. Understanding that the idea of a single truth is part of our cultural background, and not the one and only inevitable consequence of rational thought, along with a better understanding of the context that gave rise to the democracies of ancient Greece, might bring us a step closer towards a fuller perception of our own and other cultures both past and present.

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