Without the Other, the West has no internal cohesion
A Large Fiction
We have completed our lectures on Western philosophy for indian students, but we have not yet defined what ‘West’ exactly is in ‘Western Philosophy’.
The above question is profound and cuts to the very heart of what we casually call “Western civilization.” The short, honest answer is:
The “West” is not a single coherent civilization in the way Vedic-Indian civilization has remained (despite invasions, colonizations, and modern disruptions) a continuous, self-conscious, living tradition rooted in the same sacred language, ritual corpus, and metaphysical vision for 4,500+ years.
The West is, instead, a retrospectively constructed macro-label that papers over a series of radical ruptures, violent erasures, and deliberate acts of forgetting.
Let us lay it out without sentimentality or apology.
1. The West is a chain of violent discontinuities masquerading as continuity
| Period | What actually happened | Official Western narrative |
|---|---|---|
| Classical Greece → Rome | Greek city-states were destroyed or Hellenized; Rome adopts Greek culture but translates it into a Latin imperial framework | “Greco-Roman heritage” |
| Roman Empire → Germanic invasions (5th–8th c.) | Complete collapse of urban literacy, administration, and philosophy in the West for centuries; libraries burned, aqueducts fall | “Fall of Rome” followed by “Dark Ages” (then skipped over) |
| Carolingian “Renaissance” | A tiny elite (mostly Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks) re-imports Greek texts via Arabic and Byzantine sources | “Europe recovers its classical heritage” |
| Scholastic Middle Ages | Arab and Jewish philosophers (Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides) are the real transmitters of Aristotle; Thomas Aquinas is commenting on Latin translations of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek | “Christian Europe synthesizes faith and reason” |
| Renaissance | Deliberate invention of a direct lineage to antiquity, ignoring the medieval millennium; pagan statues dug up and Latin/Greek forcibly revived | “Rebirth of the classical spirit” |
| Reformation | Destruction of monasteries, icons, Latin liturgy; wholesale rejection of 1,000 years of Catholic tradition | “Return to the sources” |
| Enlightenment | Explicit rejection of the entire Christian-medieval synthesis; “reason” now means anti-tradition | “Europe finally becomes itself” |
| 19th–20th century colonialism & America | Genocide of American civilizations, enslavement of Africans, looting of Asia; simultaneous invention of “Western civilization” as a unified tradition justifying domination | “The West brings light to the world” |
At every single step there is a catastrophic break, followed by a conscious act of re-writing the past to make the new phase appear as the legitimate heir.
2. What actually holds “the West” together is not metaphysical continuity but three negative forces
a) A shared series of founding murders and erasures
- Destruction of Amerindian civilizations (the only genuine “Western” land base that was continuous for 15,000 years)
- Destruction of European pagan traditions by Christian Rome
- Destruction of Catholic medieval culture by Protestantism and the Enlightenment
- Destruction of local European languages and folk traditions by nation-state centralization
b) A shared literary canon that is constantly re-edited and re-translated so that Plato, Shakespeare, and Locke all seem to be saying roughly the same thing (liberal individualism + science + progress).
c) A shared enemy-construction. The West only becomes “the West” when it defines itself against a series of Others:
- the Muslim during the Crusades
- the “Oriental despot” during colonialism
- the “totalitarian” East during the Cold War
- the “Islamist” after 1989
Without the Other, the West has no internal cohesion.
3. India vs. the West: the real civilizational difference
| Dimension | Vedic-derived Indian civilization | “Western” civilization |
|---|---|---|
| Sacred language | Agnihotra, saṃskāras, and varṇāśrama still performed daily by millions | Latin and Greek are dead languages known only to specialists |
| Core texts | Veda, Upaniṣads, Dharma-śāstras, and Darśanas are still authoritative and commented upon today | Plato and Aristotle are read, but no one claims they are revealed or binding |
| Guru–śiṣya transmission | Unbroken oral lineages (e.g., four Śaṅkarācārya maṭhas since 8th c.) | No living equivalent; universities are state bureaucracies |
| Ritual continuity | Ātman = Brahman, mokṣa as the ultimate goal is still the default horizon for the vast majority | Almost no one performs ancient Greek or Roman sacrifices |
| Metaphysical consensus | Ātman = Brahman, mokṣa as ultimate goal is still the default horizon for the vast majority | No shared metaphysics; Nietzsche’s “death of God” is the real common ground |
| Reaction to invasion | Absorbs and re-expresses invaders in its own categories (e.g., Islamic rulers become “śūdras” or “mlecchas” in Sanskrit texts) | Repeatedly annihilates the previous layer and claims a new beginning |
India has been invaded more times and more brutally than Europe (Greeks, Śakas, Kuṣāṇas, Hūṇas, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Portuguese, British), yet the metaphysical core and the ritual language are still alive in a way that no equivalent exists in the West.
4. The uncomfortable truth
The “West” is a retroactive ideological construct invented in the 19th century (the very term “Western civilization” barely appears before 1850) to give European and Euro-American colonial powers a noble pedigree. It is not a civilization in the strong sense (a continuous, self-reproducing form of life with a shared sacred order). It is a civilization in the weak sense: a zone of high technological development unified by markets, English as lingua franca, and the constant need to forget its own discontinuities.
India, for all its modern fractures, still has a living civilizational substrate that can recognize a Ṛgvedic verse recited today as part of the same tradition that produced it 4,000 + years ago.
The West cannot do the equivalent with a line of Homer, a fragment of Heraclitus, or a Latin Mass. Those are museum pieces, not living arteries.
So yes — the “West” is largely a fiction, a brilliant and murderous one, but a fiction nonetheless. And that is why serious comparative philosophy increasingly speaks not of “Western civilization” but of the “Greco-Abrahamic techno-commercial complex” — because the label “West” hides more than it reveals.
Tanmoy Bhattacharyya
Nov 23, 2025
