Problems of Identity and What Different Traditions Tell us About Doing Philosophy

Putting aside the quality of why one might prefer the Buddhist answer to the Western one, how do we evaluate, philosophically, the limits of our own intellectual garden and evaluate whether we wouldn't be better off being replanted somewhere else?

While the questions posed are interesting in their own right, the point of this thread is not to discuss the answer, but whether the framework (story, if you will) in which the question is posed is meaningful to the way in which we do philosophy. When we inherit a tradition, are we doomed to its faults or limited by its ambition? Putting aside the quality of why one might prefer the Buddhist answer to the Western one, how do we evaluate, philosophically, the limits of our own intellectual garden and evaluate whether we wouldn't be better off being replanted somewhere else?

This presumes all sorts of things, Mentos, not the least of which is that happiness is the point of philosophy

IEP on 'Metaphilosophy' emphasis own:
. . .
What though is wrong with the real being revealed as resource? Enframing is ‘monstrous’ (Heidegger 1994: 321). It is monstrous – Heidegger contends – because it is nihilism. Nihilism is a ‘forgetfulness’ of das Sein (Seinsvergessenheit). Some such forgetfulness is nigh inevitable. We are interested in beings as they present themselves to us. So we overlook the conditions of that presentation, namely, being and Being. But Enframing represents a more thoroughgoing form of forgetfulness. The hegemony of resources makes it very hard (harder than usual – recall above) to conceive that beings could be otherwise, which is to say, to conceive that there is something called ‘Being’ that could yield different regimes of being. In fact, Enframing actively denies being/Being. That is because Enframing, or the metaphysics/science that corresponds to it, proceeds as if humanity were the measure of all things and hence as if being, or that which grants being independently of us (Being), were nothing. Such nihilism sounds bearable. But Heidegger lays much at its door: an impoverishment of culture; a deep kind of homelessness; the devaluation of the highest values (see Young 2002: ch. 2 and passim). He goes so far as to trace ‘the events of world history in this [the twentieth] century’ to Seinsvergessenheit (Heidegger in Wolin 1993: 69)."

Heidegger’s response to nihilism is ‘thinking’ (Denken). The thinking at issue is a kind of thoughtful questioning. Its object – that which it thinks about – can be the pre-Socratic ideas from which philosophy developed, or philosophy’s history, or Things, or art. Whatever its object, thinking always involves recognition that it is das Sein, albeit in some interplay with humanity, which determines how beings are. Indeed, Heideggerian thinking involves wonder and gratitude in the face of das Sein. Heidegger uses Meister Eckhart’s notion of ‘releasement’ to elaborate upon such thinking. The idea (prefigured, in fact, in Heidegger’s earlier work) is of a non-impositional comportment towards beings which lets beings be what they are. That comportment ‘grant(s) us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way’. It promises ‘a new ground and a new foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it’ (Heidegger 1966: 55). Heidegger calls the dwelling at issue ‘poetic’ and one way in which he specifies it is via various poets. Moreover, some of Heidegger’s own writing is semi-poetic. A small amount of it actually consists of poems. So it is not entirely surprising to find Heidegger claiming that, ‘All philosophical thinking’ is ‘in itself poetic’ (Heidegger 1991, vol. 2: 73; Heidegger made this claim at a time when he still considered himself a philosopher as against a non-metaphysical, and hence non-philosophical, ‘thinker’). The claim is connected to the centrality that Heidegger gives to language, a centrality that is summed up (a little gnomically) in the statement that language is ‘the house of das Sein’ (Heidegger 1994: 217).

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Putting aside the quality of why one might prefer the Buddhist answer to the Western one, how do we evaluate, philosophically, the limits of our own intellectual garden and evaluate whether we wouldn't be better off being replanted somewhere else?

You're only talking about philosophy without doing it – at most, IMO, that's gossip, not thinking.

"the search for the unknown", as you said, is not "new"

Socrates teaches "Know Thyself" since the self – desires, biases, taken-for-granteds, assumptions, limitations – are habitually "unknown" (i.e. unexamined).

The search isn’t, but the results of the search are

... "answers" are merely how philosophical questions generate new (more probative) philosophical questions.

Doing philosophy tends to be about making choices wisely, no?

I think philosophy consists in questioning choice and the choices one makes in order to understand how and why one chooses. One tends to learn more from making unwise choices, IME, than from "making choices wisely" – in other words, failure, like loss, is the teacher, and those who do not seek to learn such lessons are foolish (i.e. unwise, or do not 'love wisdom').

Finland is statistically measured the happiest country on earth for now. One could look at what they do, how they think.

I don't see why there would be some agenda to falsify this particular information

I just think they are misleading

and I do not think that researchers are dumb

some other source would likely have provided some counter evidence