The Self in the West and East Asia: Being or Becoming

From the fraught world of geopolitics to business and the academy, it’s more vital than ever that Westerners and East Asians understand how each other thinks. As Jin Li shows in this groundbreaking work, the differences run deep. Li explores the philosophical origins of the concept of self in both cultures and synthesizes her findings with cutting-edge psychological research to reveal a fundamental contrast.

Westerners tend to think of the self as being, as a stable entity fixed in time and...