François Jullien - From Being to Living : a Euro-Chinese lexicon of thought

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A Euro-Chinese Lexicon of Thought

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In this book, Franois Jullien sets up a series of oppositions in order to conceptualise what he calls the carts (divergences) between European and Chinese ways of thinking. It is important to realise that these are not dualisms, and for this reason Jullien insists on their divergent and not different character. It is not, therefore, that European thought and Chinese thought are different in kind from one another in the sense that they represent differences of sensibility that can be overcome by seeking to understand one another from the perspective of the same. A European cannot understand China in these terms any more than a Chinese can understand Europe: there is no Chinese mind to be deciphered. Rather, over the course of their different histories, European thought and Chinese thought have taken divergent paths based upon concepts that were established in ancient times and continue to condition, if not determine, what it is possible to think in different contexts. In the European context, these concepts were first developed in ancient Greece, most especially in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, while Chinese ways of thinking are grounded in the various schools of its ancient philosophy (Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism and so on). The distinction the point of divergence lies in what has been given priority: following the concerns of Plato and Aristotle, Western thinking has been overwhelmingly concerned with the question of Being, whereas Chinese thinking concerned itself principally with that of living. Jullien insists on the importance of recognising this divergence, the result of a branching off of ways of thinking that has occurred over the course of their respective histories, failing which we are in danger of reducing all thinking to a single model, which will be that of the European. The question here is whether Chinese thought, like all other divergences, is being chiselled away by processes of globalisation, reduced to a universalism under the sway of the hegemony of Western ideas.

In exploring this complex and difficult issue, Julliens language can often seem opaque and it presents considerable difficulties for the translator. This is especially so for certain words which cannot easily be rendered in English. Most problematic is the distinction drawn throughout, and extensively explored in the chapter we have entitled Surge versus Settled. The words Jullien uses here are essor and tale. Essor means, according to the Larousse, an action from a bird when it takes flight; figuratively, a sudden movement, progress. It can be translated by flight, rise, development, becoming self-sufficient. tale means what neither rises nor falls; a ship that is completely still; the moment when the tide turns. As a verb, however, it normally means to exhibit in a sale, to display, to show all ones cards. Translations for the first alternative are given as slack, steady, becalmed; for the second, as to display, lay out, spread, show off. In previous works, we tended to translate essor as springing up but here surge appeared to us as more appropriate. This is because Jullien is in general less concerned with emergence (in the sense of a plant that starts to put forth shoots) than with the forward movement that occurs within a continuity, due to factors that have developed over time and created a sense of tension. In setting this