“Do not be an initiator of [for] happiness, do not be an introducer of [for] unhappiness” (Zhuangzi). “The beginning of wisdom lies in reducing the gap between the two by going back to a point prior to their dissociation in order to ground them in a single all-encompassing context. To separate them and to grant priority to one of them – happiness – is at the same time to evoke and implicate the other – unhappiness (François Jullien – Vital Nourishment – Departing from Happiness Chapter 9).
To be “in good shape,” in fine fettle, with abilities as sharp as the butcher’s knife, is not to be happy.”
Jullien writes that “The point on which I have found philosopher friends most uncompromising is this: happiness, they say, clearly concerns everyone. Any other viewpoint is impossible; human existence depends on it according to Western philosophy … happiness persists as an unquestioned universal goal, for ‘who would not want happiness?’ That people do not agree about the content of happiness is a truism that has been repeated since Aristotle, but his has in no way diminished the normative status of the idea …”
Jullien believes that “the thought of happiness stems from a fixation.”It is“adversarial”in the sense that it brings up its opposite – unhappiness -, and it belongs to“a philosophy of finality,” which Chinese thought lacks. “Chinese thought … exempts itself from the demands of happiness,” and it is to be hoped that “it will exempt us as well, in our own minds, as we become more familiar with it.”
Jullien writes: “To be ‘in good shape’, in fine fettle, with abilities as sharp as the butcher’s knife, is not to be happy. Here we confront two different perspectives, two realms whose meanings do not intersect. When someone asks familiarly, ‘How’s it going?’ and we answer, ‘Fine’,’ without having anything else to say or without needing to say anything else, there is an implicit agreement at work. A logic of passage, or of the “viable’, grounds the statements and does not need to be pointed out because we know in advance that our attitude is shared. The discreet affirmation is like a password, a way of slipping past a barrier, that enables us to bear daily witness to our being-alive.”
Zhuangzi urges us: “Do not be an initiator of [for] happiness, do not be an introducer of [for] unhappiness.” What is meant here is: “The beginning of wisdom lies in reducing the gap between the two by going back to a point prior to their dissociation in order to ground them in a single all-encompassing context. To separate them and to grant priority to one of them – happiness – is at the same time to evoke and implicate the other – unhappiness. Similarly, to pride oneself on maintaining order is to recognize the possibility of disorder and to prepare a place for it. In this sense, ‘order’ is indeed ‘the promoter of disorder’.” In other words, this amounts to a backward step to what precedes naming, and fall into a dualistic stance.“This, Zhuangzi insists (along with Laozi), is the only way to enter into a philosophy of immanence (or of the “way,” of passage or process).”
“Goal and happiness have been deeply associated throughout the history of Western thought”
Jullien’s own experience of the extent to which philosophers, along with everyone else, have taken happiness as an unquestioned universal goal, has led him to investigate the roots of this tradition. He found it in the Nicomachean Ethics which “begins and ends with it” as Aristotle “conceived of happiness in terms of man’s proper function and therefore in relation to his highest capacity, reason.” “Every art, every investigation, every action, every choice tends toward an end, said Aristotle more generally, and that end is its good.”He found it over two millennia later, in a very different thinker, Freud, who “conceived of it in terms of the pleasure principle.” For the West, the evidence is clear: “Men ‘strive after happiness’. They want to become happy and stay that way. No debate is possible.The point is repeated over and over again. Only the rhetoric varies.” Most of us have taken this human quest for happiness for granted. To those among us who have a religious practice, there is little doubt that we often fall prey to the temptation of seeing it as leading to something akin to happiness – nirvana, or a mystical union with God. Then, there are those who say that happiness can be unbearable: Goethe, for instance, wrote: “Anything is bearable but a stretch of sunny days.” Undoubtedly an exaggeration, but it is also true that happiness cannot be an ongoing “state.” It cannot be felt unless we also go through periods of misery!
Jullien sees the Western ideology setting up a universal goal of happiness while at the same time conceiving it as unattainable, as a trap that ultimately prevents us from living life as a flow, as a “going well.” He writes: “It is clear that, no sooner had a Western ideology singled out the idea of happiness from the continuity of process and set it forth as ‘the desirable’ par excellence, while also conceiving of it as unattainable or – worse still – intrinsically unbearable, that it became trapped in a contradictory formulation that easily lent itself to various dramatizations of ‘existence’. Ideology no longer reflected ‘life’ in the true sense of the word – the life of constant flow, of the discreet and fleeting, that can be said to be ‘going well’ without cause for alarm … In the West, each successive generation has tried to conquer happiness anew by making a ‘revolution’ of some kind, whether out of generosity or ingenuousness …
“The idea of process capable of a true cleavage in the history of philosophy is that it requires no notion of a goal”
In keeping with Zhuangzi’s fondness for using concrete examples, Jullien writes:“When someone dies, we commonly say, or, rather let drop, ‘Life goes on’, as though nothing else remained to be said once all arguments and consolations have been exhausted. But a process can also become unregulated, encounter an obstacle, or veer off course and end up dwindling away to nothing. In other words, a process does not lead to but ends in, and is measured by its result. That is why life should be thought of in terms of process: “das Leben als Prozess,” as Hegel put it.” A process “has no aim and does not tend toward an end that guides its development.”
China showed little interest in happiness
Jullien continues: “Accordingly it might be instructive to question why Chinese thought barely developed an idea of finality and consequently never made the idea of happiness explicit. Or, rather, why it showed so little interest in happiness.” To fully understand it “demands that we free ourselves from the expectation the idea of finality projects in the Western context. The task calls for patience and repetition (rather than an effort of the intellect) until the keystone that keeps our whole notional edifice intact has been removed. Only then can we appreciate the coherence of Chinese wisdom – of wisdom, moreover, as strategy. For in China not even strategy is guided by finality. One cannot appreciate any of the ancient Chinese arts of war until one understands that, in China, the ideal general has no definite, fixed goals in mind, or even, strictly speaking, any aims. Instead, he evolves so he can exploit the potential of situations in which he recognizes the “benefit” (li, a very Chinese notion), or, failing that, so he can exploit his adversary’s potential by turning the tables on him, transforming the situation. ‘When the enemy arrives ‘rested’, I begin by ‘wearing him down’; when he arrives ‘united’, I begin by ‘disuniting’ him; when he arrives ‘with a full stomach’, I begin by ‘starving’ him; and so on. In other words, in each case I draw him into a process not so much of destruction as of destructuration (again, tranformation), so that when at last I engage him in combat, he is already defeated. Success is in the nature not of a goal achieved but of a result, like the dropping of a ripe fruit.” The Chinese general does not act ‘so that’ (ze) [victory ensues], but in such a way that ‘it follows that’ (er) [it ensues]. Jullien suggests that this might be due to the fact that “Chinese lacks the range of cases and the panoply of prepositions that broaden the spectrum of finality in Greek … moreover, Chinese thought is familiar with the motif of the target and aiming at the center (zhong). It also recognizes the design and the map (tu). At times it even resorts to the idea of an objective of action (di, especially in legal thought). Yet it did not develop any of these notions into coherent explanatory concepts.” He also adds that “further proof of this assertion can be seen in the fact that it was necessary to translate ‘goal’ into modern Chinese (as mudi or mubiao) in response to the West.
“Instead of the idea of destination, Zhuangzi offers that of “free evolution”
Not only did China “show little interest in happiness,” but, as hinted above, “Chinese thought barely developed an idea of finality,” and Classical Chinese did not even have a word for “goal.” Jullien explains that “instead of the idea of destination, Zhuangzi offers that of ‘free evolution’ (you), proceeding in comfort, at will, without a designated port and without anxiety over the outcome.”
Jullien explains: “In place of the Greek preoccupation with telos and finality, Chinese thought emphasized what I have called being in phase, with success measured not by conformity to some aim but rather by the capacity to induce forgetfulness. “A shoe is adequate if it makes us forget the foot. A belt is adequate if it makes us forget the waist … English speaking scholars often use the word to “align.” “Being in phase” is a more literal translation of the French “être en phase” and conveys a very similar idea, “to be in accordance.” The examples given emphasise the concrete experiental nature of the alignment or accordance while the Greek telos and finality are products of the mind. Where the Greek talk in terms of direction, the Zhuangzi uses a very different metaphor, that of fish in a pond. “Far from thinking of the dao as a way that leads to (truth or wisdom or what have you), human beings swim in this milieu of endless movement, going around and around as easily as ‘fish in water’ – the triviality of the image, in the Chinese language as well as in our own, speaks volumes about how unproblematic it has become. It allows us to see that once we have given up goals and the burdens that go along with them, life itself decides how it will go. Once freed of all impediments, life itself is capable of inducing and inciting, so that the result flows constantly and consequentially to the point of satiety. There is no need to project the result some distance away (necessitating a quest) or to turn it into a fixed finality.”
Jullien concedes that “there is a notion of felicity in the form of favor bestowed by heaven or by one’s ancestors in the most ancient Chinese thought. Yet even when it is said to be ‘limitless’ and associated with the royal mandate, this felicity is essentially material in nature, taking the form of rank, honor, or prosperity (see the notions of fu, lu, and xiu in the Shijing).” And he observes in passing that “Here is another occasion to observe that the gap between different civilizations is found not so much in their penumbral [=obscure] origins as in the theoretical divergence that occurs as thought reflects upon itself and justifies its own constructs.” In Greece, the construction of finality led to the concept of theory, which is seen as one of the markers of metaphysics, that which, precisely, did not develop in China. Then, Jullien contends, “They imposed this axiom on the Western mind so thoroughly we have forgotten how much this existential construction of happiness owed to a peculiar syntax, a syntax of ascription and subordination, whose resources their construct exploited.” On the other hand, “The structure of ancient Chinese, which is formulaic and not much indebted to syntax but embellished by effects of parallelism based on the polarity of yin and yang, gave rise to an interplay of correlations and alternations that led to the expression of constant variation within a process, and consequently to a concern for vital evolution.”
Source:
François Jullien – Vital Nourishment, Departing from Happiness (2007)