‘One shouldn’t claim to achieve the desired effect directly, because to do so always implies force and makes the result precarious, and even produces a counter-effect. Instead, we should try in some way to make this effect flow sponte sua, as a simple consequence, from arranged conditions. Thus, it isn’t necessary to make the people moral by forcing them to correspond with an imposed ideal, and any repressive politics is empty due to its effect of constraint: it will serve only to ensnare the people in the ‘net’ of punishment. But we must, by intervening ahead of the process of evolution (in other words, we might say, at the level of its ‘socio-economic’ conditions), ensure that these are sufficient for a morality ‘naturally’ to result, which education will then support’ (François Jullien – From Being to Living, p 33)
‘I want to act and I act. I want to move my body and my body moves’ – the assertion seems irrefutable’, says Rousseau in Emile. Yet the ‘will’ has ‘barely found theoretical support to assert itself’ in China.
Jullien asks ‘Who would doubt that he possesses within himself a ‘will’… Isn’t it what I most initially – most intimately – perceive about myself, and doesn’t this mean that this experience must be one that is most universally shared? The will is, furthermore, the only thing within man that has the dimension of infinity, rendering him similar to God, as Descartes proposed … For, acting by my will, I no longer feel there is ‘any external force’ that is ‘constraining’ me: my own causality takes me out of the causality of things and conditions and reveals my freedom to me. This is our European credo and it gives a basis for our system of the Subject. ‘Credo’, I say, for faith is invested in it’. Such a credo, he adds, allowed ‘the apparatus of the Subject to consolidate its mastery’ (FBTL 28).
Jullien continues: ‘The Enlightenment philosophers, such as Rousseau or Kant, testify to it. This will was what introduced the first split, giving the self its initial hold over ‘itself,’ thereby making possible ‘the comprehension of the world’. ‘The experience of it is assumed to be immediate, the one thing that is unchallengeable, needing nothing to intervene within ‘me’: ‘I want to act and I act. I want to move my body and my body moves’ – the assertion seems irrefutable (in Rousseau’s Emile, 1979:273).
In Kant as well … ‘Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will’ (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals). In the beginning therefore, is the ‘will’, the will ‘in itself’, in a ‘pure’ state that alone is absolute’ (FBTL 28).
Yet, ’in China, we don’t clearly see the distinction between what we do of our ‘free will’ (ekôn) or ‘against our will’, as it was developed in Greece by Aristotle from a reflection which, drawing upon both legal activity and the theatre (Phaedre giving in to her passion ‘against her will’), results in this fundamental question: to what extent am I responsible for my acts? It is on this basis that Aristotle unfolded the terminology we still use today, distinguishing a simple ‘wish’ (boulesis) from an act committed ‘by preference’ (proairesis) involving a deliberation and opening onto a judgement, itself assuming the form of an inner imperative’.
Going further back to an earlier divergence, Jullien links the weakness of the concept of will in China to that of causality (as shown in the page “Propensity (vs Causality). In the West, ‘it is actually from causality that this capacity to choose and decide that has usually defined the will is understood on the Western side … for Kant, it is a ‘causality of reason’, conceived in the mode of natural causality’ (FBTL 29).
In addition to this ‘causality of reason’ of the philosophers, Jullien says that ‘the psychology of the will has developed in the Christian West against the background of a meditation about sin, and above all the will has been apprehended as infinite. Voluntas is revealed in its terrible magnitude by the power it offers man to say ‘no’, to turn from God and ‘defect’, the modus defectivus of Saint Augustine that reveals it through the possibility that is recognised within man to be able to choose to do evil, posse peccare’. For Rousseau, ‘God can because he wills; his will causes his power (1979:285); and in Kant: God’s will is not only a pure will, it is also a holy will’ (FBTL 29).
On the other hand, Chinese thought ‘soon turned away from preoccupation with a personal God and hasn’t developed its primitive cosmology into a theology; consequently, it hasn’t needed to include personal self-determination of power in the will that would, as such, be absolute. Equally, it has not encountered the experience of sin as a challenge to divinity’ (FBTL 29).
It is therefore easy to explain the divergence between European and Chinese cultures in terms of their different histories, which have resulted in a different emphasis over different concepts that ‘were established in ancient times and continue to condition, if not determine, what it is possible to think in different contexts’ (FBTL vii). Jullien, however, points out that we are facing an issue in the West with regards to the nature of the will: ‘European philosophers are conscious that its ‘nature’ escapes us. I want to move my body and my body moves, says Rousseau, but I cannot ‘conceive’ of how ‘this is done’ – in other words, how the will can ‘produce a physical action’ … Kant considers that the freedom in which the will takes such pride is inexplicable, since any explanation would take us back to a determination according to the laws of nature from which our will as reasonable beings makes us independent’ (FBTL 29-30).
While, with Kant and Rousseau, the will had become the first principle, through his insights into the will to power, Nietzsche shed a new light on the concept by linking it to language
Jullien writes: ‘In Kant and in Rousseau … this history of the ‘will’ has succeeded so well that we have forgotten it; in the end, the will … becomes the first principle and everything else follows’. Nietzsche, however, brought the notion of will to its apex as ‘will to power’ and found that the concept of will was ‘complex’ and had only appeared ‘to be simple is due to the fact that in our languages we have only a single world by which to express it’ (FBTL 30). What he is referring to is a root common to Indo-European languages that enhance a unique meaning: ‘boulesthai in Greek, velle in Latin, wollen in German, will in English, vouloir in French and so on’. No such term can be found in China. Jullien says that ‘Mencius, who was … the first to develop reflections in this area, spoke of ‘getting ready’, of ‘consenting’, of ‘desiring’ – no term predominates. The distinction drawn to think about wisdom is that of ‘strength’ invested in comparison with ‘perspicacity’; the virtue praised in the resolution is ‘courage’. Here, Jullien is critical of European sinologists who have translated the notion of zhi by ‘will’, ‘since this is the notion we’d expect, but its semantic field, which is still indeterminate designates most often in Mencius the resolution taken and to which one holds – what I would call ‘tenacity’ (FBTL 30-31). As expected for a term with roots in ancient China, the term zhi, ‘is clarified only once, and this is to designate what would ‘command’ the energy-breath, qi, with which our physical being is imbued (II, A, 2). These two functions are then defined by their hierarchical relation alone, the first being to ‘maintain firmly’ while the second is not to ‘do violence’. When the guiding authority comes together (concentrates), Mencius only states that it ‘sets vital energy in motion’ as it needs to, but when it concentrates, it then sets the other in motion and their hierarchical relation is disturbed. Thus there is no intervention in his analysis of the procedures that Aristotle made clear around the same time: no preferential choice, no deliberation and no decision’ (FBTL 31).
Going back to Nietzsche, Jullien explains: ‘The relation with hierarchy is what Nietzsche says is most precisely identified at the heart of this ‘complex thing’ that is the will. It is a question simply of commanding and obeying, but this relation, eminently simple in itself, operates within a complex collective structure which is that of our body and the diversity of its ‘plurality’ of souls (see Nietzsche 1968, 19:217) … this in fact corresponds with the bias of European philosophy: it is this that reduced this duality of functions – the functions of command and obedience – to the identity of a self-subject (posited as unitary and simple) and, by “deluding us,” it impels us to attribute the execution of the will to the will itself’ (FBTL 31). In other words, since there is only one word in Indo-European languages to refer to ‘command and obedience’, the will to do something and that which actually carries out what is willed, we must regard the European concept of the will as delusionary. ‘We made full use of this subject function that Indo-European languages more particularly enhance by their grammar, and we thought we had the immediate certaintly of our ‘will’ as our ‘thought’ (FBTL 31).
‘Instead of speaking of ‘power’ or ‘will’, Mencius speaks of ‘power’ or ‘doing’
Now that Nietzsche has shown that the European concept of the will is delusional, does this means that the Chinese focus on zhi, as what ‘commands’ the energy-breath, qi’, in other words, that which ‘does’ rather than that which ‘wishes” is a safer path of investigation? Going back to Mencius, Jullien observes that ‘it is not ‘just the notion of the will that is absent in the Mencius; actually more radically, it is the category of the ‘will’ itself. This can be verified once more at the level of language, in that the expected opposition is systematically lacking in it: instead of speaking of ‘power’ or ‘will’, Mencius speaks of ‘power’ or ‘doing’ which he illustrates with a story: ‘A prince wondered whether he was able to deploy those of ‘humanity’s funds’ (ren) which, thanks to the Sage he questioned, he finds in himself. If you don’t deploy them, Mencius responds, it’s because you ‘don’t’ do it and not because you ‘can’t’ do it (I, A, 7) … so, if you are asked to take a mountain in your arms to cross the North Sea, it is justifiable to say that you ‘couldn’t’ do it; but if you are asked to collect a branch to offer your older brother (to whom you owe respect), it’s not true that you couldn’t, it is simply that you ‘don’t’ …So this opposition of power and doing, and not of power and will, structures from the beginning to the end of the Mencius, the whole semantic field relating to behaviour. The sole criterion that Mencius takes into consideration, in comparison with the capacity possessed, is that of its actual implementation. Everyone, he affirms, can become the most perfect Sage (Yao or Shun): to be comparable to him, you simply have to act as he does (VI, B, 2)’ (FBTL 32).
There is such a divergence between the archetypes: on the Chinese side, that of the process of maturation, from the germ or seed from which behaviour also arises; on the Greek side, the tradition of representing people ‘in their actions’
In the very first chapter of his book, Jullien had shown that China in general, and Mencius in particular, think ‘in terms of propensity, both of potential and actualisation’, not in terms of causality. Here we have ‘choice and action (‘deliberated’ choice – ‘willed’ action): There is such a divergence between the archetypes: on the Chinese side, that of the process of maturation, from the germ or seed from which behaviour also arises; on the Greek side, the tradition of representing people ‘in their actions’, hôs drôntas, as Aristotle said, as it comes to us from epic poetry and the theatre, genres with which ancient China was unfamiliar – as for the Bible, it too is a narrative of actors.” Evidence of this can be found in the fact that “Mencius doesn’t come across the question of evil – or at least not in a frontal way: there isn’t (there can’t be) for him, unlike Kant, any ‘radical’ evil.” For him, the only alternative is to “help to deploy the propensity … (that of our fundamental nature) – within us, or to forgo it. One doesn’t have to decide it by pondering on it: China hasn’t developed the internal monologue, … it hasn’t given choice centre stage – choice between vice and virtue, God or Satan, good and evil: Hercules hesitating at the crosssroads, Adam and Eve afflicted by temptation in the Garden of Eden’ (FBTL 32).
Instead of asking the fascinating but insoluble question of the possibility of will (evil), China offers us a thorough analysis of the effects of conditioning’
But, if there is in Chinese thought no concept of a choice between vice and virtue, Jullien points out, ‘the moral alternative posed by Mencius is not a real one – it is skewed ahead of time: he considers evil to be only a ‘non-good’, and it has no proper consistency in constituting a principle.’ Therefore, ‘it could be said that Chinese thought hasn’t sought to illuminate what Western thought, for its part has found to be unfathomable (‘… das für uns Unergründliche, as Kant said). Chinese thought is without vertigo’, but ‘it has … taken care to elucidate, by the attention it has given to processes, how the phenomenon of propensity, when it comes to behaviour, could be checked or favoured, inclining towards one side or the other. Instead of asking the fascinating but insoluble (fascinating because insoluble) question of the possibility of will (evil), it offers us a thorough analysis of the effects of conditioning’ (FBTL 33).
‘We should try in some way to make this effect flow sponte sua, as a simple consequence, from arranged conditions’
Jullien explains: ‘We see that ‘Mencius, the thinker of morality, by insisting on the importance of conditioning, merely returns to the most common Chinese thought about efficacy and strategy’; one shouldn’t claim to achieve the desired effect directly, because to do so always implies force and makes the result precarious, and even produces a counter-effect. Instead, we should try in some way to make this effect flow sponte sua, as a simple consequence, from arranged conditions. Thus, it isn’t necessary to make the people moral by forcing them to correspond with an imposed ideal, and any repressive politics is empty due to its effect of constraint: it will serve only to ensnare the people in the ‘net’ of punishment. But we must, by intervening ahead of the process of evolution (in other words, we might say, at the level of its ‘socio-economic’ conditions), ensure that these are sufficient for a morality ‘naturally’ to result, which education will then support. In any case, this is what unfailingly favoured the entry of Marxism to China, even if this relation of socio-economic conditions with respect to morality isn’t conceived in a deterministic way and once again remains of the order of propensity rather than causality’. The moral person retains the possibility of a ‘stable’ conscience and of being tenacious in his resolution, and to do this in spite of the greatest destitution (I, A, 7). A morality of the training of the person (xiu shen) was thus able to develop in China’ (FBTL 33).
But ‘what happens if we encounter the opposition of the world, instead of continually being able to embrace it and take advantage of it by conforming to it?’
Jullien is not fully convinced by Mencius’ sole reliance on training and conditioning, in the absence of a contribution from a resourceful will, and asks: ‘What hope would remain in which to trust, or how could one still be firm of resolution, if this adverse condition continues all the way through and isn’t allowed to be resolved? We see the question emerge openly when Mencius is placed before his personal failure: he also refrains from confronting it and leaves it uncertain (at the end of I, B). If I have failed in the prince’s presence, this isn’t due to some schemer jealous of my favour, but to the action of ‘heaven.’ Period: no more will be said about it – or could be said about it. The invocation of transcendence, made as a last resort, remains evasive since it is without theological support’ (FBTL 33-34).
Tenacity: the only position that remains open for the self exposed to the opposition of the world will be to ‘stand firm’, endlessly and without further questioning, without despairing or giving up.
Deprived of a resourceful will and the ability to appeal to faith in a transcendent metaphysical ‘God’, the only option opened to the Chinese is to ‘stand firm’ endlessly and without further questioning, without despairing or giving up’. In other words, if the (psychological) category of a pure will has assumed little consistency in Chinese thought, the ethical capacity not to give up in one’s effort and determination, in spite of the resistance encountered, is the only remaining possibility’. This is why Jullien has chosen the word ‘tenacity’ to describe ‘the virtue of chi’. ‘If tenacity is the first virtue, it is because it thereby responds to the attention the Chinese give to circulation and continuity, the ‘way,’ tao. By calling upon the unfolding of a process whose course demands not to be interrupted, it will need to be placed in opposition to an action-oriented will that is marked by a beginning and an end, as well as by the possibility of a start.’ Jullien does see a coherence in the Chinese view. Tenacity (from the standpoint of the person) resonates with reliability (between persons) and ‘brings to light, in its dimension of effort and investment, what receptivity, in its capacity to embrace internal coherence in the renewal of things and situations, implied first of all internal progress, before it could ease and spontaneity’. Chinese thinkers always insist on this total ‘holding firm’ (chi); otherwise, the effort would be in vain, it would be equivalent to having done nothing’.
Confucius also said (in the Zhongyong, XI): ‘The moral person behaves in accordance with the way; to abandon it half-way is what I could never do! Or consider the Master’s favourite disciple (Yan Hui, ibid VIII), of whom it is said that, having opted for control in his behaviour, ‘as soon as he reached something good’; ‘He clasped it tightly and hid it in his heart, but without abandoning it’ (FBTL 33-34).
As for Mencius, the moralist, “he expands on the point that virtuous behaviour is born from a continuous ‘accumulation’ of uprightness (ji yi) … one has to apply oneself and without thinking about how to attain it directly. One should be preoccupied with it, ‘not letting it go’, but not believing that it could artificially be ‘encouraged to grow’. This can happen only by means of a progressive development and in a ‘natural way’ (II, A, 2)’. This is a perfectly logical conclusion in a worldview where the power of transformation is located in ‘nature,’ which humans must not obstruct, but nevertheless can facilitate through their work. The key-words on the side of humans are ‘non-interruption’ and diligence (wu shao jian duan) as well as ‘courage’ (yong), and of course ‘tenacity’: Jullien says: ‘one never relaxes one’s effort’. Is that his final conclusion?
The fact remains that, if the will may appear to be a mythological representation, this myth has its function and therefore its justification.
The will may be a ‘myth’, still, Jullien believes, it is a useful myth. He explains: ‘Imagining that we might possess a will has its impact in return… this representation contains an effect in itself – in particular, one that is political. Without its support, could democracy be justified? If we again look to Rousseau, in the absence of consecration, the ‘popular will’ is its only legitimate basis (and isn’t democracy today weakening due to the breaking up of this representation of the will?). Promoted as a unique moment that conceals the diversity of the processes actually involved in it, it constitutes in fact a common and convenient referent, giving legitimacy to equal participation between people’. It does not make us ‘equal to God, as Descartes wanted,’ but it allows a subject to be instituted while deploying its initiative. Let’s therefore continue to invoke the ‘Will’, but without deluding ourselves about the evidence for it, the evidence that would deliver experience intuitively, but in a way that is so enigmatic. Let’s therefore have recourse to the will, but as a certain way of representing to ourselves our capacity for mobilisation as well as resistance which, rather than approaching the world indirectly, dares to confront it, and that even promotes itself through this confrontation’.
Source:
François Jullien – From Being to Living, a Euro-Chinese lexicon of thought (2020-Original text De l’Être au Vivre 2015)