In From Being to Living, François Jullien, who describes himself as both a sinologist and an hellenist, summarises his lifelong inquiry ‘through a series of oppositions in order to conceptualise what he calls the écarts (divergences) between European and Chinese ways of thinking’. He insists that ‘it is not that European thought and Chinese thought are different in kind from one another in the sense that they represent differences of sensibility’. 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 … 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.’
Jullien holds that it not possible for a Westerner to introduce Chinese thought head-on, as for instance some scholars have done using charts. For then, he says, ‘we would still inevitably be dependent, without being aware of the fact, on the implicit choices of our own language and thought … A displacement hasn’t occurred, we haven’t left home. We haven’t left ‘Europe with its ancient parapets’. The only strategy I can therefore see by which to emerge from this aporia is to organise the confrontation step by step, laterally … by means of successive sideways steps’ … to form a lexicon progressively, as we go along’.
A prolific French scholar, author of over fifty books, François Jullien (1951- ) is among the most translated of contemporary thinkers, with works appearing in some twenty-five countries. More than twenty of his essays have been translated into German, Italian, and Spanish, and dozens have been translated into English, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Portuguese. I have counted 15 books translated into English so far.