Le détour et l'accès: Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce (review)

i6o China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 François Jullien. Le détour et l'accès: Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce. Collège de philosophie. Paris: Grasset, 1995. 462 pp. Paperback Fr 145.00, isbn 2-246-50371-x. The subject matter of François Jullien's book is not easy to pin down: "Confucius face à Socrate" says the dust jacket; "Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce" is the subtide. At first sight, it appears to be an essay in comparative philosophy, although Jullien avoids this by now ill-fated expression,1 or a cross-cultural study. The rationale for comparing Greek and Western thinking to ancient Chinese has been stated in a variety ofways. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, having embarked upon a similar enterprise in recent years, note: "Our thinking through Confucius, therefore, must be in its initial phases an un-thinking of certain of the interpretive categories that by now have come to be presupposed in understanding Confucius."2 Jullien's approach, however, is somewhat more subtle, as it focuses on the logic ofinterpretation itself. There is, according to Jullien, a typically Chinese way of approaching reality. Its essence is the indirect, the allusive,3 the détour, as the main title of the book "Le détour et l'accès" indicates. Nonetheless, Jullien vigorously expels the notion of a Chinese "mentalité," already criticized by G.E.R. Lloyd.4 His original plan is rather to try to locate this Chinese way of approaching reality—for the Western sinologist and philosopher—at the very outskirts of Western ways of thinking, unveiling at the same time its hidden assumptions and perhaps gaining unexpected new speculative grounds.5Jullien invites his audience —which he expects to be primarily a non-sinological one6—on a journey, "sailing away from the logos, as far as possible" (p. 14).7 His goal is, as he says, to present both traditions in such a way that one throws light on the other, that one accedes to the other. Jullien's goal, hence, is not to give a complete picture of Chinese thinking, but to collect material he sees as the most representative ofwhat he calls Chinese altérité ("otherness"). The indirect, the "détour," Jullien claims, is precisely not a complicated way of doing the same things as a Western philosopher or poet; the Chinese way of approaching reality is in a category of its own, and is complementary to the Western direct, ontological way of seeing things. Jullien thus plays off Greek and Western thought against Chinese, enlightening the one by the other. Compared to the real contents of the book, this general framework, however,© 1996 by University is somewhat misleading; the overall comparative setting even looks artificial and ofHawai iPresscontrived. Jullien's essay is a very elegant and systematic way ofbringing nearer to a Western audience the peculiarities of Chinese culture,8 or at least what Jullien thinks these to be. The only function of the comparative framework, in fact, is Reviews 161 seemingly to justify the large choice ofheterogeneous material put together by the author. Nonetheless, Jullien captures quite vividly the secret union that exists among Chinese ways ofdoing philosophy, poetry, politics, diplomacy, literary criticism, history, and war. He discusses and interprets selected passages from the Shijing, Zuozhuan, Analects, Sunzibingfa, WangBi, Zhuangzi, Laozi, Mencius, and Jing Shentan's commentaries on Du Fu and on the Ming opera Xixiangji? The book is divided into fifteen chapters and opens with a briefpresentation ofthe way in which indirect and subtle allusions are used in contemporary Chinese political discourse. The second chapter, certainly one of the most interesting, contrasts Greek and Chinese military strategy. Just as a battle in Greece is a frontal clashing ofheavily armed troops, so, too, the Greek art of disputation is conceived as a clashing ofopinions. Discourse, again, is seen as a kind ofwar in Greece, and borrows its metaphors from warfare. Jullien thus claims that there is an essential link between the strategies ofwar and discourse, because Sunzi's motifofthe indirect, the qi ^r, is similarly paralleled by the indirect way that Chinese philosophers and poets...