The Philosophy of Living by François Jullien, and: This Strange Idea of the Beautiful by François Jullien (review)

It is appropriate to deal with The Philosophy of Living and This Strange Idea of the Beautiful together since they both embody the methodology of François Jullien that is to be found in many of his books. The European Continental tradition in philosophy on a particular topic is outlined and then contrasted unfavorably with Chinese philosophy on the same topic, although it has to be said immediately that by “Chinese philosophy” the author means those parts of it that he selects. Often this approach is perceptive and imaginative, and Jullien always has interesting things to say on what is thought by the philosophers that he considers. Of these two books his approach works far better with the one on beauty; the book on living is largely confined to an account of Heidegger with little reference to Chinese thought, and much ponderous italicization and very long sentences along the way. I thought this was a shame since there is that extended debate in Chinese thought on the relative merits of action and thought that could have fitted in nicely here with the topic, and it is ignored.

The book on beauty is more balanced in its use of Chinese and non-Chinese thought, and the author thinks it is interesting that there is in his view no aesthetic language in Chinese that resembles European language about beauty. Yet there is obviously a desire among Chinese thinkers to address the aesthetic in their work, and Jullien wonders how this is done. This is a relevant issue, and we often wonder what is going on when a culture has a concept encapsulated in a word or words and a different culture seems to operate without such linguistic machinery. It seems to me, though, that what Jullien describes here is not such a case, since the Chinese passages often appear to be about beauty without actually using the word or any plausible equivalent. He makes the useful point that often translators have imported the term to make sense of the passage, and this is misleading since the original does not use language that can be accurately represented in this way. This is a point often made about translation, of course, and a good translator is more concerned to preserve the sense of a passage as compared to someone who is restricted to a word-by-word replacement.

A real problem with Jullien’s approach here and in other books is that he does not see himself as limited to comparing concepts from culture to culture but he wants to evaluate them as well. He tends to prefer the ways in which Chinese thought deals with common issues, if indeed they are common, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it seems a rather passé enterprise. It is surely far preferable to compare concepts, and the desire to pick winners and losers is strange. Are languages and conceptual schemes in competition with each other? Perhaps they are if they refer to things in very different ways, yet from the examples in this book this is not the case. There are differences certainly; some cultures prioritize some concepts, some others. If they could use their concepts to make sense of the points made in the other culture, then perhaps the differences are not so major after all. Despite the virtuosity of the prose in the book, this possibility of translation at the conceptual level often seems to be plausible, and it surely undermines the main thesis.

As I read through the book I kept wondering what the thesis really was. Is it that Chinese culture has no abstract concept...