- Summary
- Contents
- Subject index
This new English translation of François Jullien’s work is a compelling summation of his thinking on the comparison between Western and Chinese thought. The title, From Being to Living, summarises his essential point: that western thinking is obsessed by – and determined as well as limited by – the notion of Being, whereas traditional Chinese thought was always situated in Living. Organized as a lexicon around some 20 concepts that juxtapose Chinese and Western thought, Jullien explores the ways the two have historically evolved, and how many aspects of Chinese thought developed in complete isolation from the West, revealing a different way of relating to the world. Translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, this text explores Chinese thinking and language in order to excavate ...
Chapter III: Receptivity (vs Freedom)
Receptivity (vs Freedom)
1 Receptivity is an under-developed notion in European thought. It is mainly concerned with goods, property or functions. Conversely, it has barely taken shape in proximity to a subject-self. At most it draws on a sentence in André Gide: ‘I held that every new thing should always find the whole of us wholly available’ (1952: 65). Hence this notion doesn’t belong to the order of morality any more than it does to psychology; it isn’t prescriptive (or if it is, what it prescribes cannot be clarified) or descriptive (or explanatory) and cannot therefore be thought of either as a virtue or as a faculty. Yet these are really the two great pillars or referents on which we in Europe ...
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