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 elements from them that reveal the fault lines of western thinking. This is an important book for students, scholars and practitioners alike across the Social Sciences.
Indirectness (vs Method)
Indirectness (vs Method)
1 If one notion has prevailed in the European context, it has been the sovereign one of the ‘method’, which has been used to establish, in the most assured and only way justified, our ‘means of operating’, the ars operandi of the Ancients. Everything has been said about the fashion in which it condenses the power of mastery of ‘rationality’, as much in respect of action as of knowledge. Rationality is a self-legitimated term, the only one from which there can be no backtracking. But hasn’t such sovereignty – which no one would think of suspecting – been acquired in a singular and consequently inventive way with regard to the diversity of cultures as well as the possibilities of ...
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