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‘China as Philosophical Tool’

François Jullien in conversation with Thierry Zarcone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

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Since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the phrase ‘Copernican revolution’ has been used in many fields to illustrate an event equivalent to the one Kant brought to philosophy, a revolutionary change in perspective. And Thierry Marchaisse, who questions the philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien in the book Penser d'un dehors (la Chine), entretiens d'Extrême-Orient, writes that the book proposes ‘nothing less than a relaunch of the great work of decentring that defines our modernity - in effect a new “Copernican reversal”‘. Jullien explains that ‘the confrontation between China and the West is one of the great contemporary issues’, that ‘Chinese thought reveals to us different coherences’, that it ‘also makes us go back to the preconceived ideas behind our Reason’, that it is thus ‘in the best position to intrigue today's thinking and shake philosophy up’ … China as philosophical tool.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 50 , Issue 4: From East to West - Civilizations in a Looking-Glass: 50 Years, 1952-2002 , November 2003 , pp. 15 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2003

References

Notes

1. Paris, Seuil, 2000.

2. p. 5. Some of the ideas developed in this book, which F. Jullien wrote with T. Marchaisse, are summarized in F. Jullien,’De la Grèce à la Chine, aller-retour’, Le Débat, Paris, Gallimard, 116, September-October 2001, pp. 134-43.

3. Éloge de la fadeur (Paris and Arles, Philippe Picquier, 1991; republished by Le Livre de Poche, 1993); Fonder la morale (Paris, Grasset, 1995; republished by Le Livre de Poche, 1998); Le Détour et l'accès. Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce (Paris, Grasset, 1995; republished by Le Livre de Poche, 1997); Traité de l'efficacité (Paris, Grasset, 1996); Un sage est sans idée, ou l'autre de la philosophie (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1998); De l'essence ou du Nu (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2000); Du ‘Temps’. Éléments d'une philosophie du vivre (Paris, Grasset, 2001).

4. Penser d'un dehors, pp. 39-40.

5. Ibid., pp. 264-76.

6. De l'essence ou du Nu, p. 74.

7. Ibid., p. 76.

8. The erotic exists but belongs to a different register; see De l'essence ou du Nu, pp. 62-6.

9. Penser d'un dehors, pp. 17-22.

10. Bernard Stevens, ‘En guise d'introduction: une présentation de l’École de Kyoto’, Études phénoménologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve, 18, 1993, p. 30.

11. Penser d'un dehors, p. 25.

12. Ibid., p. 156.

13. Ibid., p. 10.

14. Un sage est sans idée, p. 19.

15. Ibid., p. 52.

16. A poem with a paradoxical meaning that fixes the words uttered spontaneously by a Zen master in order to guide his disciple at a particular moment in his progress.

17. This is also true of Japan; see Augustin Berque, Le Sauvage et l'artifice. Les Japonais devant la nature, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 21-59.

18. ‘Le détour de la parole, ou Confucius face à Socrate’, Philosophie, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 44, 1994, pp. 72-95.

19. ‘De la Grèce à la Chine, aller-retour’, pp. 135-6, 142.