Jullien, François, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness

Abstract

Jullien is a French sinologist cum philosopher, said to be a worthy successor of Marcel Granet and Henri Maspero. He is no stranger to Chinese philosophers, particularly those who are interested in comparative philosophy between East and West. This oeuvre under scrutiny, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (Nourir sa Vie: A l’Ecart du Bonheur), is not his first in comparative philosophy. What first came to my attention was one of his early books, The Propensity of Things (1995)—the French original in 1992. What was most intriguing to me was the word “propensity” (propension), which could be lifted as signifying the quintessential element of Sinic thinking whose synonyms are “inclination,” “proclivity,” and “tendency,” that is, without ontological or teleological finality. It refers to the incessant natural flow of things (e.g., waterway) or the continuous process of phenomena. As Jullien puts it in the book under review, “The nature of water is such that when it is not troubled, it is clear, and when it is not moving, it is flat; but when it is held back and does not flow, it can no longer be clear” (114). Unlike the Greek phusis and telos, propensity signifies fluidity or flow on the one hand and a sense of perpetual movement and its “unfinalizability” on the other. Therefore, to translate human propensity as “human nature” in the Western tradition of philosophizing is misleading because one is process, whereas the other implicates the sense of finality. The ancient Chinese yin-yang logic is radically different from Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectic. Both cases come to their finalities in the State and Communism, respectively. What happens after that is anybody’s guess. Propensity may be likened to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of “reality” as “process.” His most reputed student, Charles Hartshorne, wrote an essay entitled Reality as Social Process (1953), which may also be characterized as the way of Sinic thinking. I would not hesitate to claim that both celebrate “the performative magic of the social” (Pierre Bourdieu’s expression). Sinic reality, if I may use the term, is “social process” par excellence. This book is a quest for Zhuangzi’s art of “living life” (sheng sheng). It belongs to the new philosophical genre of what I call “body politics” (in the plural) or “carnal hermeneutics” as the interpretive art of the body and its imports on multi-dimensional Dao (2010) 9:359–362 DOI 10.1007/s11712-010-9179-9