François Jullien
What is the future of Chinese thinking?
Pour une cohérence de la prognose
Presentation (French)
“Detour via China” is the formula by which the French Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has become known.
In the often heated debates about the new economic power of China that banks and conglomerates eulogise as future markets, Jullien’s voice emerges not just as one of a circumspect academic authority on China, but as one who deliberates current processes mirrored by the long, complex history of the country and communicates current economic, social and political developments in such thinking and cultural practice.
Moreover, Jullien has always advocated that China not be discussed as a mere object, which simply has certain attributes; rather it should be discussed as a moment in our disputes with our own “Western” thinking.
His detours about China always emanate from European philosophy with its Greek origins, and lead back there to reveal the contingencies of their principles and conditions. They confront this philosophy with what was thought in China – and with what was not thought there, since it is often the gaps in Chinese thinking which point to the restrictions and the aporiae of European thinking.
Why “time”?
Such a gap is, as Jullien points out in his book About “time”, the concept of a time which is standardised, abstract, neutral, for everything and applicable to all.
While Occidental philosophy has worked incessantly on this problem of time, from Aristotle and Augustinus, to Kant, from the Early Romantics and Hegel to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, the Chinese have never ventured to think along these lines.
Chinese thinking is aware of the season and the concrete duration of the process. This knowledge has been sufficient over the millennia. Is that not to say – such is Jullien’s provocative question – that this philosophical thinking of the time is unnecessary? That it does not correspond to a practical necessity of life? Perhaps it even has prevented us from asking the practically relevant questions about the processes of life.
To know the future without unity of time
What does this mean for prognosis? In the Western concept of prognoses and predictions, a general, abstract theoretical concept of time meets (and grapples with) a variety of singular practices and practical motives. How does the prognostic view to or into the future change, if it follows that movement of a detour via China, which Jullien has described?
Are we looking at the future in a different light when we turn our back on the idea of a universal time horizon, or at least relativise this idea? Does the drama of the prognosis, where the Western subject stages the struggle against the temporality of its existence, give way to a series of concrete, situation-specific techniques of prediction?
Natural growth and hypercapitalism
We also ask François Jullien for possible points of contact between the ideas of a natural growth in Chinese thinking of temporal connections and the capitalistic concept of growth.
Jullien himself in his transcriptions on Chinese thinking repeatedly uses formulations which refer to the economy. He talks of the continuum of the process as a “fund of immanence”, which functions as “resource and source”. Is the capitalistic future construction possibly more akin to Chinese thinking than the future concept of historical materialism?
A simultaneous prognosis
François Jullien will give a philosophical lecture in French about prognosis and draw his reflections in the present tense. A simultaneous translation into German will convey his pronouncements in the future tense and construct prognostic statements. The audience has the choice which of the versions it wants to use.
