TCS Special Issue: ‘Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien’
Now available: Theory, Culture & Society’s Special Issue: ‘Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien’; edited by Shiqiao Li and Scott Lash.
Cover art: Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan), 1551. Source: Public Domain/Met Open Access.
Few topics in social and cultural theory have been addressed so widely and thoroughly over the past decade as ‘ontology’. This special issue is a sustained set of explorations and analyses mobilised effectively against ontology. The focus is Chinese thought and the work of French philosopher, classicist and sinologist, François Jullien. For Jullien, ontology is a question of the ‘qu-est-ce que c’est’, the ‘what is it that it is’: in effect interrogating the ‘is’ of the ‘it’. Instead of ontology’s mechanics of cause and effect there is an organicism of cognition of patterns. The authors in this issue with Jullien and through China find that in Chinese thought this question of being is very much displaced by a focus instead on life. Thus, the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi’s notion of the ten thousand things are rejections of ontology, as are Chinese gardens, geomancers, Yi Jing and other modes of divination. As are landscape, literati, the Book of Songs and the Book of Rites. The issue begins with Jullien and then Scott Lash who directly address this question of being on the one hand and life on the other. Ontology and the question of the ‘is’ are integrally intertwined with language: the question of the ‘is’, as Shiqiao Li demonstrates is one of predicational or propositional language, whose natural home are the highly inflected Indo-European languages from ancient Greek to modern European. Li juxtaposes this to the radically uninflected Chinese whose logographic nature is close to the similitudes of natural language and actually performative life itself.
The issue addresses art, in which Yuk Hui contrasts the West’s paradigmatic art form, tragedy, with China’s, which had neither epic not tragic poetry, but instead featured landscape, which Hui addresses through a Chinese inflected idea of Immanuel Kant’s intellectual intuition. Wang Min’an looks at Chinese art and poetry as a ‘view from above’ that has nothing to do with the stationary eye of Renaissance perspective nor the omnipresent vision of God but instead with the nonhuman visions in random motion, alongside the view, not of but by the mountains, clouds, rivers and trees. We segue to the ontology debate which have been perhaps most acute among anthropologists. Here William Matthews challenges Descola from the viewpoint of divination; Stephan Feuchtwang looks at geomancy and the patterning, as if written in nature of Chinese gardens. Wang Mingming shows that the anthropology debates were never about ontology as much as about animism and points to a very different idiom of neither ontology nor animism in the earth-centred cosmology of Fei Xiaotong. We look at the possibility of a critical theory in China. Julia Ng, Michele Ty and Peter Fenves explore Walter Benjamin’s anti-ontological critical theory in his encounter with Daoism. And Joyce Liu shows how Jullien’s anti-ontological ‘silent transformations’ can be countered by Zhang Taiyan’s transformed ontology as a critical practice overcoming the passivity of Confucianist naming.
The issue includes short essays on the initial reception of Jullien in France by Paul Ricœur, Jean-François Lyotard, and Alain Badiou.
Abstracts and article links appear below
Shiqiao Li and Scott Lash, Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien: An Introduction
François Jullien wants us to see what thought and life could look like without ontology, promising intellectual riches unavailable in the heavy ontological apparatus we are deeply invested in. The strength of Jullien’s argument comes from a deep and unique alliance between philosophy and Chinese thought, a risky one – incurring predictable disgruntlement from both philosophy and sinology – but nevertheless enduring and productive. This is far from advocating one in place of another, as we are accustomed to do in critical theory in relation to divinity, grand narratives, scientism, modernity, and even stable truths. It is an endeavour to think the ‘unthought of’ of ontology through what Jullien calls a vis-à-vis suspended in productive tension, a dialogue. In philosophy, the other is subsumed in a singular dialectical relationship through oppositions. What Jullien insists on is a doubleness of co-existence in Chinese thought rather than a singularity of dialectics in ontology. If ontology grounds a philosophy that makes a world in its image, and if that image is increasingly untenable as an ecology of the planet, Jullien’s call for a deeper reflexivity in ontology is of enormous significance. This special issue brings both Jullien’s argument and Chinese thought to a forum to explicate what this could mean in multiple fields from art and architecture to anthropology and critical theory.
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François Jullien, Life or Being: What Possible Existence between Being and Living?
The author argues that being-thought, in keeping with the ‘intellectualist choice’ of the Greeks, has narrowed the thinkable to the question of whether something is or is not. The discourse-reason (logos) of the Greeks necessarily lends itself to construction and to its result, which is knowledge. Knowledge in turn trades the singular for generality, e.g. beautiful things for beauty. Because what it seeks is nowhere to be found in the world, such philosophy has located pure in-itself-ness in the beyond of metaphysics, reducing life to metabolism, a shuttling between the extrema of lack and satiety. The Chinese language, because it lacks morphological markers, an imperative mood, and a verb ‘to be’, sidesteps ontology (being-thought) and thus hints at a more fruitful perspective on living, elucidating the notion of existence as a way to provide an exteriority from which to examine living, in all its immediacy, without recourse to any metaphysical beyond.
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Scott Lash, Ontology or Theology? François Jullien and Chinese Vitalism
François Jullien intervenes into the ontology debates to understand Chinese thought as an anti-ontology, but instead in terms of ‘life’, that is as a sort of vitalism. Chinese anti-ontology features the juxtaposition of the wu (there-is-not) with the you (there-is). This, I argue, maps onto theology’s counterposition of otherworldly and this-worldly. Here Daoism features an ascetic and unstratified wu in contraposition to Confucianism’s you of moderation and stratification. We contrast ontology’s causation with ‘efficacy’ in Jullien’s Chinese thought. We read Zhuangzi’s ‘Equalization of Things’, where the inequalities of the you are equalized in the wu, as a sort of vitalist object energetics. We turn to Chinese ethics, and its driving virtue of yi. We understand the yi not as ‘righteousness’, which is a theological attribute of Christ, but instead as closer to political ‘right’, in China embedded in immanentist forms of life. Western Cartesian ontology is often contrasted with Chinese thought that works through a certain ‘analogism’. We read this, with Walter Benjamin’s Chinese ‘mimetic’ faculty, in terms of a vitalist energetics, a forcefield of the Ten Thousand Things.
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Shiqiao Li, Language, Figure, Landscape in Chinese Thought
Grounded in the use of the visual, Chinese thought and language operate within a wide spectrum that includes calligraphy, poetry, literature, painting, and garden-landscapes. In languages of phonetic signifiers, the spectrum is deliberately controlled to be narrower, excluding the visual from language and delegating it to iconology. These linguistic-cultural strategies have an ancient past and produce far-reaching consequences in thought and artefacts, with garden-landscapes being one of the most substantial outcomes. Garden-landscapes are China’s equivalent to Greek architecture, leading us to both a repositioning of Chinese thought and a new framework of architecture. In this sense, the city, serving the function of thought in the expanded medium of conceptual and material units of meanings (figures), incorporates things into intellectual orders. This is perhaps the most important feature of Chinese thought and one that is the first to be obscured when it is rendered in scholarship in Indo-European languages.
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William Matthews, Getting Our Ontology Right: A Critique of Language and Culture in the Work of François Jullien (Open Access)
This article presents a cognitive anthropological critique of François Jullien’s approach to language and culture. Jullien approaches ‘culture’ as a coherent set of concepts across time and space, relying primarily on identifying Chinese (and Greek) thought with particular concepts expressed in language. This mischaracterizes human culture, which exists on the level of individual mental representations, and relies on a form of linguistic determinism which fails to stand in the face of psychological and anthropological evidence. This leads Jullien to claim an incredible degree of cultural (and ontological) divergence between the Chinese and Europeans. By accounting for the distribution and dynamism of mental representations, the degree to which thought is underdetermined by language, and above all the divergence of intuitive and reflective cognition on the individual level, we can arrive at an alternative, ontologically realistic account of cultural divergence.
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Wang Mingming, For Heaven-Human Conviviality: Reflections on Some ‘Ontological’ Narratives
This article uses a Chinese narrative of ‘nature-human harmony’ as the main thread to connect the contributions of ontological anthropology. I argue that the best of the critiques of nature-human or nature-culture dualism in social anthropology propose rebuilding a world that ‘pursues harmony while preserving difference’ in the double sense of nature and culture. Given that most social scientific problems are indeed related to utilitarian individualism, I argue that research on ‘ontology’ should re-engage the ancient notion of ‘ji’, construed as ‘others-comprised self’, which forms the foundation of a perspective of ‘broad human relationship’ between humans and their others (other humans, things, and divinities). Perspectivism inherits many categories of Western cosmology that it critiques and represents a kind of inert ontology. Grounded in the cosmology of life (sheng), we hope to contribute to a new anthropology of the compatibility between self/others and subject/objects.
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Stephan Feuchtwang, François Jullien’s Landscape, Site Selection, and Pattern Recognition
François Jullien’s idea of landscape in Chinese philosophy and art is taken from the refinement of highly literate writers and artists, unrelated to the techniques of location that find good sites and make places in landscape. This article is based on a study of fengshui (Chinese geomancy). It argues that fengshui is a practice of identifying not things or beings but moments and circumstances of a client. It works with an epistemology of pattern recognition, which is based on observation and experience but does not test the truth of the signs that are the means of recognizing patterns. This epistemology of pattern recognition is not peculiarly Chinese but can also be found in building, urban planning, and the art of medical diagnosis.
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Yuk Hui, On the Varieties of Experience of Art
This essay takes up the line of critique of François Jullien in The Great Image Has No Form, that Chinese landscape painting (shanshui) provides a counter-example to Western painting. The opposition, namely that the former undermines form and the latter focuses on form, provides two kinds of access to ‘truth’ and demonstrates two different philosophical temperaments between China and Europe. The article attempts to reflect on Jullien’s comparison and the varieties of experience of art that Jullien has opened up for us. It also hopes to go a step further by exposing the different logic and sensibility that are present in shanshui painting through a reading of Wang Bi and Mou Zongsan.
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Wang Min’an, Against Renaissance Perspective: The Soaring Gaze
This essay explores whether ontology is internal to traditional Chinese culture from the perspective of the view from above. Ancient Chinese philosophy, poetry, and art abound with all kinds of descriptions of viewing from above. Such views from on high, as illustrated by famous works discussed in this essay, usually admit of no fixed focus; that is, there is no ontic being, concealed or disclosed, controlling the perceiving eyes. The gaze from above, which is either fluid or decentered, in some cases does not even focus on any real object. It merely reveals an abstract historical review or an attitudinal stance. As such, the fushi gaze, devoid of any concrete object of perception or any central point of reference, always points to the absence of ontology.
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Peter Fenves, Detour and Dao: Benjamin, with Jullien, contra the Ontology of the Event
Taking its point of departure from Jullien’s primary claim in The Silent Transformations that ancient Greek ontology propels European thought into ‘the vertigo of the event,’ the article turns toward a European thinker whom Jullien does not mention in this context, namely Walter Benjamin, and asks whether his work, too, succumbs to this vertigo. The choice of Benjamin as a ‘test case’ is governed by two factors: while his work is widely associated with notions of the event, there is little recognition of the degree to which he was engaged with the Daodejing (in translation) from the early 1910s to the late 1930s. Divided into four chronologically ordered sections, each of which is prefaced by a claim advanced in The Silent Transformations, the article shows how Benjamin’s concepts of transition, effective non-action (under the term ‘proletarian general strike’), mimesis, ‘the second technology,’ and Jetztzeit (‘now-time’) are all traversed by a mediated conception of the Dao. The primary question around this re-evaluation of his work, guided by the idea of ‘the silent transformations’ that Jullien adopts from Wang Fuzhi, is whether the theory of revolution Benjamin developed in the 1930s can be characterized as Daoist or, better yet, Marxist-Daoist.
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M.Ty, By Way of Resemblance: On Benjamin’s Daoist Renewal of Dialectics
Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors.
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Joyce C. H. Liu, Re-Reading Zhang Taiyan against François Jullien: Ontology and Political Critique in Chinese Thought
This article challenges François Jullien’s reading of Chinese thought based on his disjunction between ontology and shi, or propensity. According to Jullien, the Chinese history of ideas has been a never-changing entity in a homogeneous society for thousands of years. Jullien’s juxtaposing and contrasting ‘European thought’ and ‘Chinese thought’ falls into the trap of cultural essentialism he wanted to avoid. Jullien’s interpretation of shi also led him to believe that Chinese people never challenge reality, never confront or resist, tend to stay in conformity, and lack interest in critical thinking. This paper argues that, despite the combination of Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism that constituted a powerful paradigm of normative governmentality of the hierarchical system in different dynasties in Chinese history, the spirit of political resistance has never ceased. Zhang Taiyan, at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of Republican China, demonstrated the tradition of such critical political thinkers. The re-reading of Zhang Taiyan’s Buddhist-inspired reading of Zhuangzi could offer us an additional possibility for the emancipatory and political thinking that can be inspirational even today.
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Julia Ng, The Action of Non-Action: Walter Benjamin, Wu Wei and the Nature of Capitalism (Open Access)
Beginning with a discussion of adaptations of François Jullien’s understanding of ‘potential born of disposition’ and ‘silent transformation’ in two recent analyses of capitalist contemporaneity (by Bennett and Dufourmantelle), this essay argues that as a philosophical tool, ‘China’ bears within it a rich and underanalysed genealogy that reframes critical theory’s approach to nature and its objects in a new geopolitical context. The remainder of the essay then unpacks the intellectual history and textual philology of one earlier and pivotal moment of critical theory’s entanglement with ‘China’: Walter Benjamin’s transformation of ‘non-action’, or wu wei, into a complex for thinking through possibilities of what he might, with Jullien, call not-being in debt to Being.
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François Jullien, Between Is Not Being
This essay argues that the West could glimpse its own unthought-of by ‘de-ontologicalizing’ its thought, and that a fruitful way to do this is to draw on Chinese thought. In particular, the author develops herein the notion of between (l’entre), which is less a locus than a dynamic passage between states or extrema. This contrasts with the (static) Western notion of Being, where a thing either is or is not. Unlike a thing, between has no being, no nature, no properties. For the Greeks life was, similarly, an alternation of emptiness (desire or want) and fullness (satiety). Instead, life is in flux between those extrema. Accordingly, between is not an (ontological) intermediary but processual, like the through of the Tao. The author explores between in the Chinese conception of landscape as mountain(s)-water(s) and applies between to urban renewal, underscoring its value as a tool for the de-ontologizing of Western thought.
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Jean-François Lyotard, The Crab’s Efficacy
Invoking Laozi and Mencius, Jullien offers an oblique take on efficacy, one of China’s most intriguing yet most influential notions formulated in Daoism, the practice of art, and military strategies. It circumvents the heavy philosophical apparatus of means versus ends and theory versus practice that jam the Western conception of efficacy.
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Paul Ricœoeur, Constructing Comparables
As the absolute other of Greek thought and speech, Chinese renders Greek strange; in seeking equivalency, Jullien’s discussion on time demonstrates a creative betrayal of the original and an equally creative appropriation by the target language in the process of translation.
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Paul Ricœoeur, Note on Du ‘temps’: Elements for a Philosophy of Living
The author probes Jullien on the problem of time, which is at the heart of European philosophy, while allowing himself to embrace an intelligibility of the ‘infra-philosophical’ leading to a ‘living in philosophy’. The question is both intriguing and rewarding: ‘what the Chinese have thought because they have not thought time’. Yet the author wonders: does Jullien pay more attention to the Greeks than to the Hebrews vis-à-vis China with regard to the concept of time? Jullien’s text on time of course is a piece in a much larger set of texts that bring to the fore questions of life; the author offers, with generosity, much broader thoughts on the possibility of Jullien speaking French while thinking Chinese, and the enigma of living (say in Augustine and Montaigne) within a philosophy of transcendence in the West as opposed to the immanence of philosophy of living in China.
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Alain Badiou, Jullien the Apostate
Cutting through simultaneously the conventions of sinology and a capitalist universalism modeled on the West, Jullien unfolds a difference between Chinese thought and philosophy that allows it to be thought out without taking sides. His unusual move insists on the irreducibility of the difference yet at the same time renders the irreducibility intelligible; Jullien gives us a world structured by distinct lines of thought.
