The Encounter of Chinese and Western Philosophies

Front matter

DE GRUYTER

Benoit Vermander

Benoit Vermander The Encounter of Chinese and Western Philosophies

Part I: The Limits of an Encounter

Chapter 1 The Gardens of Philosophy — 13 Mapping and Mappers —— 13 Cosmos and “The-World-as-It-Is” —— 22 Permanence and Process —— 29 Non-Dual Cognition versus Dualist Reasoning — 32 Correlations and/or Substances —— 35 Does Transcendence Matter? —— 47 The Otherness That Lies Within — 55

Chapter 2 “Rectifying Names” —— 58 Di, Tian, Shen, Guishen, Shenming... — 58 Lexical Disputations: Five Notions —— 66 What’s in a Name? — 74

Chapter 3 Philosophical Narratives in (and about) China — 82 The May Fourth Movement as a Philosophical Event —— 84 Recreating Philosophy — 89 The Beijing Model —— 100 The Shanghai Variant: A “Dual Ontology” — 111

Part IJ: Reimagining the Engagement

Chapter 4 Encoding the Way —— 127 Ritual, Language, and Text — 128 Three Characteristics of Early Chinese Wen —— 134

VIII —— Contents

From “Texts” to “Classics” —— 142 Attentiveness: The Reader as Ritual Practitioner —— 145

Chapter 5 Comparative Classics, Comparative Philosophy — 152 From Notions to Motions —— 152 Models of Dialogue — 155 Modes of Reading — 165 Beyond Comparative Classics —— 179

Chapter 6 Exploring New Gardens —— 185 Ritual: Terms, Issues and Styles —— 185 Confucian Meritocracy: Between Authoritarianism and Democracy —— 192 Thinking about Thoughtlessness —— 199 Phronesis in the Confucian and Ignatian Traditions — 211 Conclusion —— 228 References —— 233 Abbreviations —— 249 Note on Citations and Translations —— 250

Index of Subjects — 256

Introduction

A long time ago, asserts the Laozi,' people in one village could hear the cries of dogs and roosters in the adjacent settlement, and yet the idea of visiting each other never occurred to them (Daodejing 80). Are we dealing here with descriptive or prescriptive prose? The text may nostalgically refer to the past, as my rephrasing implies, or, alternatively, it speaks of a utopian country, in which (suggests the same stanza) travel, weapons, machinery and even the art of writing would be considered as suspect.

Ancient Chinese thinkers were insisting on a point that the Laozi’s micro-parable illustrates in its own fashion: only after one’s way of behaving and thinking has “settled”, has fully matured, should one endeavor to move further along the road. Streams, notes Mencius iii: (372-289 BCE), fill every hollow they meet along the way before flowing on to the sea. Similarly, when devoting yourself to the art of studying (xue “), you need to go deeper before you go further, i.e., you must get to the bottom of each of the difficulties met in the course of your exploration. After an issue has been thoroughly dealt with, one can shift to another topic (Mencius 4B.18 and 7 A.24). The Confucian thinker Yang Xiong hE (53 BCE-18 CE) extends the analogy to all natural phenomena, thus strengthening further its intellectual and spiritual significance: the wild goose proceeds “like water” (you shui 447k) in the sense that, rather than trying to cover all the surrounding territory, it goes only towards certain directions and it lands only in certain locations. Besides, “a tree develops its branching by [first] stabilizing its roots. It proceeds the way water does!” (Yang Xiong, Exemplary Sayings [Fayan i] 114)?

As illustrated by our representative examples above, Chinese philosophy is not spontaneously “comparative”; it does not travel from one village to another so as to look at the neighbors’ dogs and roosters. These animals are evoked in another adage of Mencius: when dogs or roosters escape from the farm, one knows which direction to go searching. Conversely, whoever has lost her heart-mind (xin ty) has also lost the reference point from which to start the quest. Thus, “the way of learning through apprenticeship” (xuewen zhi dao [H] 2 č) is to resort to a teacher who will provide us with the guidance we need as we search for the heart we lost — “and that’s it! [er yi yi m E&]”, concludes Mencius (Mencius

1 Also called Daodejing (i.e., The Classic of the Way and [Its] Virtue [Potency]). As the sections of this seminal work are extremely short, I name them “stanzas” (following Levi 2018 and others) rather than “chapters”.

2 For the rules applying to quotes and translations throughout this volume, see the Appendix “Note on Citations and Translations.”

8 Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https:/doi.org/10.1515/9783110799118-002

6 A.11). Rather than walking at random, we need to firmly adhere to the path the teacher has opened in front of us.

Even if they may sound unduly constraining, Laozi’s and Mencius’ precepts constitute a useful reminder: one does not circulate with impunity from one philosophy, from one wisdom, from one culture to another, as one would tour a country. The displacement must be triggered by a necessity experienced in the innermost. Following the way of water, a philosophy that wants to be comparative in scope should not proceed further as long as it has not probed deeper. In other words, a philosophy that extends over very vast areas may prove to be shallow

For ancient Chinese thinkers, the art of studying was certainly not equivalent to accumulating knowledge. Rather, it was akin to exert the virtue of attentiveness till the truth being reached or the phenomenon being observed had been tasted by the students, till they were able to integrate what they had learnt into deliberation and conduct. What it meant to “study” already constituted a subject of meditation."

Keeping in mind the lessons drawn from this opening, I will now ponder over the criticisms that Kant had addressed to “scholasticism”. What at first glance may seem to be a rather disconcerting detour will eventually lead us to formulate the first proposition of the present work: inviting the Chinese and Western traditions into fruitful dialogue requires to carry out a detailed, at times critical appraisal of the way in which they are usually put into relation. I thus endeavor in this book a “critique” in the traditional meaning of the term: an inquiry led in order to better discern the conditions presiding over the shaping, validity, limitations or fallacies of a given body of discourses and assumptions. As stated by Foucault, “critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest” (Foucault 1988, 154). Kant’s critique of scholasticism will inspire the framing of my own questions as to the way comparative philosophy is understood and practiced today, for the present endeavor might suffer from limitations similar to the ones that Kant was pinpointing in the philosophical enterprise of his time. When complemented by a text-based appreciation of what “study” was entailing for ancient Chinese thinkers, this questioning will help us to find novel ways “to develop our branching by stabilizing our roots”, to appropriate the analogy suggested by Yang Xiong.

Philosophizing (philosophieren) is by no means a laudatory term in Kant’s vocabulary. It is synonymous with “repeating one’s lesson”. Kant’s criticism of phil-

3 What “studying [learning]” was meant for, and how to apply oneself to study, became a lasting topic of debate in classical China. Summarizing how a disagreement with the scholar Geng Dingxiang ke [4] (1524-1596) evolved into a full-fledged quarrel, Li Zhi 2° (1527-1602) explained: “Geng Dingxiang and I argued over learning” (Lu 2020, 217).

osophical learning, which led him to formulate the “conceptus cosmicus” (Weltbegriff) of a philosophical endeavor and to contrast it with the “scholastic concept” (Schulbegriff),* maintains a relevance that goes beyond the schools and traditions (specifically the one of Christian Wolff) he had in mind at the time. Philosophy, says Kant, cannot be learnt. Whereas the “scholastic concept” is turned towards the logical perfection of a given system of knowledge, the cosmic concept orients the philosopher towards the ultimate ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae) so she may operate a breakthrough through the dense forest of knowledge systems (KrV, B867/AA 3: 542.26 f.).

Kant’s conceptus cosmicus is not akin to an understanding of philosophy in a “cosmopolitan” sense, as some translations and interpretations would imply. It rather suggests that philosophy (and, in fact, every particular science) is a “universe” of cognition in which each part of the whole as well as the form taken by the articulation of these parts are dynamically subordinated to the end(s) that this universe assigns to itself. Two levels need to be distinguished here. The first one has to do with the mindset that triggers subjective rational activity: if someone has grasped something actively, “generating” it from her capacity to exercise reason and following the guiding idea that grounds the unity of the field of knowledge that she is investigating, then, she has entered the domain of philosophical activity as Kant envisions it. Conversely, if she has integrated the exact same content passively, for instance by following the cursus provided by an academic institution, such person has merely “learned, and is a plaster cast of a human being” (KrV, B864/AA 3: 541.11; transl. Fugate 2019, 569). However (and we enter here a second level of Kant’s discussion), the building of a system of cognition through the activity of reason is not enough for accessing the conceptus cosmicus of what philosophy ought to be: “Philosophy as a world concept is the idea of the philosophy or philosophical doctrine that would be known and taught by the ideal philosopher” (Fugate 2019, 575). Such “ideal” doctrine is to be understood as a system of wisdom based on the idea of the necessary unity of all ends. It is not enough to think rationally and independently: you need to think teleologically Said otherwise, you need to formulate what Kant elsewhere calls reflective teleological judgments — judgments informed by ends that are both necessary and universal. By contrast, the scholastic philosopher deals with the method and the ends

of particular domains of cognition without referring to their use by (and to their location vis-a-vis) other fields.

So as to insert Kant’s discussion into the perspective that this book will develop, we need to put the former in context. The term “scholastic philosophy” is primarily applied to Medieval European philosophy, and, by extension, to movements and thinkers grounding their own endeavors into a reinterpretation of its principles and methods (“neo-scholastics”). The legitimacy of applying this term to other cultural contexts than Medieval Europe (Song-Ming philosophy or Tibetan Buddhism for instance) has been debated. Several thinkers have found such cultural decontextualization useful for formalizing the relationships between textual canons and their interpreting communities in various intellectual and religious settings. And indeed, taken as a tool for comparative studies, the concept of “scholasticism” may rightly encompass all philosophies taught in the schools. “Schools” (universities or other institutions) have always been prone to privilege a given textual corpus that serves as the key reference-point for the debates in which teachers and students alike are engaged.

At the same time, Medieval scholasticism was characterized not only by the privileged reference to a given corpus but also by a method for exploiting its resources, namely the quaestio disputata. Though elliptical, Kant’s criticism applies not only to the closure of the corpus to be taught, but also to the failure of the scholastic method to draw the freedom and the will of the interlocutors into the question at stake. Based on the dialectic of pro and contra, the quaestio disputata — a pedagogical device heavily favored by Medieval theological schools — relies on the demonstrative syllogism of Aristotle’s Organon, seeking thereby to shape theology into a given form of science. The strengths of the method are obvious:

Students were trained to see both sides of a problem, to learn the viewpoint of the ancient philosophers (the ‘authorities’) with regard to it, to argue on behalf of their own opinion, and to answer objections to it. [...] The masters found the “question” form an excellent one in which to express their views. [...] Even their published commentaries, which are sometimes literal exposition of the prescribed text, frequently took the question form, the commented text serving simply as the occasion for raising certain problems.

However, the scholastic method of argumentation (the sed contra dicitur opposed to the opening videtur quod non) must implement a founding principle, which constitutes the major premise of the syllogism, with the issue to be resolved being exposed within the minor premise. Per se, the disputatio requests that the principle

5 See especially Cabezon (1998); Tiles (2000).

belongs to the order of the question to be solved. At the same time, ensuring its validity means that said principle should derive from a higher one. The term of the process could have been met when considering the Being qua Being, but Aristotle had clearly stated that what comes first is absolutely out of the process of proof (Aristotle, Met. T3, 1005b; T4, 1006a). This is exactly why scholasticism, insofar as it was attempting “a methodological and philosophical demonstration of Christian theology as inherently rational and consistent” (Price 1992,120) was ultimately to meet with almost inextricable difficulties.

Still, it would be excessive to consider the disputatio as the only dialogic mode present within the scholastic tradition. The latter possessed, at least potentially, alternative ways of anchoring the truth-seeking process into dialogue and non-formalized discussion, ways that could have engaged scholastic philosophy into new venues, and that were to bear fruits a long time after the demise of the scholastic endeavor. Of particular importance here are the considerations on the life of Christ found in the third part of the Summa Theologica: the modo conversationis is what characterizes Jesus’ active life, states Thomas Aquinas (ST III, q. 40), and this mode of familiar conversation, typical of Jesus’ style of teaching (familiariter cum hominibus conversando), is the adequate way to convey to one’s public “the truths that have been contemplated (contemplata)? (ST III, q. 40 a 1. Resp.). In other words, “conversation” is the process through which active life and contemplative life are united into one. This development should not be seen as peripheral within the scope of the Summa. Through his analysis of Christ’s way of proceeding, described as dialogical in style and nature, Thomas captures the best of an earlier theological style, more spiritual and introspective, the freedom and plasticity of which might have corrected the logical excesses of latter-day scholasticism.® No tradition that maintains the ability to bring interlocutors together, to enable them to reflect and debate as a community, could ever be a fully closed system: its openings, sometimes even its contradictions define its dialogic potential.

Again, it might come as a surprise that a book focused on Chinese philosophy’ and its current engagement with the Western tradition ponders over European

6 This reading of the Quaestio 40 is developed by Theobald (2007), notably in 421ff. and 465. See also Vermander (2011).

7 I will not debate whether “Chinese thought” is “philosophy” (one may usefully refer to a recent summary of the discussion in Rošker 2021, 1-7). Lexical confrontations around the topic have proven to be more confusing than helpful. Nothing in my view goes against the use of the word “philosophy” in Chinese context; but I am conscious that this remains a sensitive issue, due to the anchorage of the term into the Greco-Latin tradition. I use indiscriminately the terms of “philosophy”, “thought”, “thought system”, “wisdom system”. I agree with Carine Defoort when she suggests that different ways of articulating structures and procedures of thought can be ap-

Medieval scholasticism. However, the fact of locating exchanges and breakthroughs within the framework of a canon and of the various interpretative strategies it allows is even more characteristic of the Chinese “philosophizing” that starts with the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) than of Western scholasticism. The ever-evolving exegesis of the state-sanctioned Classics? was going along the systematization of thought traditions. In this regard, the ambitious endeavors of Zhu Xi R (1130-1200) and of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) offer comparable features. For mentioning just one example, the epistolary exchanges of Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan BEJU (1139-1192) about the way to articulate the notions of “supreme polarity” (taiji AHR) and “non-polarity” (wuji 4&4) are in many respects akin to a disputatio, by their argumentative style as well as by the publicity given to the debate (Darrobers and Dutournier 2012).

I am already sketching here a mode of philosophical rapprochement that does not start by comparing or contrasting concepts and worldviews. Rather, it first focuses on the way various traditions relate to their canons and inscribe thought processes into social settings. A formal rapprochement, so to speak — and yet, one that is certainly very significant. We reflect and debate within textual and societal frameworks, and their deciphering is part of the process of understanding, interpreting — and comparing.

The attention to be given to such textual and social anchoring is part of the philosophical endeavor proper. When Gadamer, in Truth and Method, reflects upon what it means to “understand” and “interpret”, he starts with the analysis of a concrete historical situation: that which, in the second half of the 18" century and especially in the first half of the nineteenth, translated the methods employed in the natural sciences into a paradigm through which to judge the progress recorded in the knowledge of humankind, its moral nature and its social setting. Gadamer’s considerations on our relation to the classics are anchored in this historical recovery, which leads him to circulate from one period to another and yet always brings him back to the rupture from which he begins his inquiry. Likewise (to quote a very different work), in The Order of Things, Michel Foucault endeavors to move away from a reflection centered on the meaning of what a given subject may express towards an investigation bearing on the mental systems by which proached as “family resemblances”, as Wittgenstein puts it (Defoort 2001, 407). Debates on lexical options are often red herrings.

8 I will write “Classics” when referring exclusively to texts included in a state-sanctioned canon (“The Four Books and Five Classics”), opting for “classics” when the term is used in a more general sense. The distinction has its importance: The Zhuangzi and the Daodejing are “classics” but not “Classics”. As I generally refer to texts that were largely commented upon — independently from their canonical status — I will privilege the writing “classics” throughout this book.

ideas are produced. But Foucault needs to proceed through a long historical wandering which begins in the 16" century and takes us through several epistemes and the transformations that affect them over time. It is the historical study of these epistemes and their transformations that explains how “Man” was constructed both as a sovereign subject and as an object of knowledge.

Although of infinitely more modest size and ambition, this work is inspired by the way of proceeding initiated by Gadamer and Foucault. It will revisit a historical phenomenon - the encounter between Chinese and Western philosophy after the re-opening of the latter in the 1980s — and, when needed, will turn towards the “prehistory” of this phenomenon, i.e., the intellectual cross-fertilization that happened from the beginning of the seventeenth century till the first half of the twentieth. It recognizes that only an interdisciplinary approach and a reflective review of such historical developments can assess their significance. It does not stop with the analysis of sequential events. Rather, it relies on it to unfold questions about what it means to mutually understand each other (intercompréhension) — about the conditions under which mutual understanding takes place — and also about the way “comparative philosophy” is conducted today. And this is where we meet again with Kant’s Weltbegriff and Schulbegriff: “Comparative philosophy”, as I will describe its unfolding for the last 40 years or so in the Chinese-Western context, has evolved into a scholastic endeavor. Again, let us not immediately take the term in too pejorative a fashion. Scholasticism, as Kant fully recognizes, should not be the object of a caricature: it is concerned with the formal perfection of a domain of cognition, even if it does not operate the jump that (Kantian) philosophy dares to make when it enters its “world concept”: to investigate the source, the nature and the boundaries of all cognition from an architectonic perspective. We will thus pay respectful attention to the way East-West comparative philosophy proceeds, and notably to its frequent reliance on the commentarial approach of the classics — an archetypal scholastic endeavor if there is one. However, we may occasionally also meet with expressions of “scholasticism” that, by philosophizing, by mostly arguing over terms and textual interpretations, somehow hinder our access to investigative, unfettered thinking.

There are three ways of approaching Chinese philosophy from a comparative viewpoint. The first one starts from a set of questions that crisscross times and cultures — say, around the proclivities that human nature may or not contain, or about the ideal ruler or political regime, or yet on matters of self-cultivation, its methods and ultimate goals. It unfolds an array of hypotheses and answers which, partly divide, partly gather on common grounds a shortlist of Chinese and non-Chinese thinkers. The second approach elects to contrast the basic tenets of Chinese thought with another set of axioms, often with the avowed objective to liberate the understanding of Chinese thinking from the framework of concepts and presuppositions anchored in the Western tradition (and such work also means to liberate Western thinking from the same presuppositions). The third one pragmatically studies the dynamics of reactions and interactions awakened by one of the successive encounters between the Chinese canon and other canonical traditions, encounters that took place alongside the progressive introduction into China of, first, Buddhist/Indian metaphysical and logical vocabulary and syntax, second, Western categories of thought and beliefs in their various, sometimes conflicting expressions.

Undertaken with due caution, each of these approaches proves to be fruitful. And they tend to complement each other, even though their respective proponents are prompt to find faults in their counterparts’ designs and presuppositions. Still, there are trends in comparative philosophy as elsewhere. For the last 40 years or so, a specific version of the second approach has awakened a considerable interest, generating an impressive amount of literature. One of the goals that this book assigns to itself is to assess its results, and to do so from the standpoint that critical distance suggests. I will mainly ponder over the contrast often suggested between Chinese “correlative thinking” (or similar expressions) and Western “ontology”, and I will question its accuracy and relevance. While recognizing how important it is to contrast traditions and systems taken as a whole, I will also suggest hermeneutical strategies that avoid the trap of swiftly “essentializing” the thought structures under study.

Let me here roughly summarize the mainstream understanding of the Sino- Western variant of comparative philosophy, as I understand its premise, as well as the reasons that make me write this book in response:

In the grand narratives of intellectual history sketched in a number of Western and Chinese accounts,’ “Western thought” effectively starts (begins its journey towards world prominence, so to speak) around the time of Plato, to whom Aristotle offers both correctives and continuation, and then develops in an almost straight line that runs through Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes ... before finding a kind of double apex in Kant and Hegel. The latter may constitute the “apotheosis” of Western thought, both in the sense that it signals a further culmination just after the one already achieved by Kant and in that it announces an inevitable “decay”, which may also be described as a welcome metamorphosis, though Heidegger is sometimes tasked with the same role. Thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Dewey or Bergson (and, later on, Foucault/Deleuze, at least for some of the authors whom we will comment) testify

9 I will identify some of these accounts in Chapters 1 to 3, and give at the same time more diversified and nuanced portrayals of them.

to a (praiseworthy) work of deconstruction within the Western tradition itself. From its origins onwards, the latter would have relied upon the building-up of an ontology, which not only presupposes the existence of a master-category (Being, induced by the features of the family of languages within which Western thought developed), but also its assumption into a substantialist view of reality that puts “relations” and “processes” into a subordinate position. The same view explains the primacy given to the autonomy of individual beings, including human subjects. Various thought systems extended these premises into the logical, theological or yet political realms.

In contrast, according to the same meta-narrative, ancient Chinese thought originated from divinatory speculations that led (a) to stress the fluidity of all phenomena and forms of life, (b) to focus on the relationships governing the passage from one state of matter (and one state of affairs) to another, (c) to describe the patterns of cosmic and social existence by establishing correlations among the various spheres of existence, and ultimately (d) to determine how to best adapt (individually and collectively) to these overarching patterns. Challenged by the irruption of a thought syntax (and a correlated lexicon) imported from India, Chinese thought was eventually able to rephrase its original intuitions. It did so partly thanks to the fact that Buddhist thought was also arguing for the inanity of all substantified “beings” (though by following another path than the one traveled in ancient China), and, for another part, thanks to the inventiveness displayed in the use of ancient concepts such as li #! (patterns), and qi 2A (energy, fluid, or even matter). Chinese thought thus progressively systematized its intuitions and concepts into syntheses embracing all the levels of existence and intellectual speculation. The political and gnoseological commotions brought in by the shaping of unbalanced relationships with the West led two or three generations of Chinese philosophers to reconsider their own tradition primarily through concepts and methods rooted in Western philosophy. The current task rather lies in recapturing the premises proper to Chinese thought, so as to build upon the resources they offer or, at least, to live and think in the tension that the reference to a “dual ontology” necessarily triggers.’°

10 I will discuss the notion of “dual ontology” in Chapter 3. Its promoters do not consider its use contradictory with the Western origin of the term “ontology” per se, as they contrast two ways of perceiving and conceptualizing phenomena. This is reinforced by the fact that the usual Chinese translation of the term “ontology” (bentilun AX fc) is sometimes used as a direct equivalent of the technical term used by the “Western” philosopher whose work is translated, and sometimes as referring to a China-specific concept: “Instead of a study of being, bentilun is a study of ben (root, origin) and ti (stem, body) of things” (Li and Cauvel 2006, 40; see also Rošker 2021, 36-38).

This meta-narrative deciphers texts, partly in function of concepts that it extracts from their reading (but sometimes takes out of context), partly according to notions that are not found in these texts and are superimposed over them. It constructs syntheses, equivalences and oppositions that are somehow too well balanced for not triggering questioning. Besides, the concept of “Chinese philosophy” supported by the said vision sometimes refers to the thought developed until around the demise of the Western Han (2000 years ago), sometimes to the various stages of intellectual reformulation that China underwent after it entered into contact with Buddhism and, more largely, with Indian texts and reasoning. In the same way, “Western philosophy” may refer to the Greek source and its Roman subsidiary, or else to the philosophical developments that occurred from Augustine onwards, as if Greek and Semitic sources had entered naturally into fusion. In such reconstructions, Indian and biblical ways of sensing and reasoning are extremely difficult to appreciate and assess independently, due to the fact that they are primarily located vis-a-vis the “Chinese” and “Western” sources that they have respectively contributed to renew and shape.

As I see the task at hand, the critique of such positions is a preliminary for tackling the following question: in today’s context, what style of cross-cultural philosophical engagement should be imagined and fostered? Cross-cultural philosophical dialogue is indeed indispensable to the revival of philosophies that could be both local and genuinely dialogic, if not “cosmopolitan”.

The first two chapters will focus upon the dominant model propounded by Western sinologists when it comes to comparing the Western philosophical tradition with the Chinese one. I will detail its main topics and assertions before dealing with lexical and translation issues, crucial for the appreciation of Chinese thought. The third chapter will shift to Chinese narratives about local, comparative and global philosophies, notably assessing its self-positioning vis-a-vis Western authors, topics and concepts. A second part will follow, also composed of three chapters. It will attempt at articulating the conditions under which Chinese philosophy can meaningfully cross-fertilize with other traditions in global debates and endeavors. Chapter 4 will offer a general reading of ancient Chinese classics, alternative to the one that presently dominates the landscape described in Chapters 1 to 3. In Chapter 5, I will harness the results and insights already gathered, offering a kind of blueprint as to the way to positively draw upon different philosophical traditions to engage common questions and pursue shared endeavors. A last chapter will present four cases of ongoing transcultural philosophical dialogues and the promises they bear, while my conclusion will attempt to recapitulate our journey and to open up further perspectives.

Part I: The Limits of an Encounter

Chapter 1 The Gardens of Philosophy

Let us imagine Chinese and Western philosophical traditions as gardens, each of them displaying its distinctive style and ornaments. You may also visualize two parks facing each other, with various enclosures in their midst — rock garden or rose garden according to the case. This is more or less how sinologists or comparative philosophers envision their field of study. Comparative philosophy is akin to landscaping: it watches over two premises located in the same resort, the one mirroring the other (which being the mirror of which depending upon your vantage point). The two cannot be separated one from the other since the concepts mobilized for describing the first are to be understood in reference to the second. What I call here “the Western blueprint” corresponds to the representation of our philosophical gardens as endeavored by Western scholars, a representation that largely depends (as we will see in our second chapter) upon the manufacturing of a specific lexicon. In parallel, the third chapter will describe the Chinese contribution to the same landscaping operation. These are not two concurrent representations: Chinese and Western academics often share common interests in creating a mirror-image of their traditions, even if their perspectives differ in other respects.