How François Jullien might approach Philosophy

Philosophy, as it is generally conceived in the West, often finds itself entangled in a particular conceptual net, one spun from an ancient decision. This decision, to prioritize ‘being’ – to think in terms of static essences, fixed identities, and substantial entities – has cast a long shadow. It has led to a relentless pursuit of universals, of immutable truths, and a separation of the abstract from the concrete, the theoretical from the practical. We have built grand edifices of metaphysics upon this foundation, believing ourselves to be excavating eternal verities.

But what if we were to take a detour, to think from an outside, from a perspective where thought is not primarily concerned with ‘being’ but with ‘process,’ with ‘propensity’ (shi)? The Chinese tradition, in its long unfolding, offers a remarkable resource for such a reorientation. It does not seek to grasp stable entities but to understand the dynamic interplay of forces, the continuous unfolding of transformations, the immanent efficacy of situations. Here, thought is less about defining what something *is* than about apprehending how it comes to be, how it tends, how it can be navigated.

This is not a simple substitution, an exchange of one conceptual framework for another. Rather, it is an invitation to a productive dislocation, an *écart*. By encountering the Chinese tradition’s way of attending to the world – not as a collection of discrete objects but as a vast, interconnected field of forces and tendencies – we begin to see the unthought-of within our own philosophical assumptions. We can begin to question the very axioms of Western thought, revealing the particularity of its foundational choices and opening up new avenues for philosophical inquiry, avenues that are less about pinning down…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in François Jullien’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.