Globalization, Divergence and Cultural Fecundity: Seeking Harmony in Diversity through François Jullien’s Transcultural Reflection on China

ABSTRACT

In the age of global mélange, cultural diversity is facing increasing threats from the homogenizing forces inherent from globalization, highlighted by the increasing risks that Western thought spreads its standard categories, saturates the mental landscape and infiltrates into “weaker” cultures, leading to mental sterilization and deculturation (déculturation) globally. The cultivation of cultural fecundity has thus become a key issue of the age in resistance towards the sterilizing tendency under the pressure of global uniformity (l’uniforme). François Jullien, French philosopher and Sinologist, has established the concept of “divergence” (l’écart), being stimulated by the tension produced by “difference” (la différence), where “in-between” (l’entre) contains fertile cultural resources to exploit. Taking China as a philosophical tool and exotic resource, the stopover in China provides Europe with the opportunities to shake up the spiritual bindings, re-interrogate the European thought and think of its unthought-of (impensé). Hence, the ideal way of cross-cultural communication is to establish an eye-opening perspective from outside (dehors) by applying a strategy of “detour and access” (le détour et l’accès), with an ambition to promote global dialogism.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural fecundity (fécondité culturelle)
• divergence (l’écart)
• globalization
• François Jullien
• East–West dialogue
• seeking harmony in diversity (和而不同)
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The author read both the French and English versions for reference when writing the paper. The English translation makes partial references (similarly hereinafter) to Jullien 2014.

2 “China as philosophical tool” is the term that best illustrates Jullien's methodology, by contrast with more traditional approaches used by many other Sinologists, to explore China issues. He published an article of the same name “La Chine comme outil philosophique” (“China as Philosophical Tool”) in 2002, which has extensively explored this issue. See Jullien and Zarcone 2002a. Please note that there is also an English version of this article: please see Jullien and Zarcone 2002b.

3 Jullien calls it “nulle part”.

4 This is Jullien's paraphrase of the sentence “Tao is mild to the taste” (淡乎其无味, Danhu qi wuwei), quoted from Chapter 35, in Lao Zi, Daode jing (道德经), trans. by Lin Yutang.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China: [Grant Number 18BWW018]; Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China: [Grant Number 16ZDA194].