Apophatic Paths from Europe to China

William Franke

Description

In Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, William Franke brings his original philosophy of the unsayable, previously developed from Western sources such as ancient Neoplatonism, medieval mysticism, and postmodern negative theology, into dialogue with Eastern traditions of thought. In particular, he compares the Daoist Way of Chinese wisdom with Western apophatic thought that likewise pivots on recognizing the nonexistent, the unthinkable, and the unsayable. Leveraging François Jullien's exegesis of the Chinese classics' challenge to rethink the very basis of life and consciousness, Franke proposes negative theology as an analogue to the Chinese model of thought, which has long been recognized for its special attunement to silence at the limits of language. Crucial to Franke's agenda is the endeavor to discern and renew the claim of universality, rethought and reconfigured within the predicament of philosophy today considered specifically as a cultural or, more exactly, intercultural predicament.
List of Illustrations

Preface and Argument
Historical-Autobiographical Introduction
Introduction to an Intercultural Philosophy of Universalism
Acknowledgments

1. All or Nothing? Nature in Chinese Thought and the Apophatic Occident

The Nature of Dao, or the Dao of Nature
In Praise of Blandness: Litotes of the Neuter
Transcendence and Immanence of the Dao
Mencius, or the Naturalness of Morality: Is the All without Transcendence?

2. Nothing and the Poetic “Making” of Sense

The Art of Effectiveness: Doing or Saying Nothing
Poetic Approaches to the Limit of Expression
Neo-Daoism and Neoplatonism: An Uncanny Historical Parallel
Western Apophatic Poetics
One and Other, All or Nothing, East and West
The Absolutely Other and the Movement of Transcendence
(Negative) Metaphysics (or Pre-Physics) as Poetry
Coda on Chinese Expression of Negativity

3. Immanence: The Last Word?

From Figures of Immanence to Formless Transcendence: The Yijing and Negative Theology
Immanence and the Ineffable
The Matter of Method in Intercultural Philosophy
China and the Sense of Transcendence
Secular Self-Critique and Theological Transcendence
New Debates on the Relevance of Transcendence to Classical Chinese Thinking
Reality That Representation Fails to Represent

4. Universalism, or the Nothing That Is All

From the Globalism of Nature to the Universality of Thought
Historical Permutations of the Non-natural Universality Forged by Thought
Beyond Cultural Relativity and the Construction of Universality
Transcendent Universality and the Negative Way: Reclaiming the Enlightenment for Religion
Universality in the (Apophatic) Gap between China and the West
The Common Broken(open)ness of Cultures
The Self-Negation of Culture by (Negative) Theology

5. An Extra Word on Originality

Epilogue Intercultural Dia-logue and Its Apophatic Interstices
Appendix Analytic Table of Contents

Index

Sujets

• Theology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438468594
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

PRAISE FOR APOPHATIC PATHS FROM EUROPE TO CHINA
“Up to now François Jullien’s conception of Chinese thought has not had a full representation in English. This book responds to that gap and opens a dialogue with other traditions of apophasis.”
— Haun Saussy, author of Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
“By highlighting Western phenomena that are comparable to the Chinese, mainly in the apophatic tradition, Franke succeeds in exposing the biases and blind spots in Jullien’s as well as in Hall’s and Ames’s respective treatment of Chinese ‘philosophy.’ This book will stand as an important resource for the future of scholarly debates in these areas.”
— Karl-Heinz Pohl, editor of Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches
APOPHATIC PATHS
from Europe to China
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
APOPHATIC PATHS
from Europe to China
REGIONS WITHOUT BORDERS
William Franke
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Franke, William, author
Title: Apophatic paths from Europe to China : regions without borders
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438468570 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438468594 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Li Jiu Ping 李菊萍 (Lemon) and Wang Hai Juan 王海涓 (Daisy)

Leap into the boundless and make it your own.
—Zhuangzi
Ultimate speech is to be rid of speech; ultimate action is to be rid of action.
—Zhuangzi
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface and Argument
Chapter 1 All or Nothing?: Nature in Chinese Thought and the Apophatic Occident
Chapter 2 Nothing and the Poetic “Making” of Sense
Chapter 3 Immanence: The Last Word?
Chapter 4 Universalism, or the Nothing That Is All
Chapter 5 An Extra Word on Originality
Epilogue Intercultural Dia-logue and Its Apophatic Interstices
Appendix Analytic Table of Contents
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1. Peter Paul Rubens, Abundantia , 1630. Oil on panel.
Figure 1.2. Ni Zan, Woods and Valleys of Mount Yü , China, Yuan Dynasty, 1372. Hanging scroll; ink on paper.
Figure 1.3. Ni Zan, Twin Trees by the South Bank , China, Yuan Dynasty, 1353. Hanging scroll; ink on paper.
PREFACE AND ARGUMENT
This book is part of a larger project of rethinking philosophy and culture across historical ages and geographical continents through “apophatic” lenses or, in other words, through the perspective of negation, of what does not appear, of what is not and cannot be said. The apophatic thinking pursued here undertakes this task through bringing about its own metamorphosis into a programmatically intercultural philosophy. This entails attempting to think ideas not just within the bounds of a given cultural frame, with its inevitable background assumptions, but rather in unbounded ways in relation to other cultures and their different conceptual frameworks. Such thinking aims to negate, if not to neutralize, first one’s own and finally any cultural framework. The possibility of relativizing culture per se by playing one culture off against the other—of stepping back and gaining critical perspective with respect to any and all cultural preconditioning, and then perchance of facing something absolute that is fleetingly glimpsed in the interstices between cultures—is the momentous breakthrough of intercultural philosophy. By negating all that is culturally relative, such philosophy opens into a dimension of the absolute that can perhaps be best interpreted as theological, or at least as religious, in nature. This “dimension” has been the source of representations of divinity throughout the history of religions and in mythologies the world over.
This uncircumscribable, unfathomable dimension intrinsic to experience as such is the real bugbear, making culture such a volatile, conflictual, aporetic, and unmasterable challenge for philosophical thinking, as well as for the multicultural—modern or modernizing—societies that in our time are seen to be mushrooming all across the planet. Reflecting on culture philosophically is not just a matter of comparing different forms and variants of manifest phenomena. More fundamentally, it entails sounding out the ungraspable ground of all cultural expressions, whether this abyss is imagined as residing in human nature and its inalienable freedom exceeding the confines of any possible definition of identity; or in language, with its differential structure opening to infinity; or in a divine endowment and destiny that transcend human knowing.
We are creatures of culture even before we are self-consciously aware as subjects or agents. And centrally at stake in the philosophy of culture, most conspicuously since the Enlightenment, is the question of universality. The title in hand will eventually be subsumed under a broader rubric: The Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking. The present volume is issued as a first installment, complete and coherent in itself, of that more comprehensive project. The broader project works from the insights of negative theology as it emerges in Western civilization from antiquity, especially in Neoplatonism, and develops in medieval and baroque mysticisms, continuing all the way to modern and postmodern expressions in philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. The work being presented now carries the self-critical vocation of such negative (or, literally, “apophatic”) thought into unconfined regions beyond what is recognized as “the West” through encounter with Eastern, particularly Chinese, traditions and their characteristic modes of thought.
Crucial to this book’s agenda, accordingly, is the endeavor to discern and renew the claim of universality as rethought and reconfigured within the predicament of philosophy today considered specifically as a cultural or, more exactly, an inter cultural predicament. Nothing could be more classically philosophical than the quest for universal knowledge and for a universal or common ethical and political practice. But how are we to think of universality in our times, after the concussions of postmodern thought and culture and in the midst of our current historical crisis, with its pervasive fragmentation and sectarianism? A conviction concerning the preeminent, perhaps paradoxical value of theology—specifically in its infinitely self-critical form as negative theology—as a guide to this rethinking animates my previous works in this vein, particularly my books On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). The special focus of the present volume is on the intercultural aspects and underpinnings of such an apophatic philosophy. In order to illuminate this focus from below and by a more particularized light than that of purportedly pure, universal reason, it will be useful and appropriate to begin in an autobiographical mode with a retrospective reflection placing the author’s personal path from Europe to China in its geographical and historical context.
HISTORICAL-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
I write from within China, or more exactly from Macao, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. This special status is legislated to last for a limited time only—until 2049—for exactly fifty years starting from the 1999 handover of Macao to China by the Portuguese colonial government. This scenario is roughly synchronized with the similar handover of Hong Kong to China by Great Britain in 1997. But particularly Macao today has become the theatre of a great experiment being conducted by the People’s Republic of China in an attempt to test the viability of opening its territory to Western-style intellectual freedom and unrestricted cultural exchange, while still maintaining an authoritarian form of government centered in Beijing. If this kind of controlled freedom can be fostered in Macao without creating a climate of revolt against the central Chinese government, maybe the model can be extended to other areas in the interior of the mainland. Something like this, we may surmise, might lie behind the reasoning of the regime in Beijing. There is much at stake for the future of China and, consequently, of the world in seeking to find ways of forging a viable form of compatibility between such overtly divergent types of civilization. The university, too, has an important role to play in this refashioning.
Within the first decade of the new millennium, the University of Macao began announcing its goal of hiring leading Western academics as part of its all-out bid to become a world-class research institution with a mandate from Beijing. In effect, whether intentionally or not, the aim was to revive Macao’s historical role as gateway to the West. Historically, especially in the early modern period, Macao had been the key point of entry into China for the Christian missionaries who first infiltrated and initiated consequential contacts with this ancient empire. It has remained a primary port of entry for Westerners and their wares—including, not least, their ideas—ever s