Apophatic Paths From Europe to China by Franke William

Author:Franke, William
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

NEW DEBATES ON THE RELEVANCE OF TRANSCENDENCE TO CLASSICAL CHINESE THINKING

Smid finally and cogently attributes to Hall and Ames a methodological “blind spot” concerning transcendence. By virtue of the fact that they define it as not significant to the Chinese conception of the world, or as “not a defining priority,” they are not able to take account of it at all and indeed exclude it in principle on the basis of their conviction that it is misleading and erroneous. However, for other researchers there is evidence that transcendence is significantly present in Chinese conceptions of the real. Smid, in principle, is disposed to grant that if transcendence is only marginally significant in Chinese culture, then Hall and Ames could be relatively justified in excluding it for the sake of gaining clarity in their presentation of the features of Chinese culture that count most or are “determining” (123). I would suggest, instead, that this is not a matter of degrees of presence but of the recognition and recognizability of transcendence tout court. “Transcendence” is not showing up for Hall and Ames not because of its scarcity and marginality but, on the contrary, because it is so pervasively and overwhelmingly significant everywhere in Chinese thought. It is not manifest as any particular phenomenon, not even as a kind of reality or unreality or surreality that Hall and Ames’s ontological optics can register and perceive. Seen thus, the question of transcendence cannot be just a minor issue or one that can be marginalized: the whole basis of our approach to and understanding of the distinctive nature of Chinese thought hinges on it.

Not so surprisingly, then, there are numerous scholars today who are turning back to transcendence and zealously defending the centrality of a dimension of transcendence in Chinese philosophy. One such comparative philosopher is Eske Møllgaard.49 Møllgaard’s counterattack addresses itself also to Jullien’s denial of ontological difference in China—that is, of any categorically other, higher reality, noting that the Zhuangzi explicitly states that the Way is “beyond the dichotomies of ‘full’ (ying) and ‘empty’ (xu), ‘root’ (ben) and ‘branch’ (wei), ‘to accumulate’ (ji) and ‘to disperse’ (san). The Way is thus beyond the continuum that, according to Jullien, constitutes the totality of the ancient Chinese philosophy of process” (2). Møllgaard cites Chinese and Japanese scholars of Daoism who, unlike Western scholars, find that “in Laozi and Zhuangzi there are two distinct realms: the realm of ‘things’ (wu), which is under the constraint of time and space, and the realm of the ‘Way’ (dao), which transcends beings and forms in time and space” (3). Recognition of this ontological difference leads to clearly apophatic formulations of the Daoist project: “Therefore, according to Zhuangzi, the highest attainment of the ancients was to realize that there is ‘a realm [or state] before there are things’ (weishi youwuzhe). The realm before there are things is the ‘Way’ (dao), which ‘things things’ (wuwu) but is ‘not a thing’ (feiwu) itself, and so, is strictly speaking ‘nothing’ (wu)” (3). Møllgaard

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