Vital Nourishment DepartinBJrom Happiness Fran<;ois Jullien ZONE BOOKS , NEW YORK 2007 The publisher would like to thank the French Ministry of Culture - Centre National du Livre - for its assistance with this translation. © 2007 Urzone, Inc. ZONE BOOKS 1226 Prospect Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11218 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lo�don, England First published in France as Naurrir sa vie: A 1 'ecart du bonheur © 2005 Editions du Seui!. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jullien, Fran�ois, 1951-. [Nourrir sa vie. English 1 Vital nourishment: departing from happiness / Fran�ois Jullien ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-890951-80-1 I. Life. 2. Meaning (Philosophy) 3. Philosophy, Chinese. I. Title. BD431.J7813 2007 128-dc22 2007023996 Contents Priface 7 Feeding the Body/Feeding the Soul: The Symbolic Divide 11 II Preserving the Freedom to Change 23 III To Feed One's Life/To Force One's Life; Or, How the Attachment to Life Turns against Life 33 IV Vacations: Finding Heaven in Ourselves 43 V Without "Soul" 55 VI Do We Have a "Body"? 65 VII Feeding Your Breath-Energy 75 VIII Procedures of Vital Nourishment 87 IX Exempt from Happiness 10 1 X On Hygiene; or, The Desperate Desire to Endure 119 XI Anti-Stress: Cool, Zen, and So On 137 XII Condemned to the Eternal Silence of Processes 151 Notes 161 Glossary ifCh inese Terms 173 Prefa ce This essay concludes a s�ries ofwritings on the question of"living:' To think through the concept of living from a detached position is far from easy. Unlike the notion of "life," it resists abstraction; its specificform does not emerge in the very act of contempla­ tion. Living is a form of capital that must be nurtured and main­ tained; it concerns the hygiene oflongevity. I have already explored this notion of "living" in two earlier works. In Un sage est sans idee, I examined variations on apothegms derived from philo­ sophical constructions that pursued knowledge and truth.! And in Du "temps, "I explored the concepts of transition and duration, the phenomenology of the moment and of seasonal existence, as opposed to a notion of time delineated by "a beginning" and "an end," a product of European physics insofar as it hastens existence toward its End.2 Those essays led to a schism between "living" and "existing:' That schism in turn cried out to be supplemented by another divide, between coherence, arising out of the breakdown of barriers between opposites, and the logic of sense made dramati­ cally taut by the question why (in L'ombre au tableau).3 Finally, there was the subject of painting itself, the nonobjective object, transcending all others (the painter, in the Greek definition, is the zoographos, or, as the Chinese say, the "animation of the living" (see La grande image n'a pas deJorme).4 7 '-Jl1l\ L NOURIS MENT Living has no meaning by way of projection or fabula- tion), nor is it absurd (despite the spiteful reaction of disbelief); it is beyond meaning. That is why approaching the question of living by way of vital potential or capital seems to me salutary: that way, the ineluctable distortions of ideology are kept to a minimum. Where can one begin in thought if not with some opening, to be followed like a fissure to deposits more deeply hidden? The crack I shall follow passes between Chinese and European thought. Each time I strike at a particular point with my pick, I open the fr acture a little wider, until I expose certain notional lodes lying on one side or the other, deposits unrelated to one another but yielding riches in their respective domains. Having thus deepened the opposition, I look anew at the conditions under which European reason became possible, with an eye to unsettling the obvious and reconfiguring the range of the thinkable. My starting point is a very common Chinese expression: "to feed one's life:' It eludes the great divides between body and soul and between literal and figurative through which European cul­ ture has so powerfully shaped itself. Yet today we see what was consequently repressed returning to menace the contemporary mind, solicited as it is by the temptations of exoticism. Pulling a bit on this thread of "vital nourishment," I see the mesh of our categorical oppositions begin to fall apart: not only at the level of the psychic and the somatic but also on the series of planes we distinguish as vital, moral, and spiritual. The goal is to recover some sort of wholeness of experience from the depths of the verb "to feed" when it is freed from these operational distor­ tions - to the point where the idea of finality so commonly pro­ jected onto it is eliminated and the appeal to happiness, to which we aspire, dissolves. Indeed, might not the Chinese literati, in freeing themselves from the pressure of sense or meaning, be tell- 8 PREFACE ing US that the ability to "feed life" is simply the ability to main­ tain one's capacity to evolve by refining and decanting what is vital in oneself, so as to develop that vitality to the full? What this journey affords is, once again, an opportunity to verify that the thought of the other remains inaccessible unless one is willing to rework one's own. In this reworking, one's "own" thought ceases to exist. The purpose of dialogue between cultures is not to attach labels indi­ cating what belongs to what, but rather to create new opportuni­ ties, to give philosophy·a fresh start. I The Chinese text that I follow in this study is attributed to Zhuang- zi (or Zhuang Zhou or Chuang-Tzu, circa 370-286 BeE) , especially Chapters Three and Nineteen, "On the Principle of Vital Nourish­ ment" and "Access to [Comprehension of] Life ." What remains of this author's work is, of course, a corpus that was assembled six centuries later and is of a rather composite nature. Usually I name Zhuangzi himself as the author of the "inner chapters" of this work, which are the most authentic and certainly come from the hand of Zhuang Zhou; as for the later chapters of the work (the "outer" and "miscellaneous" chapters), I use the italicized form Zhuangzi in order to mark the different status of these texts when necessary.s At the end of the book, I bring in a thinker from the period of the Zhuangzi compilation, Xi Kang, who wrote a celebrated essay inflecting the philosophy of vital nourishment in the direction of hygiene and longevity. At times I use the general expression "Chinese thought." To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that I am not extrapolating some overall unity to a body of thought seen from a distance from the texts under examination. Nor do I regard it as somehow 9 V1TAL NOURiSHMENT eternal, ignoring its extreme diversity or historical development. I am referring to Chinese thought as a product of its language, that is, a body of thought articulated in Chinese Gust as Greek thought is that which speaks Greek). 10 CHAPTER ONE Feeding the Body/Feeding the Soul: The Symbolic Divide "To fe ed" is the most basic verb, the most fundamental, the most I rooted. It expresses the primordial activity, the primary, basic func- tion, the act "I" engage in even before I am born or begin breath­ ing. Because of it I belong to the earth, forever. Like the smallest animal crawling in the dirt, like the smallest plant, I began by feed­ ing myself. It was through fe eding that activity began in me, and it is that activity - which we cannot dream of shedding, which guides us with its rough hand, with the iron hand of hunger, where fate begins - that defines the most general class to which we belong: "we" living things. At the same time, the verb "to feed" lends itself to a variety of transpositions, insinuating itself - and leading us - into the most elaborate parts of the lexicon: I nurse a desire, a dream, or an ambition (in French: je nourris, fr om nourrir, to feed); reading feeds the mind; my mind feeds on fantasy; my style is undernourished; and so on. On the one hand, "to fe ed" is a verb that imposes its own meaning: blunt, raw, stark, and irrefutable, the factual in its unadulterated state, allowing no room for guess­ work or ambiguity, no notion of variation or softening, no possibil­ ity even of imagining that the word lacks a perfect counterpart in every tongue. It is eternally the same and endlessly repeated, much as the very act of feeding indefatigably repeats itself in our lives: if 11 ViTAL NOURISHMENT I do not fe ed I die. On the other "to fe ed" introduces the most distinctive and perhaps even ideal requirements. It re­ veals and promotes other levels and other resources, which emerge as vocations or even destinations: the divine is what helps to feed the winged apparatus of the soul, Plato tells us. For while the soul soars in pursuit of the gods, grazing in the pastures of truth, the contemplation of true realities is its "nourishing food." Or, the soul "feeds" on mu�ic, en mousike he trophe.