Vital Nourishment : Departing from Happiness

by Jullien, Francois

• ISBN13: 9781890951801
• ISBN10: 1890951803
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-30
• Publisher: Zone Books

Summary

The philosophical tradition in the West has always subjected life to conceptual divisions and questions about meaning. In Vital Nourishment,François Jullien contends that although this process has given rise to a rich history of inquiry, it proceeds too fast. In their anxiety about meaning, Western thinkers since Plato have forgotten simply to experience life. In this installment of his continuing project of plumbing the philosophical divide between Eastern and Western thought, Jullien slows down, and, using the third and fourth century B.C.E. Chinese thinker Zhuanghi as a foil, begins to think about life from a point outside of Western inquiry. The question of how to "feed life," or nourish it, is the point of departure for the Chinese tradition that Jullien locates in Zhuanghi. Life passes through each of us, and we have a duty to become amenable to its ebbs and flows. We must cultivate a sense of being adequate to it so that we can house it. Exploring notions of breath, energy, and immanence, Jullien reopens a vibrant space of intellectual exchange between East and West. In doing so, he refuses to commit to a rigid framework of meaning, and his text unfolds as an elegant process that mirrors the very type of thought he explores. Pointing out that it seems intellectually and politically imperative today to reinvigorate Western thought with ideas from the East, Jullien seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry that maintains the integrity of both Eastern and Western thinking. Vital Nourishment is both a rich intellectual historical journey and a text very much attuned to the philosophical politics of the present.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 7
Feeding the Body/Feeding the Soul	p. 11
The Symbolic Divide
Preserving the Freedom to Change	p. 23
To Feed One's Life/To Force One's Life or, How the Attachment to Life Turns against Life	p. 33
Vacations: Finding Heaven in Ourselves	p. 43
Without "Soul"	p. 55
Do We Have a "Body"?	p. 65
Feeding Your Breath-Energy	p. 75
Procedures of Vital Nourishment	p. 87
Exempt from Happiness	p. 101
On Hygeine or, The Desperate Desire to Endure	p. 119
Anti-Stress	p. 137
Cool, Zen, and So On
Condemned to the Eternal Silence of Processes	p. 151
Notes	p. 161
Glossary of Chinese Terms	p. 173
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