Does "Eastern" metaphysics also have a blindspot? Note on François Jullien's China

François Jullien makes an eloquent argument in his book "From Being to Living," ostensibly a comparative discussion, for replacing Western metaphysics with a Chinese one. Perhaps it should be no surprise that he explicitly presents this as an ethics of management, because metaphysics has always been connected with governance and management, or "economy" in the original Greek sense, which meant "household management." Could we abandon both? The argument would be that all thought and action or practice has some structure that reveals, strongly or weakly, something like a metaphysics, in notions of what it is to be, what is time, what is the "way" (or Dao) in which things and we ourselves "go on," to use the expression Wittgenstein and Beckett both liked so much. We could at least be more weakly metaphysical. That might correspond to the liberal idea of minimal government.

Jullien occasionally mentions the possible limitations of the Dao as an approach to life and the management of people and things, always in political terms, but offering no idea of how to solve the problems posed by the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 or the Hong Kong protests of last year. Except to suggest that Eastern and Western styles of thinking might in some ways be combined or, in what is surely a Daoist way of combining them, be followed in some kind of alternation. It is tempting to reply to Margaret Thatcher, who famously said "There is no alternative" (and less famously denied Hong Kong residents full British citizenship), that "The order of things today permits no alternative, but welcomes alternations."

Along with diversity and plasticity (and precarity as partly its basis and consequence, which includes worker "availability," like tools). In the evening, at home, the torturer studies assiduously the wisdom of his people's ancient tradition. While the revolting slaves seem to lack art and wisdom. When was a religion used to sustain an empire not richly endowed with ethical wisdom? When was a war between nations whose identities and differences could be specified as ideological or ethical ones not, like World War I, well and easily justified by them? What is the alternative to the alternatives posited in exclusivity by war? Talk about the respective identities might signal an approaching conflict.