Contenu du sommaire : Y a-t-il une philosophie chinoise ? Un état de la question

China out of philosophy. An attempted genealogy from the perspective of the French sinological and philosophical traditions in the 19th century During the 18th century, the intellectual tradition of China was listed among the materials collected to set up the past of philosophy. Nowadays, it has nearly disappeared altogether from this history. The article reviews the first decades of the French 19th century to focus on the beginnings of this evolution : when philosophy and sinology are instituted as sciences and standardize their contents as educational subjects, they settle for the first time the question of a " Chinese philosophy " at the crossroad of the two disciplines. The hypothesis is that the way we currently think out the problem has not evolved since then, and that we are still depending on notoriously outdated determinations, such as history and territory, nature and value of philosophy.

Chinese philosophy has been the subject of many learned studies. Yet, it has been called into question whether such a subject exists at all. According to the understanding of a considerable number of both Western philosophers and sinologists, philosophy is an exclusively Western tradition invented by the Greeks and only much later imported into other cultures. As far as China is concerned, it has been argued that philosophy proper was absent due to linguistic, mental or developmental reasons. The article gives an account of these arguments, trying to show that they are informed by misunderstanding of both philosophy and ancient Chinese intellectual culture.

Is there such a thing as Chinese philosophy ? A typology of the arguments of a largely implicit debate The question of whether or not there is such a thing as " Chinese philosophy " is seldom explicitly stated, but the implicit answers to this question - although different in China and the West - dominate institutional and academic decisions. This paper does not only construct a typology to recognize, differentiate and evaluate various answers to this question, but it also takes the sensitivity of this matter seriously, by comparing it with one's attachment to something as meaningless as a family name.

On the transformation of Neo-Confucian thought into a modern philosophical discourse. Reflections on a few aporiae of contemporary Neo-Confucianism One of the manifold destinies of the vast " Confucian " tradition in the course of the 20th century has been its rapid transformation into a modern philosophical discourse, due to the hegemony of the European cultural model. In this respect, " contemporary Neo- Confucianism " has represented a powerful work of re-writing in reference and in opposition to Western, notably German, philosophy. One of the aporiae which such a trend encounters is to be found in the amnesia which by now strikes the particular historical conditions of its own emergence. Through the example of the philosophy of Mou Zongsan, we have attempted to show that the difficulties encountered by this kind of thought are not of a philosophical but anthropological nature : the introduction of a modern disciplinary institution such as academic philosophy has meant simultaneously the destruction of the conditions of possibility of Neo-Confucian practice. In opposition to the illusions of a binary comparatism between " Chinese philosophy " and " Western philosophy ", we suggest the necessity of reflecting, in modern conditions, on the relationship between philosophical discourse and symbolical practices, within a newly " globalized " intellectual space.

The writing of a " history of Chinese philosophy ". Classical Chinese thought confronted to modernity Does the " history of philosophy " constitute a relevant approach to achieve a proper understanding of Chinese thought ? To which extent may the usage of Western concepts and categories influence our appreciation of Chinese spiritual and intellectual tradition or even betray its core values ? Various answers have been provided to these questions during the 20th century. Zheng Jiadong presents us in this article with a broad retrospective on these debates and highlights, by the same token, the persistant tensions between Chinese thought, philosophy and history. He concludes that it is no longer possible for any narrative about the history of Chinese philosophy to hold itself up as the unique relevant model.

What about " Chinese philosophy " ? Zheng Jiadong and Joël Thoraval raise the question whether it is legitimate to interpret traditional Chinese thought in terms of " philosophy ", with some consequence on the legitimacy of that particular, typically Western, form of reflection on the world. By so doing, these two authors place Chinese thought and Western thought no longer as mirrors reflecting each other, but as interacting foci of reflection. It was contemporary Neo- Confucianism which had hitherto submitted to the formalism of Western philosophy, but the criticism raised nowadays by such a strategy might well open the way to a sort of anti- philosophy which would free Chinese thought from formalism and consequently bring us to become aware of the specious elements inherent in philosophical speculation.

When the Greeks first coined the term philosophia and cognates (philosophein, philosophos) in the fifth century BCE, they used them for different types of activity or modes of intellectual curiosity. Those terms were, moreover, certainly not always used with approval and the activities in question were certainly not carried on in institutions of higher education. First Plato and then Aristotle appropriated the terms for their - each rather different - concepts of the highest human activity, but neither among their contemporaries nor among later Greeks was there any consensus on either the definition or the contents of philosophy. The tension or rivalry between different interpretations of 'philosophy' continued, and continues in Europe to this day, as the different foci of interests of what passes as philosophy in different institutions in the UK and the USA, as philosophie in France, as Philosophie in Germany eloquently exhibit. The primary task of the historian of Chinese thought is not to see whether the later terms coined or introduced to express European concepts can be applied to classical Chinese studies. Rather it is to examine how the Chinese thinkers themselves construed what they were doing - using their, actors', categories, not later, observers', ones. The question of whether any given later term can or should be applied to their work is, then, a secondary one, though it may be a politically sensitive one. The answer will in any case depend on which mode of philosophising is in mind. But the Greek materials should be reassuring in one respect, namely that they show that, from the outset, no one had a monopoly of what " philosophy " should be.

A strange forgetfulness In the Western philosophical tradition, numerous illustrations of forgetfulness may be found : deletion, loss, denial, upset, negligence, lapsus, absent-mindedness. If we look at the Zhuangzi, we may discover a form of forgetfulness which does not seem to have attracted much attention in the West and which, far from being a passive state, is a true resource and active force : this article is an attempt at analyzing it.