Fabian Heubel, Being and Between. Reflections on Comparative and Transcultural Philosophy, EACP ONLINE EVENT: COMPARATIVE, POST-COMPARATIVE, OR TRANSCULTURAL? CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AND NEW METHODOLOGIES, July 23, 2021 (original) (raw)

European Association for Chinese Philosophy Topic: EACP online event: COMPARATIVE, POST-COMPARATIVE, OR TRANSCULTURAL? CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AND NEW METHODOLOGIES Date and time: Friday, July 23, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 (CET) https://ea-cp.eu/announcements Location: ZOOM Link: https://uni-lj-si.zoom.us/j/95736132076 Meeting ID: 957 3613 2076 This essay will argue that comparative and transcultural philosophy are interdependent, and so opting for either of the two is an impossibility. The comparative approach persists as long as some kind of distinction between identity and difference exists. As long as people do not speak only one language, the need to move between different languages and to translate, and thus the need to relate and compare different possibilities of philosophical articulation will remain. Any attempt to free oneself from the problem of identity is doomed to failure as it leads to further entrapment in the very same problem. The transcultural approach turns translation into the transformation of more or less fixed identities. The comparative approach works with fixed identities, the transcultural approach transforms fixed positions and creates new identities. Those two approaches combined constitute what I want to call intercultural. In this essay I will focus on the examples of François Jullien's "comparative" and Martin Heidegger's "transcultural" understanding of "Being" (Sein) and "Between" (Zwischen). By turning Between and Being into opposing paradigms of Chinese and Greek thinking respectively, Jullien causes both to become ossified representatives of different cultural identities within a comparative framework: Greek thinking ossifies into traditional metaphysics and Chinese thinking ossifies into the non-metaphysical thinking of immanence. Heidegger takes a decisively different direction: he explores the Between in Being, and even makes an attempt to think of Being as Between. Heidegger's invocation of "Greekdom" is undoubtedly Eurocentric. But, paradoxically, Heidegger's "Greece" is much less Eurocentric than that of Jullien, because Heidegger's "Greek thinking" is more Chinese than Jullien's "Chinese thinking".