The French Professor

Why is it that the mere appearance of something like Sur le bateau d'Ulysse, a series of talks on Radio France Culture dedicated to the exploration of the Greek heritage, raises my blood pressure? I love the Greeks. I should eat this stuff up.

That it does rattle me, of course, has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of such production, especially that emanating from France, is aimed at creating the ideological apparatus with which to shore up imaginary boundaries between us and them – broadly speaking those whom we will have in Europe (e.g. modern Greeks) and those whom we will not (e.g. modern Turks). As such, much of this effort is the first cousin of “Revealed Truth” and “the white man’s burden” – and all the other high-sounding dreck which has been generated over the centuries in order to infuse with a sense of noble purpose otherwise less than noble projects, like the crusades or, closer to home, colonialism.

But also because the “culturalist” thinking is simply intellectually bankrupt.
In the 25th installment of the series on RFC, with the electrifying subtitle La Grèce au risque de la Chine (the which risk, to exonerate its speaker immediately of any responsibility for the subtitle, is actually never mentioned by him at all in the course of the interview) was an interview with François Jullien, a professor at Université Paris VII, who has written widely on Chinese classics. In the course of the interview, the speaker points out many differences between the Greek and the Chinese classics – two large bodies of literature which arose almost simultaneously, independently, and at the opposite ends of the Eurasian continent. He points out things such as the absence in ancient China of epics or drama, the absence of an explorer figure similar to Odysseus, absence of the concept of “essence” (this was introduced along with Buddhism under the guise of “original face”), and different approaches to philosophical discourse.
This is all very interesting, of course, in the way in which comparing stamps or butterflies may be, and I love to do nothing else, actually, as long as we do not take any it to mean anything. The absence of an explorer figure in Chinese ancient classics hardly means that the Chinese have not explored (either then or since). That Chinese discourse is generally more agreeable, hardly means there haven’t been different schools of thought directly, sometimes even violently, opposed to each other. China created its own epics and drama in due course. And essentialism has been taken lately by many western philosophers to be more of a bane than boon in western philosophy. I’d like to honor the professor for not claiming otherwise in the interview.

But he does not avoid all risks and skirts terribly close to bankruptcy: noting that the Chinese language has no tenses he moves on to claim that in classical Chinese there is no concept of time; only concepts of “occasion” and “duration”. The western (true?) concept of time, he adds, is more like that of a flowing entity, like a river.

Really? A westerner since birth, I somehow managed to live all my life in the company of all sorts of westerners without once noticing this inalienably and uniquely timelike quality of time.
But alright, I can be blissfully clueless sometimes. Maybe “time” really is more like a river; still, I fail to see the significance of the finding. How does exactly this fact account for the westernness of the west, the scienceness of its science, or democtraticness of its democracy? How does it make the West more significantly unlike China – more significantly than, say, forks?
The suggestion made by the professor appears to be (if I understand him well) that the ancient Chinese were therefore somehow unaware of, or less nimble with, such concepts as “the past” and “the future”. This is – I apologize for the directness of this phrase but I can’t see how I can put it any less brutally – utter bunk.

The professor, says his entry in the French wikipedia helpfully, has studied at the Peking University. Which is impressive, of course, but – how well actually does the good professor speak Chinese? Does he feel in the language the way I do – at home? If so, when thinking and speaking in Chinese does he experience difficulty thinking about time (which I do not)? And if he does, could one perhaps suggest that the fault isn’t of the Chinese concepts but of his -- maybe not so fluent fluency? I don’t seem to experience such difficulty, and neither do any of my Chinese friends. The professors findings puzzle me.

Really, I feel tempted to point out that the French language lacks (yes, lacks) the superlative form of the adjective. Do the French therefore experience difficulty comparing more than two objects? Is the French mind therefore somehow less capable in this area than Italian? (“Perfettissimo!”) Certainly not, it would appear, since the thought that “The Greek (er, French?) Heritage is the best” comes so easily to the French mind.