The Philosophy of Living

Living holds us between one and the other: it expresses at once what is most elementary about our condition (to be alive) and the absoluteness of our aspiration: Finally living! Could we desire anything other than to live? We are always already engaged in living""while at same time we never (completely) manage to reach it. The temptation of philosophy has consequently been, ever since the time of the Greeks, to split it in two: to oppose repetitive living, which is entrapped within the biological, to what philosophy termed, as it projected it into Being, true life . Refusing this move and circulating between Far Eastern thought and philosophy, Francois Jullien aims in this volume to take into account those concepts which could become part of the philosophy of living: the moment, and the springing up that is opposed to what is settled, the in-between and the ambiguity, or what ultimately he calls, assuming an expression from China, the transparency of the morning . More generally, Jullien wonders how each concept, in order to be able to grasp the concept of living, must be opened up to what is opposed to it. How are we able to raise ourselves to the here and now without allowing ourselves either to be absorbed into this immediacy or to letting it go by? This implies developing a strategy of living in the proper place of morality. The risk otherwise would be to abandon living to the truisms of wisdom; or rather to the vast market in personal development and the bazaar of exoticism. Has not philosophy imprudently let this intervening space, between health and spirituality, remain fallow? This volume is the answer."