Silent Transformations

François Jullien's critique of Western philosophy

Much of what goes on right in front of us, all the time, eludes the philosophical imagination, argues François Jullien (Silent Transformations):

To grow – we do not see growth, whether we are looking at children or at trees. And yet one day when we see them again we are surprised at how the trunk has already become thicker or the child is so tall that he now comes up to our shoulder. To age: we do not see ageing. This is not just because we are continually ageing. . . but also because everything within us ages (2).

If we miss such “transformations,” we miss everything, since “it is the whole that is modified,” nothing excepted: “what is clearly in becoming, and is even displayed before our eyes, is not seen.” Transformation “operates without warning, without giving an alert . . . without attracting attention . . . without wanting to disturb us” (3).

Philosophy can’t see it because it’s groggy from the dream of Being. Transition and transformation form the “core” of the world, but they don’t get captured by Being: “precisely because it is not part of ‘being,’ the transition escapes our thought. . . . our thought stops, it no longer has anything to say, it ceases to speak.” Transformation is silenced (17).

Plato and Aristotle saw this, though through a glass darkly. Sitting is a mode of being; so is walking. What about the transition, when I move from sitting to walking or vice versa, when I’m doing neither? For Plato, it’s either-or, either Being or not, either one mode or another, either motionless or mobile. On this logic, the transition is simply a contradiction, and Plato offers “no other solution than to keep the two moments, of before and after, strictly separate from one another. What happens in the metaxu, the “between,” is outside time, outside place, outside being (17-18).