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Prologue ix-xi
ix a landscape... can draw us into the ceaseless play of its correlations and stir our vitality with its various tensions. It can awaken our sense of existence through what singularizes within it.
x-xi This book... follows logically from my previous work. In it I continue to pursue a philosophy of living.
[JLJ - Interesting point - rather than obsess over certain unexplainable conditions such as Heidegger's being, why not put our efforts towards constructing a philosophy of living? For those of us who are alive, is not our primary task, second only to the navigation and management of the present and immediate future predicament in front of us, in quiet moments where time is not needed elsewhere, to construct and then to follow, a philosophy of living? We must manage our rage and our rest from rage, we must fight intelligently what it is intelligent to fight, and to achieve an (uneasy) peace with what cannot easily be unseated. One must construct an understanding of the world, then construct a scheme to maneuver towards goals within that world that will make you happy, then one must practically and wisely execute such a scheme. Repeat, until dead. Is this Heidegger's being reduced to fundamentals?]
x we might consider this thing called "landscape" no longer as the "part" of the land that nature "presents" to an "observer," in the ordinary definition, but as a resource on which living [vivre] can indefinitely draw.
x Chinese landscape-thought might help us today to deploy our own concept of landscape, or perhaps reconfigure it altogether.
xi philosophy might also, or chiefly, amount to something other than giving one's opinion on everything, taking sides at every opportunity, and preaching the good life.
[JLJ - Perhaps, but not according to Nicholas Rescher...]
I Land-Landscape, p.1-14
p.4 we have no purchase on "what" we think, on what our thought "happens upon." We have so little initiative in this regard that we are quickly stuck with this "what." ...further upstream... is "what we think about": what it occurs to us to think.
p.6 a "part," as the Greeks quickly realized, is in truth an odd thing. It is one but a part. It is indeed "one," because we isolate it and consider it separately. And because it is one it also constitutes a "whole." At the same time, however, it is not "one," because it is also a "part": because it belongs to a whole that, by integrating it, exceeds it.
p.6 In landscape too the unity (the totality) is relative, contingent as it is on a mobile subject and thus on the perspectival shift that results with his every step, from his slightest displacement. As a mere part it bears a flaw deep within its being. It involves a lack, or at any rate betrays its own limit - the limit delineated by the horizon, horismos, which, as the landscape's "definition," cuts the landscape out of space.
p.10 For there to be landscape... there must be nothing to hold the eye... There is thus no landscape unless there is a de-concentration, or unfixing of the eye. The eye must circulate. It must wander for a landscape to arise... There is now no object to draw the eye's focus... Elements, or constituent vectors, emerge and face off, responding to one another.
p.11 For there to be "landscape" ...polarities must come into play that entice the eye to circulate. In other words, opposition and correlation must deploy concurrently, between factors. This then gives the eye leave to disengage from its visual obsessions and roam.
[JLJ - In my own thinking, we constantly ask ourselves, to anything that momentarily draws or catches our attention, 'How much should I care about that?' Our current predicament demands that we operate this way. We can set a high threshold if we choose - of course we attend when we see something striking or curious, but only briefly, and then we can be scanning once more. In analogy, we operate as a driver of an automobile on a busy highway - we are moving our attention constantly, in order to get a situational awareness, never attending any one thing more than necessary, in order to return to scanning and keeping our situational awareness current.]
p.11-12 Can we yet "describe" a landscape? The question is all the more apt insofar as there is no proper "object" under consideration or resemblance to seek out... There must be tension set up
p.13 The eye allows things - all things that are able - to pass into the visual field, assemble, and enter into relationships... The eyes, then, are not so much agents as intermediaries: vectors or ferrymen providing passage so that landscape can penetrate deep within us.
p.14 there is landscape when the common type of perception, reconnaissance, and observation, in which the eyes are agents, allows itself to be overwhelmed by the other type, in which the eye no longer seeks for identification or information but instead allows itself to be "absorbed." ...The gaze does not cast itself into the world and retrieve... as much of the object as the subject needs to get its bearings. Instead the gaze gives us occasion to pry into the relations of things, to immerse ourselves in the tension-setting network of oppositions-correlations... Moreover, we can now gaze for more than an instant, or more than whatever time we need to complete an observation. Truth be told, the eye thus used has no reason to stop "roaming," from one thing to another - or rather between them - as it is bandied about by their polarities and loses itself in their profusion.
[JLJ - Is it the 'eye' that is roaming, or is it our attention that is roaming? A landscape has sounds and textures and tastes which extend the reach of the roaming eye. Has our human intelligence been matched by evolution to the exact types of information provided by the senses, so much so that we can instinctively 'play' with the tensions we sense in the environment - tensions we use to construct a world we perceive to be real - and as a result get a bigger picture of what is actually happening? Perhaps we only truly understand only through a kind of intelligent 'play' with the information from our senses - which can be complex, partial, incomplete, misleading, overwhelming and in need of reduction, or hidden and only 'visible' via subtle clues.]
II "Mountain(s)-Water(s), p.15-26
p.15 China presents us with a whole other approach to what we in Europe call "landscape."
p.16 Instead of the unitary term landscape, China speaks of an endless play of interactions between contrary factors that pair up, forming a matrix through which the world is conceived and organized. Here there is no governing, dominating Subject... no individual to hold the world from his vantage point and to develop his initiative freely within it... There is no "ob"-"ject" held in vis-a-vis [JLJ - face to face across a divide], nothing to be "cast" "before" the individual's eye... Against this monopolizing power of sight China offers the essential polarity through which world-stuff enters into tension and deploys... China's opposing-correlating "mountain(s)" / "water(s)" instantly plunges us into the network of factors that give rise to the "world" - through which "there is world" - and that keep it soaring [en essor]. We find ourselves immersed in it.
p.18 Landscape... immerses us instantly in the play of manifestations of energy, manifestations that both conflict and pair up. All vitality (we we might as well call it reality) is there revealed.
p.19 We organize the field to be explored by detaching and separating it from a whole... and, to reverse the procedure, by attaching it to and integrating it with the whole... The two procedures go hand in hand. It is through com-position that we in Europe com-prehend.
p.19 In China... logic proceeds not from composition but from what I have begun to call pairing... In China to think is to "couple," as the language itself demonstrates. Chinese writing is ideographic and has never known alphabetic composition. In its brush strokes it alternates and correlates... the Chinese language knows nothing of syntax... however, it favors "parallels" ...Statements are made with respect to symmetrical others in opposition-coupling
p.20 Chinese thought has molded itself so thoroughly on coherence by coupling that sinologists... no longer even see it. What field of knowledge, what sector of activity, falls outside its scope?
[JLJ - Perhaps even game theory can proceed by way of a mutual coupling of opposing forces...]
p.20 To say "thing" in Chinese... you utter not a unitary term, not "thing" (causa), not a thing you attend to, or "make your business" (and not res, substance, either), but "east-west," dong xi... This term - this couple, rather - exemplifies the essential correlation through which China approaches landscape: "mountain(s)-water(s)." ...We can easily see that "thing," ...is already focusing, already pointing at the elementary and the substantial... With "east-west," meanwhile, we approach everything in terms of polarity. What is primary, what denotes, is the fact of the relation. Partners emerge in a vis-a-vis. They form an "east-west." A tension is set up. An engendering of "world-stuff" begins.
p.21 "East-west" horizontally deploys the divide that sets up tension between "things" and brings about their advent... In this we set them side by side, so that they can reflect each other. In this we do not so much perform a "comparison," in the proper sense, as have each interrogate the other - and thus hoist both at last out of their respective tacit implications. Through this mutual face-off we can venture back into their unthought-of. Each is ensnared (imprisoned) in its coherence.
p.22 "Mountain(s)-water(s)" keeps us in the "being-there" (da sein) of polarized tension and the contrary capacities that pair off therein.
p.23 the one is reflected in the other and is heard through that other. Its sole justification lies in the resulting tension, and from that tension derives its "aptness."
p.23 What we call landscape is approached, from the two coordinators of mountains and waters, only through activity. We walk, stroll, and wander. We explore the landscape end to end, pace it out to the point of exhaustion.
p.24 A landscape (or landscape in general) deploys in the interspace that, by means of a divide, opens between manifestations and "capacities" that themselves activate and stoke each other in their opposition.
p.26 All landscape apprehended in this play of correlations is the entirety of the world in its vibrancy: not a world that beckons from Elsewhere but a world perceived in the to-and-fro of its respiration.
III From a Landscape to Living, p.27-40
p.29 landscape arises out of the internal "coherence" that sets it in tension - the internal coherence that allows it to soar and keeps it alive. Hence the process that engenders the world will not be reduced to - reified in - any static form.
p.30 unitary... isolated... Such a depiction would reduce to outer traits, and traits, not being held in tension by a polarity-forming other, ossify at the surface... it is only by correlation, by the opposition/association of factors, by communication between these factors, and through an exchange between them that we can accede to life.
p.30 We are no longer to perceive the mountain as a given, set shape, like a fixed relief, but as invested breath or energy, in ceaseless renewal through crinkles and links of endless variety. Everything proceeds from breath-energy, qi
p.32 What I am calling con-sistency... stems... from the co-he-rence thanks to which the one depends on the other and will not be isolated. What we call landscape draws its consistency from the correlation of mountains and waters. The mountain, it is said, deploys the course of the water, and the water animates the mass of the mountain. Chinese thought never tires of varying the pair through a crossing of registers.
[JLJ - Much as (in a complex game of strategy) the game pieces mutually constrain each other through their powers of motion and animation.]
p.33 the mountain... The water... It is from the coupling of the two - from the stable rooting of the one and the fluid flow of the other - that the world deploys.
p.36 Between the poles of near and far landscape is simultaneously appearing and disappearing, bringing and taking away, and imposing itself and escaping us. No "presence" is left to coalesce, no "essence" (ousia) left to stand apart. There is no assignation to confer immobility - and thus no possible ontology. It is like a wave that spreads and dissipates, enveloping the eye, every eye, in its telluric ebb and flow. In this back-and-forth the landscape mobilizes. In this coming-and-going, this influx-reflux, landscape gives rise to respiration.
p.37 A landscape, I repeat, advenes through what it mobilizes
p.38 Guo Xi connects with these polarities... Escaping the fetters of the social, he allows the mountains and the waters to activate and mobilize him, and thereby raise him to full "capacity." ...In so doing Guo Xi makes landscape... into the very thing from which his... life... can, through renewal, well up. Thus "revitalizing" himself, he can once again soar. He can draw breath and energy. As landscape shows, the world, down to its very physicality, is made only of "breath" and "energy"... which flow or coagulate.
p.39 landscape as mobilizing environment... Instead of "looking at" a painting (as "spectators"), we undergo the experience of immersing ourselves, and even of losing ourselves (qiong), in the tensions between mountains and waters, "springs and ravines." Is this an "aesthetic" pleasure, as the West has categorized it? No. It is, rather, a gratification of living, through the activation it provokes.
p.40 what gives rise to landscape is irreducible to the perceptual. Rather, it promotes itself into a locus of exchange and makes the landscape intensive.
IV When the Perceptual Turns Out to be Affectual, p.41-52
p.42 For there to be landscape something inaccessible, a beyond, must subsist.
p.43 Our simultaneous sinking into the world's physicality and into our self's intimacy cannot be hurried. Nor can it be exhausted.
p.44 There is landscape when an inner receptiveness is so thoroughly roused that it is disencumbered of all singular objects or thoughts.
p.46 Landscape offers itself up - or, rather, forms - in the moment. It is for the most part influence and propagation, ambiance and diffusion.
p.49 One of the resources of Chinese language-thought is an ability to recompose pairs and form new correlations at leisure... By looking at everything in terms of correlation it breaches the walls behind which Europe's psychological (insular) notion of the self-subject lies entrenched.
p.49-50 Chinese analysis... continual pairing... invites us to consider landscape as a process, a process of exchange and interaction, between poles that suddenly enter into phase, between instances... that come into accord and induce each other.
V When "Spirit" Emanates from the Physical, p.53-66
p.54 the spirit... the third sense... obsolete sense of "emanation of bodies"... Here the word refers to the product of a decantation, to what is exhaled from the physical in its infinite deployment and to what turns vaporous, like a subtle emanation, but does not separate from the physical. The phenomenon of the aura is not brought to bear or added on (fake); it is one with the thing. This almost forgotten meaning is perhaps a thread we can follow on our way into landscape.
p.55 This cast-aside meaning of spirit... at any rate, is where a rigorous rethinking of "landscape" leads us... Landscape is where land breaks with the limits of the sensible, flares out, and "emanates" as an aura beyond its tangible form - although without abandoning its texture, its singular anatomy of "mountains" and "waters." It is from their active correlation, as from the play of "wind" and "light," that the "spirit" thus emanates.
p.56 My new definition of landscape, in parallel and in response to the previous one, will in fact be the following: there is landscape not only when the boundary between the perceptual and the affectual is erased, or when the perceptual is revealed to be, at the same time, indissociably affectual, but also when the breach is sealed between the tangible (the physical) and the spiritual, and when spirit issues from the physical... There is landscape when the world, through the activity of its correlations, clears out and opens up [JLJ - corrected obvious typo here] [ouvre du degagement] within itself and compels us to experience it.
p.60 Within landscape itself we have... the source of the world in its continual transformation. Thus landscape... plunges us raw into the fundamental interaction that endlessly promotes existence and conveys us to a clearing-out and opening-up.
p.63-64 There is landscape... when the landscape's physicality ceases to serve as a barrier, when its opacity dissolves, when it allows itself to be traversed by a tension that goes beyond it, and when the resulting sensible animation spreads in every direction.
p.64 An "actualized form" is what is individuated in physical configuration. "Animating tension" comprises the lines of force running between a landscape's actualized forms and deploying them. The infused "breath-energy" spreads throughout and keeps them aloft in their soaring.
p.64 A landscape's "value" stems less from its defined, marked, set traits than from what traverses it, what emanates from it as an effect, what diffuses from it, and what does not restrict itself to it.
p.66 Landscape, in its continual shifting and in its infinite diversity, "melts" the absolute into the sensible... And what, meanwhile, does landscape make us feel (experience) once we know how to accede to it through a clearing-out and opening-up [degagement]? That all that is realized through the correlation of mountains and waters, down to the shape of stone, the rustle of water, and the slightest variation of "wind" and "light," makes us right away, in the moment, "realize" reality in all its plenitude.
VI Tension-Setting, p.67-82
p.69 I therefore suggest that what gives rise to landscape is not merely the product of a vision, and thus not a projection of the mind through said vision. I contend that there exists a landscape effect - or "landscape-ment," that draws landscape from land and promotes the former form the latter. The principle has less to do with "structuring," ...than... with intensification. There is landscape when "land" is set in tension; when its various elements begin interacting and enter into polarity; and when a manifest increase in intensity results. Just as we acknowledge an "effect of the moment," ...there exists an effect that qualifies as landscape-ment. by producing an intensification in the somber expanse of space, landscape-ment both gathers the expanse into itself and draws forth its import [portee]. It is with landscape-ment that our vitality connects.
p.69 "Tension," I admit, is not considered a philosophical concept. It is perhaps too elementary a notion... Yet... there remains the tenacious concept of "living": whenever tension ceases death follows. It is because of tension-setting, because a thing is under tension, that something happens, occurs, comes out of inertia, exerts an effect, and can begin to operate and bring about advent... there must be a... tension-setting... for there to be an incitement to thought
[JLJ - Perhaps thought proceeds from an intelligent perception of tension, and the various schemes of mitigation that exist, deploy, emerge, and decay...]
p.70-71 if not for the [JLJ - examples of tensions in the landscape are presented by Jullien] the landscape would greatly suffer. It would lose intensity... it would cease to be a landscape at all... What "gives rise to landscape," then, is the system by which it sets up multiple intersecting and overlapping tensions. Everything in landscape reduces to and converges on that principle. It falls to landscape, as it emerges from the flatness of the "land," to focus and concentrate a tension that in the world is ordinarily dispersed.
p.71 Landscape, however, deals not with integration but with intensification. It meets the demands not of order but of activation. Landscape withers and vanishes - loses tension - if what we perceive in it is figures and schemes, models of the ideal, and if we think of it as a garden.
p.72 landscape... stems from an intrinsic effect, one produced directly within the world... landscape arises because the "land" is set into tension, or intensified. Land's promotion to landscape thus lies within the landscape - or, rather, exists through it, in the interspace. Polarities arise - or, better yet, enter into "activity" - and become more marked, and more diverse. Their play becomes operative. There arises a tensional field, whose first result is that landscape becomes a matter less of "view" than of living.
[JLJ - What we see in a 'landscape' is the 'current winner' in the everlasting struggle for scarce resources, frozen in time - perhaps an animal at rest or at play, perhaps a forest of trees or a field of wheat, a distant hill or peak of a mountain. What is on the surface the equal to a work of art, is in reality a frozen snapshot of tension, undergoing a resolution, and a change into a new tension, somewhat the same, yet somewhat different.]
p.72 After all, isn't everything "landscape-able"? They say we need only adapt our cultural habitus to modernity before we start seeing landscape everywhere: landscape worthy of "contemplation."
p.73 we cannot help but observe once again that we have yet to uncover what actually "gives rise to landscape."
[JLJ - Upon reflection, one does not actually see one's actual sensitivity - instead, one sees the things that one is sensitive to. Critically, we are sensitive to the driving forces of change, the potentials of things, existing in our minds perhaps through diagnostic tests and subtle cues, and the effects they produce or might produce in space and time as the interlocking tensions grind together. We are drawn to landscape because our very being must be drawn to favor some things over others. Evolution has seen to it that we are drawn to obsessively and compulsively try to make sense of our environment, in the slow-motion dance that it makes every day, the effects of which we simply and superficially call landscape.]
p.75 An "environment," first of all, is no longer limited by a "defining" horizon... The bounds of such "environs" remain forever and inevitably vague. The milieu and the surroundings can have no marked boundary. Moreover, the relation in question is no longer made up of active perception, of an initiative-wielding self, but of influence passively felt by an organism of infinite diversity, and of continual exchanges that for the most part escape our attention.
p.77 Unless polarities emerge, intensities develop here and there, differentials fall into order, and factors subsequently activate among themselves there is no landscape. All remains slack, or let us say, atonic. The various components... do not enter into tension. Because they do not activate one another they cannot mobilize a "subject," even a "reflective" one... Landscape, disengaging from "land," is intensive. Its negation is atony, the absence of life-generating tension.
p.77 all are equally prone to "tension": a ligament, a strap, the twisted string of a net, the rigging of a machine, and the tendons and muscles of the human body.
p.77 There in the darkness... in the tonos of the tonal and the tonic, all things that pertain to the interior, at whatever level of phenomenality, are interlinked; something stretches out, deploys, and is triggered; an effect breaks free. In short, activity or operativity becomes possible.
[JLJ - Jullien at his very best. As far as game theory goes, we can perceive a web of tension which consists of effects held in mutual suspension, via constraints. As the game pieces selectively move, certain effects are enhanced and certain effects are diminished as the constraints change, creating a system tension that first aims to sustain itself, but ideally is one that strategically threatens to grow. We can construct diagnostic tests of such effects - especially of effects which cannot be seen over a horizon of time, yet nonetheless can be perceived as an adaptive capacity to coerce. - in order to effectively "play" a complex game of strategy at a high level.]
p.78 But there is effectively landscape insofar as world-stuff rises up in tonos to that condition: insofar as world-stuff is set in tension variously, on its own and by immanence; or insofar as the land "tonifies" in it.
p.80-81 Activity, work, and density and its din, setting their multiple tensions, also generate landscape... let tensions be set up, let a new circuit be closed, and they too will become factors and vectors of landscape-ment.
VII Singularization, Variation, Remove, p.83-103
p.83 Landscape proceeds first from a singularization, which brings the landscape to my attention. As I drive along I am suddenly no longer willing to pass things by, no longer content to continue on my way... The instance of singularity emphasizes what is unique in a landscape, what is to be found nowhere else... Singularity causes the landscape to emerge from the anonymity and inertness of things.
p.84 A landscape enters into tension (sets up tension) by deepening the divide not merely with the surrounding "land," from which it singularizes, but primarily within itself, or in its interspace. Such is the internal variation that condenses landscape's polarity, and from that polarity condenses potentiality, and then produces activation: the vector for vitality.
p.84 Another vector for landscape is the remove that landscape opens up, deploying "beyond-ness" but doing so within this world, by effacement and shading. Remove... takes landscape's traits and opens them up beyond their limited character, rendering them evasive. They become factors in a vague, nameless going-beyond, and thus give rise to aspiration... I believe that this trinomial lays out conditions that all landscape must meet.
p.84 There is landscape... when... What is peculiar to it appears.
p.84 there is no landscape unless the place exists as (amounts to) a world. There is no landscape unless what gives rise to "world-ness" opens a crack, deploys, is revealed in the landscape's particularity.
p.85 Singularization, then, is what makes existence emerge, what brings things into existence. This is why singularization is to be demanded.
p.88 Land becomes landscape also, and more primordially, as an effect of variation, not by deepening the divide between it and other land - which amounts to singularization - but by opening a divide within itself, and thus increasing its own tension... You cannot make a "world" out of "sameness."
p.93-94 We need all three of the following to make a landscape: singularization, which brings out an individual kernel to promote "existing"; variation, which activates vitality, not only by what it sets into tension but also by the exchange and transformation it engenders; and remove, which opens an escape and encourages a going-beyond. Remove produces a flaring out. It prolongs, calls on us to carry on farther still. It de-specifies, clears out and opens up [degage], decants, and opens onto indeterminacy and infinitude. It opens... a space for "vagueness," and thereby encourages "pensiveness" and "reflection." It unmoors thought.
[JLJ - Compare with Glenda Holladay Eoyang's conditions for self organizing - represented by the initials CDE: Container, significant Differences, transforming Exchanges. "Many aspects of organizational development have emerged as practices with conflicting or incoherent theoretical foundations. The CDE Model can provide a theoretical grounding to organizational intervention that is simple, flexible, and generalizable."]
p.94 I wonder, therefore, whether in choosing the "horizon" for our basis, as we have ordinarily done in Europe, we are not already restricting the scope of our definition of landscape... if we conceive of landscape on the basis of such a circumscription, beyond which nothing is visible, and immediately separate with this demarcation the visible and the invisible into two distinct spaces - we are already overlooking landscape's continuous remove, already under way and deepening in successive planes.
p.95 Instead of allowing ourselves to get caught up right away at its edge, at its limit, why not experience landscape as we would experience anything else: in its gradual unfolding (in its processual deployment)? Landscape will no longer abide circumscription by a horizon line, or an immediate cutoff at its extremity. It will now offer itself up as a deepening, as an endless penetration, inviting the eye to lose its way within.
p.96 What we have here is a cultural experience that, in contradicting our notion of a "horizon," leads us to consider the remote as a prolongation without end.
p.97 What is evoked is not a horizon distinguishable to the eye but only an unlimited piling/flaring-out of layers of mountains, somber and murky... melting away into infinity, and in which both our vision and our thought allow themselves to be absorbed.
p.98 Remove, then, leads not to the frontier of the invisible (what a "horizon" would mark) but to the scarcely perceptible... It leads, that is, to the edge of blurring.
VIII Connivance, p.105-121
p.107 Thus there is "landscape" - this is my new, and final, definition - when my capacity for knowledge shifts (inverts) into connivance and when my objectivating relation with the world changes into understanding and tacit communication... When land becomes landscape I am no longer indifferent to what I apprehend. What I see in the landscape beckons to me, "speaks to me," and "touches me," in the familiar phrase.
[JLJ - Jullien seems to miss here that if something "speaks to me" or "touches me" it only does so because of a latent sensitivity to such things that is actively being triggered. Jullien is perhaps unaware of the depths of his sensitivity to all things - perhaps even bordering on the eccentric...]
p.112 the Chinese language, because it needn't deconstruct anything, is perhaps better "equipped" to conceive of landscape.
p.113 We we do have, however, is a gradual - or processual - slide, by flaring out, into a now endless connivance, with all the demarcations effaced. There follows upon the equal and correlated sensorial relation of sight and hearing a deployment that proceeds from itself, meeting with no end and having nothing to direct it. We enter upon a development that opens in the distance as it does in the depths, by immanence... The process itself is literally, grammatically, the "subject," the only subject there is.
[JLJ - Such is also a description of the "search" process in an artificially intelligent agent "playing" a complex game of strategy. In building our diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion, we need do nothing more than to "attend" where our competition-refined and expertly sensitive perceptions indicate that we ought, and "put off to later" those paths that are initially and wisely deemed to be of lesser "critical" interest. In the above words of Jullien, such "a deployment... proceeds from itself, meeting with no end and having nothing to direct it."]
p.114-115 It otherwise remains to be seen how the world, in becoming landscape, brings me into its tensional field - how... it puts me in resonance with its variation... we have a single dynamic running through our respective actualizations. It is this dynamic that opens the way to communication from the interior, propagating from one to another, between the "world" and the "self." It allows for a certain tension-setting of the world-becoming-landscape to set me into tension, in union with that world.
Chinese physics... implies... The reason that tension-setting spreads from the one to the other is that the "mountain" and the "water" are, like man, a singular individuation of the breath-energy, in continuous propensity, from which the world stems. It both condenses (forming the opacity of "bodies") and deploys (forming the "spirit" dimension).
[JLJ - Jullien implies that tension in the landscape must somehow couple into a tension in our perception that is more than simply visual.]
p.118 The entire world, within and without us, is, Chinese thought tells us, made up of interactions... that link up, respond to one another, and echo indefinitely. It is incumbent on man to carry within him the awareness of said interactions. Is there any other "reality"? It is these interactions that endlessly and without limit weave together the landscape... The limitless tensions that landscape opens up... In these tensions the human perceives a bottomless well of existence.
Epilogue, p.123-125
p.123 How do you fully convey what it is that, in its deployment, gives rise to world-ness... ? ...we do this [JLJ - from above, in Chinese culture] with no need for further construction or derivation, only for pairing. Because landscape, as Chinese tells us, is to be found in the interspace, and therefore escapes the philosophy of Being, of peculiarity, and of assignation.
p.123 By putting into play the various correlations that waeve it together in the first place, Chinese thought has never needed to erect an architecture of thought. It classifies, establishes typologies, and adjoins into pairs, but it never erects.
p.124 Landscape thought, meanwhile, leads us to rediscover our more primordial involvement in the world. It takes us beneath the underpinnings of reason but occasions no slide into irrationalism.
[JLJ - This stands in contrast to Nicholas Rescher's Church of Reason and rationality, which stands above all things, and is the key to deciphering all things.]
p.125 What matters is the advent of multiple polarities that set the world in tension and rescue it from impending uniformity... Landscape's virtue is that it invites discovery and encounter, until the Exterior transforms into "the innermost interior" (deeper than our interior designated as such) and becomes intimate, and until the Exterior takes that "region in which to live," invoked by Mallarme as well as Plato, and repatriates it such that it becomes the here.
[JLJ - Perhaps there is a logic to exploration, discovery and encounter.]
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