Philosophy East and West

I. Introduction: Whose Culture? Which Existentialism?

Leah Kalmanson's Cross-Cultural Existentialism offers an original and provocative interpretation of existentialist themes and threads running through classical and modern East Asian Buddhist (fojiao 佛教) and Ruist (Rujia 儒家) philosophical sources. The book takes its point of departure in existential questions concerning meaningfulness and meaning-formative practices, as articulated in European existentialism and postexistentialism, and traces how these questions are and can be addressed in their own terms in dharmic and Song dynasty Ruist discourses of karma (ye 業), vital force (qi 氣), and ritual propriety (li 禮). The book elucidates existential techniques and practices encompassing case studies of Buddhist merit-making ceremonies (pp. 42–62), Confucian/Ruist self-cultivation methods (pp. 86–89), ritual memorization and recitation of texts (pp. 73–77, 98–101), and Yijing divination (pp. 81–90).

As I am highly sympathetic with the argument and analysis of this work, I will describe and extend its insights and pose a few questions for clarification and further discussion and contextualization, beginning with the concepts of existentialism and the speculative that are positioned to initially frame the issues at stake in this volume and concluding with questions of emptiness and qi.

The introduction and first chapter provide an initial overview of the problematic of meaninglessness and the creation of meaningfulness in European existentialism—and Nietzsche in particular (Kalmanson 2020, pp. 30–34). Here it becomes clear that paradigmatic existentialist philosophies, with their unique interpretive strategies and stakes concerning freedom, guilt, death, and anxiety, should be differentiated from the existential thematics that play a significant role in the East Asian philosophies under discussion.¹ Still, existentialism signifies something more specific than shared or overlapping thematics in Cross-Cultural Existentialism. It means in this context a certain style of philosophizing concerning existence rather than a commitment to particular conception of existence as without determining essence and radically free (Sartre 1956, p. 775).

In chapter 1, Kalmanson draws in particular on Nietzsche's thinking of the creation and formation of meaning and achieving a "great health." This [End Page 278] is interpreted in relation to practices of the balanced nourishment of life through the enactment of "daily renewal" (rixin 日新) and "ceaseless vitality" (shengsheng bu xi 生生不息). She also introduces Foucault's later writings on the Hellenistic and Christian practical formation of subjects through disciplines and techniques to examine East Asian philosophies in terms of their own practices of the cultivation of meaning, subjectivity, and interiority (Kalmanson 2020, pp. 14–15, 131–142). Subjectivity and interiority have been associated with a particular understanding of the Occident, as in the still influential discourse that opposes "Occidental freedom" and "Oriental despotism," and the present work radically reinterprets their significance in Ruist and dharmic discourses and practices.

The concept of "existentialism" employed here operates accordingly with reference to, yet reverses and reframes, exemplary forms of existentialism and their notion of existence. This includes the radical doubt and individuation that characterized existence in relation to the absurd, the infinite, and God in Søren Kierkegaard, and the radical freedom, choice, and seemingly infinite social-political responsibility of existing in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and his 1945 paradigmatic lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism," which popularized the very idea of existentialism: "Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence" (Sartre 1956, p. 775).

In contrast to existence as thrownness demanding radical freedom and individuation in Kierkegaard and Sartre, and an ethos of authenticity, in Kalmanson's proposed reorientation existentialism concerns "solicitude (you 憂) instead of anxiety, seriousness (jing 敬) instead of absurdity, stillness (jing 靜) instead of alienation, and sincerity (cheng 誠) and spontaneity (ziran 自然) in place of authenticity and freedom."² This shift entails an alteration in the notion of existence itself and a distinctive ontology or metaphysics that Kalmanson designates speculative.

II. Old and New Mirrors of the Speculative

A second key notion deployed and explicated throughout the work, particularly in chapter 1 and the conclusion, is that of the speculative. Existentialism is interpreted, perhaps contrary to the anti-Hegelian and antimetaphysical impulses of classical European existentialism, as metaphysical and speculative such that the concept can embrace the cosmological and...