Silent transformation

The silent transformation (silence as Jullien defined it) is the concept François Jullien draws from Chinese thought to name a mode of becoming radically different from the one the West has privileged.

The opposition

The West, since Greece, thinks the real in terms of separate entities that are born, live, and die. Transformation is always conceived there as an event — a leap, a rupture, a crisis. This grid naturally produces apocalyptic narratives: the end as a dramatic moment that separates a before from an after.

Classical Chinese thought thinks differently: reality is made of continuous processes that metamorphose without interruption. What appears is never entirely new, what disappears is never entirely lost. The individual is only a temporary moment within a flow that precedes it and that prolongs it.

Consequence for the manifesto

This thought frees us from the apocalyptic fiction that structures the contemporary Western imaginary. It opens another way of inhabiting what is transforming: neither resisting, nor leaving, nor enduring — accompanying.

This is precisely the fiction that the manifesto considers we would need in order to inhabit the cognitive noosphere: not to leave it, not to endure it, but to transform ourselves with it, while remaining coupled to what carries us.

Not an orientalism

The manifesto does not propose a naive borrowing from contemporary political China — which has itself become mired in the Western productivist fiction. It proposes a dialogue with the long philosophical substratum of Chinese thought: I Ching, Taoism, Chan Buddhism, Neo-Confucians. This dialogue cannot take place alone; it needs a cognitive noosphere capable of holding both traditions simultaneously.