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The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China. By Fran:ois Jullien. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge: Distributed by MIT Press, 1995. Pp. 317.
Francois Jullien's The Propensity of Things,' by the author's own account, is a sequel to Process and Creation, an examination of the thought of Wang Fuzhi (1612-1692).2 Both books are centrally concerned with notions of efficacy centering on one Chinese word that has no direct English (or French) equivalent and little philosophical significance: shi, whose semantic range disconcertingly includes both static and dynamic elements-which Jullien respectively calls disposition (position, circumstances) and the more instrumental dispositif (power, potential), elegantly rendered by Janet Lloyd as "setup." How, he asks, "can we conceive of the dynamic in terms of the static, in terms of 'disposition'? Or, to put it another way, how can any static situation be simultaneously conceived in terms of historical movement?" (p. 11).
He argues-and we will return to the question of the usefulness of this argument-that however much shi seems torn across a divergent semantic field, "it is nevertheless a possible word with a discoverable coherence or-better yet-with an illuminating logic" (pp. 12-13). That logic, he continues, will not merely illuminate Chinese thought, but "could even pass beyond peculiar cultural perspectives and thereby illuminate something that is usually difficult to capture in discourse: namely, the kind of potential that originates not in human initiative, but instead results from the very disposition of things.... [L]et us open ourselves to this immanent force and learn to seize it" (p. 13).
Jullien arranges his book into three thematic and chronological sections, covering texts from the Warring States period through the eighteenth century. In the first section, he examines the central role of shi in Warring States thought, under three headings: military strategy (and the philosophy of warfare that informed it), politics, and what he calls a "logic of manipulation."
Chapter 1 focuses on the Sunzi bingfa, the Sun Bin bingfa, and the Huainanzi. In marked contrast to the tendency to omit bingfa from most discussions of "Chinese thought" or philosophy, Jullien begins with the dynamic account of shi as "setup" in military strategy. He argues that the ability to make...