Ambivalence in western thinking, an echo to the eastern way of thinking?

What can we learn from the classical debate between the universalist and the relativist approaches of reality, from the eternal conflict between rationalism and religion, from the canonical opposition between being and moving, from the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, from the encounter between East and West? My questioning, already, betrays me: I think and order my thought in a bivalent, typical Western way, suggesting that one pole excludes the other. Another way of thinking, keeping the ambivalence in balance, is probably more familiar to Eastern thinking, but is not unknown in our Western philosophical tradition. What I intend to do in this presentation is to roughly trace the main outline of the alternative western interpretation of the world where ambivalence prevails against bivalence. This western second voice, always present, but maybe less authoritative than the first one, can, to a certain extent, help us to better understand the Eastern way of thinking. But comparing has always been a dangerous enterprise. One can either impose one’s own framework, or, on the contrary, turn the other into the absolute otherness- the guru who is going to give us all the answers to our unsolved problems. Two well-known European sinologists - the Flemish Ulrich Libbrecht and the French François Jullien - trying to avoid this two-fold trick, have worked out two very different comparative models, which I shortly present in the conclusion of this paper.status: publishe