The notion of the beautiful has been a fundamental concept within Western thought. Over the centuries its criteria and conceptions have endlessly been debated and how it is to be defined has been subject to considerable variation. However, the underlying assumptions of this notion of the 'beautiful' have rarely been questioned. In this volume, François Jullien argues that the idea of the beautiful as it was established in Greek philosophy became embedded within the very structure of European languages. This gave it a hegemonic status in the history of Western thought that has determined a certain way of thinking with broad implications and has had an often unnoticed effect upon many aspects of modern life, notwithstanding the fact that the idea of the beautiful itself began to implode with the development of modern art. Moreover, through globalization this idea has been spread to such an extent that even cultures whose ancient traditions are based upon radically different aesthetic ideas have tended to adopt it unquestioningly and without recognizing the cultural assumptions it contains. Chinese thought, for instance, did not isolate, or abstract, the beautiful in the way that Western philosophy did. Rather, it worked with quite a different set of assumptions which reveal a divergence of thought, questioning the universality of Western notions and opening up possibilities for fresh ways of thinking.

Translations from the Chinese, however, have tended to obscure the significance of this divergence as they have sought to make Chinese texts comprehensible to the Western reader. Against this, Jullien emphasizes the extent of this divergence as he endeavours to bring Chinese thought into dialogue with Western notions in order that we might begin to ask the question: What is the beautiful?.