There would seem, therefore, two ways to present our vision of things: detour, where one thing refers to another and communicates with it, since they form a pair and are interrelated; and split, where everything refers to itself but on another plane, which it imitates and which informs it and from which it derives its reality. Modern ideology (particularly that from Nietzsche) stresses above all, for a culture born of Greek idealism, the construction of a form-essence and the invention of a model. This super-world of theory has devalued the Western world; this transcendent outside has cut us off from phenomena. In short, our metaphysical bias seems to have impoverished our experience. But perhaps we have lost sight of the advantage of such intelligibility; perhaps we have not even realized all that depends on it. This super-world has enabled Westerners to conceive of the ideal; the Western invention of the soul and God has made it possible to experience the sublime (indeed, this notion of the ideal has no equivalent in Chinese: lixiang which serves as its translation, literally means the thought of li, that is, of the regulating principle of things). Moreover, this transcendent exterior has enabled Westerners to conceive of freedom — including freedom in the city (the Chinese conceive of natural spontaneity, in the sense of sponte sua — that which comes through immanence).
This difference in the conception of the world appears in politics as well. The figure of the intellectual could not have developed in the West if there had not been this plane of the model and the ideal, which transcends power relationships and which the Western intellectual has made his domain. The Chinese man of letters feels uncomfortable making himself into an intellectual because he does not have this ideal world to lean on when confronting the political sphere (since nature, to which Taoist thought gives him access, only offers him a chance for escape or withdrawal). Caught in this purely mundane vision of reality, he resorts to evasions in the face of power and finds room to maneuver only in subtlety.

Francois Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece