Last week’s salon was suspended because I ran off to attend this conference instead (next week, of course, it will resume as usual).
This was, in a sense, the first formal academic conference I have ever attended in my life—so I suppose I went to broaden my horizons.
From a purely academic standpoint, the conference wasn’t very interesting. But of course, as I see it, the so-called academic conference is first and foremost socializing, second tourism, third scholarship; and in some conferences, the effects in terms of fame and profit are even higher up the list. Our conference, however one looks at it, still had some academic payoff. As for conferences that are wholly devoid of academic interest, I imagine there are plenty of those too.
I remember one of the organizers remarking during the conference that if 10% of Chinese academic conferences were like this one, then Chinese scholarship would be very different indeed. By that logic, if all academic conferences were abolished, perhaps that would be a tremendous boost to the development of Chinese scholarship.
I had earlier been advocating that web forums should replace academic conferences and become the main form of academic conversation, or rather, that web forums would be the academic medium of the next era. And the function of the previous era’s platform of exchange—academic conferences—would shrink to that of mere social gatherings. Although face-to-face exchange does provide many things that online communication cannot, in keeping with the social, economic, and cultural trends of this era, face-to-face conferences are bound to become increasingly unable to provide a stage for serious yet lively academic debate.
As for this conference, each person had fifteen minutes to present, and after four people had presented, the total time for questions and discussion was twenty minutes. Moreover, before hearing the presentations, participants had almost no time to read carefully the papers to be presented. What kind of discussion could possibly come out of that? Compare that with Teacher Wu’s discussion class: everyone reads the paper in advance, then the presentation lasts an hour and the discussion two hours, with ten-odd participants, not too many and not too few—that is when things start to get interesting. Even if an academic conference were to add another fifteen minutes to each presentation, it would not much improve the situation.
Of course, I do not mean to deny the significance of academic conferences, especially the significance of this conference. I am only saying that, as a stage for academic exchange that serves as the source of intellectual vitality, the conference is a dead end. But as a platform for scholars’ socializing and revelry, academic conferences will continue to remain.
Although the significance of conferences lies in socializing and revelry, that does not mean that the papers read and discussed at conferences are meaningless. In fact, a paper is like a scholar’s self-introduction, and is indispensable in scholarly social life. As a scholar, one’s real “designation” is not “Professor So-and-so, Department So-and-so, University So-and-so,” but “the one who studies such-and-such, says such-and-such, advocates such-and-such.” When ordinary friends gather socially, they introduce themselves by stating their “designation”—which unit they work in, what position they hold; when old friends meet, they also mention whether there has been any promotion or transfer lately, and so on, and then talk about their work and life. In scholarly socializing too, one must introduce oneself by stating one’s “designation” in the academic world. This is why reading out papers is necessary even in academic social settings. Although a conference cannot carry out deep and thorough discussions of any topic, through this kind of “designation introduction,” participants can indeed gain a general understanding of one another’s situations. Like any social gathering or party, concrete and in-depth acquaintance is not the purpose of the gathering, but the intuitive understanding achieved there may open the way to some deeper follow-up exchanges.
That said, this conference made me a little less confident about my own phenomenological path. The key problem is that I really do not want to drink… Although I do not oppose “Dionysian spirit,” I was left in awe by the drinking prowess of the teachers. But only in the sense of “awe”; as for alcohol, I neither like it, nor can I drink it, nor am I willing to drink it. It is not that I am putting on a show of being proper; it is simply not to my taste—neither so-called Dionysian spirit nor alcohol. In ancient Greek culture, the free and unrestrained way of life did indeed arise on the one hand from wine, but on the other hand there was also the source of the Olympic contests. I cannot obtain the first kind of power, so I suppose I’ll have to take the second road. By the way: when web forums become the main platform for academic exchange, video games may to some extent play the role of banquets and travel.
As for the specific academic content, let me mention a few scattered points:
Regarding Teacher Jin’s question to me (so adorable~), the point was that phenomenological analysis ought to be subtle, and distinctions should be more finely drawn. About my remark that reading written text does not necessarily require silence: some texts, such as the noisy Peking opera reading group that Teacher Jin mentioned involving Lou Yulie and others, really are read best when everyone gathers together and sings them aloud. My reply at the time emphasized the gradual development of reading—for instance, in the Middle Ages, manuscript reading was often also done aloud. The same is true in classical Chinese teaching, where one also reads aloud. This precisely reflects the developmental process of the transition from an auditory culture to a visual culture—just as Africans also do not watch films in a silent and detached way. But I did not have time to say more then, so let me add a bit now: in fact, the reading experience of a Peking opera script can be analyzed in a still subtler way—why is it that reading a Peking opera text is suited to vocalization? Of course, it is a script, and therefore naturally presents something scenified and situational, so it is not suitable for silent reading. Going a step further: does the habit in Western culture of silent reading of written texts, in turn, have some influence on Western “scripts”? Although I lack familiarity with these fields, if one imagines it purely, there should be a significant influence—“drama” in modern Western culture, such as spoken theater and film, differs greatly from classical Chinese Peking opera. I seem to recall hearing Teacher Ye Lang and others say before that Peking opera is not centered on the “director,” much less on the “script,” but on the “role”; the protagonist of the theater is the soul of the drama, and the whole play revolves around the “role,” that is, the most central “present-at-hand” presence. By contrast, drama in Western culture is not governed by the “role,” but centered on the “director” or “screenwriter”—and they are precisely “absent,” a detached and observing perspective. Traditional Chinese drama had neither directors nor fixed, unchanging scripts, but was a system centered on the protagonist and transmitted through demonstration and example. Why is there such a difference?—The difference between the “present” “role” and the “absent” “director” precisely corresponds to the difference between “demonstration and example” and “reading and writing scripts.”
Let me also mention one criticism that Teacher Jin made of Teacher Wu: Teacher Wu spoke of “the intentionality structure in technology,” and Teacher Jin disagreed with this use of the term, believing that only people have intentionality, whereas a knife will not “fly up and cut someone all by itself,” and therefore one can only say that it embodies human intentionality, not that it itself possesses an intentionality structure. Here, although I myself do not particularly like using the term “intentionality,” I am still willing to offer Teacher Wu some defense. Teacher Jin’s line of thought seems not yet to have escaped an anthropocentric fixation, and when we set up a homology between human nature and technology, the status of “human” can no longer retain such a natural superiority. Here, a knife indeed cannot “itself” fly up and cut someone, but neither can a person, if he has no knife or any other tool that can cut, “himself” cut someone. A person needs to rely on some knife in order to “cut”; similarly, a knife also needs to rely on some person in order to “cut.” So if “the knife itself” has no intentionality of cutting, by what right does “the person himself” have it? In fact, the “intentionality structure” of “cutting” is jointly constituted by person and knife. Put simply, “human beings” possess the capacity for “intention,” while the “knife” is the provider of the “structure.” Without technology, human intention can only be completely empty; it is technology, or rather the existence of media, that makes a directed intentional structure possible. If no human being provides the consciousness of “cutting,” then the knife certainly cannot automatically go off and “cut”; but if the knife does not provide the structure of “cutting” (actuality, possibility), then human beings will not automatically generate the consciousness of “cutting” either. The so-called “intentionality structure” precisely points to the “co-constitutive” relation between humanity and technology; as for human free will, that is another matter.
December 2, 2009
Suixuan » Logs » Miscellaneous Notes on the First of the Nanning Phenomenology and Philosophy of Technology Conference » Comments and Replies
Gǔ Chù2009-12-08 13:44:44 [Reply]
Yes, since we are going to use the term “intentionality” anyway (I said from the beginning that I was speaking on behalf of Teacher Wu and the others; personally, I am not very willing to use this term), what Teacher Wu and the others mean is also to start from Husserl’s phenomenology. As for what problems Husserl’s theory of intentionality specifically has, etc., I cannot possibly explore them to the end here; but of course that does not mean I think they need not be explored. So what I am emphasizing first is that the concept of “intentionality” can be expanded, and one cannot say that once it falls outside Husserl’s framework it is automatically wrong. Husserl is only the starting point of phenomenology, not its framework; only by taking such a position and then going further into Husserl’s theory can one proceed smoothly. As for how to explore Husserl’s theory in depth, that is not what I am doing right now.
Anonymous2009-12-08 12:42:31 Anonymous 219.234.81.119 [Reply]
If one says that Husserl is not equal to phenomenology, then by the same logic one can also say that hermeneutics is not equal to phenomenology, and existentialism is not equal to phenomenology.
At least one thing should not be a problem: if one is speaking within Husserl’s framework, one cannot say “this is not phenomenology,” right? If one is speaking within an existentialist framework, such as Camus’s, then it is possible to say “this is not phenomenology.” At least we acknowledge that Camus is an existentialist, but is Camus a phenomenologist?
So this is still a question that needs clarification. It is not that Heidegger’s and Husserl’s thought are inconsistent, and that starting from Heidegger means it is no longer phenomenology. The question is, one must explain from where in Heidegger one is starting. At least Merleau-Ponty, at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Perception, starts from Husserl. Merleau-Ponty’s advancement of phenomenology is widely recognized, and in his preface he also begins with what “descriptive psychology” is, what “essence” is, and what “intentionality” is.
It is not that one must necessarily confine oneself within some framework; rather, since one is placing oneself within a certain tradition, one should clarify the core issues within that tradition. For example, if what I mean by “intentionality” differs from what Husserl and Scheler mean, in what sense am I saying that Husserl or Scheler, or even Brentano, has problems with “intentionality”? Through my research, where do I think they are wrong, at what step did they make a mistake, what is problematic about their definition, and what is it that I cannot accept? Or else, I think phenomenology cannot be done that way; it has to be done this way and that way in order to make sense; that is what should be called “phenomenology.” Clarification would be very good, and could even make a major contribution to phenomenology.
Gǔ Chù2009-12-08 00:36:51 [Reply]
Husserl was the pioneer of the entire phenomenological movement, but the role he played was more that of an inspirer. How many of the later Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre—not to mention the broader paths covered by the phenomenological movement, such as existentialism and hermeneutics—are still discussing questions within Husserl’s framework? As an inspiring figure, Husserl opened up certain basic problem-consciousnesses and theoretical attitudes, and provided many new terms and categories. Later phenomenologists drew inspiration from these resources and then went off to work out their own systems; even Husserl himself was constantly surpassing himself, so how could researchers today possibly remain confined within Husserl’s framework? If one is to follow Husserl’s own theoretical identification, then he said in his early years that “phenomenology is Heidegger and me”; later he came to think that Heidegger had also deviated, which would mean that only he remained alone—Husserl is phenomenology, phenomenology is Husserl? In that case one might as well not call it phenomenology at all, and simply call it Husserlian philosophy.
Anonymous2009-12-07 23:41:41 Anonymous 219.234.81.110 [Reply]
These are the work of phenomenology’s founder Husserl. If one does not stay within Husserl’s theoretical framework, then the so-called phenomenological philosophy of technology that goes beyond Kantian philosophy—the topic of the conference in the title of this article—has no idea where to begin. And the issue of “intentionality,” which is the core of these several comments, can it be discussed apart from Husserl’s work and thought? Could it be—does this “intentionality” refer to the “intentionality” spoken of by John Searle???
Gǔ Chù2009-12-07 13:36:04 [Reply]
How do you “construct a transcendental self from pure consciousness”? What is the transcendental self? Is it some sort of thing like “identity”? Then I can also “construct a transcendental medium from pure consciousness,” and that would be some sort of “mediality” and “difference.”
Gǔ Chù2009-12-07 13:32:10 [Reply]
I simply do not understand Husserl’s method. “Restricting discourse to transcendental intuition” — how is that possible? “Discourse” is a technical medium; any discourse is first and foremost necessarily confined within language technology. Without technology as a medium, how is “intuition” possible, let alone discursive intuition?
As for “Dasein,” whether one says “human beings have intentionality,” or “Dasein has intentionality,” or “intentionality is in Dasein,” and so on, the problem is similar: first of all, what does this “have” or “is in” mean?
Anonymous2009-12-07 10:58:36 Anonymous 219.234.81.104 [Reply]
Let me say a few casual words from outside the subject.
If we are not within the scope of phenomenology, then in the STS field the actor-network theory of the Paris school seems able to make some interesting discourse on the question of whether a knife has intentionality.
First of all, “intentionality” here is not a phenomenological term; it simply starts from the everyday-language word “intention,” expressing the meaning of an intended tendency.
Thus, in the discourse of actor-network theory, people, natural objects, artificial products, social groups, and so on are all actors on an equal footing. This is the so-called “generalized relativity,” which breaks down the boundary between human and nonhuman. Every “individual” actor has its own tendency to act, which we may provisionally call “intention.” The degree of stability, activity, and clarity of the “intention” of different actors varies, and may also change over time. In a specific context, the “intentions” of different actors can be “defined.” For example, a “door” has the “intention” of “admission” or “no admission”; a “knife” has the “intention” of being “sharp” or “cutting”; and the speed bump on a road has the “intention” of “slowing down.” “Intention,” on the one hand, is based on the actor’s own behavior; on the other hand, it comes from the “definition” or “expression” made by representatives who are able to speak for them.
Take a knife, for example: its own behavioral characteristics are such that one side is very thin, relatively hard, forming a certain kind of “sharpness,” and so on… When someone (or some other actor, so long as it is able to do so) “picks up” a knife, “uses” this knife to do this and that, and “defines” or “expresses” this, then there can be the alliance of “someone holding a knife,” possessing the “intention” of “cutting,” “paring,” “chopping,” or “threatening.” At this point, “someone,” as an entity with its own intention, has successfully enlisted the “certain knife” with its own intention, and together they form the alliance of “someone holding a knife.” What may happen in this alliance is that someone expresses or defines the intention of the knife, and thus becomes the knife’s representative. As for how faithfully representatives reflect “public opinion,” one can understand that by referring to the performance of representatives in various social groups.
Anonymous2009-12-07 10:10:04 Anonymous 219.234.81.110 [Reply]
When Husserl was carrying out phenomenological reduction, he explained Kant’s problem of demarcation very clearly. He bracketed the natural attitude and restricted discourse to transcendental intuition, that is, the realm of pure consciousness. Intentionality, as the structure of pure consciousness, and intentional objects, as the content of pure consciousness, are what are intuited. On the basis of these intuitions, constructing the transcendental ego out of pure consciousness is where Husserl goes one step further than Descartes. As for concepts, categories, and the like being constructed out of the essential intuition of pure consciousness, that is a matter for the next step. To use words like “technology” and “medium” to speak within such a domain requires special explanation. At the very least, “human beings” here are not in the biological sense, not as objects of knowledge, so there is no question of anthropocentrism; and the ordinary usage of the word “knife” is of course as an empirical object. How to explain that when using the word “knife,” one is making discourse for the domain of transcendental intuition rather than referring to the empirical object “knife” requires clarifying what exactly the “knife” in such discourse means, and what relation it actually has to pure consciousness and transcendental intuition. Husserl labored to coin such abstruse terms, and Heidegger’s baffling “Dasein,” all of them distinguished from the natural-attitude use of everyday language. And when we say “human being” or “humanity itself,” of course we also need to distinguish; it’s just that in the tradition of Kantian philosophy, and even in Descartes and others, there has always been talk of “human beings,” and within these discourses there are usages without natural-attitude empirical components. With such a theoretical tradition, it is easier for us to understand a little.
Gu Chu2009-12-06 23:19:51 [Reply]
The philosophy of technology in phenomenology certainly has to go beyond Kantian philosophy; if everything is expressed in Kant’s terminology, then phenomenology has not even come out yet, let alone the philosophy of technology. I very much agree that the transcendental subject guarantees the identity of the object of knowledge, but even with just this identity, empirical knowledge still cannot be obtained. Kant believed that the properties of the object of knowledge are bestowed by the subject’s forms of cognition, and the role here can now be replaced by technology, that is, the a priori forms of cognition are not within universal human nature, but within technical media.
Anonymous2009-12-06 21:50:14 Anonymous 219.234.81.66 [Reply]
The self-identity of the transcendental subject, that is, transcendental apperception or the transcendental ego, is the basis of cognition. According to Kant, without transcendental apperception there can be no identity of objects; without that, concepts cannot be formed; without that, judgments cannot be formed. These are all preconditions for organizing experience into knowledge. If one calls Kant’s categories, concepts, judgments, and so on technology or media, then that usage of the words “technology” and “media” should be different from calling a knife technology or media. Because “knife,” after all, usually refers to an empirical object. If one wants to use the word “knife” in the same sense as Kantian “categories” and “judgments,” one probably needs a special explanation.
Gu Chu2009-12-05 23:39:55 [Reply]
I am just understanding it according to Kantian philosophy, so I don’t understand in what sense the transcendental subject is a “precondition.” You tell me it is not a precondition of intentionality, but something constructed by intentionality; then how can it in turn be a precondition of empirical cognition? Why not simply say that intentionality is the precondition of empirical cognition? Why must intentionality first create so-called transcendental subject, and only then can it become the precondition of empirical cognition? Then why must such a thing be constructed? So I say, if the so-called transcendental subject is a precondition thus constructed, then why call it a “subject”? Why not technology or medium?
Anonymous2009-12-05 22:56:04 Anonymous 219.234.81.119 [Reply]
“Transcendental” is the German transzendental in Kantian philosophy, meaning a precondition of empirical cognition, not the “a priori” in “a priori probability.”
Gu Chu2009-12-05 14:49:14 [Reply]
If you put it that way, then I cannot understand it. What, then, does the “transcendental” in your “transcendental consciousness subject” mean? Why not just say “subject,” instead of saying “transcendental”?
If “subject” is constructed by intentional activity, then “medium” is also constructed by intentional activity. If you say that this constructed cognitive subject is “transcendental” (I don’t know what that means), then the constructed cognitive medium is also “transcendental” (of course I still don’t know what that means).
Anonymous2009-12-04 18:31:45 Anonymous 219.234.81.119 [Reply]
The transcendental subject is not the precondition of intentionality, but is constructed by intentional activity. Whether it exists or not is not a logical requirement, merely a matter of intuition.
What does it mean for medium and subject to be equivalent? Does it mean that the subject has intentionality, and the medium also has the same intentionality? Or does it mean that the subject can be a medium, and the medium can also be a subject?
Gu Chu2009-12-04 13:55:35 [Reply]
As for this thing called the “transcendental self, consciousness subject,” I remain skeptical. You can say that “consciousness is always consciousness of …,” but there still is no consciousness subject appearing here, unless you change it to “consciousness is always a person’s consciousness of …,” and that would require a transcendental subject. But in my view, if this hard-to-say “self” is transcendental — that is to say, what makes “consciousness possible” — then at the same time, some sense of “technology,” perhaps what you could call a “transcendental medium,” is also necessary for making consciousness possible. So in this sense, technology and the human being still stand on equal footing, whether at the level of concrete objects, technology and human beings, or at the transcendental level, medium and subject.
Anonymous2009-12-04 10:59:02 Anonymous 219.234.81.110 [Reply]
Whether “humanity itself” has intentionality depends on how one understands the referent of such discourse as “humanity itself.” If “humanity itself” refers to the object of knowledge, the biological human body, then it is no different from the “knife” as an object of knowledge: there is no question of intentionality. After all, “intentionality” is used to speak of the structure of pure consciousness, belonging to the transcendental domain; and once one is speaking of objects of knowledge, whether a knife or a “human being,” they are empirical objects obtained through categorical organization, and talking about whether they have “intentionality” violates Kant’s demarcation.
The problem is that sometimes we use “human being” to speak of the transcendental self, the subject of consciousness; in such cases, the use of “human being” does not refer to the human being as an empirical object, nor to the human being in the biological sense. What one actually wants to say is that the conscious activity of the transcendental subject of consciousness has the structural feature of “intentionality.”
Because of the limitations of language, discussing transcendental domains and the problems of pure consciousness always involves many difficulties, and one can easily confuse things or use terms incorrectly.
This problem is very much like when we ask our Western philosophy teacher in a university class: is the “Dasein” Heidegger speaks of actually a human being? If not, then what exactly is “Dasein”? The teacher says: if you insist that I answer in one sentence whether it is or is not, then I can only be speechless.
Gu Chu2009-12-04 10:17:49 [回复]
All of that is possible, but it has no substantive significance. The knife as technology and the knife as concept are alike in being historical things, not some fixed and unchanging thing beyond time. People’s knives and their ideas about knives both develop and change: the knives that are made develop as ideas change, and people’s ideas about knives also change as knives develop. This is a relationship of mutual construction in both directions. To ask whether it is really the chicken or the egg that came first is not very meaningful.
unic2009-12-03 23:43:00 Anonymous 61.178.103.141 [回复]
Then the first person to use a knife—did he happen to use a sharp stone implement as a knife, or did he first make a sharp stone implement according to his own concept and then use it as a knife?
古雴2009-12-03 22:50:30 [回复]
I did not say that thinking knives themselves have no intentionality is an anthropocentric bias. Rather, I said that thinking “there are no knives, only humans” is an anthropocentric bias. What I want to say is that if knives themselves have no intentionality, then “humans themselves” do not either.
匿名2009-12-03 22:21:47 Anonymous 219.234.81.110 [回复]
Knives themselves have no intentionality; that cannot be called an anthropocentric bias. Because intentionality is something said of a conscious subject, whereas “humanity” is a concept. Just as a knife, as “a” thing, is also an object constituted by cognitive activity. To say that a knife itself has intentionality may well be to make a transgressive statement. A knife can, however, as technology, become an extension of the “body” of the cognitive subject, jointly constructing a kind of imaginal activity. At that point, the knife is not viewed as a thing, but merely as one part of this activity of cutting.
武政宝宝2009-12-03 02:30:21 [回复]
Only with the shells, can one gain his ghost, right?
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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