The paper I wrote on philosophy of technology before was too rushed—I only decided to switch from Heidegger to Feenberg at two in the morning on Tuesday, spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday reading, and didn’t finish the paper until 6 a.m. on Thursday morning… In fact, many places could still have been developed further.
On the question of plural rationality, the example Feenberg gives is a very good one—
In the paper I wrote: Here, Feenberg agrees with historicism and social constructivism in holding that not only the content of rational beliefs, but also the principles and forms of reason itself, are historical and culturally plural. In order to illustrate that different cultures may possess different forms of “rationality,” Feenberg especially takes Japan as an example, noting that: “Kawabata Yasunari’s novels more forcefully than Japanese exceptionalism point out the inadequacy of any equation of rationalization with Westernization. Go had long since attained the level of a rational system before Europeans encountered it; it itself formed a complete culture of strategic action, subtly different from analogous Western ideas.” (p. 205) Feenberg then invokes the Japanese philosopher Nishida, explicitly stating: “Different cultures can produce different types of rational social order.” (p. 206)
This could be written about at greater length.
This has already been shown in my earlier paper on Wittgenstein and intuitionism—“chess-like games” are a very useful metaphor. The episode about a Go match described in the Kawabata Yasunari novel Feenberg cites here does indeed very well suggest the transition from tradition to modernity.
Traditional Japanese Go, like Chinese Go, is not merely a competition, but also an art and a ritual.
What Feenberg mentions is a match during Japan’s transition from tradition to modernity, in which a young man challenges a venerable Go master: according to the rules, a Go match takes several days, and at the end of each day’s play, the player whose turn it is to move must first write down the next move and seal it away; then, when play resumes the next day, it is opened and played in response by the opponent. This ensures that the time each player uses is fair—otherwise, the player whose move it is would gain an entire night to think about that move.
In this match between the young man and the master, the young man played a trick when “sealing the board” — when they were locked in a tense struggle in the center of the board, he placed the sealed-board move in an unimportant spot on the edge, yet one that would force the master to reply. This was a move that would eventually have to be played anyway; however it was answered, there was no suspense, and it had no bearing on the overall situation—afterward, the young man continued battling the master in the center, thereby seizing the initiative and ultimately winning.
The move the young man played fully complied with the rules of the match, but it seems to have been only “fair” in form, while in substance it unfairly gave him the equivalent of an entire night’s extra thinking time. But Feenberg is not merely discussing fairness here. In fact, emphasizing “fairness”—especially formal fairness—is itself a manifestation of modern Western values. Traditional chess-like games never bothered with timers, let alone with so many additional fairness rules—the “komi” rule for the first player was only adopted in the latter half of the twentieth century, after Go became a competitive sport! And traditional Go masters regarded matches as an art: whether supplementary rules designed to ensure fairness, or underhanded tricks used within the rules, were both profanations of a work of art. And more importantly, in traditional Go matches understood as “ceremony” and “ritual,” especially in matches between a young challenger and a venerable master, the two sides were not equal in status at all; the master was naturally to stand above and await the young man’s instruction, and the attempt to create every possible “fair” condition for the young man was itself unreasonable.
The subtitle of this chapter in Feenberg is “Ritual and Fairness” — which one, after all, is the rational standard? Ritual or fairness?
If chess-like games are understood merely as contests, as struggles whose sole purpose is victory, then “rules” are the whole of Go! Since it is a competition, of course attention to rules, strictness, and fairness are all perfectly natural, and traditionally Go was indeed a competition with strict and clear rules. Yet in tradition, Go is not merely a contest; or rather, the content of a match is by no means limited to the movement of stones on the board. A match is played by two people, and the identities of these two people, as well as the setting in which the Go match is conducted, are not irrelevant factors to be excluded. And precisely these factors cannot be fully written into explicit rules, nor can they be enforced by rules—for example, the challenger’s “respect” toward the master cannot be operated as a determinate rule. In other words, although traditional chess-like games are also concerned with rules, strictness, and fairness on the one hand, they contain something deeper that cannot be “formalized”! And these things that cannot be formalized are by no means anything like “irrationality” or emotional impulse; they are also a demand for “rationality.” If the rules of a chess-like game pursue formal rationality, then the ritual and art behind the game pursue a certain substantive rationality.
In the eyes of the ancients, chess-like games were of course also aimed at victory—young people challenging a master could not possibly do so without a desire to win; otherwise that would be even more disrespectful to the master—yet the desire to win was absolutely not the sole meaning of the game, let alone the highest one. For chess-like games involve not only winning and losing, but also the dimensions of ritual and art.
And not only games: even in the eyes of the ancients, war was not merely about winning and losing. If one has read some accounts of warfare in ancient Greece or ancient China, one may well find it strange. For instance, in China before the Spring and Autumn period, the “war chariot” (that is, the “cheng”) had explicit rituals: for example, the driver had to sit in the middle, one side had to have the archer and the other side the halberd-bearer; the arrangement could not be reversed, and the design of the chariot could not be changed arbitrarily. Then, in battle, the chariot and chariot would spin around one another in a certain way… there were many other military rites besides these, too numerous to enumerate. So could I suddenly break the rules and catch the opponent off guard? No, because in their eyes war was not merely about victory and defeat (though of course victory remained the goal), but also a sacred ritual and an art. Ancient Greece was similar: war was a contest of heroes, an incomparably sublime activity, so in the Greek city-states only free men had the right to fight, whereas slaves, who in modern eyes ought generally to be sent to the front lines as “cannon fodder,” had no right to go to war.
Of course, modern warfare does not seem to be entirely about winning and losing either, hehe; there are still some added things: selling weapons, killing one to warn a hundred, flexing military muscle… But on the whole, whether from chess-like games or from war, the ancients’ and moderns’ pursuits of rationality are very different. Modern people know only formal things—those things that cannot be formalized no longer count as the purpose of the game, and so the game is left with only winning and losing, fairness only with rules.
Society is like chess-like games as well. Traditional Eastern ritual-and-music civilization pursued the establishment of a social order with ritual and music at its core; this effort cannot of course be reduced to “irrationality”—the pursuit of ritual and music is likewise a pursuit of rationality. This rationality does not stand in opposition to fairness, rigor, and utility (just as traditional chess-like games also value rules, rigor, and victory), but it is not only these, and cannot be determined by any formalized system of rules.
Pluralism of reason does not mean that concrete beliefs about reason are plural (for example, I believe in heliocentrism and you believe in geocentrism), but rather that understandings of what reason is are themselves plural. Then someone may ask me: what, after all, does the word “reason” mean? I can answer: first, the understanding of a word is plural; in Wittgenstein’s terms of family resemblance, there is no decisive essential understanding. We should first understand it in ordinary language, and then further interpret it according to different standpoints. My personal view is: one might as well use the entry from Kingsoft PowerWord: reason is “a person’s capacity for knowledge, understanding, thought, and judgment,” while rationalization is the effort to make an object or action more reasonable—that is, to improve it on the basis of reason and evidence.
On this point Feenberg’s view is very close to mine—we must oppose the homogenized, formalized mode of thinking of technological rationality, but we should not therefore side with irrationality, nor need we negate civilization and fantasize about a return to primitive times (though primitive people have many admirable qualities, civilization is admirable too). The ideal of rationalization should not be abandoned, the longing for democracy and freedom should not be abandoned, and neither should the utopian will and the will to create history!
2007-06-02 22:15
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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