The Way of Balance and Breadth — From the Philosophy of Science and Technology Conference Back to the Yangzi Lectures

What I had originally been assigned to comment on was suli’s paper, but suli seems to have suffered some kind of accident all of a sudden (bless him/her), and didn’t come today, so there was no chance to say anything. A bit of a pity.

Based on Husserl and on He Lin’s interpretation of Husserl, Suli carried out a “constitutive analysis” of the laboratory’s “production of phenomena.” As far as the question at issue is concerned, I’m also quite interested in this sort of thing. The paper I had previously wanted to write but could not write was precisely an attempt to start from phenomenology (of media) and restate some problems in classical philosophy of science. Whether it is knowledge or experiment, phenomenology ought to be able to address the questions discussed in that classical Anglo-American analytic philosophy of science; of course, not by simply giving an answer that is different from the rest, but by posing those questions anew.

But when it actually came time to write, I found it very difficult. There aren’t many ready-made materials in Chinese, and as for the English-language literature—first, there isn’t all that much of it either; second, my English isn’t good; and third, even if I managed to find a lot of papers on philosophy of science by Anglo-American phenomenologists or by so-called “post-phenomenology” scholars who don’t deserve the name, would these papers really be helpful? I am skeptical. Looking at suli’s paper, I became even more doubtful. suli seems to have been poisoned by some sort of Anglo-American style. The style of Anglo-American analytic philosophy is not bad in itself, but its superficial fusion with phenomenology may instead produce some grotesque monstrosity that is neither fish nor fowl.

Jingqi’s comment on an earlier “post-phenomenology” paper struck a chord with me—hold on a moment before talking about the “post”; have we already understood classical phenomenology well enough? Has the vitality of classical phenomenology been exhausted so that it must be reincarnated in a new body?

Modern Chinese scholars like to chase fashion, always wanting to be cutting-edge and innovative, always hoping to transcend older paths through summarizing or synthesizing them, as if “post-phenomenology” were bound to be better than phenomenology and more in tune with the times. If we could fuse analytic philosophy and phenomenology, that would be ideal, because then we would be standing at the very forefront of the era. My view is: hold off on worshipping the “post,” and be even more wary of so-called synthesis. It is rather like the so-called integration of Chinese and Western medicine. When Chinese medicine is in a weak position, this sort of “integration” is not necessarily complementary or creative; it is more likely to be annexation. Chinese medicine, once “integrated” into the conceptual system of Western medicine, is not so much developed and elevated as melted down and dispersed. Combination is not necessarily a good thing, and never combining is not necessarily a bad thing either. Human thought is rich and diverse to begin with; what’s wrong with preserving diversity as much as possible? Phenomenology need not join forces with analytic philosophy either. Phenomenology is somewhat like Chinese medicine in its predicament: although it is very popular among the public, most of what circulates are interpretations that are either half-baked or a jumble of the genuine and the fake, while deep understanding and development are still very lacking; on the whole it is in a weak position. If we again use the methods of analytic philosophy to discuss phenomenology, we may well produce consequences analogous to the Westernization of Chinese medicine. In the end, what remains of Chinese medicine would be nothing more than a few herbal prescriptions acknowledged within the Western medical system, while its entire independent theoretical system and mode of thinking would finally dissipate into nothingness. Judging from the present situation, phenomenology “absorbed” by analytic philosophers also seems similar to those “Chinese herbal medicines”: nothing more than a few scattered concepts and “ideas,” while the “spirit” of classical phenomenology has disappeared from view.

Of course, not wanting “integration” does not mean refusing communication. Communication between different paths of thought, including conflict and mutual borrowing, is the greatest driving force behind the development of thought. But “communication,” precisely, must be premised on the steadfast preservation of both sides’ subjectivity (this is where I think of Yang Zi), for only between two independent entities can one speak of communication. If one does not insist on one’s own distinctiveness, how can one possibly give voice to oneself in communication? So, in my view, a phenomenological philosophy of science should face analytic philosophy squarely and confront the problems discussed by classical analytic philosophy of science. At the same time, however, it must also firmly maintain its own style, drawing a clear line between itself and analytic philosophy, rather than unreflectively posing questions directly within the context of analytic philosophy.

A phenomenology that has been analyticized is not only of no benefit to phenomenology; it is not necessarily a good thing for analytic philosophy either. One major duty of philosophy, even if not the only one, is conceptual clarification, and analytic philosophers will probably find phenomenological concepts vague and ambiguous, unlike the clear and distinct concepts of analytic philosophy. But for analytic philosophy to absorb the various concepts established by phenomenology is bound to cause “indigestion.” For example, in suli’s paper, concepts from phenomenology such as “adumbration,” “intentional object,” and “being-in-the-world” are mixed in, but they are probably not used in their original contexts. And yet they are not defined clearly with analytic-philosophical rigor either, producing a hybrid and awkward effect. In fact, phenomenology is equally concerned with conceptual clarification, but its attitude toward concepts and its standpoint are different. Analytic philosophy treats word-concepts as if they were ready-made objects, as if they were individual symbols. Hence it prefers to provide a fixed chain of determinate “definitions” in a static manner, and even more prefers to use neutral mathematical symbols directly—refusing to speak proper human language and insisting instead on machine language. It is the same in suli’s paper: one has to use symbols like Sx, M, and |X>x to express things, and one has to invoke a special mathematical concept—“transformation group”—to explain matters. No detailed explanation is given of what a transformation group is (a transformation group is a linear function correspondence in a linear space), nor is it explained whether this usage is a metaphor or an analogy, or whether cognition is in essence being understood as a correspondence relation among mathematical functions. Setting aside the fact that this sort of functional understanding is wholly anti-phenomenological (Heidegger would certainly refuse to speak this way, and I do not believe Husserl could possibly have been mathematized to such an extent), this kind of custom that venerates mathematical symbols and mathematical concepts does not merely signify a simplification fetish; it precisely reflects a fundamental set of mental habits and a way of “seeing.” When I report, “an event occurred at the third second,” and when I say, “event X3,” or even in general, “event Xt,” these are two different things. They imply two different modes of experience; the latter is not a simplified expression of the former. “A cognitive object” and “O” are two different things as well. For in the analytic-philosophical view, concepts are hollow, emptied out. Concepts concern only extension and nothing about “intension”; even less is there any talk of “meaning,” “metaphor,” and so on, and the historical origin of a concept is utterly irrelevant to it. In the eyes of analytic philosophers, to clarify a concept means to strip away all the sticky, soft, and moist stuff attached to it, leaving in the end only the shell of a concept, an empty symbol “X,” together with the driest, hardest relations among the shells of X and Y and Z, and so forth. Put differently, in response to the tangled and entwined condition of concepts, the analytic-philosophical method is “to split” and “to analyze,” that is, to hack it apart and be done with it; whereas the phenomenological method is “to解” and “to explain”[to disentangle and interpret], to loosen it and release it, loosening here and tightening there, peeling back some things here and drawing out others there, attempting, without brutally destroying the original state of connection, to work around and sort out the content and structure of the problem and to reveal its various sources and entanglements. Thus when we look at analytic philosophy’s treatment of concepts, it feels as if it is simple and crisp in a “one stroke cuts cleanly in two” sort of way, whereas phenomenological interpretive action inevitably takes on the form of “pulling this way and that.” But phenomenologists’ use of a rich array of seemingly clouded and misty concepts, meandering and roaming about in all directions, is not a matter of deliberate obscurantism; rather, it is precisely through a roundabout method that they “interpret” concepts. Of course, this is not to say that the “swift blade cuts the tangled knot” approach is more correct or less correct; in many situations, for problems that are hopelessly entangled, cutting them open and sewing them back together may well be the most appropriate method. But the phenomenological method naturally has its own significance as well. Any attempt to introduce concepts from phenomenology into an analytic-philosophical context should pay attention to why phenomenology uses so many seemingly vague concepts—these concepts are not set there like ready-made objects, waiting for us to sort out their functional relations. If one fails to notice this distinction, and instead understands phenomenological concepts with the attitude analytic philosophers have toward concepts, then either one will conclude that phenomenologists are merely being obscure for its own sake, or else one will distort phenomenologists’ intentions in a flat and simplistic way, or else one will oneself be guilty of obscurantism.

Many people think that phenomenology is interesting enough, but impossible to understand. The more modest ones say phenomenology is profound and difficult; the more blunt ones say phenomenology is just window dressing and affectation. I used to think the same way, feeling that phenomenology was beyond reach. Now my view has been turned on its head—phenomenology is not beyond reach; rather, it ought to be the most “superficial.” The “superficial” here means immediate and personal: phenomenology must be grounded in our most ordinary, personal lived experience. It also means plain, unadorned, not flashy, not artificial: it must be articulated in the most straightforward language, resisting those unreflected mathematical symbols and technical terms. If looking at phenomenology always makes one feel it is beyond reach, then either we have understood phenomenological concepts as ready-made objects rather than the roundabout paths of interpretation, or the phenomenological text itself was simply not written well, or else it is fake phenomenology altogether. Of course, Heidegger’s texts are genuine phenomenology without a doubt, but when we read them we still do not feel them to be plain and simple; to some extent this is due to the barrier of language. Some colloquial idioms and dialect expressions in German that seem easygoing and approachable simply have to become eye-catching academic jargon once translated.

Of course, what I mean by plain and approachable is not the same thing as popular and easy to read. “Superficial” is only the starting point for meditation; further thinking must, of course, go far beyond the force of everyday thought. To take Go as an example: the elemental system and rules on which it is based are extremely simple and unadorned, whereas the conceptual and rule system on which boxing matches rely is far more complex. Yet appreciating a Go match is much harder than appreciating a boxing match.

I skipped the graduate-student conference’s final dinner. The reason for dodging the meal was, of course, in part that I don’t like attending social occasions, but this time an even more important reason was that I had to hurry back to hear Yang Zi’s lecture. I have always said that Yang Zi was the teacher who moved me most during my university years; he was the first person to let me see a living, breathing image of a “Confucian scholar.” He is not like Master Xianglong, who seems like some kind of “otherworldly expert.” Yang Zi is a typical modern person, a person of this era, someone right among us, and yet he is also a “scholar” in the classical sense. The basic spirit of Confucianism is to face this world head-on, rather than to evade it by taking any retreating or transcendent route. In this sense Master Xianglong is not a typical Confucian scholar; he is a hybrid of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, whereas Yang Zi is.

This time Yang Zi spoke on “investigating things to extend knowledge” and on “the way of the Great Learning.” He happened to repeat his long-standing position: the true “Way” must be “balanced, expansive, and open,” and the most powerful principles are always stated in the plainest language. This is required by Confucian thought, and it is also required by phenomenology. If phenomenology is not “balanced, expansive, and open,” then what I am doing is not phenomenology.

November 28, 2010

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