Last semester, because I had so many classes on Fridays, I never went to listen to the KeKe Forum, and that dragged me along so that I never quite had the nerve to come to Tsinghua to hear the salon either… This semester I’m planning to show up much more often~
The first time I met Teacher Jiang (in the flesh), my situation was rather embarrassed. Relying on the fact that I had been to Tsinghua a few times before, I didn’t even look at a map, and as a result it took me half an hour just to find the library; after arriving at the library, I then somehow spent another half hour circling around to find Xinzhai -_-! I had set out from Peking University before one o’clock, and in the end I arrived at about the same time as Teacher Jiang…
When I finally asked my question, I was a bit nervous, and I don’t know whether I spoke clearly enough. The two questions I asked were mainly exploratory, and still need to be developed further:
My main concern is this: after the metaphysics of the human being has been dismantled, how is ethics possible? More specifically, how is environmental ethics possible? How can we build a new platform of questions for environmental ethics? I feel that many other traditional philosophical problems may perhaps be dissolved, but ethics cannot be excluded from philosophy. Whether the question is “What is the human being?” or “What ought human beings to do?” or “What sort of people ought human beings to become?”—questions like these have to be faced in some way.
I asked “Do animals have technology?” in the hope of pinning down a number of things. Teacher Wu gave the answer that animals do not have technology, and this indicates many issues. First, Teacher Wu mentioned that “nature is not technology.” Teacher Wu said animals do not have technology, which means that he believes animals are “natural” (have nature). And if we look at the wording of Teacher Wu’s specific answer, the word “nature” he uses is indeed, in keeping with his usual practice, being used in its original sense of “nature” or “native disposition.” That is to say, in Teacher Wu’s view, animals do have “nature”—that is, they do have a “native disposition.”
Looked at this way, Teacher Wu is not a complete anti-essentialist in the full sense of the term. Radical anti-essentialism opposes the inquiry into the “essence” of everything whatsoever; if that were the case, then Teacher Wu’s philosophy of technology would come into conflict with the “philosophy of nature” that awaits revival, because on the one hand one wants to revive the original meaning of nature as “native disposition,” while on the other hand one denies in every sense the legitimacy of speaking of “native disposition”; then there could be no “philosophy of nature” in the sense of “native disposition.”
But if one insists on radical anti-essentialism, then ethics can still be developed; the West has already tried this. However, if Teacher Wu says that animals are “natural” rather than “technological,” that is, that animals have (perhaps only have) “native disposition,” then his anti-essentialism is mainly aimed at human nature, that is, it is devoted to dissolving the metaphysics of the human being—human essence consists precisely in lacking essence, in infinite possibility, and so on.
At this point one is approaching an existentialist position, and ethics can still be established here; there is plenty of content in Continental existentialist ethics. But then Teacher Wu also mentioned Mill’s “naturalistic fallacy,” pointing out that environmental ethics must first overcome the charge of the naturalistic fallacy before it can be developed. I very much agree with this, and I also feel that the development of environmental ethics must resolve this problem.
Teacher Wu points out that Mill’s problem lies in a narrow understanding of the concept of “nature,” taking it merely as a collection of natural objects. But does correcting our understanding of the word “nature” allow us to overcome the charge of the naturalistic fallacy? If we give “nature” its original meaning, that is, “native disposition,” then the naturalistic fallacy is reinterpreted as “human beings ought to act according to nature (native disposition).” But the problem is that Teacher Wu has already eliminated human “native disposition” — human beings are unnatural, without native disposition! Fine, human beings have no native disposition, so how could one possibly act according to native disposition? In the end, we have merely updated our understanding of the word “nature” in Mill’s “naturalistic fallacy,” but a fallacy is still a fallacy. What exactly counts as acting in accordance with nature remains unclear.
In addition, Teacher Wu’s ontology not only does not break the binary opposition between human beings and nature, it seems instead to intensify the gap between the two, pushing anthropocentrism one step further up—because in the tradition, the inquiry into human essence often includes questions such as the distinction between human beings and animals, the relation between human beings and nature, the relation between human beings and God, and so on. In that tradition, “reason” is taken as the key by which human beings stand above animals. There is certainly a danger here of leading to self-exaltation and arrogance, but I think emphasizing reason is still worthwhile, because emphasizing reason is in fact emphasizing human dignity, and at the same time emphasizing the capacity for self-discipline. And dignity, in a certain sense, is the basis of virtue. To say that human beings should “respect themselves, love themselves, and discipline themselves” is in some situations the same as saying that human beings should be moral beings. But now to say that what makes a human being human is “technology,” that human beings are the only beings with technology, in such a distinction between human beings and animals it becomes very difficult to find anything that could become human dignity, while it becomes much easier to find something through which human beings can exalt themselves—because technology is the power to transform “nature” (Teacher Wu said that nature cannot be transformed, so then nature can be transformed?); in the end one falls back into the harmful tendency of saying that human uniqueness and greatness lie in having the power to transform nature (or the natural world).
As for Teacher Wu’s remark that only human beings have the ability to choose what to become and what not to become, after he said this the students below started discussing animatedly, saying that some animals also choose suicide and so on; let me leave that aside for now. The issue is that rather than saying this human uniqueness comes from the fact that only human beings are not constrained by “essence,” it would be better to say that this freedom of choice—well, isn’t this still “reason”? Saying that human beings possess reason does not just mean that human beings have the ability to think and reflect on their own actions and states, and make choices accordingly?
March 10, 2007, 7:37 p.m.
http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/48c5bb42010008s4
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Gu Chi
2007-03-11 14:43:26 [Reply]
There is also another important question concerning the topic: Teacher Wu believes that he has provided a strategy that goes beyond technological optimism and technological pessimism, but I do not think that is the case. The first question is: why, exactly, is technological pessimism pessimistic? According to Teacher Wu’s analysis, it is because traditionally people thought that human beings have human nature, and that technology is something other than human beings; to think that human power exceeds technology is optimism, and to think that technology’s power overwhelms human beings is pessimism. Then Teacher Wu breaks the binary between human beings and technology, pointing out that human beings have no nature, that human beings are shaped by technology, and at the same time only human beings have technology. In simple terms: human beings are technology, and technology is human beings. In this way, there is no longer the problem of human beings and technology being mutually antagonistic.
But this line of thought seems too easy. In fact, for example, in the traditional thinking that places reason at the highest position and takes human beings to be reason, reason to be human beings, there is also the perplexity of “where, after all, are human beings going?” Some people find that the power of reason is destructive; rational deduction will doubt and dismantle everything certain, eventually hollowing out faith, negating hope, and dissolving values, leaving people trapped in nihilism and despair. That can also count as a kind of pessimism about reason. Then even if technology replaces the position of reason, saying that human beings are technology and technology is human beings, one still has to face the perplexity of “where, after all, are human beings going?” One may still directly confront the destructive power of technology, and likewise face the loss of direction and fall into despair.
Moreover, I think one major reason technological pessimism is pessimistic is precisely that the human “infinite possibility” so fondly praised by Teacher Wu, the “freedom to choose not to become something,” is swallowed up by technology. In the face of the vast “machine,” as an individual person, of course one can still have the power of choice—I can choose not to be a teacher, I can choose to strike, resign, not be a worker, and even choose suicide, choose not to be a human being… Yet if we look from the perspective of humanity as a whole: if I do not be a worker, someone else will; if I resign or strike, someone else will immediately take my place; the whole mechanized social order enables itself to develop according to its own logic of self-sufficiency. I can choose not to upgrade my computer, but I cannot stop the pace of the self-propagation and evolution of computer technology itself. A country can say that I will not develop new weapons or research nuclear weapons, but if you do not develop weapons, you will immediately be overwhelmed by other countries; in the end you will inevitably be eliminated or reduced to a dependent appendage. If you want to survive, you must obey the logic of technology and help technology propagate and evolve… An individual can choose refusal or evasion, but humanity as a whole has no choice in the face of technology; it can only follow the logic of technology and become a tool for technology’s propagation and evolution. It is precisely this predicament in which the “power of choice” is taken away by technology that is the reason technological pessimism is pessimistic, and Teacher Wu’s strategy does not respond to these problems. Perhaps Teacher Wu wants to evade the issue through a reinterpretation of the concept of “technology,” for example by saying that “technology” does not only refer to large-scale technology, but also includes embodied technology and so on; but let us restate the question: if we phrase “human beings have no choice in the face of technology” and “human beings are alienated by technology” as “human beings have no choice in the face of machines” and “human beings are reified or mechanized,” then these problems still remain. Just as reinterpreting the word “nature” as “native disposition” cannot dissolve any of the problems concerning the “relation between human beings and nature,” if we simply change it to “the relation between human beings and the natural world,” “the relation between human beings and ecology,” “the relation between human beings and animals/plants/the earth/rivers,” and so on, these problems still exist, and may even become sharper because the concepts have been clarified. To dismiss all serious and profound problems as “pseudo-problems” in one stroke is the least likable side of logical empiricism. Teacher Wu says that philosophy should build the platform of questions, and that is right, but it will not do to concentrate only on tearing down the stage.
2007-03-11 14:23
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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