Although Teacher Wu didn’t come, this time the Keke Forum had far more listeners than usual. Many familiar senior students also went, and the atmosphere of discussion was unprecedentedly lively (a group from Peking University bullying one person from Tsinghua), which really showed Peking University’s distinctive style~~
In real life I’m usually rather timid; with so many teachers and senior students raising such good questions, I simply didn’t ask anything, especially since the teachers and senior students had already brought up everything that should have been said. But online I can be a bit more unrestrained, and I can still offer a few thoughts. I’ve already posted my comments on Teacher Jiang’s blog, and as usual I’m archiving them here at Suixuan:
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_48c5bb4201000chc.html
I feel that the line of thought Teacher Jiang offers is very good, but this topic involves too many issues, and to argue it rigorously step by step would require at least the length of a monograph; it can’t be made clear in a single paper or a single lecture. Of course, since it sparked such an enthusiastic discussion, Teacher Jiang’s talk was a success~
Teacher Jiang’s argument is based on some achievements of the philosophy of scientific practice, and already contains quite a few radical presuppositions. But leaving that aside for the moment, and not yet aiming our criticism at the philosophy of scientific practice, if we look only at the key point of this topic—namely, proving the relationship between the laboratory science tradition and environmental problems—then the crucial issue first of all is how to understand “environmental problems,” just as the teachers have already pointed out. Environmental problems are by no means entirely brought about by science. When discussing this topic, it is still necessary to make clear which kind of environmental problem we are talking about, or which aspect of environmental problems. I think so-called environmental problems can at least be divided into three levels.
The first level is the most basic: so long as human beings live, they must transform the environment, and inevitably “damage” the environment as well—even such transformation of the environment may not all be “recoverable.” In fact, one thing emphasized by Gaia theory is precisely that organisms create and alter their environment, and this kind of transformation is often irreversible. The emergence of microorganisms, aerobic microorganisms, plants, angiosperms, and so on—whenever a new form of life appears, it often brings extremely drastic changes to the entire Earth environment. So compared with all that, why should the emergence of human beings, and the irreversible transformations science makes to the environment, suddenly become a problem and become evil? This level of the issue still needs to be distinguished and discussed. I recently read Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, and found that Gaia theory and many claims in the environmental movement are indeed not without conflict. Moreover, I feel Lovelock has a clearly technological-neutralist tendency; he even tries to defend DDT (p. 123). In short, although from a practical standpoint anything that helps awaken people’s environmental consciousness is good, if one is making a theoretical argument, one still needs a clear position in environmental philosophy: what exactly is environment, what exactly is nature, what is good and what is bad for the environment. If one’s footing is unstable at this level, the argument that follows will inevitably tend toward ambiguity and be easily shaken.
At the second level, we can see that environmental problems in a certain sense do not originate from modern science at all, but share a common origin with modern science. For example, what Teacher Liu mentioned today about “the pursuit of immortality” is a desire far older than modern science, probably as old as human civilization itself—not only scientists in laboratories, but probably people in the vast majority of cultures all have the desire to pursue immortality. It’s not that they don’t want to make such non-degradable things, but that they didn’t have the technology to do so. If some other culture constructed a different kind of science and technology, it would probably also inevitably pursue making “immortal” things; this is not necessarily a problem unique to the laboratory tradition. Or take the “will to power” or “will to force,” and ideas such as everything being created by God for human beings, or that this-worldly existence is not worth cherishing, and so on. The roots of these ideas lie in the cultural tradition of Christianity, a tradition that is both the source of modern experimental science and, in a certain sense, the source of environmental problems. The reason I want to raise this level is that Teacher Jiang also explicitly said that the tradition of experimental science is certainly not the sole root of environmental problems. But here there is a key question: what does “root” mean? Even if we concede that the tradition of experimental science is a root of environmental problems, does that mean the tradition of experimental science is no longer workable and has no future? Generally speaking, in the history of philosophy and the history of thought, tracing origins is not done in order to negate the origin, but to revisit history and return to the place of origin for renewed interpretation. To untie the bell, you must first tie the bell. For example, if we trace many of modernity’s problems back to the Christian tradition, that does not mean we must deny Christianity and establish some new religion or the like to replace it; that would be neither realistic nor fair. The same orientation can often lead both to noble beauty and to pathological fanaticism. “The pursuit of immortality,” for instance, is also a source of artistic creation, and one could even say the driving force of civilization. To negate all the roots we have traced is neither realistic nor in keeping with the original intention of reflection and tracing back. In short, even if we trace the roots of environmental problems back to the tradition of experimental science, that still cannot lead to a negation and overturning of the experimental tradition. We can equally well return to the tradition of experimental science and start again; there is no necessity that we must find some non-experimental new science.
The third level is environmental problems obviously caused by modern science, such as large quantities of new substances entering the natural world, or global ecological crises and the like. As the teachers said, there is no doubt that modern science does indeed cause environmental problems. So if the tradition of experimental science is the main thread of modern science, then to say that the tradition of experimental science is one of the roots of environmental problems leaves nothing much to be said. But what Teacher Jiang seems to want to argue most emphatically is that the tradition of experimental science will inevitably lead to environmental problems. That claim is quite strong. In light of my discussion just now of “root,” it seems that Teacher Jiang is not merely treating the tradition of experimental science as a “root” of environmental problems, but as the crux of the matter. To use another analogy: we say “illness enters through the mouth”; one can say diet is often the “root” of disease, but what that means is that diet should be taken seriously, not that we should refuse to eat. In this sense, Teacher Jiang is not treating experimental science as the root of environmental problems in order to emphasize that we should pay attention to experiments; rather, he is treating experimental science as if it were the virus that causes the disease. By the way, this seems like a Western-medicine-style diagnostic logic: disease is caused by a specific germ, and germs are bad under any circumstances and need to be eradicated. But traditional Chinese medicine should not think this way. The “cause” it traces back to is not some isolated thing, but some kind of “disharmony” or “imbalance.” External cold, heat, dampness, dryness, and internal joy, anger, worry, and desire can all be causes of breaking equilibrium, but these stimuli themselves are not objects to be radically cured away. The key to treatment lies in regulation and tonification, in restoring balance; this is very different from Western medicine’s strategy of “finding the culprit and killing it.” In short, it is easy for us to concede that environmental problems stem to a large extent from the tradition of experimental science, but why can’t a strategy of adjustment and improvement work? Why say that the ailments of the modern world arise from within the tradition of experimental science itself, rather than from disharmony between experimental science and other parts of culture (for example, politics, economics, religion, and so on)?
Having said so much nonsense above, in fact my questions are just two: what exactly is the environmental problem being referred to here? And what exactly does “root” mean? Of course, I very much support Teacher Jiang’s basic position, and I look forward to his argument becoming ever more rigorous and substantial.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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