How I Came to Approach Philosophy of Science (A Whig History)

41,371 characters2008.09.27

I didn’t write it well… not recommended reading..

Life is full of possibilities. In the course of my growing up, had it not been for those chance encounters and coincidences, I’m afraid I would not have set out on the road I’m on now—perhaps I would have gone into economics, or become a scientist; most likely, perhaps, I would have become some kind of amateur science nerd or armchair philosopher. But in the end I still ended up here: the philosophy of technology at Peking University. It was accidental, and yet somehow it also feels as though it came naturally, the most natural outcome of all.

Looking back over my entire growth trajectory and then at those chance encounters and coincidences, it seems as if every turn was designed to push me step by step closer to philosophy of technology. Ha—why not write a Whiggish memoir, and describe my upbringing as a road that kept developing toward today?

As a way of viewing history in retrospect, Whig history is certainly not necessarily terrible. I am not denying the various contingencies and possibilities of history; rather, I am simply stringing together this series of turns along one thread after those contingencies have become reality.

I will now take “how I came close to philosophy of technology” as the thread with which to sort out my own trajectory, so that I can select from countless chaotic events those that, by the standard of whether they helped me move toward philosophy of technology, are relevant, and extract from them this short retrospective:

I was born in 1985 in the center of Shanghai, spending the first half of my childhood in an old-style lane house neighborhood, and later moving to the busy area of Pudong New District. I was the only child in a harmonious family of five. From the time I was born, my father’s jobs in sequence were water-and-electricity repairman, driver, hotel manager, contractor, and private-company boss. My mother’s jobs in sequence were state-owned enterprise worker, semi-unemployed, and the boss’s wife at a private company.

Most of these family circumstances were beyond my choice; one might call them fate. And how well suited these conditions were to philosophy of technology! (Whig mode activated~~)

First, being born into the “post-80s” generation was lucky—we were born after reform and opening up, and grew up after June 4. In Chinese academia, the older generation had already mostly emerged from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution and built some stage on which to act, but everything was still waiting to be done, waiting for this generation to show its mettle. From a global perspective, since the rise of electrification and mass media, new technologies represented by computers and the internet were once again driving the world toward a new transformation, while the predicaments and dangers brought by technological progress became ever more visibly pronounced. All these new things belong to the domain of philosophy of technology, and are truly dazzling to behold. On the other hand, with the help of electronic and information technology, access to and retrieval of classical texts became unprecedentedly convenient. This meant that whether it was new problems or old problems, we now had better research conditions. Of course, perhaps the post-90s and even the new-century generation will enjoy even better conditions; yet perhaps the “epoch-making” mission will be seized first by our generation!

Second, Shanghai is a modern metropolis, and also an Eastern Third World city; the predicaments of “modernity” and the problem of “globalization” are especially vivid here. And in my brief youth, I happened to experience a period of change that was becoming new day by day. Before living in concrete apartment blocks with iron gates locked tight, I experienced the dirt, disorder, and clamor of lane-house life. I watched with my own eyes one skyscraper after another rise from the ground in Lujiazui; I also witnessed with my own eyes how, in the span of just a few years, the starry sky was completely swallowed by the lights of the sleepless city… These firsthand experiences of “modernization” prompted me, already from high school, to think about the question of modernity; of course, this too was one of the causes that brought me closer to philosophy of technology.

Third, as a pampered only child, I did not become dependent on being taken care of; on the contrary, excessive indulgence instead fostered my rebelliousness, so that once I was freed from parental control and living independently, I felt like a fish in water—at ease and refreshed.

But excessive care had two main effects on my childhood: first, I was physically weak and very obese, so that I was extremely bad at sports; and this also reinforced the second effect, namely that my temperament was introverted and unsociable.

By the time I reached high school and university, these two shortcomings had changed considerably, and their positive significance was that from the outset they kept me at a distance from fashion and trends, making it easier for me to adapt to lonely and quiet environments. On the other hand, because I had been poor at speaking from a young age, once I found a form of expression I could use with ease—writing essays—it was perhaps as if I had found a vent through which to pour myself out, and once released, it could not be held back.

A comfortable family financial situation is also a great convenience for doing scholarship; this goes without saying. And although my family was considered well-off, it had earned its way step by step through hard work; the relatives’ circumstances were also quite uneven. I saw all this with my own eyes, and thus did not become utterly ignorant of social realities simply because of a life of aristocratic ease. On the other hand, during the period of my growth when I still lacked the ability to make independent choices, my mother happened to be in the stage of being idle at home because the performance of the state-owned enterprise where she worked had declined; and just when I no longer depended on her and could make my own choices, she happened to take over a shop and start doing business…

Although I was born in Nanshi District, my family still managed to enroll me in a primary school in Huangpu District (at that time, Huangpu and Nanshi Districts had not yet merged, and People’s Road, where my hometown was located, was their boundary). This turned out to be a wise decision. The educational level of Nanshi District and Huangpu District was truly far apart,

Within Huangpu District, the First Central Primary School was closer to my home, but for some reason at the time I don’t seem to have been enrolled there (how would I remember?), and instead I entered Sichuan South Road Primary School, which was a bit farther away. And this was marvelous beyond words! Apart from greatly strengthening my confidence and ability in mathematics, the abacus mental arithmetic training at Sichuan South Road Primary School also helped me onto the road of math Olympiad competition (as I shall mention later), and even now it can serve as valuable experience for reflecting on the essence of technology and the essence of counting. The real substance of this technology of abacus mental arithmetic is to internalize, through practice, an external instrument (the abacus) into the head and body, completely replacing the way “counting” occurs in the mind—numbers arising in my mind did not mainly take the form of sounds or symbols, but of the tactile sensation on my fingers. As to what philosophical significance this really has, I’ll wait until I have learned a bit more phenomenology before saying anything.

Because I performed outstandingly in mathematics, and thanks also to Huangpu District’s educational resources, and also to my mother’s concern, I had the chance to embark on the road of math Olympiad competition. Math Olympiad allowed me to proceed all the way from primary school to university through recommendation, to the greatest extent possible avoiding exam-oriented education. In addition, Olympiad training also helped me reflect on mathematics and experience “freedom.”

I won’t say much for now about reflection on mathematics; more importantly, I truly experienced many elements during Olympiad training that can now be classified as “freedom.”

First of all, mathematics does not depend on any authority; it does not need a teacher’s approval, nor does it need everyone’s agreement, and it does not even need to look at the answers in the back of the book—once a problem is solved, it is solved. I myself am enough to confirm it: if it is right, it is right; if it differs from the answer, I can check it several times, but in the end what I can be certain of is always, and only, the answer that I personally proved. Though this can be experienced even without touching Olympiad mathematics, Olympiad math—with the name of the Olympics, elevating mathematics into a kind of game and competition—like the “Olympics” itself, lets us challenge others and surpass ourselves through mathematics, gaining tremendous joy in the game of mathematics. Perhaps this was also the feeling of Plato and the others. Of course, mathematical training can also cultivate a rigorously systematic mode of thought and the like, but compared with the experience of “freedom,” these are simply not worth mentioning.

Mathematics can always find definite and universally recognized answers, while philosophy always fails to find definite and universally recognized answers. Yet the roots of these two situations are the same: “freedom.” Because of freedom, mathematics can always find convincing answers; and for the same reason, philosophy’s answers are always difficult to compromise. The spiritual aims of philosophy and mathematics have always been quite close.

Speaking of embarking on the road of math Olympiad, I still have to mention a turning point in my way of studying. Although I myself have long since forgotten it completely, according to what my mother often loves to talk about, the general situation was this: when I was little, my mother first forced me to study seriously; after I finished the assigned homework, I still had to do extra exercises. As it turned out, my assigned homework was always a lot, and I always dawdled and couldn’t finish it. Later my mother changed her method and said that after finishing the assigned homework I could arrange my own time freely—play, watch TV, anything I liked. Once she did this, she discovered that my speed in doing homework became astonishingly fast…

Of course, I have always been very honest; I would not slack off by doing less, not doing it, or copying homework. So I had to think of ways to save time through more legitimate means. I suppose this is precisely one of the reasons I came to favor mathematics so much (though talent may have been even more important). I always say that mathematics is the specialty of lazy people, because lazy people have to search in every possible way for tricks and essentials, learn to infer the general from the particular, and resolutely refuse to memorize or recite anything that does not absolutely need to be memorized… People like that can only go study mathematics.

Besides that, this habit of being lazy has continued to the present. When I was little it meant watching TV every day; now it means watching cartoons every day. Whether doing homework or writing papers, I try to finish with the highest possible efficiency. Even at the busiest times, I always make sure to leave myself some free time that is solely for entertainment. So naturally I would prefer a major that allows “leisure,” and philosophy of technology is unquestionably a good choice.

In fourth grade of primary school, I transferred to Cao Guangbiao Primary School, having been “poached” as a top student. Although I spent only a year and a half at Cao Guangbiao, the impression that Cao Guangbiao Primary School—and its teachers and classmates—left on me was far greater than that of Sichuan South Road Primary School. But Whig history comes into play here: in my experience at Cao Guangbiao Primary School, there are not many landmark events directly related to how I came close to philosophy of technology that can be recorded. This too may count as an expression of the limitations of Whig history.

From Cao Guangbiao Primary School onward, through junior high and then high school, I was always in what are called “top classes,” or “science experimental classes.” Based on my own experience, I have always praised the “top class” model highly, and I have written many times about it before, so I won’t say much here. Although growing up in top classes may not have had much direct influence on my coming close to philosophy of technology, it was still significant for my ability to adapt quickly to life at Peking University. Many classmates probably had been among the best in their middle-school classes, only to discover at Peking University that there was always someone better, but after I entered Peking University, I felt instead that the pressure suddenly dropped.

There was another thing worth mentioning: in fourth grade I crossed grade levels to take part in the then-new Singapore Primary School Mathematics Competition, which at that time was the main channel through which Shanghai’s junior high schools discovered talent. I won third prize (the following year I won first prize). At that time, all students who won third prize or above became targets of recruitment by the major prestigious junior highs. Gezhi Middle School was celebrating an anniversary and invited some of the prize-winning students from the district to visit the school. At that time, there were six of us who had crossed grade levels to compete and win prizes; two chose to skip grades, and those of us who did not skip grades were actually not eligible to enter Gezhi Middle School, because according to educational reform, the district key junior high division was to be abolished the following year. Still, the principal of Gezhi remained courteous and invited us to come along for a visit. By now, I have long forgotten everything we saw at Gezhi, except for one item: visiting the observatory of Gezhi Middle School.

The main event in the observatory visit was watching a “simulated starry sky.” Although in Shanghai’s night sky in my childhood one could still see a few stars here and there, the legendary “brilliant starry sky” could only be experienced here through technological simulation. This left a deep impression on me. Right then and there I said that in the future I would definitely come to Gezhi, to join the astronomy club—of course, five years later what actually happened was that I chose only between the Second High School Attached to East China Normal University and Shanghai High School, and did not consider Gezhi at all; later, the lazy me never again had any intention of joining the astronomy club either. But that is for later. In any case, the “brilliant starry sky” has an obvious significance for the development of my entire philosophy. Just imagine: if I had not had that one and only shocking experience, but instead had grown up looking at Shanghai’s bright night sky, where seeing three or five stars was already a good result, I probably would not have been able to say things like “in my eyes, it is still that brilliant starry sky,” and my philosophical path would certainly not have unfolded in the way it has now.

Also, one seemingly insignificant thing is worth recording: in fifth grade my father bought me a computer. For children of the post-90s, this is nothing special, but in my day, for parents who knew nothing at all about computers to specially buy one for a primary school student was still quite rare. The first computer was a 586, with 16M of memory, a hard drive of more than 1G, and Win95. I remember the price was over 11,000. After that, I changed computers on average every three or four years, which counted as keeping up with the times.

The computer’s main function was to play; aside from a few games, the operating system itself also let me play and “explore” within it. I initially mastered a lot of computer knowledge and operations through play. When I was in pre-preparatory class, my mother, having fallen into a semi-unemployed state, actually thought of learning “office automation”; at the time this mainly meant Win3.x, Word95, and Excel95. I followed along, learning as I played, treating Word and Excel as games to beat. As a result, before my mother even passed her exam, I had already passed the “office automation” exam myself—probably when I was in pre-preparatory class.

At present, it is still too early to tell what influence these experiences had on my growth. In any case, besides helping me adapt early to using computers, they also meant that when I faced new technologies I at least did not feel afraid; of course, I also would not embrace them unconditionally, but would be willing to personally “play around” with them.

In junior high I entered Dong Gezhi Middle School (this school no longer exists), a so-called public school with private support; after the abolition of key junior highs, schools of this kind became the first choice of the “top students.” Although located in Pudong New District, it was considered a school of Huangpu District. At that time, that cohort included almost all of Huangpu District’s math Olympiad top students, mixed together with some of the best-performing girls to form one class.

As for how I came close to philosophy of technology, there is again not much to record about my junior-high years. One thing worth mentioning is the weekly journal and essays in Chinese class. From junior high onward, my writing style gradually began to take shape; the first sign was a strong preference for argumentative essays. Anything that could be written as an argument was never written as narrative; anything that could be reasoned through was never written as lyric expression. My junior-high compositions already showed this obvious tendency. In the freer weekly journal, I began to criticize society, mainly targeting the hypocrisy and grandstanding of the school’s so-called “quality education” at the time.

Junior high continued with math Olympiad competitions. We people of course did not need to worry about the high school entrance examination, so the lazy me from then on neglected English study, causing foreign languages to remain a weak point to this day. Of course, this too is related to how I came close to philosophy of technology, because if English had not held me back in high school, I probably would have entered the more favored science and engineering departments at the time, rather than running into the philosophy department.

In ninth grade I won first prize in the Shanghai Mathematics League (14th place), and after the math competition I had nothing to do, so I also took up physics on the side, again winning first prize. Any first prize entitled me to apply to the National Science Experimental Class at the Second High School Attached to East China Normal University, and I chose that class, and of course I got in successfully.

The national science class had already been discontinued by then; we were the penultimate cohort. There were only four such classes nationwide—three in Beijing and one in Shanghai—with fewer than one hundred students in total. Students who had won provincial first prizes in mathematics and physics competitions across the country were eligible to apply. Entering this class meant obtaining guaranteed university admission. In senior year, university admissions teachers would determine acceptance based on the ranking of students’ grades in each subject over the three years and their competition results; in general, most students went to Peking University or Tsinghua University, while the few at the bottom went to Fudan or Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

This, of course, allowed me to escape the final and heaviest gate of exam-oriented education—with a difference from ordinary guaranteed-admission students, I had from the very beginning no worries at all, and did not need to consider the possibility of the college entrance examination. The lazy me naturally let my studies go to waste.

Originally, doing math and physics competitions was completely out of interest, but although I still did not dislike solving math problems in high school, my interest did in fact shift and diversify, leading to poor results in the math competition. Added to that, by the time of the final competition I had a problem with my second-round performance under exam conditions, and in the end I did not even get first prize in Shanghai (I was first place among the second prizes). On top of that, my long-term bottom-ranking in English greatly dragged down my overall ranking (every subject’s grade was recalculated using standard scores, with the top scorer at 300 points, the bottom scorer at 100 points, and the middle distributed normally; one can see what a devastating consequence it is if one subject is often at the bottom). In short, the final result was that I ranked second from the bottom among the 24 students in the class. If my成绩 had been a bit better, perhaps I might have gone to Tsinghua (Tsinghua took everyone up to 19th place) or to slightly less popular science-and-engineering departments such as the Department of Geophysics at Peking University (at the time it seemed I was also just about to go there); if my luck had been a bit worse, then I would have entered the joint-degree program at Shanghai Jiao Tong, and would most likely now be studying economics. But the result was that, neither too much nor too little, I ended up in the philosophy department. The causes and consequences of this period, my contact with “philosophy” in high school, how I wrote “philosophical grand unification,” and how I began to get addicted to buying books—all of these were written about in my earlier article “A Casual Recollection of My Growth: The Second High School Attached to East China Normal University” in the 随便回忆一下我的成长经历：华师大二附中; all of these directly influenced my move toward philosophy of technology, but I won’t repeat them here.

What cannot be omitted is this: my first formulation of “starry-sky philosophy” (even if 99% of the universe is filled with darkness, when I look up at the night sky, in my eyes it is still that brilliant starry sky!) emerged during my senior year of high school. That sentence still hangs unchanged at the very top of Suixuan to this day, and it has always been the core motto of my entire philosophy. If I had encountered Emerson’s line “When it is darkest, men see the stars” earlier, I might have chosen it once and for all, but fortunately I had not seen that line at the time, so this sentence counts as one hundred percent original.

The context at the time was roughly like this: back then I often discussed state affairs with classmates in my class, and would also occasionally chat online with some people about issues concerning this society. In others’ eyes, I was undoubtedly an optimist, neither a foul-mouthed angry youth nor someone who seemed to have seen through the warmth and coldness of the world like a hardened adult. Whether talking about the Party, the state, or this society, I always wanted to say that they were ultimately good and full of hope, rather than simply cursing this and that. And those angry youths and “see-throughers” would say that I knew too little of the reality of this society, that I did not know how dark society was, how sinister the human heart was, and so on.

But the matter was not so simple; I certainly was not appearing straightforward and optimistic because of childish ignorance. Was I not already, back in middle school, cursing Chinese education? As an old netizen full of curiosity, had I not long since grown tired of all sorts of reactionary, realistic, and messy information? It was not that I did not know ugliness and darkness, let alone that I could not curse them. The key point was that I refused to “make comments from the sidelines” with an attitude of indifference to the matter or even schadenfreude. Many people seem to be denouncing others, but in fact they are trying to shirk their own responsibility—“Look, this society is just like this, so what I am doing isn’t any big deal.” By belittling others they achieve a kind of psychological balance, and console themselves with emotional outbursts. Whereas I demanded action—if it is an inalterable destiny, then what else is there to do besides accept it? If it is something with hope of improvement, then why not help bring that about? Whether one accepts it or helps promote it, why not love it? What reason is there to hate it? If it has nothing to do with me, then why curse it at all? If it does have to do with me, then cursing it is cursing myself.

There is no need to expand further here on my starry-sky philosophy; in short, that starry-sky philosophy was settled on at that time. It not only affects my attitude today when I criticize science or technology; it has become a core part of my entire philosophy. According to the “hard core–protective belt” model, this sentence is my hard core. As I kept revising my thought, and therefore needed to find a more solid protective belt for this hard core, I found philosophy of technology and related fields. Of course, as for how my interest in philosophy of science could be used to defend my starry-sky philosophy, I will not develop the detailed theoretical argument here.

In fact, what this article really wants to write about is my undergraduate years; everything above is just prelude, and much of it has already been mentioned in various recollections I wrote before, so there was originally no need to write it again. And I still have not even started the “casually recalling…” series about my undergraduate years. Who would have thought that this prelude would, without my noticing, drag on for too long and sap away much of my writing enthusiasm? So below I can only write briefly:

When I entered university I was very “blank,” carrying with me no ideals or ambitions at all, and no expectations or desires either; I simply went along with things naturally, to see what exactly was waiting for me.

I think this state of mind is not the same as so-called drifting with the current. In fact, those who look as if they have firm ideals and lofty ambitions are the ones who are really “drifting with the current”—getting into Peking University or Tsinghua University, going abroad to study, becoming stars, tycoons, scientists… I dare say that these so-called “ideals” are all shaped by fashion, and very rarely arise from self-determination. When many people set these goals, they still do not know themselves well enough; they are not clear about what exactly suits them, but instead use trends or “role models” to set goals for themselves. And my first goal was to see myself clearly, to see what was actually under my feet, and only then could I talk about lofty ambitions or whatever.

Therefore I never at any point decided that I would head toward philosophy of science and technology; rather, I walked along the most natural path, the path most in keeping with my own nature, and in reflection I discovered that the road I was taking was quite suitable for being borrowed under the name of philosophy of science and technology, and that counted as stepping onto the road of philosophy of science and technology. There was no ready-made “road of philosophy of science and technology” that I then chose to step onto. I was walking my own road, different from anyone else’s; it is only that I chose philosophy of science and technology as the major that would “legitimize” part of my activity, allowing “me” and “philosophy of science and technology” to interpret each other.

Philosophy of science and technology is the most chaotic branch among the secondary disciplines of philosophy, lacking a necessary disciplinary paradigm; anything and everything can be counted under the name of philosophy of science and technology. Of course this situation is unfavorable for the construction of philosophy of science and technology as a discipline, but for me it is favorable—because the road of a philosopher is always special. A genuine philosopher does not divide things into “foreign philosophers,” “ethicists,” or “philosophers of science”; a secondary discipline is only a social institution by which a philosopher can “take up residence.” Naturally, the more inclusive, the better. Of course, if a group of distinctive but nevertheless stylistically similar philosophers were to establish their name here, that would inevitably in turn further establish the so-called paradigm of “philosophy of science and technology,” building a new lineage and tradition.

The “Introduction to Philosophy” course in the first semester was taught by Ye Xiushan, the teacher Wu had invited to teach his teacher’s class. Teacher Ye was a big name, but I have never been able to compliment the way he taught the introductory course. My experience of “taking him on” on the course BBS at the time also benefited me profoundly. I recently wrote about the relevant experience in the article “Re-reading *Big Questions: A Concise Introduction to Philosophy*,” so I will not repeat it here. I got 97 and 95 on the two major courses in the first semester, Introduction to Philosophy and Mathematical Logic; this score was indeed helpful for establishing my self-confidence.

Of course, in the first semester my thinking was still in a chaotic stage. There was an essay assignment for Introduction to Philosophy (An Essay for Introduction to Philosophy); looking at it now, the language of that time was undoubtedly very immature, but this assignment can really reflect the then-current thread of thought: just look at the bibliography from that time—what a strange jumble it was: *A History of Western Philosophy*, *Heidegger*, Wu’s *Reflecting on Science*, *Big Questions*, *Finding Schrödinger’s Cat*, *A Brief History of Time*, and *Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty*. The last few popular-science books were, of course, relics from middle school; *Big Questions* and *Reflecting on Science* were my newest interests; *A Reader on Being and Time*, of course, was something I had not understood and only included to make up the numbers, though it must also have had some influence on me.

My first contact with Wu should probably have been reading *Puzzled by Modernization* before entering university, but at the time I had no idea who Wu was at all; only later did I realize that I had in fact read this book long before. Besides this one, I seem to have also read some books about the predicament of modernity, but they left little impression; a systematic exploration of these issues really did not begin until university.

*Reflecting on Science* was probably my first impression of “philosophy of science and technology,” and from then on I gradually came to understand something of what the scholars in this so-called philosophy of science and technology actually did. I then went on, naturally enough, to read Wu’s *Let Science Return to the Humanities*. I also read several essay collections by Liu Huajie, Tian Song, Jiang Xiaoyuan, and others in that wave of “scientific culture” writers; both the style and the topics were very attractive to me,

but these readings were still not enough to push me into philosophy of science and technology, because although I could read them with great interest, I was not sure that I myself was also suited to studying these issues. At that time I still had not found a gateway that would let me enter this field of problems myself; I needed an entry point, otherwise philosophy of science and technology might for me only be an activity fit for “looking on from the sidelines”—just as in the past I was happy to read popular-science books: although listening to accounts of scientists’ activities was quite fascinating, I knew that I probably no longer suited being personally involved in those activities.

That entry point appeared in the second semester. At the time I saw that Su Xiangui from the philosophy of science and technology teaching-and-research office was offering a course called “Environmental Ethics,” so naturally I had to take it and see. Besides the concern for environmental issues that had arisen from my previous reading of books on scientific culture, the main idea in choosing this course was to see whether I could actually do the kind of scholarship that the teachers in philosophy of science and technology were doing.

Besides Teacher Su, there was also a teacher from Marxist philosophy offering “Environmental Philosophy,” and a teacher from the School of Environment offering “Introduction to Environmental Ethics.” I took all of them in one go, and in addition I also signed up for two other environment-related courses. Beyond exposing myself to a few different approaches, I was also considering how to complete the required tasks with maximum efficiency.

To be frank, Teacher Su’s class was not outstanding. It did not go very deep in theoretical terms, nor was the lecture particularly engaging; and in terms of personal charisma, it was even farther than Teacher Wu’s dazzling brilliance… However, it was precisely this sincere, down-to-earth, and more approachable style that encouraged me from another angle, making me feel that even an honest fellow like me, not good with words, might be able to make a living in academia. Of course, I am not saying that Teacher Su’s scholarship was shallow, just as I am not saying that I lacked confidence in my own thinking. Rather, I mean that I had absolutely no confidence in my ability to perform.

Teacher Su’s course contained too much background and too little theoretical discussion; Teacher Xu Chun’s course, like her book, had absolutely no “content” at all; and the course taught by Teacher Lin from the School of Environment followed a translated work called *Environmental Ethics* in its lectures. Of course there was some argumentation, but of course it still could not satisfy me. Since I had adopted the strategy of taking five courses in one shot, of course I ought to have devoted more than five times the usual amount of energy to it. So I bought nearly all the Chinese-language books on environmental ethics that could be found on the market at the time, supplemented them with some related philosophy and humanities/social-science books, and in the end I actually found more than a hundred reference books for this course all at once.

Of these more than one hundred books, I had in fact read through only a little over twenty; the rest I merely read in excerpts or skimmed quickly. The whole process of reading and writing took about two months. The final result was an 80,000-character “paper” — *Ecological Philosophy*.

As soon as I had written this paper, I “abandoned” it, so much so that I did not even bother to read it twice to check for typos. But the significance of this paper did not lie in its ideas; rather, it truly established my academic interests and confidence, and gave my start a roughly defined direction.

The first gain was this: after I had almost swept through all the environmental ethics works then worth reading on the market, I still felt that I had something to write. In other words, even when all the existing works were added together, they still could not satisfy me; I still felt that there were things they had not said, things they had not thought of. Thus I might be able to do something within this field.

The second gain was discovering that my various interests and readings could in fact be tied together under a single thread—modernity, science and technology, philosophy, ethics, religion, and so on.

The third gain was that it triggered new puzzlement—I discovered that the “discipline” of “environmental ethics” itself was inherently inadequate, difficult to make sense of in theoretical terms, and even the direction and mode of effort were questionable. If, under the pretext of urgent practical needs, one ignores deeper theoretical inquiry, then environmental ethics may well degenerate into sophistry; ethics will be treated as if it were a technical means, like some kind of technology, a means for alleviating the environmental crisis, and will lose its freedom as ethics. And if environmental ethics is to become theoretically self-standing, it will necessarily first have to return to philosophy, to ask and clarify what is nature, what is science, what is technology, and so on. One could say that my concern with and dissatisfaction toward environmental ethics prompted me to resolve to step through the door of philosophy of science and technology. (Come to think of it, this seems similar to Wu’s path?)

The process of writing *Ecological Philosophy* also allowed me once again to enjoy the pleasure of writing papers. The first time, of course, was in high school when I wrote “Philosophical Grand Unification.” But at that time my way of writing was nowhere near on track, and I had not yet learned how to cite. This time was the first proper mode of reading—extracting—writing. The joy of writing, moreover, was greater than before.

In the second semester of freshman year I took the three major courses in Chinese, Western, and Marxist philosophy at the same time. Although from my current perspective the one closest to me should be Western philosophy. Among these three courses, the one that undoubtedly influenced me most was Yangzi’s history of Chinese philosophy. Old Yang’s Marxist philosophy course also had an influence on me that cannot be ignored. However, from a Whiggish perspective, these influences, because they had no very direct connection to philosophy of science and technology, were all left out.

During the summer vacation between freshman and sophomore year, the Suixuan blog was grandly launched. Although this also has no especially direct connection to philosophy of science and technology, it directly participated in shaping my entire thought and life today, so much so that one could almost say that Suixuan is Gu Duan, and Gu Duan is Suixuan…

In the first semester of sophomore year I had one failed romance. This was of course an extremely important event for my later thought and life, but under the Whiggish perspective there is not much related material to record. Only one point is worth explaining: it was not, as some people speculated, that I later grew indifferent toward my girlfriend and even broke up with her because I had thrown myself into academic interests; the fact was exactly the opposite—by the time I had already decided to take the academic path, I then began looking for a girlfriend. For at that time I believed that if one still could not recognize one’s own road, and was instead confused and at a loss, then one was not qualified to make others rely on oneself. But once I had become clear about myself, I could confidently seek a partner. The failure of the romance seriously shook my self-confidence, so much so that I seemed to have lost myself; and for the following two years my self-confidence did not recover to the level it had reached after I finished *Ecological Philosophy*. This also made me more modest in my studies during this stage (internally empty), and exactly how this influenced my academic development is something that is still too early to assess now.

In the first semester of sophomore year I continued taking Teacher Su Xiangui’s classes. This time the course “Science and Religion” was noticeably more brilliant than environmental ethics had been, and this topic also attracted my intense interest. I was not a believer in religion, but I have always had a strong religious complex, and was already quite concerned about religious issues in themselves, not to mention this thing called “science and religion.”

This course, “Science and Religion,” together with a book I read around that time, *The Tree of Philosophy*, stirred in me a tremendous interest in Kant’s philosophy. Pang Sifen’s introductory philosophy book cannot be said to be especially brilliant, but as a researcher of Kant’s philosophy and a believer, he interpreted Kant’s philosophy in a distinctive, concise, and interesting way (at least that is how I felt). Although Kant’s three Critiques had long stood on the bookshelf, no matter how much I understood their importance, I still never had enough motivation to read them; I needed an entry point. *The Tree of Philosophy* brought the first spark—although this book was not actually an introduction to Kant’s philosophy, the author kept citing Kant and deploying his scientific philosophy and philosophy of religion. Such a presentation, whether viewed as a guide to introductory philosophy or as an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, probably does not count as successful, but as an introductory guide to Kant it was just right.

As the midterm reading report for Western philosophy history, I read a bit of Kant, then under Teacher Su’s encouragement added content about Kant’s philosophy of religion and wrote my first complete paper on Kant’s philosophy—“Under the Same Starry Sky.” At that time I was mainly reading Li Qiuling’s edited volume *Kant on God and Religion*; I had not yet read a whole one of Kant’s Critiques in full. My interpretation then was also extremely superficial (in comparison with my later two papers on Kant, it was even rather crude). Nowadays I basically no longer quote that paper. But my interest in and reverence for Kant had already been established. Beyond specific viewpoints, Kant’s significance was even more as the “model” of the first philosophical thinking.

By the second semester of sophomore year, the brief romance had soon collapsed, and together with the fact that from the end of that semester I began renting a place off campus to live (the mutton-soup-pit residence). As a result, I gradually distanced myself from various group activities and shut myself in. Over the following two years, I basically no longer took the initiative to make new friends, and contact and gatherings with old friends also decreased greatly.

But do not think that I spent that long period immersed in grief or anything of the sort; in fact, my life had always been very cheerful. Except for a few brief periods in which I fell into prolonged pain, I basically did not allow pain or resentment to dominate my emotions. Yet the lack of daily interaction also consolidated the blog as the main means of my self-expression—or, if not the only one,

In this semester Wu returned from abroad and offered an “Introduction to Natural Philosophy” course for undergraduates, while Liu offered “Introduction to Philosophy of Science,” and of course I took both. My first direct contact with Wu and Liu should have left a good impression—both in terms of the impression I gave the teachers and the impression the teachers gave me. Coupled with the fact that around that time I became active on Liu’s blog, I felt as though I was drawing even closer to people like them.

Besides these two courses in philosophy of science and technology, I also took Bo Bo’s Philosophy of Logic. My analysis of a certain paradox left a rather good impression on Bo Bo, and in the end he recommended that my article analyzing the exam paradox be published. During the summer school I continued to take Bo Bo’s course on paradox studies, and this time I submitted an essay on the intuitionist school. Taking this opportunity, I gained some understanding of the early twentieth-century debate on the foundations of mathematics, especially the intuitionist school within it, which further allowed me to see a new thread in philosophy of science and technology—through the bridge of intuitionism, it might be possible to reintroduce Kant’s philosophy into the context of contemporary philosophy of science.

In my junior year, the courses I chose were all miscellaneous ones. I naturally took Wu’s *A General History of Science*, which was splendid and interesting, and also increasingly allowed me to feel Wu’s style of “one must always invoke Greece,” thereby roughly confirming that his academic interests were the closest to my taste.

This semester I also took two miscellaneous courses taught by Marxist philosophy teachers, one being Teacher Xi’s “Popper’s Philosophy of History” and the other Old Yang’s “Research on the Question of Globalization.” I chose these two courses mainly out of interest in their topics—they were also subjects closely related to philosophy of science and technology. As for the teaching, to be frank, it was not particularly brilliant, but the key was to seize the opportunity to seriously read and write some things myself.

Through the Popper course, I read several books by Popper and compared him with Kuhn. The theme was philosophy of history, but the issues it raised were in fact the common ground between philosophy of science and philosophy of history.

The research on the question of globalization mainly consisted of each student preparing a report, with the teacher commenting after the presentation and then class discussion and so on; it was not especially interesting. Still, through it I discovered the theme of “media” — globalization is the expansion of mass media, and mass media is not merely a neutral technology, but can change human culture and cognition, and even is itself a new form of culture… I will not say more about the specific ideas here. In short, this course in fact led me toward “philosophy of technology”; just in time, the next semester Wu offered an Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, continuing my train of thought and consolidating my interest in philosophy of technology.

In addition, that semester I also took Professor Han Linhe’s course on metaphysics. The exam was just a single question, roughly asking us to use the approach of analytic philosophy to criticize a certain passage of Kant’s. Yet I tried instead to defend Kant, and in the end I got a 68 from Professor Han, who is usually rather generous in his grading… (see What Exactly Was Kant’s Hundred Thalers?) This was not Professor Han’s fault; it was simply that I truly did not succeed in carrying out the defense. In any case, this failure in the course left me with a stubborn feeling that I had to get this Kant problem straight once and for all.

So the following semester I enrolled in Lao Yang’s “Ontology Studies.” This course still centered on student presentations, which was not very interesting; I, meanwhile, used it as a chance to make up for that regret over the 68. The gain was that I ground through a bit of Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and wrote a paper on Kant’s ontology. This process further strengthened my decision to take Kant as the “starting point” for discussions in philosophy of science, and it also made me believe that, despite being examined over and over again by generation after generation of philosophers, the “possibilities” of Kantian philosophy had still not been exhausted.

My undergraduate thesis was supervised by Professor Liu. Originally it was supposed to be about Ramsey’s philosophy of science and its influence on Wittgenstein, but I found Ramsey really hard to write about, so I shifted the topic to Wittgenstein’s intellectual turn. By drawing on my earlier investigation of intuitionism, I linked intuitionism with the later Wittgenstein and managed to piece together the undergraduate thesis. The paper was written in a rather stiff, forced, and superficial way; I even came to think it was worse than the earlier paper that merely introduced intuitionism. Still, through this opportunity, I once again brought Wittgenstein and philosophy of language into my line of thought in philosophy of technology, and established a connection with Kant through intuitionism.

The final year of my undergraduate studies, through two reading courses on Being and Time and The World as Will and Representation, brought in Heidegger and Schopenhauer, whom I had already long been interested in. In this way, the several most important philosophers to be cited in my philosophy of technology—Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—were basically all assembled. These figures were not picked at random; rather, they could just happen to be arranged into a coherent line of development. That is a matter for later.

In short, the whole preparatory buildup toward philosophy of technology is basically complete by this point. With my successful straight-through admission to graduate study in philosophy of technology, it is time next to talk about how to do philosophy of technology, rather than how to approach it.

Because I had rambled on so much in the first half, most of the parts I had originally prepared to expand on in the second half can now only be mentioned in passing. In fact, I had wanted to focus on explaining the theoretical characteristics and strengths of my path and the relevant background accumulation, but for the moment I’m too lazy to write more. If there is a chance later, I’ll discuss it in a separate essay.

September 27, 2008

Latest Comments

Jizha
2009-08-14 13:42:02

The blogger’s research approach is very clear; unlike me, who just drift along with the tide. I don’t even plan when I read books—I just pick up whichever one at random and read it