Abstract: As a philosophical program, media ontology points to a new philosophical line of thought whose origins lie in traditions associated with thinkers such as Heidegger and McLuhan. Media ontology develops its thinking around the everyday meaning of the concept of media, but it seeks to go beyond the everyday understanding of media as a neutral conduit for transmitting messages. Media, as the “extension of man,” also prompts us to rethink media as a way of understanding human nature. Media ontology implies an anthropology that transcends traditional dualism, and it is both a continuation and a surpassing of the Western classical philosophical tradition. Modern philosophy “discovered media,” but media ontology truly faces media as media, employing a phenomenological method that reflects on media as media. Philosophical thinking should begin from the everyday experience of practical engagement; the reason theory or propositions, as a special kind of medium, can be communicated lies in the lived experience of the world as a whole within which our everyday practical involvement operates as a network of directives. In an ontological sense, media comes before the object of media; object-like things appear only as interruptions in the functioning of media, and interruption itself is also medial. We always interrupt one medium by inserting another medium, and objectifying cognition is precisely obtained through the activity of “demediatization—intermediary insertion.” Media ontology prompts us to understand spatiality and human being-in-the-world from the perspective of media, to reconsider the distinctions between “subject—object” and “inside—outside,” and thereby to provide clues for a more concrete and detailed reflection on our situation.
Keywords: media ontology Heidegger McLuhan
1. Media ontology as a philosophical program points to a new philosophical line of thought whose origins lie in traditions associated with Heidegger and McLuhan
This article attempts to elaborate a philosophical program, or rather to outline a path of thought, which may be called “media ontology,” or perhaps “media phenomenology” or “media philosophy.”
What I mean by a “program” is nothing more than a signpost. Of course, the path it points to was not opened up by me myself; many thinkers have already explored it in different ways, and I am merely trying to make this road more visible through appropriate naming and signposting. Such an outline will help us recognize anew the thought of these predecessors, and then continue to explore further.
However, that which points to a road, or rather that through which we are able to reach an existing road, is itself another kind of “path.” In a certain sense, every opening of a road is nothing but presenting an old road in a new way. In this sense, I really am offering a completely new line of thought.
The main intellectual resources of media ontology are the phenomenological-existential tradition represented by Heidegger, and especially the philosophy of technology in Heidegger’s early ontology, represented by Being and Time. I will directly quote many of Heidegger’s assertions in support of my views. Of course, Heidegger’s thought is rich and full of tensions; even if one looks only at Being and Time, the aims of its first and second halves may not be entirely consistent. This article merely borrows some of Heidegger’s remarks out of context as backing, and does not intend to offer a thorough evaluation of his thought.
In addition, another major source to which media ontology can be traced is the tradition of media ecology represented by McLuhan. McLuhan’s significance lies far beyond his analyses of various media and his predictions about the information age; more crucially, as a thinker, he was the first to discover “media.” Of course, many thinkers before him had engaged in profound investigations and critiques of media issues. Yet before McLuhan, media was at most a specific topic, an object that thinkers occasionally paid attention to and analyzed. In McLuhan’s hands, however, media was far more than a topic for theory to address; it was also the very point of departure of his theory itself. “Media” was not only an object of thought; it also became a path or program of thought. Rather than thinking about media from some philosophical standpoint, one begins philosophical reflection from “media” itself—in this sense, McLuhan is the first media philosopher, and he interprets what I call “media ontology” in another way.
I have briefly sketched the subject of this article (media ontology) and its intellectual resources (McLuhan and Heidegger). In what follows, I will summarize in turn the following issues:
The central concepts of media ontology (media, ontology) — sections 2.
The historical positioning of media ontology (its continuation and surpassing of the classical philosophical tradition) — sections 3 and 4.
The basic method of thinking in media ontology (a phenomenological method that begins from practical engagement in the lifeworld) — sections 5 and 6
The epistemological starting point of media ontology (object-like cognition arises from the “interruption” of media; human beings deal with the world through “demediatization—intermediary insertion”) — sections 7 and 8
The anthropological starting point of media ontology (reconsidering the distinctions between “subject—object” and “inside—outside,” and reflecting on the human situation from the perspective of media) — sections 3 and 9
2. Media ontology unfolds its thinking around the everyday meaning of the concept of media, but it seeks to transcend the everyday understanding of media as a neutral conduit for transmitting messages
So why choose the concept of “media” to designate this mode of thought? We must begin with the basic meaning of the word media in everyday language.
In everyday language, media in the narrow sense refers to tools for “dealing with people and things”; in a broader sense, it can also refer to any tool, background, means, or method. To use X as the medium for achieving Y is to say “through X, Y”; anything that is thus “gone through” can be called a medium. Even in everyday language, what serves as media is not necessarily a concrete, tangible object; for example, “speech” is regarded as a basic medium of communication, yet it is not a utensil or implement. In ontological interpretation, what is emphasized by introducing the word media is likewise not first of all those concrete communication devices, but media’s own mediality itself, namely the directive structure of “through X, and then …”
In many cases, media, “technology,” and “tool” can be used interchangeably; we may regard media as a tool in a broad sense, or regard a tool as a medium in a broad sense. But in any case, compared with concepts such as technology or implements, the word media brings into sharper relief meanings such as “between,” “through,” and “to present itself to.” What we want to emphasize is precisely this kind of intermediary directive concept, and this is also what Heidegger’s ontology emphasizes.
However, to further develop media ontology, we must also sublate a certain everyday understanding of media, namely, the understanding of media as a neutral conduit for transmitting messages. On one side of the conduit there is a ready-made subject, and on the other side a ready-made object; the information to be transmitted is likewise ready-made, and the only question is how to transmit this information more quickly and more completely. Ontology, first of all, must break this subject-object dualism and this essentialist mode of thinking.
As McLuhan said, media “are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature[1].”[2] This does not mean that there is an objective world and also a subjective world, with media as the intermediary between them transmitting things in the objective world into human perception. Ontologists never speak of some transcendental world of being, because what people are able to “speak about” is already a structure determined by the medium of “speech”; it is meaningless to speak of a world beyond any medium whatsoever. Everything that human beings can understand, grasp, and speak about must necessarily be “through media.” The significance of media is not to transmit to people the determinacy of things that possess such-and-such determinations; rather, it is that media is what makes things possess such-and-such determinations in the first place. McLuhan said: “The medium is a cause of the effect, rather than a cause of awareness of the effect.”[3] This is what McLuhan’s startling maxim—“the medium is the message”—seeks to emphasize.
And if the medium itself is the message, then what is the content that people communicate through media? Of course, the “content” of media is also a message, but at the same time it is still “media.” McLuhan said: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the content of print is the written word, and the content of the telegraph is print.”[4] What appears as the content of one medium is always, in another setting, a medium that directs us to another thing. Later we will also discover that Heidegger’s so-called “equipmental referential whole” expresses a similar idea.
Ontology, first and foremost, is a questioning of the problem of “being,” which has always been a core theme of Western philosophy. The formulation “media ontology” first of all indicates that this philosophical approach aims to answer the question of being with the concept of media; media ontology is above all an ontology, not merely a theory of media.
At the same time, through the concept of “ontology,” we will introduce Heidegger’s ontological thinking. Heidegger distinguished being from beings: the ready-made objects with which people encounter and deal are beings, whereas the being of beings is their way of appearing and presenting themselves. So if beings always present themselves to us through some form of media, then we may say that this medial form is itself the mode of being of things. In this sense, ontology is media theory.
Finally, in the narrow sense, ontology also refers to an “existentialist” stance. According to Sartre’s classic formulation, the basic slogan of existentialism is “existence precedes essence,” that is, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.”[5]
In other words, human beings have no essence, or rather, the essence of human beings is “nothingness,” is “possibility,” rather than any determinacy. However, this does not mean that human beings can define and shape themselves without any limits. Through what, exactly, do they “encounter” themselves? And through what do they “make” themselves? Media ontology gives the answer: media is the extension of man; human beings encounter themselves in media, and fashion themselves through engagement with media.
3. Media, as the “extension of man,” also invites us to ponder media as a way of understanding human nature; media ontology implies an anthropology that transcends traditional dualism
McLuhan used the terms “media” and “technology” interchangeably, and defined them as the “extension of man.” Of course, earlier philosophers had already put forward similar propositions. For example, Marx called nature man’s inorganic body, which in fact already contains the idea that human beings extend their bodies through technological practice; moreover, Kapp, who first coined the phrase “philosophy of technology,” is also famous for his doctrine of “organ projection.” Yet we should also note that there is a subtle but important difference between the “extension of man” in media ontology and such notions as the “inorganic body” or “organ projection.” An “inorganic body” is obviously opposed to an “organic body,” while the concept of “projection” likewise implies two sharply separated categories, on the one side the human body, on the other side technology. This dualistic perspective suggests a certain ready-made conception of human nature, pre-accepting a determinate boundary between the human and the non-human, so that what remains to be discussed seems only to be how the two sides of this boundary are related and correspond to one another. But the proposition that “media is the extension of man” does not imply such a ready-made boundary, or at least not a static one.
To understand “the extension of man” first in an everyday sense, it simply means that technology is always the extension, expansion, or strengthening of some faculty or faculties of the human body. For example, glasses are an extension of the eye, wheels are an extension of the foot, clothing is an extension of the skin, and cities and society are also extensions of the human body’s mechanisms of defense and balance, and so on. In McLuhan’s view, “all the artefacts of man, from the alphabet to computers, are extensions of man.”[6]
More generally, human extension does not merely extend human capacities; it is also an outward “expression” of human nature. Media technology as an object thus becomes a certain externalized, or rather objectified, humanity, and to understand technology is to understand human beings themselves—human beings can, and can only, intuit themselves through externalized technologies (what traditional philosophy calls introspection in consciousness is, in the final analysis, nothing more than an inquiry into human-made media technologies such as language and concepts).
Yet everyday understanding nonetheless presupposes a certain rigid boundary, namely, it defines “man” within the scope of the “human body,” while understanding “technology” as the “thing” outside the human body. However, if we understand “technology” in a broader and more comprehensive way, then it becomes hard to say that “man” is precisely that lump of stuff wrapped in skin. Here it is useful to replace “technology” with the concept of “media”: we understand “a human being achieves X through Y” as extending one’s own possibilities through some medium. But here “extension” no longer has a fixed starting point.
When I say “I use a telescope to look at the moon,” the “telescope” is the medium through which I achieve my purpose; it extends my eyes. But I can also say, “I use my eyes to look at the moon”; at that point, my eyes become the medium that is gone through, extending my capacity for perception. I can also say, “I look at my eyes through a mirror,” “I look at my mirror through my eyes”… In these structures, the corresponding media indeed all reveal some kind of dual boundary, with the subject on one side and the object on the other; yet the boundary between them is mobile and unstable.
However, to say that the boundary is mobile and unstable already implies a commitment to some fixed and unchanging subject or determinate and immovable object. In traditional philosophy, people always try to pin down one “endpoint”: either they posit an absolute subject, such as “spirit,” or they posit an absolute object, such as “matter,” and then try to understand the nature of man or the world on this basis. Thus, once people notice the shifting boundary between subject and object, the question of how subject and object can possibly communicate with each other becomes a major difficulty. But in fact, it is precisely because people insist on binding themselves to some fixed endpoint that the “medium” of communication appears so elusive and hard to grasp. Media ontology, by contrast, no longer tries to start from “endpoints”; it no longer presupposes some fixed and immutable subject or object and then seeks by every means to establish “communication” between them. Media ontology observes that “communication” itself comes first; “communication” gives rise to subject and object.
4. Media ontology is both a continuation and a surpassing of the Western classical philosophical tradition; modern philosophy “discovered media,” but media ontology truly faces media as media
Media ontology begins from real media rather than from an absolutely endpoint abstracted from fantasy, in order to advance our understanding of human nature. This certainly does not become a form of nihilism (it is precisely building anthropology on some imagined and fictitious foundation that leads to nihilism). Media ontology acknowledges the contextual and historical character of knowledge, that is to say, that knowledge depends on a specific media environment. And through reflection on the corresponding media, media ontology still seeks to answer the ancient epistemological question—how is it that we are able to possess such-and-such knowledge? Where, exactly, does our knowledge come from? Media ontology still inherits the classical philosophical tradition of seeking certainty, insisting that knowledge is by no means a whimsical fabrication, but always has a definite basis.
To inherit and surpass the classical philosophical tradition, one must confront the various developments and predicaments of Western philosophical traditions since modernity. In fact, the transformations that took place in the Western philosophical tradition in modern times, taken as a whole, were precisely the “discovery” of media.
What is meant by the “discovery of media” is that people began to realize that we can never deal with objects “directly,” but must always “through something” reach them. Modern philosophy begins in the age of Bacon and Descartes, and its first sign is methodological self-awareness. This means that we do not obtain knowledge directly from nature, but always through certain specific pathways. Right up to the so-called linguistic turn in contemporary thought, it was further discovered that people’s expression of views, statements of knowledge, and even epistemological discussion itself must always be expressed “through language.” Once people discovered the media of knowledge, the first thing they thought of was how to improve it, so as to obtain knowledge more accurately and efficiently. Afterwards, suspicion of media became unavoidable—media are always real, that is, historical and limited; how, then, can certainty be guaranteed? Thus some tried to design absolutely reliable media, such as Descartes’ method and the formal language of logicists; while others simply denied that human beings can obtain knowledge of the external world.
These reactions, in fact, never truly face the inevitability of mediality as a mode of human existence. In people’s eyes, media always seem to be something superfluous; people still fantasiastically imagine “direct” contact between a ready-made subject and a ready-made object, while media is like an airtight wall confining “man” within it. Thus people always want to break the wall, to make media transparent.
However, according to the line of thought of media ontology, such a wall simply does not exist in the first place. Every sort of mediation is also always a way of access, and every sort of access also always appears as a kind of mediation. It is not that media block communication (interruption is also a way of communication); on the contrary, media produce communication. Media ontology truly takes media as media and unfolds reflection from that standpoint, rather than treating media as an annoying hindrance to be eliminated.
5. An illustrative phenomenological method for reflecting on media as media
So, exactly how do we reflect on media as media? Simply put, media as media, precisely because of their accessibility, allow us to reach through them to the objects they present. When they are thus “passed through,” they also disclose their own meaning, and once we take them themselves as conspicuous objects for analysis, they are no longer media in the original sense.
Therefore, to think media as media requires a mode of reflection that transcends objectivity. That mode of reflection is precisely the phenomenological one.
But we know that the starting point of phenomenology is the doctrine of intentionality, and intentionality says that “every act of consciousness, every experience, is related to some object. Every intention has its intended object.”[7] If phenomenology emphasizes that every intention is objective, then where does the thinking that transcends objectivity come from?
In fact, so-called thinking that transcends objectivity does not mean abolishing the object, but rather “bracketing” it, neutralizing it, and turning instead to the way in which the object is intended, to caring about the media through which we are able to reach the object,
In Heidegger’s words: “All phenomenological analysis of acts observes acts in this way: it does not really verify acts, nor does it investigate their thematic meaning; rather, it makes the act itself thematic, and thereby also makes thematic the object of the act and the way in which it is meant. This means: what is perceived is not itself meant directly, but is meant through its mode of being.”[8] We can see that phenomenology discovers media, discovers that what is perceived is not directly, but is meant through some medium; but at the same time, phenomenology also emphasizes that what is “meant” is indeed the perceived object itself, not the medium (for example, an idea, a sense organ). When we say that through touch we come into contact with a stone, we are coming into contact with a stone, not with touch. We are not sealed off within the mental world by the mediacy of experience. To analyze media as objects is what causes modern philosophy to fall into a “solipsistic predicament”[9], because once media are analyzed as objects, one always has to pass through yet another medium in order to reach this new object; and thus, in an infinite regress, one not only fails to “break through” media to know the world, but instead grows ever farther away from the real world.
Phenomenology is a reflection on the “mode of access” (media) by which we reach the objects we intend (content, beings). And such reflection does not proceed by excluding the question of beings; phenomenological inquiry does not mean “no longer having any relation to beings”[10], but rather both maintaining a relation to content (beings) and shifting one’s gaze toward the medium through which beings are accessible (being). This phenomenological attitude stands in opposition to the natural attitude. In the natural or everyday attitude, we deal directly with beings, while the being of beings remains hidden and unmanifest; in other words, we directly come into contact with content, while the “medium” is transparent, and without being aware of the medium’s existence we proceed straight to the object. The phenomenological attitude, by contrast, brings to the fore precisely this thing we usually see through, namely mediacy: we bracket the “content” conveyed by the medium and reflect on the nature and structure of the medium itself.
For example, I look at an object through glasses (eyes, a telescope, and so on). In everyday attitude, my glasses are “transparent”; I do not notice my glasses, but directly deal with the object through them. Another situation is an unconscious alternation between everyday and reflective attitudes—for instance, I can no longer see clearly, so I begin to reflect on the way I see, discover that something is wrong with the glasses, and then take them off to inspect and wipe them. In the course of inspecting the glasses, my intention has already moved away from the previous object of sight and turned toward the glasses themselves; at that moment, the glasses do not present themselves as glasses. They no longer function as a medium, but as a present-at-hand thing, as another object of experience to be examined. Under this examination, the glasses in fact become the content under another layer of media—for instance, we need to remove the glasses and move them to a certain distance; only by “passing through” a specific distance to inspect them can the glasses, as an object, properly present themselves.
But there is also a third attitude or mode, namely a method that both maintains the existence of the glasses as glasses and simultaneously reflects on the glasses themselves. That is to say, I am still wearing the glasses, still looking at objects through them, but at this point what I care about is no longer what the content seen through the glasses is, but rather the activity of “looking through glasses” itself. I still need to look at the object behind the glasses; however, this looking is no longer for the sake of investigating the content of those objects, but for helping me adjust or understand the function of the glasses. I inspect various objects through the glasses, and what I think about is not the properties of those objects themselves, but the possibilities contained in the way those objects are presented through the glasses; in other words, what kind of possibilities does wearing glasses open up for my world? Only in this special activity of viewing do the glasses on the one hand play the role of glasses themselves, while on the other hand being subjected to reflection and examination. Only through such activity is the existence of the glasses revealed. And the meaning of their existence is ultimately understood as “the possibilities they open up for me.”
To give another example, I am now writing an article. This article that is being worked on is laid before me; it is the object I am facing right now. And yet at the same time, I am writing “through the computer.” I am tapping the keyboard, running software, turning on the display screen… even the power switch by the door and the power plant miles away are media through which I am able to write. Yet in the process of writing, none of them has become an object of my consciousness; I simply make immediate use of them, and “directly” face my article. But if my keyboard suddenly malfunctions, I will set aside my article and turn to repairing the keyboard; at that point, the keyboard becomes my object. Another situation is when I am not very familiar with something like a keyboard, and need to grasp it and thereby become familiar with it; then the way remains to type the article with the keyboard, and I am still taking certain words as the objects of my operation, still facing the article, but at this point the article is neutral for me, and its concrete content has been “bracketed.” Yet I am still attending to its content rather than typing randomly, while also attending to the action of “typing with a keyboard.” Only through such practice can I grasp the keyboard as a keyboard.
Perhaps someone may say that what is called the third situation here is nothing more than a mixture of the first two modes, merely switching back and forth between them or superimposing them—that is to say, I sometimes take the article as object and sometimes take the keyboard as object, or I face both keyboard and article as two objects at the same time. That is not wrong either. We do indeed always deepen our grasp of the world by constantly switching back and forth between the boundaries of subject and object. In any case, the process of understanding or grasping ought to be such a dynamic process with a multi-layered structure; phenomenological reflection is like relearning things, a dynamic process rather than a static state. Once this process is frozen, and one then reflects on and analyzes this reflective process itself, it inevitably appears stiff as well.
6. Philosophical thinking should begin from everyday practical experience; theory or propositions, as a special kind of medium able to communicate, are rooted in the life experience of the whole world in which we carry out our everyday practical dealings as a network of guidance
The examples above may seem too plain and ordinary, whereas philosophy is concerned with truth, reality, essence, and so on. What good, then, is this discussion of the modes by which we grasp and reflect on everyday utensils for the study of truth? The problem is: how, exactly, should reality be questioned? What is the starting point of philosophical reflection? — When we re-examine the task of philosophy, we find that these things of everyday practical dealing in the lifeworld are precisely the starting point of philosophical thinking. The “foundation” of media ontology is the experience people have in their daily lives of practical dealings with things, rather than, as in traditional philosophy, always wanting to begin from an abstract concept furthest removed from human experience (such as God, the soul, atoms) and build a static theoretical system.
The thinking of everyday or traditional philosophy always opposes phenomenon to reality, as if behind the phenomenal world there were still a real world, and the phenomena that correspond to this real world are truth, while those that do not are illusion. This “real world” is too distant from our actual life, so distant that one must begin from an even more distant starting point in order to discuss reality.
Media ontology, however, points out that it is not that there first exists some real world, and only then do people seek out various media to deal with this ready-made real world. On the contrary, what is called reality and the world are themselves grounded in mediacy.
As explained above, mediacy means a non-objective relation of guidance itself. Heidegger also points out that, in a certain sense, “reality means non-objectivity”[11]—the things we take as objects are often illusions or phantasms, so where does so-called authenticity come from? The doctrine of intentionality says that consciousness is always directed toward external objects, but that alone still does not clearly reveal the source of the real and the illusory. If we ask how consciousness can direct itself toward real objects, and when it directs itself toward false objects, we may still fall deeply into a quagmire. And as Heidegger had already pointed out, reality is precisely not grasped in objectifying apprehension, but understood in non-objectifying practical dealings. In short, the problem is by no means whether one is directed toward a real or an illusory object; reality does not belong to the object at all, but to this “directing” itself. Reality and illusion are different ways in which things present themselves to us.
In fact, when abstract entities are used to explain concrete phenomena, language as a special medium is always being employed. Language as a medium is indeed able to convey truth, but the inherent characteristics of language make it inclined to point toward objective things and difficult to express non-objective existence. Traditional philosophy’s obsession with finding some objectifiable, reportable essence is precisely because it is blinded by language and has failed to reflect deeply on its inherent tendencies. As Heidegger says: “It is one thing to report beings narratively, and another thing entirely to seize upon the being of beings. For the latter task, what is often lacking is not only words, but in a fundamental sense grammar as well. … The tendency of language is first and foremost suited only to expressing beings rather than being.”[12]
Traditional philosophy is inclined not only to understand truth as a sentence, but also to understand sentences as propositions of the form “… is …”. Yet although such propositions can indeed provide an explanation, they are by no means the only form of “explanation.” As Heidegger says: “The primordial process of interpretation does not lie in theoretical propositional sentences, but in the circumspective, silently discarding of unusable equipment or replacing of unusable equipment; yet one may not infer from the absence of words that there is no interpretation. On the other hand, the circumspectly articulated interpretation need not yet be an explicitly defined proposition.”[13]
A proposition is a “derivative mode of interpretation”[14]; the reason a proposition is valid always rests on some more primordial understanding. I point to a hammer and ask, “What is this?” and you pick up the hammer (or instruct me to do so) and drive a nail; from this operation I grasp what the hammer is for—that is the original interpretation. To give a name—“hammer”—has no more significance than affixing a label, and then to give a proposition saying “a hammer is used to drive nails” does in a sense provide an explanation, but the reason this explanation is an explanation rests on the guiding function language has as a medium: this sentence points toward a situation of picking up a hammer and driving nails, and the questioner ultimately understands what the hammer is for in precisely such a situation. If I cannot grasp the use of the hammer by watching the process of hammering nails, or if I cannot convey the corresponding situation of use through the sentence “a hammer is used to drive nails,” then this sentence has not provided any effective explanation at all, but remains merely a heap of symbols.
Explanation of “what it is” fundamentally always reveals the situation in which it appears as “a medium for doing something.” In Heidegger’s words: “Circumspective inquiry: What is this particular ready-to-hand entity? To this question, circumspective interpretation answers: it is there for doing such-and-such. Enumerating the ‘in-order-to’ is not merely naming such-and-such: the thing in question is recognized as something; what is named is thus understood as that sort of thing. What unfolds in understanding, the understood, is already accessible in such a way that its ‘for-what’ can be explicitly brought out in it. This ‘as’ constitutes the structure of the explicitness of what is understood.”[15] This must be how not only human-made artifacts like hammers are understood; even so-called natural things must be disclosed through the situation in which human beings deal with them.
Thus Heidegger regards the world as a guiding network of the “for-what” of things, and “interpretation” is “a revealing of a thing’s for-what, thereby bringing to the fore the reference of ‘in-order-to.’”[16] In other words, it is to show the mediacy of things. And practical dealings with things themselves always display what things are for, so that “so long as practical dealings reveal the references embedded in the totality of relevance of the world already laid open, all practical dealings themselves are disclosure and interpretation.”[17] This is Heidegger’s version of “the medium is the message” — not only in the sense that a ready-made message (an interpretation) is transmitted through the use of media, but also that the very mode of using the medium is itself the message.
The more content stands out, the more the medium recedes into concealment. Propositions can effectively convey interpretations, but this conveyance is often so effective that people fail to notice the process of conveyance and simply take what is conveyed through propositions as the most primordial interpretation, without noticing the variations caused by this mode of conveyance. Heidegger says: “The revelation of presence-at-hand is the covering up of readiness-to-hand. … A proposition determines beings in presence-at-hand as something or other … The structure of the ‘as’ in interpretation undergoes a modification … It no longer extends into the totality of involvement. The ‘as’ that circumscribes the involvement is cut off from significance.”[18]
In other words, in the explanation provided by this proposition, “hammer,” “driving,” and “nail” all become present-at-hand things, becoming the “objects” of discussion; and in this explanation the hammer’s original state of ready-to-handness—that is, the state in which it is handled non-objectively as a medium for driving nails—is covered over. The referential connections embedded in the actual activity of using a hammer to hammer a nail are cut out from the entire network of references (hand—hammer—nail—wood—house—dwelling…), and the dynamic practical relations they contained are abstracted into grammatical relations among several symbols, becoming an isolated present-at-hand formulation. What Heidegger calls “lack of grammar” means precisely this: the grammar of language always appears as a static present-at-hand structure, and yet it is difficult for it to express the referential relations taking place within practical activity.
We must keep firmly in mind that precisely because we naturally possess such a world, which serves as the overall network of references and indications (we are thrown into a world), because we first understand the world as an “overall meaningful whole,” it becomes possible for us to grasp the meanings embedded in certain “fragments.” Therefore, any theoretical act that cuts the world into pieces for analysis is always grounded in our everyday life experience of dealing with the world.
7. In the ontological sense, the medium comes before the object of the medium; objective things are disclosed as a break in the operation of the medium
Thus “we have thereby defined the being of ready-to-hand things (their involvement) and even the world as world itself as a referential context.”[19] “This being that we call world is shown by those characteristics, such as ‘for…’—useful for…, helpful for…, or harmful for…, significant for…, and so forth. Things in the world themselves are always encountered through a reference to something else and as a reference to something else.”[20]
When formulating referential relations, Heidegger still had to use concepts like “thing”; we still have to say that media connect things. So people may still insist that what exists first are things, and only secondarily the relations between things. Of course, medium ontology cannot abolish the concept of “thing”; it merely overturns its ontological status. Heidegger says: “In the structure of encounter in the world, what has the primary role is not the thing, but the reference; and if this fact is to be expressed in the terminology of the ‘Marburg school,’ then it must be said: not substance, but function.”[21] In the language of medium ontology, that is: not content, but medium.
Our most originary state of life is “practical dealing rather than a floating, rootless, and isolated perception of things. … Reference is what lets things show themselves as present, and reference itself is made present or disclosed only through the referential totality. The state in which a thing can be grasped and thereby objectified has its source in the world’s occurrence as an encounter; but the objectification of the thing is not a precondition for the encounter of the world.”[22]
“Things” emerge as a break in everyday dealing. Under normal circumstances, “things constantly recede into the referential totality; more precisely: in the most immediate everyday dealings, things never even detach themselves from the referential totality. … Things recede into the nexus and do not stand out on their own.”[23]
When I type on a keyboard, the “keyboard” is not a “thing”; not even the text I produce is a thing. Through the text I am expressing my thoughts, and only when expression is obstructed do I treat the text as an extant thing to be examined. Of course, once I reflect and use language again to speak of these processes, they all become objective. But the “keyboard” is an object conveyed by the text, an object of reflection, in short, something that becomes a determinate object only by the addition of some new medium, not an object in the original practical activity. In Heidegger’s words: “In a certain sense, concern turns away from the tool as a thing; the tool is not originally encountered as such a thing, but as a tool, that is, as the ‘for-which’ in use.”[24] Only when this originary state is interrupted do they present themselves to me as objective things. For example, when the keyboard cannot type, or when the text cannot clearly express my thought, then it becomes conspicuous, and only then can I confront it as a thing.
Because “interruption” often means that something is damaged, we may feel that this is an obnoxious state. In fact, however, as Heidegger said, “all change in the world, up to and including the transition from one thing to another and simple alteration, is first experienced through this manner of encounter (interruption).”[25] We always experience changes in the world first through interruption. Interruption not only makes our world appear rich and strange; it also makes theoretical cognition and creative invention possible.
8. Interruption is also medial; we always interrupt one medium by inserting another medium, and objectifying knowledge is obtained precisely through the activity of ‘demediating—interposing a medium’
Interruption is still a way of dealing with things, that is, this interruption is still medial. We may call this interruption “demediation” or “the insertion of a medium.” By “demediation” I mean that something that originally existed as a transparent medium no longer functions as a medium but becomes content (a thing), whereas “the insertion of a medium” means that in order to make something that originally functioned as a medium into content, we need to create distance from it, that is, let another medium be inserted. This medium plays the role of “breaking in the middle,” and may even render the original medium an object for contemplation and repair and the like; and the inserted medium may also still be “transparent.”
For example, when a machine in operation breaks down, we go find hammers, screwdrivers, and the like to repair it. We first find the proper tools according to the relevant referential relations; once we have the proper tools in hand, we immediately “turn away from” these tools and instead repair the machine as an object. When the machine is functioning normally, it is ready-to-hand as a medium “for producing products”; whereas in the activity of repair, the newly inserted tools make the machine into a present-at-hand object, and those tools are the medium that is ready-to-hand “for repairing the machine.” This change is simultaneously the removal of one medium (the machine) and the insertion of another medium (the repair tools).
Language is also such a medium that can be inserted at a point of interruption. It is precisely one of the most universal media, that is to say, it can be inserted almost anywhere in order to create distance between us and things. Language can most easily make any thing into “content.” Moreover, language has the characteristic that it can easily turn itself into content and establish within language itself a certain structure of references. When dealing with “language” as such, it often appears in a mixture of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand states. But language analyzed as a truth-bearing proposition is often not presented as language in its original sense, as a medium of communication.
When language functions as language itself, it is like glasses functioning as glasses, or a hammer functioning as a hammer in a ready-to-hand state: it plays the role of a medium, and it must point to some thing, or let some thing appear, or, one might say, “bring out” some thing. Like any ready-to-hand medium, it always functions within a specific context; waving a hammer in the air does not count as the original state of the hammer, and ready-to-handness is always contextual.
And when we use language in the most natural way, it too is always situated in some context and functioning as a medium, that is, pointing toward other things. For example, if I say “It’s raining,” then depending on the specific context, it may very likely point to: you should take an umbrella before going out; or, we should bring in the clothes hanging outside; or, in the most minimal sense: why don’t you look out the window too? The person hearing this sentence will not direct attention to the sentence “It’s raining” itself, nor will they take it as a proposition to be judged true or false; rather, they will directly use it to attend to the umbrella, the clothes, or the window. Only when there is some problem with this sentence, just as only when there is some problem with the glasses, will you pay attention to it itself and treat it as a present-at-hand object. It is only at this point that speech becomes a “proposition.” That is to say, the “proposition” is language in an inauthentic state, the present-at-hand state of this medium of language, the result of demediating or inserting a medium into speech. Demediation means that at this point the proposition no longer points to what it originally meant; you set aside the umbrella, the clothes, and the window, and instead examine the sentence itself. The insertion of mediation means that in order to examine this sentence as content, you need to insert another medium. That medium may also be language, for example: “What did you just say?” “Really?” “It is said that ‘It’s raining.’” Or it may be symbols or gestures. Only when “It’s raining” is taken as content and pointed to by another medium does it become a “proposition.”
Mathematics, physics, structural analysis, and similar techniques are also media that can often be inserted at the point of interruption. What we need to note is that their significance is first of all medial and instrumental; their significance appears in the practical dealing of “analyzing something through them.” But if “the analysis of something” itself is objectified, if mathematical calculation as the medium for analyzing something is itself demediated, and the mathematical relations within it are taken as a present-at-hand object, then that object is not the original thing that is analyzed through it. Modern science often takes these media of “analyzing things through them” to be the “things themselves.” This blocks other possibilities of revealing things and excludes all other media through which things might be reached. In fact, we may say that “the object toward which mathematical analysis is directed is indeed the thing itself,” and that “physics indeed is a way of grasping things,” but we cannot say that “the analysis provided by mathematics is the thing itself,” or that “the theoretical system of physics is the uniquely determinate structure of the thing.” Heidegger said: “One can formally grasp the referential nexus as a system of relations (functions). But it must be noted that such formalization will flatten the phenomenon, so that the genuine phenomenological content disappears.”[26] In other words, we can “through” a system of relations, a mathematical function, grasp the world as a “referential nexus”; yet this does not mean that the world is nothing but a set of mathematical functions, just as a nail is by no means a hammer, bacteria are by no means a microscope, and a painter can depict the world with pigments, but the world is not pigments; a mathematician can indeed reveal the world by means of a mathematical system, but the world is by no means a mathematical system.
Of course, although the way of inserting a medium is not the only way, it is by no means arbitrary. I can look at a mountain through a telescope, look at it from a helicopter, look at it from five hundred meters away, walk into the mountains to look at it, or use geological theory to look at it… Each possible inserted medium reveals one mode of being of that mountain, and the same mountain presents different aspects through different media. Thus the world is always rich and colorful, full of possibilities. But this by no means means that I can subjectively decide to see it as whatever I want; if I cannot find an appropriate medium, then of course I cannot see a mountain as today’s dinner. Medium ontology is pluralist in epistemology, but it is by no means nihilist.
9. Medium ontology prompts us to understand spatiality and the human mode of being-in-the-world from the perspective of media, to reconsider the distinction between human “subject” and “object,” “inside” and “outside,” and thereby provides clues for a more concrete and fine-grained reflection on our situation
As a medium of “insertion to create distance,” the simplest and most basic medium is undoubtedly “distance.” For example, when my glasses have a problem, I take them off, hold them up before me, and inspect them carefully. Then this process can be seen as inserting a stretch of distance; without this proper distance being inserted, the glasses cannot be contemplated as a present-at-hand object.
Here it may be useful to introduce Heidegger’s analysis of the spatiality of Dasein and of the phenomenon of “de-severance.” Space is first of all not a present-at-hand thing (for example, a distance or a coordinate system), but a medium. And “distance,” “coordinate system,” and the like are already the result of inserting another medium and taking space as an object to be grasped, for example, revealing space as distance through measuring instruments, revealing space as a coordinate system through geometry. Distance and coordinates indeed reveal space, yet just as a nail is not a hammer and a canvas is not a pair of glasses, space is not simply distance and a coordinate system.
The distance and direction of space are grounded in Dasein’s activities of de-severance and direction-finding. “De-severance is a mode of being of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. … To remove something by making it farther away is only a definite, actual kind of de-severance. De-severance means making the distance disappear, that is, taking something away so as to bring it near. Dasein is essentially de-severing; as the being it is, it lets what is already there come into nearness.”[27]
Heidegger’s use of the German term for “going away” (Ent-fernen) to describe the meaning of “bringing near” is not merely a new definition of the word; it is because remoteness and nearness are indeed fundamentally correlated, and moving an object farther away is indeed a way of bringing it closer. This is already made explicit in the example of taking off one’s glasses: removing a medium and inserting a medium are one and the same thing. On the one hand, from the perspective of objectifying reflection, the glasses are farther away from me, or rather, I have inserted a medium before the glasses (a certain distance); on the other hand, from the perspective of the phenomenon itself, the glasses are closer to me, or rather, the originally transparent mediality of the glasses has been removed.
Far and near are not determined by distance; on the contrary, “distance is discovered and measured by the activity of de-severance.”[28] “If the worldlessness imposed upon things caused them to shrink into two geometrical points, then they would ultimately lose the character of remoteness; they would possess only a distance. And distance itself is a quantity.”[29] We can grasp space through quantity, but space is not simply quantity.
The nearness and farness of things are disclosed by media. We can disclose space through distance as quantity, for example, “one kilometer”; we can also disclose space through anticipation of timing, for example, “it’s just a smoke’s worth of time away”; we can also disclose space through the capabilities of instruments, for example, “bring a chair over and you’ll be able to reach it”; and we can explain space through referential relations to other things, for example, “just over this wall,” and so on. In short, the accessibility of media determines spatial nearness, remoteness, and orientation. In Heidegger’s words: “‘Ready-to-hand’ beings always have different degrees of nearness; this nearness cannot be determined by measuring distances. This nearness is regulated by circumspective concernful dealings and uses. … The equipmental nexus in the surrounding world gives directionality to the locations, and each location determines itself from the whole of these locations as the place of this piece of equipment for something.”[30]
To quote Heidegger, “for example, glasses are, in terms of distance, close enough to be ‘on the bridge of the nose,’ yet for the person wearing them, this tool in the surrounding world is much farther away than the picture on the opposite wall.”[31] “‘Near’ means: within the circumspective range of concern that primarily deals with what is ready-to-hand. Proximity is not determined by the body-bound ego thing, but by being-in-the-world as care; that is to say, by what is always first encountered in being-in-the-world. Hence the spatiality of Dasein cannot be determined by listing the places where bodily things are present-at-hand. Although we also say, when speaking of Dasein, that it occupies a position, this ‘occupying’ is fundamentally different from the presence-at-hand of a being at a place within a site. Occupying a position must be understood as: making the ready-to-hand things in the surrounding world distant so as to let them enter the site that circumspective sight has already disclosed. Dasein understands its ‘here’ from the ‘there’ of the surrounding world. … Dasein returns from that there to its here.”[32]
What is meant by “what is first ready-to-hand” and “what is first encountered” is the “transparent” medium. Such a medium that is first ready-to-hand is first of all the human body, and second also includes media as “extensions of the human,” as though operating as parts of the body. Human beings are not things of the soul without extension; human beings possess a certain spatiality, but this spatiality is not to be understood as fixating on the body as a boundary and separating it from the world. Media, as ready-to-hand tools, are extensions of the body, or rather, are part of the body. Human beings define where they are through media, not through the body.
To say that Dasein is spatial means that Dasein is not a point of soul floating outside space, nor imprisoned within a fixed spatial range. Spatiality means that Dasein is always media-like, and cannot leap out of any medium to make direct contact with objects. As Heidegger puts it, “Dasein is spatial in an essential way. Dasein cannot circle around within its own near and far region; all it can ever do is alter distances of nearness and remoteness. Dasein has spatiality by way of the discovering, sightlike disclosure of space, in that it constantly makes room-farings, and so does something with the beings that encounter it in space.”[33] The phrase “can only alter distances of nearness and remoteness” means, in other words, that what humans can always do is nothing but eliminate and insert media, and through such media-like handling do something with beings.
And what is called the division between subject and object is also a division between “inside” and “outside.” We discover that we, as Dasein, are not the thing enclosed by objects “inside,” but precisely the thing that regulates itself “in between.” Human beings constantly adjust “distances of nearness and remoteness” by inserting media. We do not always have to achieve communication between two ready-made inner and outer realms; rather, the boundary between inner and outer is itself constructed through our activity.
At last we return to the question mentioned at the beginning of this essay—how to understand human nature. We have already seen how media ontology unfolds its reflection on human nature through the concept of media. Of course, we would never think that revealing human beings as media-like beings would count as having completed the inquiry into human nature. In fact, this is only a starting point; what is called a “program” is nothing more than a map pointing the way. What really matters is walking the road, and even the best map cannot replace each person actually walking it for themselves.
In this programmatic sketch, “media” is capitalized, as it were: an enormous concept that seems to encompass almost everything. But in fact, media are concrete and rich. Starting from the basic perspective of media ontology, we can rethink language, writing, painting, mathematics, electric lights, television, and all the other diverse media. From the standpoint of media ontology, whenever we face any phenomenon, we can reflect: through what medium does it become present? Where will it lead us? What kind of medium should be inserted into it to gain an appropriate understanding? What does its conspicuousness or concealment obscure? … The construction of abstract concepts in itself is not important; what matters more is carrying out real and minute reflection in concrete contexts.
References
Heidegger: *Being and Time*, trans. Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie, rev. Chen Jiaying, Sanlian Bookstore, 3rd ed., 2006
Heidegger: *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, trans. Ou Dongming, Commercial Press, 2009
Heidegger: *Selected Works of Heidegger*, ed. Sun Zhongxing, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2006
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000
Marshall McLuhan: *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000
Marshall McLuhan: *McLuhan Speaks* [Canada] ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, China Renmin University Press, 2006
Robert Sokolowski: *Introduction to Phenomenology*, Wuhan University Press, 2009
Wu Guosheng: *Lectures on Philosophy of Technology*, China Renmin University Press, 2009
[1] In Western languages, the word “nature” (nature) also has the meaning of “essence.” The meaning of this sentence also includes: media is not only the route through which human beings come to know the essence of things; media is essence.
[2] Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., *Essential McLuhan*, trans. He Daokuan, Nanjing University Press, 2000, p. 310, p. 272.
[3] Marshall McLuhan: *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, trans. He Daokuan, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 82.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] [US] S. E. Stumpf and J. Fieser: *Western Philosophy: History of Philosophy, Revised 8th Edition*, trans. Kuang Hong, Deng Xiaomang, et al., World Publishing Company, 2009, p. 421, p. 434
[6] Marshall McLuhan: *McLuhan Speaks*, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, trans. He Daokuan, China Renmin University Press, 2006, p. 192, p. 233.
[7] Robert Sokolowski: *Introduction to Phenomenology*, Wuhan University Press, 2009, p. 8.
[8] Heidegger: *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, trans. Ou Dongming, Commercial Press, 2009, p. 132.
[9] Robert Sokolowski: *Introduction to Phenomenology*, Wuhan University Press, 2009, p. 8.
[10] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 132.
[11] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 267.
[12] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 204.
[13] Heidegger: *Being and Time*, trans. Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie, rev. Chen Jiaying, Sanlian Bookstore, 3rd ed., 2006, p. 184, p. 157.
[14] *Being and Time*, p. 180, p. 153.
[15] *Being and Time*, p. 174, p. 149.
[16] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 361.
[17] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 381.
[18] *Being and Time*, p. 185, p. 158.
[19] *Being and Time*, p. 103, p. 88.
[20] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 256.
[21] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 276.
[22] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 261.
[23] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 257.
[24] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 263.
[25] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, pp. 258–259.
[26] *Being and Time*, p. 103, p. 88.
[27] *Being and Time*, p. 122, p. 105.
[28] *Being and Time*, p. 123, p. 105.
[29] *An Introduction to the History of the Concept of Time*, p. 316.
[30] *Being and Time*, p. 119, p. 102.
[31] *Being and Time*, p. 124, p. 107.
[32] *Being and Time*, p. 125, p. 107.
[33] *Being and Time*, p. 126, p. 108.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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