The much-noticed Fourth National Conference on Phenomenology and Philosophy of Technology had already passed several days earlier. Teacher Wu asked me to write up the conference record, but I kept putting pen to paper very late. On the one hand I was being lazy; on the other hand, it was also hard to know where to begin. Faced with so many papers and trying to review them one by one, the job really made my head spin… Although I have written records of forums and talks before, the KeKe Forum, for example, was basically just one lecture: an hour of presentation, an hour of discussion, with a commentator in between to help me digest the lecture content before the discussion started at an unhurried pace. So when listening and when整理ing things afterward, I could both be fairly composed. But at this conference, each session was only half an hour to an hour, and especially the discussion time was too short. Some had ten minutes of commentary, which was a little better; those without commentary were simply too fast. Before I had time to chew over and digest the paper’s content, the discussion had already broken into “you say one thing, I say another,” scrambling for the floor, and then, before the issues had been properly discussed, it would suddenly end. With my thinking not yet recovered from the previous session, I had to begin the next one at once. As a result, it was hard to gain a really good grasp of anything. I have also never been good at taking notes. In the past, when attending classes or lectures, not long afterward or within half a day, when I was riding my bike leisurely along the road, or staring blankly while eating, I would slowly recall the relevant questions and sort out some strands of thought, and some impressions and feelings would gradually sediment. But this time, with more than twenty papers over two straight days bombarding me in turn, there was simply no time to digest anything at all.
Also, to be honest, I wasn’t really interested in most of these papers. Even though I knew I was supposed to write a record, I still didn’t listen with much care, especially when it came to the questions raised in discussion; I felt they didn’t really matter and didn’t take them to heart. But for the few topics that did interest me, I would think through the issues involved, and sometimes I had to calculate during the discussion how to ask a question or jump in with a remark. Since the discussion time was very short, trying to participate made one quite tense; and because I was concentrating on my own questions, I paid rather little attention to what the other teachers were saying in the discussion. So for both the papers I was interested in and those I wasn’t, I remember the discussion sections very badly…
But in any case, I still have to write it. On the one hand, it is an account to give Teacher Wu; on the other hand, it is also a second learning experience for me from this conference. To make up for the lack of现场 notes, I will reread some of the papers, on the one hand to stir up memory, and on the other to add some of my own comments.
Then let me review it from my own perspective in chronological order.
At noon on August 9, we took off, and after more than two in the afternoon we arrived in Hailar. The sky was blue, the clouds were low, the air was good, and it felt nice. We checked in at the Guofu Hotel, 2 stars? But the accommodation was actually quite good, and there was even internet access. According to the original arrangement, I was supposed to share a room with Teacher Zhao Guowei; his translation of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning the Thing had just been published, and I happened to have brought it along for reading (though in fact I wouldn’t have much time to read it, but one still has to carry a book). Unfortunately, Teacher Zhao had to cancel his trip at the last minute for some reason, so I had no chance to meet him this time. In the end I shared a room with Teacher Tian Song. Teacher Tian is lively and easygoing in temperament, quite approachable. Although I have had many criticisms of his milk article, when I was with him I didn’t feel constrained at all.
The 9th was the registration day, with no other activities. In the afternoon I couldn’t sleep, so I wandered around outside the hotel a few times. The street where the hotel stands seemed to be a digital street, with every shop selling mobile phones. If one walked a little farther there was a wholesale market; bored out of my mind, I strolled around inside a few rounds and bought a stuffed pancake to stave off hunger. But now I regret it. At the time I should have found a proper street food stall and savored it. Over the next few days it was all banquets of big fish and meat, and I never again had the chance to try local street snacks.
Behind the hotel there were several specialty shops. I bought one pack each of dried crabapples, air-dried beef, wild boar meat, and roe deer meat. Pity I didn’t buy any blueberry products. I didn’t bargain much either, so it seems I overpaid. A pack of marinated game was 30 yuan (26 yuan on Taobao). But since one is traveling on one’s own, bringing back a bit of a souvenir is, after all, a different kind of meaning from receiving something by online shopping and courier delivery, so I still bought several packs. During the last two days, when we went to Moerdaoga for sightseeing, there was no chance to buy local specialties. Still, I didn’t buy much more. For this trip I carried only a small backpack for everyday use; I didn’t bring many clothes, and with four bags of specialties plus a matryoshka doll and a loaf of bread later on, it was just enough to fill it up.
Dinner in the evening goes without saying: those who drank sat together, those who didn’t drink sat at a separate table, and so I ended up sitting with many of the women comrades, with the Xianglong couple beside me. My previous contact with Master Xianglong had been limited to gazing up at him from the back rows of the classroom. This trip allowed me to see a more everyday and easygoing side of Master Xianglong, and just that alone made the journey worthwhile. Even so, Master Xianglong, even in his merriest moments, still radiated an air of immortality, and there remained a sense that he was admirable but not easily approachable. In truth, besides elegance and refinement, Master Xianglong also has a certain Zen-and-Daoist aura, different from a Confucian like Yangzi.
After we had eaten, the drinkers were still drinking, while the nondrinkers organized a trip into the city to see the night view along the Yimin River. The distance was neither near nor far. First we passed through the local commercial street, then the “Sanjiaodi” mall; the trees by the roadside were all hung with colored lights. This was a lively city. Colored lights do consume electricity, but compared with whole expanses of neon lights or high-power landscape lighting, they probably do not count as particularly wasteful. To brighten the city’s night scene in this way, at an appropriate level, I think is rather nice.
Along the way several teachers bought some fruit to share. One kind was a yellow berry called “guniang,” and another was a tiny blueberry-like berry whose name I forgot, probably “chounü.” They both tasted very good.
By the river there was a tall musical fountain, as if showing off the local water resources; I didn’t like it very much. But the riverbank had been well done, with a lively yet leisurely feeling.
We walked quite slowly along the river. Teacher Zhang and his wife were at the very front, while several people behind us who were taking photos fell far back. I wandered in the middle. Later I heard that the drinking group had also come out, and they asked us to stop and wait for them, so we found some tables and chairs and rested for a while. But after waiting a long time in the cold wind and still seeing no one, we went back to the hotel, returning by another bridge. The whole loop was still quite a distance, but Teacher Zhang and his wife were still the fastest, looking not the least bit tired.
That ended the activities of the 9th. Back in the room I didn’t shower; I went online for a while and then slept.
The 10th was the first day of the conference. This year’s program was somewhat improved over last year’s. Last year each person had only a quarter of an hour to speak and five minutes for discussion. This year there were two kinds of reports: one with half an hour of presentation, ten minutes for the commentator, and then ten minutes for discussion; the other with twenty minutes of presentation and ten minutes of discussion. Even the latter was much more spacious than last year’s fifteen minutes of talk and five minutes of discussion. But the change from five minutes to ten minutes seems to enter some kind of awkward middle state. If there are only five minutes, there isn’t time for back-and-forth dialogue or multi-person exchange, and one can only have a few people raise hands to ask questions, ending with an answer or two. Ten minutes, on the other hand, seems to make it possible to go beyond a simple question-and-answer model, leaving time for further questioning, and interaction among participants may also occur. Yet in this way, ten minutes feels even shorter and more abrupt than five, as if the discussion has barely begun when it must come to a sudden halt.
First, Teacher Wu Tong of Tsinghua University gave the opening remarks. This conference was hosted by the Institute for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at Tsinghua University, and Dr. Niu Guiqin and her husband contributed a great deal of effort.
The first paper was by Teacher Sheng Xiaoming of Zhejiang University, titled “Natural Attitude and Transcendental Attitude.” Teacher Sheng first distinguished these two attitudes. He believed that philosophy could have countless “-isms,” but when it came to the “basic direction of doing philosophy,” “there are only two possibilities: one is to look outward from within, seeking the basis for explanation from the inside; the other is to focus on the external world and try to dissolve the subjective by means of reality and causality. In more than two thousand years of philosophical history, these two directions have alternated in dominance, each ruling in its time.” Teacher Sheng called the former the transcendental attitude and the latter the natural attitude. But I must interrupt a little here: this sounds exactly like the political textbooks’ treatment of materialism and idealism facing off against each other. How much significance can there really be in such a sweeping, one-size-fits-all characterization of the whole history of philosophy? I deeply doubt it. Teacher Sheng then placed Kant in the camp of the transcendental attitude and reinterpreted Kant’s concept of “transcendental.” He believed that the term “transcendental” as used by Kant is vague in concept, often rather like the word “scientific” in “the scientific outlook on development,” merely a synonym for “advanced,” and Teacher Sheng helped Kant clarify it: in Kant, “the so-called transcendental attitude, in the final analysis, is a critical attitude, and also a reflective attitude.” But this translation of Kant seems extremely crude. First, Kant did not propose a so-called “transcendental attitude”; that “attitude” was Teacher Sheng’s own proposal. The “transcendental” in Kant’s “transcendental idealism” and similar contexts is indeed a label, distinguishing Kant’s idealism from ordinary innate-ideas theories or transcendent idealisms, and here “transcendental” cannot be omitted, because when Kant speaks of “transcendental idealism” he is not trying to designate an “idealism” that, as Teacher Sheng puts it, is basically just one that emphasizes analysis a bit more or synthesis a bit more, more or less the same as Descartes, but rather to distinguish it from previous idealisms. If Kant’s so-called transcendental philosophy simply means a turn inward toward reflection, then what exactly is Kant’s revolution? We say that Kant launched a Copernican revolution in epistemology, and this may lead some people to misunderstand him as merely reversing the original pattern in which people (inside) revolved around objects (outside) into one in which objects revolve around people. If so, Kant’s main point would just be a turn toward inner reflection. But this is an oversimplification, lumping Kant together with earlier idealists. How, then, are we to understand Kant’s absorption of the empiricist tradition? In fact, Kant’s “transcendental” is clearly explained, for example in the passage Teacher Sheng quoted: “We call all knowledge transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects as with our mode of knowing objects insofar as this mode is possible a priori.” That is to say, “transcendental” refers to knowledge that comes before experience and makes experience possible; “how is knowledge possible” is a typically Kantian question. Kant’s philosophy begins from such questioning, and therefore is called transcendental philosophy or transcendental idealism. When “transcendental” functions as a label for Kant’s entire philosophy, it of course carries the sense of “advanced,” but that does not mean the meaning is vague. The very reason why this philosophy is more “advanced” than earlier ones is precisely that it first clearly elucidates the concept of the “transcendental.” Kant’s philosophy first clearly clarified the concept of the transcendental, and therefore deserves to be called transcendental philosophy, and therefore is advanced. It is not that because Kant sometimes used the term transcendental philosophy to refer to his own work with the implication of “advanced philosophy,” therefore Kant’s use of the concept “transcendental” is vague.
If one says that the philosophical tradition opened by “Kant—Husserl” can be called “transcendental,” while other everyday modes of thought can be called “natural,” then that does make some sense. But Teacher Sheng seems first to have mixed up “transcendental” with “idealism” (idealism), and then equated “transcendental” with “reflection” and “critique,” which only keeps making people confused. Finally, Teacher Sheng mentioned Kuhn, thinking that Kuhn, on the one hand, is the source of what is called the “naturalistic turn” in philosophy of science, but on the other hand also turned toward “post-Darwinian Kantianism,” toward the so-called “transcendental attitude.” These statements are also puzzling. Teacher Liu Jie, in his comments, also raised questions: Kuhn’s turning of his perspective toward history and psychology—wasn’t that naturalism? In fact, the key to the confusion is that Teacher Sheng seems not to have clarified the difference between the so-called “natural attitude” and “naturalism.” Without clarifying what the “natural attitude” actually is, Teacher Sheng finally said that the “natural attitude” of (Rorty, Foucault, Kuhn, and so on) differs from an “objectivist, physicalist attitude,” does not deny a priori knowledge, and “still retains a first-person, subjectively engaged stance, and therefore still retains the characteristics of Kantianism and phenomenology.” By this point I was completely lost. At first we were told that there are only two philosophical attitudes, the transcendental attitude and the natural attitude; now out of nowhere there appear objectivist attitudes and physicalist attitudes, while the transcendental and natural attitudes also share many traits. So in the end, are these to be merged into one attitude, or divided into three or four? Teacher Wu Guosheng also said that these two attitudes still had not been clearly distinguished.
The second paper was by Teacher Deng Bo of Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, “What Can We Say About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda?” It was also a 30-minute talk. Teacher Deng tried to give a “phenomenological interpretation” of the pagoda, but his report was basically just an introduction to various historical and cultural facts about Buddhist pagodas and Xi’an’s Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Aside from occasionally inserting some terminology that sounded phenomenological and quoting a few poems, it seemed to be nothing more than an engaging explanatory essay. Hence a teacher asked: if we did not have phenomenology, would we be unable to say anything at all? It seems that even without studying phenomenology, one can still say everything that needs to be said; the significance of phenomenology here is not clear, and it has not enabled us to discover a strikingly fresh perspective. Of course, to use phenomenology to open up a new and eye-opening perspective on certain mundane and trivial things is not easy. This is possible only if phenomenology becomes something ready-to-hand, something at one’s fingertips, rather than a present-at-hand object of study and analysis. Moreover, phenomenological analysis seems better suited to reflecting on certain universal concepts, or on certain technologies and media. As for something concrete like the “Big Wild Goose Pagoda,” it is not so easy to say, unless one places it within a particular context for specific reflection. To simply take “the Big Wild Goose Pagoda” as a “theme,” as the “object” of discourse, and to focus on it so deliberately and sharply, it is hard to say that this is phenomenological reflection.
By the way, regarding the relationship between poetry and phenomenology: after hearing this paper, classmate Lian Xinyan had a question. She had not had time to raise it on the spot, so she told me in private, and finally asked Master Xianglong about it at the dinner table. Simply put—does quoting a few poems and making things poetic count as “phenomenology”? What, after all, is Heidegger’s so-called “poetic” mode of being? Are the classical Chinese poems and modern poems quoted here the same thing as the poetry of Hölderlin that Heidegger admired? Teacher Zhang replied that Hölderlin’s poetry is indeed distinctive: compared with mainstream Western traditional poetry, it uses fewer metaphors and narratives, and employs more “qi/xing.” For example, “Guan guan cry the ospreys, on the islet in the river. Gentle and graceful is the good maiden, fit for a gentleman’s mate” is a case of xing: the birds and the river have nothing to do with the maiden and the gentleman in the later lines, yet they are placed at the beginning to create a scene, an atmosphere, and then the poem is set in motion. Traditional Western poetry, by contrast, is mainly epic in character, and mostly tells stories or uses metaphor and other devices to adorn them—for instance, “He was brave like a lion.” The characteristic of xing is that it is a non-objectifying, non-focal mode of description. Even though it describes certain objects (birds, river), it is not truly intending them; rather, it uses them to lead toward another layer of meaning. In this sense Hölderlin’s poetry is closer to classical Chinese poetry, and also more in keeping with Heidegger’s phenomenology.
The first two papers were grouped as “Phenomenological Preludes.” After a tea break, the second session began, with three papers under the theme “Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy.” The first was Teacher Liu Xiaoli from Renmin University of China, “The Meaning of Propositions and the Meaning of Action,” which tried to show that analytic philosophy and phenomenology share a common origin (anti-psychologism) and were once very close, but eventually parted ways. Teacher Liu traced the root of their separation to the linguistic turn triggered by modern logic: from then on, analytic philosophy focused on the “meaning of propositions,” whereas phenomenology focused on the “meaning of action.” Finally, Teacher Liu looked toward their convergence by taking “philosophy of mind” as “a kind of analytic phenomenology,” and used the case of biosemantics to illustrate this convergence. I myself do not have a deep understanding of the 20th-century history of philosophy, nor do I have much understanding of the genesis and development of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Although I once leafed through my older brother Bo Tian’s translation of Parting Ways, it was a difficult book, and to this day I still lack a grasp of the division and convergence of the two major philosophical traditions. But intuitively, I do not think that the common origin of analytic philosophy and phenomenology can be summarized simply as “anti-psychologism.” The key is why they opposed psychologism—because they jointly insisted on something? Moreover, did the various intellectual currents including psychologism share some kind of spirit of the age? On the other hand, the difference between phenomenology and analytic philosophy probably cannot be explained by “proposition or action” either. Phenomenologists also care about language; they turned to hermeneutics—but why not to propositional analysis? Analytic philosophers also care about action, but what emerged there was behaviorism. Teacher Hu Xinhe, in his comments, also raised questions: is the distinctive feature of phenomenology its concern with the meaning of action? In addition, Teacher Hu Xinhe and some other teachers who asked questions also expressed doubts about the “convergence” part. First, this part was discussed too briefly, and the key links were not adequately expanded; it was pointed out that the “intentionality” spoken of by analytic philosophers differs from that of phenomenology, and the aim of “biosemantics” also does not fit the phenomenological standpoint at all. Li Zhangyin also questioned Teacher Liu’s interpretation of Husserlian intentionality as a structure of “action—intentional content—object,” pointing out that the so-called intentional content should roughly be equivalent to the object. In short, as an attempt to understand and accept phenomenology from an analytic-philosophical standpoint, this paper is valuable and rare indeed (though Teacher Liu Xiaoli did not fully acknowledge that she stood within the analytic camp). But there are still too many issues that need to be pursued. In my view, we do not need to rush to integrate the two great traditions of analytic philosophy and phenomenology; a forced convergence would amount to nothing more than borrowing one another’s vocabulary and saying vague, formulaic things. As I see it, if one truly wants to try to reconcile these two traditions, there is one line that may be worth exploring, namely William James. First, his doctrine of the stream of consciousness directly influenced Husserl; second, he was a psychologist situated between the psychologistic current and modern psychological science; and third, the pragmatic philosophy he initiated eventually merged into Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Studying James may provide some comparative clues. Of course, my idea is based on certain serious prejudices about Anglo-American philosophy. In my view, among the analytic philosophers of the 20th century, the ones worth taking seriously as “philosophers” basically all have a pragmatic background; the rest are nothing more than technicians.
The second paper in Session 2 was Meng Qiang’s (Institute of Philosophy, CASS) “Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, and Contemporary Science Studies.” Meng Qiang argues that in his later years Merleau-Ponty abandoned certain lines of thought from *Phenomenology of Perception* and turned toward a Whiteheadian metaphysics; contemporary science studies (science and technology studies) also moved out of its initial social constructivism and likewise turned toward a Whiteheadian metaphysics. Meng Qiang identifies a path that is neither analytic philosophy nor phenomenology, neither a philosophy of subjectivity nor objectivism—in other words, the revival of metaphysics. This new Whiteheadian metaphysics differs from traditional speculative metaphysics; it is an experiential metaphysics, namely, “explaining being by empirically describing the generative process of the phenomenal world.”
Meng Qiang’s line of thought made me glimpse certain shadows of “media ontology,” and that piqued my interest. Offstage, Meng Qiang also came over to me and said that after reading just a few paragraphs of my article, he knew it was talking about exactly that sort of thing. Indeed, in a line of thought that begins from the “middle” rather than from the two poles, in such a metaphysics or ontology, I found resonance in Meng Qiang. The difference, however, is that I believe this path is precisely the philosophical progression from Kant to Husserl to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and so on—that is, a path from transcendental philosophy to phenomenology—whereas Meng Qiang thinks it is another new path beyond the phenomenological route, and he takes Whitehead as the beacon lighting this road, while I choose Heidegger and McLuhan. So my question also focused here—I agree with such a path, but the question is: just how “new” is this path, exactly? Professor Zhang Xianglong raised his hand to speak and voiced what I wanted to ask. He pointed out that Kant did not abolish metaphysics; Kant also provided a path toward a future metaphysics. Heidegger too wanted to re-ground metaphysics, and their way of re-grounding is precisely to free metaphysics from the fantasy of pure speculation and to find its “empirical umbilical cord.” So what, after all, is new about your so-called “revival of metaphysics” and “experiential metaphysics” by comparison? Is Whitehead’s metaphysics, like Laozi’s, a return to a cosmological metaphysics?
I know little about Whitehead. I seem to have flipped through *Process and Reality* as an undergraduate, and I also paid attention to process theology, though my impression is faint. Although Meng Qiang’s paper introduced Whitehead from the perspectives of Merleau-Ponty and science studies, it did not unpack Whitehead’s own philosophical claims, which was a pity to me. I hope that in the future I will have the chance to learn more from Meng Qiang or from Whitehead himself.
The final session on the morning of the first day was Sun Si’s (Department of Philosophy, Wuhan University) “A Naturalist’s Critique of the Unnatural” — On the Rationality of Quine’s Critique of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction. If the first paper under the theme “Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy” was about receiving phenomenology from within analytic philosophy, and the second was an attempt to stand on a third road outside both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, then this one seemed to be entirely just a paper within analytic philosophy; I did not see any connection with phenomenology. As for the analysis itself, I also found it quite questionable. However, I did not listen to this presentation very carefully, and there was little discussion afterward—the paper seems to have been presented back-to-back with Meng Qiang’s and then discussed together, with the questions mostly focusing on Meng Qiang’s paper. I have now reread this paper as well, and still have no thoughts.
Lunch at noon needs no elaboration. I always try to sit at a table with Professor Xianglong and his wife, on the one hand to admire the master’s bearing from close up, and on the other to avoid the drunkards. But I also never take the initiative to strike up conversation, so I try not to sit right beside the master either… Today I saw Professor Zhou Jianwen come to the conference and outing with his wife and daughter; the happy little family of three was a sight to behold and quite enviable. The drunkards, even at lunch, still had to drink; for the rest of us, the main beverage was the locally abundant blueberry juice, which was very tasty.
The first session in the afternoon was Professor Wu Tong’s “The Lifeworld: A Case Study of the View of Nature as Expressed in Ancient Chinese Landscape Painting — Seen from a Combined Perspective of Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Scientific Practice.” Through the characteristics of ancient Chinese landscape painting, the paper points out the characteristics of the view of nature in ancient China—interpenetrative, aesthetic, and non-anthropocentric. The whole attempt was of course quite good, and the master Xianglong’s comment also first gave it a “very good” evaluation. Another point that left a deep impression on me was the discussion of “brushstrokes” (citing Wentworth’s *The Phenomenology of Painting*): in the Western tradition of oil painting, although one uses a brush to work and refine the image in the process of painting, the “brush” is not visible in the finished picture; what appears in the picture is the object being depicted, and it is only in later abstract painting or Impressionism that the brush begins to leave its “trace” on the canvas. Chinese ink painting, however, makes extensive use of brushstrokes; “as Zhang Yanyuan believed, if the traces of the brush are not visible, then it should not be called painting.” The brush is not only a means of painting but is also integrated as part of the work. Master Xianglong brought up Chinese calligraphy, which here can be considered together with painting. Calligraphy is an even more typical art of “brushstrokes.” The reason Chinese calligraphy became an art lies also in the fact that Chinese characters do not point directly, without any room to spare, to spoken sound, but leave a certain space for maneuver, thereby opening up a certain field of meaning. In my view, the distinctive feature of Chinese characters is just like the characteristic of the brush: unlike the West, where writing hides itself and points straight to speech, or the brush hides itself and directly presents the object, the Chinese brush cannot present the object entirely clearly and definitively. As a medium, it is semi-transparent, and the blurred places are precisely the room it has to present itself. In this way of showing itself as a medium “trace,” a new semantic space is opened up, and artists are always adept at catching the implications in these interstices. Of course, there were also many obscure points in Professor Wu Tong’s paper—for instance, the relationship between the “natural attitude” and the phenomenological attitude, or the similarities and differences between the meaning of intentionality and the meaning of xieyi, and so on.
Next was Su Li (/Li), a student of Professor Wu Tong’s, with “A Phenomenological Analysis Exercise on the Door.” Su Li carried out her reflection through two “thought experiments.” Su Li audited our class for disciples of the Wu school, and also sat in on Professor Jin Xiping’s course on “Alternative Husserl,” and one can see related influences in her paper. Su Li’s analysis is broad in scope. On the one hand, it is a general phenomenological mode of thinking, an exercise in phenomenological routines, where the object of analysis could be a door or something else; on the other hand, it is a reflection specifically on the door as door. In the end, Su Li placed the “door” in a certain central position—the “path” of Heidegger, the “flow” of Husserl, the “body” of Merleau-Ponty: they are all Su Li’s “doors.” Using the image of the “door,” Su Li characterizes the generative mode of consciousness’s flow or the path of truth, namely the mode of connection and triggering in each present moment. Su Li’s “door” is similar to what I mean by “media” as well. Whether it is “door,” “path,” or “media,” these are all words whose meanings depend on the effect of transmission, with no absolute distinction between better and worse. At times I also feel that “doorway” may be a better word. But as I mentioned during the presentation, what makes the concept of “media” better than door or path is that when we say we “do X through media…,” it is not like “through a door,” where after passing through it we leave the door behind us; the door we pass through and the place we reach afterward seem independent of one another. But when we say “through media…,” we do not pass through the media in one stroke; rather, we are always in the act of passing through it. Still, the advantage of the concept of “door” lies in its image of “triggering,” which highlights temporality. That said, this paper involved a bit too much, and in particular the discussion of Sinn and Bedeutung still strikes me as somewhat questionable. The commenter, Professor Liu Jie, gave it a “successful” evaluation, but also pointed out the problem of excessive elaboration.
After the tea break, the final session of the first day, themed “Phenomenology and Modern Science,” consisted of four short presentations without commentators. First was Wu Guolin (School of Public Administration and Politics, South China University of Technology) with “A Phenomenological Study of Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.” The paper lists six interpretations of quantum mechanics (the Copenhagen interpretation, Bohmian interpretation, decoherence interpretation, many-worlds interpretation, and so on), and it punctuates the article with a number of formulas in a rather solemn fashion, showing that the author has studied quantum mechanics. In the end, through Wu Guolin’s “essential reduction,” these six interpretations are all reduced to the Schrödinger equation; in other words, the essence of these six interpretations is the wave function. It must be said that this was a bad paper. This is not phenomenology; the “appearance” of “phenomenology” in the text is no different from the appearance of those striking formulas—it merely indicates that the author has studied phenomenology, and nothing more. The so-called “essential reduction” in the text is no different from reduction in the sense of modern scientific reductionism, or rather worse: it is a crude reduction. In fact, the various interpretations of quantum mechanics all center on the wave function, which is not strange at all. The reason we speak of “interpretations” of quantum mechanics rather than different mechanics theories or mechanics systems is precisely because they all first of all acknowledge the same basic equations, but the same equation, the same symbols, may be based on different physical meanings and different pictures of the world, and thus there are different “interpretations.” If a new interpretation is to establish a new theoretical system, then in some way it will revise and add certain equations. For example, Bohmian mechanics, based on hidden-variable interpretations, does not think the Schrödinger equation is the most fundamental; rather, it believes that a more basic structure is still contained within it, along with hidden variables that have not yet been shown. But Wu Guolin, on the one hand, is even more dismissive of “physical meaning” than most scientists; he simply abolishes the scientists’ arguments about physical meaning, saying that since the equations are the same, the essence must be the same. On the other hand, he also ignores scientists’ established claims about the status of the wave function, and instead takes it upon himself to regard the wave function in every case as essence. Such a method of reduction, a hundred times cruder than modern science, is actually given the name of phenomenological essential reduction. That is truly heartbreaking.
During the discussion, someone raised the point that quantum mechanics is far removed from intuition and therefore not suitable for phenomenological analysis, and Wu Guolin replied that quantum mechanics can also be intuitive: when an atomic bomb explodes, you intuitively perceive the atom. Both the question and the answer are questionable. Intuiting an atomic bomb explosion and intuiting an atom are two different things; this is easy to grasp even without studying phenomenology. It is like intuiting the current moment through a clock, or saying that the moment can appear through the clock—yet in this process you do not intuit quartz or gears. But the operation of the clock is the result of quartz vibration, and the atomic bomb is the result of atomic fission; yet we do not “see” those causes through those results. Still, in a certain sense, these things can also be intuited. This requires some training, so that we can “see” the clock as a way in which quartz vibration is manifested, or “see” the atomic bomb as a way in which atomic fission is manifested. Just as intuiting the moment through a clock also requires training: every child has to learn how to tell time. Without such training, the clock does not present the moment; it only presents itself as a disk and a few sticks. But once the relevant training has been undergone, we can “see” the moment. Indeed, we see the “moment,” that elusive, abstract, mysterious thing—“time”—and yet it can be “seen” by us so easily. We can even “see” time itself; can atoms really be impossible to see?
Some phenomenological scholars also seem to insist that “intuition” means placing some tangible, medium-sized, ready-made thing at not-too-far and not-too-near a distance so that we can see it—that alone counts as intuition. This notion of intuition is simple, but not true. Any “intuition” is also always achieved through certain media and technologies, including bodily techniques. For instance, a person with severe myopia who is not allowed to wear glasses will “see” nothing at all—so how can there be intuition? If we can have intuition through glasses, then why not through a telescope? A magnifying glass? Then what about a microscope? An electron microscope? What kind of medium is one through which what is presented cannot be called intuition? People always tend to think in terms of ready-made things, so when we think about the concept of “intuition,” we often imagine a ready-made space, ready-made things, already placed there, and then quietly contemplated by a subject. But in fact whether something is intuitive does not depend on these ready-made distances and spatial relations; it depends on the degree of skill in the activity of handling. A baby, not yet familiar with its bodily functions, does not really have intuition; a blind person who has just regained sight cannot immediately intuit things with the eyes; and someone who has just gone blind has lost the ability to intuit objects “in front of” him or her. Yet through training and familiarity, even without the eyes, a blind person can still intuit. Intuition is an ability, the ability to employ one’s practical techniques “with ease,” thereby reaching the object directly. “With ease” means allowing the medium to fully incarnate itself as oneself, so that the medium merges into the “self” and becomes highly transparent; at that point, the presentation of the object is intuition.
Can the objects handled by science not be intuited? Is quantum mechanics unsuitable for phenomenological reflection? One major task of phenomenology is precisely to confront the “crisis of the European sciences,” and this crisis is that science has lost its foundation. But does that mean phenomenology should reject quantum mechanics, which is “unsuitable for phenomenological analysis,” and eliminate those abstract formulas that “cannot be referred back to intuition”? If quantum mechanics is unsuitable for phenomenological analysis, does that mean we must tear down and start over the cutting edge of modern physics before a phenomenological philosophy of science can be established? I do not think that is the case at all. The task of a phenomenological philosophy of science is precisely to try to reveal how abstract objects such as “quanta” can possibly be rooted in the lifeworld and in intuition. Well-trained scientists can indeed, through experimental operations, intuit quantum phenomena and intuit the presentation of quanta. To reflect on quantum mechanics phenomenologically is to ask after the “mode of presentation” of the “quantum.”
The next paper was Li Hengwei’s (Department of Philosophy, Zhejiang University) “The Uniqueness of Consciousness and Its Structure.” He mentions “light” as a powerful metaphor for understanding consciousness, and states the general structure of consciousness as: “I” — in the feeling F — “think” of — object image O. To my mind, his analysis is questionable throughout, seemingly imagining the process of consciousness in a rather ready-made, schematic way. Master Xianglong also noted that the metaphor of “light” is one-sided: consciousness has both light and dark aspects, both subjective self-aspects and anonymous processes. The “light” metaphor at most describes one kind of process in which consciousness arises, a process in which an object is illuminated and placed opposite the “I.” But why not imagine the conscious mode of a blind person—does a blind person have consciousness? That is a silly question. But can the conscious process of a blind person really be compared to any process of illumination? Also, is the “I” really a necessary element in the structure of consciousness? Of course, through reflection on the process of consciousness, through reflective construction, we can always add the subject “I.” But in the original process of consciousness’s arising, does the “I” appear as a determinate endpoint? And does the object image likewise appear as another determinate endpoint? When we report our own conscious activity, we either say: “There is a cake on the table,” or “I am hungry,” rather than “I, being in the feeling of hunger, thought of the cake on the table.” Such a complex sentence structure is formed only after reorganizing, refining, and splicing together our reflection on consciousness. To take such a complexly constructed formula as the most general structure of consciousness is questionable. Even if every conscious activity can be re-examined and reorganized to construct such a formula, what we should pay more attention to is which structural elements are bright and which are dim in the actual process of consciousness. If we simply treat this formula as a ready-made fixed structure, then we are completely objectifying consciousness for study. But phenomenological research on consciousness, according to the doctrine of intentionality, is precisely not about turning conscious activity into such a clear, readily present object for examination; rather, it is about preserving the object of consciousness while reflecting on consciousness as a dynamically occurring process.
The third paper in Session 4 was Xu Xianjun’s (School of Humanities, Hangzhou Dianzi University) “From Indirect Phenomenology to Proximal Phenomenology.” Xu Xianjun is not satisfied with phenomenology merely serving as a speculative philosophical theory that offers some indirect critique of science; instead, he is committed to directly intervening in the research frontier of empirical science. This paper introduces the possible applications of phenomenology in neuroscience. I listened with a confused mind and will not comment further. As for myself, I do not seek to use philosophy to guide empirical science. Philosophy has always been a rear-guard action; reflection and critique are the philosopher’s mission. Philosophy is a useless word game, though word games may perhaps also provide certain guidance for practical operations. Since philosophy can hinder science, it can of course also promote science. If philosophy can indeed bring about some substantial push for science, that would of course be encouraging, but that is not philosophy’s proper job, and I do not care about that.
The fourth talk, and the final one of the first day, was by Teacher Tian Song (from the Philosophy Department at BNU), titled “Bohr’s Phenomena and the Phenomena of Phenomenology.” Teacher Tian’s PPT had only one image, one we had also used in our own classes: Wheeler’s statement that “reality is composed of several iron pillars of observation, with a mixed structure of imagination and theory between them.” Teacher Tian mentioned that Bohr used “phenomena” in place of “objects,” suggesting that Mach, Bohr, and Wheeler’s sense of reality and view of phenomena coincided with phenomenology. On this theme, however, Teacher Tian’s analysis and reflection both struck me as too shallow. Anti-realism is nothing new. Perhaps to ordinary people who have not yet adjusted their “default settings,” this view of reality sounds astonishing, but as philosophy scholars, to keep repeating this same old stuff back and forth really has little interest. That “reality” is constructed out of imagination and theory is nothing novel; even positivists would, in a certain sense, admit the constructedness of reality. So-called scientific realism does not claim that every detail of scientific theory is a complete and exact imprint of the real world. Rather, it only holds that there are some solid things—say, core concepts such as electrons and atoms—that correspond closely to “reality,” while the rest, together with the overall image of scientific theory, is constructed. There is no problem with that, and realists can agree as well. But now, look at Teacher Tian’s picture. Aren’t there still solid iron pillars there? What, then, is new about it? Why should we not go one step further and ask why these iron pillars are solid in the first place? I too agree that Bohr, or quantum mechanics, resonates with phenomenology. But Teacher Tian seems to emphasize too much only the “anti-” side of their anti-realism, while forgetting that Bohr or Husserl were first and foremost seekers of truth, seekers of certainty. Quantum mechanics or phenomenology does not deny scientific knowledge of reality; rather, it tries to seek anew the foundations of our knowledge. That is the task of quantum philosophy or phenomenological philosophy of science. Can the foundation of knowledge as knowledge really be explained simply by “iron pillars + imagination”? This simple picture is nothing more than an aid for an initial explanation; it is not enough for deeper reflection.
The evening banquet of the first day was hosted by the local area’s only university, Hulunbuir College. We first took a car to the college to visit an exhibition of photographs by two college leaders. The banquet was held at the Tianjiao Hotel, the highest-class hotel in the area, which often receives state leaders and, so it is said, was built with quite a Diaoyutai flavor. During the banquet there was song and dance; first local professional performers displayed their skills, and then the teachers themselves entertained one another with singing and dancing. Even the Xianglong couple went up on stage and started dancing, apparently for the first time. Madame Zhang said that Teacher Zhang must have drunk heavily today and was acting a bit abnormally; Master Xianglong replied, “He can stretch and contract with perfect ease.”
The first session of the second day was originally to be opened by Teacher Zhao Weiguo, but since Teacher Zhao was absent, Zhou Jianwen began instead, with Master Xianglong still providing commentary; and Ren Xinyan, originally scheduled for the afternoon, was moved to the morning.
Zhou Jianwen (Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University) presented “Can the Tightening Spell of Gestell Be Lifted?” “Gestell” is the newer translation, in place of the original “enframing,” and is said to fit the German compound more literally; Master Xianglong also prefers the rendering Gestell. Zhou Jianwen first quoted Heidegger’s related statements about “Gestell” as the all-encompassing domination of the modern human fate, and took Heidegger’s account of Gestell to be a kind of pessimistic fatalism. Zhou Jianwen wanted to find a way to escape fate, and that way was “the human heart and mind.” He explained the root of Gestell as the “self-centered impulse of private desire” in the human heart, so the way to break fate was to eliminate private desire. My feeling about these arguments was that they seemed far too innocent, as though it were a child’s idea: as long as everyone is a good person, the world will be fine. Of course, Teacher Zhou does indeed have a pure heart, but the problems of the age cannot be solved that way. Master Xianglong’s comments raised many issues. First of all, is Heidegger really simply a pessimistic fatalist? Has Heidegger himself not already offered a way of confronting this? Heidegger is not saying that people can do nothing before fate; he did offer a way of facing it. It is only that if one insists on the logic of technology, insists on seeking a technical, effectual, ready-made, formulaic “method,” then Heidegger indeed does not provide such a “method.” But Heidegger has his own way of putting it. One cannot ignore the path Heidegger offers and simply classify him as a pessimistic fatalist. You may say Heidegger’s way does not work, but you should not ignore his line of thought. That interview in which Heidegger said, “Only a god can save us” often intensifies misunderstanding, leading people to think that Heidegger meant nothing can be done and one can only sit and wait for God, a kind of pessimism. But this interview has its context. Heidegger said this sentence in opposition to the demand that philosophy directly guide human action, or directly bring about social change. Heidegger opposed making philosophy shoulder such a mission. “Philosophy replaced by cybernetics,” “thought sold off cheaply”—these are precisely among the bad consequences of the technological age. This does not mean people should not act, nor that philosophers should not act; the issue is that requiring philosophy to directly drive society is a degradation of thought. Philosophy becomes a petty trick, a technique, and forgets the mission of thinking. If you insist that philosophy must provide a trick for controlling society, then I will tell you that I am “pessimistic” about this; I think philosophy should not provide any such thing. If you are waiting for philosophy to transform society, why not simply wait obediently for God? Philosophy does not provide transformation; it provides a kind of “preparation” for facing transformation—perhaps brought by God, perhaps not.
As for attributing the cause to “the selfish impulses of the human heart,” that may well be the real pessimism. As the saying goes, “Mountains and rivers are easy to change, one’s nature is hard to alter.” If the predicament is caused only by the technical system of the technological age, then we might still hope that a transformation of technology could make the world take on a new face. But if the crux lies in the human heart, how are we to imagine a world in which individual selfish impulses have been eliminated? Is it really the only way out to have everyone become vegetarian and recite Buddhist scriptures? If so, what a pessimistic thought that would be. Of course, this entire logic is problematic from the outset. Did selfish impulses in the human heart not exist in ancient times? And “Gestell” concerns the problems of modernity. Zhou Jianwen did not make clear what the distinctive feature of “modernity” is. According to his logic, ancient society likewise had selfish impulses; why then did it not have the predicament of Gestell? If ancient people did not have selfish impulses, or did not have them as strongly, then why did modern people suddenly acquire them? Is the problem not precisely that the spread of selfish desire is itself one of the consequences of the technological age? It is precisely because of the fate of Gestell that modern people’s selfish desires have become so rampant, not the other way around. Of course, if you eliminate people’s selfish impulses, then naturally you can “escape” Gestell, just as if I smashed all the machines in the world and everyone went back to slash-and-burn farming, then the great harmony under heaven would arrive—wouldn’t that be even better? Is that a way out? It is only a bunch of innocent fantasies. Worse still, even if selfishness were eliminated, Gestell might still not be lifted. For example, if everyone became a living Lei Feng and devoted themselves selflessly, then what? Lei Feng was a “screw.” His selflessness was to turn himself into a mechanical part of the whole social machine, that is, a mechanical component on the very Gestell or enframing itself. The giant machine runs by itself, while human beings are swallowed up within it—that is precisely the tragedy of Gestell.
As individuals, the way we face the fate of the technological age, I do not think, is simply to suppress selfish desire. The proper attitude is, as Heidegger said, “releasement toward things.” On my interpretation, this so-called releasement toward things is precisely an attitude of maintained astonishment: neither infatuation with technological artifacts nor rejection of them, but astonishment. That is to say, letting things appear as things, allowing them to enter daily life, and also allowing them to leave. We maintain our astonishment rather than habituating ourselves to turning them into transparent media that are completely fused into our lives, but neither do we completely ignore them and kick them away. Rather, we always keep a dynamic, oscillating relationship with things, staying a little near and a little far from them, so that our lifeworld remains open and lively.
The next talk, similar in theme, was by Zhang Qiucheng (School of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University), titled “Rooting Modern Human Existence: An Interpretation of Heidegger’s Thinking of Technology.” The article analyzes the relationship between presence and absence, arguing that absence is the root of presence. And in order to re-root modern human existence, what Heidegger offers is the root of art in poetry and thought. Poetic dwelling holds that while human beings should attend to the things present, they should not forget the root of being in the absent. The article mentioned Heidegger’s attitude of “releasement toward things,” and then quoted the painting of peasant shoes by Van Gogh mentioned in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” taking Heidegger’s discussion of the peasant shoes to mean that the meaning of the present being (the shoes) is rooted in the absent being (the field). However, the article did not further explore the relation between “releasement toward things” and the work of art or poetic dwelling. According to my earlier interpretation of “releasement toward things,” this is actually quite easy to understand: releasement toward things is precisely poetic dwelling, precisely the attitude toward the peasant shoes brought forth by the artwork. This attitude is neither infatuation nor rejection, but astonishment. When facing the peasant shoes through the artwork, we are not like a peasant woman, infatuated with these tools. The peasant woman uses the shoes, works in the fields, and the technological object is hidden, just as modern people use televisions, computers, mobile phones, plastic bags, and so on. We are like a peasant woman wearing peasant shoes, using technological objects and sinking into a technical environment. Is that poetic dwelling? Is poetic dwelling a pastoral life like that of a peasant woman? No. Pastoral life is still a life without thought. Then is poetic dwelling an attitude of hostility and confrontation toward things? Is it to take things as conspicuous, isolated present-at-hand objects, sever their ties to the lifeworld, as though placing artifacts in a display case for contemplation, with the artifact presented only as a bare artifact, no longer connected with the earth or with one’s own lifeworld? No, not that either. Just like Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes: although they present themselves in an astonishing manner, they are not presented as an artifact wrapped in cellophane; they are still presented as an artifact connected with the lifeworld.
Then came the earlier-than-scheduled talk by Ren Xinyan, “The Mirror and Introversion-Based Aesthetics,” on Mumford. Mumford believed that the move toward “introversion” was a feature of modern art, and that this turn was related to the invention of the mirror. However, this article was relatively short, and both historical details and the philosophical argumentation still needed further supplementation. First there is the historical question of mirrors: when exactly did glass mirrors arise? At the banquet, Master Xianglong asked about the difference between Eastern bronze mirrors and Western glass mirrors, and whether Buddhist metaphors expressed through mirrors—such as the three thousand worlds, or the “Net of Indra”—could be compared with the Western tradition. I also offered my own thoughts: I feel that, on the one hand, the mirror does metaphorize a certain introspective culture, but on the other hand it also carries a metaphor of objectifying spectatorship, as well as a tendency toward visual centrism. We think that looking in the mirror is self-reflection, and that is not wrong, but it is only one dimension of self-reflection. The highly clear image of the glass mirror makes such an objectifying, imagistic mode of reflection become the general model of reflection, thereby obscuring more and more comprehensive modes of reflection. Does looking at oneself in the mirror, observing and grooming oneself, really amount to self-reflection? Aren’t we actually taking the “me” in the mirror as a “common person,” an ordinary person, as a “they,” and examining and grooming that image? Through the mirror, we scrutinize ourselves with the eyes of “everybody,” measuring ourselves by fashion standards. And we take this mode to be the ordinary one, even finding it hard to imagine another way of reflecting on ourselves—when we imagine self-reflection, the metaphor of the mirror has already taken root. In reflection, we seem always to be watching through a pane of glass, in our minds in ways resembling looking in a mirror, watching a movie, and so on. We have almost forgotten that we do not necessarily always have to reflect in such a way that a pane of glass separates us from the object; we can also stand within the world and see the “self” in our real activities.
As for the difference between bronze mirrors and glass mirrors, I think that, according to McLuhan, it is simply a difference in clarity. And this difference in clarity is crucial: when observing and grooming oneself, the bronze mirror, because of its fuzziness, still requires the intervention of touch and bodily coordination to become complete, whereas the glass mirror strengthens vision to the utmost, and touch instead has to be positioned according to vision. From another angle, through a bronze mirror we cannot see ourselves the way we see another person standing in front of us, but through a mirror, when we see ourselves, it is entirely as though we were seeing another person. Put another way, when we look at ourselves through a bronze mirror, the medium is not entirely transparent; while presenting the object in a fuzzy way, it also presents itself. But when looking in a mirror, the mirror seems to be completely penetrated, hiding itself. In my media ontology, these distinctions are undoubtedly decisive.
The next phenomenological etude was led by Teacher Wu Guosheng. Teacher Wu’s paper was “On Newton’s First Law,” and it seemed to be an unfinished paper, or perhaps merely an essay; the final section on “force” was even just a fragment of notes. To be frank, it was rather disappointing. The argument seemed far too airy. Although airy thinking is one of Teacher Wu’s customary strengths, as a proper paper this should not have been written in such a way. In his classes for Wu’s disciples, Teacher Wu taught many norms for academic paper writing and also required students to write one or two complete papers in a semester, but in this paper he did not seem to lead by example. As for the content, the paper first seemed to have little novelty—not because it lacked breakthrough relative to my own foundation or that of the other listeners, but because it seemed to lack breakthrough relative to Teacher Wu himself. Scholars undoubtedly should keep surpassing themselves and moving forward. There are two ways of moving forward: one is to expand into new lines of thought and new horizons; the other is to express existing lines of thought in a clear and rigorous way. This paper, on the one hand, did not broaden Teacher Wu’s usual territory, and on the other hand clearly lacked rigor; one could say it contained no progress. Of course, Teacher Wu’s papers are still characteristically full of inspiration and serve to bring out the main point. Senior Brother Bupian expressed heavy dissatisfaction with this paper, though perhaps it can still be used as a lecture outline.
The specific content also had problems; first, some parts were rather rough and needed further scrutiny. For example, Senior Brother Bupian, who did not attend the conference, mentioned privately that “before any quantitative calculation can become widespread, some world must be qualitatively opened up, thereby providing the basis and premise for quantitative calculation.” This is dubious: quantitative calculation had already begun to flourish long before Newton (of course, perhaps you can say it had not yet flourished enough), and the mechanistic world-picture also did not come into being in a single moment. In fact, this “world” was still in the process of being “opened up” even after Newton. At most one can say that the two developed in parallel and mutually constituted one another, but such a claim as “necessary premise” is obviously too strong. Another example, also one that Senior Brother Bupian found objectionable, is that between the two sentences “Why is rectilinear motion the eternal motion?” and “Rectilinear motion is the correct motion,” a passage from Descartes is inserted, but that passage speaks neither of eternity nor of correctness; it says only that rectilinear motion is the motion that can be simply imagined. Of course, I know what Teacher Wu meant: the ideas of eternity, correctness, and simplicity gradually locked together. But the arrangement of the text still makes the transitions feel disconnected. Later, when it says that “the principle of least action became the collective unconscious of the early modern period,” linking this to the spirit of capitalism and so forth, that too seemed rather overblown, and the commentators in the venue also raised objections. Master Xianglong’s comments on the “force” section were relatively weak; indeed, this section was on the one hand written in a rambling way, and on the other hand stood as an independent paragraph without even punctuation, looking exactly like draft notes. Teacher Wu mentioned in the venue the fusion of force and “mechanics,” but apparently did not touch on the issue I raised in “The Mechanization of Force.”
Next came “A Phenomenological Meditation on the Mathematicalization of Science,” coauthored by Meng Shaorong of the Institute of Philosophy of Technology at Guangxi University and his graduate student Xu Wentao, with Xu Wentao giving the report and Meng Shaorong adding some supplementary remarks. Apparently the previous conference also had this same pairing. Personally, I do not really approve of the way such a short philosophical paper is coauthored by two people, and so I was not especially attentive while listening. The article thinks about mathematics as a language, as a way of presenting the objects of the various scientific categories, which is good; however, the process of analysis still seems rather rough. The two authors mistakenly attributed Galileo’s famous line about the great book of the universe being written in mathematical language to Husserl, and Teacher Wu Guosheng immediately and mercilessly pointed this out on the spot. To say that mathematics is a language, an exercise of reason—these claims are not novel. But Meng Shaorong and his student apparently did not distinguish clearly between “mathematics,” “mathematicalization,” and “number.” Phenomenology opposes the mathematicalization of nature, but does not oppose mathematics itself; this distinction must be made clear. Overly mathematicalized natural science is far removed from the lifeworld, but that does not mean that “numbers” themselves are far removed from the lifeworld. Teacher Meng gave an example in the venue: for instance, if I invite you to drink beer, you do not feel much; but if I say I invite you to drink five bottles of beer, it sounds different, and you feel happier. Therefore, the lifeworld cannot do without mathematics, right? But that “five” is not mathematics, let alone “mathematicalization.” Following this example, what would a thoroughly mathematicalized language look like? It would probably be something like this: I invite you to drink 3000 ml of liquid whose main component is H2O, whose secondary component is C2H6O, together with numerous impurities. Would you still feel anything hearing such a language? What so-called mathematicalization means is precisely such a tendency: it seeks to describe everything with neutral, abstracted symbols and numbers. Of course, beyond making symbols neutral and severing them from “feeling,” mathematicalization also entails homogenization and quantification. In the mathematicalized gaze, Erguotou and Moutai do not differ qualitatively; they differ only in the content of their components. Simply saying “mathematics is a good thing” does not clarify anything. A spoon is also a good thing; life cannot do without spoons. But if you turn all pots, bowls, and pans into spoons, then things become a mess. If counting also counts as mathematics, then people indeed cannot do without mathematics. But the key question is: in what way, and to what extent, should mathematics be understood and applied?
Next came Wang Haiqin’s (Institute for Science, Technology and Society, Henan Normal University) “An Attempt to Analyze the Problems in Heidegger’s Thought of the Mathematical Factor.” As Teacher Zhang Xianglong said, this topic sounds astonishing at first hearing, as if one had discovered a hard flaw in Heidegger. But on closer hearing, that is not at all what it is. The so-called “contradiction” is entirely a misreading caused by not having properly understood the most basic line of Heidegger’s thought. The article consistently uses a mode of thinking based on present-at-handness: it seems as though “the thing-in-itself” is just sitting there, we control the thing-in-itself, and thereby obtain knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Thus the claim that mathematics is the project or determination that makes a thing into a thing becomes the claim that the mathematical factor “belongs to the thing-in-itself,” and so it is said to contradict Heidegger’s earlier statement that the mathematical factor does not belong to the thing-in-itself. This kind of misreading is first and foremost a kind of violence. Heidegger very clearly says that the mathematical factor is a basic attitude toward things, not some property of the “thing-in-itself” itself—where, then, is the contradiction? The author insists on first forcing onto Heidegger a pre-Kantian way of thinking, a mode of thought in which people deal directly with “things-in-themselves,” and then of course contradictions will be manufactured. Fortunately, in the end the author still did not insist that Heidegger had fallen into such an obvious major contradiction, but instead “resolved” the problem. Yet this resolution consisted in accusing Heidegger of using a term with multiple meanings without explanation, which remains unsatisfying. In my view Heidegger explained enough already—though I still cannot say that I have grasped exactly what Heidegger’s mathematical factor means, I at least understand that Heidegger certainly does not mean some of the things the author takes him to mean. The author violently forced Heidegger’s line of thought through a confused logic, and then blamed the confusion on Heidegger’s own obscurity; this is truly disappointing. Heidegger’s thought of the mathematical factor is a subject worth probing in depth, and I must take a careful look at it later.
The first session in the afternoon was on phenomenological philosophy of technology, and the first paper was Teacher Duan Weiwen’s (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) “Technology as the Essence of Man and Man as an Artifact.” From the title and the bibliography alone, one could tell this ought to be a good paper, but unfortunately the article was not finished, and its argumentative structure was somewhat rough. The article first argues that the essence of man is technology (or technology and time as a dual essence), and that man can also be viewed as a functional technical object and thereby become an artifact. Although I did not fully grasp Teacher Duan’s line of thought, broadly speaking it was not novel. The most interesting part of the report was the unfinished final section, namely technology as another kind of “body.” Teacher Duan points out that the uncontrollability of the body gives rise to “power,” and that technology as another body likewise requires the intervention of power. This line of thought can connect Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with philosophy of technology and political theory. Although at present it is only a fleeting glimpse, I believe Teacher Duan will further develop a broad horizon from it. Technology as “body” is a phenomenological version of McLuhan’s idea of technology as an extension of man. Teacher Duan has also read McLuhan, and privately he mentioned to me that he thinks McLuhan’s thought is rather loose; this is probably why he did not cite McLuhan, and of course I understand that as well. I myself merely take McLuhan as a point of inspiration and an entryway, and perhaps entering from the “body-technology” line of thought would work just as well.
Next was Gao Lianghua (Institute for Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University) with “Technical Mediation and Technical Intentionality.” In terms of topic, it was certainly quite appealing, but Teacher Gao’s paper was also unfinished. What was printed in the handbook was only a few lines of outline; the PowerPoint had somewhat more content, but still not enough development. So I will not comment further.
Then came Zhou Zhuhong (Department of Philosophy, Wuhan University) with “How Is Labor Sacred? — A Phenomenological Interpretation of Marx’s Concept of Labor.” The paper was very long, and the report was very long as well. It had originally been scheduled for 20 minutes, but because one previous speaker had been absent, the start time was actually moved up quite a bit, and the moderator forgot this and still used the ending time printed in the handbook, dragging things out a bit, so the report took quite a lot of time. Zhou Zhuhong delivered the report in a rather feminine, soft voice with rich emotional coloring, to the point that no one could bear to interrupt her, and no one even asked any sharp questions. Lian Xinyan first raised a question, and then I really could not help but interject a few remarks. That was because the whole report was infuriating to hear. Zhou Zhuhong interpreted Marx’s statements with utterly subjective conjecture: Marx says that man is the sum total of social relations, so Zhou Zhuhong says that relations of power and money are not social relations, and that only the activity of truth, goodness, and beauty counts as social relations; Marx emphasizes sensuous activity, so Zhou Zhuhong says that ordinary desire is not sensuous activity either, and truth, goodness, and beauty are required. The whole article was not only logically chaotic, but also lacked any documentary basis. At times it quoted a few passages from Marx, but these seemed unrelated to the surrounding interpretation. I almost slammed the table and demanded to know where the textual basis was—how could Marx possibly become so naive? A teacher perhaps out of gallantry interrupted and asked me, in turn, what my textual basis was. Of course, I had no textual basis; I was merely an audience member, not the speaker. But if the speaker wants to claim that Marx means such and such, then surely it must be grounded in the text. Even setting aside the specific interpretation, where exactly this article uses “phenomenology” is also puzzling. Only the opening few sentences use a few bits of phenomenological jargon. The first sentence says, “Through eidetic reduction, labor should be free, conscious, sensuous life activity,” again “eidetic reduction”—as if simply using the term with great fanfare is enough to qualify for a phenomenology conference?
After the tea break, the penultimate report was my own “Outline of a Media Ontology.” I have already written in the earlier text about supplementary remarks on my report, so here I will only add two questions that were not mentioned there. The first was apparently raised by Teacher Duan Weiwen, who said that I seemed, like McLuhan, to generalize everything into media—what on earth is not media? My answer was that when my microphone is not being used, but is instead treated as a damaged machine that I am repairing, then it is not media. “What something is” is not an essentialist ready-made label, as though every thing in the world were already sitting there, and then one merely affixes labels one by one saying this is media, this is not media, and the labels then remain fixed. Whether something is media (and indeed whether something is anything at all) is contextual. In the sense that anything can be understood only as a link in the meaningful network of the whole world, anything is media. But that does not mean that anything appears as media in any context whatsoever. The second was raised by Meng Qiang, who said that most of my claims can probably already be found in the first two-thirds of Heidegger’s Being and Time, so what is my breakthrough? I said that the introduction of the concept of “media” is the biggest breakthrough. I introduce the concept of media to translate what Heidegger had already said, and that is where the newness lies. As for the question of in which respects I must draw a line between myself and Heidegger, in my view that is secondary. Of course, as my views gradually unfold, I will still distinguish myself from my predecessors, but there is no need to rush right now. After all, repeating a great philosopher’s statements is easy, but criticizing him is not. This is because a philosopher’s thought is always a self-contained system, and taking a few isolated words to refute it has no meaning at all. Only by grasping the full trajectory of his thought can one possibly mount a rebellion. For me right now, Heidegger is still only a guiding light or an inspiration. I have gained illumination from him, but I have not yet taken in his full picture. Therefore I will not rush to rebel against him, but remain in the stage of learning to speak and continuing to speak.
The last paper was Teacher Li Zhangyin’s (Department of Philosophy, Shandong University) “What Does the Combination of Scholar and Artisan Mean?” Li Zhangyin began with the original scholar and artisan. The original scholar came out of the priestly tradition and explored mysterious knowledge, while the original artisan arrived at the same destination by a different road, guarding mysterious truth. Later, however, the two declined and merged: scholars became scientists, artisans became technicians, and both lost their sacred belonging and their awe before mystery. But this article felt too rough, more like an essay, lacking references and deficient in argumentation. The audience also raised many questions about the relevant historical divisions. For example, is the so-called “original scholar” merely an ideal? Aside from the priests of ancient Egypt, did ancient Greece really have such scholars? Did the fusion of scholar and artisan occur in the early modern period? We know that in the early modern period the traditions of science and technology were not yet differentiated, but still existed independently side by side. So in what sense can one say that modern science arose from the combination of scholar and artisan? Teacher Li did not provide concrete historical materials for evaluation.
Finally, Teachers Zhang Xianglong, Liu Jie (Shandong University), and Wu Guosheng spoke in succession to conclude. After briefly affirming the conference, Master Xianglong gave us an appraisal of the gains and losses of Sokolovski’s Introduction to Phenomenology. Teacher Zhang thought a more appropriate title for this book would be Introduction to Husserl’s Descriptive Transcendental Phenomenology, meaning that the phenomenology it introduces is only a very small part, does not adequately engage Husserl’s later thought, and still less involves such important phenomenological branches as Scheler and Heidegger. In addition, the introduction in the first chapter to the realist significance of intentionality is somewhat questionable, though overall it is still a clear and accurate introductory text to phenomenology. But one must not be confined to this; phenomenology must not be regarded as only this and nothing more.
Teacher Liu Jie was the organizer of the next conference, and his remarks mainly looked ahead to the arrangements for that future meeting.
Teacher Wu Guosheng delivered his concluding remarks with PowerPoint slides, listing the significance of the conference—learning, networking, travel, cultivating new talent, and so on. Teacher Wu also criticized himself for the fact that after a full year he had not produced a single complete paper. He also said that the conference papers might still need to be edited and published in some form.
The banquet was still all drinking, singing, dancing, and various forms of revelry, and the Xianglong couple also went on stage to sing. Teacher Zhang sang “The Vast Sea Lets Out a Laugh” (沧海一声笑), reportedly taught to him by his son.
Starting on the 12th it was pure touring. However, while traveling by car, the teachers initiated some academic discussions in the bus. For example, Teacher Tiansong spoke about a theory concerning “garbage,” saying that the word “garbage” only appeared relatively late. In traditional agricultural life there was no corresponding term for “garbage.” Everything had a name, and everything was useful. Even the bits of debris swept up while sweeping the floor had some name; they were not called garbage. “Garbage” is a product of industrial civilization. Gao Lianghua objected to this, saying that sanitation workers clear excrement every day; feces is garbage, so surely one cannot say that feces is some evil product of industrial civilization. But Teacher Gao clearly had not understood Teacher Tian’s point—feces was originally not garbage. In agricultural civilization, one says that “fertilizer and water should not flow into other people’s fields”; feces is something useful, not something that should be discarded. Feces becoming garbage is precisely a consequence of industrial civilization. In addition, Teacher Gao’s insistence on the existence of “male dairy cows” also sparked debate with other teachers. Teacher Gao pointed out that male dairy cows are necessary as the group used to breed with female dairy cows. This in fact concerns the issue of naming and classification. First, if one classifies by function, there are dairy cows, breeding cattle, beef cattle, fighting bulls, draft cattle, and so on. Second, if one classifies by breed, there are actually only a few major types such as yellow cattle, water buffalo, and yaks, while there are many smaller subspecies or hybrid breeds. Thus, according to tradition, there really is no such thing as a “male dairy cow”; it is either a male yellow cow/female yellow cow, or breeding cattle/dairy cattle. But the point is that “male dairy cow,” like “garbage,” is a product of the industrial age. Because of the specialization of breeding, modern people began consciously crossbreeding and domesticating some specialized dairy breeds, such as the Ayrshire cattle. Since this breed as a whole points toward the use of milk production, we can also call them Ayrshire dairy cows, and then the bulls of this breed are of course also classified as dairy cows. In this sense, Teacher Gao is right.
In addition, Zhou Jianwen also spoke about how photography changed travel. Taking pictures is no longer merely a record of the journey, but has become the purpose of travel itself. People are accustomed to capturing scenery in a static and objectified way, yet have no time to place themselves within it and appreciate nature. Teacher Sheng Xiaoming added that photography is an expression of human voyeurism. All this of course makes sense, but it still cannot stop the many photography enthusiasts led by San Wu. As for me personally, I believe I still mainly treat photography as a way of recording the trip; the main use of the photos is to provide a thread of continuity when I look back after the journey is over. The most typical manifestation of the alienation of photography in travel lies in the expression “I have been here.” In particular, when people arrive at some scenic spot, they do not first go to look at the scenery; instead, they rush to take a photo with the stone engraved with the name of the scenic spot, making it the symbols that are photographed rather than the actual landscape, and that becomes the primary task.
In the morning we went to the Asia’s First Wetland in Ergun. The wetland covered a very large area, but the wetland park was only a small fenced-off stretch for us to look down upon from above. Of course the scenery was quite beautiful. At noon we were hosted to a government banquet, and in the afternoon we headed to Moerdaoga. Along the way we first visited the birch forest area; the so-called birch forest area was simply a fenced-off tourist site, with many people and not much woodland. Then, passing through the town of Shiwei, we took a boat tour of the Sino-Russian border river. After evening fell, we drove all the way to Moerdaoga. As the sun was about to set, we saw mist rising from the plain, astonishing like a kind of immortal vapor. Teacher Wu and the others naturally shouted, “White smoke rises in the waves as the three Wu’s emerge,” and were extremely excited.
The next day was mainly spent touring Moerdaoga Forest Park. In the morning we went to the red-bean forest to pick red fruits, and to see trees that had been struck dead and struck alive by lightning; there was really nothing much to say about that. In the afternoon, more than an hour of drifting at White Deer Island left a deep impression. Seven people in a single kayak; the current was not fast, but even without paddling one could still move ahead at a fairly quick pace. The rules said we could not land midway, but our boat still found the right moment to go ashore once. After landing, we discovered that the boat carrying the Xianglong couple had also landed on the same sandbar. The two groups of “pirates” met up and took a group photo, and Master Xianglong began singing Canghai Xiao, quite delighted. During the time we were ashore, no patrol boat happened to appear; although we ultimately arrived at our destination much later than expected, the staff seemed not to know the reason.
Dinner was the legendary Russian song-and-dance banquet. It was said to cost 168 yuan at the original price, but the fee had been waived after some coordination with the local government. Still, this banquet was disappointing: apart from a few slices of bread and kvass, it seemed to have little Russian flavor. Aside from a catfish with firm flesh, there was not much in the way of delicious food either. The performances consisted simply of one man and four women taking turns singing Mongolian songs and dancing suggestive dances, and neither the singing nor the dancing was of high quality. After the banquet we checked into Russian wooden cabins. This time I roomed with Teacher Deng Bo, whose snoring is said to be “beast-like.” Our cabin was charged as a standard room with a bathroom, but Teacher Deng’s and my room was filled by only two beds and a television.
Soon afterward a bonfire party was organized. One look from me and it was obvious it would amount to nothing but dancing and going crazy, so I slipped back. I wandered around the streets for a few rounds, looked at another bonfire party, and bargained at a souvenir shop to buy a Russian matryoshka doll. On the way, when I glanced back toward the bonfire, I saw a group of naked men dancing around the fire, and just then I saw Master Xianglong take off his clothes and join them. Startled, I immediately slipped away again.
After the bonfire, at Teacher Tiansong’s suggestion, Teacher Wu Tong and I also went to the riverbank by the border river to listen to the river water. Fortunately there was indeed no lighting by the river, but there was simply too much horse manure underfoot; after stepping into three piles in one go, I stopped going forward. Although I did not hear the river water, I saw many stars. The North Star was very high, and the Big Dipper was brilliantly bright. It was a rare experience of “silent wonder.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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