A few days ago I attended a lecture by Li Meng. To be honest, the lecture was rather like scratching an itch through one’s boot, or rather, he merely pointed out where the itch was, and then it was entirely up to us to do the scratching ourselves. The lecture’s inspiration is wholly concentrated in its title; for those of us doing phenomenology of technology, there’s no need to attend the lecture at all—just recite this title a few times over.
“Utensils and Ritual Vessels—A Chinese Appraisal of Metaphysics”
First of all, we know that Western philosophers of technology, with Heidegger as their leader, carried out a kind of “appraisal” of the entire metaphysical tradition from ancient Greece onward. They appraised metaphysics as “utensil metaphysics,” and the modern technological world as the completed form of metaphysics. Li Meng gave examples from Plato and Aristotle, which are also familiar to us: that is to say, at the beginning of Western metaphysics, “manufactured things” are already the core of a certain imagination; the origin of the cosmos, the coming-to-be of causality, and natural philosophy unfold along the logic of the craftsman and of making. Up to the modern world, this utensil metaphysics—or, one might say, productive metaphysics, or foundationalist metaphysics—reaches its apex, and the result is what Heidegger called the world of Gestell, or the world of enframing. Things are linked to one another through relations of “custom fabrication,” and natural things too become resources preordered for the factory. Every thing is embedded within this pre-customized system, and its meaning is fully realized as “efficiency,” that is, a thing is always measured by its output. In a world assembled according to the logic of tools, human beings are also utensilized; human beings too become a kind of utensil, and human meaning is likewise reduced to output.
So where do other possibilities open up? Heidegger and the others begin with the “artwork.” They distinguish “artwork” from “utensil,” attempting to lead technology back to its source in art. But although the artwork avoids relations of “custom fabrication,” it also runs the risk of flowing into nothingness. The artwork does open up its own space of meaning, but these spaces of meaning are often isolated; the connections between artworks and other things, their connections with the world of everyday life, and their connections with other people are no longer close. Immersing oneself in the world of art, becoming a person like a work of art, may not be as rigidly dull as being a “utensil person,” but it seems even more solitary and withdrawn, with a feeling of escaping the world and becoming detached from it. No wonder people often understand this line of thought as “romanticism.” It may be a possible way out for some individuals, but as far as society as a whole is concerned, I’m afraid it is not enough to hold it together through the logic of art alone.
Beyond the binary of “utensil” and “artwork,” is there no other dimension to technical objects? My introduction of the term “medium” is also meant deliberately to distinguish it from concepts such as “utensil” and “tool,” which are the notions one is apt to associate with when talking about “technology.” What a “medium” constructs is a world of sociality, not a workshop world or a world of production, nor an artistic world. I won’t say more about that for now. One concept that Li Meng pointed out is “ritual vessel,” and this thing draws in the whole spiritual world of the Chinese tradition, revealing new possibilities for the Western metaphysics of utensils.
Clearly, “ritual vessel” is different from artwork: a ritual vessel is not there for appreciation, but also for operation and use. Yet it cannot simply be called a kind of “utensil.” Or, to put it in classical terms, a ritual vessel or sacrificial vessel can by no means be equated with a “nourishing vessel.”
An artwork presents a self-contained space of meaning, rather than clearly pointing toward other affairs. A utensil and a ritual vessel, by contrast, both point toward something; they are meant to be used. But for a utensil, its meaning and form coincide—I use a knife to cut meat, and the meaning of the knife is to cut meat; I use a wan to serve rice, and the meaning of the wan is to serve rice. This seems perfectly natural. If the meaning of an object is identical to the target object it points to when being used, then that object can be regarded as neutral and replaceable. For example, an axe can also cut meat, and a meat-cutting machine can also cut meat; whether one uses a knife, an axe, or a meat-cutting machine depends on how well the meat is cut, and on the efficiency of result compared with cost. If the meat comes out the same and the labor and capital expended are also the same, then there is no meaningful difference between a knife and an axe, and at most they are only formally different.
But a “ritual vessel” is a strict “formalism.” Although this knife is used to cut meat, the meaning of this knife has nothing to do with how the meat it cuts turns out; of course, it is also not completely unrelated to meat in the way an artwork is, concerned only with the knife’s own form. The meaning of this knife must arise in a particular setting, with a particular person using it to cut particular meat; only within such an entire context does this knife have its meaning, and it cannot be isolated and substituted outside that context. The ancient Chinese required that the knife used to cut sacrificial offerings must be dull; apart from burial objects offered to accompany the dead, various sacrificial items were also selected according to the standard that they appear similar in form but be unusable. All of these were based on ethical considerations. We need not investigate exactly what those ethical considerations were for the moment; the key is that they were not considerations arising from “use.” Although artworks are likewise not judged on the basis of use, artworks are not meant to be used in the first place. A ritual vessel, however, is indeed meant to be used, and the form of its use has a direct connection with the way utensils are used in everyday life. But its meaning is not guided by the goal of its use.
Does this suggest a new dimension for the philosophy of technology? Confucius praised his disciples by calling them “people like sacrificial vessels.” In the Western way of thinking, there are two kinds of value for human beings: one is a person like a tool, a “useful talent”; the other is a person like an artwork, useless, detached, pure. But a person like a ritual vessel is probably a kind of position one would think of only in China, right? Neither useful nor useless. The logic of utensils opens up a world of production, whereas the logic of ritual vessels points toward some kind of world of ritual and music.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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