After returning from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I attended the “Winter Solstice Conference,” I had the chance to meet teachers and students from Shanghai’s history-of-science circle, and I also took my senior and junior brothers around Shanghai for a bit. Although it took up a whole weekend that included the founding day of the PRC, it was still worthwhile.
After I came back, Teacher Wu asked us to talk about our impressions. I said that, in my view, the biggest problem with the history of science in Shanghai is that it lacks philosophy. Of course, from a good perspective, this means that such history of science is relatively “pure”: it is simply about figuring out what happened and recording it. But from another perspective, this kind of history lacks a concern that goes beyond historical facts, or rather, lacks the philosophical concern—the concern with “Who am I?”
This can be said to be a distinctive feature of the history of science at Peking University, or more precisely, of the Wu school’s history of science: philosophy and historiography are brought together, sharing in the humanistic tradition and atmosphere of Peking University. This is something that other programs in history of science or philosophy of science that grew out of engineering schools cannot possess.
The so-called integration of philosophy and historiography clearly does not mean paying more attention, in historical inquiry, to the contents of philosophical texts, nor does intellectual history necessarily amount to an “internal history” that focuses on the inner workings of theories and ideas. On the contrary, a philosophical historiography can also take technical artifacts, social relations, and empirical data as its object of concern. However, the “content” of historiography is not the same as the “purpose” of historiography.
This separation of purpose from content is precisely the kind of phenomenological mode of reflection, or, one might say, the mode of reflection of media philosophy, that I have been interpreting all along. That is to say, I am neither completely penetrating the medium in order to gaze at the content, nor discarding the content and making the medium itself into an object of contemplation; rather, I am reflecting on the medium while attending to the content through it. In other words, what I truly care about is neither those concrete historical contents nor the objective relations among them—sequence, causality—but rather the inner ground of how these histories could possibly present themselves in just this way.
This time, Brother Donglin’s article “The History of Mathematics: From Whig History to Intellectual History” was very inspiring and resonant. Brother Donglin cites Jacob Klein’s concept of “intentional history,” and explains the purpose of such historiography: to realize a kind of research that “returns to the root.” Husserl certainly affirms that sciences such as geometry possess an “ideal objectivity” that can be universally understood across cultures and eras. But geometry is still a human invention created by historical beings; this objectivity has an origin. Before modern science, which ultimately floats free of the lifeworld, science had its roots in the lifeworld. To reveal this root, one can proceed either through a certain psychological reflection on individual experience, or through a historical reflection. Of course, Husserl was urgently opposed to psychologism, and at the same time would not have accepted historicism; this is precisely because Husserl’s approach came too close to them. Husserl tried to avoid falling into some hasty skepticism or nihilism, but at the level of basic orientation, phenomenology is common ground with psychologism or historicism: human beings are first understood as historical, or temporal, beings—and to understand oneself is also to understand one’s own “origin.”
When Teacher Wu commented on Brother Donglin’s talk, he said that Donglin had spent too much time discussing phenomenology, which was not appropriate for the audience present, and that he should have spoken more about the parts the audience could understand. But I rather felt that Brother Donglin might as well have spoken even more about the philosophical part. In fact, the greatest significance of this kind of conference for North-South exchange lies precisely in being able to understand each other’s differences, and the philosophical concern is exactly where the differences lie between Brother Donglin, Zheran, and me on the one hand, and Teacher Wu himself and most of the audience on the other. In fact, this is also the point at which the teachers and students present could not fully grasp our work. When Brother Donglin tried to defend himself by saying that history should have a higher purpose, and finally spoke of the philosophical mission of “know thyself,” I felt that many of the teachers and students present were surprised and found it hard to understand. If one focuses on those contents that are easier for both sides to understand, then although one may perhaps receive some well-founded criticism, the meaning of the exchange is diminished.
When I reported on my paper on printing technology, I stated from the outset that I was actually doing philosophy, and that the paper I brought to the history-of-science conference was only a “byproduct” of philosophical research. I said this not because I wanted to avoid criticism (although the wording I used to express humility and trepidation may objectively constitute a kind of evasion), but because I hoped that the teachers and students present would assess and understand my article more from a philosophical perspective. In fact, I was treated rather well; Brother Donglin’s and Zheran’s reports received even stronger criticism. The focus of the comments was either on historical facts or on causality.
But for a historical narrative, are there really any possibilities besides presenting historical facts and hinting at causal relations? In my paper on printing technology, I mentioned that I did not attempt to reveal a causal relationship between printing and modern science; rather, I treated printing as an intermediary or medium, and explored a relation of “coupling.” A commenting teacher criticized this statement as a retreat born of insufficient confidence, arguing that in the later part of the paper I was in fact still talking about causality. But in truth, I was not expressing any retreat. My intention became clearer after I took Brother Donglin’s quotation into account: even if I do seem to be revealing a kind of relation resembling cause and effect between printing and modern science, this “before and after” is not directed at the actual historical process; it is not a relation of sequence on an external, objective timeline. This relation occurs within some inner “intentional history.” “Genesis” in this sense (if I may temporarily borrow this mysterious term) is not a causal relation, nor can it necessarily be precisely reproduced in objective history. Of course, this relation is not a logical relation either. It is a more originary relation of precedence and subsequence; it is not meant to explain any question of the form “what is ‘X’,” but rather attempts to answer the question “how is it ‘X’,” trying to present how “presentation” itself is possible.
Thus we can understand that, in the sense of intentional history, printing comes before the Renaissance, even though in objective history the people later credited as the initiators of the Renaissance came before Gutenberg; likewise, linear perspective in (Zheran’s report) comes after Ptolemaic classical astronomy, even though in the astrolabe-making techniques mastered by ancient astronomers there already lay, in the eyes of modern people, the principle of perspective; the change in the intentional form of what number is, mentioned by (Brother Donglin), led to the origin of algebra, even though from the modern point of view algebraic relations had long since been the essence of certain geometric propositions in ancient Greece.
Even if, according to the modern understanding, some geometric propositions of the ancient Greeks were expressions of certain algebraic relations, this does not mean that those Greeks had already grasped those algebraic relations; similarly, even if it seems that when the Greeks made astrolabes they were already using the principles of perspective, this does not mean that they had already understood perspective. In the objective sequence of history, the conclusions of algebra appear before algebra itself; the conscious awareness of perspective comes later than the use of perspective. None of this is strange.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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