In today’s seminar, I presented Levinson’s essay. Though the essay was short, the discussion was quite extensive, and in the end we had only twenty minutes left for reading—unexpectedly enough.
As for Levinson’s positive significance, I really did write too ambiguously in the paper, or rather, too falsely; I even felt embarrassed saying it myself…… But the one theoretical element in Levinson that truly deserves to be called positively meaningful is indeed something I mentioned in the paper, and also what I first brought up at the start of the lecture: his kind of unselfconscious “Hegelian” line of thought.
I first mentioned Wu’s “walking on two legs”: one leg is the history of science, the other is philosophy of science (which in substance has already been replaced by philosophy of technology). As Wu’s direct disciple, I want to inherit both legs at once. But the next question is: what is the relationship between these two legs? If I merely jump on one leg until I get tired and then switch to the other leg, that does not count as walking on two legs; it is still just hopping on one leg. Between these two legs there also needs to be a pivot, so that the forward movement of the two legs can mutually pull one another and coordinate in tacit harmony. Of course, if we go further up, there also needs to be a trunk and a soul—for example, phenomenological philosophy and concern with the problem of modernity. Those are matters above the trunk; what I need now is precisely a connector that sits squarely “between the two legs,” one that is rooted both in philosophy of technology and in the history of scientific thought. And what I found, simply put, is called “the history of technological thought.”
In the proposal for my doctoral dissertation, I already mentioned that I wanted to develop media ecology into a program for the history of technology. But to which tradition should such a historiographical program be attached? In my view, it should be connected to the historiographical program of Koyré. And behind Koyré’s program for the history of thought, there is in fact a Hegelian faith sustaining it (of course, in Koyré this Hegelian thread is explicit and self-conscious): namely, that “thought rolls on by itself,” that behind the actual history of human beings there lies some kind of intrinsic logic, whereby thought unfolds itself and generates itself…… Thus, broadly speaking, the history of thought can be called the approach of “internal history.”
Philosophy of technology, or what I call media ontology, is already meant to break through the conventional distinction between “internal” and “external.” Of course, this breaking through does not mean smashing it to pieces; rather, it means that the boundary between inside and outside is not a fixed, ready-made, unshakable wall, but a kind of shifting, generative, permeable “medium.” In this way, when we once again examine the “internal logic” of thought, the situation is no longer the same. The domain of “thought” is no longer confined to the abstract world composed of ready-made type, but is instead a certain intentional space defined by media technologies. Thus, when we speak of the history of technology, it is by no means that, in the sense of Merton’s social history, we have introduced an “external” parameter of influence into the history of thought; this technology is neither internal nor external, but the medium between inside and outside, the pivot by which the externalization of the inside and the internalization of the outside are made possible.
The predecessors of media ecology have already carried out many explorations in such history—for example, Havelock’s guide to Plato, Walter Ong’s studies of oral and literate cultures, Eisenstein’s research on the history of printing, and so on. These historical studies all touch on the history of science or knowledge, but they are clearly not “external history” in Merton’s sense.
Levinson, though he did not have sufficient self-awareness of the Hegelian tendency in his theory, is undoubtedly the media historian who most confidently and most straightforwardly expresses this kind of Hegelian faith. If we translate Levinson’s “spirit, matter, technology” into Hegel’s “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” then Levinson’s view of the history of technology suddenly no longer looks so negligible; rather, it is something worth weighing carefully.
Personally, I think Hegel’s absolute spirit is some kind of empty talk meant to hoodwink people, but that does not mean this doctrine is unworthy of attention. Even with Hegelianism itself, we may also need to carry out a kind of “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” overcoming.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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