Yesterday, Senior Brother Han Lianqing gave a lecture at Beihang for the Beijing Philosophy of Technology Forum, “Intermediation and Constitution — The Meaning and Function of Artificial-Object Intentionality.” Teacher Wu sent us a text message in the morning, but lately my rhinitis has been acting up badly, and I stayed home unwilling to go out; as a result, I didn’t go. Although this rhinitis comes and goes, even though it is there every day, it still flares in bouts, and by that afternoon I was already feeling quite a bit better.
In the evening I asked Wu Ningning for the recording and asked Senior Brother Han for the paper, and filled in the gaps a bit. Senior Brother Han’s horizon and line of thought actually have quite a lot in common with mine: phenomenology, media ecology, philosophy of technology. But in his case, he makes less use of media ecology and relies more heavily on Ihde. In my view, he still seems too deeply constrained by Ihde, even though he occasionally quotes some criticisms of Ihde; the firepower is not concentrated.
For these background elements that overlap, Senior Brother Han did not really inspire me much, because my own line of thought has already begun to take shape independently, and his report did not scratch my itch. Yet one detail that he mentioned only in passing during the lecture did arouse my interest: namely, that in his next stage of work he plans to introduce research in psychoanalysis. But he did not develop this in the report; he only mentioned Lacan in one of the two papers attached, “A Phenomenological Analysis of Love,” with the introduction of “a paradoxical phenomenology without a subject.”
I still haven’t dug deeply enough into psychoanalytic resources in this respect; I only once got some inspiration from Teacher Zhang Xianglong,
When we speak of technical things, of artificial objects as possessing “intentionality,” that is one starting point of technological phenomenology. But this is precisely the step least likely to be understood by traditional phenomenologists. Back when the conference on phenomenology and philosophy of technology was held in Guangxi, Teacher Jin Xiping expressed his objection to this point. He insisted that intentionality concerns human consciousness; to say that a hammer has intentionality made him feel as though the hammer would fly up by itself and smash people, as if it were an utterly unreasonable statement. One can say that technology has bias, directionality, or tendency, but one absolutely cannot say that it has “intentionality,” precisely because the concept of intentionality concerns “human consciousness.”
But technological phenomenology insists on saying that technology has intentionality, and this is exactly to emphasize the internal connection between technology and consciousness. If one is only talking about technology’s “tendency,” then media ecology or critical-school philosophy of technology is enough; there is no need for phenomenology to intervene.
And if one is to talk about the intentionality of technology, one must reexamine the concept of “consciousness.” Indeed, “intentionality” concerns “consciousness,” but the question is, what is consciousness? Does “consciousness” also have multi-layered structures of inside and outside, surface and depth, such that saying technical objects share in human consciousness is entirely reasonable?
The psychoanalytic school happens to provide a line of thought here. Consciousness in the traditional sense is always manifest, self-aware, and active. So when one says that a hammer has intentionality, one immediately thinks of whether it can spontaneously leap up and hit people. But Freud revealed that consciousness does not have only this one level; there is also a hidden, unselfconscious, non-active level, namely the “unconscious.”
Freud discovered the existence of the “unconscious.” But where exactly is this unconscious hidden?
“The unconscious” does not refer only to some habits or behavioral tendencies people develop. The key point is that the unconscious and the conscious belong to the same whole; it is not an external part, but the part of the same iceberg submerged beneath the surface of the sea. The conscious can be said to be only a small part that “emerges” above the unconscious, and the boundary between them is also fluid.
Consciousness has an intentional structure; what about the unconscious? Is the unconscious also always a consciousness of some object? Of course, when the unconscious remains hidden, it is hard for us to grasp its structure. But there are always direct or indirect ways of revealing it. Psychoanalysis uses hypnosis, while neuropsychology uses experimental apparatus and statistics, in an attempt to uncover the structure of the unconscious. But if the unconscious from the very beginning is not merely something contained within a single brain, then our analysis of technical objects may well become a kind of analysis of consciousness, a “psychoanalysis of things.” When things possess a psychic structure, then the intentionality of things becomes a perfectly natural concept. This intentionality structure cannot be subjected to self-reflection in the way it is in manifest consciousness; like the unconscious, it is a kind of other for manifest consciousness, yet at the same time it participates in forming the same self.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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