Earlier I spoke of “phenomenological education,” which also made me recall the as-yet-unwritten essay I mentioned last year, “Knowledge Is Linkage.” Why is it that I, someone just about to begin a PhD dissertation on “media ontology,” “ have suddenly, and quite off the beaten track, decided to take up “education”? Have I changed direction? Of course not. My turn toward educational questions is on the one hand driven by my interest in Neil Postman (who is in essence an educational theorist), and on the other hand it is also a question I have long cared about. In fact, the question of education involves the whole range of philosophy, from epistemology to ethics, from the history of science to the philosophy of technology, all converging under the issue of “education—learning.”
When we speak of educational problems in philosophy, what first comes to mind is Plato’s paradox of learning: if you already know something, you do not need to learn it; if you do not know it, you cannot learn it. So how is learning possible? Plato’s answer is that learning is “recollection” of what the soul originally knew but has forgotten.
In Plato, “knowledge” is regarded as fully internal, and in a sense as something mysterious and inexpressible. Yet the Greeks left room for pedagogy in the form of “practical wisdom”; the teaching process is not knowledge itself, but it still belongs to wisdom, or knowledge in the broad sense.
By modern times, however, knowledge and education were mechanized at the same time (see Mathematics, Education, and Machines), and the educational process was no longer understood as a means of bringing knowledge forth, but was itself taken as knowledge. More importantly, in part because of the influence of printing, the educational process (and knowledge) became increasingly textualized, typefied, labeled; thus knowledge eventually came to be taken for granted as the black-and-white words printed in textbooks.
Learning became “parroting,” students became “imitators,” learning shifted from recollection to “memory,” and knowledge itself changed from a mysterious thing entirely internal to the soul into a completely external mechanical thing.
Still, I am not trying to say that printing is the source of all evil, or that one must never learn knowledge in the form of memorized propositions. What I am saying is that we need to find a way to understand why knowledge was bound to take the form of type in the age of print; in a certain sense, this is a kind of destiny—epistemology had no choice but to adapt to the development of media.
For in essence, knowledge is neither wholly internal to the soul nor wholly engraved on the page from the outside. Are the type on the page entirely unrelated to real knowledge? Are propositions unrelated to truth? That is not the case either. We need to understand that although the type on the page is not knowledge itself, it is indeed associated with knowledge, and in a certain sense we really can point to the type and speak of knowledge.
It is much like the relation between a photograph and a thing: we really can say, “This photograph was taken of me” — I can indeed accurately and rigorously point to the photograph and say, “This is me.” But is this flat piece of paper me? We all know that I am a person, this infinitely complex living being standing before everyone, and not some piece of paper pinched between two fingers. Yet what is seen through this photograph is indeed “me,” and that is completely correct as well. So when is this photograph “me,” and when is it “not me”? The answer is: when it serves as a penetrated medium, “I” can appear through it; when it is treated as an objective, independent object, it is merely a photograph.
Those propositions printed in a textbook are, in a certain sense, indeed “knowledge,” but they are not knowledge itself; the reasoning is the same as with a photograph.
But where is knowledge, then? This is similar to asking: where am “I”? Draw a coordinate system in space, locate a position within it, and say that within the range of a certain shape at that position lies where “I” am? The “I” thus located is, just like the “I” depicted in a photograph, a flattened and partial presentation, and not the “real me.” But where is the real me? We can also use many other ways of “locating” me: for instance, I am a student in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University, what is my ID number, where is my household registration, what is my family relationship, and so on. Each method of locating is nothing but a partial mode of presentation, yet through each mode of presentation what we recognize and understand is indeed me; through these various media, we can indeed come to know, or misunderstand, my true or false appearance.
We believe that behind these countless modes of knowing there lurks a “myself-in-itself.” I still agree with Kant’s approach: we certainly ought to posit the existence of the “thing-in-itself,” but this existence is, in epistemological terms, entirely “negative”; the “thing-in-itself” serves only a limiting function and not a constructive one. It limits the finitude of knowledge and leaves room for mystery. We must make clear that, through any medium, or even through the sum of them all, we cannot exhaust our knowledge of things. But apart from remaining open to mystery, positing a “myself-in-itself” that is independent of any concrete mode of presentation has no meaning whatsoever for knowledge. Knowledge of things is in fact obtained through presentation by various media, including photographs and type.
Therefore, the development of media will change the form of knowledge. In cultures dominated by oral media, knowledge (note the character for mouth and the speech radical) appears as names, formulas, essential points, and the like, and to blurt them out like arrows is what counts as “knowing”; whereas in cultures dominated by print media, objective and rigorous public expression becomes the hallmark of knowledge. The hallmark of knowledge is in fact the hallmark of the medium of cognition.
We have to admit that knowledge presented through certain media is indeed true, indeed accurate. In some cases we can even judge: a photograph is more “accurate” than an oil painting, an oil painting more “lifelike” than a ink wash painting. We can indeed acknowledge that modern science, through propositional and mathematical forms, presents knowledge of things that is, compared with many traditional forms, more precise and more true. But this in no way can negate other traditional modes of presentation, nor can it eliminate the possibility of new ones. Compared with a long descriptive passage, using a photograph to identify a person may well be more precise, but verbal description can reveal many dimensions that a photograph cannot express. Similarly, various premodern or postmodern media may not be as precise as the mathematical language of modern science, but they can still retain their own unique value. They cannot replace exact science, nor can they be replaced by it.
Thus, the so-called “knowledge is linkage” has two layers of meaning. First, it expresses a certain form of knowledge in the network age. Memory is gradually giving way to the ability to retrieve, and the tools of retrieval have likewise shifted from tags, catalogs, and indexes to search engines and web links. Although network media still remain text-dominated, the form of text is gradually moving from propositions and assertions toward “hypertext” rich in “links.”
Second, “linkage” at the same time reveals the essence of traditional forms of knowledge. The essence of a link is neither the explanatory text on the surface, nor the target webpage to which it points behind the scenes, but rather the establishment of a connection between the explanatory text and the new context in which it is located, and the target webpage and its new context. “Knowledge” is the same in this respect: on the one hand, knowledge has a form of expression—words, writing, mathematical formulas, or images; on the other hand, this expression directs us toward certain objects or certain scenes. But knowledge is neither the former nor the latter; it is the linkage itself between the two.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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