Today’s discussion seminar covered that earlier article, and the result seemed pretty good. Of course, Wu’s comments and those of the students pointed out that while my article reads smoothly overall, a close look reveals many gaps in the logic, especially the final section, which seems overly hurried. This is certainly something that can be improved in part—particularly, the last section ought to have been written in more detail. At the time I probably felt that I was almost done, breathed a sigh of relief, and then slackened off, lacking patience in handling the most crucial part of this section. But in a certain sense logical gaps are impossible to eliminate. After all, Stiegler’s three volumes all discuss this issue, and he still has to write a fourth and fifth volume; whereas I have taken such a major question and discussed it in a tiny introduction, so naturally it is impossible to provide a comprehensive argument, and I can only offer a rough outline. Some of the missing links can be filled in by the concrete cases I will present in the main text; the rest will have to be supplied by the reader’s own imagination.
This article is planned as the first part of the introduction to my doctoral dissertation. The introduction may have a total of two to four parts: transcendental philosophy, philosophy of history, ontology, and literature review. The discussion of philosophy of history (for example, media history as intellectual history) will definitely be included, but whether it should come immediately after the introduction’s opening section, or instead be treated in some part of the main text or at the conclusion, remains open to consideration; the “media ontology” part could introduce a shortened rewritten version of my earlier outline, though of course it could also be interwoven into the main text and brought up again there (for example, when discussing McLuhan). The literature review section should explain which representative works of the media-environment school I will cite in the main text, why I am focusing on these works, what existing scholarship there is on them, and so on. Of course, this review can be long or short, or it can also introduce the relevant figures one by one when they are mentioned in the main text.
Because I have an overall plan in the background, I left many “embedded positions” in this article—that is, foreshadowings that will have to be elaborated later in retrospect—so Brother Bu, the Tianshi, criticized the article for not sufficiently guaranteeing its independence as a text in its own right. This criticism is correct, but it does not seem easy to solve. One strategy seems to be to embed, in the form of notes, things that ought originally to have been explained later on. Or perhaps, as for the theme of this article, if it is treated as an independent academic text, it is probably inherently insufficient from the outset.
There are two things left in reserve that I have not yet discussed and would like to mention here. One is the issue of the concept of “nature” mentioned by Jin Shixiang and Jing Qi: what is nature, and what is the relationship between nature and technology? The other is a question Brother Meng Qiang raised when I chatted with him about this topic at the forum a few days ago. Because what he was more hoping for was my “media ontology,” whereas transcendental philosophy is clearly a question of epistemology, so how to return from transcendental philosophy to the theme of ontology was what he was concerned about.
These two questions can be taken together. First, transcendental philosophy is not entirely a kind of “epistemology”; in a certain sense, Kant’s transcendental philosophy precisely redirected the epistemological questions that came before it back to ontology, back to the question of being and its manifestation, and set the limits of knowledge by way of a redefinition of the domain of beings. The theory of the “thing in itself” is an indispensable link in Kant’s philosophy.
What is the thing in itself? The thing itself, in fact, is just “nature.” If natural things are what have within themselves the source of motion and change, and the thing in itself is unknowable, then the conclusion is that natural things are precisely those things whose source of motion and change is unknowable.
In Kant, the concept of the thing in itself is entirely negative (negative ontology): we cannot obtain any knowledge of the thing in itself, but the concept of the thing in itself is precisely what defines the boundary of what knowledge cannot obtain; the meaning of this concept is to prevent the arrogance of reason.
The significance of the concept of “nature” lies precisely here as well. If knowledge is conditioned by memory, and memory is conditioned by technology, then the boundary of knowledge is precisely the boundary of technology. That is why I take “nature” to be the “boundary of technology”: nature is the background of technology, its shadow, the supplementary residue of chaos, and we understand nature from the standpoint of the boundary of technology. Wu mentioned his recent line of thought: Aristotle’s natural philosophy is precisely grounded in his philosophy of technology. This is exactly what I want to say: we understand what nature is through technology, through the finitude of technology. But in my Kantian, transcendental media ontology, such “understanding” must be a kind of arrogance, because what is understandable, graspable, and controllable is precisely not nature. If you see someone throw that stone, then its motion is unnatural; if you cannot find who threw it, then it just capriciously falls by itself—that is what is called natural motion. But the modern scientific precision with which free fall is grasped has precisely made free fall no longer “natural.” In fact, the kind of free fall that can be precisely grasped is really only a controlled motion in the laboratory, so “natural science,” in a certain sense, has become an anti-natural science. We construct the most unnatural extreme environments in the laboratory in order to study the motion of things; this “anti-natural science” distorts the original meaning of “nature.”
Still, as a boundary between the knowable and the unknowable, as a boundary between technology and control, such a concept of “nature” is not mysterious or particularly distorted. I think this is precisely the most natural, most original understanding of the concept of “nature”—that elusive, romantic, changeable, inexhaustible, self-speaking “wild nature.” The romanticists’ call to return to nature is precisely this layer of meaning. Therefore “returning to nature” and “letting things take their course” must not be understood as submitting to some determinate rule—the paradox of Muir’s naturalism arises precisely here: “letting things take their course” is precisely to let the capriciousness of things run free, to rein in the ambition to control, to tolerate room for the ambiguous, the fuzzy, the shadowy—that is, “being serenely resigned toward things and open-heartedly receptive to mystery.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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