Continuing on from the previous post, there have recently been many things lined up and demanding to be finished, so I didn’t really have the mind to write the travel notes to completion. But in the end I discovered that if I didn’t finish the travel notes, I would always have this one thing hanging over my heart, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything else well either, so I still went ahead and filled them in……
After the first day’s sessions in Shenyang’s Xiaoshicheng, we arrived in Benxi, where the conference’s final two days were held.
The morning of the 26th saw the start of Session 4, themed “Phenomenology and Chinese Tradition.”
Liu Shengli from the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences gave a report titled “Body and Nature—Dong Zhongshu’s View of Nature and Its Phenomenological Interpretation of the Body.”
Brother Shengli first reviewed the traditional ways scholars have interpreted Dong Zhongshu’s thought, pointing out that their analytical frameworks have all failed to move beyond binary oppositions such as “materialism—idealism, science—theology, mechanism—teleology,” and that this framework is based on the worldview of modern European science. The traditional research framework runs into difficulty when trying to understand Dong Zhongshu’s “theory of Heaven,” for example in grasping coherently the threefold nature of Dong Zhongshu’s “Heaven”: natural Heaven, moral Heaven, and spiritual Heaven.
Brother Shengli pointed out that traditional studies of Dong Zhongshu’s theory of Heaven have all implicitly relied on a Chinese-Western comparative framework calibrated by the modern mechanical view of nature, using that standard to measure the “deviation” of Dong Zhongshu’s view of nature. No matter how much one excavates the uniqueness of Dong Zhongshu’s thought within such a framework, one still cannot escape the limitations of Cartesianism. Brother Shengli attempted to draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as a resource to reinterpret Dong Zhongshu’s theory of resonance between Heaven and humanity.
Brother Shengli believed that Dong Zhongshu’s talk of “body, corporeality, form, trunk,” and so on, does not refer to the objective body as a physical structure, but to the “phenomenal body” in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. In this way, Dong Zhongshu’s phrase “measure Heaven by the body” is not an empirical rationality in the modern scientific sense, but “embodied rationality.” The three aspects of Dong Zhongshu’s “Heaven” can all “be brought, by means of phenomenological reduction, back to a perspectival profile within the pre-objective horizon in which bodily phenomenology unfolds”; such “Heaven” is a pre-objective unity, “a disclosive unconcealment that conceals itself.”
Teacher Li Zhangyin offered comments. He first affirmed the originality of Liu Shengli’s research, saying it opened up a new path for the study of Chinese philosophy. But Teacher Li also had some questions. For example, regarding whether the second concept of nature in Descartes, as revealed by Merleau-Ponty, is still substantially a theory of substance, Teacher Li and Brother Shengli had different views. In addition, if measuring Dong Zhongshu by Descartes’ view of nature is certainly a coercion, then why would doing so with Merleau-Ponty not also be one? Brother Shengli felt that Teacher Li’s questions arose from misunderstandings caused by insufficient communication, and that introducing Merleau-Ponty was meant to reactivate the view of nature in Chinese philosophy.
My own feeling is that, first of all, Brother Shengli’s work indeed opens up a new space for re-understanding ancient Chinese philosophy. But specifically in relation to Dong Zhongshu, or to this article, I feel that Brother Shengli’s interpretation is somewhat forced. In fact, the article does not offer much analysis or interpretation of Dong Zhongshu’s text itself; many interpretations seem to have a wishful quality, and Dong Zhongshu himself may not have been quite so profound.
For example, Dong Zhongshu’s rather famous theory that “the human being is a counterpart to Heaven’s numerical order” seems to have been intentionally or unintentionally ignored by Brother Shengli. Dong Zhongshu says that human beings have 366 small joints, corresponding to the days in a year; they have twelve large joints corresponding to the months; the five viscera correspond to the five phases; the four limbs correspond to the four seasons, and so on. In this place, the “body” being discussed does not seem to rise to the level of the “phenomenal body,” and the relation between humans and Heaven also appears quite external.
It is not the case that if it is not a mechanical view of nature, it can therefore be understood with an embodied view of nature. Outside Cartesianism and bodily phenomenology, Dong Zhongshu’s view of nature may be more naive. He neither entered the objectifying mode of modern scientific thinking, nor unfolded a phenomenological reduction. We may, like Heidegger interpreting the ancient Greek natural philosophers, reveal the originary meaning of their thought, but that is not to say that Dong Zhongshu’s view of nature itself achieved an original synthesis.
Brother Shengli has tried to use bodily phenomenology to reinterpret Chinese medicine, and now uses bodily phenomenology to reinterpret ancient Chinese philosophy. I have always had reservations about these efforts. The key question is whether we are using the perspective of phenomenology to excavate ancient Chinese thought, or whether we are interpreting ancient Chinese thought itself as a kind of phenomenological thought. If Brother Shengli’s purpose is only to borrow the phenomenological perspective to reactivate the vitality of ancient Chinese thought and excavate the meanings within it, then of course I support that. However, in the actual interpretation, Brother Shengli seems to elevate ancient Chinese thought too much, as if the ancient Chinese view of nature and the body were already phenomenological. That, then, carries the suspicion of overinterpretation.
Next came Associate Professor Yan Yan from Huaibei Normal University, speaking on “Dao: A Naturalist Philosophy of the Flesh.” In fact, what she used in the title was the oracle-bone form of the character for “dao”; through a round of “philology,” the article argues that dao means “something that works,” and finally concludes that Chinese philosophy is not a phenomenological philosophy of the flesh but a naturalist philosophy of the flesh. Honestly, when I saw this article I was completely stunned and had no idea what she was talking about. Although I read it in complete bewilderment, I still had a basic judgment: this article was basically nonsense. To evaluate it in her own words from the abstract is the most fitting: “Constrained by the meager wit of Western scholars with their jug-like learning, China also has no shortage of scholars who wield the pen of phenomenology, producing fragmented and dissected writings, twisting and forcing things into clever shapes, yet rarely reaching the essential point or arriving at the true principles of Chinese philosophy.” She does not in fact wield phenomenology, but the words “fragmented and dissected, twisting and forcing things into clever shapes” are simply uncanny.
I felt that Teacher Li Zhangyin’s comments were overly flattering. Teacher Li thought that although Yan Yan flatly refused to acknowledge phenomenology, the philology she did was phenomenology. In the end, Teacher Li cautiously pointed out that the article lacked enough logic and enough argumentation; there was a lot of material, but not enough interpretation. He finally reminded everyone that “naturalism” is also a concept from Western philosophy.
It is worth mentioning that the two undergraduate participants, namely Zhou Xiyuan and Wang Kuangrong, both asked Yan Yan questions during the discussion period, and Wang Kuangrong pointed out that Yan Yan in fact cited many concepts from Western philosophy but lacked any interpretation of them. As expected, young people still dare to speak up. The old hands, on the one hand, are already used to seeing these things; on the other hand, they are adept at compromise. Over these past few years of attending conferences myself, I seem to have become gentler as well, and that may not necessarily be a good thing.
Next was Professor Ma Delin from Xidian University, speaking on “From the Unnamed Raw Block to Returning to Simplicity and Authenticity—A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Daoist Thought of ‘Pu’.” Brother Shengli gave the commentary. I have no confidence in this area, so I won’t say much.
The final paper in the China-themed section was given by Professor Tao Jianwen from South China University of Technology: “Looking at the Characteristics of the Thingness of Ancient Chinese Science from Dujiangyan.”
Teacher Tao used Dujiangyan as an example to discuss the ancient Chinese understanding of thingness. What is meant by “understanding thingness” may also be called “physics,” but Teacher Tao deliberately used the term “thingness” to distinguish it from physics, because ancient China clearly did not have mathematical physical science in the modern Western sense.
And yet, from the construction of Dujiangyan, the ancient Chinese understanding of thingness was already quite profound. Dujiangyan adopted many strategies of “adapting measures to local conditions,” unlike the homogenized, universalized approach of modern science, but from the perspectives of lifespan and ecology, Dujiangyan is superior to many modern dams. Clearly these measures adapted to local conditions are not random accidents of irrationality, but reflect the ancient Chinese understanding of thingness. In the eyes of the ancient Chinese, things are rich and anthropomorphic. The anthropomorphism of things runs through Aristotelian physics; in Newton it still retains some remnants, but in modern science it has been completely replaced by indifferent mathematization.
Teacher Tian Song’s summary in his commentary was right on target: so-called “thingness” refers to “the temper of things.”
Teacher Tian also mentioned that some concepts were used rather awkwardly, such as “pre-scientific.” Indeed, the article’s title speaks of “ancient Chinese science,” yet this “science” is being discussed with “pre-scientific” methods, which is indeed somewhat awkward.
A common issue running through this group of China-themed discussions is that when one uses modern Chinese, formed under Western influence, along with related academic terminology, to grasp the thought of ancient China, there will always be all sorts of mismatches. Teacher Wu Tong and Teacher Wu Guosheng both offered related comments. Teacher Wu pointed out that this condition of being “neither fish nor fowl” is our destiny, and that we must bear this destiny and carry out research under the aim of a fusion of horizons.
After the tea break came Session 5, themed “Nature, Science, and Human Beings.”
First was Professor Wu Guolin from South China University of Technology, speaking on “Viewing the Essence of Quantum Technology from Phenomenology.”
Teacher Wu Guolin was nicknamed “Wu Quantum” this time. Wu Quantum talks about quantum mechanics every time, but he has no proper understanding of either quantum mechanics or phenomenology. This time the topic involved “quantum technology,” which is actually quite interesting: in phenomenological terms, what exactly is “quantum”? Can it be “intuited”? Can it be “fulfilled”? In my view, though perhaps unlike most teachers, “quantum” can indeed be intuited and fulfilled; “seeing” a quantum is no more magical than seeing a broom. But how one sees a quantum, like how one sees any thing, requires learning and training, the sedimentation of memory, retention and protention. And all these processes need to be sought within a technical environment.
However, Teacher Wu Guolin’s work did not help me much. Teacher Wu merely strung together various terms related to quantum mechanics and phenomenology in a very external way.
In his commentary, Teacher Wu Tong mentioned that Teacher Wu Guolin did not seem to distinguish the similarities and differences between so-called quantum technology and classical technology, and that the word “quantum” could even be removed from the conclusion.
Then came Teacher Zhang Changsheng from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, speaking on “The Idea of Nature and the Basis of Ecological Phenomenology—A Transcendental Phenomenological Understanding of Nature.”
Teacher Zhang’s paper was extremely long, taking up 30 pages in the conference booklet (most papers took less than 10 pages). The sheer length, however, instead revealed that Teacher Zhang’s research was not yet mature; many parts still seemed to remain in a state of material accumulation, and the main points and threads were not especially clear.
Teacher Zhang’s main contribution should have been a rearticulation of the phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity, proposing “the intersubjectivity of life” in order to understand the relationship between human beings and animals.
Teacher Wu Guosheng’s commentary pointed out that Teacher Zhang’s article was somewhat “not what it says on the tin”: in fact, it did not focus on clarifying the concept of “nature,” but mainly discussed animals and their intersubjectivity. Teacher Wu believed that there were two missing links in Teacher Zhang’s argument: first, the transition from subjectivity to intersubjectivity—whether animals actually possess subjectivity in the transcendental temporal sense was not made clear. In fact, Teacher Zhang’s text did discuss the subjectivity of animals, but Teacher Wu had not looked closely, or perhaps Teacher Zhang’s discussion still could not satisfy Teacher Wu’s doubts. The second gap was from animals to nature: how is it that the discussion of animals suddenly turns to “nature”? Teacher Wu believed that many issues concerning the concept of “nature” had still not been elucidated, especially because “nature” in the phenomenological horizon is not just a collection of things, but also has transcendence and horizon-like character. But in that sense, how should one speak of “reverence for nature”? Reverence toward the context of reverence, or reverence toward emergence?
Teacher Wu believed that Teacher Zhang had failed to sort out the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and superficial ecological ethics, and had instead fallen into confusion.
In the main text, Teacher Zhang rarely directly discussed the issues of traditional ecological ethics, only mentioning in the second-to-last paragraph that ecological phenomenology is superior to both traditional biocentrism and ecocentrism. But where exactly traditional ecological philosophy is “weak” was not explained in detail.
Teacher Zhang seems to have placed greater emphasis on how to interpret and extend traditional phenomenological thought so that it can suit ecological thought, rather than on revealing what expansions or transcendences phenomenological ecological philosophy offers over non-phenomenological ecological philosophy. The result is that he is busy reconciling internal contradictions within phenomenology, while in the overall line of thought he basically still follows the aims of traditional ecological ethics, namely, establishing the ethical status of animals. This makes the stance of ecological phenomenology seem relatively weak and lacking in novelty. If one could adopt a more aggressive posture, focusing more strongly on clarifying the unique strengths of the phenomenological stance and more sharply exposing the defects of traditional ecological philosophy, perhaps the key points would stand out more clearly and the issues become more lucid.
Professor Chen Zhiguo from Shandong University spoke on “The Essence of Medical Art: Aristotle and the Phenomenological Tradition.”
Teacher Chen examined some discussions by Aristotle and Heidegger concerning medical art or the body. There had originally also been a section on Gadamer, but this was not developed either in the text or in the talk. In fact, Aristotle and Heidegger directly discuss medical art only very sparingly, and even their discussions of the body and disease are not many. Within these lines and between the lines, Teacher Chen tried to highlight his core concern, namely that the essence of medical art is not to control disease, but to restore health; and the inner cause of restoring health is “nature” rather than medical art. The body as nature is something that medical art can never fully unconceal.
I also gave the commentary on this report (Hu Yilin), and what I raised were all questions. I mainly brought up two problems in the logic of the argument and three problems in textual interpretation.
The first problem is that the article begins by saying:
“In recent years, the reform of our country’s medical system has been moving hesitantly forward; adjustments to medical procedures have had limited effect; the distribution of medical resources has been imbalanced and improper; relations between doctors and patients have remained tense; the level of medical education has improved slowly; the physical condition of the population is not optimistic; and so on. Behind these kinds of medical-sector problems may lie complex and varied reasons, but these are not unrelated to the various sectors’ cognition, understanding, and promotion of the activities of medical art itself. For example, medical art is often regarded as a precise science on a par with disciplines such as mathematics and physics; the object of medical art is disease, and its task is to control and resist disease’s invasion of and harm to the body; doctors and hospitals, as the main agents of medical care, are authorities that cannot be challenged or questioned; progress in medical skill is endless, and all bodily pathologies can ultimately be completely overcome by medical means, and so on.”
After this, Teacher Chen tries to cite Aristotle and Heidegger in an effort to correct people’s misunderstandings of medical art. But I think the argument in the main text deviates from this aim and does not answer the original demand. In my commentary I only mentioned this in passing and did not make it clear, so when Teacher Chen responded, he thought it was because I had not understood his claim. In fact, the question I wanted to raise was this: according to Teacher Chen’s interpretation in the main text (which is itself dubious, but let us assume the interpretation succeeds), the purpose of medical art should be to assist the body’s nature in restoring health. But what does that have to do with problems such as reforming the medical system, tense doctor-patient relations, and the poor physical condition of the population? Saying that the task of medical art is not “to cure disease” may make sense philosophically, but on the practical level it only leaves people baffled. Once one has understood a more correct view of medical art, how exactly should medical-system reform be carried out? How should medical resources be distributed? How should the population’s overall quality be improved? In short, after reading Teacher Chen’s article I was still completely confused. The first problem I pointed out is, in essence, the problem of how theory and practice are connected. Of course, I think Teacher Chen’s theory is not coherently presented to begin with, but even if it were theoretically coherent, there would still be a rupture in how it could be implemented in actual practice.
The second question is: why select these three people—Aristotle, Heidegger, and Gadamer—to ask about the essence of medical art, and why focus on them? Especially since they basically do not talk much about medical art, at most mentioning it only incidentally as examples. If one wants to trace things back to their source, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to examine ancient doctors like Hippocrates and Galen? If one wants theoretical depth, wouldn’t drawing more on Merleau-Ponty, who talks more about the body, be more beneficial than Heidegger? Teacher Chen replied that Aristotle and Heidegger are more important; Galen was influenced by Aristotle, and Merleau-Ponty was influenced by Heidegger. That is certainly true, but Heidegger was also influenced by Husserl, and Aristotle was also influenced by Plato.
These two issues are easy to resolve; the key lies in positioning the topic of the paper. If the paper’s topic were simply limited to interpreting and elucidating Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s views of medical art, then there would be no problem. But now the article’s theme extends to the essence of medical art, and ultimately it even has to confront practical issues. The ambition is simply too large.
As for the specific textual interpretation problems, I felt there were many; basically all the texts felt strained. I only mentioned three places.
The first two are actually related. First, Teacher Chen says that “although medical art constitutes the efficient cause and formal cause of the ill body, it must unconditionally serve the fundamental purpose of ‘human health.’” This kind of statement is puzzling. We generally think of medical art as the cause by which the body regains health; even if one were to say medical art is not fundamental, surely one could not say that medical art is the cause of the ill body, could one? What does that mean?
The second is that Teacher Chen quotes Heidegger as saying, “techne (art) can only accommodate phusis (nature), and can promote recovery more or less; but as techne it can never replace phusis, and can never take its place as the arche (origin) of health itself.” I asked: what is the relation between this arche and the “cause” discussed earlier? Are they the same thing?
Teacher Chen did not respond to the first question, but he did respond that, in Aristotle, arche and cause are basically not distinguished from one another.
These two issues suggest that Chen-laoshi’s interpretation has a fundamental deviation. What Chen-laoshi says—that medical art is the cause of the sick body—does not seem to be a slip of the pen, but something he has carefully argued for. In fact, Chen-laoshi is unwilling to say that medical art is the cause of the body’s recovery of health, and thinks that medical art can only accommodate nature and more or less promote health a bit, while the cause of health is “nature.” This is actually a complete misreading. Neither Aristotle nor Heidegger understood medical art in such an awkward way; medical art is the cause of the recovery of health.
The natural things defined by Aristotle are things that themselves possess the principle of motion and change, whereas the cause of artificial things lies outside them. So when a patient recovers health, is the cause inside the patient or outside? Because one has preemptively set health as nature, Chen-laoshi seems to think that the cause of recovery is obviously inside the patient, and thus this “recovery,” this “motion and change,” is like a body’s “natural motion” returning to its natural position, requiring no appeal to an external cause. By contrast, forced motion, which causes a body to deviate from its natural position, requires us to seek a cause from outside it. If one understands recovery in this way, then of course one must set health as the body’s natural state and the sick body as a “forced” state; then the external cause of illness becomes medical art. Such an explanation is quite awkward. If one does not understand it this way, then what? Actually, it is very simple: as long as one abandons Chen-laoshi’s core belief—that man’s natural state is the state of health—everything becomes smooth. What is man’s natural state? It is not some fixed, unchanging state of health. “Birth, aging, illness, and death” is man’s “nature.” Is “illness” an artificial thing? Is the cause of “illness” always outside illness? Not necessarily. Illness also has its nature. If a patient is allowed to “develop naturally,” perhaps he will die; at that point medical art needs to intervene and save him. Then medical art of course is the cause of saving his life—what is there to go around in circles about? If a seriously ill person receives no treatment and is allowed to “develop on his own” naturally, and in the end dies of illness, then his death is “natural.” But if a person is killed by a quack doctor, then his death is not “natural.” If a person recovers spontaneously without treatment, then his recovery is “natural.” If a person recovers through treatment, then his recovery is not “natural.” For death or recovery alike, the issue is whether or not it is natural; it is not that only if a person lives healthily is that called natural, and everything else is unnatural.
All of this is very easy to understand. Precisely because it is easy to understand, Aristotle uses medical art as an example, rather than as an object of analysis.
Aristotle often does not distinguish strictly between principle and cause, but my second question concerns Heidegger’s usage, because when Heidegger inquires into technology he speaks of the four causes as four ways of bringing-forth; silver, the silversmith, and the sacrificial rite are all causes of the silver bowl. Technology is a kind of “bringing-forth”; technology must accord with “nature,” meaning that technology must bring forth the nature of a thing, for example the silver bowl brings forth the silverness of silver, the waterwheel brings forth the waterness of water, and medical art brings forth man’s health. If what Chen-laoshi wants to emphasize is that medical art brings forth health, summons health, rather than controls health or constructs health, then that is correct. But that does not mean that the silversmith no longer needs to be “responsible” for the silver bowl, or that the doctor can no longer be “responsible” for recovery. When we ask why a person recovered, we can still correctly say, “because of the doctor’s treatment.” If the Heidegger sentence Chen-laoshi cited was not taken out of context, then we can only understand Heidegger as speaking on different levels; that is to say, beyond the sense in which the doctor is the cause of recovery, one must also emphasize that the doctor’s way of causing is to bring forth and promote health rather than to construct or create health.
The third issue is a hard flaw. Chen-laoshi quotes: “Aristotle once spoke of the special phenomenon of a doctor healing himself.”
“Nature is the first principle and cause of motion and rest in the thing in which it is present primarily and not incidentally. I say ‘not incidentally,’ because, for example, a doctor may perhaps be the cause of his own recovery. But he is not, as a patient, the possessor of medical skill: the doctor and the patient are the same person only by accident. That is precisely why these two attributes are often difficult to be found together. So too are all other products of skill. No product of skill has within itself its own principle of production. Yet although in some cases (for example, houses and other artifacts) the principle is external to the thing, in other cases, namely when a motion and change are incidentally initiated in the thing itself, the principle resides in those things themselves (but not because of themselves).”
Chen-laoshi interprets this as follows: “Here Aristotle’s meaning should be quite clear. Namely, a normal body ‘by nature’ possesses health, but when he loses health, the intervention of medical art becomes necessary. And although elsewhere he has emphasized that the ‘lack’ (steresis) of health may also constitute a special form of the body, and that the goal of the body’s health must also lie outside the activity of medical art as a skill, he still, to a great extent, attributes the efficient cause of the body that has lost health to medical art.”
Here Chen-laoshi’s interpretation falls into confusion. In fact, Aristotle’s meaning here is indeed quite clear, but obviously has nothing to do with what Chen-laoshi says. What Aristotle is doing here is defining what nature is: nature is “because of itself,” that is, the cause of motion and change lies within itself. But Aristotle says this definition is not precise enough, so here he emphasizes that this “because of itself” cannot be accidental; being because of itself accidentally does not count as nature. What does “accidentally because of itself” mean? Aristotle gives the example of a doctor healing himself. In the case of a doctor healing himself, the doctor’s recovery is indeed “because of himself,” but this situation is “purely accidental.” In fact, in the usual situation of “the patient recovers because of the doctor,” the recovery is not because of the patient himself, but because of the doctor, so the recovery is not “natural”; whereas in the case where by chance the doctor is also the patient, although it is “because of himself,” because this situation is an accidental case within ordinary medical activity, one cannot say the doctor’s recovery is “natural.”
The logic here is very clear. What Aristotle says is completely the opposite of what Chen-laoshi says. The fact that a patient recovers because of the doctor is obviously “unnatural,” and Chen-laoshi, because of his powerful preconceptions, insists on explaining recovery as “due to nature,” with the result that everything becomes muddled.
The reason I spend so many words here clarifying my criticism is, on the one hand, that perhaps I did not make myself clear enough at the conference itself; on the other hand, it is because my impression is that Chen-laoshi is a reliable scholar, and the defects in this article are very likely “by accident.” My criticism is aimed at this article, not at Chen-laoshi. Out of respect for Chen-laoshi, I am willing to explain it in more detail.
Below is Dongbei University Professor Deng Ming speaking on “An Interpretation of the Existential-Spatial Thought of Architectural Phenomenology.” Teacher Deng Bo commented.
Starting from the phenomenological concept of space, Teacher Deng organized the thought of architectural phenomenology, but I did not listen carefully to this presentation; when I later looked back at the paper, I also found it somewhat hard to grasp its main points, so I will not comment much. I feel that this sort of article seems too abstract; if it could include more vivid examples, it should be better.
The final presentation of this session was by Beijing Normal University Professor Tian Song on “Can Dogs Count as Meat?” Teacher Tian finished the article only at the last minute before the conference and did not include it in the conference handbook, but he posted a copy in the WeChat group. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, Teacher Tian discussed why dogs have traditionally not been regarded as meat. For example, dogs usually have names, and can go in and out of the living room and even get up on the kang bed. Teacher Tian listed some ethnic cases and everyday scenes to show the place of dogs in people’s lives. His presentation did not use any phenomenological terminology, and yet it was widely recognized as a phenomenological exercise. Teacher Tian did not state bluntly whether one should eat dogs, so much so that Teacher Zhang Qiucheng specifically asked about Teacher Tian’s personal attitude. But in fact, through Teacher Tian’s account, the status of dogs naturally stood out, and the significance of not eating dog meat was naturally revealed as well. Comrade He Tao pointed out that this narrative method, in which meaning reveals itself, is precisely a typical phenomenological method, and Teacher Zhao Weiguo also expressed agreement.
After the morning session ended, the afternoon was devoted to sightseeing. We first went to visit Benxi Water Cave. Benxi Water Cave is a huge karst cave, with an underground river several kilometers long. We put on padded jackets, boarded a boat, and went into the cave and back, listening along the way to the guide’s explanations of one “scene” after another formed by stalactites, such as a sword, Guanyin, an elephant, and so on. And to be honest, this “investigation” really did have phenomenological implications: we are always “seeing” stalactites as something or other, and this experience of “seeing as” is jointly constituted by bodily perception, cultural background, and technological environment.
After coming out of the cave, we visited the adjacent geological museum, which contains many beautiful minerals, as well as many paleontological fossils. The minerals were indeed quite pretty (though they all seemed to have been made into decorative rock ornaments), but the fossils were highly suspicious. Many fossils had obviously been artificially painted over, and these artificial markings seemed too perfect, making them feel especially fake. We guessed that a large number of the fossils were fake, but the museum did not label them as such. If these specimens were in fact all genuine, then one could only say that the museum’s ornamentation was excessive and added unnecessary flourishes.
The final stop was the Silicified Wood Park, a very small park whose main attraction was several pieces of silicified wood, with a pond in the middle containing many challenge installations such as floating bridges, rope bridges, swing bridges, and the like (I can’t even be sure of the names). It originally wasn’t much to look at, but after Teacher Tian Song took the lead in challenging the floating bridge, many teachers and students began taking on the various installations, and this scenic spot unexpectedly became the most joyful part of the trip. Teacher Tian Song fell into the water many times while crossing the floating bridge, and in the end he crawled slowly across to the other side. Professor Wu Guosheng crossed the single-rope bridge barefoot, and the most energetic of all was Zhou Xiyuan, an undergraduate from the University of Macau, who kept challenging it despite falling into the water several times. Some others either tried it or posed for photos, having a marvelous time. I, knowing my own limits, did not want to get soaked, so I watched from the side.
On the last day, September 27, there was still a morning of conference sessions. The sixth and seventh mini-sessions were titled Phenomenological Principles I and II, and both consisted of more theoretically oriented papers.
Professor Zhao Weiguo of Shaanxi Normal University spoke on “The Connotation of Finitude in Kant’s Moral Subject.”
Teacher Zhao believes that traditionally we usually emphasize the positive, active side of “man legislating for nature” in Kant’s philosophy, as if human subjectivity had expanded infinitely after Kant; however, this ignores the connotation of finitude and passivity in Kant’s moral subject. Teacher Zhao attempted to approach Kant’s moral philosophy from this angle.
Teacher Zhao’s paper was obviously something done to fulfill an obligation, and Teacher Zhao himself also admitted that he had not completed the relevant paper originally planned. This paper does not seem to have much relation to phenomenology or philosophy of technology. When Teacher Sheng commented on it, he mentioned the issue of the constitution of the subject, seemingly trying to pull Teacher Zhao’s topic toward phenomenology.
In any case, I still agree with Teacher Zhao’s basic view. My feeling is that in Kant, whether it is the “thing in itself” or the “categorical imperative,” what is actually being emphasized is human finitude; the main point of Kant’s philosophy is always to restrain human “presumption.” My undergraduate thesis was on Kantian ethics. I pointed out that Kant’s philosophy is by no means so-called “anthropocentrism”; Kant’s moral philosophy does not seek to regulate human behavior, but rather to initiate the self-restraint of reason.
Below is Teacher Duan Weiwen from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences speaking on “The Impending Being and Technicized Science.” Teacher Duan did not provide a paper, nor did he have a clear PPT; he simply spoke extemporaneously and at great length, completely ignoring our digestive capacity after two days of tense listening to papers. In Teacher Duan’s remarks, one could occasionally hear a few brilliant phrases, such as “discovering in thinking what cannot be thought and yet must be thought,” which gave one a jolt of spirit, but when taken as a whole, it was as if one had fallen into clouds and mist.
Teacher Duan’s presentation had no commentator arranged, and then Professor Lü Dongguang of Dalian University of Technology spoke on “The Phenomenal Field in Phenomenology” without commentary as well (it seems that originally it had been assigned to Teacher Lei Depeng).
Using Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration, Teacher Lü sorted out Husserl’s concept of “phenomenal field.” I am an outsider to Husserl, and not very familiar with Merleau-Ponty either, but from intuition alone, I always felt that something about this was off, and that the phenomenology had probably been misread. Senior Brother Liu Shengli and Teacher Li Zhangyin both raised criticisms. Teacher Li Zhangyin pointed out that the Chinese concepts in the article were not given in the original language, so it was impossible to know how they corresponded to Husserl’s concepts. Senior Brother Shengli was even more severe, pointing out that this article had been misled by the mistranslation in Jiang Zhihui’s edition of Phenomenology of Perception, turning Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl upside down and resulting in a series of misreadings.
Then came the talk by Liu Zheng, one of Teacher Wu’s new doctoral students this year, on “From Body to Flesh: A Preliminary Discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Ethics.”
Liu Zheng elaborated Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. In Merleau-Ponty, having a body means entering into an environment, linking oneself with others and the world through bodily intentionality. Liu Zheng emphasized that this is a kind of “normativity” in an ontological sense: on the one hand, the body gives meaning to things; on the other hand, it responds to the call of things. In the interaction between body and thing, a “normative situation” is constructed. This situational normativity differs from the unified system of rules sought by traditional normative ethics, but it likewise possesses ethical significance, or rather, in the sense of ethics, this embodied normativity is more originary. Liu Zheng believes that elaborating embodied ethics can promote humanization and democratization in matters of technological design and technological practice in the age of technology.
Teacher Yan Yan commented on Liu Zheng’s paper. Although I previously said that Teacher Yan Yan’s paper was not very reliable, here she raised some issues that were still fairly to the point, such as noting that the article did not develop closely around its title, that it was not clear how bodily ethics should be externalized into social ethics, and that the chapters were not well integrated with one another.
Liu Zheng’s paper involved many issues: from bodily intentionality to bodily normativity, from normativity to ethics, from bodily ethics to social ethics, from self-cultivation to bodily aesthetics, and also the question of technological design. Liu Zheng tied this whole series of issues together, and we seem to feel instinctively that they are related; yet when one reads carefully, there should still be quite a few missing links in the argument that remain to be filled in.
I myself have long tended to understand the relation between body and technology from the angle of “epistemology.” According to Stiegler, technology is tertiary retention, the exteriorization of memory. But the issue of “memory” is not only about “knowledge”; it is also more fundamentally about “normativity.” To speak of memory in normative terms seems more fundamental than confining oneself to the traditional epistemological dimension. Liu Zheng’s article gave me a great deal of inspiration.
For the final, seventh session, first Professor Bao Guoguang of Dongbei University, our host institution, spoke on “Being and Technology in the First and the Other Beginning.” Because the host was busy with conference matters during the tea break and arrived late, and because He Tao, who had originally been expected to speak a bit later, also did not appear in time, Teacher Zhang Qiucheng, who had been scheduled as the third speaker, ended up reporting first. But here I have still recorded things in the order listed in the conference handbook.
Teacher Bao is a steadfast “Heidegger fan.” Every time, he persistently writes articles interpreting Heidegger’s texts. Although at least more than half of our conference participants could be counted as Heidegger’s followers, when it comes to devotion to Heidegger, Teacher Bao is probably hard to rank second. Yet the most obsessed person is not necessarily the one who understands best; compared with a devoted lover, perhaps a calm bystander understands that person more accurately and more comprehensively. Teacher Bao is obsessed with Heidegger’s texts, but cannot pull himself free.
I did not read Teacher Bao’s article carefully, because I always feel that what he writes is harder to read than Heidegger directly. What Teacher Bao does is to distill Heidegger, but what he distills are mainly various concepts and propositions, while leaving out more of the lubricating material. This means that people unfamiliar with Heidegger cannot understand Teacher Bao’s article at all, while those who are familiar do not need to read it.
This past year I have been hosting a reading group. After finishing Kuhn, we went on to read Being and Time; several years ago I also read it once with Wu Ningning, Jing Qi, and others. I feel that my guidance in leading the reading is pretty good. I have always opposed reading texts as “key points”; being able to summarize and distill does not mean much. The real sign of having understood a text is being able to give examples. So after each section we finished, our focus was not on summarizing the key points, but on “for example…,” “just like…,” “similar to…,” “nothing more than….” When we can ourselves find cases and use them to demonstrate by analogy the issues involved in the relevant text, then we count as having understood it and read it through. Although such understanding is very likely a kind of misreading or superficialization, only this sort of understanding is what digests Heidegger’s text into one’s own.
Teacher Bao’s interpretation, by contrast, remains quite external. In Teacher Bao’s paper, one rarely sees vivid examples, and the “density of terms” is even higher than in Heidegger’s original text. The significance of such an article is at most nothing more than helping me “confirm” my own understanding of Heidegger.
Zhao Weiguo also pointed out, in his comments, that the words themselves are not the most crucial issue. In response to Professor Bao’s statement that Heidegger “left beings behind to inquire into Being,” Professor Zhao said that Heidegger did indeed say something like that in a certain context, but more often than not he was still talking about the Being of beings. Heidegger’s later concept of “being proper” also need not be made to sound so mysterious and obscure; in fact it is just the Being he had spoken of before, just “things,” and not only good things either. Something “coming from being proper” can also be a bad thing; it is not the same thing as “poetic dwelling.”
Professor Zhao’s interpretation may not necessarily be accurate, but this style of interpretation is the one I more strongly agree with: there is no need to treat those terms as if they were so grand and lofty, or to imagine Heidegger’s meaning as so obscure and impossible to guess. I often say in reading groups: whenever you run into something difficult to understand, or somewhere ambiguous, then understand it in the simplest and most straightforward way possible. If it can be read through simply, there is no need to make it complicated. This attitude may not be suitable for reading others, but it is most suitable for reading Heidegger. Heidegger’s books “are paths, not works”; however you go about it, the path that helps you “get through” is the good path, while the path that leaves you lost in it is the bad one. When you encounter confusion, even if you have to charge straight ahead and blaze your own trail to get through, that is still better than getting stuck in the road and treating the road itself as the destination.
Professor Wu’s master’s student, He Tao of Peking University, gave a talk titled “From Tools to Things: Heidegger’s Ontology of Technology and Its Turn.”
He Tao is a member of our reading group. Of course, he had previously also read many of Heidegger’s early and late works carefully, and is one of the new generation’s “Heidegger fans.” Yet his paper was still rather disappointing to me. It was basically still in the form of a textual survey, and when presented it was quite long-winded and dull, failing to make the text come alive. Fortunately, before the conference we had given a trial presentation at the Wumen seminar, and after urgent corrections from Professor Wu and the rest of us, we decided to change strategy for the actual talk: instead of trying to cover everything in his reading report, we would focus on some especially striking parts for discussion. In the end, He Tao’s on-the-spot performance was fairly good. In particular, he highlighted the issue of how a broom, as a broom, reveals itself within the activity of sweeping and its cultural environment, and the effect was good. Besides receiving affirmation from the commentator, Professor Bao, Professor Li Zhangyin also specially praised him for speaking very “beautifully,” and Professor Wu Tong likewise expressed approval.
He Tao also explained during the talk that the broom example came from me. It is true that I had used the broom example in the reading group, though the context was not quite the same; He Tao himself applied it flexibly. When I originally mentioned the broom example, it was to explain how “one and many” come to be seen. Why is a broom seen as “one” object rather than as a stick and a few clumps of straw? This is not directly related to the objective distance between the stick and the straw. If we paste a few clumps of straw onto a desk, we will not see “one X,” but rather a desk and a few clumps of straw. Why is a wooden stick tied with straw seen as “one,” while a desk with straw pasted to it is seen as “many”? Analytical philosophers like to use “X” to characterize things, but once this “X” is posited, the question of how it is possible to see a thing as “one” X has already been skipped over.
Professor Zhang Qiucheng of Northeastern University gave a talk titled “The Convergence and Revival of Phenomenology and Analytical Philosophy: From the Perspective of Philosophy of Mind.”
The paper Professor Zhang submitted was only three pages long, yet the title was extraordinarily grand, inevitably arousing suspicion. From the paper and the talk, Professor Zhang’s integration was still rather external; it mainly amounted to listing the various contributions phenomenology and late Wittgenstein made to philosophy of mind. But this kind of integration is very superficial. In the history of philosophy, there has never been any integration accomplished by simply summing up the contributions of two great traditions. Kant obviously did not say that rationalism had such-and-such contributions, empiricism had such-and-such advantages, and then sum them up. The “convergence” in the history of philosophy often appears as a subversive transcendence, as stepping outside the dimension of the tradition and opening up a new intellectual space.
Judging from Professor Zhang’s current work, he is obviously still far from his ambition. The commentator, Professor Sheng Xiaoming, also advised him not to overreach: as for the convergence of the two great traditions, perhaps we should wait for someone even greater than Wittgenstein to accomplish it. But Professor Zhang Qiucheng said that he did have such an expansive vision; if one does not try, how can one know it cannot be done?
Then Professor Li Yimin of Jiujiang University gave a talk titled “The Essence of Number: The Dispute Between Husserl and Frege,” and Professor Zhang Changsheng offered comments. This topic is really not my area of expertise, so I won’t comment on it.
The final session was given by an undergraduate student, Zhou Xiyuan from the University of Macau, who spoke on “Reflections on Research Methods in the Social Sciences.”
Zhou Xiyuan had read many articles by teachers in our circle, including my Suixuan; he had stumbled into contact with Professor Li Zhangyin by email, and was recognized at once by Professor Li, who recommended him to this conference. Zhou Xiyuan participated very seriously, both in and out of the session, actively engaging in discussion. He is a young man of great potential. However, his conference presentation was not performed well. Of course, this was related to his lack of conference experience. He did not deliver an impromptu speech based on PPT slides, but his speaking was not fluent either, and he stumbled through it. His article involved many things and contained many of his own distinctive thoughts, but in a conference one obviously cannot assume that the other teachers have already read one’s article; rather, one must actively bring out the highlights of one’s own paper.
As Professor Wu said in the conference summary, Zhou Xiyuan’s hatred of mathematization was somewhat “an overcorrection.” In off-stage exchanges, I also mentioned to him that phenomenology merely emphasizes that modern science has forgotten its origin; it does not completely reject mathematization itself.
Of course, as a young person, Zhou Xiyuan has the right to be a bit one-sided. Academic enthusiasm and interest are the most important things.
And then came the closing ceremony of this year’s conference.
Professor Sheng Xiaoming reviewed the history of the past nine meetings and thought that we were “gradually entering the best state,” growing more and more confident, no longer needing to constantly proclaim that we were doing phenomenology. Once the “Ren and Du meridians” have been opened, whatever you do counts as phenomenology. Professor Sheng felt that we have a stronger sense of problems than those who do Western philosophy. Then Professor Li Zhangyin also shared his views. While affirming our distinctive way of “doing phenomenology,” Professor Li also reminded us that training in the basics still cannot be neglected, and that tension must be maintained between practical application and textual research.
Finally, Professor Wu Guosheng delivered the concluding remarks. He first thanked the host team led by Professor Bao Guoguang, and then pointed out that next year’s tenth conference should have some commemorative activities. Professor Wu mentioned that we should put together an excellent paper collection, and that there should also be an English edition. I felt this proposal was rather unreliable; it would already be pretty good if we could manage a Chinese volume. Of course, putting together an album would also be nice.
In the afternoon we went to Guanmenshan for sightseeing, mainly walking along the plank road, and eventually went to see the red leaves of Maple King. The main group seemed to all walk straight to the end first and then ride the sightseeing car back. The smaller group I was in, together with He Tao, Liu Zheng, Senior Brother Shengli, and Zhou Xiyuan, first took the car to the end and then walked all the way back. Maple King itself was not especially interesting to look at, but the few of us had a pleasant time walking and chatting along the way. It was just that the tour guide this time was rather unreliable, neither leading the group nor explaining things clearly, which led several people, including Su Li and Wu Ningning, to take the wrong path and nearly get lost in the mountain road.
Dinner was a whole-fish banquet. As usual, I hid at the table where no one drank, while Liu Zheng, who had already demonstrated his drinking ability the previous night, naturally sat at the drunkard’s table. Unexpectedly, although Liu Zheng could hold his liquor well, he had no self-awareness; he did not know that today’s liquor was different from yesterday’s, or that his bodily condition was different too. So, after similarly going around the circle toasting everyone in one breath, Liu Zheng got completely drunk today and started talking nonsense nonstop, tears streaming down his face. We had no choice but to send him back to the hotel. Afterwards we said Liu Zheng was still too young and still did not know how to drink. Looking at those teachers, their alcohol tolerance may not necessarily have been that high, but they knew how to drink: they understood how to pace the body, not drinking heavily from the start, but gradually coming into the right state, drinking more and more high-spiritedly. I heard they kept drinking baijiu until midnight and then had to move locations to eat barbecue and drink beer. This is also a kind of “embodied ethics,” perhaps. Liu Zheng still needs training. The next day I learned that besides Liu Zheng, Wu Ningning had also overestimated herself that night. She had originally been sitting at my table, but after sending Liu Zheng back, she and Su Li voluntarily went over to that table to fill the vacancy. As a result, after a few rounds they too were thoroughly drunk and ended up completely unconscious. They still had not recovered by the afternoon of the next day.
We returned to Shenyang on the 28th. Liu Zheng, He Tao, and I had booked our tickets together, and we had deliberately chosen later flights so that we could spend a little time wandering around Shenyang. Originally we wanted to visit Shenyang’s Industrial Museum, and Professor Wu had the same idea. In order to catch his flight, he took a taxi first thing in the morning straight to the Industrial Museum. However, just as Professor Wu arrived at the entrance, and we got on the shuttle bus, we realized that the museum was closed on Mondays as usual. In the end, we went to the Shenyang Imperial Palace in the afternoon. Because Zhou Xiyuan had mistaken the time and booked a ticket for the next day, he ended up touring with us as well. There was nothing much to do at the Shenyang Imperial Palace, but it was enough to pass the time.
When booking the return ticket, I had only paid attention to the destination being Beijing South Station and had not paid much attention to the fact that the departure station was “Shenyang South Station.” It was only in the afternoon that we realized Shenyang South Station was in a very remote place, tens of thousands of miles from the city center, basically out in the village. We had no choice but to hurry there by taxi. After arriving at South Station, we discovered that the station looked like a ghost town: in the vast, empty hall, there were hardly any living people in sight. And so it goes: I heard that Shenyang is still building new railway stations, with Shenyang Station, North Station, South Station, New South Station, and it seems there is also an East Freight Station and a West Freight Station, and now they are still building a New North Station. From this it can be seen that the old northeastern industrial base really has no way to revive, or rather, the direction of revival has gone wrong; using overconstruction to solve overcapacity is ultimately a vicious cycle.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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