I had mentioned this in passing on Weibo before, and because it was rather short, I didn’t plan to put it on the blog. Yesterday, at the small reading group, this question came up again, and after thinking it over I decided to post it after all, since it is ultimately a question about the basic orientation of philosophy.
Byzantines Should Regard Themselves as Romans
As a student of Wu, my philosophical position is of course inclined toward continental phenomenology, but in fact I am not very willing to call myself a phenomenologist or a continental philosopher. It is much like how, after the division of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, outsiders called them the Eastern Roman and Western Roman Empires, and later the Eastern Roman Empire came to be called the Byzantine Empire, yet the Byzantines themselves did not identify under the banner of “Byzantium,” but still regarded themselves as “Romans.” Philosophy is similar: twentieth-century philosophy split into continental philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy, and continental philosophy was also called phenomenology, but that is a definition from the viewpoint of outsiders. As far as we ourselves are concerned, we are not “continental philosophers,” nor are we “phenomenological philosophers”; we are simply “philosophers.” Our founding master is not Husserl, but Plato.
Of course, to put it this way is a bit inauspicious. Although the Byzantine Empire claimed to have inherited Roman orthodoxy, it was ultimately a realm with the sun already low in the west, gradually shrinking, until in the end only a lonely city remained, eking out a precarious existence, while the descendants of the “barbarians” grew stronger day by day. Phenomenology seems to share a similar fate: it has already been gradually withering away.
Those of us who incline toward phenomenology must not deceive ourselves; we must face squarely the reality that the phenomenological tradition has been shrinking day by day. Of course, outsiders will think that it is Anglo-American analytic philosophy that has replaced/overwhelmed phenomenology’s position, but for us, what we are really facing is the shrinking of “philosophy” itself.
The birthplace of phenomenology, Germany, long ago had its philosophical world Anglicized. Now only France still retains a relatively strong continental philosophical coloring. But even so, we must see that the decline of phenomenology is an irresistible trend of the times.
We should recognize this clearly and soberly, but this is not an attitude of despair or pessimism. On the contrary, only by recognizing one’s own fate can one recognize one’s own mission, and only then is it possible to act positively and accomplish something.
The Split in Philosophy Under the Rise of Science
Why is it that the phenomenological tradition, or rather the ancient philosophical tradition itself, must tend toward decline in this age?
This has to be explained in two stages. The first stage runs from the last glory of classical philosophy—after German Idealism—to the beginning of the twentieth century, when philosophy faced the major problem of the rise of “science.” On the one hand, many old philosophical topics were taken over by scientists; on the other hand, philosophy itself began to “professionalize.” Kant can be said to be the first great philosopher who made a living as a “professor of philosophy.” From Kant onward, philosophers took up residence in universities and colleges, standing alongside other “professions.”
Philosophy, as the “love of wisdom,” had now become “one wisdom among many”; from the foundation of knowledge, it gradually turned into a specialized body of knowledge. Accompanying this was the rise of “disciplinary learning.” “Science” in the modern sense had fully spread its wings and seized the discursive authority over “knowledge” and even “truth.”
“Science” in the double sense of the term—disciplinization and monopoly over natural knowledge—pressed ever closer on philosophy, and the split between phenomenology and analytic philosophy took place against this historical background.
Some people believed that philosophy should bow its head and submit to science; that, just as science once stood to theology, philosophy should become the modern scientist’s “maidservant.” The philosopher’s only mission was to “help scientists clarify concepts.” This is the origin of analytic philosophy. Although they did not necessarily do a particularly good job of helping scientists clarify concepts, at least they retained a place within the modern scientific disciplinary system. So long as institutional support could be secured, the posture of contemporary analytic philosophers was not necessarily all that humble, but the most basic orientation did not change: unconditional submission to modern science—its conclusions, certainly, but even more its methods and attitudes.
Continental philosophy took another path, or rather several other paths; in any case, it did not readily surrender to science. This includes the phenomenological path represented by Husserl, which exposed “the crisis of European science” and tried to re-found science. In this respect, critical traditions such as the Frankfurt School, which criticized the instrumental rationality accompanying the rise of modern science, also followed another route. There were also life philosophies such as Bergson’s, and alternative, spiritually inclined routes such as Spanish philosophy and Orthodox philosophy, and so on. In short, apart from bowing down to science and calling it master, continental philosophy represented another attitude—or rather, philosophy’s original attitude: a detached, independent stance.
It should be noted that standing above science does not mean seeking to stand over science, much less to direct science. Just as the ancient philosophers’ stance was of course above that of craftsmen, they did not go about instructing craftsmen, nor did they think the craftsmen’s skills were wrong or unreliable. Ancient philosophers could, with complete peace of mind, live in buildings constructed by craftsmen while talking about anything and everything; likewise, modern philosophers can of course comfortably dwell in the world shaped by modern science while discoursing at length.
Phenomenology acknowledges the various achievements of modern science, just as ancient philosophers accepted the various implements created by craftsmen—they were indeed effective, reliable, and even indispensable, but they were still not the sort of thing loved by lovers of wisdom.
Historical Decline: The Contingent and the Necessary
The first stage of decline is not all that different for phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers, though they actively sought shelter under science, found that scientists gave them the cold shoulder and were not especially receptive. In the end they only managed to attach themselves tenuously to the margins of the modern academic system. By contrast, continental philosophers did at one point produce one famous figure after another.
However, in the next stage, continental philosophy was clearly met with greater resistance, and thus came to a complete standstill.
Why was this? On the one hand, there was a relatively contingent, but also highly fatal factor: the rise of the United States and the concomitant dominance of English in the global academic world. For one thing, the United States is a country lacking in cultural depth and does not possess any especially weighty philosophical tradition; the pragmatist philosophy that arose there, though certainly profound in its own way, also indirectly suggests the practical atmosphere of Americans. Moreover, English is also one of the most straightforward and objectifying languages. Thus the cultural atmosphere of the English-speaking world is most naturally suited to analytic philosophy, which prizes clarity and plainness. With the rise of the United States, this perhaps not-necessarily-most-beautiful language became the world language, and the analytic philosophy that fit it most closely naturally came to dominate. In this regard, it is easy to understand why it was precisely French philosophy that managed to preserve the most continental flavor, which is clearly related to the French people’s special attachment to French.
But on the other hand, there was another, more subtle but inescapable factor that constrained the development of continental philosophy: the changes in the academic “media environment.”
Traditionally, what were philosophers’ works? Nothing more than “books.” When we read ancient philosophers, we always read them in units of one classic “brick” after another. Plato’s Republic, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger’s Being and Time—one has to chew through them one by one before one can be considered to have entered philosophy. To read philosophy was, in traditional terms, simply to read philosophical books; that seemed perfectly natural.
Apart from books, there was also oral teaching. The traditional academic system was also organized mainly around the “chair,” but not in the form of the ten-minute or twenty-minute fast-food-style presentations of today’s academic conferences. Rather, it mainly took the form of long lecture series, or teaching semester after semester. Many of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s works are also compilations of lecture notes.
In contemporary times, however, the mainstream academic form is not the book, but the “paper”: a paper is only a few thousand words, and many people need to make their conclusions clear in an abstract of fewer than 500 words.
It should be noted that piling together a dozen papers does not make a book. Or rather, a philosophical book cannot be broken up into a dozen papers. Just imagine: how could you split up the Critique of Pure Reason or Being and Time into papers for publication?
Of course, this is not to say that continental philosophers are incapable of writing short pieces, or that Anglo-American philosophers are incapable of writing large tomes. The key point is that the intrinsic characteristics of continental philosophy determine that it is not good at writing short papers. In an academic environment where publication in papers is the main criterion of evaluation, and papers and conference presentations are the main modes of academic exchange, continental philosophy is naturally bound to decline.
Why Philosophers Are Not Good at Papers
Analytic philosophy is more adept at publishing works in the form of papers, precisely because of their attachment to “science.” Submission to science may not give scientists much help, but it can at least provide them with one crucial advantage: it makes it easier to establish a common public platform for consensus. First, the mainstream conclusions and general methods of the natural sciences form a natural common basis for analytic philosophers to conduct discussion. Second, in keeping with the logic of disciplinary learning, analytic philosophers are skilled at breaking up a domain into fine distinctions, dissecting and extracting the problem, and finally focusing discussion on a small part. The more finely a problem is broken down, the more targeted the discussion can become.
However, as mentioned earlier, phenomenologists do not submit to science; instead, in various ways they seek to re-found science. So often, just as an analytic philosopher begins the first step of division, the phenomenologist may already disagree, because the key to any problem lies precisely in its “premises” — how, exactly, is it possible for us to understand this problem? How is this very division possible? These questions cannot be lightly brushed aside.
Therefore, phenomenologists, like all traditional philosophers, find it difficult to locate a common foundational platform. Each person must instead trace things back to their sources according to his own line of thought and build his own theoretical edifice starting from the most basic questions. Those system-building philosophers naturally want to construct a grand edifice that can stand up to scrutiny, while those “anti-system” philosophers are even less willing to readily accept an already-existing public knowledge system. So they always seem to be talking to themselves, and find it hard to join a highly specialized public domain. To understand a logic that is self-consistent, obviously a paper of a few thousand words is by no means enough.
So, from the perspective of the works that ultimately sediment in the academic world, Anglo-American philosophy tends to crystallize around “propositions,” such as “Hume’s problem,” “Russell’s paradox,” “Hempel’s covering-law model,” “Tarski’s definition of truth,” the “Quine-Duhem thesis,” “Goodman’s new riddle of induction,” “Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat thought experiment,” “Chalmers’s hard problem”… The contributions of one analytic philosopher after another sediment into the scholars’ common platform in the form of these propositions. Analytic philosophers even use this approach to interpret ancient philosophers, breaking their work down into a series of clear and definite propositions or claims. For example, from Kant’s entire Critique of Pure Reason, an analytic philosopher can extract the proposition “existence is not a predicate,” and then rave about it as though Kant had been bestowed with immense honor.
This is not the style of traditional philosophy; this is the style of modern science. A modern scientist only needs to know Newton’s three laws, and does not need to read The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy from cover to cover. The contributions of earlier scientists can be recorded in concise form in the latest textbooks, and the honor of the great is reduced to having one’s name attached to certain propositions or symbols; but beyond the name and the proposition, the great tome and the total personality recede into the shadows.
By contrast, the style of phenomenologists is closer to that of philosophers from ancient times to the present: what they leave behind for the world are books. Heidegger’s contribution is Being and Time, or rather “Heidegger’s philosophy,” and not some “Dasein definition” or “enframing conjecture.” Husserl’s contribution is “Husserl,” Kant’s contribution is “Kant.” More than two thousand years later, we are still reading the Republic, reading it all at once as a whole book.
Modern people have become accustomed to scientific modes of thinking, accustomed to reading anyone’s work on the basis of ready-made, public conceptual foundations, and are unwilling to settle down and slowly enter each philosopher’s unique intellectual space. So naturally they sneer at the traditional style of philosophers. For example, at the beginning of his The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Reichenbach quotes a passage from Hegel and mocks it: look at what this is writing — it simply doesn’t speak like a human being!
They dissect philosophers into a collection of propositions and little snippets of discourse, splitting out a fragment to flog, and of course they are then in an invincible position,
The True Philosophical Work Is the Person Himself
We must soberly realize that the analytic, or rather modern scientific, style of research is more suited to the academic exchange environment of the information age, and is more conducive both to high output and to cumulative progress.
But if that is so, why should we not surrender? Why should we still cling to an old style? The reason is very simple: what we seek is not here.
It is like this: if we are looking for a key, should we search under the bright streetlamp, or deep within the gloomy forest? Under the streetlamp everything is clear and definite, and it is easy to divide up the area and cooperate through division of labor: you search this block, I search that block; the efficiency is extremely high, and now and then you even find a few coins. Deep in the forest, however, it is dim and unlit, the boundaries are vague, and you may not even find companions to work with… so does that mean the wise person should naturally go look under the streetlamp? No! Where one should search has never depended on where things are clearest; the key question is: where was the thing you are looking for lost?
So what exactly is it that philosophy seeks? According to the ancient Greek maxim, it is nothing other than “know thyself”; according to Kant, the questions philosophy asks are nothing but the three great questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” Or one overarching question: “What is man?”; according to the most common formulation, there are nothing but three great questions: “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?”
In short, philosophy asks about the “I,” about the “self.” Philosophy starts from the “I” and ends with the “I.” What philosophy concerns itself with is always the irreplaceable self; no one can live my life for me, and no one can die for me. Science or tools can help me do many things, but how to recognize them as part of “me” and trace their origins and development as one would reflect on the self is still not something others can do on my behalf.
And the “I” is a complete unity, not something composed of fragments of propositions. No matter from what angle I inquire into the origins and development of the self, my individuality will run through my philosophy.
Of course, no self stands outside the world in aloof isolation; the self and others can communicate. But this communication is not an “exchange.” “I” am not like a robot or a set of Lego bricks, from which some parts can be taken out and directly assembled onto another person. Human mutual understanding is achieved through “sympathy,” through “empathy.”
What philosophers truly care about is always themselves, their own “I.” Therefore, the philosopher’s true work is precisely himself. Through books, the philosopher presents and expresses the “I” that he has reflected upon and pursued.
This is the fundamental difference between philosophers and sophists: a sophist’s speech and writing can submit to external aims. For example, even if he clearly does not agree with something, in order to create an effect for the show, or in order to swindle money, he can talk about it from the standpoint of utility and expediency. Thus the sophist’s writings need not be unified. One can take their utterances apart according to relevant functions or purposes and understand them separately. But the philosopher writes in order to persuade himself, not others; therefore the philosopher does not necessarily need to labor over constructing a system, and his writings also tend toward unity, because his writings are nothing but expressions of the “self.” The unity of personality and the unity of the writings mutually guarantee each other; the independence of personality and the independence of the writings mutually support each other.
The formation of an independent personality cannot be completed on some abstract island cut off from the world; the maturity of an independent personality requires interaction. Human beings always grow through mutual communication with other independent personalities. If in a person’s eyes there are no other independent individuals, only countless isolated “behaviors” coming from outside, then his personality is probably not sound.
An ordinary person, in order to form an independent personality of his own, needs to deal with others as complete, independent individuals. And a philosopher, in order to reflect upon and position the self under historical conditions, also needs to use other independent personalities as points of reference.
To read philosophical works is not to extract from them a few useful phrases, but to deal with other free and immortal minds.
The true philosophical work is neither a paper nor a book, but each philosopher himself. Through unified and self-consistent writings, philosophers present their reflections on the self and its situation. Philosophers strive to endure in the world as complete personalities, rather than merely as pale nominal symbols.
No matter how times change, no matter how the media or technological environment evolves, humanity’s concern for the self never ceases; to seek immortality is itself an immortal quest. In this sense, anyone who can reflect, anyone who tries to embody the unity of the self in various external actions, is a “philosopher.” The difference is that an ordinary independent personality only manifests its power in dealings with family and friends, whereas those philosophers who become classics can transcend the limits of time and space and continue to communicate with readers in the distant future.
In view of this, although philosophy will certainly decline, there is no need to worry that it is heading toward extinction. Only if there comes a day when human beings no longer care about the “oneness” of the self, only if self-consciousness itself can be standardized, disassembled, and reassembled like Lego bricks, will philosophy truly face the crisis of extinction. Perhaps computers do not need philosophy; artificial intelligence does not care about “the One.” An intelligent program can at any moment split into countless equal subprograms and then recombine them at any moment. For such a form of intelligence, the ancient philosophical tradition would probably really be obsolete. But at least for human beings today, “proposition philosophy” is still far from being able to replace “personality philosophy.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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