6.We have already become familiar with using digital technologies such as Tencent Meeting for online education. Please, based on your personal experience and with appropriate reference to the thought of philosophers such as Heidegger, Winner, McLuhan, and/or Arendt, comment on online education: Will online education completely replace offline education? If not, what irreplaceable significance does offline education have? If it can, then in an environment dominated by online education, what differences will there be in the cultivation of knowledge and humanity?
Because last semester’s final assignment was not due until the beginning of this semester, and after the term started I was, on the one hand, busy with all sorts of pointless odds and ends, while on the other hand I ran straight into allergy season. Every spring my allergies torment me half to death, and this year was no exception; when my rhinitis flares up I can do absolutely nothing. In short, I dawdled and dawdled until now before finally writing this summary.
“Introduction to Philosophy of Technology” is an old course. I taught two rounds of it in the autumn of 2018 and the autumn of 2019 (see the course summary for the syllabus), and later I turned the lecture notes into a book, Introduction to Philosophy of Technology. Then I paused for two years. On the one hand, I opened new courses such as “History and Philosophy of Media”; on the other hand, since the lectures had already become a book, I did not much feel like repeating them, because either I would simply read from the script, which would be pointless, or I would have to come up with something distinctive and teach it in a new form.
Last year I once again offered the graduate course Selected Readings in Original Works of Philosophy of Technology. The way I taught that course was to read the book aloud paragraph by paragraph and explain it, while the students asked questions at any time. This is a somewhat lazy way of teaching: the teacher does not need much extra preparation, and the students do not need to preview the material; we just read, chat, and the class is over. After the course ended I felt the result was not bad, so I simply decided to try another round in this way for undergraduates as well.
This semester I am auditing Professor Wu’s reading course, which is also on Heidegger, and his course design places very high demands on the students. Each student must read dozens of pages of text in advance every week, and then write a 500-character assignment. Each student must also speak in turn in class, one by one, about their reading experience and questions. In fact, I myself prefer this kind of class structure more: student participation is high, and the discussion atmosphere is strong.
Still, I continued to run the course in a hands-off mode, placing very little pressure on the students, roughly for the following reasons:
1. I am not good at hosting, and I do not have enough aura;
2. For something like Heidegger, a philosophically dense text that seems forbiddingly difficult, students with no philosophical background find it hard to get started; line-by-line explanation, hand in hand, can greatly lower the threshold for entry and reduce frustration;
3. The subtleties of such philosophical texts lie not in their conclusions but in the details of their arguments; a summary-style discussion may lose the taste for profound meaning in plain words;
4. The discussion-seminar model is suitable for small classes of fewer than 20 students; the ideal number may be around 10, and it is not suitable for larger classes with a broader audience.
5. I prefer to give students freedom. I think general-education courses can be “listened to casually”; if one can gain a little inspiration here and there, that is already quite good.
In short, I made the course’s hard requirements as relaxed as possible, but that does not mean I wanted to merely skate by. If I really wanted to skate by, this course had already been offered two rounds, and it would not have been any trouble to recycle the old lecture notes and offer it again; nor would there have been any need to use a new way of teaching it. Perhaps some students really thought I was the kind of person who likes to slack off and can be fooled, so when a batch of slackers actually signed up as a group, I could only go all out and give out a dozen failing grades.
Aside from those who barely listened and tried to coast for credit, the other students should have received the course fairly well. Judging from the university’s teaching evaluation data, it was at an average-to-above-average level, and the lowest scores, as usual, were for items like “strict requirements.” What I myself valued more was actually classroom attendance: even knowing full well that I never took roll, by the end of the semester the attendance rate still remained above half. The key point is that among the 65 students in total, there were more than a dozen slackers who almost never listened and were destined to fail; even if I had spoken as brilliantly as possible, I still could not have attracted students who did not listen.
In addition, the final class session already featured a clear statement that it would not be on the exam, as an extra piece of material; at the time, because of the outbreak of the epidemic and the approach of the exam period, many students were in a very difficult situation. Even under those circumstances, some twenty people still came to the Tencent Meeting, and afterward another 19 people downloaded the video to watch it again. This shows that among the students who attended normally, more than half could be attracted by the course content itself.
Course Content
Below I will briefly summarize the course content. In the earlier graduate course I chose Heidegger’s writings on philosophy of technology, and focused exclusively on Heidegger. But for the undergraduate course I felt it should be enriched a bit, with a few more philosophers introduced. Conveniently, last year Professor Wu’s edited volume Classic Texts in Philosophy of Technology was reissued, and I selected a number of articles from it as course reading materials, including Heidegger, Mumford, Ellul, Winner, Stiegler, McLuhan, and Arendt.
Among them, both of Heidegger’s articles were read and explained paragraph by paragraph in class. The first was “The Spatiality of the Surrounding World,” excerpted from Being and Time; the second was the complete “The Question Concerning Technology.” The first was read over three weeks, the second over seven weeks; for a total of ten weeks (two class hours per week) we read Heidegger. The later philosophers then returned to the lecture-PPT format, but unlike previous years, when each week had one theme, this time the course was organized around philosophers. Lecture 11 was on Mumford; 12 on Ellul and Winner; 13 on McLuhan; 14 on Stiegler; and 15 on Marx through Arendt.
The main reason for choosing these people later on was simply that I am more familiar with them. Of course, the reason I especially like these people (and thus know them well) also has certain common features. In Professor Wu’s anthology they are divided into three broad critical traditions: “social-political,” “philosophical-phenomenological,” and “anthropological-cultural.” But in my view there is actually another way to classify them, namely “first philosophy of technology” and “special-topic philosophy of technology”—“philosophy of technology as first philosophy” is also Professor Wu’s formulation.
What is called special-topic philosophy of technology, or what Professor Wu calls “philosophy of technology as a departmental philosophy,” means “technology” as one topic or object of philosophical discussion. For example, a philosopher may be most concerned with ethical issues, but along the way also touches on technical issues, discussing technology from the standpoint of a philosopher or by using various philosophical resources. Philosophy of technology in this sense stands alongside political philosophy, value philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of art, and so on, existing as a branch within the larger category of philosophy.
Philosophy of technology as first philosophy, however, is not, or not only, about taking technology as the object of discussion; rather, it means taking technology as the basis or point of entry for discussion. The focus of philosophy of technology in this sense is not “technical problems,” but “first problems.”
Different philosophers will formulate the first problem differently. The ancient Greek oracle has been passed down for generations: “Know thyself.” Kant’s formulation is also representative. Kant believed that the basic questions of philosophy are nothing more than three: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? And these three great questions ultimately reduce to one fundamental question: “What is man?” I myself have a more colloquial way of putting it: the great questions of philosophy are nothing more than the “three questions of the soul”: “Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?” (There is a more traditional way of saying it: “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?”—the meaning is roughly the same, though I think it is not as direct as the former).
In short, the first question of philosophy, or the first object of philosophical inquiry, has always simply been “I.” Of course, many philosophers believe that when inquiring into the “I,” there is no need to involve “technology,” because technology has traditionally been regarded as something “external to the body,” an added enhancement of the human being, a “bonus” rather than an essential component of what constitutes a “person.” Others, by contrast, believe that when one inquires into the “I,” “technology” is unavoidable: technology is what makes humans human; it is a basic condition for human being, or at least one of the basic conditions.
So in the texts I selected, the fundamental problem that Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Ellul, McLuhan, Stiegler, and others are concerned with is “human beings.” Winner was selected as a contrast to Ellul, while the final Arendt was selected as an extension of Marx. Of course, if one looks only at her book The Human Condition, Arendt can also be said to be a philosopher of technology as first philosophy; her analysis of labor and work is a profound revelation of the human condition.
Aside from Heidegger, the other course materials were mostly based on things I had lectured on even earlier, but it seems that, except for McLuhan, much of the material is still only in PPT form, and I will gradually sort it out into writing.
Exam Questions and Commentary
Choose any 4 of the following questions to answer. Total word count must not exceed 5,000 characters. Each question is worth 25 points.
The exam questions still follow my usual style: choose three or four out of seven or eight questions, giving students more freedom. All of the questions are open-ended essay questions, with no standard answers; they test reading and thinking. Questions 1 and 2 are on Heidegger, each extracting a passage from the two texts for students to interpret. Questions 3 and 4 take two lectures from the later philosophers—Mumford, Ellul-Winner—and use them for the exam; the questions also quote a passage from the reading materials, clearly still encouraging students to answer by centering on or citing the text (what left me speechless was that quite a number of students did not understand this point; of course, perhaps they simply had not read the text at all, and when answering did not know to cite it). Questions 5, 6, and 7 are open-ended, requiring students to use or imitate the philosophers’ ways of thinking to comment on concrete human situations. Roughly speaking, the smaller the question number, the more “substantial” the question; the larger the number, the more “free” the question. The more free-form questions are relatively easier to bluff your way through: as long as you can roughly write some personalized thoughts, you can pass. So in my imagination, those students who did not read after class and only wanted to coast for a grade should have concentrated on the later questions. But that was not the case: many slackers also chose the first two questions, and several even copied Heidegger’s entire surrounding context, word for word and unaltered, and handed it in as their answer. There was even one who went even further and submitted Heidegger’s original text after using a text-spinning tool on it. It was truly astonishing. They would not even take a passing grade handed to them for free, insisting instead on provoking the teacher’s bottom line in this way; I truly cannot understand it.
The numbers of students who chose each question were, in order, 34, 47, 51, 38, 24, 44, and 14. The average score was around 80. After excluding the failing students, the average score was roughly around 86. The second question had the lowest average score, and the last question the highest. Commentary follows in order.
1. See page 282 of the reading materials: people first measure the distance of things according to what is “natural” and “objective,” and therefore tend to call the explanation and evaluation above of the function of de-distancing “subjective.” But such “subjectivity” probably reveals what is most real in the “reality” of the world; this “subjectivity” has nothing whatsoever to do with subjective arbitrariness or subjective “opinions,” because the being that subjectivism sees as “in itself” is a different matter altogether.
—In light of the context and your own understanding, explain the meaning of the “subjectivity” and “reality” of de-distancing. What relation do this subjectivity and reality bear to the objectivity pursued by the natural sciences?
The first question was excerpted from Being and Time; if you simply look at the context around this passage, you can see what the point is: the sentence before the text in the question reads, “People may know the objective distance accurately, but this knowing is still blind; it lacks the function of approaching the surrounding world in the way of circumspective disclosure. People only use such knowledge in order to exist toward the world that is ‘concerned with people’s conduct’, and within this existence of taking care, they do not measure distances.” The sentence after it reads, “The circumspective de-severing activity of everyday Dasein discloses the being-in-itself of the ‘real world,’ and this ‘real world’ is precisely the being that Dasein, as existing Dasein, has always already existed in dependence on.”
In short, the reason this is called “subjectivity” is precisely that “circumspective activity” always takes place within my “surroundings,” and in the end always concerns my own behavior and conduct. And the reason this is called “reality” is the “in-itself” and “always already” character of the so-called “real world.” The “objectivity” pursued by the natural sciences, by contrast, seeks “accuracy,” but what is accurate is not necessarily “real”; only when this accurate knowledge is given its proper “use” in life do scientific truths reveal reality.
The idea that “correct is not necessarily real” is something I actually emphasized when I lectured on The Question Concerning Technology. I gave an example: suppose someone comes running toward me. I can acquire a great deal of correct knowledge, such as “this person is 1.78 meters tall, weighs 89 kilograms, is running from east to west, at a speed of 8 meters per second…” and so on. As science advances and technology develops, I can keep increasing the precision of this knowledge, for example: “He is 1.785 meters tall, weighs 89.3 kilograms, is running 12 degrees north of east, at a speed of 8.05 meters per second…” and so forth. This string of knowledge is indeed more “precise” and more “correct” than the previous one. But does this more precise knowledge necessarily have greater “disclosing power”? Is it necessarily more helpful for me to understand my “real situation”? Not necessarily. Perhaps my real situation is: “There’s a strong murderer charging at me with a watermelon knife in hand!”—perhaps there is more ambiguity or inaccuracy in that sentence, for example, what exactly counts as “strong”? Or, if he hasn’t been sentenced yet, he can only be called a suspect, not a criminal; perhaps the weapon in his hand is a large broadsword rather than a watermelon knife… In short, perhaps the former kind of proposition is incomparably accurate, while the latter is ambiguous and unclear, but what can help me grasp my actual situation more quickly and more vividly is probably the latter proposition. Sometimes I don’t even need a proposition at all; perhaps it is a finger-pointing gesture, perhaps a cry of “Murder!”—something that helps me “circumspectively disclose” this menacing killer.
Heidegger thinks that what is disclosed in this way is the more “real” thing. It reveals the subject’s immediate situation, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with “subjective guesswork.” A timely shout of warning, rather than plunging one into a world of subjective imagination, is in fact what pulls one out of subjective imagination and back into the real world. On the contrary, if a killer is closing in on you and you are still calculating in your head whether he is 1.78 meters or 1.79 meters tall, that is what comes closer to so-called “subjectivism.”
What is harder in this question is to further interpret the relationship between reality and objectivity. In fact, it is enough to indicate the priority relation in broad outline. Heidegger does not deny natural science’s pursuit of objectivity, but what he wants to emphasize is the priority relation between reality and objectivity. The immediate, surrounding, real life-world is prior; it is the basis of all knowledge. “Objective distance” is the product of a special de-severing mode of circumspection, the result of “abstraction” and “construction.”
The naturalist, or scientistic, view would also agree that natural science is a kind of “abstraction,” but the difference is that the modern scientific attitude generally takes the result of abstraction to be the “essence,” and that is a reversal. Statements like “everything can have its objective distance measured” and “every phenomenon can have its mathematical principles abstracted from it” are similar to the claim that “anyone can be photographed.” Photography is also a kind of “abstraction”: it ignores complex information such as a person’s experience, thoughts, temperament, identity, and so on, and extracts only the appearance from a specific perspective under specific lighting conditions, producing a photograph. Anyone can be photographed—that is “universality”; a photograph can faithfully reflect this person’s appearance—that is “correspondence”; a photograph can present quantifiable bodily proportional relations—that is “precision”; a photograph can be taken and developed repeatedly—that is “repeatability”; a photograph can be witnessed by countless people, and different people see the same photograph—that is “objectivity”; a photograph is clear at a glance, with all information visibly on the surface, with no mysterious dimension—that is “disenchantment”… In short, we can acknowledge that photographs possess such “scientificity,” but none of this means that a person’s photograph is that person’s “essence.” If you think the photograph is the real essence, while the living, breathing person is a questionable or even illusory “appearance,” then you have put the cart before the horse and gone mad. But the problem is that many people think that the symbolic formulas and mathematical models obtained through special abstraction are the true essence of this world, while the vivid and rich life-world is “merely appearance.” This is where the crisis of modern science lies.
A few students also answered from their own line of thought, and gave me some pleasant surprises. For example, one student pointed out that “if subjectivity is not real, then objectivity has no foundation,” which I thought was very much to the point. Of course, this is a simple fact, because the foundation of scientific research is always one concrete individual scientist after another; if an individual’s life is unreal and insubstantial, then science obviously cannot even get off the ground.
2. Read the material, page 295: But precisely because human beings are, more primitively than natural energy, subjected to the challenge, that is, driven into ordering (Bestellen), human beings have never become a pure stockpiled presence.
——In light of the context and your own understanding, briefly explain the concepts of “challenge,” “ordering,” and “stockpiled presence,” and the place of the human being within them.
This passage is from The Question Concerning Technology. In the text before the excerpt, Heidegger gives examples such as “human resources” and “forest rangers” to explain how human beings are subjected to the challenge more primitively than natural energy; in the text after the excerpt, he says, “By engaging in technology, human beings participate in ordering as a mode of revealing. But the unconcealment in which ordering unfolds itself is never a human product, nor is it the domain through which a human being as subject passes whenever he stands in relation to an object.” But to understand it properly, one needs to look a bit further before and after, for example at the meanings of concepts such as challenge and ordering, as well as at the later sentences: “… we need only become aware, without any presuppositions, of that which always already has occupied human beings, and this occupation is so definite that human beings have always been possible only as beings thus occupied. Wherever human beings open their ears and eyes, open their hearts, wherever in thought and striving, cultivating and working, asking and thanking they open themselves, they will see themselves already brought into the unconcealed.”
Quite a few students chose this question, but the average score was the lowest, because it is rather difficult to answer well and easy to answer in a rather mediocre form. Many answer sheets looked like this: 1. challenge: means blah blah; 2. ordering: means blah blah; 3. stockpiled presence: means blah blah; 4. the human position: ….
Anyone who has read Heidegger should be very clear that this kind of “glossary entry” style of interpretation is very un-Heideggerian. It tears apart Heidegger’s originally interconnected expressions, and this fractured reading in turn makes it hard to understand the interrelation of the concepts. None of the several students who received the highest scores used this 1, 2, 3, 4 answering pattern. A better approach is to connect these concepts and explain them as a whole; even if one deviates a little from Heidegger’s own line of thought, that still makes for a very good answer.
Simply put, “challenge” is the mode of revealing characteristic of modern technology. Compared with ancient technology, its feature is that it “leaves no room for maneuver,” meaning that things no longer have any independence apart from the meaning of being “pre-ordained,” or in other words being “ordered.” Everything then remains “ready” in the direction already laid out in advance, like “inventory” already fully fabricated and standing by at any moment; this is what is called “stockpiling” or “standing-reserve.”
Once one has simply connected the meanings of these key concepts, one can return to the question of “the human position.” One must remember that the prompt requires one to “combine the context and your own understanding.” Some people merely copied a few sentences of context without showing their own understanding; others improvised freely but failed to stay anchored in the context. Neither is good enough. If you combine with the context, you can simply borrow the examples Heidegger gives of the forest ranger and “human resources”; if you add your own understanding, you may as well provide two additional examples, and that would be excellent.
Simply put, the human position is first of all to be “the first to bear the brunt” of the challenge; and precisely because one bears the brunt, once one is able to “open one’s heart,” one may more directly “become aware” of the fate that challenges one, and thus understand the corresponding limits and possibilities.
3. Mumford says, “The machine age did not begin in the eighteenth century, but rather at the very beginning of civilization.” (Reading material, page 484)
——Briefly explain Mumford’s line of thought, and comment on what significance his related ideas have for understanding modern industrial culture.
This question is relatively easy to pass, as long as one brings out the key concept of the “mega-machine.” The modern machine as a concrete artifact has its prototype in some kind of “social machine,” or, in Mumford’s own words: a machine of aggregation (of human groups), a power machine, and so on, including the mobilization of aggregated groups to build large-scale projects such as pyramids, and including military machines that maintain strict order. Modern machine industry, represented by power machines and assembly lines, is nothing more than the materialization of this prototype machine; without the social techniques that organize human groups in machinic fashion, the Industrial Revolution could never have begun.
The harder part is the commentary in the second half of the question—what help is there for understanding our own age in tracing the origins of the machine age back to antiquity? If one thinks of the title of Mumford’s later major work, The Myth of the Machine, the point is easy to grasp: the task is nothing other than to “demythologize the machine.” Modern people often take pride in the achievements of machines, thinking how far they have surpassed the ancients, as if the person who controls machines can control everything. But Mumford says that the power of machines is nothing new; it has existed for a long time, and in ancient times it often took the form of authoritarianism. The authoritarian, monotonous, and “anti-life” traits inherent in this mega-machine are by no means absent in the new machine age either. If one overadorns machine power with faith, then modern people are not much wiser than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.
In the later part of the reading material Mumford has some excellent remarks directed against human arrogance and superstition, which can be directly quoted to develop the point, for example:
“Since before the age of the pyramids, the inventors and controllers of the mega-machine have in fact been haunted by illusions of omniscience and omnipotence, whether these illusions were directly manifested or imagined. These original illusions have not become more rational; they are still the great driving force behind precise science and high-energy technology today. The concepts of absolute power, absolutely reliable computer intelligence, and infinitely expandable productivity in the atomic age culminate in a system of total control. This system of total control is implemented by the military-scientific-industrial elite, corresponding to the concept of sacred kingship in the Bronze Age. This power, succeeding according to its own logic, must destroy the symbiotic cooperation among all species and communities, which is extremely important for human survival and development.”
Although Mumford’s text is relatively simple, very few students were able to connect it together and identify the crux of the matter. I remember two students who noticed the target of critique in the “illusion of omniscience and omnipotence,” and those two students also happened to be the top two overall.
4. Ellul believes that modern technology “has all its parts so intertwined with one another that it is impossible to separate them, impossible to solve any one technical problem in isolation,” while Winner believes we should pay more attention to specific technical objects; each specific technology and related artifact may have a particular political tendency. Are these two views contradictory? If so, which do you support more? If not, please explain.
There is no standard answer to this question; one can simply say they are not contradictory, or that they are contradictory, or that they are superficially contradictory but not contradictory in essence. Any answer is acceptable. What is most taboo is an incoherent line of logic, such as when some people begin with “they are not contradictory,” and then the content they write is actually about how they are contradictory.
It is actually quite obvious that I am saying something contradictory. The contradiction is in fact what the academic world calls the “empirical turn in philosophy of technology”: the Dutch school holds that, including Winner, including Ihde, Feenberg, and a group of other American philosophers of technology, all represent this turn, namely a shift in attention from capital-T “Technology” to the plural, lowercase “technologies.” The former are the traditional philosophers of technology represented by Ellul and Heidegger.
Of course, once the contradiction is acknowledged, which side to stand on is also a matter of freedom. As for me, I still incline more toward the traditional philosophers of technology. I would think that the so-called empirical turn actually departs from the core concern of Ellul, Heidegger, and the like: the destiny of human beings.
If one wants to argue that there is no contradiction, one possible line of thought is this: the two are discussing the issue on different dimensions. Ellul is more concerned with “technological society” as a whole, but he does not reject discussion of individual technologies. What Ellul and Heidegger seem to be saying is: before discussing concrete technologies, one must first understand modern technology as a whole; only then is it possible to obtain deeper insight in concrete contexts. As for Ellul himself, the last item in the salvation scheme he proposed is “to let the technicians join the dialogue,” which in Ellul’s view is the hardest thing of all. But perhaps we may also regard the various mechanisms advocated by philosophers of technology after the so-called “empirical turn” — such as “responsible innovation,” “ethics committees,” and “deliberative democracy” — as active explorations of “letting the technicians join the dialogue.” In this sense, Winner is a supplement to and development of Ellul.
5.Heidegger says that “the emergence of radio has today for Dasein taken a huge step on the road toward widening and destroying the everyday surrounding world” (pp. 281–282). Please refer to the thought of Heidegger, McLuhan, and/or Stiegler and other philosophers, and write a brief discussion on the theme of “the impact of telecommunication technology on the everyday lifeworld.”
This question lies somewhere between a close reading question and a free-ranging one. It can be treated as textual interpretation, or one can cite McLuhan and other philosophers to discuss it. But the prompt requires one to “refer to the thought of … philosophers”; to go completely off on one’s own is not in line with the requirements.
Here it would be better to follow Heidegger’s line of thought. The context of the quotation in the prompt is as follows: “In Dasein there is an essential tendency toward making things near. Today we are more or less all compelled to speed up together, and all ways of speeding up aim at overcoming remoteness. For example, the emergence of radio has today for Dasein taken a huge step on the road toward widening and destroying the everyday surrounding world, and what being so far away from the ‘world’ means for Dasein is still not something that can be grasped at a glance.”
We can see that Heidegger is discussing this example under the theme of “de-distancing.” The so-called “everyday surrounding world” is the place where de-distancing and orientation take place. In this everyday surrounding world, the “near and far” of things are estimated in the activity of de-distancing. For example, Heidegger immediately goes on to mention things like “a bowshot away” and “the time it takes to smoke a pipe”: “From a calculating standpoint, such estimates may be inaccurate, perhaps wavering, but in Dasein’s everyday life they have a completely intelligible definiteness of their own.”
The so-called “everyday lifeworld” or “everyday surrounding world” stands in opposition to “the world of science.” In the world of science, such estimates of near and far made through de-distancing naturally appear “inaccurate, wavering,” but in everyday life they have “intelligible definiteness.”
Following this line of thought, it is easy to understand how “radio” “widens and destroys” the everyday surrounding world. First, “de-distancing” is always carried out through tools or implements: for instance, “a bowshot,” “a pipeful of tobacco,” “next door,” “across the street,” “right under one’s eyelids,” “two intersections away,” “just around the corner,” “a ten-minute drive,” and so on. People always estimate distance and proximity by reference to certain ready-to-hand implements (including bodily skills).
Then, as telecommunication technology — from radio to mobile phones — increasingly permeates everyday life and becomes a ready-to-hand implement of daily use, it also plays the role of de-distancing and orientation. Once “on the radio,” “on the other end of the microphone,” “across the screen,” and “online neighbors” become as ordinary and familiar as “in the house,” “across the road,” “opposite the window,” and “the neighbors around us,” then people’s “surroundings” are undoubtedly greatly “expanded.” A person a thousand miles away can be right before one’s eyes.
But expansion also means “destruction,” and what is destroyed is precisely “intelligible definiteness.” Human beings do indeed have a tendency toward “making things near,” but if everything no longer needs to be “made near,” and instead is all forcibly thrust close by, then this situation may not be a comfortable one.
The new situation is full of uncertainty and indiscriminateness. Expressions like “a bowshot away” and “the time it takes to smoke a pipe” are suitable for measuring space or time, for measuring “distance and nearness,” precisely because these technical activities themselves have “definiteness” and constitute a stable “norm.” Bows and arrows can roughly shoot this far; a pipe can roughly burn for this long. But if today a bow can shoot 200 meters, tomorrow 500 meters, and next month 20,000 meters, then we would no longer use “a bowshot away” to measure space. If a road is one kilometer long today, ten kilometers long tomorrow, and then torn down next month, then we will also increasingly no longer know where “the other end of the road” actually is.
And this unsettling turbulence really does happen in the technological age. The whole world is “developing at high speed,” and all technology is changing at an accelerated pace. People have just become familiar with a certain implement and its scale, only for that implement to have already gone through many rounds of upgrading and replacement, or even to have become obsolete and discarded. For example, “radio” was a pioneering novelty just a few decades ago, but today playing “radio boys” has already become retro nostalgia.
In the technological age, “everyday life” changes from day to day, losing the sense of certainty that makes the everyday everyday — its “ordinariness,” “familiarity,” and so on. And telecommunication technology, among all technologies, develops the fastest and impacts most directly, pushing speed and distance to their extreme limit (the speed of light).
In the technological age, people instead become more accustomed to measuring the world by the spatial-temporal scales of exact science, which is also easy to understand. For compared with the unrest and instability of the various technical implements of the everyday lifeworld, the measurement technologies of modern science sometimes appear even more ordinary and familiar.
But the world of science cannot truly replace the world of life, because the world of science is “without me.” In the world of science, “distance” can be measured precisely, but one cannot find one’s own “position” within it.
6.We have already become familiar with using digital technologies such as Tencent Meeting for online education. Please, based on your personal experience and with appropriate reference to the thought of philosophers such as Heidegger, Winner, McLuhan, and/or Arendt, comment on online education: Will online education completely replace offline education? If not, what irreplaceable significance does offline education have? If it can, then in an environment dominated by online education, what differences will there be in the cultivation of knowledge and humanity?
This question is relatively free-ranging, and the issues it involves are also ones the students have personally experienced; it should be said that everyone can say a few words about it — even if they have never attended class. Of course, the most crucial part is “with reference to the thought of philosophers such as …”; for students who have not taken the course, that is not easy. If one does not cite the relevant philosophers and only talks casually about one’s personal thoughts, then one will not get a high score.
Students who have taken the course and read the books should not find it difficult to connect this question with the philosophers. For example, Heidegger’s “Gestell,” “enframing,” is very suitable for discussing educational models; Winner’s claim that artifacts have politics can also be linked to the political tendencies of different educational technologies — no educational technology is absolutely equal; McLuhan’s hot and cool media can also be used to discuss the characteristics of different teaching environments, for instance, face-to-face communication is more “cool.” Arendt is harder to work with; one might probably discuss education from the angle of whether it cultivates laborers, workers, or actors, and so on.
7.Different philosophers have different periodizations of the technological age. Heidegger distinguished antiquity from modernity; Mumford further divided the machine age into eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic phases; McLuhan distinguished the print age from the electronic age… Please refer to the thought of philosophers and propose your own periodization, sorting out the characteristics of each era, and focusing on what kind of era we currently inhabit.
Among the students who chose the last question, the fewest selected this one — only 14 students picked it. Relatively speaking, I was also more lenient in my grading, so to speak: as long as there was a bit of personal character, one could get a fairly high score. It is worth noting that when discussing the differences among the eras, it is best to focus on emblematic technologies and the revolutionary impact they brought.
If I were answering myself, I would probably say that in all of human history there have been only three major eras: the agricultural age, the industrial age, and the information age. We are probably still in the information age at present, but perhaps we are at the dusk of the information age, and the next era may be the age of artificial intelligence or the metaverse, or something of that sort.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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