The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics | ☰☷

The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics | ☰☷



The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics




“In this remarkable book, Yuk Hui draws on the major thinkers of both the West and the East to elaborate an original reflection on the nature of technology. He has enlarged the philosophical horizon for the Anthropocene age.”

—Andrew Feenberg



“There is no more challenging work for anyone interested in trying to understand both the manifold philosophical challenges of Western scientific technology and the contemporary rise of China on the world-historical scene.”

—Carl Mitcham, Issues in Science and Technology

“uma das visões mais originais e poderosas sobre como pensar a tecnologia a partir de uma perspectiva filosófica” (one of the most original and powerful views on how to think technology from a philosophical perspective)

—Ronaldo Lemos, Folha de S. Paulo

Yuk Hui’s essay on cosmotechnics is a commendable effort, an inspiring and informative alternative history of Chinese philosophical thought on technology and a provocative speculative fugue.

—Gabriele de Seta, Asiascape: Digital Asia

ハイデガーを換骨奪胎し、東洋における哲学的思考の条件を問う、許の論点自体もむろん興味深いが、そのような論点が洗練された図式に落とし込まれて提示される仕方、さらにそこで引かれる固有名の配置のされ方も、私たち日本の読者、とりわけポストモダン以降の批評的な知の可能性を探ろうとする本誌読者の好奇心を満たすものとなりうる。

—仲山ひふみ, Genron

Вместо отрица- ния техники и традиции наша программа должна быть открыта плюрализму космотехник и многообразию ритмов посредством трансформации того, что уже есть (Instead of denying technology and tradition, our program should be open to cosmotechnical pluralism and diversity of rhythms through the transformation of what is already there)

—Eugene Kuchinov, Журнал DOXA



Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.

Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger’s challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal.

This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Chinese philsophical thinking largely unknown to Western thinkers, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization?

In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.
CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

The Becoming of Prometheus; Cosmos, Cosmology, and Cosmotechnics; Technological Rupture and Metaphysical Unity; Modernity, Modernisation, and Technicity; Whence the ‘Ontological Turn’?

Part 1. In Search of Technological Thought in China

• Dao and Cosmos: The Principle of the Moral; 
• Dao and Qi: Virtue Contra Freedom; 
• Qi and Dao in Daoism: Pao Ding’s Knife; 
• Qi and Dao in Confucianism: Restoring the Li; 
• Remarks on Stoic and Daoist Cosmotechnics; 
• Gu Wen Movement: Writing as Unification of Dao and Qi in the Tang Period; 
• Song Yingxing’s Encyclopedia and Qi-Dao During the Ming Dynasty; 
• Qi-Dao After the Opium Wars; 
• The Collapse of Qi-Dao; 
• Carsun Chang, Science, and the Problem of Life; 
• The Manifesto for a China-Oriented Cultural Development, and its Critics;
•  Needham’s Question; 
• The Organic Mode of Thought and the Laws of Nature; 
• Mou Zongsan’s Response; 
• Mou Zongsan’s Appropriation of Kant’s Intellectual Intuition; 
• Self-Negation of Liangzhi in Mou Zongsan; 
• The Dialectics of Nature and the End of Xing er Xian Xue

Part 2. Modernity and Technological Consciousness

• Geometry and Time; 
• The Absence of Geometry in Ancient China; 
• Geometrisation and Temporalization; 
• Geometry and Cosmological Specificity; 
• Modernity and Technological Unconsciousness; 
• The Memory of Modernity; 
• Nihilism and Modernity; 
• Overcoming Modernity; 
• Anamnesis of the Postmodern; 
• The Dilemma of Homecoming; 
• Sinofuturism in the Anthropocene; 
• For Another World History

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CHAPTER
Preface


The Question Concerning Technology in China, xi–xiv

CHAPTER
Preface


EXCERPT

Quite a few of the notes to which I returned in writing this book date from my teenage years, when I was fascinated both by the cosmogony of Neo-Confucianism and by contemporary astrophysics. I remember how, over several summers, I went regularly every week to the central library in Kowloon with my brother Ben, and brought home piles of books on physics and metaphysics, spending all day reading things that were beyond me and which at the time I didn’t know how to use. Luckily, I profited from many discussions with my literature and calligraphy teacher Dr. Lai Kwong Pang, who introduced me to the thought of the New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995)—his PhD supervisor at that time. When I started studying Western philosophy, especially contemporary thought, I confronted the great difficulty of integrating it with what I had learned in the past without falling prey to a superficial and exotic comparison. In 2009, an encounter with the work of Keiji Nishitani and Bernard Stiegler on Heidegger suggested to me a way to approach the different philosophical systems from the perspective of the question of time; more recently, while reading the works of anthropologist Philippe Descola and Chinese philosopher Li Sanhu, I began to formulate a concrete question: If one admits that there are multiple natures, is it possible to think of multiple technics, which are different from each other not simply functionally and aesthetically, but also ontologically and cosmologically?…

The Question Concerning Technology in China, 1–57

CHAPTER
Introduction

EXCERPT


In 1953 Martin Heidegger delivered his famous lecture ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, in which he announced that the essence of modern technology is nothing technological, but rather enframing (Ge-stell)—a transformation of the relation between man and the world such that every being is reduced to the status of ‘standing-reserve’ or ‘stock’ (Bestand), something that can be measured, calculated, and exploited. Heidegger’s critique of modern technology opened up a new awareness of technological power, which had already been interrogated by fellow German writers such as Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler. Heidegger’s writings following ‘the turn’ (die Kehre) in his thought (usually dated around 1930), and this text in particular, portray the shift from technē as poiesis or bringing forth (Hervorbringen) to technology as Gestell, seen as a necessary consequence of Western metaphysics, and a destiny which demands a new form of thinking: the thinking of the question of the truth of Being.


Heidegger’s critique found a receptive audience among Eastern thinkers—most notably in the teachings of the Kyoto School, as well as in the Daoist critique of technical rationality, which identifies Heidegger’s Gelassenheit with the classical Daoist concept of wu wei or ‘non-action’. This receptivity is understandable for several reasons.…


Part 1. In Search of Technological Thought in China



EXCERPT


The Chinese had already dedicated a classical text to the question of technics during the Ionian period (770–211 BC). In this text, not only do we find details of various technics—wheel-making, house-building and the like—but also the first theoretical discourse on technics. In the classic in question, the Kao Gong Ji (考工記, A Study of Techniques, 770–476 bc), we read:


Provided with the timing determined by the heavens, energy [氣,ch’i] provided by the earth, and materials of good quality, as well as skilful technique, something good can be brought forth through the synthesis of the four. [天有時，地有氣，材有美，工有巧。合此四者，然後可以為良]

Part 2. Modernity and Technological Consciousness

EXCERPT


In Part 1 we demonstrated that, even if what Western thought would recognise as a ‘philosophy of technology’ remained alien to the Chinese, nevertheless the exposition of the history of the relation between Qi and Dao enables us to unearth a ‘technological thinking’ in Chinese philosophy. It is our task in Part 2 to ask what happened when this Chinese technological thinking confronted the Western one, grounded in its long philosophical tradition. What is called ‘modernity’ in Europe didn’t exist in China, and modernisation only occurred after the confrontation between the two modes of technological thought. Here this confrontation will be described as the tension between two temporal structures; but this will also involve a rethinking of the question of modernity itself.…