Question Concerning Technology in China
* Book: The Question Concerning Technology in China. By Yuk Hui.
URL = https://www.urbanomic.com/book/question-concerning-technology-china/
Description
1.
"A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics.
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."
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780995455009/the-question-concerning-technology-in-china/)
2.
"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 Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, 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."
(https://www.urbanomic.com/book/question-concerning-technology-china/)
Discussion
Jeffrey Bishop:
"Hui explores what the various Western approaches to technology have wrought on the world, and how Asian philosophy—especially Chinese philosophy—has appropriated Western science and technology. He also explores the various attempts of Chinese and Japanese philosophers to overcome Western modern and postmodern philosophy (Modern philosophy inevitably morphs into postmodern philosophy).[3]
Without a hint of romanticism, Hui turns to what he claims to be a more ancient rendering of Chinese philosophy that places the human in a world that is already moral, the world that is Dao-Qi. The Dao is the governing principle of the universe, the way or the method by which the cosmos is organized. Yet, Dao is already the moral way of reality. Qi is the vessel, or the tool or device through which Dao is mediated. The Dao-Qi pairing appears in one of the most ancient books of Chinese writing, I Ching, and Hui argues that this fundamental metaphysics in Chinese philosophy is a moral metaphysics (not a metaphysics of morals). Dao—what the world is—is already moral. Qi are the technics through which there is a mediation of the ought-is of Dao.[4] Chinese ritual practice (Li) are the habits that put one in proper disposition to take up with Dao-Qi. Li—the ritual practice—mediates through a technics, the proper disposition of the human actor.
There is some question among Chinese philosophers as to whether Hui’s reading of Daoist philosophy is historically accurate. Yet, Hui nonetheless understands that the Western proclivity to set the human apart from nature is part of the problem; separating the metaphysical from the moral is the problem. The binaries of nature-human, or nature-culture, or is-ought is the fundamental problem at the heart of modern technology, including its appropriation in China, according to Hui."
(https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/toward-a-liturgical-cosmotechnics/?)