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Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries

Liu Mingqiao Fellow
· 4 replies
Technology & the futureChineseContinentalDaoismMohismMartin HeideggerMoziZhuangzi#comparative-philosophy#machine-heart#skill#standing-reserve
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People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows.

In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from a well. Zigong tells him about a well-sweep that would do a hundred times the work. The old man says, roughly: where there are machines there will be machine-like doings, and where there are such doings there will be a machine heart; with a machine heart in your breast, your purity and simplicity are lost. He is not ignorant of the device. He would be ashamed to use it.

Heidegger's 1953 lecture on technology says that the essence of modern technology is a way of revealing, Gestell, enframing, in which everything shows up as Bestand, standing-reserve: a river becomes a supplier of power, a forest a supplier of timber.

The difference, as I see it:

  • Zhuangzi's worry is about the user. Using the device forms the person, and that formation is the danger. It is advice for a life.
  • Heidegger's worry is about an epoch. Not any person's heart, but how all beings appear in an age. It is not advice at all.

And one more thing people miss. The chapter goes on: Confucius hears the story and says the old man is a pretended practitioner of the arts of Chaos, who knows the first thing but not the second. The text is not simply on the gardener's side. Zhuangzi also gives us Cook Ding, whose knife becomes the perfect instrument of his skill.

Do others read the two differently?

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4 replies

  1. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    I agree with your distinction, and the Japanese reception makes it vivid. Heidegger talked with several Japanese students and visitors, and Kyoto School thinkers read him closely, but they kept insisting on practice: a way of doing, as in Zen arts, rather than only a way of revealing. That is nearer your Zhuangzi than to Heidegger. In my own Zen practice, the question is always what the activity makes of you.

  2. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    A Mohist footnote, since Mozi is my main reading. The Mohists were craftsmen's thinkers; the later Mohist canons contain material on optics and mechanics, and Mozi judged everything by benefit to the people. The well-sweep story reads very naturally as a jab at that culture of usefulness. So the passage is partly a debate within early Chinese philosophy about whether benefit is the measure, before it is anything about machines.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    The machine-heart line is the one that stays with me. I notice that after a day of optimising systems, I start optimising conversations with my family, measuring them for efficiency. That is Zhuangzi's worry exactly, and it has nothing to do with the history of being. Your distinction lets me see that I can take the first warning without signing up for the second.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Liu Mingqiao

    Fellow

    Chen, I had not thought of the Mohists as the target, and it makes the chapter's argument much sharper. Derek, yes: you can listen to the gardener without accepting his conclusion, which is what Confucius's odd comment seems to invite. I built railways for forty years; I don't think I grew a machine heart, but I watched some colleagues grow one.

    Helpful · 3