Viewing suffering in other countries and regions from a distance through precisely reproduced images is a typical modern experience. Kang Youwei was one of the earliest Chinese with this type of experience. Interestingly, there is an extremely optimistic side to his reaction.
As a result of the Franco-Prussian War Chronicle, published in 1873, the Franco-Prussian War became the earliest European war recorded in detail in Chinese. In the eyes of the knowledgeable Chinese at that time, Europe was no longer far away. Therefore, the author Wang Tao said in the preface that the "War Record" records the fortunes of other countries, but the intention is in the universal "Heavenly Heart": "Those who are good at the Heavenly Heart ,...... First stand on your own in the middle of nowhere, and then the enemy is not allowed to multiply me. He saw a new Warring States era coming, and it issued a new order: to stand on its own in a hostile environment.
For Wang Tao's "Heavenly Heart", Kang Youwei of course had already experienced it. In April 1898, three months after the defeat in the Sino-Japanese War and two months before the Penghu Reform, in his speech at the first rally of the Kyoshi Bao Congress, he mentioned an image related to the Franco-Prussian War:
However, the matter of the loss of power in the cession of land is taboo and secret, and the state is unable to draw a picture of defeat in the oil painting institute of Shi Dan (now translated as Sedang) to inspire people's hearts; bo hai subjects, many people do not know.
"Shi Dan's Oil Painting Academy" is likely to be a misrememberment. Xue Fucheng has a famous "Notes on Oil Paintings in Paris", which records his experience of watching the "Map of the War between France and France" at the "Oil Painting Academy" in Paris. This "figure" is actually a special visual installation, "its method is a large round room, with a huge wall hanging on the four walls, from the roof to put light into the room", which is now called "panoramic painting", which was popular in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. Xue Fucheng was shocked by the cruel picture displayed in this device, "unbearable to see", but did not seem to understand the meaning of this display, so he asked the accompanying translator, and the translator replied: "So Zhao Jiong is angry, stirring up public indignation, and trying to take revenge." This may be the source of the above "exciting" article. Kang Youwei was dissatisfied that the Qing Dynasty did not learn from France, which had also been defeated, and set up such a visual device that could both feel the heavenly heart and inspire people's hearts.
But after only two or three years, his perception of the Franco-Prussian War changed dramatically. After the coup, Kang Youwei traveled to Darjeeling, India. In Mencius, written during this period (1901-1902), he again mentions the Franco-Prussian War:
Dan, the master of the German attack, burned the whole city. France attacked Petersburg, and the fleeing division was gone. Reading his pictures today, the fire and smoke rose in the sky, and his head was all over the field, and he was saddened by it.
Kang Youwei must have been very impressed by this experience of watching "pictures and paintings." The main part, also written in the Datong Shu of this period, mentions that Sedang was burned seven times. In the chapter "The Harm of the Nation", he describes this "shadow painting" in more detail:
The shadow painting of the witness, the shadow of the mage Dan, the grass and trees stick to the sky, the mountains and rivers are majestic, and the fire smoke touches the wilderness, the boat buildings blow up, the city house is half-collapsed, the corpses cover the ground, or the guns are peeping and then shot to death; the women are running away, or the house is smoky and the whole family is destroyed. Although the humble man is strong, he should be weeping when he sees it, and the husband is benevolent, can his safety be endured? Husbands and wives are also people. Mencius said that "taking the land and eating human flesh" is just a "thief".
In the viewing of "shadow painting", he seems to have experienced another kind of "Heavenly Heart", that is, the "Datong" that transcends "self-reliance".
Scenes from the Franco-Prussian War by the French painter Wilfrid Constant Beauquesne
In Kang Youwei's place, "shadow painting" is also known as "shadow drama". The modern Chinese word for "shadow drama", which refers to images displayed by projection devices with convex mirrors, was first introduced to China by Jesuits in the late Ming Dynasty. With the development of technology, "shadow drama" refers to static slides, continuous slides and changes in the focus of movies, while "shadow painting" mainly refers to the first two. (Interested readers, see Sun Qing's "Magic Lantern Mirror Shadow", "Modern History Studies", No. 4, 2018) The Franco-Prussian War is unlikely to leave continuous or dynamic video data, and the "shadow play" that Kang Youwei saw was estimated to be a still image of a slide projection, and the image screened was a photograph, not a painting.
In the first chapter of the Datong Book, "Introduction", there is a passage that thinks: Why do I care about the suffering of others? Because I have consciousness. However, if I really have the consciousness that there are wars on the outer planets that are a hundred million billion times more brutal than Changping and Xin'an, why don't I grieve for them? Kang Youwei replied:
And bismarck's fire burned the mage Danye, I am more than ten years old, I have not felt any mourning, and watching the movie, the corpse is full of grass and trees, burning the house, and I am afraid to move. It is not me who is unconscious, I am not seen. The one who sees the enlightened, the form of the voice in the other, the transmission in the eyes and ears, the rush to the soul, the miserable pity, the attack on my yang, the meditation, into my yin, but the one who cannot help himself, how can he be?
It is more likely to achieve the immediacy of "form and sound to the other, transmission to the eyes and ears" than to the photograph (referring to the "shape"). Mr. Shi Jingqian believes that Kang Youwei saw this film when he was a teenager, which is probably a misreading. The above quotation only mentions that Kang Youwei was "more than ten years old" at the time of the burning, and does not indicate the time he watched the film. Given that this viewing is not recorded until the Mencius and the Book of Datong, it is more likely to have occurred during the Darjeeling period or earlier, but unlikely earlier than 1898, since in that speech to the Council of TheRies he referred only to "oil paintings" rather than "shadow plays" about the Franco-Prussian War. No matter when and where Kang Youwei watched this film, this event will help us broaden our understanding of the "open eyes to the world" of modern characters. "Seeing the world" is accomplished not only through reading and field trips, but also with the help of the visual medium provided by modern technology; what is seen is not only exotic and technologically spectacle, but also ancient evils amplified by modern state organizations.
Viewing suffering in other countries and regions from a distance through precisely reproduced images is a typical modern experience. Kang Youwei was one of the earliest Chinese with this type of experience. Interestingly, there is an extremely optimistic side to his reaction. Based on the scientific knowledge he swallowed, he imagined the human mind as some kind of electromagnetic phenomenon. The so-called "god, there is the electricity of knowledge", the "god" here refers to "soul knowledge", "refreshing", "spirit" and "matilda", that is, individual cognition, morality and communication ability. Therefore, "Ren" is interpreted by him as positive and negative attraction between electric charges, "intolerable" is a kind of "suction force", "sincerity" is radio stations, and so on. And "where there is electricity, there must be light", (at least some type) of light seems to be an accessory to "electricity of knowledge". Therefore, in Kang Youwei's vision, paintings and photographs are like radio relays, and the difference between them is that the photographic technology, which is a modern photochemical achievement, can achieve lower losses in the process of signal transmission. Therefore, through the viewing of the photo, the "electricity of knowledge" of the viewed person can be more completely transmitted to the "intolerable heart" of the viewer.
It is conceivable that according to the technical conditions at that time, the "map of the battle between the popularization of law" seen by Xue Fucheng may be more visually shocking than the shadow play; although he also "can't bear it", he was immediately reversed by the translator's explanation to the direction of "figure revenge". According to Kang Youwei's line of thought, if Xue Fucheng was watching a shadow play, then he would not be swayed by other interpretations: the integrity of the transmission of "electricity" and "light" signals, in other words, the personality of the pain of others conveyed by the precisely reproduced images would make any narrow explanation emotionally impossible.
Through these doubtful speculations, Kang Youwei's view has a reasonable core: specific sensory objects are necessary to stimulate compassion. As a reminder, the title of the "Introduction" is "Man has an intolerable heart." We know that Mencius, in order to illustrate that "everyone has an intolerable heart", once gave a classic example: "When people see that their children will enter the well, they all have the heart of compassion and compassion." On the basis of Mencius, Kang Youwei also had naïve confidence in the reproducibility of modern technology. From this, he actually provides a modern version of the above example: "When people today see Shi Dan's burning shadow play, they all have a heart of compassion. ”
In addition to the dubious relationship between reality and reproduction, the problem here is that Mencius only said that compassion is the "end" of benevolence, that is, the bud that needs to be protected and cultivated, while Kang Youwei is close to making two other claims. First, specific sensory objects are sufficient conditions for arousing compassion. The scope of our observation limits the scope of our sympathy; but within that range, compassion is like an insurmountable desire that cannot wait to fill every corner of the perception: "He who knows less has less love." He who is aware of the great is also great in his benevolence. The boundlessness of love and the boundlessness of enlightenment are somewhat proportional to the size of love and enlightenment. "Second, compassion can certainly lead to action. He never clearly deduced that the expansion of the viewing range brought about by modern technology would automatically lead to the automatic realization of "cosmopolitanism" through a series of causal chains of psychology and action (e.g., the "awakening" of the masses). At the same time, due to the existence of early works such as the Complete Book of Practical Theologic Law, we cannot think that the experience of watching the burning shadow drama of Sedang is the only source of Kang Youwei's "Datong" thought. But he does admit that this viewing has played an inspiring role in planning the action of "Datong". Based on these two propositions, we can read a kind of optimism in the "Datong Book": the high-precision viewing of distant suffering is the opportunity to achieve "Datong".
Datong Shu, Changxing Bookstore, 1919 edition
For a long time, it was believed that "if horror could be presented with realistic pictures, most people would eventually understand the ferocity and madness of war." (Susan Sontag: "About the Suffering of Others") Kang Youwei is even more optimistic than these people. However, modern life has proven that, unlike material concepts such as "electricity" and "light", there is no torrent of inevitability here that can bind truth, watching, sympathy, and action intimately together. The distance between them was farther away than he had imagined, and there was only a thin silk thread linking them, and those huge voids satisfied the old entertainment and had become a new place for strategic deployment.
But perhaps more importantly, there is indeed such a silk thread. Otherwise, we cannot understand Stephen Pinker's controversial observation that factors such as publishing, literacy, and travel contributed to a humanitarian revolution in the 18th century, and the technological revolution of the second half of the 20th century played a similar role (Angels of Goodness in Human Nature). They show that, like optimists, the realists' understanding of human nature is mutilated. It is in this place that Kang Youwei's fantasy may contain a little truth: both our viewing and uneasiness will have meaning.
Author: Bao Wenxin Institute of Philosophy, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
Editor: Junichi Lee
Editor-in-Charge: Yang Yiqi