CONCEPT
The Ti-Yong Formula
Chinese learning as substance (體 ti), Western learning as application (用 yong)—the failed attempt to adopt Western tools without Western cosmotechnics.
The ti-yong formula (體用) was the late-Qing intellectual response to China's traumatic encounter with Western military-industrial power in the nineteenth century. After the Opium Wars demonstrated that Chinese cosmotechnical traditions could not withstand Western technology, reformers proposed: adopt Western tools and techniques (
yong, application) while preserving Chinese philosophical and ethical foundations (
ti, substance or essence). Learn science and engineering from the West, but remain Confucian in values, Daoist in cosmology, Chinese in identity.
Yuk Hui argues this formula was structurally doomed because it assumed technology is separable from
cosmotechnics—that one can adopt a tool without adopting the worldview that produced it. A tool is not neutral. It carries the logic of its production—the assumptions about nature, purpose, maker-material relationship that determined its design. To adopt the steam engine is to adopt nature-as-standing-reserve; to adopt the factory is to adopt labor-as-commodity. The adoption is not immediate or total, but it is real. Over time, the cosmotechnical assumptions embedded in adopted tools reshape the adopting
culture's understanding of technology,