The first, the most crucial, and the final question is respectively communication, communication, and communication.
A flowing individual communicates flowing emotions with flowing words in a flowing world.
Only when the flowing river receives the rain of the moment does it remain eternally undried.
Latest Comments
- Guchen
2009-03-16 15:45:42
:“Dialectics” is just dialogue, or rather “communication studies.” I think “philosophy of communication” also sounds good.
I feel that, whether one is speaking of how people get along with one another or of how people get along with the world, communication is both a premise, a means, and an end. - physis
2009-03-22 23:24:34 anonymous 59.55.252.230
Saw an article that can echo your point of view
http://www.ifeng.com/phoenixtv/76569994053287936/20050708/582307_1.shtml - Guchen
2009-03-23 10:41:13
Professor Chen Jiaying has always been someone I have admired, so it is hardly surprising that my views echo his. Of course, neither my views nor Professor Chen’s can have come out of nowhere; both are a certain understanding of the history of Western philosophy, and both are also influenced by Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and others.
Let me casually excerpt a few passages from Professor Chen’s lecture:
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If truth is not something in-itself unrelated to us ordinary people, if it is not the overcoming of our prejudices, then truth becomes a ready-made thing. In my understanding, truth can only appear in communication and debate, so I would say truth is a process, a dialogue. The word we now commonly use, dialectics, is translated from the Greek, and its original meaning is the art of dialogue. Researchers in intellectual history point out that this art of dialogue, in Plato’s hands, became a method for seeking truth, became the most important method for seeking truth. Philosophy is unlike myth. Myth is a declamation; philosophy is a dialogue.
In sincere dialogue, the interlocutors open themselves to truth, waiting humbly for truth to reveal itself; whoever has the stronger reason is the one the interlocutors follow. In this sense, the interlocutors are equal. Of course, this equality is a principled equality, not entirely an equality in fact. For in order for us to be able to have a dialogue on a topic, we must have experiential or intellectual preparation regarding that topic. If you suddenly ask me to stand up and have a dialogue with Hawking, say, to talk about the explosion of the universe, the future of the universe, I cannot be equal, because I do not have such intellectual preparation.
But this is so obvious that I won’t dwell on it. What I do want to say is that, if we are to obtain an equal standing in a dialogue, there is another factor that people may not pay enough attention to: namely, you must first have a genuine concern for the topic. I just said that truth and falsehood are born from the same root; then what is that root? I think that root is concern. To have honest views, to have serious prejudices—this already is a call to truth. If I simply do not care about something, then truth has nowhere to reveal itself. A late Greek and early Latin philosopher, Augustine, once said, “Love, and then there is true knowledge.” In the Enlightenment era, some scholars took this kind of statement and called it a kind of benighted saying. But I think Augustine should be understood this way: on things about which you are indifferent, you do not even have the chance to make mistakes. If someone truly does not care about anything, truly holds no prejudice about anything, then he is cut off from truth. For in these matters I have no convictions of my own, I have nothing I want to insist on, and therefore nothing that needs to be overcome. I am merely shuttling back and forth between two statements. If we understand truth in this way, then we probably need to rethink tolerance.
My understanding of tolerance is those people—who are they?—who have definite positions of their own, and at the same time place those positions within a broader world, listening to others while preparing to revise themselves. Because one genuinely has positions out of concern, and because one insists on one’s positions to the full extent of one’s reason, this is not intolerance; in my view, this is a necessary condition of tolerance. Only those who truly have positions can even speak of tolerance or intolerance. Here I speak of positions, of views; the views I speak of are views in the sense of how one regards things. How we truly see this world is reflected in how we treat it, how we handle it; it is in this way that we have real views. I may hold that we should not discriminate against Black people, but if I never have anything to do with Black people, if I see a Black person and immediately walk the other way, then I think your kind of view, that egalitarian view, that lofty view, whether it exists or not is really beside the point. It may be that each of us truly cares about far fewer things than we imagine we do, and the views we genuinely hold in the sense of how we regard things may be far fewer than the views we imagine ourselves to have on all kinds of matters. The modern world has extremely developed media, so it seems that we know everything about the world, and seem to care about everything as well. I say this may be an illusion; at the very least, there is very likely—very likely—a great deal of the unreal in it. Indeed, according to my understanding of truth, I think the question of truth cannot simply be an epistemological question; first and foremost it is a question of life, closely related to where exactly we live.And also:
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……Truth is not something unrelated to me, not something floating anywhere at all. I want to say that truth can only reveal itself with the participation of ordinary people; only starting from my own views and experience can truth that transcends my views and experience appear to me. Truth needs the small self; it needs us ordinary people who have prejudices, and our own prejudices have an active constitutive role in truth. In other words, truth becomes manifest only to those who hold prejudices; truth is a kind of overcoming, the overcoming of our prejudices, and it can manifest itself only in struggle with prejudice. Truth needs to appear in debate. But I am not saying that truth is hidden like treasure on Treasure Island, and that we fight each other in order to seize it and finally possess it. None of us can possess truth. What I mean is that truth struggles with my own prejudices; truth reveals itself precisely as it overcomes our prejudices, and without our prejudices truth has no way to appear. Let me quote Wittgenstein here: he said that people must begin from error, and then turn from it toward truth. To make someone believe truth, it is not enough merely to state the truth; one must also find the road from error to truth.
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I can almost reproduce these words without reservation. - Guchen
2009-03-23 10:49:54
And also:
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The difference between truth and a view can only be recognized in the activity of inquiry. In this sense, I would very much hope that we try our best not to understand truth as a noun, but to understand it as an achievement verb. Truth is our present highest achievement, but it is not something that becomes eternally fixed once discovered.
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However, here Professor Chen seems not to have fully carried through the understanding of “truth” as a verb. My own view would still differ somewhat. There is no truth of today or best truth of the present; there is only truth that “happens on the spot.” Truth is not the thing that is revealed, but the “revealing” itself. So I say philosophy is magic: what it presents is not the thing that has transformed, but transformation itself.—Of course, the basic spirit is still the same as Professor Chen’s.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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