“Not a Fool” — this is the four-character mantra for students of philosophy. Recite it often, when reading and when writing, and you will benefit endlessly!
Philosophy is not truth and law; it is a longing for wisdom. Philosophers’ thoughts are all the more prone to error, and may even be more extreme than those of ordinary people. However, philosophers are not fools; even when they are “wrong,” they are often wrong in a “profound” way.
When reading philosophers’ ideas, you must always keep in mind that they are by no means fools!
And yet the “philosophy” we first encounter in middle school always seems to come with an attitude of treating others as “fools.” “Idealism,” “metaphysics” — all of it is described as so simple and superficial, as if, like Dr. Johnson, one merely had to kick a stone hard to refute Berkeley.
Why would so many philosophers advocate theories that can so easily be refuted by common sense? Were the sages of antiquity really inferior even to today’s middle school students? Then why is the modern struggle still not over? The authors of middle school textbooks seem not to have thought these questions through very seriously. In fact, they have refuted no philosopher at all; what they are engaged in, locked in “battle lines” and fierce combat with, is merely a set of shallow views they have themselves wishfully concocted.
Of course, Marx and Engels are by no means fools either. When we see the superficiality of textbooks, we must never conclude that “Marxist philosophy is only this.” Before seriously reading their thought, it is absolutely not permissible to presume to judge them arrogantly. Today there are many people who can “smell out with their noses” the stale clichés of Confucius and Mencius, the superficiality of Marx and Engels; this is a kind of impatient and ignorant mindset.
As the saying goes, there are no unworthy figures under a great name. Those thinkers are always more profound than ordinary people. Even if it is said that many among them are even more stubbornly erroneous than ordinary people. When we evaluate the classic works of the ancients and of Westerners — for example, in the prefaces to many translations — we often comment that their thought is “incomplete,” “dogmatic,” “one-sided,” and so on. Yet how many “comprehensive” and profound original ideas have we ourselves produced?
Philosophers have two kinds of temperament: one is the encyclopedic scholar, the all-rounder of his age, who organizes the most common worldview of that era and systematically sorts it out and expounds it in clear, rigorous prose; the other is the incomprehensible heretic, whose radical ideas are not easily accepted by the age in which they appear, because they are ahead of their time. Real philosophers are always somewhere between these two temperaments.
Those who can write books cannot be fools, and neither are the textbook writers who regard dogmatic philosophers as fools. They too are not fools. What they represent is often precisely everyday common sense. When we become aware of the superficiality of those who treat others as fools, we should think: this is our own superficiality. The superficial are not necessarily fools; common sense is also very important wisdom. But superficiality is superficiality all the same, and it is something we need to reflect on.
By the way, we ourselves are not fools either. Philosophy is not something unattainably remote.
Night of May 6, 2006
Plato Café
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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