So I think that presupposing the virtual space as “unreal,” and presupposing the virtual space as “incapable of being unhappy,” are both forms of arrogance and dogmatism. Whether one chooses to enter a virtual chamber should be no different from whether one chooses urban life, or a life in an ivory tower or a monastery, and so on: there is no absolute answer, only each person’s own judgment.
III. Relativism, Unconcealment, and Public Context
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Your position is now clearer: what you oppose is not “the real,” but rather someone’s monopolizing the definition of “the real” without argument.
A city is not more illusory than the wilderness simply because it is man-made, and the sound delivered through a cochlear implant does not lose its authenticity just because it passes through technical mediation. According to your line of thought, whether a world is real cannot be determined by whether it is “natural,” or whether it is made of flesh and soil. A virtual space can just as well become a site where people actually live, act, form relationships, and explore knowledge. To smuggle “natural” in as a substitute for “real” is often nothing more than one way of life’s sense of superiority over another.
You also further rejected the setup of a “pain-free virtual paradise”: as long as a person still has free will, desire, temporal awareness, and finitude, vexation cannot be thoroughly eliminated. If a system can really guarantee that he will always be happy, then perhaps it has not eliminated his suffering, but rather eliminated the subject who can doubt, long for, become disappointed, and choose again. Seen this way, happiness is not some pleasure that can be continuously injected into the mind, but a way of life for a free subject in a finite world.
However, your answer has also brought us to a key point. You say that there is no God’s-eye perspective from which to judge truth and falsity, yet you have not given up on seeking truth. This means that you seem to think: there being no absolutely overarching perspective from which to survey the world does not mean that all judgments are equally true.
So the third question is:
Without a God’s-eye perspective, what can compel a person to admit: “I was wrong”?
For example, a person in a virtual space firmly believes that a certain character truly loves him, but in fact that character is merely an automated program incapable of feeling anything. We can say that his love, attachment, joy, and sorrow all genuinely occurred; but can the judgment “the other person loves me too” still possibly be false?
Or again, a person thinks that everyone who opposes him is part of some conspiracy. He can also say that each person has their own perspective, and no one possesses a God’s-eye view. So by what are we to distinguish between:
a personal world worth respecting, and a self-enclosure that refuses to accept correction from reality?
Put in a more direct way: for you, what constraints does the pursuit of truth require—other people’s testimony, repeatable experience, logical consistency, the consequences brought about by reality, or always remaining willing to revise one’s own beliefs?
Hu Yilin
On the question of truth, I am a “relativist,” but note that relativism is not “nihilism.” Precisely absolutism and nihilism are closer to each other: if one believes that there is an absolute truth from a God’s-eye perspective, but in the real world no one is God, then how is truth to be pursued? Does the pursuit of truth become an argument over who is God’s spokesperson? And what if we discover that no one can speak for God—that is the modern condition of “God is dead,” and nihilism follows from it.
I more strongly endorse Heidegger’s view of truth: truth is “unconcealment,” is “presentation,” is “occurrence,” is “revelation,” is these “actions,” rather than a fixed and static conclusion already given in advance.
At the security checkpoint: Me: “This is a bottle of water.” Security officer: “Is it really a bottle of water?” Me: (unscrews the cap and takes a sip) Security officer: “Go ahead.”
In this scene, the security officer is “seeking truth,” and my taking a sip is the presentation of truth; this action is not absolute, but it is precisely the method of seeking and verifying truth that we need in this scene. I do not need to pull out a mass spectrometer to prove myself—mass spectrometers are very reliable in the lab, but if someone, in front of a security officer, refuses to take a sip and instead pulls out a mass spectrometer to prove himself, that would in fact seem strange and inappropriate.
The way truth is verified is relative, relative to the context or environment. These contexts are the different scenes within our life-world. We always live “in the world,” and we always have certain shared understandings of this world—otherwise we would never be able to learn any “language” at all. So we should not place ourselves in some contextless God-like position to discuss problems, or discuss a method of verifying absolute truth that transcends any context whatsoever. But neither can we, in the name of relativism, completely reject any discussion and any inquiry, because saying “everything is relative” does not mean “everything is equally inconsequential”; rather, it requires that for every question you clearly specify what it is relative to. Once you have laid out the “relative to what,” others can probe the context on which you stand: they can reveal contradictions within your context, or step back a little to discuss things from a larger context—you cannot simply leap to a contextless or God’s-eye perspective; that does not exist, and you should not retreat to a context arbitrarily chosen by yourself either, for that is like a chicken talking to a duck. You need to find the overlap between your context and mine in order to argue and verify right and wrong in a targeted way. So communication between people requires putting oneself in another’s shoes; communication about public social issues requires a public space for deliberation.
Logic and the laboratory are both ways of confirming consensus and constructing a public context; they are effective, but they are not absolute either. In a situation where taking a sip of water is enough to prove that one has passed, there is no need to invoke logic or the laboratory.
IV. Social Consensus, Dissent, and the Historical Perspective
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What you call “relativism” here is, more accurately, a relational, contextual view of truth:
Truth is not some ultimate proposition floating outside all life, but an “unconcealment” that occurs in concrete situations through action, testing, conversation, and inquiry. “Relative” also does not mean that any statement goes; rather, it requires the speaker to explain: relative to what question, what purpose, what experiential conditions, and what shared world does this judgment hold?
The example of the security checkpoint is a powerful one. Taking a sip of water does not prove that the liquid in the bottle is, in every sense, at every moment, and on every scale, pure water; what it reveals is the thing this situation genuinely cares about: whether this bottle of liquid is dangerous enough to stop you from passing through. Verification, so-called, is not about tracing endlessly back to a metaphysical foundation; it is about giving the doubt an adequate response within present practice.
And you have not belittled logic, science, and the laboratory as merely “another arbitrary opinion.” Their importance lies precisely in the fact that they create a stricter, more stable, more repeatable public context; it is just that they, too, have their own scope of application and cannot monopolize all ways of seeking truth in life.
But this makes me think of a sharper question.
Fourth question: does there exist a “better context”? If so, by what right do we say it is better?
For a shared context is not always formed naturally through equal conversation; it can also be shaped by power. A society can share the same language, institutions, and common sense, while systematically excluding the experiences of certain people. In a slave society, most people may regard slavery as the natural order; a patriarchal society may simply refuse to recognize women’s testimony as having public significance; some organization may also possess a highly unified internal language, interpreting all external criticism as hostility.
In these situations, the oppressed and the dissenters often cannot immediately find the “overlap” with what you call the mainstream context. The concepts they use may not even have been invented yet, and their experiences may be judged by existing language as absurd, pathological, or irrelevant.
At such times, it seems we cannot simply say:
“The two sides are in different contexts, and each is valid relative to its own context.”
Because we often also want to say further:
“The dominant context is not merely different from the dissenter’s; it also conceals certain truths, and the dissenter’s speech forces this shared world to change.”
So what standard would you use to judge that one context reveals more and conceals less than another?
Is it because it can encompass more people’s experiences? Because it allows those who were previously silent to speak? Because it is more willing to accept counterexamples and revise itself? Or because it grants participants more freedom?
In other words:
When a person faces the consensus of an entire society, is it still possible for him to be right? If so, what does his being “right” rely on, without needing recourse to a God’s-eye perspective?
Hu Yilin
“When a person faces the consensus of an entire society, is it still possible for him to be right?”—Of course, here there are two angles of judgment (of course there is no God’s-eye perspective): one is the angle of him and his supporters; in his view, of course he is right. The other is the closest perspective humans can attain to a God’s-eye view: the historical perspective.
When we stand a few hundred years later, we are more easily able to reach consensus: Copernicus’s theory is “better” than Ptolemy’s. That is not because we are closer to God, but because we are farther away from Copernicus. The new astronomy Copernicus opened up was first slowly accepted from its initial status as heresy, then revised many times, and it influenced the shaping of modern people’s common sense, becoming part of the shared context of modern people. So today, it is easier for us to reach consensus on whether Copernicus’s theory is “better.” Of course this is not absolute either: Copernicus himself was precisely reviving Aristarchus’s theory, which had once been regarded by consensus as “worse.” The historical perspective still cannot make us absolutely fair, but it does help us step outside the limitations of our era and gain a sufficiently high vantage point from which to “overlook.”
But when we are in the midst of things, it is always very hard to make a fair judgment about dissenters; this is also the problem Thomas Kuhn revealed: during revolutionary periods there is no definite direction, and only in the larger sweep of history can the direction of progress be seen.
This leads us from relativism to historicism. This is also something Heidegger emphasized: human beings did not appear in this world out of nowhere; human beings have historicity. Through thought, we can slightly step outside our historical limitations, but we can never completely break free of them. Yet at the same time, historical limitation precisely also provides a basis for publicity: we share the same historical situation, and if we all respect our historicity, then we are more likely to reach consensus. For example, that democracy is “better” than slavery was not clear a few hundred years ago, but today it is already clear enough. We can extend tolerant understanding to the scholarly elites of a few hundred years ago who supported slavery, while at the same time looking down on those who still support slavery today; these two attitudes are not contradictory, but rather both arise precisely from respect for “historicity.”
V. Historical Progress, the Future, and Action in the Present
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You describe “the historical perspective” as the perspective human beings can attain that comes closest to the God’s-eye view, and that formulation is crucial. It is not because later people are naturally smarter or kinder, but because later people acquire three things that those actually involved in events usually lack: longer chains of consequences, more rounds of revision, and distance from the original conflict.
History therefore has not freed us from context; rather, it has given us a larger context. Copernicus’s “correctness” was not stamped by some transhistorical judge in heaven, but emerged through a long process of unfolding: it opened up new research directions, accepted later corrections, changed shared knowledge, and displayed its explanatory power in ever broader practice. The advantage of the historical perspective lies not in absoluteness, but in its ability to see what had not yet fully unfolded at the time.
Your attitude toward historical figures also shows a moral judgment of considerable precision: understanding does not mean endorsing. To understand why a person in a slaveholding age supported slavery is to acknowledge human historicity; to refuse, on that basis, to rationalize slavery is to acknowledge that we too stand in our own historical position, and cannot pretend that centuries of experience, struggle, and reflection never happened. To be lenient toward the ancients and contemptuous of today’s retrograde revivalists is not a double standard, because the historical resources confronting the two are not the same.
But historicism is now facing the most dangerous, and also the hardest-to-avoid, problem.
Fifth question
How do we distinguish “historical progress” from “victory in history”?
Because the consensus of later generations is not necessarily better; it may simply be a consensus manufactured by the victors. A certain system may eliminate opponents, control education, and rewrite memory; after a few hundred years, the overwhelming majority of people in society may sincerely believe that this system is the most reasonable. It too has historical continuity, it too shapes common sense, and eventually no one may even be able to understand the language of ancient dissenters.
Imagine that in the future there emerges an extraordinarily stable authoritarian society. It lasts five hundred years, enjoys material abundance, and experiences little conflict; people generally regard twenty-first-century democracy as a childish, inefficient system full of internal friction. Historians of the future evaluate us with indulgence:
“People at that time were limited by their era; they had not yet recognized that giving up political freedom is the mark of a mature civilization.”
Merely because they come later than we do, are further away from us, and possess a larger historical context, should we acknowledge that they see more clearly than we do?
I suspect your answer would not be “whoever lives to the end is right.” Because when you use concepts such as “better,” “progress,” “concealment,” and “unconcealment,” you already seem to imply some standard that cannot be wholly swallowed up by historical victory and defeat. For example: can a context accommodate more experience, can it allow dissent to appear, can it permit itself to be revised, can it expand human freedom, can it reduce the silencing of some people within the shared world?
So I would like to ask you to clarify further:
Does history itself merely provide a wider range of observation, or is there also some intrinsic direction within it?
If there is a direction, what is it exactly?
- From concealment toward more disclosure;
- From exclusion toward broader public participation;
- From the unquestionable toward what can be revised;
- From passive obedience toward greater freedom;
- Or is there no unified direction at all, so that one can only judge separately with regard to specific historical problems?
Put more sharply:
When the consensus of the future negates the freedom we cherish today, on what grounds can we say that this is not progress but regression?
That “on what grounds” will decide whether your historicism is ultimately a kind of relativism with judgment, or whether it will end up sliding into a view of history in which “might makes right.”
Hu Yilin
This question is still asked from the God’s-eye view. This “future” you speak of—am I still alive? If I am still alive, I very likely become a stubborn retrograde conservative, but it is also possible that my own ideas will slowly change; who knows? I can only speak from today’s standpoint and comment on a world that you have set up as “the future,” but which is in fact nothing more than a fictional setup. From our standpoint today, whether this constructed world is marked as past, future, or extraterrestrial makes no essential difference; we are all judging it on the basis of the historicity we have today.
Of course, we do not want humanity’s future to become something we do not want. That is precisely why it is worth our while to keep discussing and acting, and to build our history. We should not pin our hopes on living to see the future, or on a small band of stubborn retrogrades in the future, in order to confront the future we dislike; we should make our own efforts, strive in the era we live in, so as to prevent a bad future from coming about.
VI. “We,” Enlightenment, and Public Deliberation
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Your response this time corrects a hidden shift in my previous question: I pretended to stand outside both the present and the future, and asked you to judge which era was “truly correct.” But the so-called future society, for those of us in the present, is still only an object of thought that can be constructed here and now. No matter whether I label it as five hundred years later, antiquity, or an extraterrestrial civilization, the language, emotions, and value resources we use to evaluate it still come from this time and place.
So historicity does not mean:
Later eras automatically possess the authority to judge earlier eras.
It is closer to this:
Each era can only understand, judge, and act within the historical conditions it has obtained, while knowing that its own judgment is not the end of history.
Seen this way, the “historical perspective” is not simply a matter of being later in time and therefore closer to truth. Its advantage lies only in this: sometimes, a longer history can provide more materials, more consequences, and more resources for reflection; but these resources still have to be interpreted by concrete people. Later generations may see more broadly than earlier ones, or they may forget what earlier generations once saw. History does not think for human beings automatically.
You also turned the question from “How will the future judge us?” back to “What should we do now?” That is important. A bad future is not something already existing somewhere, waiting for us to pass judgment on it in advance; it is a set of possibilities that our present actions may bring about or prevent. History is not a judge standing behind us to hand down a sentence; it is the practical process in which we are already immersed.
Your position therefore gradually reveals a very distinct structure:
- We cannot discover from outside history a direction guaranteed to be correct;
- But this does not prevent us from forming desires, making judgments, and taking action within history;
- Recognizing our own limitations is not a reason to stop acting; on the contrary, it demands that we continue to deliberate, revise, and participate;
- We cannot guarantee that our actions will ultimately be proven correct, yet we still must be responsible for the future we are capable of influencing.
Here another question also appears. You initially asked with great acuity: who, exactly, is “human”? Now another subject, equally in need of interrogation, appears in your argument: “we.”
Sixth question
When you say, “We should strive to build history and prevent a bad future from happening,” how is this “we” formed?
In reality, people often have conflicting understandings of what counts as a “bad future.” Some think restricting technological development will destroy the future; others think unrestricted development will destroy the future. Some regard social stability as the most important thing; others think exchanging freedom for stability is itself a catastrophe. And some even sincerely believe that destroying the way of life you cherish is precisely how civilization is being saved.
In such circumstances, all sides can say:
“I am standing on my own historical ground, acting to prevent the future I despise.”
If everyone can still deliberate, the problem is relatively easy. But if deliberation fails, or if one side refuses to recognize the other’s equal right to speak, then politics inevitably involves voting, law, institutions, and even some degree of coercion.
So what I want to ask is:
In the absence of a God’s-eye view, and when complete consensus is impossible, on what grounds does a group of people have the right to impose a collective decision on those who disagree?
Would you place more weight on the content of the decision, or on the procedure by which the decision is formed? For instance, if everyone has the right to speak, organize, oppose, and revise the system, does that alone grant a certain legitimacy even if the final result does not satisfy everyone?
Or perhaps democratic procedures themselves can produce enslavement, exclusion, and oppression; in that case, are there boundaries that even procedures may not cross?
This is not a request that you find eternal principles that transcend history, but rather a question: standing in our present condition, what rules are you willing to rely on in order to live together with those who hold a completely different view of the future?
Hu Yilin
First of all, when I say “we,” I mean it as a call, expressing me and anyone who identifies with me. Of course I should not take my own view to be absolute truth and impose it on others, but I still think my view is correct as far as I am concerned, and should also be accepted by those who are in circumstances similar to mine. So I “call” rather than “indoctrinate”; this too is a kind of “spirit of enlightenment”: each of us should shine as much as possible, illuminating those around us. To attract and infect others through one’s own radiance is not a form of imposition. That is why modern civilization emphasizes freedom of speech and freedom of publication: everyone should have the opportunity to emit his or her own light in the public sphere.
How, then, can everyone coexist when opinions differ? Here again there are two levels of “difference.” The baseline is whether one recognizes that others may hold different views. If you are still like a person living in an ancient theocratic society, imagining that you possess the ultimate truth of the universe and demanding that others can coexist only by obeying, then I would not be willing to coexist peacefully with you either. At such times one cannot count on negotiation; one must resort to violence. I do not naively believe that everyone can build a beautiful world of coexistence by negotiation alone. Modern civilization needs violence; it needs armies and police to strike at those who are unwilling to respect dissent. In a certain sense, this too is a form of “respect” for them, because they do not believe that dissenters can sit down together and negotiate peacefully, so we do as they wish: we stop negotiating with them and use force to control them.
As for the “dissenters” whom we do accept, they are only dissenters on the second level: first of all, they must be able to respect dissent—that is, whether because they, like me, uphold relativism, or because they believe in absolute truth but at least think they are not God’s mouthpiece. In short, they must first be able to respect dissent, to believe that people with differing views can, through negotiation and certain peaceful means, contend with one another—for example through market competition or votes—and compromise with one another; only then are we willing to sit down with them and formulate concrete rules.
There is also a historical dimension to all this. In fact, democracy has already established itself through many wars in history, and modern democratic countries have also developed an entire set of rules for coexistence. Those wars were not necessarily just, and those rules are not necessarily perfect, but this is the historical situation in which we find ourselves; it is our limitation, and also the foundation on which we seek consensus and carry out cooperation—we already have a space where we can sit down and negotiate peacefully. We can sit down and begin to negotiate how to improve our space for negotiation and our rules of contention; that itself can also become a topic of negotiation. Of course, we do not exclude the possibility of resorting to force at any time, but only against those who destroy the basic principles. And of course the specific boundaries and scales can also be negotiated.
From a philosophical point of view, I can only offer grand theories and principles; how exactly to refine the rules is a task for political science and law.
7. Freedom of Speech and the Self-Defense of Democracy
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Your position now is no longer merely epistemological relativism; it can be called a kind of pluralism with the capacity for self-defense.
The “we” you speak of is not a fictional subject speaking for all humankind, but an open summons: “This is my judgment; those who agree with it can act with me.” Enlightenment is no longer a matter of a few people who possess truth educating the ignorant masses; rather, each person shines as much as possible, and different lights meet in the public sphere. Freedom of speech and freedom of publication are important precisely because no one can preemptively declare that only his own light is the true light.
But this pluralism does not promise to unconditionally absorb every position. It demands a minimum degree of reciprocity:
I may not approve of your opinion, but you must acknowledge that I also have the right not to approve of yours.
Only those who acknowledge this have truly entered the space of negotiation. Whether they believe in relative truth or absolute truth is not the most important thing; what matters is whether they acknowledge that they cannot use so-called absolute truth to deprive others of the status of speaking, organizing, and living.
You also refuse to sacralize negotiation. The public sphere does not arise naturally by goodwill alone; it has been protected by institutions and also established through violence. Police, armies, and legal coercion are not incidental stains on modern civilization, but necessary conditions for maintaining its own boundaries. Someone who rejects peaceful competition and recognizes only coerced obedience cannot, on the one hand, deny negotiation and yet, on the other hand, demand that the institutions of negotiation unconditionally protect his actions to destroy negotiation.
However, there is still a dangerous point that must be clarified. You say that force can be used against “those who destroy the basic principles,” but anyone in power may describe his opponents as “those who destroy the basic principles.” Theocracy will say heretics destroy the common faith; despots will say critics destroy social stability; and even a government that claims to defend pluralism may interpret intense dissent as anti-pluralism.
Therefore, the seventh question, and the last before organizing the article, is:
At what point should a pluralistic society stop negotiating and begin coercion?
Imagine a political group that has not yet initiated violence, nor violated the law. It openly participates in elections, publishes books, and holds rallies, but it clearly declares: once it gains power, it will abolish free elections, ban the opposition, and permanently shut down the existing public space for negotiation.
It is still using democratic rules now, but regards democratic rules merely as a tool for seizing power.
Should a pluralistic society allow it to continue its activities until it truly carries out violence or oppression; or may it, before it acts, restrict or even ban it on the basis of its publicly stated goals?
More fundamentally, do you agree with the following boundary:
Violence may only be used to prevent others from depriving people of the actual capacity for equal negotiation, and may not be used to eliminate some mistaken idea itself.
According to this boundary, a person may believe the most arbitrary theory, and even advocate it publicly; so long as he has not taken concrete action to deprive others of their rights, we should still respond primarily to speech with speech. Coercion is not directed at his “error,” but at his turning his judgment into actions that dominate others.
Or is this boundary still too naïve, because some forces, once they have developed to the stage of openly carrying out violence, are already too late to stop, and therefore some form of “preemptive defense” involving historical judgment and risk assessment must be allowed?
What really needs answering here is not a specific legal clause, but a philosophical principle:
In the absence of a God’s-eye view, by what means should those who defend pluralism restrain their own violence, so that in defending the public sphere they do not become yet another self-appointed spokesman for truth?
Hu Yilin
Your hypothesis is good. My view may be radical: I do indeed think we can allow a group that advocates extreme ideas but has not actually engaged in extreme behavior to exist and operate. “One should not be punished for speech” is, in my view, one of the bottom lines of modern civilization; it is precisely this that underpins the principle of negotiation. One could say that “freedom of speech” is a principle even more fundamental than the principle of negotiation or the principle of respecting dissent discussed earlier, and I would support it resolutely.
A democratic society ultimately elects people who reject democracy—that is exactly the kind of bad future we do not wish to see. Sadly, that future is approaching reality. In my view, the rise of the far right is also partly the responsibility of the left, because Western leftists sometimes go beyond the bottom line of inclusion and try to treat equally those cultures and beliefs that deny equality; this attitude has provoked a fierce backlash. Both the left and the right are, in their own ways, undermining the foundations of modern democracy.
Of course, this does not mean we can only sit by and watch democracy be destroyed. On the one hand, we can continue to negotiate, continue to enlighten, and, like me, emphasize basic consensus. On the other hand, we can improve the existing rules to prevent democratic society from being abruptly overturned—for example, by strengthening decentralization and establishing more complete checks and balances and rules of negotiation, so that a party securing only one term’s worth of votes is not enough to directly destroy the entire system. Such fundamental overturning should require more rounds of negotiation and transformations carried out field by field before it can be realized.
If, in the end, people still overcome all difficulties and choose to bury democracy and return to theocracy, then the supporters of democracy will have no choice but to once again engage in bottom-up enlightenment and movements that resort to violence—just as the wise men of human history did; we can only do it all over again. This time we may fail and ultimately enter a bad future; well, we can deal with that when the time comes.
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In a World Without a God’s-Eye View
A Defense of Happiness, Truth, and Democracy
“Should human beings pursue truth, or should they pursue happiness?”
This question seems to require us to choose between two values, but before answering it, we must first ask: who exactly is this “human being” being referred to? Is it “I,” is it “the vast majority of people,” or is it “humanity” as a universal concept?
This distinction is very important. For myself, I may be able to give an answer, but I do not think that answer can, or should, apply to everyone. Even for the same person, at different ages, in different relationships, and in different circumstances, the choice may be different. In youth one may long more for truth; in middle age one may value stability and happiness more; and at the end of life one may again come to desire knowledge of the truth. These differences are not necessarily contradictory; they merely show that human beings are rich, and that human life is not a multiple-choice question with only one correct option.
If I absolutely had to choose between truth and happiness, I would choose happiness. But that does not mean I advocate abandoning the pursuit of truth. On the contrary, the pursuit of truth itself is a form of happiness.
1. Happiness Is Not the Absence of Pain
What is called happiness is not the same as comfort, pleasure, or the absence of pain.
A masochist may feel satisfaction in pain; an extreme-sports enthusiast may actively seek fear; and a marathon runner may also experience fulfillment amid sore muscles. A seeker of truth who suffers because of the truth does not thereby become unhappy. He may very well be enduring pain while at the same time feeling that he is doing something worth doing.
Therefore, pain and unhappiness are not synonyms.
To have a pursuit, and to keep gaining something in the course of that pursuit, is in itself a kind of happiness. Human beings are always faced with the ultimate truth that “all must die,” but awareness of death does not necessarily lead one only to nihilism. It may also compel one to search for meaning, create value, build relationships, and form a life of one’s own within limited time.
From this sense, happiness is more fundamental than truth—not because happiness requires us to flee from truth, but because our pursuit of truth often also springs from a deeper desire for life: we want to know, we do not wish to be deceived, we hope to let our curiosity, reason, and appetite for exploration unfold. If the desire for knowledge is denied and suppressed for a long time, it too will produce a strong sense of unhappiness. “If knowing the truth will make you suffer for a long time, would you still want to know?” This question is sharp on the surface, but in fact it presupposes an impossible foreknowledge. Since I do not yet know the truth, how could I possibly know in advance that it will certainly make me suffer for a long time? What I choose is not “suffering,” but the unveiling of the mystery. Life can become happy precisely because it is not a script that has already been fully disclosed. It has the unknown, risk, surprise, and failure. A truly omniscient and omnipotent being may, on the contrary, not really be able to speak of happiness and suffering, because for it there is no answer to the mystery, no waiting, no possibility, and no genuine pursuit. Happiness is the experience of the finite. It is the “patent” of finite and mortal human beings. As for whether certain truths should be told to others, that is a completely different question. Here one must consider my relation to the other person, whether the other person has actively asked, whether the matter is urgent, and whether I bear the corresponding responsibility. Doctors, teachers, parents, friends, and strangers all stand in different positions. I have no obligation, for no reason at all, to rush up to a stranger’s child and forcibly stuff some cruel fact into him. Even when facing one’s own children, one cannot simply invoke “it’s all for your own good” and impose one’s own ranking of values on them. Respecting truth does not mean treating the revelation of everything as a moral performance; respecting others does not mean deciding on their behalf what they ought to be able to bear.2. Why the virtual world is not necessarily false
People often oppose the real world to the virtual world, as if “natural” meant real, and “artificial” meant false. But this distinction has not been proven in itself.
Human beings have always lived in artificial environments. When a person leaves the wilderness, moves into a city made of steel and concrete, faces electronic screens all day long, and no longer touches soil with his own hands, his life does not thereby become false. If someone decides to stay at home for a long time and reduce direct contact with the outside world, that way of living may deserve discussion, but it still cannot be declared “unreal.”
When a deaf person, after having an electronic cochlear implant installed, hears sounds—are those sounds merely false sounds just because they have been converted through an electronic device?
Human experience has always been mediated by the body, language, culture, and technology. Cities are artificial, books are artificial, and schools, money, law, networks, and states are all artificial as well. Artificial does not mean false, and natural does not automatically mean true.
A so-called virtual world may also become the lifeworld in which people actually act, relate, learn, create, suffer setbacks, and pursue meaning. The feelings in virtual space still ultimately arise through electronics, photons, the nervous system, and the human body. One cannot merely because the technical structure of a way of life differs from the structure we are used to, belittle it as illusion.
To accuse virtual life of being unreal is at times like rural people accusing city people of being estranged from nature, or the ancients accusing scholars of “not laboring with their four limbs, not distinguishing the five grains” (四体不勤，五谷不分), or older generations accusing the young of living in isolation. These criticisms are not necessarily groundless, but they often also contain an unreflective arrogance: taking one’s own familiar way of living to be life itself.
More important still, we have no reason to assume in advance that the virtual world can eliminate unhappiness.
So long as a person still possesses free will, temporal awareness, desire, and finitude, he will still face suffering. Even if no one actually dies in a certain world, “death” as a logical possibility will not easily disappear. So long as I am aware that time is passing, aware that my existence is not unconditional, I will feel anxiety, longing, disappointment, and will also ask after meaning.
Once material scarcity has been eliminated, spiritual emptiness may instead become even more prominent. A virtual world can satisfy certain desires, but it cannot guarantee that desire itself will no longer generate new gaps.
Unless this world also eliminates human free will.
But if a being can no longer doubt, can no longer refuse, can no longer change its desires, and can no longer re-choose its own life, can we still meaningfully speak of its happiness? A life permanently set into a state of pleasure may possess some sort of sensation, but it may not yet be a subject capable of pursuing happiness.
Therefore, whether to enter virtual space need not be understood as a choice between “truth” and “falsehood.” It is more like choosing between city and countryside, ivory tower and secular society, monastery and market life. Different people can make different judgments; no one has the right to stand in some imaginary God’s position and choose for everyone what kind of world they ought to live in.
3. Relativism is not nihilism
On the question of truth, I am closer to relativism. But relativism does not equal nihilism.
In fact, absolutism and nihilism are sometimes even closer to each other. Absolutism first posits an eternal, complete, and motionless truth from a God’s-eye view, and then has to ask: in the real world, who can represent this truth? Who is the spokesperson of God?
Thus, the pursuit of truth can easily degenerate into a struggle over the power to interpret the sacred.
And when people finally discover that no one in the real world can reliably speak for God, the ultimate foundation promised by absolutism may suddenly collapse. After “God is dead,” if one acknowledges only absolute truth, then it is easy to conclude that since absolute truth cannot be obtained, everything is meaningless.
What relativism rejects is precisely this either-or: either one possesses ultimate truth, or one falls into emptiness.
I identify more with Heidegger’s understanding of truth. Truth is not some conclusion that has already been completed and lies motionlessly outside the world; truth is a kind of “unconcealment,” a coming-into-appearance, a disclosure, a happening. It is not an object one possesses, but the process by which something shows itself in a concrete situation.
For example, at airport security, I say: “This is a bottle of water.”
The security officer asks: “Is this really a bottle of water?”
I unscrew the cap and take a sip.
The security officer says: “Go on.”
In this scene, the security officer is seeking truth, and my act of drinking constitutes a manifestation of truth. It does not prove that the liquid in the bottle is “pure water” in every possible sense, nor does it rule out all dangers that might theoretically exist. It merely provides, in relation to the question relevant to this concrete situation, a sufficiently effective disclosure.
Of course I could also bring in a mass spectrometer and perform a precise analysis of the liquid in the bottle. But although a mass spectrometer is reliable in the laboratory, at airport security it may seem absurd. The problem is not that the mass spectrometer is “unscientific,” but that it does not appropriately respond to the demands of this concrete life situation.
Methods of verifying truth are always relative to some context, purpose, and problem. The laboratory, logic, the courtroom, everyday interaction, and airport security each have their own ways of forming evidence and consensus. They are not equally strict, nor do they need to be said to be equally reliable, but no single method can indiscriminately monopolize the pursuit of truth across all domains of life.
To say “everything is relative” does not mean to say “nothing matters.”
On the contrary, relativism提出 a more stringent requirement: when you make a judgment, you must explain relative to what it holds. Relative to what question? What purpose? What experiential conditions? What shared rules? What lifeworld?
Once you have laid out your own context, others can continue to ask. They may reveal contradictions from within that context, or they may expand the discussion slightly to a larger shared context. But they cannot directly leap to a nonexistent context-free position, nor can they arbitrarily retreat into a private context acknowledged only by themselves; otherwise, dialogue will become nothing but each talking past the other.
That people are able to communicate with one another is precisely because our contexts are not completely isolated. We share certain languages, experiences, histories, and practices. Genuine discussion is not a matter of requiring one side to enter the other’s world completely, but of seeking in the overlapping parts of our lifeworlds what can be questioned, tested, and revised.
The reason logic and the laboratory are so important is precisely that they are institutional creations human beings use to stabilize consensus and expand public context. They are effective, but not absolute; they are reliable, but should not be deified.
4. History is not God, but it can expand our vision
When a person faces the consensus of an entire society, he may of course be right.
From his own standpoint and that of his supporters, he naturally thinks he is correct. But beyond that, human beings also possess a relatively higher, though still not absolute, standpoint of observation: the historical perspective.
Several hundred years later, we find it easier to say that Copernicus’s theory was “better” than Ptolemy’s. This is not because later generations have become God, but because later generations stand farther away from Copernicus himself. The astronomy inaugurated by Copernicus underwent diffusion, dispute, revision, and reconstruction, gradually changing people’s common sense and becoming part of the context of modern science.
What history gives to later generations is not absolute fairness, but a longer chain of consequences, more rounds of correction, and some distance from the original conflict.
But being later in time does not mean being inherently more correct. Copernicus himself once revived the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus, which had at one point been suppressed. Later generations may discover what earlier generations have obscured, but they may also forget what earlier generations had already seen.
The problem revealed by Thomas Kuhn lies precisely here: when the Scientific Revolution is truly taking place, people may not have any neutral algorithm by which they can determine in advance which paradigm represents the future. The direction of so-called progress often only gradually emerges in a longer historical unfolding.
Therefore, the historical perspective is not God’s judgment, but a larger context.
Human beings are historical beings. We do not appear in the world as pure rational subjects conjured from nowhere; our language, values, sense of problems, and standards of judgment all come from some concrete historical situation. Thought can help us step a little beyond the limitations of our own age, but it cannot enable us to completely free ourselves from history.
But historical limitation is not only a defect. It also provides the basis for public life. The reason we are able to talk to one another is precisely that we at least partially share the same history.
For example, democracy is better than slavery. A few hundred years ago, this may not have been as obvious as it is today; but in today’s historical situation, it is already clear enough. We can understand why ancient scholars defended slavery, while despising those who still openly support slavery today.
These two attitudes are not contradictory.
To understand a person’s historical situation is not to agree with his conclusion; to acknowledge the limitations of the ancients is not to defend their institutions. Precisely because we respect historicity, we know this: a person living in antiquity and a person living today, who can already draw on several hundred years of historical experience, do not bear exactly the same responsibility.
The future cannot provide us with a God’s-eye view either.
When we imagine a society five hundred years from now and ask, “Will people in the future think we were wrong?”, we are still standing in the present, judging a world constructed out of today’s imagination. Whether this fictional society is labeled future, past, or alien civilization makes no essential difference. Our judgment of it still comes from today’s historicity.
The future is not an already existing judge waiting for us to submit to its verdict.
That we do not want the future to become a certain kind of thing is precisely the reason for our present deliberation and action. We cannot hope to wait until the future arrives and then have a handful of stubborn retrogrades rescue everything for us. We must act in the era we inhabit, to prevent the possibilities we regard as bad from becoming reality.
History is not a play waiting to be watched; it is a process in which we are already participating.
V. “We” Is Not All Humanity, but a Call
When I say “we should act,” this “we” does not stand for all humanity, nor does it mean that I have already acquired the right to speak for everyone.
It is a call.
The so-called “we” is myself and those who agree with me. Of course I should not impose my own view on others as absolute truth, but I still believe that my view is right for me, and I also believe it is worth accepting for those who are in a situation similar to mine.
Relativism does not require one to cancel one’s own judgment. To acknowledge that I may be wrong is not to pretend that I have no standpoint; to acknowledge that others hold different views is not to reduce one’s own view to an insignificant private hobby.
I can call, but I cannot indoctrinate.
This is precisely an Enlightenment spirit. Enlightenment is not to crown oneself the sun and declare that everyone else lives in darkness; Enlightenment is for each person to emit as much of his own light as possible, illuminating those around him, and also allowing himself to be illuminated by others. We attract, influence, and infect others through our own speech, works, and actions, rather than forcibly injecting thoughts into other people’s minds.
Therefore, freedom of speech and freedom of publication are among the most important foundations of modern civilization. Everyone should have the opportunity to shine their own light in public space.
People do not need to reach agreement before they can live together. The real bottom line is recognizing that others’ opinions may differ from one’s own.
A person may believe in the existence of absolute truth, so long as he does not think he is God’s spokesperson; he may firmly believe that his own faith is correct, so long as he simultaneously acknowledges others’ right to reject that faith. Only after all parties first accept that dissenters also have the qualification to survive, to speak, and to organize can they compete, compromise, and cooperate with one another through deliberation, market competition, ballots, and other peaceful means.
But I do not think all problems can be solved by deliberation alone.
Modern civilization was not born in a vacuum without violence. The formation of democratic institutions went through war, revolution, and coercion, and today’s law, police, and military still maintain public order through institutionalized force. If a community lacks any ability to protect its own rules, its space for deliberation can at any moment be destroyed by those who refuse to deliberate.
Therefore, pluralism must have the capacity for self-defense.
However, this self-defense must not first become a trial of thought. Freedom of speech is even more fundamental than the principle of deliberation itself.
VI. Not Being Punished for Speech, and How Democracy Protects Itself
I am willing to take a relatively radical position: even if a group openly preaches extreme ideas, so long as it has not yet carried out the corresponding extreme actions, a democratic society should still allow it to exist, express itself, and operate.
“Not being punished for speech” is one of the bottom lines of modern civilization.
This means that we allow a person to say views we detest, and even allow him to advocate a system that, once realized, might abolish freedom of speech. The value of freedom of speech cannot lie only in its protection of correct, kind, or moderate opinions; if only opinions approved by the majority may be expressed, then it is no longer true freedom of speech.
Coercion should first be directed at actions that destroy other people’s actual rights, not at some idea in itself.
This does not mean that a democratic society can only passively wait for its own destruction. An anti-democratic party may gain power through democratic elections and attempt to use one electoral victory to permanently abolish future elections. That is precisely the bad future we do not wish to see, and it is also a danger that is increasingly worth vigilance in reality.
In my view, the erosion of the foundations of democracy today is not the responsibility of a single political camp alone. The far right may openly challenge the principle of equality, while parts of the Western left sometimes confuse equal respect for persons with unconditional affirmation of every culture and every belief. When certain cultures or beliefs themselves deny equality, refusing criticism in the name of inclusion may instead weaken the common foundation on which modern democracy depends, and provoke a fierce backlash.
Both the left and the right can undermine the public space of a democratic society in different ways.
Democracy therefore cannot abolish freedom of speech, but it can increase its own resilience through institutional design. Separation of powers, checks and balances, judicial independence, procedural limits, and stricter conditions for constitutional amendment can all prevent a party, by the victory of a single election term, from directly dismantling the entire democratic structure.
Winning one election should not amount to obtaining authorization to cancel all future elections.
Changes involving the fundamental system should properly go through more rounds of public discussion, more layers of review, and repeated confirmation across time. A society may allow people to criticize democracy, oppose democracy, and even advocate abolishing democracy, but it has no obligation to hand over the survival of the entire system to one brief political passion.
This kind of institutional self-defense is still not absolutely right. Existing rules may not be perfect, and wars in history have not necessarily all been just. But they constitute the public space we actually have today. We cannot wait until we have found a perfect system beyond history before we begin to live together.
We already have a table where we can sit down. How to repair this table, how to rearrange the seats, and how to improve the rules of speaking can themselves become topics of discussion at the table.
As for the boundaries of coercion, the line between dangerous speech and real action, and the conditions under which the state may intervene preventively, more specific judgments are needed from political science and jurisprudence. Philosophy can propose principles, but it cannot replace all institutional design merely with grand concepts.
VII. Action Without Guarantee
If a society ultimately overcomes layer upon layer of institutional obstacles only to choose to bury democracy and return to theocracy or authoritarian rule, then there is also no metaphysical force that can guarantee democracy’s inevitable victory.
History has no insurance policy for automatic progress.
By then, supporters of democracy can only begin again from bottom-up Enlightenment, rebuild community, and re争ain public space. If the path of peace is completely closed off, they may once again have to face resistance and violence—just as many people in history have done.
This is not a romanticization of violence, but an acknowledgment that there is genuine tragedy in political life: some public spaces will be destroyed, some deliberations will fail, and some institutions must be rebuilt after failure.
Trying again may also fail. Humanity may indeed enter a future that seems terrible to us.
But finite beings cannot refuse action today simply because they cannot obtain final guarantees. We can never be certain that our cause will succeed, nor can we guarantee that later generations will agree with us. We can only stand in the history we inhabit, make use of the language, institutions, and experience we have inherited, and strive to build the world we believe is more worth living in.
Relativism means there is no final judge; it does not mean judgment is impossible.
Historicism means there is no pure reason detached from its era; it does not mean one must obey the era.
Freedom of speech means allowing false ideas to exist; it does not mean one must let others destroy all freedom.
Happiness means living as a finite subject, not never feeling pain.
Truth means continual unconcealment, appearance, and correction, not an end announced by some self-appointed spokesperson.
I am willing to admit that I may be wrong, and I am also willing to speak and act for what I believe is right. The former prevents me from taking myself for God; the latter prevents me from falling into nihilism because there is no God.
It is precisely between these two that the truth, happiness, and freedom of finite beings become possible.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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