A fortunate chat with Professor Li Deshun

Me
2006-01-14 21:52:45 [reply]
Just jot down a few odds and ends:
We were told to assemble at nine in the morning. I wasn’t properly awake; ZW had a nosebleed; CG sprained his wrist. It seemed everyone was having a pretty rough time. LY overslept; at first, when we texted and called, he didn’t respond at all, and I even thought something had happened to him, like he had chipped a front tooth or something. In the end, we confirmed it was because he had stayed up all night and only gone to sleep at six.
We didn’t bring an MP3 player. LY brought a voice recorder, but the batteries were dead. After buying two batteries, it worked fine, but the machine, which was said to be able to record for 18 hours, stopped automatically after only two hours in the morning, apparently because it had run out of space. In the afternoon it basically failed to record anything. When we got back and checked, it turned out not to have a USB port, so the laptop couldn’t connect to it. I had to bring it back to connect it to a desktop, but it still can’t read it. I still don’t know what to do……
The atmosphere during the conversation was pretty good. Teacher Li’s line of thought was very clear. Of course, there were many major differences between our views, but we didn’t dwell too much on those differences. On the one hand, out of respect for our senior; on the other hand, our ability to express ourselves was too weak; and on yet another hand, what Teacher Li said did make sense. It was just that we were looking at things from somewhat different angles.
The most important disagreement was that Teacher Li said he wanted to “subvert the ethics of Confucius and Kant,” to subvert “putting oneself in another’s place.” This is certainly difficult for CG and me to accept, but Teacher Li has his own reasonable considerations. Perhaps after Teacher Li writes out these ideas he is currently mulling over, we’ll be able to offer some comments on this issue.
Besides this issue, we also discussed academia and politics, philosophy and the times, the silencing of Marxist philosophy, the problem of suicide, the building of philosophy departments, and so on.
One important point on which everyone was still relatively much in agreement was that, whether in philosophical debate or in philosophical research, the most important thing is first to discover the problem and point it out. Then, around these problems, everyone can, from their own positions and with their own resources, offer different views. But if the problem itself hasn’t even been clarified, and people just go on dragging things out and speaking in empty abstractions and slogans, then that is really quite meaningless.
When we left, Teacher Li gave LY some books. LY let us pick some out; I took two, and CG took a whole stack.
After we got back to LY’s place, CG knocked over a bottle of water onto an electrical outlet, causing the power to trip out across LY’s whole apartment. CG said, “I’m really sorry—I made a mistake on my very first visit,” and LY said, “What does it matter whether it’s your first visit or not first visit……”

zw
2006-01-15 01:44:09 [reply]
The narrative writing is pretty good

Li
2006-01-15 13:52:45 [reply]
Mm……and there’s also the recording, do I really have to整理 it into a written transcript?……terrified.
Little bug is being a bit too greedy, hehe~~