Some people fly the banners of relativism and postmodernism, claiming to oppose absolutism and universalism; in fact, they are unconsciously poisoned by absolutism, and at bottom they are nothing more than a further development of absolutism itself.
Relativists will say one moment, “There is no absolute, universal, singular standard,” and then a moment later, either bluntly or obliquely, they say: “There is no standard”; one moment, “There is no interpretation beyond context,” and then a moment later, “interpretation is nothing but telling stories”; one moment, “Every argument has its limits,” and then a moment later they can, with righteous assurance and in complete ignorance of those limits, use their own arguments……
The first half of the above sentences is indeed a reaction against absolutism, but the second half immediately throws them back into the embrace of absolutism.
At bottom, they still firmly believe that a “standard” must be absolute, universal, and singular, so when they cannot find such a standard, they proclaim that there is no standard; they are always in pursuit of the absolute, and when they wake up to the fact that the absolute is something they can never pursue successfully, they simply abandon the pursuit itself.
Philosophy is first and foremost philo, is love, is pursuit. But when certain people come to think that they can no longer possibly pursue the absolute, they simply give up inquiry, give up questioning.
It is just like someone being brutally dumped out of an unrequited romance, and not only giving up the object of that love, but giving up love itself. Having learned that the object of that romance was illusory, he then assumes that “love” itself must also be illusory.
That is why I say that relativism, put nicely, is precisely absolutism’s “self-negation”; put less nicely, it is simply “giving up on oneself.” Having been flung back from illusion into reality with a heavy thud, they can no longer be bothered to get up and set out again.
Philosophy, after a journey spanning several thousand years, is indeed too heavy for the flashy, noisy modern society we live in. Words like truth, goodness, beauty, and freedom are even heavier, so heavy that one feels unable to bear them. They flee philosophy, flee freedom, flee reflection, flee serious and conscientious thinking, and are content with empty grandstanding, or even with saying nothing at all—just singing and dancing is enough to satisfy them. Some people abandon ideals and questioning, yet still do so with great assurance, even smugly, imagining themselves to be exactly the opponents of this flashy, noisy “modernity”; in fact, they have long since sunk right into it.
The hallmark of the modern is precisely to trumpet “freedom,” to venerate “individuality,” to make “rebellion” fashionable. Rebellion, being an angry young man, cursing and swearing, denying everything—none of that means escape; on the contrary, it means one is already deeply trapped within it. The hallmark of modernity is precisely to destroy everything, to flatten everything, including itself. The so-called turn from the modern to the postmodern is nothing more than the claim that the absolutism that levels everything has finally swung its cannon around to aim at itself.
A true scholar will never be satisfied with rebellion, much less give up on himself and abandon everything. “Holding the line” is the scholar’s proper duty. “Reflection” is also “returning to thought”: not for the sake of abandoning something, but in order to retreat back into tradition and then set out once more.
January 7, 2008
最新评论
- 星空
2008-01-08 17:18:26 匿名 124.207.169.27
Your recent articles are rather radical。。。 “retreating back into tradition” sounds a bit like shouting “Back to Kant”。。。 Personally, I think relativism does have its merits, of course, “relativism” may be understood in more than one way。。。
- 古
2008-01-08 23:34:24 匿名 125.34.40.220
I wasn’t “shouting.” “Retreating back into tradition” is in the first place the most perfectly natural thing in doing scholarship; there is no need to yell it at all. It is only that in this noisy and restless age, even such a slogan has to be shouted—truly lamentable.
As for the slogan “Back to Kant,” it has its own background, and that is not what I am saying here.
I have not denied the “merits” of relativism, although I prefer the term “pluralism.” Still, if you want to call me a relativist, I am happy to accept that. One of my major scholarly ideals is “rearticulating pluralism from the classical tradition,” and this article is precisely yet another interpretation in service of that ideal.
Three Pieces Beyond “Relativism and Absolutism Are of a Feather”
Gu Cha wrote on 2008-01-08 03:09:40
I am attaching these two pieces rewritten from chat records. Do these two pieces have any relation to the previous one? Do they not? Anyway…… let’s put them together.
Piece One (rewritten from Email):
Why must one read the works of the “past” in order to do philosophy?
There is no value standard that transcends history, no absolute one. Then could there be such a situation: if the Nazis had won, successfully conquered the globe, and passed their values on to every child, would people after several generations all have come to regard concentration camps and mass murder as moral?
For the masses, that is entirely possible; when the Nazis rose, they enjoyed broad and strong support among the public at home.
But does that mean we cannot transcend the present, and that whether mass murder is good or evil depends only on whether the Nazis win or lose?
Of course not. Even though, in the very end, the judge can only be “history,” that cannot serve as an excuse for philosophers to shirk responsibility. Philosophers have the responsibility to transcend their own time, to free themselves from the shackles of “fashion,” to see the problem clearly and explain it plainly.
Philosophers always direct the spearhead of criticism toward what is existing and what is popular. Philosophers will not accept the logic that “the winner is king.” If the Nazis had failed to win, then so be it; philosophers might even have defended them from some angles. But if the Nazis had come to power, then philosophers should by all means have aimed their criticism at them. And now what holds power throughout the world is liberalism, the so-called “democracy,” so philosophers certainly will not, as a matter of course, flatter and praise freedom and democracy; rather, they must criticize them and reflect upon them.
How is it possible to view problems from beyond one’s own time? This is precisely why philosophy is always “philosophy history,” why philosophy must read those classics from long ago, and trace things back to their source. Only with the help of history can we transcend “history,” that is, transcend the “present age” and reflect upon and criticize the present age. So it is said that reflection is also “returning to thought”: if one does not first “return,” one can by no means gain the strength to “re-”flect.
Put another way, what one most fears in studying philosophy is deep-seated preconceptions. “Preconceptions” include not only some concrete claims and positions, but also habits of speech and fixed patterns of thinking, and the latter are even harder to transcend. For instance, many people in China have been deeply poisoned by political textbooks; sometimes it is not that you accept too many of the textbook’s claims—you may even oppose the textbook’s claims, and perhaps despise the textbook—but if you have long been exposed to the textbook’s mode of speech, your patterns and habits of thought may well have been imperceptibly shaped into fixed grooves. In that case, you may outwardly oppose the textbook’s conclusions, but in fact find it ever harder to break out of that framework of thought.
Of course, once a philosopher’s thought has matured, every sentence he speaks is also imbued with stubborn “preconceptions”; yet these preconceptions belong to that philosopher himself, and one might even say that this kind of “preconception”—that whole set of ways of thinking and conceptual framework—is precisely where the philosopher’s contribution lies. For ordinary people, however, before they have formed a set of “preconceptions” that truly belong to themselves, they are already deeply trapped in preconceptions that have come unsolicited from elsewhere and cannot extricate themselves. In Heidegger’s words, they are “falling” among “the they.” The philosopher, by contrast, must transcend out of the they.
How is it possible to avoid too early a plunge into preconceptions from which one cannot extricate oneself? One still has to do it through reading works from different periods and different schools in history. At times one thinks about problems with Kant’s line of thought; at times one changes to Heidegger’s style of seeing things. In this way, on the one hand, one can keep strengthening one’s thinking; on the other hand, one may also avoid being permanently confined within a single fixed pattern.
January 7, 2008
Piece Two (rewritten from QQ聊天):
Question: Philosophy cannot do without clear semantic meaning. So how is Eastern philosophy possible?
Answer: It is not that philosophy necessarily requires speech to be perfectly clear. But even if I say that my philosophy is meant to lead you to the realm of “forgetting words once the meaning is grasped,” I still have to do so through speech. The mode of philosophical activity is speech. And this speech still requires clarity and precision.
Of course, different styles and schools have different standards for what counts as “clear,” but as a systematic author, a philosopher’s language needs, under his own norms, to be clear and precise. That is to say, the most basic requirement is that the philosopher himself must be extremely clear about what exactly he is saying; whether others can understand it deeply is another matter, and what realm my words are intended to lead readers toward is yet another matter.
Much of Eastern philosophy is not systematic philosophy; this refers to their mode of writing, such as Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucius, and Mencius, who communicate in the form of sayings or aphorisms. But that does not mean their thought has no inner system. A philosopher, as a philosopher, must certainly possess a relatively clear and stable system of thought; that is to say, none of his statements is “abrupt” or disconnected. You can find links among his different utterances, and these utterances are fundamentally one and the same. When Confucius says “one principle runs through it all,” he is emphasizing just such coherence. Each of Confucius’s sayings is of course clear and precise, and must be connected to and coherent with his basic line of thought and basic claims, and can be interpreted in relation to his other utterances; otherwise there would be no basis for speaking of “one principle running through it all.” This is what semantic clarity means. Even if someone like Laozi at times deliberately adopts ambiguous or even seemingly contradictory formulations, that contradiction is only on the surface. He certainly has his own intention, wanting to convey something through ambiguous concepts; why such things must be conveyed through such language—there is intention in all of this, and that intention ultimately remains “consistent throughout” with, and connected to, the philosopher’s entire discourse.
Semantic clarity does not require “logical rigor.” Formal logic, as a thing, is not something that Chinese philosophy talks about, nor has the West always talked about it from the very beginning. The true requirement of semantic clarity is that every sentence and every word you use in this way rather than that way must surely be “grounded” and “considered.” That is, not random, not speaking off the cuff. Even “silence” is a kind of speech; even if you wish to say that this sentence cannot be further explained, the reason for “silence” here rather than somewhere else must still be grounded and justified.
In short, “semantic clarity” means having grounds and evidence, and not “anything goes.” Seen from the standpoint of pluralism, other people’s statements may each have their own system, and in general it is “anything goes,” but for you alone, your thought must after all be coherent and mature; otherwise it cannot count as philosophy. For example, if you say something and you yourself do not know what it means, that simply will not do. You may say that the deeper meaning of your sentence is inexpressible, but the “silence” of the “inexpressible” itself is also a kind of “interpretation.” Why you need to be “silent” cannot itself be without grounds and evidence; which places should be silent and which should be explained cannot be arbitrary, as if I can say, “I’m in a bad mood today, so I won’t explain it,” and tomorrow, when I’m in a good mood, I can explain it. That would not do for a philosopher.
January 8, 2008
最新评论
- ray
2008-06-20 13:33:06 匿名 124.115.173.236
It’s obvious you must be classically trained in philosophy. I’m a sophomore philosophy student at Northwest University, and I hope you’ll give me guidance in the future. My QQ is 287185221
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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