Friends who have long followed Suixuan will probably already have noticed that Unic, who used to be a regular here and once declared how much she agreed with my views and how much she supported my blog, suddenly became so agitated after I came back from my period of seclusion that she eventually left Suixuan. Some people may wonder: what on earth happened? In fact I was quite astonished myself; I really had underestimated a girl’s emotional reactions. But there was nothing to be done about it. Gentleness and deference may put others at ease, but they cannot help them reach a decision. And since she was facing the college entrance examination and having to make a choice, and since, to a very great extent, what she knew about philosophy came from me, how could I bear to stand by and watch her remain so naïve and muddle-headed all the time?
What I did was actually very simple: in conversation, I merely took the most central line of thought and stance I have always held—or rather, the starry-sky philosophy that has always hung at the very top of Suixuan—and confronted her directly with it in the sharpest possible way, emphasizing it to her personally.
She had repeatedly claimed that she almost completely agreed with my views, except for those she did not understand. I, of course, merely laughed it off—wait until you have “your own views” before saying that! But to be honest, I really had not expected that from the very first sentence she would go in the opposite direction.
This most fundamental difference had been clear to me ever since I first got to know her; it just had never received serious attention. Because when I was little I also had similar tendencies (of course, she does not believe this, and even less can she accept the change I claim to have undergone). Yet as I increasingly and more thoroughly carried out my starry-sky philosophy, I came to realize that she might not develop in the direction I had originally expected, and that I no longer needed to expect others to develop in some direction I approved of. She ought to choose her own, unique path; what path she chooses is not the key point. The key point is “choice” itself: she must choose “by herself,” must choose “for herself.” And what I can do for her may be, as Heidegger said: “not to take ‘care’ away from him, but to return ‘care’ to him for the first time as care.”
If my torrent of sharp, direct language caused her pain, I did indeed do it on purpose. I am neither her parent nor her lover; I have no reason to use sweet talk to coax her into happiness (of course I am not good at that sort of thing anyway). Philosophy is by nature a tiresome, long-winded discourse. It often cannot make people feel comfortable and carefree; on the contrary, it makes them restless and anxious. This restlessness and anxiety do not come from external stimulation or oppression, but because philosophy brings people before their own “themselves.”
The title I wanted to give this article was not originally related to Unic. Mm, you’ve guessed the reason, haven’t you? This year’s snow disaster, the earthquake, Tibet independence, the anti-French incident, CNN, and so on… These events produced the same effect, simply put: “common cause against a common enemy.” Many people think that common cause against a common enemy is admirable and gratifying, but I do not feel happy about it.
I do not deny those people who “share a common cause against a common enemy” or who are “as eager to hate evil as to hate the enemy,” but I firmly refuse to join any group凝聚ed by hatred!
Starry-sky philosophy has long explained this: I love the whole world, I love the whole society. I do not hate darkness; I do not resent ugliness. I will not fight because of hatred, nor will I hate because of fighting—these have always been my path.
A person who only wishes to love will often be hated by others, or at the very least despised, I suppose. The reason Unic lost all hope in Suixuan was, as she herself said: “But I have one biggest disappointment, and it is not how you treated me or how you responded, but rather, as you said, I found that we had no common ground on an important issue. Having realized this, I became calm.”—What exactly was that “important issue”? Even without making the private chat logs public, you can more or less guess from the comments left on the blog: this “important issue” was—“hatred.”
A “shared past” or a “shared future” can become the cohesion of a community, but the most effective one is undoubtedly a “shared enemy.” Even the Greeks, who were as free and independent as one could ask, managed to form an alliance when faced with the Persian invasion. And according to one account, Eastern “despotism” arose precisely because river civilizations had to jointly resist disasters and build large-scale water conservancy systems.
The existence of a common enemy can rationalize despotism and even dictatorship. No matter how much people revere freedom and equality, the strict hierarchy of the army is rarely criticized. When facing a common enemy, ideals and traditions lose their persuasive power, and practical considerations override everything. Strength and efficiency become the highest standards. Replacing violence with violence not only becomes reasonable, it often even becomes a compulsory ethical demand—when facing a foreign enemy, if you do not take up arms to defend the country and the homeland, you will be accused of cowardice; if you remain calm and carefully analyze the problem, you will be looked down upon; if you go so far as to offer even a little defense for the enemy, you will become the target of everyone’s hostility and be subjected to curses, even violent mobbing.
Dictators also always rely on creating a common enemy to maintain their authority and stir up popular support. Hitler with anti-Semitism, Mao with anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism… Even when there is no dictatorship, politicians are always adept at using “common cause against a common enemy” to manufacture cohesion. In modern democratic states, despotism and communism are set up as enemies. Whether the “enemy” truly threatens one’s survival or not, the “threat” and “backwardness and ignorance” of the Other can greatly promote mass solidarity and sustain so-called pride.
People always like stories of justice and evil fighting heroically. Here, the public opinion woven for adults is not much more mature than the fairy tales concocted for children—one’s own side is always the side of justice, and the enemy is always the representative of evil—“the righteous friend who bravely fights evil forces” is always talked about with relish. Even those who are not brave enough and thus failed to rush to the front lines of battle must at least voice support for the warriors, must at least display the attitude of “clear distinctions between right and wrong” and “as eager to hate evil as to hate the enemy,” otherwise you are a numb, heartless coward.
But I want to ask: why hate? Why be as eager to hate evil as to hate the enemy? Because the other side is evil, so hatred is warranted? Or is it because what we call evil simply refers to the things we hate?
If we seriously and calmly reflect on this, we will discover that what we identify as evil often merely arises from our “dislike,” just as what is good arises from our preference. Emotion always precedes reason and becomes the basis of reason.
Yet the meaning of reason is precisely to correct emotion; a rational person does not act merely according to emotional impulse, and thus human beings become ethical beings. Pure emotion itself has no distinction between right and wrong. Right and wrong are two concepts; they only acquire meaning when they enter the net of discourse. Emotion itself has no distinction between right and wrong, but the direction emotion takes does admit judgments of right and wrong, because the “object” is often shaped through reason—this is a cup, that is a chair. “Cup” and “chair” are both concepts shaped by reason, and through concepts, human understanding can transcend a particular moment and place, gaining the ability to generalize, to analogize, and to universalize.
For example, if I simply feel bad when eating some particular thing at some particular time and place, then this emotion itself has no distinction between right and wrong. That emotion is “real”; one might say this is precisely the most fundamental meaning of “real.” But if I were to say that I feel bad because I ate an apple, then concepts are involved, and questions of right and wrong can be discussed. For instance, I may have gotten it wrong; what I actually ate might have been a pear rather than an apple. If I go on to say, “I (always) don’t like eating apples,” and then even further, “apples are disgusting,” then I am taking an emotion based on a particular moment and place and extending and universalizing it, which makes it increasingly likely to involve disputes of right and wrong.
If you merely feel pain or disgust on some occasion, there is absolutely nothing doubtful about your emotion. But if you say: I hate Japanese people; I dislike French people; I despise traditional culture, and so on, then your judgment may well be questionable.
Someone may say: at least on matters of right and wrong of great consequence, shouldn’t you still feel hatred? When faced with those thugs who trample human nature, do you not feel hatred? Of course, when acts of violence occur right before my eyes in living, tangible form, I will undoubtedly feel offended. However, what I refuse is to rationalize and turn such offense into principle. No hatred can become reasonable, let alone necessary.
Of course, people often provide rationalized explanations for their emotions. For example, if I like something, I may say that it has this or that merit and is therefore worthy of love. But at root, explanation is always grounded in emotion, not the other way around. When I use the fact that something has certain “merits” to support my affection for it, how do those so-called “merits” come to be established in the first place? The reason certain features are called merits still ultimately has to be explained by preference. This is what I meant when I once said, “love is the ultimate meaning.”
But among all emotions, the status of “hatred” is not equal to that of “love.” “Love” is the premise of all reasons, whereas hatred is always born out of love—if you did not love life, how could you hate the brutality that tramples life?
Yet “hatred,” as a derivative emotion, will often usurp the host’s place, occupy a person’s inner life, bury the emotion of “love,” or else twist love into something distorted and pathological, causing a person to lose calm judgment and be ruled by impulse. It is hard to imagine how a cold and peaceful hatred could even be possible. Love can make people fervent, but it can also make them gentle and calm; hatred, I fear, can only drive people toward fervor.
Human beings sometimes do need a bit of fervor and passion, but that still does not prove the necessity of hatred, because these can equally be brought by love. The fervor and passion brought by love are fuller and more substantial, yet not in the least aggressive.
People ought to have a “sense of right and wrong.” But “being as eager to hate evil as to hate the enemy” does not in the slightest improve one’s judgment of right and wrong; on the contrary, it often drives people into a frenzy and causes them to lose insight and judgment. Love does not need hatred as its premise. You do not need to hate everyone else before you fall in love with your lover. On the contrary, hating the whole world cannot improve the love between two people; it instead makes the two become each other’s tools, tools for seeking shelter and for fighting against the world.
We have seen many stories of “true feelings revealed in adversity,” but likewise we have also seen plenty of examples of people who “can share hardship but not prosperity”; from Liu Bang to Lao Mao, examples throughout history are too numerous to mention. When encountering shared suffering and facing the same enemy, people are more likely to rely on one another and cling to each other for survival. In particular, if someone appears at such a moment in the guise of a hero or savior, that person will very easily win people’s support and backing. And a savior often must appear in the guise of a sufferer, only then can he awaken people’s emotions; Jesus, for example, is the典型 case.
When suffering ends and the enemy retreats, the people who had coalesced through “common cause against a common enemy” lose their center. So people always want to go seek out enemies again, construct enemies, establish enemies. In short, only the existence of an enemy can most effectively maintain cohesion. Reflect on the ideological and moral education we received from childhood: whenever it is necessary to persuade us to love—love the motherland, love the people, love socialism—it is without exception always necessary to depict the ugliness and odiousness of the “enemy,” always necessary to sing the praises of the great struggle in which justice defeats evil. Nominally, it is teaching us to love, but in reality it is always teaching us to hate. That is hardly surprising. The purpose of ideological education as a political course is not to cultivate a sound personality, but to mold supporters of this society.
But why is the human world filled with hatred? Why is it always so difficult for people to respect one another and get along amicably, and instead they always have to treat one another as enemies and hate each other? Why are people always so self-righteous, always looking down on different views and ways of life? Why is it always so difficult for people to resolve differences through calm, reasoned discussion, and instead they must resort to violence and combat? Are these things not ugly and contemptible?
Violence is the final rationality. Only when all efforts of reason have failed and reason must negate itself does one resort to violence. Yet many people treat violence as the initial rationality—you must act, you must fight, otherwise you are a numb, heartless coward. As for reason, at most it is merely the tool needed afterward to justify violence.
This is the hubris of reason—reason abandons freedom and degenerates into a tool serving violence. What the rationalization of hatred brings is not only the rationalization of violence, despotism, and efficiency; more importantly, “the reasonable” itself is distorted and abused. Reason no longer provides the force to correct impulse; instead, it becomes the slave of impulse.
I will write only this much for now.
July 4, 2008
Latest Comments
- Bùyàn Kōngjìng
2008-07-04 10:16:46 http://deleted
In life, we can be friends; in scholarship and thought, we can be enemies!
- Gǔ Chǔ
2008-07-04 11:15:55
An enemy and a foe are two different things. In one sense, those who share with oneself common interests or preferences, and yet compete with me for something, can be said to be enemies. But are they not precisely my confidants? To engage in fair competition out of the same hobby—such enemies are always worthy of respect and love. In another sense, “enemy” originally means “match,” a “counterpart,” that is, an enemy of equal strength. This is exactly what my pluralism has always emphasized: to love “other” people, to love different forms of existence, to love divergence and diversity; this world is rich and colorful because of divergence. Respect those existences that are your counterparts and regard them as equal to yourself.
But “foe” is not merely an enemy; it is also to direct feelings of hatred toward certain specific people and then to build a connection through reason.
In life, you may get along better with some people, feel more incompatible with others, and even become enmired in grudges and enmity with a small number of people, so that just seeing them makes you feel bad. This is all quite human. But in scholarship and thought, there is no reason to establish foes. - sdaly
2008-07-05 11:10:25 Anonymous 125.123.229.135
I think that if the whole world were made up of a people with your kind of temperament, then cultural diversity would probably only be achievable through genetic isolation.
Patriotic education is actually probably a kind of primitive, instinctive species-preservation behavior in human beings. All peoples are the same in this respect: they either show arrogance, or hostility toward outsiders, or simply shut themselves off from the world…
Heh, I’m new here, and I admire your eloquence. No matter where the truth is hidden, it is always good to persist in being oneself.
But it seems that all of us would rather believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are truths whose existence should be taken for granted, without needing to be explored or proven. - Gǔ Chǔ
2008-07-05 13:16:04
What the person above says is very contradictory: if the whole world is already made up of peoples with the same temperament, then where would cultural diversity come from? Genetic isolation would not help either, since the temperaments would already be the same.
Patriotic education is not something that is the same among all peoples. In fact, the concept of the “nation-state” is a modern product.
Pride and self-assurance are not frightening; every great nation will of course feel proud and honored by its own culture and tradition. If even this confidence is lacking, then one has truly reached the point of national peril.
The key issue is whether pride must be accompanied by contempt and hostility toward others? In fact, the opposite is true. For example, there are forty people in our class. If I say, “I am the most outstanding person in our class!” that would of course be arrogance, right? But if I say that the other thirty-nine people in our class are either thugs and scoundrels or idiots and fools, in any case all not worth mentioning, then what is the point of saying I am better than all of them? Only when the others are also all worthy of respect, when each person has his or her own strengths, when each person is very优秀, if I then say that among such an excellent group I can still maintain a distinct personality and am still no less than any strong person, only then can I truly obtain self-respect and pride, right? - Gǔ Chǔ
2008-07-05 13:59:14
Pluralism can be said to be a cultural temperament, but I prefer to see it as a new platform. On top of it, diversity can be further unfolded.
Diversity always needs to unfold more fully upon certain principles, and what is called a platform is undoubtedly a kind of constraint and limitation; yet without any limitation, no diversity can unfold at all, and the world would be nothing but a mass of chaos.
For example, we have all kinds of games, yet games always have to unfold on some basis. Chess follows the rules of chess, soccer follows the rules of soccer. Under fixed and strict rules, a tiny chessboard can yield countless variations. But if one had not first been constrained by rules, then the chessboard would at most just be a sheet of paper, and no diversity whatsoever could emerge from it.
Tens of thousands of competitive games all share a common basis: the principle of fairness. If one does not observe rules, does not observe fairness, and simply does whatever one wants, then the game cannot be played. Only by acknowledging this most basic principle does the diversity of games become possible.
Similarly, pluralism, and within it the principle of respecting others, is a platform for the further unfolding of the diversity of culture and knowledge. Some relativists try to break all rules and deny all universal principles, but if there is no platform at all, diversity cannot unfold, and what one harvests can only be a mass of chaos. And the status of pluralism corresponds precisely to the principle of fairness in games.
As for the unfolding of cultural diversity, of course, from ancient times to the present, the “isolation” of the lifeworld has always been the main factor. So the key question is: in such an age of globalization, how are the maintenance and development of cultural diversity still possible? This is by no means the question of “what if the whole world were a people with your temperament”; rather, it is a problem that already exists in this globalized age. If the whole world really did accept pluralism, then things would be easier to say.
As for the prospect of preserving cultural diversity in the age of globalization, I am actually quite pessimistic. I have already expressed this pessimism in “Media Culture and Globalization”; I see no way out. But in any case, I believe that my idea of pluralism can still point to a glimmer of hope.
- sdaly
2008-07-11 08:41:42
Once you analyze everything so clearly, you end up feeling that nothing can be seen clearly anymore; cultural diversity has no way out either, and instead you’ve muddled your own mind. Then you want to leap out, say some vulgar commonplaces, and by the way see whether it’s just Achilles chasing the tortoise—take it as it comes and keep watching, and the problem is solved/
Hehe, we are interpreting the world’s development, forecasting it, worrying about it, rejoicing in its future/
I, your little brother, have not studied philosophy or logic, so it is inevitable that my thinking is somewhat confused/ - 随缘
2008-07-15 09:27:38 Anonymous 222.29.26.136
Perhaps the goal of philosophy is not to destroy the natural attitude. On the contrary, it is based on the natural attitude; it reflects upon the natural attitude and clarifies the natural attitude. In other words, philosophy should be a trusted friend who remonstrates with the natural attitude.
I hope Xiaogu and UNIC, through calm and collected reflection respectively, can ultimately restore communication and exchange, restore friendship, and continue forward together on the road of philosophy!
- 古雴
2008-07-16 02:16:47
To sdaly: what you say is indeed a bit confused~
“After analyzing everything clearly, it instead muddles one’s brain”; not having studied philosophy or logic, one would “inevitably have somewhat confused thinking” — that is really well said: after all, one’s brain is always muddled~
As I see it, studying philosophy is nothing more than learning a kind of self-knowledge: my brain is simply confused; our knowledge is limited and unreliable. Philosophers may not necessarily be able to grasp knowledge more reliable than common sense; it is just that philosophers can recognize more clearly that common sense is unreliable.
To 随缘: thank you, what you said is quite right. But what exactly is my “natural attitude”? It seems that I have always been able to maintain my attitude fairly steadily. Philosophy has slowly transformed my everyday attitude; aside from the occasional failed attempt, I have never deliberately tried to change my everyday attitude toward life.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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