On the meaning of “Suixuan,” I spoke about it once half a year ago, just before I was about to go into seclusion: https://yilinhut.net/2008/02/14/1850.html. Although the experience of seclusion and my return to blogging has not changed Suixuan’s positioning or style, I think I can now give a more comprehensive explanation of Suixuan’s meaning.
The most basic point will certainly not change, namely that Suixuan is run entirely selfishly. The reason I make it public for everyone to see is to create an atmosphere more suitable for the development of my own thinking. The very existence of readers is, for me, a kind of spur and stimulus, and readers’ feedback can bring me even greater benefit. I have never hoped to use the blog to spread anything, or to help my readers. Of course, if you have gained help and inspiration from here, I am naturally delighted — but can you be sure that what you have gained is helpful and not that I have led you onto the wrong path? I cannot give you any guarantee. Even the best writer may drive people into obsession and delirium (Marx is one example), let alone me. Therefore, if you have no desire to interact and exchange with me, then I suggest you not read Suixuan too much; if you rather like reading it and find it delightful and engaging, then that is all the more dangerous.
Since it is entirely selfish, what exactly do I want to gain from running Suixuan? As I said above, those who do not wish to interact and exchange with me are not what I hope for, no matter how much they like reading my blog. Of course, because Suixuan exists, I have received quite a few cries of astonishment and compliments: strong, impressive, erudite, a great writer… None of these compliments can give me any real satisfaction, though I generally still politely say something like thank you, you flatter me, and so on.
Most compliments are merely polite formulae. People do not carefully read the content of Suixuan; they merely see its outward appearance and then offer a ceremonial expression of wonder. Relatively speaking, I am actually rather pleased by such compliments, because they are either a natural reaction or a matter of etiquette. I, too, would exclaim in astonishment when I see something similarly huge and strange: “Wow! What a huge blog!” This kind of “compliment” is very natural. By the way, “wow” in Minnan dialect is “fuck,” so this sort of compliment takes the form: “Fuck! What a huge lump!”
But some compliments are not born of this kind of natural surprise or etiquette; rather, they are conclusions genuinely reached after a fair amount of reading. Yet this kind of compliment not only fails to make me happy, it is instead disappointing, discouraging, and saddening. Fortunately, as things stand, there probably still are not many people who have read a large number of articles on my blog.
But there are indeed some people who have already read quite a lot of my blog posts. Occasionally someone will tell me privately that they have read most of my blog entries — this sounds a bit alarming, but it does not in the slightest make me happy. First of all, having read many of my articles does not mean you understand me more than those who have read only one article or even never read Suixuan at all; Unic is one example, and the person who asked “What is the difference between natural history and philosophy?” is another. Isn’t this discouraging? Could it be that so many of my articles still are not enough to let you understand my central theme, “loving the whole world,” which is displayed high at the top of the page? Do so many of my articles really keep philosophy and natural history hopelessly mixed together? Is that the effect of my writing? Considering that there are still many readers of Suixuan who have not interacted with me, what have they gained from Suixuan? It is truly unimaginable.
What is most disappointing is not even those readers who have, to one degree or another, engaged in dialogue with me. When I think of the possibility that there may still be quite a few lurkers who have been reading Suixuan for a long time, I often lose all interest, and my motivation to write is weakened considerably. Why? Because although there has been a certain number of regular readers and more visitors, until now it is still rare for anyone to come and challenge me here; even fairly polite questions are uncommon, let alone provocative objections.
Teachers at Peking University (for example, Teacher Wu) often say: if a lecture finishes and nobody asks any questions, then it is a failure. Therefore, judging from the current effect, Suixuan’s operation has undoubtedly been a disastrous failure in this respect.
I once criticized those indifferent “audiences” in the article “The Laziness of Onlookers.” Now I do not want to criticize them further; after all, the greatest responsible party is myself. If a professor gives a report to the central leadership and fails to provoke any questions, perhaps one could blame the leaders’ habitual dozing in meetings. But if a professor gives a report at Peking University to those students who have voluntarily come to listen in, and still fails to provoke questions, then the professor can only blame himself for failure. I think the reading style of Suixuan’s visitors probably lies somewhere between these two cases, so at least half of the failure is on my own shoulders.
Still, this is after all somewhat understandable: first, when giving a speech, a professor can actually see whether the people in front of him are cadres of the leadership or students from Peking University. He can prepare accordingly and improvise on the spot based on the audience’s reactions — which parts resonate with the listeners, which parts are dull and tedious, and which parts make the listeners confused or doubtful… During the lecture, this information can be sensed from the audience’s expressions, and then more feedback may be elicited by seizing the moment. But the readers I face through the blog are uncertain. I do not know which people will be interested in which parts of Suixuan, and I cannot instantly detect readers’ reactions. So I can only take myself as my imagined audience and talk to myself.
You may say: philosophy is supposed to be talking to oneself anyway; wouldn’t the art of lecturing that takes the audience into account violate the “freedom” of reason and instead capitulate to the “sage”? In a certain sense, yes — after all, I am not a rigid classicist. Private language is impossible; all speech arises from communication. The “freedom” of thought lies crucially in its non-instrumentality and in “being responsible to oneself,” rather than in detaching itself from public platforms and contexts of exchange.
Second, the principal meaning of my blog is after all still communication between myself and myself; I have indeed not especially concerned myself with readers’ reactions. In fact, most readers merely pick a few articles they are interested in, or newer articles, and glance through them; that is quite normal. Readers who read a great deal of the content are after all extremely few. If there ever comes a time when there is a considerable number of readers, and yet still no one comes to question or challenge me, then it would truly be a complete failure.
What does “communicating with oneself” mean? If one does not need to write a blog, just think things over in one’s own head and mutter to oneself, isn’t that already communicating with oneself? Not quite. Of course, in the broadest sense, “thinking” is communication between oneself and oneself. In thinking, “I” am both speaker and listener; this “listening to the speech of one’s own heart” is what is called “self-consciousness.” But what I mean by communicating with oneself is not merely the process of thinking. Through writing on the blog, speech and reflection are not in an immediate relation; rather, they take the form of communication within history.
Writing makes history possible, making it possible for later people to hear the speech of the past. This makes the quest for “tradition” possible. Even without written records, thought always has roots and sources. The ideas of any era are rooted in the preceding era, but without texts, the derivation and evolution of these ideas becomes difficult to trace. Although distant memories may also sediment or be preserved in life in other ways, still the coexistence of several different styles of life in the present is rare, whereas the coexistence of texts from different eras in the present is easy.
In the introduction to “Notes” During Seclusion, I mentioned: “In a certain sense, the reason I have been able to embark on the path of philosophy is precisely that I have never been willing to give up my own words and writings. My views may change, but I must personally witness the historical reasons why my views change before I allow change to occur. I hope that the texts I leave behind will be like historical documents, from which the line of conceptual evolution can be clearly sorted out, … I look at history in the way I look at my own growth, or I look at my own growth in the way I look at history: accepting change but refusing rupture, embracing the future while never denying the past.” This has already explained Suixuan’s main significance. That is, to create history, or rather to let “li” become “shi,” to “illuminate” the course of thought with texts.
In earlier discussions about “tradition” or “history,” I have already mentioned: it is a futile fantasy to sever tradition and build conceptual castles in the air; only by rooting oneself in history can one create history. I will not say more.
Creating history is carried out through continuous self-interpretation and self-reflection; this is Suixuan’s work. Before, I compared my running of it to gardening or building a house; now it can even better be compared to “weaving.” A horizontal thread, a vertical thread, a stitch here, a cut there… From its embryonic form onward, a net is a net, and throughout the entire process of weaving, it is a net. A net half woven is still a net (how do you know where “half” is?); a net with holes is still a net (how do you know this is not an intentional design?). As for my texts, since writing “The Great Philosophical Unification” in my first year of high school, it has been a net. At any time it can be taken out and looked at as a whole, a system, yet at any time the weaving continues. This net not only tries to unite my lifeworld and my conceptual world into one, it also makes the process of uniting itself into a whole.
“Tension” — conflict that preserves harmony — gives thought life and vitality (resilience and elasticity). Maintaining the tension between my different texts in different periods and different contexts is no easy task. Many people would readily give up such efforts: “I was wrong then,” “These two things have nothing to do with each other.” But I will not easily give up the effort to connect things. Of course, I will not randomly establish connections either. A concise, compact, and firm net cannot have too many tangled knots, but it cannot have too few either; the threads cannot be too rigid, but neither can they be too slack.
However, I seldom read my past articles. In the article “Writer, therefore I leak,” I mentioned that after I have “leaked out” an article, I seldom have enough motivation to proofread it again. But when I am writing a new article, or, especially, when someone questions me, all the articles I have written seem to be right at hand. I will say: “In an earlier article of so-and-so, I mentioned…” “You can refer to so-and-so article for this question.” Although I have not tested it, I believe that through not many rounds of questioning and citation, any two articles on Suixuan can be linked together, making it seem as if what one article says naturally leads to what another article says, even if the two statements address seemingly unrelated topics.
Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am. … But what then am I? A thing that thinks.” People often pay attention only to “I think, therefore I am,” and do not care about the question that follows: what exactly is “I”? What exactly does the indubitability of “thinking” lead to the existence of? Descartes’s answer is “a thing that thinks.” I do not know Descartes’s own train of thought, but according to my interpretation, the emphasis in this phrase is not on “thinking,” not on “thing,” but on “a.” Through reflection on “I am thinking,” what can I become aware of? The key is this “a” — the thing that is thinking is one thing; this thinking is continuous thinking, and the reflection on this thinking is still the thinking of the same thing, still this one I. “I” is “one,” even though the issue being thought about at this moment is different from the one of the previous moment; in the previous moment I was thinking about what being is, while at this moment I am, as if from the sidelines, reflecting on the “I” that is thinking about the question of being. This “I” and that “I” are the “same” thing — that is the biggest point. From “I think” one arrives at “I am”; in fact, what one obtains is the existence of “oneness.”
Following the line of transcendental thought, one can go further and say: why is the universe uniform? Why are causal connections universal? Because this “I” is “one,” the world I see can of course only be one. Thus the things in this world must of course be interconnected, and the unity and order of “time” and “space” derive from the continuity and synthesis of sensation…
I do not want to go too far afield. The key point is: in any case, the “oneness” of “I” is extremely important. Since I am trying to express myself through words, I necessarily have to express this “one.”
August 30, 2008
Latest Comments
- physis
2008-08-31 00:00:21 Anonymous 59.55.255.66
Old Gu, not bad at all. I used to see someone write a very long piece and call it “showing off.” I hadn’t even said that out loud yet, and I never expected you yourself to “leak” out a second-order analysis.
It seems that things related to philosophy of science and philosophy are very easy to find their way to your blog. Looks like I’d better just stay on permanently from now on.
A classmate taking the philosophy of science and technology entrance exam at Peking University - Gu Hua
2008-08-31 02:27:50
Call me Little Gu… I’m not old… I’m still young… really… I’m not even a graduate student yet, though that’s only a matter of these next few days…
- woowoo
2008-10-08 20:38:12 Anonymous 116.22.158.85
Let me offer you a few blog subtitles for reference:
1 Why am I so smart?
2 Why am I so wise?
3 Why do I know more concepts than other people?
4 Why can I make such a great blog? - Gu Hua
2008-10-08 22:22:05
Are you mocking me upstairs? I’ll take your suggestions as sincere. It’s not that I cannot boast, but I would never boast about the things above. That would make me a sage, and I am a lover of wisdom.
I can offer a few self-aggrandizing formulations myself:
1 Why can I love everything?
2 Why can I be so steadfast and confident?
3 Why am I more ignorant than ordinary people?
4 Why can I keep such a huge blog as a whole that is always able to make sense of itself?
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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