I had long wanted to write an article about poetry, but I kept putting pen to paper, and the folder I had created called “Music—Poetry” had never lived up to its name.
One reason I kept not writing was that I felt I was, after all, a complete illiterate, utterly ignorant; how could I presume to talk about poetry? Apart from the Tang poems I learned in class as a child, and the poetry collections by Bei Dao, Hai Zi, and the like that I now very occasionally flip through at random, I have virtually no firsthand experience of reading poetry at all. At the same time, as for criticism on poetry or poetics, whether from poets or philosophers, aside from the occasional glance I have caught in books on other subjects, I have almost no exposure whatsoever. Moreover, to be frank, as an illiterate I simply do not know how to read poetry; whether it is a matter of reading habits or of mood and temperament, I have never really been able to enter the world of poetry. And, I have never liked affected pretentiousness, much less do I approve of pretending to understand something one does not understand; instead, I locate my philosophy in the camp of the crude and the vulgar. In short, since I cannot read my way into poetry, I would never pretend that I read it with relish or write about it as though I had something serious to say.
But if that is the case, why would I dare, and even want, to write about poetry? On the one hand, crude people have their own special advantage: they are able to look at things surrounded by all kinds of halos and camouflage in the plainest possible way. They lack the refined palate needed to judge details, and yet precisely because they have never fallen into and become obsessed with them, they may be able to perceive other, rather special things.
I have always felt that reading does not promote expression. Reading more may either strengthen your power of speech, or, on the contrary, corrupt it. In many cases, the more one reads, the more one tends to “say nothing of substance”; worse still, because the erudite are good at citing sources from every direction and talking non-stop with seeming logic and fluency, their arguments then appear to be full of substance. Yet on closer inspection, what they have been rattling on about after all this time contains not even a single truly penetrating “point” at all! — only “points,” but no argument! The most important creativity of a scholar does not lie in the specific one-two-three conclusions he offers, but in the domain of questions or horizon he opens up. Following a master’s speech, sometimes you can only make out a vague line, but like gazing at an endless horizon, it suddenly places you in an utterly vast new world; whereas following those lackluster erudite types, you may indeed see all sorts of colorful and clearly defined patterns, but at most it is merely as if they were showing you a sheet of paper right in front of your eyes. In order to see this small scrap more clearly, you lean closer and closer, and the broad vista that had opened before you is instead narrowed more and more, until in the end you are content to look at painting and painting only within this cramped space, forgetting to gaze once again toward the far side of the sky and sea. In such a world, there may initially still be room for superb creativity, but the eventual result is likely that even the richest imagination will inevitably wear itself out.
People are not born already standing amid a vast heaven and earth; rather, human beings are always confined within all kinds of limits, shut inside layer upon layer of little rooms, blinded by all the colorful stickers right before their eyes. And what is so-called “insight”? To put it a bit perversely, it is to drill a hole so that you can see — you may say that “insight” lets you see something more “inside,” more “interior,” more “deeply embedded.” Of course you can say that. But why must the opposite side of the hole be “inside,” “interior”? Why must you be digging “downward”? The metaphors contained in these words should make us alert. When we speak of processes like “seeking knowledge,” the picture that naturally arises in our minds is often one of moving inward, into, downward, as if the scholar’s path of knowing were to enter a dark and deep cave, crawl into a sealed and mysterious black box, or excavate a treasure buried deep underground. Modern people, when they think of “seeking knowledge,” often produce just such associations, just such metaphors, just such feelings. Isn’t that so? Of course you may still pursue knowledge in this way, but what should be warned against is that this imagination has already constrained your understanding of the activity of knowing.
Think of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave: what kind of process is that? People are originally inside the cave, “within,” underground. And the process of seeking knowledge is to run out, to run upward — not to dig into greater “depth,” but to flee toward greater “shallowness”!
Of course, as a pluralist, I do not deny the “direction” of any kind of pursuit — why must one say that it has to run upward? Perhaps digging downward or exploring within the cave can also find its own path. And yet the question of “direction” is still worth taking seriously. This difference in “metaphor” is not accidental; it is not merely a simple rhetorical variation — is “truth” ultimately outside or inside, above or below?
As for the character 理, it does indeed seem as though it belongs in the “inside.” Yet in ancient China, 理 seems to have been used more often as a verb, meaning “to govern” or “to put in order,” and this act of 理 is precisely not about leading people inward to an internal depth; rather, it turns around and makes the inside reveal itself outwardly. Perhaps it was only in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism that 理 came to be treated as something like an ultimate substance, and it was precisely Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism that developed 格物穷理, the path closest to modern Western philosophy (science). Since I know almost nothing about the relevant developments, I will not go on at length. In any case, when it comes to the direction of “pursuit,” the ancients seem to have emphasized more often moving outward and upward; what they sought was “understanding” and “awakening,” a feeling of moving from obscurity to brightness, from closure to opening. By contrast, modern people, although they still retain many traditional rhetorical habits, prefer to use metaphors of moving inward or downward — such as “researching deeply” or “digging deeper” — as their figurative language.
Although this essay is deliberately meant to go off-topic frequently, I do not want to wander too far. I will discuss the question of changing “direction” more slowly later. What I want to say here is actually very simple: the meaning of “insight” lies in opening up a broader field of vision, not in making your world smaller.
Whenever we point out differences between ancient and modern, or between China and the West, and so on, we are trying to display a certain kind of “insight.” When Liang Shuming says that Western culture exerts force “outward” and Eastern culture exerts force “inward”; or when I say that the ancients “sought outward” while modern people “seek inward” (note that I am of course not speaking of the same thing), we are all trying to establish some sort of “binary,” to display some kind of contrast. To “see” such a contrast is often itself a kind of “insight.” But what is the key issue? Why, when I see many people speaking at length about these differences, do I still feel that their work is so empty and boring?
The key question may be twofold, and these two points are related: first, those people are too self-assured; once they have listed one, two, three, four points, they feel they have gained something substantial, and they no longer pursue the deeper connection among them; second, their attitude toward “insight” is somewhat skewed. As mentioned above, in my view the meaning of “insight” is like boring a small hole in a wall, through which you see a broader, unheard-of new world, and your field of vision is expanded. However, if you remain at this point and become fixated on the “hole” itself — for instance, if you are so absorbed in the world outside the hole that you remain forever peering at the opening — then your field of vision shrinks to a point. Originally you could still look freely all around inside the closed room behind you, but now you only know how to squat at the opening and peer from a fixed angle. Then your world has not been opened by insight at all; it has instead become narrower. Or again, you feel that the work of drilling this hole is truly a masterpiece, so instead of looking through the hole at the world, you merely stare at the hole itself in admiration. It is like having made a hole in a wall but not caring about the world outside the wall, and instead stepping back to admire the wall that you have pierced with several little holes — “Look! I did this. A masterpiece, right? Brilliant, right?” Perhaps these insights really were exquisite masterpieces to begin with; yet if they themselves become things that intoxicate and fascinate people, then they are not only no longer what opens the eyes and brightens the mind, but become new things that blind and deceive.
Of course, I should also restate that, as a pluralist, I am not trying to negate any way of life whatsoever — merely being fixated on one wall, painting on it or carving out intricate and exquisite patterns, is also a respectable way of life. For instance, certain medieval modes of scholarship: I simply place myself beneath the Bible and Aristotle, I willingly allow the Bible always to stand before my eyes, and I write my essays on this wall — what is wrong with that? Of course, nothing. It is similar with the modern “research specialist” in philosophy: I simply focus on one philosopher and work on him, and I write my essays beneath that curtain of his — what is wrong with that? Of course, nothing. But the key question is twofold: first, each person should have some understanding of his own limitations and should maintain an appropriate grasp of the strength of his own insight. You may be content with your own horizon and proud of your curtain, but if you insist that everyone else must also be confined to the same world and must recognize only your views, then that is an overreaching or dogmatic attitude. Second, in my view, philosophers are those endlessly dissatisfied explorers: since they know that there is a broader world outside the house, they will not settle forever inside. They will strive to open windows and drill holes, but their ultimate purpose is always to broaden the field of vision. When they pass through the openings they have painstakingly carved and move toward a brand-new world, those openings, apart from showing future generations new possibilities and providing themselves with the convenience of moving back and forth, or of being able to return at any time once they have entered a dead end, are not themselves the object pursued. No matter how much genius and effort must be invested to carve these large and small openings, a true philosopher will never carry them around like heavy treasures — it is like this: you drill a hole in the wall and through it see an entirely new world. Then the meaning of that hole is certainly extraordinary. But if you say, “Ah, this hole is truly marvelous, so I’ll just tear down the whole wall and carry it on my back, so that on the road I can take the wall out at any time and look at the world through that hole again — wouldn’t that be even more marvelous!” — then you are a fool. What you may carry with you is your insight, that is, your experience and skill in making holes; but the holes you once made have no universal significance that can be applied everywhere. Some holes can only provide a peep-through-the-keyhole view, while others can cross enormous barriers and connect several distant domains. But in any case, there is no “magic door” or arbitrary hole; every hole is immovable. It can be further maintained and expanded, it can be developed into a giant palace containing holes within holes, but you can never take it from where it is and simply move it somewhere else.
So I often say that my writing is all “excrement” (this is an important metaphor, and there is no female version!). Philosophy, as an art, ultimately produces my whole personality. What needs to be emphasized is not my inferiority or contempt for my own writing — I hold a great deal of pride and confidence toward everything I have ever written, and I bear lifelong, unconditional responsibility for it. But my eyes are always more fixed on the road beneath my feet and the world in the distance than on the baggage behind me. In a certain sense, excrement itself can also be used to construct roads and worlds; this is the metaphor of the spider spinning silk and weaving a web. A spider web is excrement with constructive significance, but its significance ultimately still lies in catching prey, not in binding the spider itself. A silkworm spins silk to enclose itself, but the ultimate purpose is still the evolution of breaking out of the cocoon. Philosophical construction is the same: even when philosophers are indeed trying to build a completely enclosed space, the final aim is still their own growth, to cultivate through self-enclosed practice those wings that enable them to fly toward a broader heaven and earth.
At this point, the reader may already be impatient — supposedly I was going to write about philosophy and poetry, so how did I veer off topic from the very beginning, and further and further at that? Can I still turn it back? In fact, there is no need to turn it back. Although my discussion above deliberately went off-topic, it has all along been consciously circling around the theme, serving entirely as some preliminary groundwork for the discussion of poetry, or, if you like, as clearing the field. Moreover, I will not really be discussing poetry head-on next either; I have no particular authority to speak from. From start to finish, I have merely been wandering along the path of my own thoughts.
People always say that there is a profound opposition between philosophy and poetry. Such claims are certainly not new; rather, this is one of the most long-standing questions in the entire history of Western philosophy, and also one of the most tangled and unresolved. Classical philosophers could easily brush aside other arts — sculpture, painting, and music, for instance — simply by ignoring their existence. But philosophers have the hardest time ignoring the opposing existence of the poet. This is really because poetry, unlike literature in the broad sense, is not something that can encompass everything, and thus has no sharp boundary separating it from philosophy and other fields of learning; nor is it like painting or music, which, although very different from philosophy, differ so much in form that a conflict is not especially visible. What makes the dispute between philosophy and poetry so striking is first of all their similarity — both are arts of creation through words — while their styles seem to point in entirely opposite directions.
I do not deny that the two concepts of philosophy and poetry do indeed bear utterly different meanings; what matters is what kind of difference this is, and what it signifies.
When we are talking about a pair of opposing concepts, we must be extremely cautious, or else this binary framework may very likely make our field of vision extremely narrow. As said before, even the best insight is nothing more than a hole; do not try to carry the hole on your back, or what you will be carrying is not the hole that opens up your vision but a wall that obstructs your vision and burdens your movement.
The key lies in this: if you look at the world through a fixed framework that you are carrying on your back, then what you see is often indeed shaped by it; when you look at the world through green-tinted glasses, the world will tend toward green. If you are satisfied with this green world, then you will grow increasingly accustomed to these glasses, until you forget their very existence. For example, traditional textbooks present the history of thought as a struggle between materialism and idealism, and many sincere scholars, no matter how much literature they read, often still cannot overturn this mental habit; instead, they may end up continually confirming this division. Or traditional textbooks present the histories of different countries as a “five-stage” developmental model, and many sincere scholars, no matter how much historical material they read, still do not overturn this model theory; on the contrary, they even find more and more support for it, making it sound more and more plausible…
In short, once you place philosophy and poetry at opposite poles, you will always be able to find enough evidence. I do not want to refute such views; they do have their reasons. The problem is: if philosophy and poetry are such opposing activities, then what does that mean?
Constructing oppositions such as idealism versus materialism is not, in itself, entirely wrong; however, once such a framework of opposition is established, people often tend to fit other binary oppositions into it as well, such as backwardness and progress, subjectivity and objectivity, ignorance and science… Any single pair of binary opposites is not inherently harmful, but once several different categories of opposition are entangled together and bundled as a package deal, they are very likely to make people’s field of vision narrow.
For example, the opposition between philosophy and poetry may originally have been only a perfectly natural little matter. Even if the figures in history who are renowned both as philosophers and as poets are few and far between (and this may not even be the case), even if the way of life of philosophy and the way of life of poetry seem incompatible (and this may not even be the case), what is so strange about that? If we casually look at any other pair of similar yet different forms of work or artistic activity, aren’t they much the same? Take flute-playing and singing, for instance — when you are playing the flute, you absolutely cannot sing, and when you are singing, you absolutely cannot play the flute; and in history there have been few famous figures known simultaneously as great flutists and great singers. Moreover, needless to say, it is difficult for a flutist to transform into a singer, and perhaps it is also very difficult for a rock singer to transform into a bel canto singer. So are flute-playing and singing not even more opposed kinds of activity? Or is the difference between two different singing styles already so enormous? Yet people often do not feel that there is any unbridgeable chasm between flute-playing and singing, while they very easily come to believe that there is such a chasm between philosophy and poetry. Why is that?
I have no objection to the distinction between philosophy and poetry as such, and I have even less intention of blending the two together, just as forcibly mixing bel canto, rock, folk, pop, and so on into one another would produce an awkward monstrosity. I also acknowledge that the deeper one goes down a certain road, the more difficult it often is to turn around and shift to another road — just as the more accomplished one is in bel canto, the less likely one is to turn to some other singing style and achieve equally superb mastery there. Yet none of these facts mean that there is any essential contradiction between them; rather, they precisely prove how close and mutually connected the two are. Therefore, what I need to clear away is the subtext behind the so-called opposition between philosophy and poetry — when you speak of the opposition between philosophy and poetry, what are you really trying to say?
The key is not the opposition between philosophy and poetry, but rather that behind this layer of opposition, other opposing concepts are, overtly or covertly, entangled. For example — reason and sensibility, thought and life, cool seriousness and sentimental melancholy…
People, whether consciously or unconsciously, assign these sets of oppositions to philosophy and poetry, causing these two originally unclear concepts to become deeply entangled with yet another group of equally ambiguous concepts. From far away, it seems as though everything has become clear and distinct — on one side philosophy, reason, thought, and coolness; on the other side poetry, sensibility, life, and emotion… I do not deny any set of oppositions; every distinction makes the world seem richer. But bundling a series of distinctions together only makes the world appear more monotonous.
At the same time, because philosophy and poetry have never been ready-made objective objects with clearly defined boundaries, but are themselves real activities constructed through the participation of interpreters, when an interpreter defines philosophy as some kind of rational and intellectual activity and takes poetry to be its opposite, he will naturally examine the people of history according to such a standard; and more seriously, he will also participate in real activity along such a standard. The result is this: when you view their relation as one of conflict, then they are in fact in conflict, and will continue to develop in the direction of conflict. To take a simple example, it is much like the so-called conflict between family and career: once you have affirmed the existence of this conflict, you will consciously or unconsciously observe those who came before you from that perspective, and you will certainly discover countless people who were successful in their careers yet a mess in family life; you will regard those who were successful in their careers and happy in their families as exceptions or poseurs. Moreover, worse still, when you come to deal with your own family and career, you will also consciously or unconsciously be influenced by your own judgment, and you will discover many dilemmas between family and career; you will bravely make a choice among them, but however you choose, the conflict between family and career has been personally confirmed by you. Similar oppositions include study and entertainment, lover and friend, scholarship and life, the self and the public good, and so on.
Yet, in my view, such dilemmas are by no means natural; in many cases they are really just people making trouble for themselves—when you decide that you begin from a position above truth, then you will dig downward, and indeed encounter layer upon layer of hardship and obstacles… and yet, if truth is above you, then those checkpoints underground are meaningless from the very beginning.
It is rather those things that truly cannot be reconciled that so few people ever worry about—for example, eating and bathing: I am hungry now and want to eat, and I also want to bathe, yet I cannot bathe while eating, and cannot eat while bathing; it really cannot be reconciled! Should I bathe first or eat first? That is the question! If it is already too late, and going to bathe first will delay eating, while going to eat first will delay bathing, then the contradiction becomes all the more irreconcilable. Strangely enough, with such helpless and serious oppositions, people often do not become especially entangled; they can quickly arrive at a clear decision. How is such a decision possible?
I cannot explain how a decisive and natural choice can be achieved under such a water-and-fire irreconcilable dilemma; this is truly a very mysterious matter. But I believe that the capacity that enables one to choose between eating and bathing is equally applicable to any supposedly more “advanced” dilemma. You do not decide with the brain, but with the body; you let your steps fall naturally, and that is the most appropriate choice.
I am by no means saying that the brain is useless in the process of choice, that one need only “go by feeling.” The brain needs to consider and calculate the various conditions and backgrounds involved in making a choice. For example, if you think that the cafeteria closes at seven; the bathhouse closes at ten; it is now six-thirty; and so on, and after listing, comparing, and calculating these items in your head, you are more likely to choose immediately to go eat first. But the significance of the brain lies only in presenting your situation more clearly and comprehensively; it does not give rise to the final judgment. When considering exactly the same situation, if you feel that the itching on your body is really unbearable, you may still dash to the bathhouse without hesitation—there is only mistaken cognition (for example, remembering nine o’clock closing as ten o’clock) or mistaken calculation (for example, mistakenly thinking that ten is earlier than seven), and not mistaken decision. (By the way, many people take it for granted that philosophers think more and struggle more in life than ordinary people. In fact, at least for me, the situation is exactly the opposite: the more deeply one enters the world of philosophy, the more one is enabled to recognize the limits of rational capacity, and the more one is able to halt thought at the proper moment.)
Even if we say that a judgment based on mistaken cognition or calculation is a faulty judgment, then perhaps the choice between bathing and eating really can go wrong; but the choice between thinking and feeling does not even have the chance to go wrong, because feeling apart from thinking cannot be said to be right or wrong, and thinking detached from feeling cannot be said to be a choice. When you want to evaluate a dilemma between two opposites, you are forced to affirm both thinking and feeling at once, and to let them operate in tandem.
Thus, one major drawback brought about by linking the opposition between philosophy and poetry to the opposition between reflection and feeling is this: it leads people to neglect the close connection between reflection and feeling, and to fail to see that reflection and feeling often always appear together, inseparable. More seriously still, it tends to make philosophers reject feeling and poets reject reflection. I do not know about poets, but I only know that, as a philosopher, a pure thinking that rejects feeling is impossible, or rather, it is self-deceptive and empty.
Other forms of binary division are even more destructive, for example positivism or romanticism. The fundamental opposition these currents are obsessed with is the two poles of “science” and poetry; their divergence is nothing more than whether philosophy should side with the former or the latter. Positivists seek to make philosophy side with science, running what is called a philosophy of science, while throwing traditional metaphysics, ethics, and so forth over to poetry. Romanticism, by contrast, makes philosophy side with poetry, running what is called poeticized philosophy,
In a sense, the opposition between science and poetry is more striking, because science can be said to move toward a specialized linguistic form, in which the emotional connotations of words are evacuated and only empty symbols are extracted. Seen this way, it does indeed stand at the opposite extreme from poetry. Yet, on the one hand, the opposition between science and poetry should not be absolutized; on the other hand, even if one admits the separation between science and poetry, that does not necessarily mean philosophy must side with one or the other. In my view, both a philosophy of science and a poeticized philosophy are a form of self-abandoning evasion. Philosophy does not stand above science or poetry, but neither must it submit beneath them.
Some say that philosophical training weakens one’s emotions—for example, that when looking at fallen leaves on the ground, it becomes harder and harder to arouse the poet’s sort of melancholy. But what must be reflected on is this: is this really a problem of philosophy, or of yourself? In fact, any kind of career, any kind of involvement, will change one’s emotions in the face of things. Even if one does nothing at all, as age increases and people become ever more “mature,” most people will grow more and more steady and indifferent, and less and less easily stirred by emotional waves. What activity can cultivate and protect these emotions? Does frequently going to look at fallen leaves keep one’s sadness in the face of fallen leaves alive? I am afraid the situation is just the opposite—too much exposure makes those things more and more ordinary, and repeated stimulation makes feeling increasingly numb and sluggish; that is the general rule. Would not the emotions of a street sweeper facing fallen leaves be even more easily altered?
Of course, you can say that although a street sweeper inevitably grows tired of fallen leaves, he will still be full of feeling toward flowers and other things. The implication, as if philosophers had lost all feeling for the entire world, is of course a very absurd assertion. But here one must first note that my street sweeper is also a metaphor; in fact, it is meant to stand for any routinized way of laboring, or the way most people live in society. In fact, people not only always deal with fallen leaves in a routinized way, but also deal with the whole world in the same way. In society, once people find a stable occupation and a stable family, a stable mode of life will unfold: every day passes in a similar manner, various similar things repeatedly appear before you, and you must also toil for them… Any lifestyle of “toil” is akin to that street sweeper; increasingly mature people become accustomed to their world in the daily round of labor, and the things that keep appearing before them can no longer arouse rich emotions. Instead, they either annoy and weary one, or numb one into indifference. This is the way most people grow up; it is not a problem of philosophy, but a problem of life.
Is there any way of life that does not lead people toward habit and numbness, but instead can cherish and cultivate the rich emotions one has in the face of things, preventing the world from becoming increasingly monotonous and dull as people become “mature”? Do poets have a unique method? I do not dare be certain. But at least I dare say: I have a method!
This method of cherishing the richness of feeling is the philosophical activity as magic; through such activity, I can constantly transform the appearance of the world, neither making the world utterly strange so that nothing can be said, nor allowing the world to become so familiar that one grows numb and insensitive. Of course, perhaps in the eyes of others I often appear cold and unfeeling; I do not want to argue about that. Perhaps that is only natural as well—a lampshade makes the flickering flame seem more restrained and more tranquil, yet precisely thereby it can protect and sustain the flame. Moreover, I believe that every great philosopher, behind his texts and in the depths of his heart, must possess a beating, ardent poet’s core; otherwise, no matter how grand and ingenious the theoretical edifice, it will also be dim and without brilliance.
Perhaps modern science, as a specialized form of philosophy, is precisely that kind of huge, intricate, yet gloomy and cold monster, because its symbols and words have almost severed their connection with sensation: the more central the concept, the more “insensible” it becomes. In particular, a concept like “force,” originally apprehended through touch, has in modern science been completely evacuated, becoming the emptiest of computational codes. Science has become increasingly calculable and imperceptible, and imperceptibility means that people in fact cannot understand it. We ultimately understand concepts through the connection between concepts and feeling; if we rely only on the formal connection between concepts and concepts, then we cannot obtain any substantive understanding.
Thus we see that poetry is precisely what establishes the most direct connection between sensation and words. No wonder some philosophers say that poetry is the most primordial reason. In my view, the poet’s mission, put simply, is to “make feeling speakable.” Although people like me also believe that we possess rich emotions and feelings, I am clumsy with words, and can only let feelings drift about in my heart, unable to voice them in language. And inferior rhetoric not only fails to express feeling forcefully, but instead interrupts or damages one’s own feeling. Excellent poetry, by contrast, can provide a beautiful channel for pouring out feeling; such pouring may burst out spontaneously, or may require more refinement and deliberation, yet without doubt it “expresses” living feeling in a living way.
Because this kind of expression is direct, and requires no intermediary between speaking and feeling, poetry is the most immediate presentation of the poet’s emotions. Thus poetry often does not require interpretation; aside from necessary explanations of names and background, reading a poem does not require the aid of further analysis or argument. Poetry is speech that is directly felt.
By contrast, if one were to summarize the philosopher’s mission in the simplest terms, it would be “to make speech feelable.” This means that the philosopher’s work moves in the opposite direction on the same plane as the poet’s: what the philosopher more directly confronts is not living feeling, but those cold utterances—in our language, there are some concepts that are particularly hard to arouse feeling, such as God, electron… there are other concepts that were originally sensible, but because of certain historical and environmental reasons, and because they are entangled with certain other forces, their sensibility has been increasingly obscured, so that they too become dim and unclear—for example, beauty, force… There are still other concepts that always easily arouse feelings that are not quite appropriate, such as science, philosophy… Thus, the philosopher must find a way to revive those dead concepts and clear away the entanglements that confuse and mislead.
Thus, philosophical work often begins from the place farthest from poetry, starting by confronting those coldest concepts head-on, parting the tangled net, disentangling the knots, and ultimately bringing all concepts onto the ground, clear at a glance. Of course, both philosophical and poetic activity should follow nature and should not become affectedly artificial; some knots are so troublesome that the harder you try to untie them, the tighter they may become, and in the end you sink ever deeper—if you turn a loose knot into a dead knot, that will be disastrous. The philosopher’s way of solving riddles is not to sink into inescapable contemplation; going too deeply into the tangle of concepts will make one increasingly lose one’s way. For me, the most effective method of thought is by no means the so-called tools of logic, analysis, and argument, but association, contrast, analogy, arrangement… and, most importantly, a method that may be called “chewing” or “stroking.”
When people talk about thinking and understanding, they often use all kinds of sensory metaphors; these metaphors are not merely rhetoric. In fact, people always mobilize all their senses to think; thinking itself is the use of sensory capacities. It is not some mysterious mechanism that can operate independently of the senses. And different modes of thought mobilize the senses in different ways: some modes of thought mobilize the senses comprehensively and richly, while others tend toward the isolated and monotonous use of one particular sense.
For example, mathematical reasoning often appeals only to the spatial sense of vision and no longer actively mobilizes the other senses. This is true not only of geometry, but also of algebra and logical calculation. Recall the feeling of doing mathematical computation? Or reflect on why doing math problems is so dependent on scratch paper? How do we use scratch paper? — We need a visible space; we need to carry out mathematical computation under this visual plane, but we do not especially need the intervention of sound. On scratch paper, figures are silent, symbols are also silent; they are silently arranged and moved about, and the entire process of thinking is basically carried out in our vision.
Or, for example, some hollow sophists and dogmatists appeal only to hearing. When people solemnly talk about “science,” “democracy,” “truth,” “justice,” “the Scientific Outlook on Development,” and the like, what we hear is only a series of deafening great sounds; but once one asks what exactly is meant by these resounding names, our minds go blank—we cannot picture anything, or can think of anything at all. Those glib sophists are not not thinking; it is just that their thinking does not effectively mobilize the senses as a whole, but instead focuses only on tuning the acoustics of speech.
And healthy thinking activity should be a full-body exercise: besides vision and hearing, it must also mobilize taste and touch. In words like “trying,” “chewing,” and “savoring,” the existence of taste is implied. This is a subtle sensation, and I find it hard to explain exactly why taste should be involved in thinking; but you can experience it yourself. In reading some concepts, phrases, passages, and poems, you can try to chew them—prolong them in the mouth. When reading words in or reading them aloud, do not swallow or spit them out in one gulp, but let them turn on the tip of the tongue—then whether they are interesting or not becomes immediately clear to the heart.
As for touch, it may be the most crucial sensation of all. There are thinkers who are born blind, and thinkers who are born deaf, but how one could think without touch is something I find difficult to imagine. Vision and hearing correspond to particular organs, whereas touch corresponds to the entire “body,” and the body is the medium through which the self comes into contact with the world.
Here I do not want to bring up anything as abstruse as body phenomenology; I do not understand it. For now I will only point to the most obvious phenomenon: when people think and argue in face-to-face communication, they often “wave their hands and feet about,” consciously or unconsciously making all sorts of movements, gesturing at something in the air—gesturing at what?
In a speaker who is in fine form, we can see the interweaving of the various senses in thought—if he is trying to express his thinking, what is thinking like? Besides the abstract verbal symbols themselves, there must inevitably accompany, as part of what is “expressed,” those changing tones, as well as those conscious or unconscious gestures—sometimes these gestures hint at visible shapes, sometimes they move in time with the rhythm of the voice, and more often than not they seem to have no special meaning. So what are these meaningless gestures expressing? Why is it that the human body, especially the hands, always naturally participates in the process of expressing thought? I think this precisely suggests that bodily sensation was from the very beginning deeply embedded in the activity of thought, so much so that when expressed through speech it often spills out involuntarily.
Here I may as well mention one of my private experiences, namely the practice of abacus mental calculation in childhood. I once said that this skill not only gave me endless confidence in mathematics, but also had profound philosophical significance waiting to be explored, so here I can say a little of it. That is, through the practice of abacus mental calculation, the impression that “numbers” evoked in my mind was completely transformed. I do not know what feeling numbers evoke in ordinary people—whether they are merely cold, silent symbols, or just inaudible sounds? In any case, in my mind, numbers were not only notes, but also visible and tangible: they were the moving beads on the abacus cast in my heart. When I performed mathematical calculations, I was not only using vision and hearing, but more importantly, I was using my fingers. People who have learned abacus calculation will, consciously or unconsciously, lightly tap their fingers on the tabletop or on their own thighs when calculating, moving the beads in their hearts, and stroking them at the same time as they announce the answer. When my hands are constrained, my computational ability is somewhat diminished; and if my hands are stroking something else, I can hardly do addition at all! Thus, I think I can appreciate the participation of the “fingers” in thinking more than ordinary people—so when I say that I hold a book in my hands and let words flow over my fingertips, this is not merely a figure of speech; I really am using my fingers to participate in reading!
Whether it is philosophy, poetry, sweeping the floor, or abacus calculation, they are all different ways of living and different forms of “cultivation.” Through them, the way things or concepts arouse our emotions is continuously adjusted and transformed. After a long life of sweeping, the feelings that fallen leaves can arouse become different; after long training in abacus calculation, the feelings that numbers can arouse become different. Philosophy, as a way of life, of course also transforms people’s emotions, but transformation need not be destruction; it can also be creation.
The aim of everything, after all, is this: to make the world richer, more interesting.
May 17, 2009
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- unic
2009-06-12 17:15:04 Anonymous 115.155.143.90
Thinking of an example from a psychology experiment: a scientist placed two buckets containing equal amounts of food at equal distances in front of a donkey tethered to a post and let the donkey eat. As a result, after a day had passed, the donkey had not eaten a single bite. The reason was that it did not know which bucket would be better.
When it comes to oppositions that are artificially constructed, we have a feeling like this: “I don’t want to separate the two of them!” Or, “I don’t want to set the two of them in opposition!” But when facing things that are naturally opposed, we do not have this feeling, because they are already separate in themselves; perhaps this shows that in people’s subconscious, they know the former division is artificial.
“The deeper I go into the world of philosophy, the more I am able to recognize the limits of my rational capacity, and the more I am able to suspend thought at the proper moment.”
What I have always wanted to ask is: can you give an example to show when you would stop thinking and yield to feeling and emotion?
“The way to safeguard the richness of emotion is the philosophical activity as magic. Through this activity, I can constantly alter the appearance of the world, neither letting the world become so utterly strange that there is nothing to say about it, nor letting it become so familiar that it turns numb and insensitive. Of course, in the eyes of others, I may often seem cold and heartless. I have no wish to argue the point; perhaps that is only natural as well—a lampshade will make a flickering flame appear more restrained and more tranquil, but it can precisely serve to protect and sustain the flame.”
Here you compare yourself to a flame used mainly for illumination. But please note: lampshades also differ in their degree of translucency. A bedroom calls for soft, dim light, but places like classrooms and offices need brighter illumination.
- 古雴
2009-06-12 17:23:35
Rather than asking me, “When do you stop thinking and yield to feeling and emotion?”, it would be better to ask when I need to think. In fact, in most circumstances I do not proactively think through and pursue most questions; only when I have especially much free time, or when a question is especially interesting, or when there is some special compulsion, will I think about it. And once thinking gets mired in an obvious quagmire, tangled and unresolved, I will pull myself out and set the question aside.
There are all kinds of lampshades, and people also have all kinds of personalities; you can never find a lampshade that can do everything. Nor can you become a person who can do everything. So everyone has their own unique personality, and that personality will shine on the stage that suits it. In places that do not suit it, it will seem out of place.
- unic
2009-06-12 17:28:36 Anonymous 115.155.143.90
I wonder what it would be like to be a gas blowtorch! Hahaha~ just kidding
unic2009-06-12 18:14:45 Anonymous 115.155.143.90 http://ywbeing.blogbus.com/
You regard philosophy as a kind of reflection on life, so what is the so-called “special compulsion”?
This should include a situation in which the question naturally emerges, I think.
And in that kind of situation where “when a clear question emerges, the question has actually already been solved,” the question in fact emerges as the starting point of the answer.- 古雴
2009-06-12 21:42:18
What is meant by “special compulsion” is, for example, having to turn in a paper right away, or being asked to answer certain questions on the spot in an exam—in such cases, of course, one must deliberately think about it.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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