Treating Concepts as Toys and Glasses as Toys

In the last part of the previous essay, “Philosophy and Poetry,” I had originally wanted to mention “taking concepts as toys rather than regarding them as higher or lower,” but in the finished version I ended up deleting it because the writing never naturally flowed there. It just happened that a later chat touched on the related topic, so I’m putting it here as a supplement.

At first I felt that the analogy between eyeglasses and language was not very convincing, but after thinking it over, it seems to be a pretty good analogy, actually rather interesting.

Like eyeglasses, many concepts, pieces of knowledge, articles of faith, and so on seem to be things on which people depend in their normal lives; yet can these things also be taken as toys? Of course they can!

To keep things simple, let me directly lift a few excerpts from the chat log out of context:

So when do we use concepts, and when do we not……

My prescription is to regard words as block-like toys, to fiddle with them, rather than letting them imprison you.

Can eyeglasses also be toys?

[Eyeglasses and words]aren’t both things that people borrow to look at the world, but that also distort the world?

……Eyeglasses are used to assist the senses in cognizing the world……

Eyeglasses are an extension of the senses……

Of course, eyeglasses can also be treated as toys, if you can switch between different colors……

Of course, perhaps one could say that philosophy’s ideal is to make words as transparent as eyeglasses……

Just as eyeglasses may not necessarily be transparent at the outset……

Well, for example, at the beginning you cannot tell whether the distortion in what you see is caused by the world itself, or by the eyeglasses, or by your eyes. Worse still, perhaps the situation is that what looks like a non-distorted world is actually produced by the double negative of distorted eyeglasses and a distorted world adding up to a positive. You don’t know where the problem lies, or even whether there is a problem at all, so what can you do?

What you can do is fiddle with your eyeglasses, try this and try that, as if it were a toy.

In fact, we can never obtain an absolutely reliable judgment: what exactly is the real world? We can never have a final, once-and-for-all conclusion.

So why take eyeglasses as a toy? Because when you fiddle with them, the appearance of the world changes, and that is fun.

But won’t you fall into a ditch if you treat eyeglasses as a toy?

Everything is open to doubt, but that does not mean one must doubt everything at every moment. When I want to read, of course I can set doubt aside at any time and put on my glasses to look.

You shouldn’t play with the same toy all day long, should you? That kind of life is unhealthy.

First play with the eyeglasses for a while; when you stand up and walk, of course there is no longer any need to keep fiddling with them.

So that is why we say that words or eyeglasses are toys: it means that you can fiddle with them and play with them, but don’t spend all day staring at them and playing in only one mode. If you do that, even if you don’t get tired of it, it will hinder your ability to carry on with other kinds of life and play.

Every kind of game has its proper field, just as you can play soccer on a soccer field, but you should not play it on a cliff [highway]; otherwise you are either being foolish or courting death. It is the same with playing with eyeglasses. Saying that eyeglasses can be played with does not mean that you can play with them while walking around regardless of the situation. Playing with words is the same. When we say that any concept is open to doubt, in other words, that it can be played with and manipulated, that does not mean you can play with it in any situation whatsoever, let alone that you must play with it in any situation whatsoever. In what situations it is playable, and in what situations it is not—that is a judgment made on the spot, just like judging whether a given field is suitable for playing ball. Such judgments do have some method to them, but in the end they also depend on intuitive judgment.

May 17, 2009

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.