This article is meant to lay out some matters. Since bringing these things up still leaves me with a thousand tangled threads, this essay has no fixed theme; I’ll write as far as I get.
As for my own romantic experiences, I already gave some account of them in some earlier articles, but clearly that was not enough, and I also did not devote a special treatment to them in the “Talking Love — Speaking of Love” folder, which makes it seem insufficiently sincere. So here I’ll write a dedicated piece to gather my thoughts.
When I was a sophomore, I had a little, short-lived romance, and afterward I lay dormant for several years. It is said that my emotions sank into a low ebb and my mind into a knot of confusion. Now that I have long since climbed back out of the cave, it is time to explain the reasons.
Of course, here I will not involve other people’s private affairs too much. This is not only to avoid the bad effects of gossip and the like, but more importantly because all the despondency and entanglement were in the first place unrelated to anyone else; they were all my own business.
First, it should be made clear that although I speak of despondency or entanglement, all of this is relative to my own state. Objectively speaking, when my mood was at its lowest, my enthusiasm for life was probably still much higher than that of many people; when I was most tangled up, I was also much more free and easy than many people. In those so-called low periods, apart from my usual silence and loquacity’s opposite, and my lesser participation in collective activities, I think I never showed any obvious gloom. Still less did I become sentimental or make a fuss. The world and life were, from first to last, wonderful, rich, and lovely to me. I still never hated anything whatsoever, including myself, and of course I did not deny myself either. The problem was only that, with respect to one particular matter, I no longer had confidence in myself.
I also need to thank her and my friends at the time; they did not come to blame me, nor did they press me excessively for answers, but instead allowed me to fade away silently and let me retreat into the cave to lie dormant.
It also needs to be explained that the reason I was able to crawl out of the cave again was not that I solved the problem through some kind of seclusion and contemplation. I have always believed that no problem is clarified by annoying thought. If some problem makes me agitated and tangled, then I do not deliberately force myself to think about it. Rather, I suspend it in midair: neither letting it drift away completely nor allowing myself to forget it. When the time comes and I find the proper entry point, I follow the momentum downward, and the difficulty is naturally resolved.
That difficulty, in one word, was: “change of heart.”
No matter who first drifted away from whom, no matter what originally triggered the change, the point was that I found I really had changed my heart. In other words, from some moment on, I discovered that my feelings toward her had changed completely and could never be recovered.
Only then did I begin to face squarely this fact I had already known for a long time: feelings are fluid, and fixed concepts cannot constrain fluid feelings.
At the time I did not phrase the problem like this. As I saw it then, what troubled me was this: given that I could not guarantee the lasting constancy of my feelings, how was it possible for me to make a commitment of affection to a girl?
Of course, for this to become a problem, the premise was that I held a rather classical attitude toward love. I did not want to be a heartless swindler, and still less did I want to be a philanderer. I did not want to toy with other people’s feelings, and even less did I want to toy with my own feelings. What I longed for was not a fleeting passion that blossoms and is gone in an instant; I was not satisfied with a spark that flashes as one passes by… What I wanted was sincere and lasting feeling.
My grandfather’s illness and death happened to overlap with that period of my sophomore year, making the problem especially heavy. The last lesson my grandfather gave me was probably: “Don’t make the little girl sad.” Yes, I also did not want to make her sad, but what was I to do? Things that had already happened and ended could never be replayed. I did not know what to do. She had in fact already left me; what more could I do? Should I rush over and defend myself before her, or tell her that in fact I was not sad at all for your sake, so you need not feel any self-reproach? It seemed that whatever one did at that time was futile, so I did nothing, said nothing, and took no notice of, asked after, or cared about anything. If this was an attitude of indifference or coldness, I admit it. It was not a lovely attitude. In any case, I feel that this was at least better than being sentimental or vacillating. Although I was long unable to say the words “break up” on my own initiative, the breakup was one-time and clear-cut, with no repeated entanglements and no mutual blame. And it was precisely this stage, in which there was in fact a breakup though no explicit farewell was spoken, that helped me gradually understand the illusion of so-called “contract.”
In short, the reason I lay dormant for many years was to reestablish my own confidence — next time, I would not let a little girl be sad again.
Of course, if someone is courting trouble on their own, that is beyond my control. For example, if someone treats me as the prince in their ideals, projecting their fantasies and demands onto me, only to discover that I do not suit their heart, then the disappointment and sorrow thereby caused are beyond cure; that is not my problem. So I will absolutely not be a phantom prince, but rather a real king. A king, so to speak, will not submit to any other, will not become another person’s puppet and design himself according to another’s wishes; a king is responsible only to himself.
To be responsible to oneself, concretely speaking, means to be responsible for one’s own words and deeds, always able to carry what one has said and done with pride — yes, I never said that! Yes, that’s exactly what I did! — not only before others, but more importantly, before oneself, always able to stand upright in one’s own presence, neither ashamed nor timid. That is a king.
And in those years, I never dared to face the topic of love directly. Though it would not quite be called shame or regret, it was certainly that I could not shake off my timidity; I always refused to talk about such matters head-on. Thus I lost the qualification of king, and only after I reestablished comprehensive confidence could I proclaim myself a demon king and set out again.
For me, being able to defend my own words and deeds at all times is not difficult. So long as I always speak and act with the utmost sincerity and never deny my past, I can be free of inner guilt. However, even if I have never been ashamed of my past, I no longer have so much confidence in my future. That is to say, if I really do “change my heart” in the future, I believe I still would not feel guilty. So long as I always face my own emotions honestly and do not deceive myself, I have nothing to feel guilty about. But does such stubbornness seem somewhat cruel to a girl? — To be frank, I am someone who may well change my heart at any time, and who, after changing my heart, can still stand there and speak with perfect righteousness — that sounds terribly bad. Although I, as a pluralist, do not deny the philanderer’s way of life, that is not my image. But apart from such an image, what else can I promise? What kind of confidence can I offer to a girl willing to associate with me? How could I tell her I am a safe, reliable man worthy of being entrusted with one’s whole life? I feel that I am such a person, yet my own confidence has also begun to waver. What is to be done? I do not require any absolute guarantee, but I do need to establish sufficient confidence.
The process of reestablishing confidence did not happen all at once, but was achieved through several moments of “awakening.” This kind of awakening does not mean suddenly thinking of the solution. Rather, it means suddenly discovering that the problem has already been solved by me.
The most important discovery was to fuse “philosophy” and “life,” to make philosophy part of life and life part of philosophy. Of course, when I discovered this point, the fusion had already taken place; it was not done deliberately. Or to put it another way, my discovery was precisely this “letting things take their course”: I discovered that I no longer needed to deliberately draw a line between so-called philosophy and life. I no longer needed to fear philosophy interfering with my life, nor fear life corrupting my philosophy, because the interference and corruption had already happened, and the result was not destructive. On the contrary, if I were to forcefully distinguish between philosophy and life as two separate activities, the resulting rupture would be destructive. So-called “philosophy” as part of life would not stand any higher or lower in status than the other parts of life such as socializing, games, eating and drinking, and so on; so-called “life” as part of philosophy would not be any more or less beneficial than reading, writing, attending classes, and so on. I no longer needed to suffer from this schizophrenic opposition between philosophy and life, because I did not need to consider whether I should be a little more philosophical, or a little more life-like. This dilemma was from the very beginning self-inflicted trouble. I only needed to consider “becoming myself.” So long as I was willing, I could at any time divide different sides or different parts out of my life, but I was not going to become the self of any one of those parts. “I am a unified whole” — this is the premise of all thought and the aim of all life. As for the relation between philosophy and life, to be precise, I did not quite solve the problem; rather, I realized that this was not a problem!
After I understood this “non-problem,” I immediately gained boundless strength. I had originally worried that philosophical cultivation might damage my enthusiasm in life, while the looseness of life might damage my depth in philosophy. Perhaps when I regarded the two as separate, such dangers really would arise. Yet once that boundary was broken, the situation was exactly the opposite. I found myself becoming more and more exuberant in life, while my philosophy also became ever more powerful and inspired. More importantly, the magic in these two domains could circulate without end, continuously supplementing one another, forming a virtuous cycle that kept amplifying itself. As my philosophical world became richer, my world of life would also become more colorful, and vice versa.
Such continuity instantly rebuilt my confidence in romance, because my confidence in my philosophy could likewise support my love. In particular, I also connected the love of wisdom with romantic love. In short, the power of my philosophy would be able to ensure that my passion flowed on without cease and would not easily run dry.
However, the problem was still not entirely resolved. For philosophical pursuit has no specific object — or rather, the object of philosophy is “myself.” But the object of love is “her.” If I can guarantee that “love” will be inexhaustible, how can it be certain to be love for “her”?
Of course, such a question is still something I now formulate by looking back. At the time I did not raise such a question. I merely felt that the time had not yet come, but I did not clearly express that there was still some other problem. Yet once one formulates the problem in this way, the answer is often already close at hand.
After I fused philosophy and life into one, my state was probably such that I could already face girls’ pursuit with confidence, but I still could not freely release my own feelings. My love was still locked up tightly by me.
During this period, I had one kind of confidence — “So long as I put this problem into writing, I can explain it clearly.” This was also my usual state: on many questions, before I wrote them out, I was not clear what exactly I wanted to say, but I could be very clearly certain that I would definitely be able to make sense of them. In other words, there are almost no problems I work through purely in my head. I always seem to be accumulating momentum, then, once the momentum is full, I carry it forward and bring this phase of thought to an end with the keyboard.
The emblematic article that turned this stage of thinking into words was my long essay “Searching for mm.” But before that, at the end of my senior year, through exchanges with a web friend named unic, I had already brought out some other basic positions regarding love. These basic positions were in fact very simple: “to love, not to hate,” or in other words, “do not let your love be expressed through hatred.” I do not want people to walk side by side through common hatred; at least I do not need enemies, and I have no enemies. Love ought to be beautiful and happy, not painful struggle. More crucially, one must first love oneself, and not hate, and need not hate one’s own private desires. Not understanding selfishness and instead wanting to devote oneself to some ideal or to some others — these idols, this superstition and fanaticism, are far more dangerous. No matter how insistently you argue otherwise, I must at least speak honestly: I am a person who loves myself and the world, a person lacking in hatred, a person who refuses to love comrades through “shared outrage against a common enemy.” If you feel hatred toward such a person, then I have no remedy for that.
From then on I became even more certain of two things: first, I really can accommodate different values without feeling disgust; second, it is not easy to keep those who are different from me from feeling disgust toward me. For my philosophy can be said to be strong and domineering. Unless you do not come to contend with me, once you try to argue with me, I will not conceal my views. Whatever my view may be, the sheer aggressive force of how I state and defend it, and my long and annoying prose, are enough to scare off most people.
Even now, after I write each new heap of articles, I still feel somewhat uneasy, fearing that these words may in the end scare away the very people I absolutely do not wish to scare away. In fact, just as I call my writing “excrement,” I myself often find these ugly things hard to bear, let alone ask others to chew over them.
Therefore, I in fact no longer expected merely my frightening blog to attract mm, so I then wrote that even more shocking “Searching for mm.” As I have frankly admitted many times, that text was not a sincere post seeking friendship; personally, I did not expect to find a girlfriend through that method. That article aimed to set forth my related ideas in concentrated form. And the reason I posted it in the form of a dating ad was to show that my theory was not empty talk, that my words and deeds are consistent.
The ideas I wanted to express there were, if explained in detail, virtually endless — they could drag in almost all of my philosophical reflections to date — but in simple terms they amounted to just two characters: “freedom.” The key point is that the object of love is a real “person,” not an ideal idol, much less an abstract symbol. A real person is free, is alive. That is to say, he may always change in ways that do not follow your design. A fixed and unchanging ideal person is either your self-deceiving fantasy, or else a shackle that binds both sides’ freedom.
Long ago, I once compared love to shackles. In a certain sense, I really have changed my view, though the earlier formulation was not wrong either. Now I prefer to call this constraining connection a “bond.” I won’t go into a detailed explanation here; what is worth mentioning is this: a bond or constraint is often both an obstacle to moving forward and an aid to moving forward. Just as rough ground is resistance to walking, yet without ground one cannot take a single step. A romantic relationship may be said to be a bond one sets for oneself freely; it ought to facilitate the two people’s forward movement, not make them from then on forever unable to move.
I clarified this already-known truth: people grow and change, and to love does not mean fixing oneself and the other person. On the contrary, to love means being able to mutually accept each other’s unknown changes.
Thus I put forward the “unconditional condition.” What I wanted to convey was this: although I certainly have one preference or another, I do not want any preference of mine to become a burden that constrains the other person. It is not that I cannot, like a normal dating ad, list one plus and minus after another. But my dating article was not aimed at finding a date; more importantly, it was intended to express some of my most basic ideas. What I mean is, if you do not meet some of my “plus points,” you absolutely do not need to try to force yourself to meet them; if you do meet some of my plus points, you also need not deliberately keep up those traits. For example, a girl who watches anime would obviously get extra points in my eyes, but if you simply do not like watching it and only force yourself to do so in order to get close to me, that would be even worse. This is even more true in terms of thought and character. I do of course have some preferred traits, but if you do not agree with me, there is no need to care. If you can oppose my thinking, that may actually make me happier. But deliberately looking for fault with me just in order to make me happy is not good either… In short, I do have one preference or another, that is true. But if you care very much about my preferences and try hard to cater to them, then associating with me may well be quite an arduous thing. You will find that this king is truly difficult in every possible way, and impossible to serve properly. But in fact, associating with me is actually a very simple thing. So long as you stop considering so many issues, you will find there were never any problems in the first place. You only need to be yourself, only need to face your own emotions honestly, to bloom the character that belongs to you, and then everything will be fine.
So the core idea of my whole dating post was to express that what I desire is a truly free kind of love: I do not want you to conform to my requirements, nor will I conform to yours. Under the premise of freedom, we can talk, exchange, and see whether we can actually fit together. In any case, only with communication is there possibility; without communication, nothing can begin.
After all, compared with a living, breathing person, the information conveyed through writing and other forms of material is always pale. One cannot establish a romance merely through these rigid things. Romance is also a living relationship that keeps changing and growing; it needs to be established and maintained in live, “on-the-spot” interaction. However, when I put out the dating post, I did not expect to begin any reliable communication at once. In fact, just as I had already thought, that frightening dating article was enough to scare off reliable people, while the people it attracted were sometimes inexplicable. So after hanging the dating post up long enough, I took it down.
It was only this semester that I truly established my confidence in full, which is to say, I could again take the initiative and pursue a girl. I would no longer fear either her falling in love with me or my falling in love with her. This integrated line of thought, when stated, is more complicated: first, it confirmed the status of emotion and reason as the caretaker of emotion; second, it confirmed that “only change makes permanence,” that flowing water is inexhaustible while solid things are what perish easily; third, it confirmed the meaning of “ambiguity,” that fluid concepts convey fluid feelings; and finally, there is “relationism and the philosophy of communication.” And so on. I do not want to expand on these related topics too much here.
Speaking of “ambiguity,” I do not mean that kind of unwillingness to face one’s own feelings directly or inability to confess one’s intentions honestly, still less the attitude of taking pleasure in flirting with the opposite sex while evading responsibility. What I call “ambiguity” is precisely the search for the most honest way of confessing and the most responsible attitude.
What, then, is the most honest expression? Is expressing one’s feelings in sharp, decisive language an act of honesty? In fact, emotions themselves are always hazy and fluid. When it comes to depicting them, which is more “real”: using clear and distinct concepts, or using rounded, ambiguous language to hint at them?
Especially in these years of blogging, I have come to feel deeply that the process of expression is at the same time the process of establishing oneself; the way one expresses oneself will in turn shape the content of that expression, and then, in reverse, shape one’s own thoughts. A definite judgment does not finally take shape before it is expressed, but only after it has been expressed. It is rather like in quantum mechanics, where states are constructed by measurement, rather than there being first a definite state waiting for measurement to reveal it.
The key point is that human mentality and emotion are deeply constrained by language; people always use concepts to cut apart and distinguish their own feelings—Is this love or hate, rational or emotional, reflective or poetic…? In fact, those dichotomies and conflicts were not originally inside the human heart at all. The human heart, like the external world, before people use all kinds of concepts, terms, and theories to cut it up and name it, is a mass of chaos, or what is called “the manifold.” When people use those ready-made conceptual frameworks to describe that mass of manifoldness, they are not merely describing facts objectively; they are also shaping facts in a particular way. Those divisions and definitions are both derived from that original chaos, and at the same time come from the conceptual framework through which human beings observe the world. And in truth we can never transcend the limits of mediation; no word is “absolutely objective.” We should even realize that because any word is a fixed sign, it cannot capture a changing world or flowing emotion; the more one wants to nail them down precisely, the more destructive such language becomes (perhaps this is still like Bohr’s complementarity…).
In short, to put it simply, “confession” is not such a simple act—there is a state in your heart that is crystal clear to you, and you just transmit that state to others in the most precise language possible. In fact, let alone the impossibility of such precise and effective language, even if one sets aside the limits of language, at the very least this process of confession itself will inevitably participate in and reshape the state within you; and the more intense and unequivocal the confession, the greater the disturbance it causes to that inner state, and the effects of such disturbance are often unpredictable (why does this always sound like a discussion of quantum mechanics…).
In any case, I do not think words like “love/not love,” “like/dislike,” and the like can properly convey true emotion, or rather, they are “spells” that need to be uttered again under certain specific circumstances, under some ritual, in order truly to work their magic. And in different contexts, words that at first glance seem more “ambiguous” are often better able to convey inner feeling. Perhaps phenomenologists’ concern with seeking “room to maneuver” or “elbow room” in words is similar in this respect—not to be deliberately sly and equivocal, but to convey thought more accurately.
Related to this, I also do not think that concepts such as “lover” possess some kind of supreme authority.
There are always people who like to ask in this way: Did it succeed? Did you get them?—Of course, we can talk about all kinds of “success.” For example, every date can be said to be a success; clearly revealing some hint of affection without frightening the other person away is also a kind of success; holding hands, calling each other lovers, and so on are of course all successes as well. But each “success” can only be regarded as provisional; there should not, fundamentally, be any state of “having won them over.” Even if your relationship develops to the point of living together, or even registering your marriage, there still should not be that one-and-done state of “having got them.” Because human beings are never “ready-made”; people are free and constantly changing. Thus “pursuit” is endless, and only by continuously extending the relationship and continuously pursuing can one always be able to face and embrace the other person’s changes. Once you fix the relationship between the two of you in your mind, sooner or later you will discover that you will change your mind, and she will change hers too; and if the pursuit is terminated, then the two of you are very likely to pass each other by and go off in different directions.
Love is a matter for a lifetime. Young people have young people’s love, middle-aged people have middle-aged love, and old people have old people’s love. People change, the way they relate to one another changes, the world they live in changes, and the form of love changes too. You can treat love as a harbor where one takes refuge from unease in this uncertain world—of course, that is appropriate, because love really can give people a sense of belonging and security—but do not expect this harbor to simply cope with every change by remaining unchanged; one must know that what does not change is necessarily lifeless. Once you forcefully use the word “got them” to turn a living object into a fixed object, perhaps the crisis in the relationship has already begun.
However, the changes of love differ from the changes of the world. The world’s changes are almost beyond your control; it will intervene in your life, while you can hardly intervene in it in a corresponding way (for related discussion, see the article “On Fate”); this is a relationship of “I and it.” Its changes can affect my own changes in turn, but my changes can scarcely influence it at all. As for my own personal changes, they are under my own control; through reflection and action I continuously affirm and bring about my own changes. This is a relationship of “I and myself.” And my interactions with other people (lovers, family, friends) are a relationship of “I and you.” Under this relationship, both sides can intervene in each other in an equal way. In particular, in a one-to-one intimate romantic relationship, this exclusivity and intimacy make the two seem like one person, able to influence and shape each other immediately and directly; but at the same time, the two people can by no means become one entity, for they remain independent individuals of each other. What does this mean? She is so close and reliable, yet so distant and alluring; both within reach and forever beyond pursuit. This strange feeling is akin to philosophical inquiry.
I use my philosophical attitude to fall in love, or rather I use my attitude toward love to do philosophy. Perhaps this will scare many people away, because the philosophy in their minds is rigid and dull; I do not need to defend myself much. What I want to say is that in this way I am completely convinced that I can embrace the unknown changes, so long as these changes arise naturally in free and close communication. For through such communication, the changes of either party are never isolated or abrupt; her changes either already involve my participation, or are about to enter into my own changes. Thus, as long as I can always face myself with an open and confident attitude—as long as I can always refuse to deny my past, nor confine my future, and always express myself sincerely—then I have confidence in maintaining the permanence of my own feelings.
However, if communication between the two sides is cut off, can I still preserve my emotions? I cannot guarantee it. If communication is severed by outside force, such as some compulsory separation, then perhaps I will wait more, and at the time of reunion try to build a brand-new love from scratch. But if it is the other person who takes the initiative to leave, then so long as I am certain that her choice comes from her own will rather than being forced by some external pressure that might yet be overcome, I will not allow myself to stand rooted there from then on. With communication ended, her image in my heart is no longer living and changing; I may continuously recall her image, but I can no longer carry on that free and equal exchange with her. Thus, my “changing my mind” will no longer be entangled with hers. In other words, after the sorrow has passed, please rest assured: I will certainly “change my mind.” Such a statement may again seem cold and heartless; yet to be frank, I admire even less those so-called “sentimental” men who, after a girl leaves them, are unable to “change their minds” for a long time, stubbornly clinging to a so-called unwavering love, forever struggling in pain. In this way, it seems as though those girls who “change their minds” have done something wrong, as though she must bear the guilt of making the sentimental man suffer—either she should never have agreed to date him in the first place, or she should not have broken up with him. In short, the sentimental man has done nothing wrong; the girl who changed her mind is in the wrong.
Originally, there is no right or wrong in matters of love. But if you insist on finding fault, then I am willing to say that it is not the girl who changed her mind who is at fault, but the sentimental boy who is at fault; his fault lies precisely in his “unchangingness,” and thus he cannot closely follow the girl’s changes, nor is he willing to let her depart freely. He treats the girl as an ideal doll or an abstract label, rather than as a real, living person, and so his romance is doomed to fail. So long as one is a living, real person endowed with life, one will certainly “change one’s mind”; the question is not whether she changes her mind, but whether you can keep close on her heels.
So let us return to the original question: regarding the endurance of love, what confidence and assurance can I provide to the girl, and to myself? The answer is: my whole personality (or rather, my philosophy). I can sincerely reveal all aspects of myself in communication, and this whole “I” is precisely the sort of thing that can provide trust and reliance. Nothing external to me is sufficient to provide such strength. Some people need to make serious promises, some need to rely on clear status or titles, some need to exchange keepsakes, and some need to use oral or even written contracts to constrain both sides’ feelings. Of course, I can provide all of these as well—but I provide them only as spells and rituals. For words, clauses, and objects external to me have no power to stand above the king; the king answers only to himself, and not to anything else. Of course, the magic of words and the pressure of public opinion will certainly also trouble the king, and so they can all function as limited constraints. However, the question is: if these constraints are something I can easily shake off at any time, yet for her—if she has not yet developed such confidence—they may instead become a psychological and public burden, then there is no need for me to rush into establishing those constraints.
The title of this article was noted down before writing, and now it has obviously wandered off-topic in all sorts of ways, but I cannot think of a more suitable theme, so let it be.
May 18, 2009
smw
2009-05-24 00:31:35 Anonymous 222.189.172.153
Actually, love is “talked” into existence… probably one of the few things in the world where theory is almost useless and success depends entirely on practical accumulation. Fromm is a very good example.
- Guwu
2009-05-24 00:40:02
Originally, all “philosophical theories” are not for use, but only for reflection. When I say that I have fused philosophy and life into one, I mean that philosophy permeates my life and my body, becoming a part of me, and is no longer a tool external to me. Certain tools are useful for life or for the self, but life itself and the self itself are neither useful nor useless.
- smw
2009-05-24 11:20:21 Anonymous 117.91.154.16
That is why I said “almost useless.” The starting point is different; mine is from a practical angle. Or rather, reflection is certainly undeniable, but perhaps when it comes to the matter of interaction, what needs to be thought about or reflected upon is not only the relationship of “love” itself, or the causes that produce positive or negative effects on this relationship, but also the object of interaction—in other words, what exactly women as a group are. What do they need in love? Of course, you can also call this kind of thinking “catering to them.”
- NKM
2009-05-24 18:34:29 Anonymous 124.205.76.73
Senior, you say you do not want to use words and concepts to fix the relationship between two people. Of course, I also admit that such a relationship is in flux. But this idea seems, ms, hard for girls to accept, even frightening; women are more likely to become marriage maniacs, and they more want the relationship between two people to be guaranteed, not merely through formal things like marriage, but more through feeling your inner determination to maintain the original intimate relationship.
It’s just like how no matter how subtle and profound the “Way” may be, it still cannot change most people’s need to worship tangible entities. Thus there also arises the debate between the “Way” preached by Jesus and the “Way” of Jesus’ flesh.
Sometimes I feel that thinking too much about the feelings between two people is the greatest obstacle to the development and maintenance of this relationship; at the very moment when you do not want to trap the relationship with ideas, you have already pre-trapped it. The richer your ideas, the harder it is for the person you expect to appear. Sometimes it is simply the action of feelings whose cause cannot be named. I admit that I have mystical tendencies… - Guwu
2009-05-24 19:27:42
What you say makes some sense.
Do you think I am someone who might “think too much about the feelings between two people”? I cannot do much about this kind of understanding either, but in fact I am someone who hardly ever deliberately thinks about anything. I only read and write, and do anything else in a natural, unforced way. If the words here are the product of thinking, then they are all natural outflow, which is why I compare them to excrement; in life, they will not become something that stands above my immediate intuition and habits. Reading and writing may perhaps sharpen intuition and cultivate new habits, but in the end people still live by intuition and habit, not by concepts.
As for how to make mm feel the determination in my heart, and so on, I think I do have that power. This kind of determination, of course, cannot be conveyed by articles like this, nor can a few words make people believe it. But I believe that the mm who actually interacts with me will be able to find enough confidence in the whole character that radiates through all my words and deeds. So long as she is willing to feel it, she will certainly be able to feel my determination.
Using some kind of contract as a guarantee does indeed have an effect, but contracts are things that can be torn up; it is only that tearing them up requires paying a larger or smaller price. But the guarantee I provide with my whole personality is such that even tearing it up is impossible. Under certain calculations, I may be willing to pay any degree of price, but at any time, I will not and cannot tear up my whole personality. So this is my strength, but only those who interact directly with me can ultimately feel this kind of assurance. Of course, there is no need to show this kind of assurance to junior brother you or to anyone else~ - NKM
2009-05-26 13:27:54 Anonymous 124.205.76.85
Mm, senior, what you say is right. But I still think that sister-in-law would be better off not seeing this article of yours and the pie essay expressing your ideas.
- Guwu
2009-05-26 18:45:38
Thanks for your concern… but let things take their course. I don’t plan to use these words to entice mm. As for if there is already further interaction, then my words can never escape anyway, and I also believe that the person who may eventually accompany me will not be easily scared away by these words. She need not place excessive importance on my words, but at least she should not completely reject them either. Since my philosophy is part of my flesh-and-blood body, then however ugly it may be, it must still be something one can bear…
- unic
2009-06-12 15:41:40 Anonymous 115.155.143.90
“Romantic love can be said to be a self-imposed bond freely set for oneself; it should help both people move forward, rather than from then on leaving the two of them motionless.”
The “moving forward” here is a kind of growth and change as a living being, but your previous sentence seems to imply some direction of change. Could you clarify?
Also, there is an obvious problem: in the article, it is man—girl, which is obviously unequal in terms of the wording~
Also, you acknowledge that you have certain preferences. Although freedom means that both sides only need to be their most authentic selves, the existence of preferences is a reality; will this reality bring about certain effects? - Guwu
2009-06-12 17:16:28
Of course there is a kind of “direction,” but this does not mean that you decide on some direction from the very beginning. Rather, it means that so long as you are walking, so long as you are walking hand in hand along a road, then that road reveals a direction. It may not be that the direction is settled while you are walking, but once the road has been traveled, any road has its own direction.
Man—girl, of course, is an asymmetry; originally, man—woman is already an asymmetry. Although this wording is only a linguistic habit, it does indeed contain certain things worth investigating. But in any case, in my view, first: men and women are two different forms of being, with asymmetries that cannot be ignored; on this point I have always been affirmative. Second: this asymmetry does not mean a difference of higher and lower, better and worse in value.
Reality will of course bring about effects. My whole idea has in fact been emphasizing the reality of love and the necessity of “influence.” What I want to do is precisely let one’s real preferences exist as reality, rather than allowing them to become some ideational existence. For example, I like doing A; then I let this liking be affirmed as a real feeling, but I do not want to use it as a rule of ideas to prescribe myself, turning it into something like “I am a person who likes to do A,” or even prescribing feelings, such as “I must find someone who also likes A.” I will affirm both liking and dislike as real sensations, but what must be avoided is abstracting them out and using them to prescribe reality.
- unic
2009-06-12 17:23:48 Anonymous 115.155.143.90
Could you illustrate this asymmetry in a more concrete way?
Even if one does not turn this feeling into an idea that prescribes one’s thinking, as a direct feeling, when you feel that you dislike a lover’s A behavior, what would you do with yourself and with her? - Gu Chu
2009-06-12 21:40:27
Illustrate it concretely? Opposites and complements, perhaps… Moreover, this asymmetry here is also reflected in the fact that “man” is what I use to refer to myself, whereas “girl” is used to refer to another person. “I” and “he/she” are of course an asymmetrical relation. If “I” were female, then of course I could also use “woman” to refer to myself and “boy” to refer to others. And what is the feeling when the words “man” and “woman” are used to refer to other people? You can notice that when I refer to other male people in my essay, I also use things like “boy” and “male student,” and rarely use “man” to refer to others.
When a feeling is affirmed as a feeling, what is affirmed also includes immediate reactions, such as covering one’s face, frowning, shaking one’s head, resisting, avoiding, and so on. However, once you avoid it, if there is no help from reason, these reactions are not easy to solidify. I do not need to design corresponding modes of response; next time, when I again feel discomfort, I can still cover my face and resist, but I do not need to investigate whether her behavior is correct or whether my reaction is reasonable. In this way, as the relationship deepens, some feelings will tend toward harmony, while other aspects that remain unbearable may also find appropriate ways of avoiding them.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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