Yesterday the two Wu teachers had a gathering, and Old Wu [Bei Wu laoshi] got quite drunk and launched into a grand speech. Unlike when he is drunk in other settings, he said many things that he would only say in front of his disciples. Teacher Wu mentioned that, during his lifetime, he would certainly PUSH us; gold always shines in the end, but don’t count on Teacher Wu living too long—we have to make a name for ourselves within fifteen years… (Although Teacher Wu said drunkenness means speaking logically, in fact there were still some problems at the level of logic.) In the end, Teacher Wu came to the hope that students should have the spirit of working for the welfare of the toiling people of the world, and should have this kind of concern for the fate of the nation and the suffering of the people.
Indeed, being able to encounter a mentor whom I admire both for academic interests and for the spirit with which he navigates life is no easy matter. Scholars and scientists who yearn for pure scholarship are not exactly rare, and there are even more so-called public intellectuals who seem very concerned for the fate of the nation and the suffering of the people. Yet scholars of this kind—those who, on the one hand, pursue free and pure Greek-style learning, and on the other hand are deeply imbued with the Chinese scholar’s spirit of taking the world’s people’s welfare as their own responsibility—are indeed not common.
We might as well call these two temperaments love of wisdom and love of country. Love of wisdom represents a feeling that stands above worldly concerns in pursuit of truth; as for the phrase love of country, it has now been worn threadbare, and is often used by the authorities to promote a narrow nationalist sentiment. But we know that love of country is not the same as love of the court; “country” signifies a historical and cultural boundary. That is to say, after all, I am more concerned with the hardships and fate of the Chinese people, and with the future of China’s politics and culture; as for the peoples of America, Japan, Africa, and so on, I too sympathize with them, but they are not the focus or the center of gravity.
Christian-style universal love, or the so-called cosmopolitan feeling of modern Western thought, seems to me to be something abstract—that is, fictitious. They are more a rational concept than a real feeling. We always first love our family and our hometown, and only then can we extend this actual situation outward. If someone says he loves his neighbors and his children in the same way, or loves the country and his parents in the same way, then this love must be false, or else distorted.
How to reconcile the tension between these two things is a rather difficult problem. One of the simplest methods is to separate them completely: do scholarship is scholarship, while caring about national affairs and people’s livelihood is quite another matter. Modern scientific experts can make this distinction; their pursuit of knowledge is highly specialized, and whether they care about the toiling people has little to do with how they do scholarship. Another way is to choose one’s specialty according to the needs of the state; for example, in the early days when Western learning was spreading eastward, Chinese people went to learn shipbuilding, and then learned about Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, all out of the desire to break through the nation’s peril and crisis. But once that happens, scholarship is in fact no longer pure and free.
Doing philosophy or doing history is different both from being a scientific expert and from shipbuilding. On the one hand, the problems of philosophy or scholarly research are often distant: we do not pay attention to contemporary Chinese social problems, yet we care about ancient Western thought. But on the other hand, in our academic topics, no matter how specialized or minute they may be, we are always bound to care about “human beings” or human nature, and the concept of the human is not some abstract mechanical definition; rather, it is always understood starting from “here, with me.”
Here, with “human beings,” love of wisdom and love of country achieve unity. The abstract “human nature” or the distant “ancient people” are objects of exploration and inquiry, but the real people of this here-and-now country are the starting point of all inquiry.
In particular, the thinking activity of phenomenological philosophy is always a kind of solipsistic reflection: it always begins from the real I, not from an abstract God’s-eye view, and proceeds through reflection; “reflection” means returning to the origin of the “I.” This kind of scholarly activity may well be saturated with concern for the actual livelihood and well-being of the people, but this concern is not objectifying—that is to say, it is not a matter of standing high above like a disinterested God, observing and coolly and objectively analyzing the problems of the world. China’s reality is less an object of our recollection than the starting point or situation of recollection. So long as we can persist in this phenomenological attitude—that is, not cut off this real, irreducible, historical self—then no matter what the object of our recollection, or rather the “content,” may be, the presentation of these contents will always bear the imprint of our personal feelings. China is our “relation,” our “this”; a phenomenological scholarship that proceeds from being-here/relation-here will not sever the bond between this and being, between China and scholarship, or between life and truth.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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