The occasion for writing this piece was yet another email discussion recently. Our class Party secretary forwarded a publicity push for the vote in the “2011 China University Student of the Year” selection, and our department’s 2009 undergraduate student, the “ticket-selling master” Pei Jiyang, had made the shortlist.
But the comrade secretary, who has always been quite strong-minded, said that he himself did not support this publicity campaign, on the grounds that “(since Department Chair Wang Bo said) the philosophy department should cultivate philosophers,” and that “promoting him is more suitable for the Railway Institute than for Peking University’s philosophy department. If the Peking University philosophy department actively publicized that it had trained an excellent train ticket seller, that would be like Mercedes-Benz promoting the fact that it had produced an excellent bulldozer.”
I immediately raised an objection, and later we went back and forth twice more in response.
Of course, first of all, what I did not mention in the email was that the statement “the philosophy department cultivates philosophers” is probably incomplete. The department’s official line all along has been “we cultivate philosophers as well as versatile, interdisciplinary talents.” In fact, philosophy’s place in university education should be that of a foundational discipline. For example, studying philosophy as an undergraduate and then going on to pursue political science, economics, law, management, and so on at the graduate level is actually a more appropriate model. To say that the philosophy department cultivates philosophers is obviously too narrow. Even if this is what the department chair said, either the comrade secretary has taken it out of context, or there was a specific context in which it was said.
But setting that issue aside, after understanding the concept of “philosopher” in a broader and more originary sense, even if we grant that “cultivating philosophers” really is the philosophy department’s mission, I still think that Pei Jiyang’s accomplishments do not conflict with this.
This issue can be discussed on three levels: first, a philosopher is not a profession; second, a philosopher is a way of life; third, philosophers are related to scholars, but not necessarily identical with them.
First, is a philosopher merely a profession? Just a profession standing alongside ticket seller? No. Professor is a profession; ticket seller is a profession; but philosopher is not. A professor can be a philosopher, a king can be a philosopher, a person who grinds lenses can be a philosopher, and a ticket seller can also be a philosopher. If Spinoza was good at grinding lenses, does that mean his status as a philosopher should be discounted? We say that the philosophy department cultivates philosophers, but no one says the philosophy department cultivates professors. Do not regard philosophers as a specialized profession equivalent to and mutually exclusive with other specialties.
On this point I only emphasized that “philosopher” does not conflict with some particular specialized profession; they belong to two different levels. But using Spinoza as an example may indeed cause misunderstanding, after all, the skill of grinding lenses does seem unrelated to being a philosopher. This led to the rebuttal: “Spinoza is famous because of his philosophical insights, not because of his lens-grinding profession; whereas Pei Jiyang is famous because of his ticket-selling talent, not because of his philosophical talent.”
Indeed, if Pei Jiyang were merely famous for some talent completely unrelated to philosophy, then he should not be promoted in the name of the philosophy department. But the question is, what is philosophical talent? Is it the talent for writing papers? Philosophy is less a technique than a way of life. A way of dealing with things that is questioning and reflective. Is spending large amounts of time reading books and writing papers what makes a model? That can be the exemplary image of any discipline of textual scholarship, but not necessarily of philosophy. And if one incorporates a reflective and goodness-seeking orientation into life itself, wouldn’t that better represent the spirit of philosophy? Is Pei Jiyang’s fame due to ticket-selling talent? No. He simply happened to put his talent to use in ticket selling. Do you really assume that after graduation his wish is to continue being a ticket seller? Is his talent really limited only to ticket selling?
“Ability” has two levels of meaning. One is the sense of being “competent” and “skilled in using something,” that is, taking an existing model and some existing tools, and being able to carry out a given task well. “Ability” at this level is concrete and specialized. But another level of ability is the ability to discover and unfold possibilities: not to complete tasks step by step along established patterns, but to reflect upon and probe existing methods and excavate the possibilities hidden within them. This is not a concrete competence, but a concrete realization of philosophical ability. Only in this sense can notions such as management philosophy, engineering philosophy, or ticket-selling philosophy—so-called “applied philosophy”—possibly make sense.
If the Railway Ministry were training ticket-selling employees, it would only teach procedures and matters requiring attention. A most competent ticket seller would amount to someone with a slightly better attitude and slightly more nimble hands and feet. But the kind of vision Pei Jiyang showed—creatively discovering the potential hidden within these routine, by-the-book procedures—does not belong to the professional skills of a “ticket seller” as such; it is a philosophical vision. If a professional ticket seller achieved this, then one could also say that he possessed a philosophical vision. Any “paradigm revolution” carried out in a profession by breaking through conventional formulas has, to some extent, a philosophical dimension. Of course, what Pei Jiyang did may not amount to a ticket-selling revolution, but it was clearly more than merely “ticket-selling talent.”
The secretary agreed that inquiry and reflection are important, but he said that these inquiries and reflections are most able to “let others understand” only through “written form”; that “it is unlikely to become a philosopher without specialized philosophical training”; that philosophy professors are “more likely to become philosophers” than ticket sellers; and therefore that “although philosophers are not a profession mutually exclusive with other specialized professions, the possibility that he is identical with a philosophy professor is higher, while the possibility that he is mutually exclusive with other professions (such as sales clerks, shoemakers (except when a philosopher is moonlighting in disguise)) is higher.”
Of course, the secretary has always stubbornly believed that “if an undergraduate student spends a lot of time selling train tickets, I doubt he/she has enough time for the necessary philosophical training.” On this point, he obviously takes “necessary philosophical training” to be far too onerous. In fact, the Spring Festival travel rush only lasts for that one stretch each year; for most of the remaining time one is not very busy, and philosophical training does not require 365 days of high-intensity investment. But setting that aside for now, let us first talk about the relation between philosophy professors and “becoming a philosopher.”
I pointed out that he was confusing a philosopher’s way of life with the way a philosopher becomes famous. It is just like a ticket seller: if one wants people to know about them, one usually has to appear on television or in the newspapers, but television and newspapers are not intrinsic to what makes a ticket seller a ticket seller. There are many prerequisites for becoming a famous philosopher, but what I am concerned with right now is only one of them: that is, first to live as a philosopher. Given that premise, the question of how to become a well-known philosopher comes later.
Of course, the philosophers of ancient Greece all had a strong desire to communicate and express themselves, but this is less a characteristic of philosophers than of Greeks. The pursuit of standing out among the crowd, the pursuit of excellence, the pursuit of immortal achievements—these are what Arendt called the characteristics of the actor. But Arendt was unwilling to call herself a philosopher precisely because the philosopher more represents contemplation than action. In my view, the philosopher is not opposed to the actor, but neither is the philosopher necessarily an actor. That is to say, insofar as one is a philosopher, one does not intrinsically possess the ability to become famous. A person with shelves full of books to their name is not necessarily a philosopher, and someone who writes nothing at all can also be a philosopher. A philosopher’s achievements can be large or small: they can be immortal works that shine through history, or they can be an ordinary, obscure life lived in silence.
Let me stress again: a philosopher is first and foremost a way of life, not a profession. The translation “philosopher” easily causes misunderstanding, linking it with “expert” or “specialist,” but if one translated it directly as “lover of wisdom,” it might be easier to understand. Loving wisdom is like loving beauty, loving play, and so on. There can be professors who love beauty and ticket sellers who love wisdom. Of course, the identity label “lover of wisdom” implies a way of life that carries “loving wisdom” through one’s entire life, but the “loving wisdom” involved is still an attitude, not a professional skill.
Personally, I hope to become a professor, and I also hope to be renowned in history as a philosopher, but the overlap between the two is not inevitable. Nor would I think that the entire philosophy department exists merely to cultivate a tiny group of people like me, while everyone else who does not want to become professors is just cannon fodder. The more important significance of the philosophy department lies not in cultivating “philosophy workers,” but in cultivating “workers of philosophy”: people who can carry the reflective spirit and love of wisdom nurtured in the philosophy department into specialized work in all walks of life. Only in this sense does the philosophy department have indispensable significance as an undergraduate major at a university, and not merely as a graduate program.
(By the way, I never cast a vote in this online election activity either, because I thought that the format of showing photos and voting among a large number of photos was worse than a talent show. We do not have the patience to open each one and inspect the deeds one by one; except for people we already know, we are very likely just looking at faces and choosing randomly by feel. That is very uninteresting. Five or six candidates would be fine, but with so many candidates, how is one supposed to look at them all? So I boycotted the voting, but I still supported the effort to publicize Pei Jiyang’s accomplishments.)
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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