People have the right to stupidity—this is Tian Song’s claim: “The people have the right to stupidity; if they are deprived of the right to stupidity, they will only have the right to be made stupid. The key question is: who has the authority to draw the line between civilization and stupidity?”
Back then (almost six years ago now—terrifying), I already had reservations about this, though I did not discuss it in detail. Yesterday Jing Qi raised this claim again, and recently I have also been paying attention to pedagogical questions, so this is a good moment to talk through my thoughts.
First of all, Teacher Tian, including Teacher Liu, Teacher Jiang, and others, support the “right to stupidity” because they are in fact trying to emphasize a kind of freedom of resistance—I can refuse the authority of science, refuse the tide of modernization; I simply choose to be stubborn and unyielding, what of it?
Of course I also recognize this kind of “freedom,” but the question is whether this freedom of resistance is a “basic right”; that is still worth debating. In fact, “right” is a concept far narrower than “freedom.” It stands in opposition to “duty,” and is an institutional, normative concept under a certain legal system. Simply translating any kind of “freedom” as a “right” can lead to conceptual confusion. For example, do people have the freedom to rebel or to make revolution? Revolution, as we call it, means thoroughly breaking the existing normative system, establishing new norms, and rebuilding values. But the conventions concerning rights and duties are originally embedded within that very normative system that is now being broken. And which normative system would confer the right to negate that normative system itself?
A right refers to what is permitted under a certain normative system, whereas rebellion is an attempt to do what the existing normative system cannot allow. The two are incompatible. Rebellion is not a right; rather, it is a kind of anti-right. But do people have the freedom to rebel?—of course they do. Yet choosing this freedom means that one is trying to refuse certain established duties, and thus also voluntarily giving up certain existing rights. The more you oppose and reject the rules of mainstream society, the more hostile and exclusionary mainstream society will be toward you; the fewer duties you bear, the fewer rights remain to you. You cannot expect that on the one hand you reject other people, while on the other hand other people still grant you rights as usual.
But I am by no means saying that everyone must obey authority, that whatever authority says goes, that one may only believe in science and not in anti-science. The key point is that resistance and dissent both have corresponding levels. Aside from total opposition, aside from wholesale rejection, in general specific acts of refusal always occur within specific domains. On the premise of basically acknowledging the existing “consensus” and “common sense,” one protests against some particular parts of it. It is in this sense that there is a “right” to resistance.
Including “revolution,” all controversies take place upon some public platform, and that platform is historical. For example, in the present age, do you have the right to appeal to “rights” in a premodern way?—this question itself contains a trap, because the concept of “rights” is itself modern. To appeal to “rights,” one inevitably has to enter the discourse system of modernity, and must necessarily accept modern education, thereby making dialogue possible.
Then what if I make no appeal to any rights at all, have no desire whatsoever to talk with “modern people,” and simply want to be self-sufficient in a premodern society—would that be acceptable? This requires a certain regional autonomy. For instance, an independent country, or an autonomous region, autonomous prefecture, cultural preservation zone, and so on: within each relatively self-governing social environment, there can be a relatively independent platform of communication, and within that platform there may be distinctive conventions concerning rights and duties (or other concepts regarding social relations), to a certain extent free from outside interference.
But this independence is also relative. Cultural independence requires the existence of barriers, yet human beings always hope to break barriers and carry out exchange. No culture can be a monolithic block with sharply fixed boundaries. Within any ethnic group there may be many people who refuse communication, but there will always also be people who are willing to communicate; and before exchange gets underway, who has the right to declare that they ought not to participate in exchange? Protecting cultural diversity is one reason, but after all human beings are not animals. It is not as if, just because something has value for display and research, we then have reason to refuse the blending of cultures.
Adapting to the environment is the historical fate human beings must bear. An ethnic group entering the rainforest must adapt to the conditions of the rainforest; an ethnic group entering the desert must adapt to the conditions of the desert; nomadic tribes that take control of the Central Plain must adapt to the environment of Huaxia culture; and cultural units surviving in the age of globalization must also try to adapt to the environment of modernization. The multiculturalism that can survive in this historical environment can only be some kind of “postmodern” culture that has withstood modernity; it can no longer be a premodern culture.
We do not have to embrace “modernity,” but we do have to endure it and bear it. “Independence” means bearing oneself, bearing one’s own fate. All individuality, independence, and diversity are only possible on the basis of bearing one’s own historical fate.
So-called bearing one’s own historical fate is also a certain “self-awareness” of one’s situation. We may say that people lacking this “self-awareness” are “stupid,” and the process of making people self-aware is precisely the process called “enlightenment.” Of course, this is an academic definition. In everyday usage, we employ the word stupidity in many concrete situations, but in terms of its meaning, it often still refers to being cut off from information and lacking self-awareness. By comparison, words like foolish or dim-witted are often used to describe someone who understands the situation and knows what should be done, but does not get to the point and uses clumsy methods. Stupidity, by contrast, tends to express that a person is simply unable to grasp the situation at all, does not know what to do, let alone how to do it.
This is why “enlightenment” corresponds to “stupidity.” In everyday usage, “enlightenment” is often synonymous with “getting started.” Introductory education differs from expert education: the latter teaches you how to become more skilled and proficient on the premise that you are already ready-to-hand, whereas the former guides you in figuring out the lay of the land when you are completely at sea.
Introductory education is not aimed at free persons; quite the opposite, introductory education is the precondition for a person’s becoming free. With regard to any specific field of knowledge, you must first understand its overall contours, its historical accumulation, what this field of knowledge actually contains, roughly what achievements it has made and what room for development it has. Only on this basis can you then learn and conduct research freely within that field. Before that, if you have no grasp at all of the current state of that field, you cannot simply begin by learning freely and autonomously; still less can you begin by making breakthroughs or overturning it. You must first follow authoritative instruction and follow in the footsteps of those who came before. Thus, introductory education is authoritative, but it is also the precondition of anti-authoritarianism.
For an entire era, we must first understand where we have been cast within history, understand our era’s circumstances and cultural background, and only then can we establish some unique individuality or create a new historical trend. Before that, we must undergo a kind of education. This general introductory education is what is called civic education, or what is called the cultivation of national character. Therefore introductory education is a kind of “basic education,” a stage that every citizen has both the right and the duty to complete. Only after passing through this stage of education is a citizen’s personality made “sound,” only then does a person become “free,” and only then can one truly speak of his rights and duties in the sense of personal independence.
As times change and circumstances differ, different modern societies may have different standards for basic education, but this standard should correspond to the standard of “stupidity.” That is to say, since “introductory education” aims to dispel stupidity, then all citizens who have successfully undergone the stage of basic education have no reason to be regarded as stupid any longer. Except in specific professional domains, in general public affairs every citizen can participate in discussion and cannot be excluded on the pretext of stupidity. Therefore enlightenment is also the precondition of democracy. And enlightenment aims to make people self-aware of their own situation, but it does not require that one must approve of one’s own situation. In other words, after enlightenment, we may of course still refuse authority and rebel against the status quo. Therefore, a person’s qualification to participate in public communication as an independent personality depends only on whether he has undergone education by authority, not on whether he accepts authoritative ideas.
Thus we see that China’s present problem is double. On the one hand, we are more inclined to judge whether a person is stupid by whether he has accepted rather than undergone something; on the other hand, our “basic education” does not aim at freedom and self-awareness, but at indoctrination and brainwashing. This double predicament has made democracy difficult. Enlightenment in China has never been completed, and so some people simply want to reject enlightenment and reject Westernization. But the third predicament is that, whether we are willing or not, we are after all living in an age of globalization. Our way of life has long since been irreversibly modernized. To reject it before undergoing enlightenment will not result in cultural soundness and independence, but only in disjunction—a disjunction between thought and material life, between value norms and historical circumstances.
Finally, let me mention in passing “enlightenment and unconcealment”—in a certain sense, the two are a pair of synonyms, both meaning to lift the veil of obscurity. Along this line of thought, I have tried to offer a “pedagogical reading” of Heidegger’s phenomenology. Truth is unconcealment; unconcealment is enlightenment; enlightenment is a kind of teaching process. This teaching process does not aim at learning some nouns or mastering some skills, but at gaining a kind of self-awareness of one’s situation and a space of freedom. But here I am only opening the topic; if there is a chance later, I will expand on it.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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