Recently I have been supervising students’ thesis proposals, and I have had a lot of thoughts. In fact, I have always hoped that students would do history rather than philosophy, because then my supervision would be a bit easier. Doing history requires inspiration and thought, but more important is steady, painstaking labor: I give some broad conceptual inspiration and advice, and then the student just buries their head in the books. But if students want to do philosophy, then I get a headache, because philosophy is the easiest thing to fake and the hardest thing to fool. If you run into a teacher who is happy to look the other way, a little padding of the word count will do the trick; but if you run into a demanding teacher, it is not easy to bluff your way through. I consider myself someone with at least some philosophical taste and standards of reasoning, and even the things I myself write often disgust me; let alone what students produce. But philosophy is precisely the thing that most demands independent thought. I can only criticize; I cannot do the work for them. I can help a student restate this sentence clearly according to my line of thought, but if the student has not really entered into my line of thought, then by the very next sentence we are back to square one.
The two words “faking it” and “bluffing,” which I used above, look like synonyms, but in use there is still a subtle difference between them. “Faking it” often implies that both sides have reached some tacit understanding: no one probes too deeply, and everyone just goes through the motions. You know your stuff is not very good, and I know you are just trying to get by. But “bluffing” puts the emphasis more on deception, on deliberately passing off the inferior as the superior. So what I mean is this: if you want to get a philosophy paper published, or get a degree, you may well manage it easily enough; but if you want genuine scholars who love philosophy to recognize it, that is extremely difficult. By contrast, if you are doing textual analysis of historical sources, or a sociological case study, then as long as you are willing to put in the work, you are more likely to produce something experts will recognize as valid. Philosophy, however, is fiendishly difficult.
This subtle difference between terms is itself one of the important skills in doing philosophy. I seem to remember Bachelard saying something along these lines: what philosophers and poets have in common is that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of “synonyms.” No two words are ever exactly the same. A poet’s skill lies in savoring the subtle feel of each word, and philosophers are the same. That is why we so often hear that philosophy must be read in the original, and that translation and paraphrase all introduce damage; the reason is right here. And when ordinary students study the works of philosophical masters, they are often working precisely at those points where “a little word carries a great deal of meaning.” So I often say that doing philosophy requires spiritual flair, requires talent; the most crucial kind of intuitive talent is sensitivity to concepts. Of course, perhaps this “talent” can be cultivated through acquired training and refinement, but if by the time you are sitting down to write the paper it still has not been cultivated, then you might as well consider changing the topic or doing something “faked.”
In my view, philosophy is a discipline that does not require a background, yet demands accumulation more than anything else. By saying it does not require a background, I mean that philosophy always begins in ordinary language and ordinary experience: each person’s everyday life is the starting point and the endpoint of philosophical reflection; one does not need to first read through some book or learn to solve certain problems before one can do philosophy. But by saying it requires accumulation, I mean that it is not as though anyone who wants to do philosophy can suddenly detach themselves from everyday life and enter the channel of philosophy. In the very beginning of philosophical reflection, no one can immediately shake off all the shackles of everyday life—preconceptions, habitual patterns of thought, habits of expression, and so on; indeed, even in the end we can never completely break free of these shackles. The aim of philosophy is nothing more than to know oneself and to reflect on one’s own limitations. This is an arduous and difficult task; if a person is not aware of this difficulty, that means their philosophical thinking has not even gotten through the door.
Breaking free of shackles cannot be done in one swift stroke. In history there really were some philosophers who tried to rid themselves of ordinary language once and for all and build an abstract language from scratch in order to speak, but such efforts were unsuccessful; and even within this artificial language, certain everyday prejudices and habits of thought were precisely solidified and magnified rather than eliminated. This kind of liberation requires training, but what is worse is that some so-called forms of professional philosophical training actually cause people to sink into confusion and lose their way. For example, phenomenological training that teaches one to speak in a mouthful of jargon and clouded obscurity, or analytic-philosophical training that teaches one to sink into mathematized, symbolized thought—these kinds of training, if one is not careful, can lead one astray, beyond recovery.
Philosophers will quote or invent many words that look quite portentous, whether the terms of phenomenologists or the symbols of analytic philosophers; they are all abstractions.
Abstractions can be referential. For instance, “triangle” is an abstract concept, but of course we can also point to a table and say, “Look, a triangular table,” or point to a triangular area marked out with paint on the ground and say, “Let’s wait in that triangle.” But we need to note that our language often operates on multiple levels: with the same word, such as “triangle,” sometimes we are discussing an abstraction as a mathematical concept, and sometimes we are discussing an entity in a concrete situation. These two levels cannot be confused. Clearly, we cannot use that concrete “triangular area,” which in fact has curved edges, to disprove our understanding of “the sum of the interior angles of a triangle.”
Of course, from this example it seems that these two levels are not easy to confuse. In a concrete context, we often use deictic expressions such as “this,” “that,” “your,” “his,” “upstairs,” “outside,” and so on, to delimit the referent of a word, so that it seems “proper names” are concrete things while “common nouns” are abstractions. But in other cases, so-called “proper names” are not concrete either; for example, “this country,” “this world,” “this earth” all seem to be proper names with a specific reference, but in fact they are closer to abstractions than to entities.
Traditional philosophers like to use many “big words”: nature, world, matter, spirit, humanity, earth… These words all seem substantial, yet somehow remain elusive. And many people do not carefully distinguish the substantiality of these big words, but instead point and arrange them as though they were tables and chairs. That will lead their thinking astray.
I like to cite the textual details about Marx mentioned by Nie Jinfang. Nie Jinfang places extreme emphasis on the importance of original texts; I actually do not agree with this, because creative misunderstanding is unavoidable in real philosophical work, and being overly exacting about the “original meaning” can also become a trap from which one cannot extricate oneself. But Professor Nie is deserving of respect, and the examples he gives fully display the way philosophical researchers work with “a little word carrying a great deal of meaning.” He mentions:
For a long time, we have been accustomed to interpreting Marx’s thought on “human emancipation” as, and equating it with, “the emancipation of humanity,” and in the international communist movement and the practice of the Chinese revolution, “liberate the whole world” and “liberate all humanity” have also been slogans and dreams very familiar to us. Yet little do we realize that this is precisely a viewpoint and line of thought that Marx once labored to probe deeply and to distinguish himself from.
Professor Nie believes that this misunderstanding has been deepened by a large number of mistranslations, such as translating Marx’s “universal human emancipation” as “the emancipation of all humanity.”
“Universal” and “all,” “human” and “humanity” seem to differ by only a single character, but in Marx’s context they are worlds apart. In fact, Marx denounced traditional “metaphysics” and believed that old philosophy had fallen into the condition of standing “on its head”; this is exactly the kind of misunderstanding he had in mind.
This line of thought about “liberating all humanity” is actually utterly opposed to what Marx advocated. One could even say that it precisely reflects the chains from which Marx wanted to emancipate human beings: namely, that living, concrete, flesh-and-blood individuals are controlled by some abstract, inhuman force. People’s real bodies and real lives are portrayed as abstract things like “labor power” and “GDP,” and all actions, all policies and campaigns, aim to raise or regulate those abstract things, while turning a blind eye to the suffering and fate of real people. What Marx advocated as human emancipation is, first and foremost, that each person should win back their own “reality.” Professor Nie says:
Accordingly, Marx clearly expounds his thought on “human emancipation,” pointing out that: “Every emancipation is restoring the human world and human relationships to man himself.” Political emancipation has two consequences: on the one hand it reduces man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual; on the other hand it reduces man to a citizen, to a legal person. And only when the “real individual” takes back the abstract citizen into himself, and as an individual, within his own experiential life, his own individual labor, and his own individual relations, becomes a species-being; only when human beings recognize that their own “native powers” are social powers and organize these powers, thus no longer separating social power from themselves in the form of political power—only then can “human emancipation” be completed.
What, then, does “universal” emancipation mean? “Universal” modifies the specific way emancipation takes place. What is emancipated is still one concrete individual after another, not some abstract “humanity.” But this concrete emancipation does not occur as a series of “special cases,” nor does it occur by virtue of the “privilege” of a particular group. Rather, it can be generalized, repeatedly replicated, and ultimately extended to everyone; that is why we say this emancipation is universal.
The crux here is that the object of the act of “emancipation” is, from beginning to end, concrete individuals, not “all humanity” as an abstraction. “All humanity” is not a subject of action nor an object of action. What Marx calls for is this kind of bottom-up action, not a top-down one. He stresses that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” which is to say: sacrificing the freedom of some people in the name of “all humanity” is simply unacceptable.
Of course, you may object to Marx and think that “all humanity” can serve as a legitimate banner. But in any case, “all humanity” is always being used as an abstract concept, not regarded as a tangible entity with flesh and blood that can be seen and touched. We need to distinguish these two levels. The meanings of insisting on the concreteness of human beings in the “universal individual” and of a pre-established totality in “all humanity” are different.
Coincidentally, when we previously read Latour’s Gaia doctrine, what he wanted to emphasize was also the difference between these two levels. He stresses that “Gaia” must be understood from “universal connection” rather than “total regulation.” Latour draws a strict distinction between “universal connection” and the “global,” and this distinction is consistent with Marx’s distinction between the “universal individual” and “all humanity.”
Latour opposes a “God’s-eye view,” criticizes the “view from nowhere,” emphasizes that “earth” is not “global,” opposes the dichotomy of “nature/society,” and advocates “rebuilding democracy from below.” These positions are, in fact, all expressions of the need to return to the concrete and to keep one’s feet on the ground (earthbound). To be honest, these are all rather familiar things already; if we have read Marx, read Heidegger, or read any other of the very top contemporary philosophers—Nietzsche, late Wittgenstein, and so on—we would not find them strange. But it is still meaningful that Latour, with a background in sociology and anthropology, promotes this basic discriminating power.
As long as we read a few more papers written by students, we can feel that the emphasis on this distinction is still far from sufficient. Many student papers quickly slip into the role of “state counselor,” or even the role of “chief strategist of a world government,” offering advice and devising plans for “us,” or rather, for “all humanity.”
In the comments I wrote for the assignments for Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, I criticized a certain student’s paper as follows: academic papers should try to avoid a style of “staking out a position”; every “should” ought to be sufficiently argued, otherwise don’t say it so much. The subject of your “should” is very vague—“society” should do X, but what is society? Is society a subject? Does society have free will? When you say these things, you seem to be speaking to some supreme dictator or even some transcendent controller outside the world, but if you think it through carefully, you will find that these words are all very empty. In academic research, don’t always worry yourself about being the “state counselor”; one paper only needs to make a few things clear.
This kind of “state-counselor style” writing is sometimes merely a matter of writing style or writing orientation, but at other times it is actually the result of mental confusion. In the former case, there really is a channel for offering advice and suggestions, and there really may be someone who accepts or implements the plan you propose. In that case, your writing is simply misplaced—academic papers are written for fellow scholars to read, and policy reports should find another channel of publication. But in other cases, there simply is no actual institution that could carry out the so-called plan, and this style of writing becomes pure fantasy.
The most typical example is thinking in terms of “humanity” as the acting subject, for instance: “How should humanity face nature?” “How should we respond to the environmental crisis?” If “humanity” here means “universal individuals,” then the statement may still contain something substantive. But if what you are discussing is a concrete plan or countermeasure, then this kind of language that subjectifies or reifies “all humanity” is empty talk standing on its head.
I am a devoted player of the Civilization series and have always recommended this kind of game, but I also often remind students not to let such games mislead them into solidifying their own “God’s-eye view.” “Civilization” is not an entity that can be operated and controlled. Even if you are a national dictator, what you can mobilize are concrete armies and wealth, not the “state” as a totality. The Civilization game lets you inhabit a standpoint and a perspective that in reality one has no right to inhabit.
I have often emphasized that phenomenology is a tradition of “philosophy of individuality,” and that philosophy is “from the self outward.” But the analytic philosophy tradition also has its own ways of distinguishing between different conceptual levels. “View from nowhere” is the title of Thomas Nagel’s monograph; he tries to establish a connection between the “objective standpoint” and the “standpoint of a concrete person,” but in any case, the distinction between these two levels is quite stark.
Although the thoughts above arose from supervising students, I do not, in fact, want my students to feel too much pressure, because while I do not accept muddling through, I can accept perfunctoriness. In any case, just find your own proper place.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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