(This essay was drafted by Claude Fable 5 after reading all 1,400-plus posts on this blog, and approved by the author without changes. In October 2026, when the site’s categories changed, a few names and numbers were updated, and Claude added a few passages based on posts written since July. Unlike most English pages on this site, which are machine-translated through an API pipeline, this English version was translated and edited by Claude Fable 5 directly.)
This blog is called Suixuan (随轩). It has been written since 2005 — more than 1,400 posts, over six million Chinese characters. When one person’s writing piles up for twenty-one years, even the most welcome guest may hesitate at the door: where do I start? This guide was written for that moment. It is not a table of contents — for that you can go to Topics and Selected — it is more like a map, tracing a few underground streams that run beneath all these words. You can follow any one of them in.
First, the name. The “sui” (随) in Suixuan means something like: going along — with one’s temperament, with circumstance, with wherever the question itself leads. I once wrote a whole post explaining it. My pen name “Gu Lin” (古雴) is coined too: 雴 is the great rain that comes after a long drought. Between them, the two names sum up my disposition. Half of me is “sui”: I do not plan my life, I do not chase what is trending, one question simply leads to another. The other half is “gu” — the ancient: the faster everyone else hurries forward, the more I want to look back.
The Starry Sky: the Ground of Everything
If my thinking must have a single point of origin, it is the starry sky. It appears among the very first posts on this blog: even if ninety-nine percent of the universe is filled with darkness, when I look up at night, what my eyes hold is still that blaze of stars. This is not a poetic affectation but a stance — face the world with reverence first, analysis second. Years later I found that Paul Woodruff had a name for this forgotten virtue: Reverence, and realized I had long since laid it down as the foundation of everything else; later still it merged with Kant’s “starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”. Love first, do not hate; see what is good before you find fault — that patch of starry sky has always hung over Suixuan.
What grows out of the starry sky, as method, is pluralism. I have called myself a pluralist since my undergraduate years, but my pluralism rejects dogmatism and despises relativism in the same breath — I once wrote that relativism and absolutism are birds of a feather: deep down, the relativist still believes a standard must be absolutely universal, and gives up in despair only because he cannot find one. Real pluralism is not “anything goes” but preserving common ground while seeking difference — difference is something to be actively treasured, and it only becomes visible in serious dialogue. This stance runs through nearly every argument I have had since, about science, religion, Chinese medicine, and politics; you will keep bumping into it under the philosophy tag.
Starting from Kant, Arriving at Phenomenology
My training in the philosophy department at Peking University began with Kant — as a sophomore I wrote on Kant’s space-time and Hawking’s universe, and later on negative ontology, arguing that the true intent of critical philosophy is to set limits, not to extend knowledge. Kant is my starting point, and the great opponent I have never quite put down. In graduate school the center of gravity shifted to phenomenology: reading Being and Time, I came to hold that truth is first of all disclosure and clearing rather than the agreement of propositions with facts; reading Aristotle’s tactile world, I began to suspect that one root of modernity’s sickness is that vision has overwhelmed touch, and the world has been flattened into a picture. This thread has settled into the Phenomenology & Heidegger selection, and it forms the backbone of the Philosophy & Thought topic.
In Singapore I lead a reading group at the Unfinished Bookstore (未完成书店), and over fifty sessions and a year and a half we read Being and Time from the introduction all the way to death and conscience. Claude later distilled those talks into a plain-language reading of Being and Time, now in the Books section: it follows the book’s own chapters and explains Heidegger through everyday examples — a water glass, a hammer — because his book starts from everyday life in the first place.
History of Science: Science as a Historical Phenomenon
By profession I am a historian and philosopher of science. The first thing this discipline taught me is that science is not a list of truths dropped from heaven, but a tradition grown inside human history, whose relationship with religion is far more ambiguous than the textbooks admit. I have defended Kuhn’s concept of “scientific revolution”, and re-sorted the debate over Whig and anti-Whig history — what anti-Whiggism asks us to suspend are conclusions, not perspectives. Eventually I condensed this view of science into “the history of science as a nature reserve”: there is no eternal guarantor standing behind science, and precisely for that reason, the historical details wrapped in myth and all that “obsolete wisdom” deserve to be taken seriously — obsolete does not mean stupid or wrong, only out of season.
The most systematic work on this line is not on the blog but in the Books section: Obsolete Wisdom is my lecture course on the general history of science, and A Brief History of Scientific Culture is its popular companion. The day-to-day commentary, book reviews and philological digging are gathered under the History of Science & Scholarship topic and the History of Science & Technology selection.
Lately I have written two pieces on museums and science communication for China Science Daily. From Inscription on the Page to Spatial Exhibition starts from Latour’s “inscription”: science compresses the world, layer by layer, into charts and formulas, and visualization can perform a “reverse inscription,” unfolding that compressed knowledge again so that it reaches the senses; Please Touch, Please Do Not Touch moves from a damaged specimen to the hand and the glass case in the museum. These are collected in the Museums & Science Communication selection.
Technology and Media: My Home Ground
If all of the above still counts as homework within a discipline, “media ontology” is the house I built myself. The idea of my doctoral dissertation was simple and presumptuous: graft Heidegger’s ontology onto McLuhan’s media theory — media precede objects, all technology is media, and the history of media can be practiced as a transcendental philosophy. Technology has never been a neutral toolbox; “double-edged sword” is the laziest metaphor there is: every technology reshapes the people who use it. I later gave technology a plainer definition — technology is “that which can be learned” — freeing it from the traditional definition of “means to an end.”
The complete versions of this work are in the Books section too: The Extension of Man: A General History of Technology, What Is Technology, The Strong Programme of Media History, and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology. The scattered pieces live under the technology and media tags.
Bitcoin: a Thought Experiment That Never Ended
In 2013 I met Bitcoin, and I have never left. What I wrote that year — Bitcoin: The Nature of Money and Bitcoin: The Disappearance of the State — was less investment analysis than a live experiment in media philosophy conducted on money itself: the essence of money lies not in being “valuable” but in a jointly maintained tradition of bookkeeping; and a bookkeeping tradition that needs no state to vouch for it shakes the very foundations of modern politics. A decade on, I am still working this seam: On “Fair Launch” asks where legitimacy in the crypto world comes from, From BTC to NFT: From Wealth to Power argues that what actually goes on-chain is power rather than wealth, and The Great Blockchain of Being tries to gather it all into a philosophy of decentralization. This year, in an AI interview, I pressed the question again: do we still need central banks in the age of AI — why should a small clique still decide the global market? These pieces live in the Web3 & Cypherpunks topic and the Web3 & Bitcoin selection.
Out of Bitcoin grew another, more “Chinese” branch: Huawendao, the Way of Written Chinese. I believe the core of Chinese cultural cohesion is not a monotheistic faith but the tradition of written characters and recorded history — the culture of the court historian is where Chinese people have kept their faith. Hence the Huawendao White Paper and the vision of a “triple greatness of the crypto renaissance”: put Chinese characters on-chain, and let record-keeping and decentralized technology complete each other. This line has its own selection: Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese.
AI: Not Whether to Use It, but How to Give It a Heart
Since ChatGPT, the center of my writing has visibly shifted to AI. My position probably counts as radical these days: I hold that AI brings a double revolution — a technological revolution without a matching social revolution turns liberation into unemployment; I criticize OpenAI-style “alignmentism” because “aligning with human intentions” is itself a pseudo-proposition — nobody is entitled to speak in the name of humanity; I have even said that universities that forbid students to write papers with AI should be dissolved on the spot — a scholar who leaves the best assistant unused is closer to academic corruption. But behind the radical usage stands a classical question: rather than quarrel over whether AI has a mind, ask how we are to establish one for it; the real crisis of scholarship is not that AI can write papers, but that we only know how to recognize titles. These essays cluster in the Philosophy of Technology & AI topic and the AI & Scholarship selection. Incidentally, the redesign of the website you are looking at was itself a collaboration between me and AI — The Blog Has Been Refreshed tells that story.
Since this guide was written, the AI thread has grown two new forms. In one, AI asks the questions: ChatGPT poses a problem, we go back and forth for several rounds, and then it writes the discussion up. That is how I talked through reality and happiness, why moral philosophy should question the heart, not calculate, and AI, freedom and the formation of the self; they are collected in the Setting a Mind for AI selection. The other is a new column, AI Interviews: a news story as the occasion, questions put to me by an AI, and the conversation written up. On agent safety, I argue that we should put a leash on AI, not pull its teeth — capabilities can be open, but actions must be bounded; on the safety politics of frontier labs, I hope to let despotism stop at the factory gate; on the copyright lawsuits against AI companies, I say that AI should be born bearing sin, and that the way to atone is not to pay a copyright tax but to open up its own fruits of wisdom. These are collected in the AI & the Free Society selection.
Recently my student Shen Cong and I started a company: we want to build an AI application that makes scientific exploration fun, using AI to visualize science and knowledge so that interdisciplinary researchers and ordinary people alike can take part in research. It is my other answer to “the real crisis of scholarship” — reviving the original aspiration to seek knowledge: with AI’s help, everyone can be a scientist.
Enlightenment and Freedom: My Political Bottom Line
I am hard to place on the political spectrum, so I once invented my own label: “a right-wing socialist” — freedom takes priority over equality, and what should be eliminated is poverty, not difference. But more important than the label are a few judgments I have never revised: freedom is not a privilege but a burden, worth shouldering deliberately — that was my graduation message to Peking University; leisure is a responsibility, and the baseline of modern civilization is the refusal of any “freedom to be a slave”; freedom of speech requires a public space as its condition, and the algorithmic cocoon is dismantling that condition; “discontent” is precisely the responsibility of the intellectual. Moving to Singapore has not made me change my tune: freedom is the root, plurality the branches. This year, writing on current events, I have put that bottom line to work again and again: DEI must start from equality for all; criticizing Meta does not mean letting the government become the product manager; machines can ban accounts, and regulators must also explain. This thread is collected in the Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom selection.
Connected to this is education. I taught at Tsinghua for years, and my stance boils down to two rules: zero tolerance for plagiarism, unlimited tolerance for free minds — my old recruitment notice said it plainly: I was looking for people who love freedom and can bear its weight. Writing this year on Wang Hong, math olympiads and the freedom to run schools, I made the same point: education abroad is not necessarily looser, but it is freer. The lectures and reflections are in the Teaching & Courses topic.
Life: the Soil of Thought
All of the above grows out of a concrete life. I was born in Shanghai, spent ten years at Peking University, taught eight years at Tsinghua, and in 2025 moved with my family to Singapore to become an independent scholar. The people and events along the way — my grandfather, the birth of my daughter Tianyu, walks along Singapore’s streets — are all in the Life & Notes topic and the Singapore & Everyday Life selection. I never show off my child in public, but I have started a column, The Philosophy of Raising Children, that uses the experience of raising her to talk about general questions; the first piece is on how to reason with children. As for taste: I still consider One Piece an introductory text of old-school philosophy (“I am the man who will become the Pirate King” is not a joke but a scholarly manifesto — without the resolve to be a pirate, what philosopher can you be?), I listen to Bach and to anime theme songs, I play video games, and I call myself “a spiritual aristocrat full of vulgar tastes.” Scholarship and life must not be severed: scholarship needs ease, and life needs depth.
How to Wander Around Suixuan
Finally, the layout of the house. Topics are the eight main rooms, sorted by field; Selected holds ten long-running series that cut across the topics, each with a suggested reading order, and a list of representative works grouped by theme at the bottom of the page; Columns are eleven serials and regular features, in issue order; the Archive divides twenty-one years into six stages of growth, best for watching one person change along a timeline; the tag atlas at the foot of the Topics page can be dragged and zoomed — three hundred-odd tags clustered into galaxies by affinity, best for wandering and chance encounters; the Books section holds the full text of ten books. There is a fortune-stick cup on the home page and at the end of this page: give it a shake and let chance pick a post for you. And if any passage strikes you as dubious or worth talking back to, select the text and annotate it right there — leaving a trace is the kindest gift a reader can give a writer. To get an email when something new is published, subscribe in the footer.
Twenty-one years on, Suixuan is still growing. You start here; where you end is up to fate.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.