On this issue, I would like to make three points.
One of the most urgent tasks facing China and the Chinese today is "input". By "devotion", I mean devoting oneself to the ever-changing trend of the times in the international community from a state of utopian rhetoric of being static and idle, and to enter the center of the international community to do something. This kind of openness is something that the Chinese have never had. Our nation has always tended to be conservative, even if it is like the "prosperous Han and Tang dynasties", it is only that it does not reject foreign things, or selectively absorbs them, but it has never "invested", never adopted an active attitude of participation in the outside world, and has never taken foreign culture itself seriously. The reason why Chinese are interested in dealing with foreigners is not to gain any benefits and gain their own development in their interactions with the outside world, but only to show their strength and self-sufficiency. This kind of display is actually a loss, just like the countryman treats guests and gives gifts to talk about pomp, it is just a kind of "face" good-looking. Some people think that China used to be open, and it has only been closed for nearly two hundred years. This is a very superficial view. China's closedness is not the result of several defeats, it is one of the fundamental characteristics of our national culture, and in this regard, the most typical representative is the Great Wall.
The actual Great Wall has long been broken, but the psychological Great Wall has never been broken. In addition to being inseparable from the narrow understanding of patriotism, it is also integrated with the traditional Chinese theory of origin, the idea of loyalty to the monarch and the ethics of Gangchang, and has become a symbol of the collective unconscious of the Chinese nation. Every Chinese uses the Great Wall to represent the greatness of national traditions, and "breaking the Great Wall" is regarded as a national shame, and "destroying my Great Wall" is **. Can we today reflect on ideas that we have never doubted from an objective perspective?
The Great Wall used to be the pride of the nation, but in a certain era, it can become the shackle of the nation. Today, with the high development of the aerospace industry, it can only become a souvenir and decoration, but the psychological Great Wall shackles the hands and feet of our nation and makes us cringe in the face of the prospect of international investment.
Needless to say, modernization cannot be talked about without investment. And true dedication is all about dedication. At present, many people are worried that if we devote ourselves to the trend of the times in the international community, will we lose our national characteristics? I offer the following rebuttal:
1.National identity is not a permanent thing. Our devotion to the trend of the times is precisely to forge our new national characteristics, which are vigorous, progressive, and upward, rather than sluggish and stagnant. If an era cannot add something new to the characteristics of a nation, this era is a symbol of decline and decline for the nation.
2.National characteristics are not something that can be maintained if you want to maintain them, and you can give up if you want to. How many Chinese Americans, such as physicists Yang Zhenning and Lee Tsung-dao, are no different from Westerners in life, and they still speak in Chinese style; Many cities have engaged in "antique streets", but they have not made people "simple and simple". Sentimentality and wishful thinking are not okay.
3.A person who says that he will lose his national characteristics if he joins the international community is too unconfident in this national characteristic, or in other words, the national characteristics in his eyes happen to be a weak, weak, and hopeless thing. It is better to let this kind of national characteristic, which cannot stand the test of the times, lose it as soon as possible. What should be preserved is the powerful thing in the national tradition that can be revitalized in the new era.
4.And this can only be done through engagement with the international community. On the one hand, what is powerful in a national tradition can only be tested in investment. Today, many people tend to talk about the "rational factors" of Confucianism and Taoism in the abstract, ignoring the fact that many of the "rational factors" have long been abandoned by reality and the times, which is really pedantic. On the other hand, investment provides a broad space for development and development opportunities for these powerful things, and it suppresses those things that have decayed in the tradition, so that they do not play a role in holding back the vital things in the tradition; It maximizes the true value of tradition. Even places of interest can only be truly valued from the perspective of modern people; Looking at it from an outdated point of view, the Qin bricks and Han tiles are only equipped with a pigsty.
From this, we can draw a conclusion: All those who sincerely want to carry forward the fine traditions of the nation can only achieve their goal by absorbing the essence of foreign culture as much as possible in the course of comprehensive opening up. On the contrary, those who hold on to the defects behind closed doors are destined to inherit the dross of the inherent culture and become a stumbling block to the times.
So, how to get involved? Technology introduction is investment, studying abroad is investment, and system reform is investment, but if there is no investment in the most fundamental investment, that is, cultural and psychological investment, all this will be distorted and deformed. More than 100 years of Chinese history illustrate this point. The so-called cultural and psychological investment is to understand and familiarize ourselves with the West. As a Chinese, we must always have two frames of reference in our minds, namely China and the West: not only to look at the West through the eyes of Chinese, but also to look at ourselves through the eyes of Westerners. This is called "cultural self-awareness".
In order to understand the West and form a Western frame of reference, it is necessary to understand not only the modern society of the West, but also the history and traditions of the West. Although Chinese do not understand their own history and cannot truly grasp their own culture, after all, he grew up in China, and his daily life and language are all permeated with history; However, the understanding of Western culture can only start from history and cultural history, and the most concentrated reflection of Western culture is the history of Western philosophy. In the past, we tended to one-sidedly examine the history of Western philosophy from the perspective of political history and the history of class struggle, and later some people proposed to examine it from the perspective of the history of human understanding and the history of category development. I have also advocated the history of philosophy as a history of the evolution of categories, but I now feel that it is necessary to add that the development of Western philosophy as a whole should also be examined from the perspective of cultural history. There must be a method of cultural philosophy, that is, to examine the general tendencies of the culture of an age, its place or stage of development in the hierarchy of human nature in general, its manifestations in the fields of religion, morality, law, art, and science, and its concentrated reflection in philosophy. That is, from the height of the philosophy of man, to study the evolution of human nature in history, in order to establish a "philosophy of philosophy history" and "philosophy of cultural history". It examines questions such as why did Western culture break down? What is the underlying basis for this? What is the inevitability of the alienation of Western human nature? Why has Chinese culture been consistent for thousands of years? Why is there no real "Renaissance" in China, only retro regression? From the perspective of category evolution, how to express these two different laws of motion and development models?
Obviously, whether it is the philosophy of cultural history or the philosophy of philosophy history, it is impossible to compare China and the West without it. So we have to talk about "comparisons". The comparison between China and the West has been a very hot topic in recent years. There are many articles comparing Chinese and Western philosophies, arts, and cultures, but there have been no large-scale monographs with merit so far. The main problem is that it is difficult. There are three difficulties: the overall grasp of Chinese culture; a holistic grasp of Western culture; A grasp of the nature, purpose, function and status of comparative methods. Contemporary China is not an era of scholars, and it seems unlikely that in the next decade or decades, there will be no scholar who has truly studied both China and the West, and is unconditionally recognized by both sides. But it is certain that this is a critical era to adjust the pace of Chinese culture and scholarship and determine the general direction for the next few hundred years. The central task before us is not to draw a comprehensive and in-depth conclusion about Chinese and Western cultures in the comparison, but to determine a method of comparison. So, what is the method of comparison, or what kind of method should be adopted to compare Chinese and Western cultures?
The method of comparison itself was originally an empirical method, a kind of incomplete inductive method, such as analogical reasoning, which contains the method of comparison. Aristotle gave an example: Was it a bad thing for Athens to fight against Thebes? It is good to start by mentioning the fact that the Thebans and the Fontines were both defeated in battle, which was a bad thing; From this it follows: all wars with neighboring countries are bad; Since the war between Athenians and Thebans was also a war of neighbors, it must have been bad as well. Aristotle did not see this method as strictly logical reasoning, but called it "inductive analogy of speech", which was only intended to convince people that there was no causal necessity other than "assumptions". In China, analogical reasoning has always been the main method of traditional Chinese scholarship, and the five elements of yin and yang, the induction of heaven and man, and the "cultivation of Qi and Zhiping", all kinds of classical theories are based on intuitive analogy. This primitive form of comparative law, as a means of purposefully collecting information, distinguishing types, and pointing out the direction for further research, has a certain scope of application, but it needs to be improved after all. At present, the academic market is full of a large number of useless comparisons, and the use of two characters or theories that have nothing to do with each other and are only superficially similar to each other is cut off from history and compared with each other, either for the sake of curiosity or to satisfy a certain national arrogance, which has no theoretical significance and has ruined the reputation of comparative studies.
The combination of history and theory did a better job of Hegel. Although there are many far-fetched things in his philosophy of history, lectures on the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and spiritual phenomenology, the general tendency is correct, that is, logic is infiltrated into the description of history, and in the evolution of logic, a great sense of history is reflected. The fact that the things of logic are consistent with the things of history has been fully affirmed by Marx and Engels. This is not a subjective method invented by Hegel out of thin air, but reflects the objective fact that there are inherent laws of necessity and universal commonality hidden under the accidental phenomena of history. I believe that it is this fact that forms the basis on which everything is comparable. Regardless of the comparison, to compare two different things is to inadvertently admit this fact. Hegel was the first to say this (in an idealistic way).
From this point of view, the comparison of Chinese and Western cultures makes the problem obvious. The comparability of Chinese and Western cultures is based on the consistency of history and logic, that is, it is necessary to look at the historical development of Chinese and Western cultures from the overall perspective of two different forms of the same human nature development, and explore the different "levels" in the structure of human nature from the comparison of two different "laws". Therefore, it is necessary to have a view of human nature that transcends the limitations of Chinese and Western cultures, that is, a philosophical view of human beings. So, how to "go beyond"?
In recent years, there has been a meaningful debate among young and middle-aged scholars in the philosophical community. Some people believe that modern Western philosophy is far ahead of us, and that some of the problems that we rack our brains and meditate on have already been solved in the West, while we have not even thought about the problems that Westerners are considering now. Therefore, the top priority of the current philosophical community is to introduce a large number of foreign academics in translation, and they should honestly learn from the West, instead of having to come up with an ingenious theoretical system on their own, so as not to duplicate work and waste energy. Another group believes that translation, introduction, and learning are all necessary, but should be based on their own reflection; Philosophy is not learned, in essence, but the experience of life and the sublimation of personality; Digesting foreign ideas is as important as introducing foreign ideas, and economically backward China is not necessarily so backward in philosophy, and the life experience of Chinese in recent decades is unmatched by any nation, and such a huge epochal difference (equivalent to jumping from the Middle Ages into the information society) may result in a high level of philosophy.
In my opinion, the latter view can roughly include the former's view. When we introduce and learn foreign things, the ultimate goal is to transcend, not only to surpass the West, but also to surpass China, which is the essence of true "philosophy" and the fundamental difference between a philosopher and a "philosopher's craftsman". Philosophy is somewhat similar to art, where true art is always universal, transcendental, and purely individual. We have long debated whether Western-centrism or ethnicity-oriented theory should be advocated in philosophy, and we should advocate "individuality-based theory" and "let a hundred flowers bloom". Of course, philosophy is not something that can be transcended if you want to transcend. Individuality is not stubborn, but the result of transcending oneself. In order to break through the limitations of the self and improve the realm of the self, we must open the self to all possibilities, and we must examine, examine, study, and absorb all things that are recognized as spiritual wealth by mankind without prejudice, and construct a new ideological system according to our own life experience.
There are three major contemporary philosophical currents, one is Marxism, the other is phenomenology, and the other is the philosophy of science. To have a truly in-depth understanding of it, it is impossible to do without knowledge of the history of Western philosophy and culture. Those who aspire to transcend must start from the most basic things.
To invest, we must compare, to compare, we must surpass, and to surpass, we must invest.
Input is the premise of comparison, comparison is the premise of transcendence, and transcendence is the premise of better investment.
Input is comparison, comparison is transcendence, and transcendence is real investment. ▇
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