Recently, the Oriental Publishing Center of China Publishing Group published a new book "Twenty Nights of Philosophy". Xu Yingjin, a professor of philosophy at Fudan University, started from the movie and used simple and humorous language to explain 20 philosophical questions to help us understand the complex and changeable life from a rational perspective.
Existentialism, cynicism, Epicureanism, ontology, body schemas, the principle of intranslatability, ......Have you made up your mind to study philosophy countless times, only to be defeated by the philosophical concepts that twist your mouth? If you're also drawn to lofty philosophies and struggle to understand concepts, you may need this book. In "The Shawshank Redemption", can Andy predict that life after escaping from prison will be better than in prison? In "Truman's World", why are the lies of the TV company destined to be exposed? In "The New Batman", Batman can glide with the help of a suit, why do he hesitate to stand on the top of a tall building? In "Let the Bullets Fly", who should prove how many bowls of noodles the sixth master ate? ......If you can't understand it in philosophy, you can understand it when you talk about it. This book illustrates 20 philosophical propositions through the plots of more than 40 movies, allowing you to watch movies and easily get started with Western philosophy.
About the Author. Xu Yingjin is a professor at the School of Philosophy of Fudan University, specializing in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, artificial intelligence philosophy, Japanese philosophy, and Chinese and Western comparative philosophy. He is the author of "Fifteen Lectures on the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence", "Useful Philosophy: 99 Thinking Methods to Solve Daily Problems", and the long "Jian - Sun Jian Kuanghan of the Prequel of the Three Kingdoms".
Recommended reading. Xu Yingjin is a genius in the field of philosophy, not only deeply engaged in the field of orthodox research, but also expanded the boundaries of writing to history, ** and art. This book interprets the philosophical issues in film works, from the shallow to the deep, and it is full of fun. This is a specimen of the practice of "loving wisdom" in everyday life.
Liu Qing is a professor at East China Normal University.
One of the most difficult aspects of studying philosophy is to understand its abstract nature. This little book for the popularization of philosophy has found a good way to visualize abstract philosophical theories through the plot of a movie that readers are familiar with, and is a great work for beginners to learn philosophy.
Fan Dengfan, founder and chief content officer of Fanshu App.
Content sample. Preamble.
What you have opened now is a small book that introduces basic philosophical ideas through the interpretation of films.
As for what a movie is, I'm afraid I don't need to make a special explanation. However, when it comes to philosophy, many people ask questions like: What is philosophy? Physics, chemistry, and economics all have their own research objects, but what is the research object of philosophy? Why do philosophers always give the public the impression that they "don't eat the fireworks of the world"? What good is it to learn a little philosophy?
Well, let's answer the first question first: what is philosophy?
The word "philosophy" in English and the Greek word "love wisdom" was translated by the Japanese scholar Nishishu (also known as Nishishusuke, 1829-1897) as the Chinese character phrase "philosophy". But what is "loving wisdom"?
My own definition of philosophy is a bit different: the essence of philosophical activity is to think in the ocean of knowledge, so as to facilitate the flow of information between the various knowledge modules of human beings. Philosophy, therefore, is essentially a "commercial activity" of human knowledge, which does not directly produce new knowledge, just as commercial activity does not directly produce products. However, philosophical activity stimulates human production of knowledge at the conceptual level, just as commercial activity gives vitality to human productive activity.
Why?
Let's start with business. We know that after Zhang Qian of the Western Han Dynasty sent an envoy to the Western Regions, the busy merchants on the Silk Road brought Chinese silk to the West, and also brought Western glassware (called "glazed ware" in the Han Dynasty) and Huohuan cloth (a kind of fireproof asbestos cloth) to China at that time. Are the merchants themselves engaged in production? Of course they don't, they only engage in trading and circulation. However, it is precisely because of their existence that Chinese farmers engaged in silkworm farming will know that there is a demand for silk in distant foreign markets, and it is on the basis of this understanding that they dare to expand their production scale in order to obtain more profits. In other words, without businessmen, there would be no globalization in its most primitive sense, let alone a unified world history based on it. So, what kind of talents does a businessman need to engage in these business activities? In addition to being willing to endure hardships and take risks, they also need to have an understanding of the landscape of various industries. For example, in the face of questions from Western buyers about the use and quality of porcelain, they can neither say too much (otherwise it will threaten the technological monopoly of the origin), nor too little (otherwise they will not be able to gain the trust of Western customers). So, in a sense, businessmen are in the delicate position of "information viewers" compared to buyers and producers: although they certainly don't know as much about the details of a process as a Jingdezhen porcelain master at the micro level, they look at the big picture, and only they know how to maximize the benefits of the selection, transportation, and buying and selling of goods with the information they have.
Back to philosophy. What is the analogy between philosophy and business activity? Imagine that business stops all over the world, which leads to a blockage of the channel between producers and consumers, producers lose their motivation to produce, and consumers lose their channels of purchase. In this way, the economic machinery of the whole world will slowly come to a halt, and every civilization will have to return to a natural state of self-sufficiency, so that no one will understand the overall situation of the world economy, and everyone will have to sit and watch the sky. A world without philosophy, just as there is no business: everyone can only become a "knowledge craftsman" in their own familiar field of knowledge, and no one can know what the relationship between these complex knowledge modules is, and therefore, no one can think about the global problems that cut through the various fields of knowledge. There are even some "experts" who feel that the perspective of this discipline is enough to overlook the "perspective of God" of all beings. For example, some economists believe that all social problems of human beings are essentially economic problems, some Freudian psychologists always believe that all individual psychological problems are related to childhood trauma, and some physicists believe that all physical or psychological problems are physical problems in nature. This way of looking at the world based on the perspective of the discipline and the industry often brings about a "chain of discrimination effect": your perspective is not as good as mine, so the world picture you see from your perspective is lower than my world picture in status. But it is very obvious that this kind of chain of discrimination thinking can only lead to the self-isolation of knowledge in the end.
One of the typical symptoms of this kind of intellectual autism is "ignorance". The "illiterate number" here does not mean that the index performance is not good, but refers to the lack of a sense of proportion and pattern. Many people who score well in mathematics may not have a sense of proportion and pattern for the essence of things. For example, even a top science student will make this mistake of lacking a sense of pattern: he can shop around when buying king crab, but immediately make the final decision when buying a house - he doesn't realize that no matter how expensive the crab is, it is only a drop in the bucket of real estate. It should be noted here that the word "rationality" in English originally means "ratio", so the lack of a sense of proportion means that the person concerned lacks rationality.
In contrast, businessmen are the more rational type of people in the crowd. They will carefully calculate the input-output ratio of everything they do, and they will not spend too much time on the budget when buying a king crab – of course, buying 100,000 king crabs for the sake of a seafood business is another matter entirely. Thus, from a philosophical point of view, it is no coincidence that merchants are closer to the realm of philosophy than non-merchants – it is no accident that Western philosophy originated in Miletus, which featured commercial activity (ruins in present-day Aydin Province, Turkey).
But philosophers are always a little different from businessmen, right?
Of course, it is different, otherwise the business school can directly become a philosophy school. The basic motivation of business activity is the pursuit of profit, while the fundamental motivation for philosophers to think comes from curiosity. Why, then, do philosophers not regard profit-seeking as their fundamental purpose in life? The simple reason is that philosophers are more calculating than businessmen. Philosophers will ask businessmen: Why do you make so much money? In the end, people still have to go into the loess; I have earned a few taels of silver in my life, how boring life is; If you want to live a better life in your limited life, shouldn't you swim in the ocean of human knowledge to enrich your horizons? Therefore, when the merchant is counting money, the philosopher is calculating the more wonderful life that he has lost because he has been counting money all day long.
But why don't philosophers turn themselves into naturalists? Wouldn't a naturalist be able to swim in the ocean of knowledge?
It's easy to see why: naturalists can only swallow a lot of fragments of knowledge, they can't find the relationships between the modules of knowledge, and therefore, they don't see the big picture. In order to understand the mysteries of knowledge and life, we must achieve "outline", and such an outline can only be obtained through philosophical reflection.
Are there any concrete examples of how philosophical reflection can help us discover the general principles behind knowledge and life?
Yes! For example, in Kant's time, the development of the natural sciences had made astonishing progress, and Kant also found that, in general, people from any cultural background could learn and understand the results of these scientific developments, so he asked the question: what is the mental basis that makes the construction of the natural sciences possible, and why is it relatively easy for people from different cultural backgrounds to agree when discussing science? Such inquiries led him to discover the general principle of the human cognitive architecture—the category principle. For example, after human beings slowly emerged from the Middle Ages and entered a contract society, they began to presuppose the freedom of individual behavior in order to sign commercial contracts and conduct various transactions under the constraints of contracts. So, what should be the basic social framework for allowing contracts to be established? This led philosophers like Rousseau to come up with the outline principle that makes modern society work—the theory of the social contract. In short, philosophy is about the legitimacy and legitimacy of the basic framework of the various daily activities we engage in.
But why do the philosophical propositions we are familiar with sound so ethereal? Socrates' "My smartest thing lies in self-knowledge and ignorance", Descartes' "I think, therefore I am", Berkeley's "to exist is to be perceived", Hegel's "the unfolding of history is the unfolding of logic", and Sartre's "the other is hell" all sound very mysterious, and even have a sense of "distance" and "abstraction".
How can we overcome the so-called "sense of distance" and "abstraction" brought about by philosophical propositions? To do this, we first need to understand how these "distances" and "abstractions" are created. In fact, the most fundamental reason for such feelings about philosophical propositions is that you did not live in the time of the great philosophers, and therefore you don't know why they started thinking about them. For example, Hegel's admiration for dialectical logic is closely related to the rational culture of Western society, and without this life experience, we can only grasp the surface of Hegel's texts. For another example, the social roots of Sartre's existentialist thought are a certain collective experience of Western young people about the current situation of life after the collapse of traditional European rational values after World War I.
A new question arises: since we do not live in the time in which the great philosophers lived, what does their philosophy have to do with us? Do we still need to learn from their minds? My answer is yes, this is because the different forms of life of human civilization are common to each other, for example, modern China has entered the era of market economy, and the basic philosophical questions related to the market contract (e.g., what is abstract personality) are also relevant to China. Nowadays, young people in China often feel alienated, so the existential ideas of the French philosopher Sartre can also resonate with contemporary Chinese youth. The advantage of studying philosophy is that you can be highly systematic and inferential when thinking about these questions – to put it simply, philosophy allows you to more systematically defend or refute certain views of your life, so that you can understand more deeply why you chose the path of life, or why some of your choices are wrong.
The systematic and inferential nature of philosophical discourse also objectively explains why philosophical texts are so abstract. The reason is simple: a large list of perceptual examples can undermine the systematization and reasoning of philosophical texts, and even their conciseness. Someone asked Kant: Can you use the vernacular and a little more popular examples to explain the problems in the Critique of Pure Reason? Kant's answer was this: it is not impossible, but in this way, the thickness of the book will be tripled, and the publisher will not be happy. From this point of view, philosophy books often provide milk powder, and in order to brew the milk of thought, the reader has to do it himself.
How to brew the milk of thought? That's what this book needs to address.
Hot water is needed to brew milk powder, and some kind of hot water-like solvent is required to interpret philosophy. The solvent I think of is the movie. There are a number of interesting films that provide visual explanations for abstract philosophical propositions. For example, if I were to explain Descartes' skepticism, some of my friends might find it boring, but if I were to introduce you to the virtual sensory experience making mechanism in The Matrix, many of you will find it very interesting, and the idea for this movie originally came from Descartes's "First Philosophical Meditations".
It is for these reasons that I decided to write a small book to popularize philosophy through cinematic interpretation. The focus of our discussion is not on whether a film is made well or not, but on the philosophical issues involved. For example, in terms of artistic quality, I don't think the American movie "Starship" is an excellent film, but the film's reflection on the social structure of extraterrestrial creatures can indeed help us reflect on the possibility of deforming the structure of human society, and this thinking has a distinct philosophical dimension. Coincidentally, although the American comedy film "The End" has a mediocre reputation and box office, its plot is enough to provide an annotation to the abstraction of the market personality expounded by Hegel's philosophy of law.
Next, I would like to talk about the logic of the development of the content of this book. The book contains a total of 20 questions, divided into 4 parts, each of which revolves around a keyword. The key word in the first part is "argument", the key word in the second part is "future", the key word in the third part is "society", and the key word in the fourth part is "life".
Why is it necessary to arrange the contents of the book in such order? This is because this sequence coincides with our individual human upbringing.
Let's start with the key word "argument" in the first part of the book. Why start with "argumentation"? Think back to your childhood. At that time, we may not be ignorant of the complex society, let alone have the ability to reflect on life, but we may already be able to do simple geometry problems. It can be seen that the ability of rational argumentation is one of the first logical abilities that we acquire in our growth. From the perspective of the relationship between this stage and the subsequent stages of life, the ability to argue acquired at this stage lays a solid foundation for us to understand various complex natural and social science knowledge in the future. In order to gain the ability to reflect on life's problems, we must first learn how to make arguments and how to build the most basic framework of the ideological system - this is like the process of learning martial arts: we must first learn to tie the horse and set the plate, and then we can learn the eighteen blades.
The key word in the second part is "future". Why the "future"? Obviously, it is a bit boring to talk about the ability to argue in an empty way, and sometimes, we do need a richer social context to exercise our thinking skills. Future-oriented science fiction is in line with the psychological characteristics of teenagers with limited life experience. Moreover, the literary and artistic works of science fiction themselves undertake the task of popularizing science, and the appreciation of such works can have a natural connection with the "argumentation" training we received in the previous stage. At the same time, science fiction-themed literary and artistic works often think about the new structures that may arise in human society in the future under the stimulation of technology, so being familiar with such works can also prepare us to think about more complex life issues.
Then we can move on to the next stage of critical thinking training. At this stage, we are faced with the key word "society" in the third part. Interestingly, in the real functioning of human society, the argumentation skills we have learned before seem to be useless: originally, according to the spirit of rational argumentation, black is black, white is white, right is right, and wrong is wrong, but after a certain age, we will find that there is a gray area in society that is neither black nor white, and from this we understand that simple rules do not work here - we have to learn to read words, learn to understand the sound of the strings, and slowly understand "irony" with "black humor". At this stage, we will also become more mature and sophisticated.
When we passed middle age, we began to faintly see the end of our lives. At this point, we begin to think seriously about the meaning of our whole life and the following question: Will my life be in vain? This is the key word in our last part: "life".
It should be noted that although the importance of rational argument seems to have begun to decline from the "social" part, reason has not really gone away, because philosophy itself is the cause of reason. Therefore, even when discussing the most subtle issues in life (such as those that are ambiguous in the "gray area"), we should pay attention to the hardcore logic in them. Explaining ambiguous issues clearly, and thus understanding the ambiguity and temperament, is what philosophy can bring us.
I love philosophy because I feel that it satisfies my need to think about human life from all angles, and there is no other discipline in the world that gives researchers as much freedom as philosophy. Of course, I also love to watch movies and interpret them philosophically. I hope this little book can help everyone enjoy the fun of thinking through the combination of philosophical speculation and film art.
Xu Yingjin. March 15, 2023.