Hello everyone!
As my translation (here) of Zhao Tingjiang’s “People need thought, not just entertainment or knowledge” goes to post, it is top of the ‘Weekly Ratings’ column that leads Aisixiang 爱思想, the website I’ve mentioned as a ‘highbrow aggregator’ more than once before.
Zhao’s incisive text deserves to be enjoyed in full, but here are his own crystallised takeaways:
From the two authentic philosophies of Greece and Pre-Qin, it can be seen that:
If any philosophical question is meaningful, it must be a major issue raised by life;
The major issues of life are first of all political and philosophical, issues of ethics and intellectual method;
any meaningful solution to these issues must be universally valid.
Zhao Tingjiang 赵汀阳
A research scholar in the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Zhao has written movingly about his primary influence, Li Zehou 李泽厚 (1930-2021). He is also deemed a promoter of the US philosopher Michael Sandel, himself a student of Charles Taylor. Sandel has had quite a following in the PRC; Wikipedia tells us he was named the ‘most influential foreign figure of the year’ there in 2011.
A decade of unremitting nationalism later, it’s unlikely that any foreign figure would be heralded as ‘influential’ quite as warmly. Yet China’s scholarly circles are adept, as we have noted, at ‘talking human with humans, talking zombie with zombies.’ Much that appears on Aisixiang is, I would contend, written in human, as is Zhao’s essay. Nor can Sandel’s signature emphasis on dialogue, not least in Socratic-Platonic mode, be missed in it.
Also of note in it is his reference to self-deception:
We may on the other hand notice another way that the academic world may misunderstand itself. It likes to deceive itself by saying that academia has good reason to go from book to book, caring only about concepts rather than reality. Such pure depravity, while less conspicuous, misleads thought too. Thought devoid of living meaning is also entertainment, despite being deemed superior to life.
‘Non-self-deception’, we noted several posts ago, appears in a cardinal Confucian text, the Daxue 大学, where it defines chengyi (诚意 ‘sincerity of the will’).
New frameworks of sincerity and rationality provide the topic of this Substack, so we will be getting back quite soon to self-deception as the negative corollary of the ‘Han stairway to Heaven’.