Shangjie: What is enlightenment?

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Enlightenment, from the French word lumiéres, means light. Light is not there at the beginning, if a person is wooden, his eyes are black, his brain is empty, he believes everything others say, he carries out all instructions, he does not dare to think, and over time, he will not think, this is a person who is ignorant.

The so-called enlightenment is to teach people to learn to think independently, from black to bright, with light, not only to thank the teacher of thought, but also to criticize their own teacher, for today's thinkers, crossing the river can tear down the bridge; and those who have enlightened others who are about to become obsolete must also have such a mind, not afraid of teaching their disciples, starving themselves - otherwise, the history of ideas cannot move forward. We should not be afraid to criticize our own people, nor should we be afraid to criticize our own cultural traditions. The more critical it is, the brighter the future, so much so that such enlightenment becomes a new tradition.

The history of Western philosophy is a history of constant criticism of traditional Western thought, and when it criticizes, it does not directly call out "rebellion is justified", but in a deliberative tone, saying that I already understand the meaning of what you said, but the meaning of what you said can still be said like me. And as I speak, I say something new that I have come up with on my own, so that the tradition is dissolved in a subtle way. This is cooler, because it is in line with the truth of the heart, does not use the spirit to contrast with some kind of "noble" thought on the outside, and is not as difficult as some people think in advance.

The brainless, only a little willful, is the inevitable result of a man who likes to think, and it does not necessarily come from a thinker, but may come from a novelist. The modern French writer Gide wrote a novel, The Counterfeiter, in which the protagonist Edward wanted to write a novel called The Counterfeiter. In order to write this novel, he wrote creative notes every day. The result? The novel was not written, but the notes on how to write this novel were well written and could even be published as a novel.

Edward wrote the novel "Counterfeiter" into a novel about how to write this novel,—— which is very much in line with people's real thinking process. That is, before man's real thinking—I mean, before man has been so ruined by our education that he almost becomes a robot who is instilled all day long—the real thinking process of man never goes in a straight line. Now education is composed of a whole set of "you should", you can not ask "why should", you have to determine the "why" question, someone has already assigned you the right direction in advance, your obligation is to go in this direction, you have no right to ask why this direction? Can't you go in another direction? This is not the attitude of a good robot. But to make a robot that knows only how to obey instructions is contrary to the spirit of enlightenment.

In the 1980s, when students answered political examination papers, they would ask the question: "What is 'five lectures, four beauty, three loves'?" I believe that the man who came up with this question at that time, he himself does not know the answer now, because it is not knowledge, it may be a secretary of a certain big leader, one day thinking about it, and then very solemnly by a certain big leader, reading it on a formal occasion, it has become a must," Duchamp was very tired, so he made a "heterotopies" (hétérotopies, also translated as "heterotopia"), in this very serious place in the museum, An object that was originally a serious object (a urinal) was exhibited but because the occasion was not right, it became an unorthodox thing exhibited in a serious place. Unexpectedly, this act of violence has become a pioneering act in the history of art, it has created a precedent for ready-made art, but it is first and foremost performance art. The reason why it can become a work of art is not because Duchamp has made any artistic modifications to the urinal, he just moved his eyes. So the urinal is no longer ready-made, but how it becomes a work of art, which is a bit like Edward's novel "Counterfeiter" into a novel about how to write this novel, hehe, and it is equivalent to writing art as art criticism.

A "What is Enlightenment" and B "What is 'Five Talks, Four Beauty, Three Loves'?" The sentence form seems to be the same, but just as knowing only the components of a proposition or expression (subject + predicate + object) does not mean that sentences are constructed. Being able to make sentences or write does not mean that you will only use flowery words, but you must be able to think. The hallmark of thinking in writing is that the meaning of the sentence is open. The above A is such a "living sentence", what is enlightenment, its meaning is unclear, it needs to be thought about and rethought, and B is a dead sentence, because its meaning has been completed in yawning, it blocks any kind of breakthrough and development space.

Foucault, in What is Enlightenment, distinguishes between the above A and B. B belongs to the "subject that has been put forward with some insight", for which we can no longer say anything new, while A belongs to the "unexplained", which forces the author to think and create independently. For example, Kant's What is Enlightenment and Duchamp's first ready-made art in art history is actually a urinal. But at this moment, we no longer want to urinate on it, we have completely lost this desire, it ignites our desire for another feeling, a desire in another direction, this is enlightenment, both Kant's and Foucault's enlightenment, but Duchamp did not give birth to the inspiration for such a creation after reading these two famous "What is Enlightenment" - this question belongs to "there is no way to explain", and I do not want to explain.

Foucault said that the problem of "no way to explain yet" is more attractive. What he said made sense, and Duchamp's urinal could reveal it, but it didn't have to be proven. Revealing is already proof that it is like you fall in love with a person, in fact, you fall in love immediately, but in order to solve the problem that will seem improper, you slowly make up reasons, so Duchamp never cares about the overwhelming comments from others after the success of his work of art, because these comments are imitations and forgeries, and the act of taking the urinal to the museum for exhibition itself is like love at first sight, but it is not romantic enough, it also means not poetic, not philosophical enough. Here, the poetic and philosophical flavor is strong, because it does not stop at the expression itself, and the feeling itself is not so much a virtue as it is a mental trauma caused by a raid.

Thus Baudelaire, with the acumen of a modern poet, points out that loveat first sight is actually love at last sight, that "first sight" is "last", that life is death, and that there is no kung fu lingering here, because we are discussing the great problem of enlightenment—here, the turning point from darkness to light, is that when we realize that "first sight" is "final", we understand that artistic and philosophical creativity comes from such moments. At this moment, our gaze of pure thought and emotional concern has undergone a reversal, which is not what it was originally, but something else.

It is in this light that Foucault re-understands what Kant calls "enlightenment": enlightenment is not a ready-made thing that exists now, and it is not as if there is some kind of standard answer waiting for us to recite. Enlightenment means to discover differences, to discover the possibility of thinking otherwise, and this possibility is open, to have the courage to think. This is the proverb of enlightenment. The so-called discovery of differences is that there have been some life and thought events that have not been experienced before. Habitual life has been interrupted, and these phenomena as events cannot be explained by the previous explanations, for they do not belong to the previous interpretations, they mean something else, and for these fresh things we do not yet know, it is difficult to grasp.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Do not be superstitious about existing knowledge, Kant said in What is Enlightenment, if a person's mind only trusts authority (experts, others, people who are qualified to speak on behalf of a certain field), it is equivalent to handing over his own understanding, such a person is a person who is mentally immature. For example, an authoritative book or article replaces our understanding, and we believe what we read (for the sake of sharpness, we may as well treat it as a human being.) For example, the book is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Foucault's Words and Things, or their eponymous essay "What is Enlightenment"). Or, a pastor takes our place of conscience... In short, in Foucault's view, "Kant described the Enlightenment as a historical turning point at which man began to apply his reason without surrendering to any authority." (See Foucault's What is Enlightenment.)

At first glance we tend to fully agree with Kant above, but the suspicious thing is that Kant only says a certain general situation here, and he tacitly acknowledges that his philosophy is on the path of enlightenment — we acknowledge this — but as Derrida said, the light of enlightenment is never one thing, and there are lights from different directions. Let's look at Foucault's question of Kant's Enlightenment in What is Enlightenment: Kant believed that reason should be used properly and rationally, and he used his "Three Critiques" to solve what we can know and what we must do. What should I hope for? What is the last person to answer? Thus, Kant himself, now became the authority. A person who challenges the authority of thought turns out to be an authority himself, a "Saint-Condé." As I understand it, the crux of foucault's criticism of the Kantian Enlightenment is that "I think that if we look at this article in this way, we will recognize from it a point of departure: its general appearance can be called the attitude of modernity." (Ibid.).

Foucault agrees that the so-called pre-modern, modern, and post-modern are questions of attitudes or patterns, not of time. Then we can divide the history of ideas by the mode of understanding. Kant's mode of understanding belongs to the 18th century, that model of enlightenment, speaking as a human spokesman, believing in the certainty of scientific thinking, trying to discover the laws of development of human history, purposeful thinking, trying to establish a package of overall solutions to all the dilemmas of mankind. The 18th-century French thinker Condorcet's Compendium of the History of Human Progress and Darwin's theory of evolution played a catalytic role in it, both under the banner of "for the sake of mankind" or "liberation of mankind" (humanism, humanism). The problem is not that these slogans are not correct, but that they stubbornly believe that human liberation can only be achieved by following the "right" direction they have pointed out. This is the use of big words to make a grand narrative. How did it happen? Let's take a closer look:

If we don't use big words, then the so-called modern or contemporary is actually a meaning, just as "now" and "now" mean the same thing, both refer to the present moment - then two situations occur, one is that a pure plan, an idea, a plan, an ideal, a certain ambition is born in our brain, and then we write these thoughts. Thus there was the Critique of Pure Reason and the Communist Manifesto—the author's ideal at this moment was that, thanks to his book, "time has begun." But this beginning is equivalent to time frozen, because it establishes a certain mode of interpreting history, and all the miscellaneous living experiences are to be put into this pattern, so that we say that the history of ideas has no real time from now on, which is to solidify "love at first sight" into "last glimpse of love" in a reactionary sense, because the days that follow lack real new ideas, feelings are trapped in an invisible cage, just repeating the boring days of "chai rice oil and salt", which is equivalent to killing real life.

So, what does real life look like? In other words, at this moment, there is a wonderful and different scene in the whole world, which does not follow a so-called correct line of thought, but stages different contents of the same moment, or different epochs of the same era, or the scene of "ectopic transplantation" or "heterotopia" mentioned earlier by Foucault, which is like between Kant (born in 1724) and Marx (born in 1818), and Schopenhauer (born in 1788), but divided by the history of ideas. Nietzsche belongs to Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer belongs to the postmodern, while Marx belongs to Kant and Marx belongs to the traditional Enlightenment thinkers, which is to divide ideas according to ideological attitudes or patterns, and it is impossible to follow the true order of clock time.

If we remove the modern or contemporary big-lettering factor, what is happening now? If a pattern is going to happen here, it depends entirely on the temporary (to prove it, at the moment I give up typing, I raise my arm, and it depends on two things: first, I have a certain interest in this posture. Second, I have the physical strength to lift my arm), I make an arc in the air with my arm, then call for takeout and then continue typing. So, in just one minute, my hand went through three different poses that told the true story of my hand at this moment. The time and space that happen here are real, and they are occupied by my hand.

My contemporaneity, at this moment, is the way in which my hands relate to what I do, and in a moment it becomes in a different way, and between these different ways, there is a broken relationship, because Sartre once said that the human hand is dirty, and Deleuze argued in an interview that Sartre was right, because with the same hand, everything is touched, not just the noble things. In other words, we can't make a "5-year plan" for the hand in advance, and from then on, the hand can only touch things according to this plan, which seems to be a joke, but we have really staged such a joke in the world, not only half a century ago, but also engaged in the "planned economy" that cannot be carried out later, but also the "planning idea", which is still being staged. For example, if we create a profession and then designate a textbook across the country to instill it in the brains of 18-year-olds, this is equivalent to the way I said above to give hands to activities, make a 5-year plan, don't bother with your hands, and never give up.

Well, my hand can now be associated with anything, it's about the potential possibilities of the hand, and the hand is excited about it. For example, I can type with just one finger, or I can practice blind typing with my eyes closed. In short, in every different person's case, the story of one's own hand is fragmentary and broken.

In the above context (not referring to the "story of the hand"), Foucault's sharp pen turned to the surprise of all readers. Originally discussing Kant's model of modern enlightenment, Foucault wrote in a way of thought raids: "To outline this attitude of modernity, because it is widely believed that his conscious consciousness of modernity was one of the most acute consciousnesses of the 19th century." He was Baudelaire. Foucault here offends the history of philosophy first, because the history of philosophy does not leave a chapter for the poet Baudelaire. I then think of Deleuze, a thinker who was in the same group as Foucault, who said that the history of philosophy exercises a certain function of repression, which is equivalent to sodomy of ideas, that is, infertility (see the translation of Deleuze's interview", "The Negotiation of Philosophy and Power"). Here, Foucault, like Deleuze and Derrida, turned to the artist for inspiration for a new enlightenment.

In writing What is Enlightenment, Foucault only hurriedly took Kant's article of the same name, but devoted a larger space to the ideas in Baudelaire's poetry. He writes: "Modernity is often summed up as a conscious awareness of the discontinuities of time: a break with tradition, a vertigo for novel emotions, before moments of constant passing. When Baudelaire defines modernity as transitional, ephemeral, and accidental, it seems to be what he wants to express. But in his view, it is not to become modern is to recognize and accept this endless movement, but to adopt a certain attitude towards it. There is something eternal that is neither outside the present moment nor after the present, but in the present. It is in the recapture of this eternal thing that a cautious and unyielding attitude is embodied. Modernity differs from fashion, which is limited to the passage of time; modernity is an attitude that enables people to grasp the "heroic" side of the present. Modernity is not a sensitivity to the fleeting present, but the will to "heroize" the present. ”

The key words that sift out the above quotes are: discontinuity, rupture, novelty, vertigo, transience, chance, the present (= eternal now == happening = paradoxical), recapture. Finally, like Benjamin's praise for Baudelaire: seizing the moment when the aura is about to fade — then modernity has something to do with the break of time (becoming instantaneous). This moment is present as the presence of the present moment—space, the events that make up the plot, the connections between the events that cannot be connected, because, as mentioned above, it is that what happens simultaneously is not simultaneous, that the gaze is asymmetrical, that the identity is destroyed. For example, language does not have the ability to express what the eye sees. All of this reveals its limitations.

Foucault imitated Baudelaire's saying: "You have no right to despise the present". What is modern man? Modern people are people of big cities, people of strangers, people of crowds, wanderers of prosperous downtown areas, who wear tuxedos and black clothes not to catch the fashion, but to mourn the relentless mourning of the old times that have never returned. It seems to be saying that the good moments begin now, and that the beauty of the moments must be seized—these descriptive ideas are quoted by Baudelaire, Foucault, in an affirmative tone, almost unchanged. What is affirmed here is not so much a fleeting pleasure that arises from circumstances, but rather as the subtext of Foucault's "man dies" in Words and Things: man is undefinable, cannot judge man from a fixed nature, and before that, Sartre had a saying: "Man is not what he is, man is what he is not", which is a criticism of Descartes for equating man's existence with my mind. Foucault agreed with Lacan's sarcasm of Descartes: "I am in a place where I do not think", before the poet Rimbaud said that "I am someone else", and before that Kierkegaard explicitly opposed Descartes, because Descartes reversed the order of things, because in order to be able to think, man must first exist.

Well, what man is, obviously this is an open question, and any attempt to define man or to try to discover the essence of man belongs only to the traditional enlightenment, not to the enlightenment of modernity. Traditional enlightenment gives man a box and uses only this box to explain people. For example, "Man is an intellectual animal" (Aristotle) or "Man is the sum of all social relations" (Marx)

When Foucault says "man dies", his true intentions are not literal. Here Foucault and Derrida's ideas are the same. That is to say, we cannot start from concepts or judgments and ask the general question of "what is..." or "what", but ask "who" and where it comes from? What are its characteristics? Man is composed of three-dimensional elements, and man cannot be reduced to a flat declarative sentence. In Words and Things, Foucault presents scenes of human activity from at least three basic elements: life (desire, passion), labor (material, wealth), and language expression (reproduction of one's own situation). To integrate finiteness into these three elements, there is no need to directly say "man", man has already revealed it.

There is reason to believe that Foucault's inspiration for the "three-dimensional man" in the above", words and things, is related to his reading of Baudelaire (and of course not only that). In What is Enlightenment, Foucault again quotes Baudelaire's praise for the painter Gunstain-Guy in Among the Painters of Modern Life: "The natural" thing is "more than nature", and the "beautiful" thing is "more than beautiful", and the individual object is like "being endowed with a vibrant life like the soul of [their] creator". "This refers to painting, which reveals human desire (the life impulse of beauty), physical labor (canvas), and language (painting language)." Turn his body, actions, feelings, emotions, and even his existence itself into a work of art. In Baudelaire's view, as a modern man, he is not to discover himself, to discover his own secrets and hidden truths, but to strive to create himself. (Foucault's assessment of Baudelaire's modern man in What is Enlightenment.) In other words, a modern man, instead of excavating the essence of man, as traditional Enlightenment thinkers taught, transforms himself into a different kind of person, so that the former self no longer knows the present self. It's the equivalent of creating yourself into a work of art, like an art teacher answering a student's question— the student asks the teacher, "When will I be able to say I'm doing a good job?" The teacher replied: "When you are surprised by your painting, ask, 'Is this my painting?' 'time. ”

Foucault said that the Enlightenment could not be hijacked with traditional humanism, and that he was "unwilling to accept the planning of shaping new people that the worst political system had repeatedly repeated throughout the 20th century." This revives Kant's spirit of enlightenment: the word "enlightenment," which stands not with scholars but with philosophers, means criticism, a break with tradition.

But, in his final summary, Foucault does not seem to fully endorse the age of maturity of reason that Kant called for in What is Enlightenment. What is maturity? It acquiesces to a mature standard, a boundary stone on the road of ideas, and we had better not reach this boundary stone, otherwise we will ask the question of "what to do after maturity". Yes, in Ibsen's "Doll's House", Nala finally awakens and runs away from home, but this either-or, resolute attitude assumes that there is an ideal state, in fact, there is no such thing, there is no so-called "maturity" that does not contain childish elements. Therefore, for critical philosophy, it is necessary to continue to criticize, which includes the criticism of maturity itself. Because as Sartre satirizes the self-learner in Disgusting, although you have extraordinary perseverance, although you have achieved a grand reading plan and read all the books in the library from A to Z, you are not mature, because you are only happy for a short time, and you will ask yourself: "What about going down?" How do I fill my time next? The same problem exists for Nala, where should she go after she runs away from home? How to solve your own desire for life? The living world is made up of people who don't think differently from themselves, they are even younger than themselves, I don't want to be like them, but the future world belongs to them, and so on. I can't think of an answer, so I can't say that I'm mature, but to describe me as "childish" doesn't seem to be to the point...