One
On November 2, 2021, Mr. Li Zehou, a famous contemporary philosopher, passed away in the United States.
Li Zehou is a native of Ningxiang, Hunan Province, and in the early 1980s, he became the spiritual idol of a generation of young scholars.
Li Zehou wrote many works in his lifetime, and many works had a wide and far-reaching impact. The best-selling and most influential is The Course of Beauty, which is regarded as an "external edition of the history of Chinese aesthetics" and was printed eight times within ten years of its official publication.
But Li Zehou's most important work is "Chinese Aesthetics".
Mr. Yi Zhongtian made a unique explanation in the article "Inventory of Li Zehou", why does Li Zehou himself attach so much importance to "Chinese Aesthetics"? Because Li Zehou wants to be a philosopher.
Li Zehou's grades in middle school are very good, especially in mathematics, physics and chemistry. At that time, when "learning mathematics, physics and chemistry, and not being afraid to go all over the world", he was admitted to the Philosophy Department of Peking University with his first choice. It shows that he has liked philosophy since he was a child, and his choice of philosophy is due to interest.
Mr. Feng Youlan said that there are usually two ways to engage in philosophy. One is "by the way", which is the practice of historians of philosophy. The other is "go on", which is the philosopher.
Yi Zhongtian analyzed that if Li Zehou wanted to "go his own way," he was not willing to "follow the rules" and was too willing to "go along with the flow." However, for a while and a half, they could not "continue to speak", so they had to "pick and say" and "talk around". The so-called "pick and say", that is, to pick those topics that can be "said by the way" relatively speaking, first say that they will rise, and finally go around to the field they want to say the most.
"Li Zehou chose aesthetics. The choice of aesthetics is the right one. Li Zehou originally had an artistic temperament, introverted, lonely, melancholy and susceptible, and he liked literature and art since he was a child, with both the sober thinking ability of a philosopher and the keen sensing ability of the artist, and it is most appropriate to engage in aesthetics. More importantly, compared with other branches of philosophy (philosophical principles, ethics, epistemology, etc.), aesthetics is the furthest from politics, the least affected by political interference and influence, and the largest free space, but it is also a branch of philosophy. Seven or eight circles, or can go back to philosophy. Therefore, it should be said that it is feasible to talk about aesthetics first, then to talk about philosophy, and to talk about philosophy through aesthetics."
Therefore, in a big way, Li Zehou has made useful contributions to promoting the development of contemporary Chinese philosophy, and from a small aspect, he has had a positive impact on the evolution of Chinese thought, aesthetics, and literary criticism.
However, for me, as a non-famous and non-senior researcher of modern and contemporary literature, Li Zehou is more than me, all embodied in the book "On the History of Modern Chinese Thought".
In his "Treatise on the History of Modern Chinese Thought," Li Zehou clearly put forward that the thirty years of modern China are "the double variations of enlightenment and salvation." Under such a "double variation," if we understand the Chinese modern revolutionary movement, the trend of Chinese modern literary thought, and the works of modern writers, providing a new vision and dimension, we will have a feeling of sudden enlightenment, and quickly bring you into that area, room, and door, and there will be many detours, which is the charm of thought.
Today, Mr. Li Zehou is a Slovak who has passed away, but works like "The Course of Beauty" will surely survive forever.
It is just confusing that as a young generation, Li Zehou has long been little known, and Li Zekai is "well known to passers-by". "The Course of Beauty" as an aesthetic work is difficult to become a bestseller again. But I think that as an aesthetic classic, after many years, at least it will be loved by the majority of liberal arts students.
Two
From the death of Li Zehou, I think back to my years of study. When there is no class, I go to the library to "read a lot of books". At that time, I was particularly interested in Chinese modern and contemporary literature, especially books on Chinese culture and thought, and I often loved it.
If you read more books, you will naturally be treated with tenderness. Sometimes, a paragraph of text, or a few words, can resonate or empathize, so that you can see the sun like a cloud, suddenly realize, get out of the predicament, get a new life, and thus change the trajectory of your life.
Ten years after graduation, the world of reading has changed completely. The web has changed so much, and the phone has changed everything. The speed of dissemination of online texts can almost ignore the limitation of time, and the audience range is no longer limited by space.
Literary works are squeezed into living space by short videos, and ideological treatises are beaten by chicken soup for the soul. Communication is too developed, information is too rich, time is easy to be divided, energy is naturally dispersed, short, flat, fast, vulgar, strange and other things are more likely to win attention and win attention.
There is a passage that says that at present, except for textbooks, few people read it repeatedly. In addition to the working documents, many people have studied it repeatedly. Best-selling authors have also been replaced by the network big V.
Li Zehou's "The Course of Beauty" has been selling well for ten years, but the print distribution is at best about 1 million copies, which is the peak of the printing era. Nowadays, a big V article can achieve "100,000+" in one hour of reading, and some explosive articles can break through "10 million+" within one or two days. If translated into book circulation, it would be a miracle in the history of publishing.
Three
In the era of print media, the distribution of publications is relatively easy to supervise. In the Internet age, everyone can speak up, although there is also supervision, but the scale is much looser than in the paper media era.
In the era of print media, it is what the publishing market offers you, and what you can read. In the Internet age, what you want to see, the market will appear.
Nowadays, with the rapid development of big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing technology, you like to watch the cooking art display, and the online platform will push the cooking art display to you. Where you are uncomfortable, as long as Baidu searches for relevant content, the associated content will be automatically pushed to your commonly used APP home page interface, so that you have to open. If you are interested in a certain point of view, similar articles will immediately appear before your eyes.
When a person has not yet made up his mind, go to the Internet for help, in the face of a powerful search engine, you will not hesitate to expose your truest thoughts. The system will immediately push all similar information to you according to your real thoughts and tendentious thoughts, constantly strengthening your inner tendentious thoughts, and finally, with the blessing of many similar views on the Internet, you will be more likely to strengthen your ideas and accelerate their actions.
When your physical examination report has an abnormal indicator, your first reaction is to immediately pick up the mobile phone to seek help from Du Niang, and the results of the search are mostly the copywriting that has been prepared by Putian Hospital. So, you have become their potential customers, online one-on-one consultation, expert online Q&A, telephone consultation ah are coming, free registration, skip-the-line, good medical environment, good efficacy, how many cases of similar diseases successfully cured, all are arranged for you, there is a picture and the truth, so that you unconsciously walked into the Putian Department Hospital.
When you are a rookie who has just entered the workplace, you will definitely hold the idea that "gold will shine wherever it is". When someone instills in you that being a person is far more important than being able to do things, you will scoff at them. But when the people around you are adhering to this attitude, you will seem out of place. If your boss also believes in this set, you will run into walls and bleed from your head. Under setbacks, and then seek spiritual comfort on the Internet, at this time, chicken soup texts such as "Ten Rules for Handling Affairs in Organs", "Lessons To Remember", "How to Win the Approval of Leaders" and so on will easily impress you, and over time, you will inevitably compromise with the world and bend to reality.
When you are tired of life and tired of work, you confide in friends around you and talk to the Internet, and the results obtained may be very different. Friends may work with you to dig out their hearts and lungs, find the root cause of the problem, help you stop the spread of this bad emotion in time, and let you rekindle the light of longing for the beauty of life. But if you are facing an artificial intelligence machine without emotion, it will rely on the keywords you provide, and then through sophisticated cloud computing processing, the information transmitted to you may develop along your mind, for example, you say you want to eat button meat, the system will provide you with the method of button meat, which restaurant button meat is good, but it will never tell you that the button meat is too greasy to eat often.
Four
Our cognition of a thing, from the perspective of acceptance, if you are a participant, stakeholders, in the face of complex information, the earliest accepted information is easy to preconceived, the formation of "stereotypes", follow-up to change the need to spend a lot of money. At the same time, you are most likely to accept the information that is good for you, and the messages that are not good for you are easily filtered out by the name "fake news".
In such a context, in the Internet era where everyone can become a participant or even a builder of the public opinion field, it is much more difficult to guide public opinion and enlighten ideas than in the era of print media.
Especially for the young generation who are not highly educated, lack social experience, and grow up with mobile phones every day, the internet has a greater impact on them. At every turn, what is said online, seen online. Rarely will reflect, said online, is it right? Is what you see on the Internet the truth?
When you do not have a certain knowledge reserve and social experience to pave the way, you are easily blinded by the Internet and follow the crowd. When we discuss hot events, the information or views we obtain are all the arguments and arguments that we are interested in or feel reasonable from these network Vs. Over time, we will lose the ability to think, like to do multiple choice questions the most, and regardless of whether the answers are correct or complete, we are unwilling to do thinking questions, because this is too much effort and too brain-burning.
The most vivid example is the Chinese stock trading. There are many shareholders around, which stock to buy, are word of mouth, the most concerned question is, who recommended this stock to you, this person speculated in stocks to make money, then the stock he recommended must be reliable, rarely pay attention to the quality of the stock itself. Nowadays, the network is developed, and the task of word of mouth is handed over to the big V of the stock market. Those stock market big V, every day before the market has a strategy, after the hours there is a review, to recommend a bunch of stocks to you, you see I said today so-and-so stock up and down, you see, today I reminded so-and-so stocks that there is a risk, and sure enough, it fell sharply. Behind every shareholder (leek), there is a bunch of stock market big Vs. Taking their own money and following others to speculate in stocks, leeks cut round after round, going farther and farther on the way back to their roots.
Five
Obviously, in the Internet age, we have more channels to obtain information, but our ability to analyze and identify information needs to be strengthened. In other words, in the Internet age, we need to strengthen our ability to think independently.
So, who should give the heavy responsibility of improving the ability to think?
I think time is the best witness. Classic works always radiate the brilliance of ideas and guide us forward. The most effective way to improve the ability to think is to return to the classics, read more classics, and talk more about classic works.
To be called a classic work must have undergone the screening of many people and the washing of many years. The charm of the classic is that it can not only closely follow the requirements of the times, conform to the spirit of the times, but also surpass the times, popularly speaking, that is, not only write well, but also stand tall and see far, so that people of different ages, different regions, and different classes can have the resonance of thought after reading.
Literature, historiography, philosophy, from the past to the present, the works are vast, brilliant like stars, countless, passed down from generation to generation, can not be buried by the dust of history, indicating that there is a unique charm. For example, the Book of Poetry, as the beginning of ancient Chinese poetry, the earliest collection of poetry, although there are only 311 poems, can fully reflect the literary and artistic level from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, or even the highest level. Because only if it is recognized by the public, it will be passed down.
There are so many novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but only the four famous works have endured for a long time. Even if it is the novel of Zhang Huishui, the master of Zhang Hui's novels in the Republic of China period, it was popular all over half the sky at that time, but after a hundred years have passed, who still knows jun?
Both Marx and Mao Zedong are epoch-making great men, their works are very rich, and their classic works, which are still highly respected by the people of the world until now, have a strong guiding significance for transforming our reality.
We often say that opening the book is beneficial, and if you look at the classics, I think the benefits will be even greater. We read more classics, multiple warm classics, more or less, can absorb the experience and wisdom of predecessors, accumulated over time, will stand on the shoulders of giants to continue to move forward, naturally more open-minded than the average person's vision, more mature in thinking, and dialogue with gaoren books for a long time, the ability to think will naturally rise.
At this point, please put down your mobile phone and read more classic works. (Chen Ye)