#In the name of the book# Philosophical confusion has always meant chaos of social thought. If the human mind is likened to the ocean, philosophical thinking is roughly the deepest and hard-to-reach bottom of it. Historically, the surface of the ocean has sometimes been sunny and picturesque, but sometimes stormy and choppy, with little feeling in the depths of the ocean floor. But conversely, once there is some kind of riot in the depths of the ocean, then the turmoil in the human mind will continue for a long, long time.
01.
The World of 2020
2020 is a landmark year. This year, the global epidemic of the new crown virus not only caused many people to lose their lives, but also caused the world to enter a rare "great blockade" state, and global economic activity also fell into an unprecedented recession. As an article in The Economist put it: "The pandemic has exposed anarchy in global governance. France and Britain argue over quarantine rules, while the United States continues to sharpen its grip on the trade war. Despite some examples of cooperation during the pandemic (such as the Fed lending money to other central banks), the United States is reluctant to take on the role of world leadership... Public opinion around the world is abandoning globalization. ”
It is during the pandemic that the UK officially leaves the EU, and the anti-racism movement under the banner of "Black Lives Matter" is tearing apart the United States... In fact, the new crown virus does not pose an excessive threat to the survival of mankind. It is insignificant compared to the infectious diseases that have occurred in history, but strangely, its impact on the human mind is like a monstrous wave and becomes the last straw that crushes the camel. Since then, people no longer cherish the lessons of the two world wars and the Cold War in the 20th century, and the trend of nationalism and anti-globalization is unstoppable. The mindset of many people goes back to the 19th century.
The 19th century was an era of rapid expansion of the modern nation-state, the idea of the supremacy of the interests of the nation-state pushed mankind into the First World War, and the catastrophe of the Great War led to doubts about the currents of thought of modernity; the rise of fascism against Marxism resulted in The Second World War and the Cold War. Humanity lost tens of millions of people in two world wars and suffered from totalitarian rule. After the tragic 20th century, people began to examine the first globalization, modernity, nation-state, democratic values and other issues, learned the lessons of the origin of totalitarian society, reflected on the success of the market economy and the problems it brought, and reconstructed and improved the modern value system, which led to the second globalization.
However, after 30 years of peace and prosperity, when the economy and technology have developed amazingly, history seems to be repeating itself. In the face of the problems caused by the second globalization, the existing experiences of social and political philosophy, governance and integration have failed. As the "holy land of liberalism", the United States began to retreat from monroeism, and nationalist and protectionist ideas became increasingly popular, marked by Trump's rise to power and the introduction of his "America First" policy. The deeper crisis behind these events is that the publicity of the facts themselves is disintegrating. To paraphrase Fukuyama, "almost all authoritative sources of information are questioned and challenged by dubious and unexplained facts" and that "the direct product of the overall dilemma facing democracy is the inability to agree on the most basic facts, as is the case in the United States, Britain, and the rest of the world."
Facts, unlike values, are considered to have objective authenticity, which guarantees the publicity of facts. If facts lose their publicity, the publicity of values will be completely destroyed. A global economic community without public facts and common values is incredible. Therefore, even if it is known that once nationalism becomes the dominant ideology, it will bring about constant conflicts and even wars, and the consequence will be a great regression of the human mind, and 21st century society will still return to the 19th century ideologically.
02.
The decline of scientific utopias and humanistic spirits
What the hell is wrong with the world? To answer this question, we need to look back at two other major events of the 20th century: the scientific revolution of the 20th century, especially the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics; and the decline of the humanistic spirit.
Over the centuries, people have witnessed a series of subversive scientific revolutions, from Copernicus's "heliocentric theory" and Newtonian mechanics to relativity and quantum mechanics, and radical changes in theory seem to have become the norm of scientific development. Everyone was optimistic that there would be a new scientific revolution in the 21st century, but in fact there was none. In other words, scientific theories, while still making progress, have bid farewell to revolution. Why did the scientific revolution occur in the 20th century? With relativity and quantum mechanics becoming the cornerstones of modern science, why are there no longer "paradigm shifts" in scientific theories? Philosophers know very little about this. The philosophers of science of the 20th century—from Rudolf Karnap to Carl Popper to Thomas Kuhn—have all turned out to be problematic in their explanations of the scientific revolution, and their philosophical quest for what is modern science has failed. That is to say, although human beings have made great progress in scientific knowledge and mastered more and more developed technologies, they have encountered great difficulties in understanding modern science as a whole. People don't realize that this failure and the setback to the value base of the second round of globalization are twins.
Another major event occurred in the 20th century in the field of human thought, that is, the decline of the humanistic spirit. Ever since Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," Christianity has withdrawn from public life in the West day by day. Behind the pluralism of values is the degeneration of the humanistic spirit. Since the origin of modern society in the soil of Catholic civilization in the 17th century, humanistic values, including religious beliefs, have always existed side by side with science. The humanistic spirit and science and technology together maintain the basic structure of modern society, but the humanistic spirit of the 20th century faced the bombardment of totalitarian ideologies again and again. Even after totalitarianism has subsided, the humanistic spirit has been constantly affected by the wave of nihilism. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, the critical humanistic spirit once again tried to regain its strength, but failed to regain its vitality. After the ebb and flow of postmodernism, the humanistic spirit finally died with the end of the 20th century.
A scientific world without a humanistic spirit must be deformed, and the consequence of this is the rise of scientific utopias, which, in addition to justifying new forms of totalitarianism in the 21st century, means that technology overwhelms science and becomes a new religion. When people do not know what science is, but only specific scientific and technological knowledge, the proliferation of scientific utopias is unstoppable.
What is a scientific utopia? We can use the life sciences as an example. Today, new advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology have led to unprecedented changes in human life, yet man's macroscopic understanding of life is far from keeping up with the knowledge and manipulation of biological details. As a result, technology dominates science, and humans begin to be blindly confident that they can play the role of creator. Google's chief futurist Ray Kurzweil even predicted that humanity will achieve immortality in 2045. Scientific utopia refers to this blind superstition of science and technology.
Behind the disappearance of the public nature of social facts, people's inability to understand the scientific and technological revolution of the 20th century, and the decline of the humanistic spirit, there is a common core, that is, in today's rapid development of high technology and the rapid growth of productive forces, people's judgment of authenticity is becoming more and more narrow and vague. The so-called "narrowness" of the judgment of authenticity refers to the fact that only specific science and technology have unquestionable authenticity at present, and most people lose the ability to judge the publicity of social facts and the overall problem of "what is science". The so-called "vagueness" of authentic judgment refers to the loss of the ability to reflect on authenticity.
Why does the humanistic spirit decline? The reason is that many people think that past beliefs and morals are false. So why did people see it as true in the past? Most people don't think about it or don't have the ability to think about it. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary declared "post-truth" the word of the year. Since then, more and more people have begun to think that human society is entering a "post-truth era". The so-called post-truth era stems from the fact that people have lost their full and overall authentic judgment. We call the comprehensive and holistic judgment of truth the true mind, so that the ideological roots of the above phenomena can be collectively called the disintegration of the true mind.
03.
The study of the philosophy of authenticity
Today, we have a prosperous material civilization, but the human heart has never been more fragile, afraid of death, cowardly and cowardly to resist than it is today. Humanity's contemporary technology is enough to sustain us to live on Mars – if we have the courage. But do we have the courage to do that? Do we have a mind that contains such technology? No! I believe that without such a mind, not only will the bitter lessons of history be ignored, but the repeated disasters in history will be repeated, and our scientific and technological achievements will be forgotten more than 100 years later.
So what the humanities scholars have to do today is to reconstruct the real and grand mind of human beings, which can match our science and technology, and this will definitely not arise from the technology itself or from the study of the science profession.
Today we often hear the question: How can we build a society in which people have dignity? Only when there is a dignified life, there will be a society in which a person has dignity. Only when a person has a true heart can he obtain a dignified life. Therefore, the core of cultural and social reconstruction is the reconstruction of the true mind of modern society. However, we must be soberly aware that the true mind of traditional societies cannot be restored. In modern society, how to restore the authenticity of the ultimate concern, and to make it interconnected with the authenticity of values and experiences, so that man once again becomes the carrier of the three kinds of authenticity, is a question that the times have asked the philosophers, which I call the exploration of the philosophy of authenticity.
The term "philosophy of authenticity" was coined by me. The reason why I compare authenticity with philosophical research is to grasp the direction of today's philosophical research from a higher level. In fact, as long as we come out of the history of Western philosophy and analyze the problems of the value systems of various axis civilizations, philosophy will come out of the "love of wisdom" that originated in ancient Greek civilization and turn to the exploration of its hidden essence, that is, its authenticity. Different axis civilizations have different transcendent visions, and each transcendent vision has its own ultimate care and value, as well as the experience of integration by ultimate care and value. That is to say, the real minds of different Axis civilizations are not the same, and the ancient Greek civilization's "love of wisdom" pursuit of reason and truth is only one of the true minds of the Axis civilization. That is why the cultural study of today's Axis civilization and its modern transformation should be framed by the philosophy of authenticity. The corresponding research question is the structure of the true mind in traditional society, and how the unfolding of modernity leads to the disintegration of the true mind in traditional society. On this basis, we can further study whether the real mind must contradict modernity, and how to establish the modern real mind.
In order to achieve this goal, I will complete the philosophical exposition of authenticity in three steps. First, from a historical point of view, analyze why with the establishment of modern society, especially the formation of modern scientific and technological structures, the real mind will disintegrate step by step. In fact, modernity originated from the coexistence of faith in God and the separation of cognitive reason, and its universalization necessarily dissociated individual autonomy from ultimate concern. At this time, if the true connection between individual rights and authenticity is not found, the loss of the authenticity of ultimate care is inevitable. Further, when empirical truth is equated with objective reality, sooner or later human beings will live in a world where there is no distinction between true and false. Is there really nothing humanity can do about this fate? I call it the history of the philosophy of authenticity.
Second, it proposes a methodology for the philosophy of authenticity, discussing whether the reconstruction of the true mind in modern society is possible. Through the historical analysis of the evolution of the real mind, I find that the real basis of scientific experience is the infinite expansion of universally repeatable controlled experiments, that is, we can always increase the set of controlled variables based on the results of controlled experiments, and on this basis do new controlled experiments, and this new controlled experiment is also universally reproducible. Mathematics happens to be a symbolic representation of an infinitely expanded structure of universally repeatable controlled experiments. Because the truth of mathematical symbols and the true isomorphism of scientific experience can be built, arch bridges can be built across both, leading to the expansion of scientific reality (as a whole in which mathematical symbols and scientific experience are interdependent). Therefore, every scientific revolution has been accompanied by great developments in mathematics. This is precisely the essence of modern science, which has long been misunderstood.
From this, I have come to an important conclusion: there are different fields of authenticity, such as scientific truth, social truth and personal truth, and different fields do not necessarily intersect, and there are different structures of truth. In addition, there are two types of authenticity in each field: experience and symbol. On this basis, I will define concepts such as symbols, experiences, etc. more strictly. That is to say, there is the authenticity of pure symbol systems, and the philosophical revolutions of the 20th century ignored this and eventually abandoned it halfway, unable to establish a new epistemology that is truly based on the study of symbols. To integrate different realms and types of authenticity is to build arch bridges between them. Once new arch bridges that are different from scientific reality (such as the arch bridge of humanistic reality) are established, we find the structure of ultimate care, value and empirical authenticity that are interwoven. If my analysis is correct, then it is possible to reconstruct the true mind in modern society. I call this the method of the philosophy of authenticity.
Third, 20th-century philosophers tried to analyze natural language in terms of logical language. However, natural languages and logical languages have different real-world structures, so they must be studied as two different symbologies. Just as modern science is an arch bridge between the truth of mathematical symbols and the truth of scientific experience, society is a bridge built on the reality of natural language symbols and the truth of human action. By analyzing the structure of this arch bridge, the relationship between authenticity and modernity in the humanistic world can be understood. From this, we can argue the structure of the real mind in the 21st century at different levels. Whether scientific or humanistic, the existence of free will is the premise of the authenticity of all symbols, so individual freedom is a meta-value, and morality and all other values are derived from individual freedom. The modern value system comes from the modern transformation of the Axis civilization, in which the ultimate care of traditional society will gradually disappear. Philosophical research on authenticity shows that although it is inevitable that ultimate care withdraws from society, the pursuit equivalent to traditional ultimate care is not illusory, but philosophers have never explored the overall structure of authenticity and are unaware of their existence. In this sense, ultimate care in the modern sense can be reconstructed, and they are the modern form of ultimate care in the Axial Age. Pluralistic modern ultimate care should be able to integrate with the authenticity of values and even science, and constitute the true mind of modern people. Therefore, the third part of the philosophy of authenticity is to analyze the authenticity of the humanistic world, and the focus is on the re-argument of the modern value base, which can also be called the construction chapter.
The book "Disappearing Reality" is a historical chapter of the philosophy of authenticity, and the main purpose is to reveal the logic of the disintegration of the real mind through historical research. I think that even if historical research finds all this inevitable, we can still make the reconstruction of the true mind our task.
Why? Because by analyzing why this process is inevitable, it helps to understand the composition of the true mind and its relationship to modern value systems. That is to say, once we realize that the basis of modernity is the real mind formed in the Axial Age, and that the unique form of modern society as an Axis civilization will lead to the disintegration of the real mind in the process of its development, we may imagine how to reconstruct the real mind in the new era. At this point, I am reminded of the science fiction story that Asimov described in Al Qaeda: psychohistory foresaw the great regression of civilization, but its research could help humanity shorten that "long period of darkness." Of course, there is no such discipline as psychohistory in reality, and what we can hope for is only to discover the structure and meaning of the true human mind through continuous in-depth exploration of what is scientific truth, what is humanistic truth, and whether there is a law of historical development.
Excerpt from Jin Guantao: The Vanishing Reality