Today, the Department of Chinese Chinese And Literature of East China Normal University and the International Institute of Chinese Culture hosted the Summit Forum on the Construction of Chinese and Chinese Literature disciplines from the perspective of new liberal arts in Shanghai. Academician Qian Xuhong, president of East China Normal University, expounded on some of his thoughts and ideas on "New Liberal Arts" and "Chinese Chinese Literature" under the title of "New Wave of Liberal Arts and the Advanced Nature of Chinese and Chinese Literature".
The New Liberal Arts Wave and the Advanced Nature of Chinese Chinese Literature
——The construction of chinese and Chinese language disciplines under the new liberal arts vision
Speech at the Summit Forum
Qian Xuhong
President of East China Normal University, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering
September 25, 2021
Today's world is in an era of great change. The era of great social change must be an era of great development of philosophy and social science. The level of development of humanities, philosophy and social sciences reflects a nation's thinking ability, spiritual character, and civilization quality, which is related to the prosperity and development of society.
For human beings to become cosmic species that transcend their own limitations, the limitations of the earth, and have infinite care, they need the enlightenment of a new liberal arts. Humanistic care, exploration of the unknown, and service to the society are the eternal mission of the new liberal arts. For the new liberal arts to serve the outstanding development of the country and mankind, we need to be introspective, conscious, and confident, and we need to constantly update our concepts and change our thinking.
The development of the new liberal arts cannot avoid two questions, one is "Needham's question": Despite the many contributions of ancient China, why did the scientific and industrial revolution not take place in modern China? The second is "Qian Xuesen's question": Why do our schools always fail to cultivate outstanding talents?
In fact, Needham asked not only about science and technology, but also about the knowledge system of modern disciplines, such as music, art, sports, sociology, science, engineering, etc., why they were not born in China. What reminds ancient China ignored formal logic and lacked sound logical thinking and image thinking.
What Qian Xuesen is talking about is not general education and education, but how outstanding and outstanding. He was well aware of the importance of humanistic aesthetic education and thinking, and during his lifetime, he always dreamed of establishing another category that could integrate natural science and technology and social science and technology: thinking science and technology. He reminded us that in the process of talent training, we still lack the cultivation of critical thinking and creative thinking.
Chairman Mao Zedong pointed out in 1956: "In the past, people looked down on us for a reason. Because you don't have much to contribute. ...... Then you're going to be expelled from the planet! ...... [China's] contribution to humanity is not in line with its population. ...... China should make a greater contribution to mankind. This is the expectation of the great man for the Chinese nation. Today, China's GDP has ranked second in the world, but most of the professional systems and education models of the knowledge disciplines we study come from the West, and the unique contributions that are widely accepted by the world from ourselves are not much, which leads to the third "question": how to provide a professional system of Chinese knowledge disciplines that originate from China and can go to the world and truly have international discourse power, and then truly achieve excellence. This not only challenges the development of the new liberal arts, but also provides important opportunities.
We believe that the construction of new liberal arts focuses on building a new disciplinary paradigm and talent training model. The development of the new liberal arts should not only focus on knowledge and skills, but also on thinking and spirit; not only on wisdom, but also on intelligence; not only on and maintaining the divergence of thinking with liberal arts characteristics, but also on creating the convergence of thinking with liberal arts characteristics.
Based on the above understanding, we believe that the construction of the new liberal arts needs to strengthen the sense of "mission", face the future, face the world, integrate East and West, inherit and innovate, open up new fields, new methods and new models, pursue excellence in educating people through academic excellence, and then promote the innovative development of liberal arts education and cultivate liberal arts talents in the new era who are responsible for national rejuvenation.
Specifically, the construction of the new liberal arts includes the following three aspects:
1. Strengthen interdisciplinary research, cultivate new disciplinary growth points, and produce outstanding academic results.
2. Build a talent training system with Chinese characteristics, strengthen free and comprehensive thinking and ability education, realize the transmission of knowledge points beyond, and cultivate outstanding talents in liberal arts.
3. Accelerate the construction of a discourse system with Chinese characteristics, and enhance the international discourse power and academic influence of disciplines.
After talking about the new liberal arts, I will talk about what I understand as "Chinese Chinese language literature."
Chinese is the first important feature that distinguishes Chinese civilization from Western civilization. Chinese pictograms, pronunciations, tones, words, and ideograms all have their own unique characteristics. We can often hear the saying that Chinese is the most efficient language. The same article, such as the UN Charter, Chinese version is always the thinnest.
Of course, the thickness of the version may not be scientific, but some researchers have calculated the amount of information contained in a single Chinese character and English alphabet and English word through the method of physical concept "information entropy". The amount of information contained by a single Chinese character calculated is 9.56, while the single English letter is 3.9, and the single English word is only 2.62. In one respect, this does prove that Chinese is more efficient than English. But people don't know why, and I think the efficiency of Chinese has to be rooted in quantum theory. October this year is the 70th anniversary of East China Normal University, and we will publicly publish the Declaration of Quantum Thinking, because life and human beings are originally at the intersection of classics and quantum laws.
People usually have the impression that Chinese this single Chinese character contains a large amount of information, and its intuitive phenomenon is that a word and sentence are often polysemantic, and the rigor of expression is not as good as English, which is easy to misunderstand, for example, Chinese sentence "like a person", if translated into English, there can be at least 4 different expressions, with at least 4 different meanings. However, some argue that this is a flaw in Chinese: scientific papers that express rigorous logic are often inferior to English. As everyone knows, Chinese can be used for scientific paper publication and writing, which is one of the few languages.
Contempt for Chinese, misunderstandings Chinese often stem from simple classical modes of thinking. Classical thinking, represented by Newtonian mechanics, is a deterministic, inertial, and unique mode of thinking, that is, things can only present a unique state at a certain moment, or here or elsewhere, can not be combined. Thus, classical thinking convinces people of their ability to accurately describe the definite state of things at any given moment. In this mode of thinking, English, a language with strict logic, can express a concept very precisely, so it is more important.
However, with the development of quantum mechanics, quantum thinking has widely affected our lives. Unlike classical thinking, quantum thinking has typical quantum characteristics, that is, a quantum probabilistic, non-localized way of thinking, allowing the superposition of states, even mutually exclusive states may be combined at the same time, and their uncertainty is universal.
The human mind is the sum of classical and quantum thinking. If we stand in the perspective of quantum thinking and look at Chinese and English, we can find that Chinese should be a language that transcends classical Newtonian logical thinking, and more embodies the characteristics of quantum logic, that is, it has a greater amount of information and more possibilities, and its true meaning judgment depends not only on the words and sentences themselves, but also on the context of the words and sentences, that is, the context! Just like a quantum "wave function" with infinite possibilities, because you observe the perturbation, the collapse becomes the "particle" reality in front of you. Therefore, Chinese is both concise and colorful; words are multi-meaning, one word pun, one language multi-level, Spring and Autumn brushwork, colorful. In the era of mechanical typewriters, Chinese input is far inferior to English, and in the intelligent computer age, Chinese through the diversity and selectivity of its associations, its input speed exceeds that of English and any other text, which reflects the advantages of its quantum logic.
I am pleased to note that experts have begun to pay attention to the study of Chinese linguistics related to quantum phenomena. It can be said that the close integration of Chinese research and the forefront of our modern science to give Chinese more modernity represents an attempt to Chinese research in the "new liberal arts.".
I think that China's economy and technology once lagged behind in the Newton era, and now it should be able to regain its lead in the quantum era, which must have something to do with the language and thinking we Chinese. Therefore, our Chinese research can have more attempts and explorations to enrich the connotation of our research, create a new research paradigm, and form our own discourse power.
The above are some of my own thoughts and ideas on the "new liberal arts" and "Chinese and Chinese literature" for the experts to discuss and criticize. I believe that with the support of all experts, today's meeting can not only effectively promote the great development of the liberal arts department of East China Normal University, greatly promote the great cause of the construction of the "new liberal arts" of the school, but also become a landmark event in the grand cause of the construction of "new liberal arts" in China, which is of landmark significance for the future development of the "new liberal arts".
Author: Qian Xuhong
Editor: Wu Jinjiao
Photo: Courtesy of East China Normal University
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