Excerpt from the Internet;
This article is a dialogue between two scholars, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, on education, in which they predict the high alienation of human society in the 21st century and discuss the way out for the future. Li Zehou pointed out that the 21 st century will be the century of pedagogy, and education should return to the classical way of shaping human nature, and that the 21 st century should re-establish "meaning" instead of blindly negating and deconstructing meaning as in the 20 th century. Therefore, the purpose of education is to re-cultivate a healthy human nature and to educate people on how to develop a positive and healthy mind in their daily lives, in their dealings with each other and in their social interactions.
Why does Li Zehou attach great importance to the "return" of education? This stems from his concern that the rapid progress of science and technology will lead to more alienation of mankind and more involution of society. In his view, contemporary people, as computer accessories, are actually half machines and half animals, and in order to become real people again, they must not only get rid of the alienation caused by obeying the rule of machines at work, but also avoid being alienated by animal desires in order to meet their physiological needs after work. However, the development of science does not stop, and human work is no longer inseparable from machines, and the solution is not to break the machines, but to find ways to buy more free time. Only when there is more free time than working time, and the psychological ontology reigns, can human nature develop. He believes that the most critical issue facing education is whether it is possible to cultivate people into a super-machine, super-creature, and super-tool social being, rather than a slave and instrumentalized existence of the machine. He boldly proposed: If one day, the world realizes the three-day work week, the world will be very different, what will mankind do? This is an educational topic that has a bearing on our future.
This article was originally published in Soochow Academic, No. 3, 2010, with the original title "Two Dialogues on Education". It only represents the author's own point of view, and is hereby compiled and distributed for the sake of mourning and for readers to think about.
▍First dialogue: 1996
Liu Zaifu: In the book, I would like to record one of your important thoughts, which is that there needs to be a new Renaissance in the next century, and this renaissance, compared with the Western Renaissance, the central theme is still the reaffirmation of human values, but the main thing is not to liberate from the shackles of religion but from the shackles of machines (industrial machines and social machines), which is what it means to say "farewell to modernity and return to classicism". Correspondingly, you put forward the idea that the twentieth century is the century of linguistics, and that the twenty-first century will be the century of pedagogy. It's a big topic, and we should continue to work on it.
Li Zehou: That's a big topic. The 20 th century was a century in which science and technology developed at an accelerated pace, and it was a century in which science and technology entered people's daily lives most extensively and deeply. Science and technology have greatly improved the quality of human material life and enabled mankind to take a big step forward. However, science and technology have also made many people its slaves. Man becomes an appendage of the computer, and man is ruled by the machine. This is probably one of the biggest problems facing humanity.
Liu Zaifu: The evolution of human beings and the alienation of human beings go hand in hand, which is a very significant phenomenon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, human beings would never have imagined that the end of the twentieth century would be the world of computers, and that the human beings who could invent and use computers were of course more evolutionary than those who could only use typewriters, but they also did not think that after human beings made computers, they also created a kind of alien existence for themselves, and people became accessories of computers, slaves of machines, and slaves of advertising. The phenomenon of human alienation has indeed developed to an alarming degree. In this way, how to get rid of the phenomenon of alienation will become the central topic of the next century.
Li Zehou: Alienation is a huge topic, but it's also very specific. How to get rid of the domination of the machine, how to get rid of the fate of becoming an accessory of the machine, this involves the key of "education".
Liu Zaifu: To say that the next century will be the century of pedagogy means that the next century should be a century of people-centered and education-centered disciplines. For schools, it is more important to realize that today's education is an education in which human beings are objectified and alienated. I appreciate Dewey's remark that schools should have a natural immunity to social trends, that is, to maintain a critical distance from them. At present, the social trend is that materialism overrides everything, and it is the alienation of people by materialism, and schools should have an immunity to alienation, that is, they should have a critical cognition. Our dialogue is precisely the hope that human beings will return from the alienated existence of the twentieth century to the classical true existence, that is, the existence that is not ruled by materialistic desires.
Li Zehou: In order for man to return to the real man, he must not only get rid of the alienation of machine domination, but also get rid of the alienation of animal desires, and the two are interconnected. Because people are subordinate to machines, they often become part of machines, and their work and life are very stressful, monotonous and boring, so when they are not working, they are extremely eager for the satisfaction of their physiological instincts as a biological species, and fall into the madness of animal lust, and robots become animal people. So man is actually half machine, half animal. I raised this issue in the '70s, but I didn't go into it.
Liu Zaifu: Towards both machines and animals, modern people should realize that they are living a terrible pendulum life, that is, a life that oscillates between machines and animals, with alienated labor on the one hand and extreme luxury on the other. China is also entering the most extravagant era. If you just swing between these two poles, you are not a meaning being.
Li Zehou: When I say that the 21st century should be the century of education, I also mean that "meaning" should be re-established, and we should not blindly deny and deconstruct meaning like the 20th century. To re-cultivate healthy humanity through education is to re-establish meaning.
Liu Zaifu: The twentieth century was a century of negation, or a century of deconstruction. In practice, with the high development of science and technology, machines have negated and deconstructed people, which is a critique of people by tools; Theoretically, it is another kind of instrumental negation, another kind of deconstruction and criticism of people, which is the deconstruction of the subject by language, and the deconstruction and criticism of value rationality (truth, goodness, and beauty) by instrumental reason. In order to restore the meaning and dignity of the human person in the next century, it is necessary to theoretically critique the absolute idea of language, affirming the positive role of language and rejecting the deprivation of meaning by language. We are both affirming instrumental rationality and rebelling against the domination of instrumental rationality over value rationality.
Li Zehou: Language is important, but language is not the foundation of human beings. Language is an indispensable tool for human beings, and they cannot survive without language. People make themselves richer and more colorful through language, but language cannot replace human beings.
Liu Zaifu: People are the result of history, not language. The meaning of human existence is given by itself, not by language. People are also created by history in the process of making history, which is what you call historical accumulation, and language is also a kind of accumulation, but it is not the whole of historical accumulation.
Li Zehou: Not fundamentally. I've been talking about two ontologies over and over again, one is the tool ontology of making and using tools, and solving the problem of food, clothing, shelter and transportation by making tools, which is the difference from animals, animals can only rely on their limbs, and people rely on tools to survive, which is the material ontology. The other is that people make their own psychological growth through various life activities, people have animal desires, want to eat, want to have sexual intercourse, this is the animal instinct of people, but the psychology produced by people in these activities is different from the psychology of animals. Not only can humans have sex just like animals, but more importantly, people can fall in love, which is different.
And human love has a very complex and detailed variety of emotions, which can be expressed through letters, conversations, poems, and various literary works, that is, what Freud called "sublimation". Animal demands and feelings are sublimated, and from person to person, this leads to individual differences. Through the historical accumulation of culture (such as literary and artistic works), this psychology has enriched human nature and made personality differences more and more prominent. So not only is the external world of man constantly changing, but the inner world of man is also constantly changing and enriching. I think that modern man's sensibility is many times more delicate, thorough, and rich than primitive man, so I don't approve of wishful thinking and blind worship of primitive man and natural man.
Liu Zaifu: It can be said that the philosophy of language in this century has made great achievements. They are fully aware of the mediating role of language, and they are fully aware of the constraints that language has on people. This cannot be said to be unreasonable. By the twentieth century, the human mind had become very complex, and many new and complex sophisticated ideas to be expressed were often hindered by language. In the 20th century, mankind entered the information age, and exchanges between countries and regions around the world were unprecedentedly frequent, and the translation of various languages was also unprecedentedly prosperous. At this time, we will find more strongly the errors of language and the difficulty of expression, and find that the phenomenon of people being dominated by language is particularly serious. A positive view of language, which is undoubtedly a kind of progress.
However, later they described language as the fundamental existence of man, and it was at this time that Western scholars created the last home, and it was not even man who mastered language but language who mastered man, and replaced the question of man's own meaning with the question of the function of language, which fell into a fallacy, which lost the subject and the ontology of history, and especially the purpose of man. Man has to challenge language, to be free from the prison of language, and more importantly, to challenge the fundamental dilemma of man, to be free from the bondage of machines.
In the twentieth century, I feel that it is Kant's duality that is the most profound, Hegel's "one", which leads to the pursuit and superstition of "essence", and the linguistic deconstructivists try their best to break this "one", oppose essentialism, and break the "one" into pieces, which has merit, but at the same time it is questionable to break the subject into pieces, and the person into meaningless and soulless pieces. I think it is equally problematic to interpret history, the world, and man as fragments and the essential world as "one", we are at the middle point where the essence is emphasized to the extreme and the essence is shattered to the extreme, and I think Kant's contradiction of the two laws is the most reasonable, it distinguishes different levels and different occasions, in a certain situation, it is in line with the law of sufficient reason to talk about the essence and human subjectivity, and in a certain situation, it is also reasonable to explain and construct anti-essentialism. At this time, because the anti-essence and anti-subject have gone to the extreme, we have re-emphasized the value of human beings and the fundamentals of history.
Li Zehou: When we talk about subjectivity and human value, a very important point is the possibility of human freedom. The loss of freedom in front of machines is a fundamental problem. How do you restore that freedom? Here's a specific question of how to buy free time. Science continues to advance, and it is becoming more and more difficult for human work to be separated from machines. Our solution is not to smash the machine, but to find a way to buy more free time, personal time, emotional time. Now the work week is five days, but in the future it can be reduced to three days, and there are four days of personal time, and the value of people will be different. Of course, it is also necessary to pay attention to how to get rid of and overcome the control problems of the social machine, the advertising machine, and so on. Today, people's free time is often controlled and dominated by them.
Liu Zaifu: Literature and art pay a lot of attention to free time, but this is subjective free time. The free time we are talking about here should be the free time in the objective sense, that is, the free time on the level of real life. Man should first strive to expand and extend the free time of reality, and then show his imagination in this time, create a spiritual life, and create a real free time. Without realistic free time, there can be no education, literature, and a calm temperament.
Li Zehou: In reality, there is too little free time, five or more days a week to be attached to the machine, which means that people still exist as tool ontology, or are ruled by tool ontology, and only when there is more free time than working time, and the psychological ontology dominates, can human nature develop. This is the dialectic and the way out of historical materialism.
Liu Zaifu: The focus of school education is to cultivate people's healthy and excellent psychological ontology, rather than tool ontology. It is extremely important to be clear about this. If the school puts too much pressure on students to evaluate and calculate grades all day long, it is bound to mislead students to pursue external vanity and mechanical homework, and do not know how to fundamentally cultivate students' strong interest in the subject and noble heart, then education will fail. American schools are too liberal and too laissez-faire, and Chinese schools are too strict and too pressuristic, which can really make children more and more stupid.
▍Second Dialogue: 2004
Liu Zaifu: Brother Yaoming asked us to write a discussion on "Humanities and Humanities Education under High Technology", so let's discuss this issue. In "The Farewell" and in other books, you have repeatedly expressed the idea that the twentieth century is the century of linguistics and the century of machine domination, and that the twenty-first century is the century of pedagogy and the century of liberation from machine domination. Therefore, the eyes of the new century should be shifted to education, and the most important thing is to regard education as an end in itself, not as a means.
Li Zehou: That's good. Education should no longer be a means of realizing other things, such as cultivating all kinds of experts needed by the capitalist society and cultivating the scholars and doctors needed by the feudal society, but should be regulated and constrained by itself, that is, with the aim of shaping human nature itself, the full realization ———of individual potential and physical and mental health itself, and thus regulating and restricting the social structure and tool ontology of craft (technology).
Liu Zaifu: It can also be said that education should not be aimed at cultivating "survival skills", but should be aimed at improving "quality of life" and cultivating "meaning of life". To say the least, survival skills and vocational skills are the second purpose, and only the shaping of people and excellent human nature itself is the first and fundamental purpose of education.
Li Zehou: The Chinese tradition (especially Confucianism and Confucius) is based on "education" ——— "learning" as the essence of life and the foundation of human nature. So what is "learning"? I explained it in the first chapter of "Learning and Learning" in the Analects of the Analects: "This chapter begins with a clear meaning, in a nutshell: Those who 'learn' learn are also people. Those who learn to be pleasing to others, because human beings are where the ontology is, identify with the ontology, and be happy. Friends come and have fun, which shows that this ontology is a group rather than an individual. In the Analects and Confucianism, the word "learning" has both broad and narrow meanings. In a narrow sense, it refers to the "learning" of "learning literature if there is spare energy", that is, it refers to the study of literature, which is equivalent to today's reading and research, but on the whole, Confucius emphasizes "learning" in a broad sense, that is, virtue is superior to knowledge, and behavior is prior to language. What I mean by "the century of pedagogy" is that education should return to the classical way of "learning as a person" and "virtue is superior to knowledge" and shaping human nature as the foundation.
Liu Zaifu: Your philosophical thinking has been deepening in recent years, especially because you are aware of the spiritual crisis of the modern and postmodern, and the focus of your thinking has also shifted, which is probably not many people can read seriously from your writings. For example, what you just said about the question of "human beings are the ontology", that is, your anthropological historical ontology, in the seventies and eighties, you emphasized the instrumental ontology, and after the "Theses of My Philosophy", especially in "The New Theory of Bozhai", the emphasis was on the emotional ontology, the ethical ontology. The shaping of emotional ontology is the "naturalization of man", that is, it requires man to return to the diversity given to him by nature, so that he can break free and liberate himself from the omnipresent power created for survival ——— the machine world, so as to achieve poetic survival and obtain the free enjoyment of existence that cannot be regulated by concepts. When you say that the purpose of education is also to shape the ontology of emotions and ethics. Only this shaping can liberate us from the twentieth century of linguistic/power domination (the language of technology, the language of politics, the philosophical language of "language is home").
Li Zehou: In recent years, although the focus of my thinking has been on the ontology of emotion, I had a hunch about this in the late 70s and early 80s. In my 1981 book On Kant's Hegel's Philosophy, I said: "This may be one of the future directions for the development of historical materialism: not only the external structure of production, but also the internal psychological structure of human beings, which may increasingly become the focus of the future era." Linguistics was at the center of twentieth-century philosophy, and pedagogy, the science of the study of the holistic growth, development, formation, and shaping of man, could become the most important central science of the future society...... This is perhaps exactly what Marx hoped for in those days of naturalistic humanism, the great idea that the natural sciences and the humanities should become the same science. ”
This article was written 20 years ago, when China's economy was on the verge of collapse and its productive forces were severely damaged, so my focus cannot but focus on the issue of "tool ontology" as the "foundation", but I also have a hunch that the focus of the future era is not on the problem of tool ontology. The rapid development of science and technology in the world over the past 20 years has made me feel that this focus is unavoidable. The most critical question facing education is whether it is possible to raise man into a super-machine, super-creature, super-tool social being, rather than a slave to the machine and a being who can only use tools.
Liu Zaifu: These theoretical expressions of yours boil down to the topic we are discussing, that is, humanities education should be regarded as the focus and premise of education in the 21st century. Of course, education should also require intellectual education, but it should be premised on humanistic education. Just as the student who produces the atomic bomb should first be educated to develop the concept of the peaceful use of atomic energy for the benefit of mankind. Shaping this belief should be a prerequisite. Mr. Qian Mu said in ancient Chinese philosophical language that students should be cultivated to have the ability to have the ability to be Getian, Gewu and Gexin, which are the relationship between man and nature, and Gexin is the nature of human mind.
Education in the 21st century should return to the classical Chinese tradition with the premise and purpose of "Gexin". If this is expressed in Spengler's language, it is that the cultivation of the third dimension of human beings should be the main goal of education. In his book The Decline of the West, he said that in addition to the width and length (the secular plane dimension), human beings also need to have depth, and the so-called depth is the third dimension, which is the humanistic dimension. He believes that the reason why people become human beings is not because they have the survival direction of the worldly plane, but because they have the three-dimensional existence space of the spiritual soul. He concludes: "Deep experience is a premise, and many things that derive from it must be determined by this premise." (The Decline of the West, Chapter 4) I think that today's education sector can only have hope if it recognizes that humanistic education is the prerequisite for all education. And the construction of a modern new country can only belong to the new era if it is premised on the humanities.
Li Zehou: You just said that you can't use "survival skills" as the purpose of education, and that's right. If this is the goal, the humanistic premise is lost. As I said in my conversation with F. Tameson two years ago, education cannot be understood narrowly as the training and acquisition of occupations or skills. The main purpose of education is to develop a positive and healthy mind in their daily lives, in their dealings with each other and in their social interactions. Now we have five working days, and people in agricultural and underdeveloped areas are overworked. If the three-day workweek were implemented all over the world, the situation would be very different. At that point, what will humanity do? It's a serious question about our future, and the topic of education will be very prominent. In other words, at that time, the problems of "latticeism", "third direction", and "naturalization of man" will become particularly prominent.
Liu Zaifu: In the period after World War II, American universities attached great importance to humanities education, and the humanities accounted for a large proportion of the basic courses in the first and second years of college. However, except for private church schools, which have "moral education", other middle schools do not seem to have the dimension of "moral education", but only intellectual education and physical education. With the development of high technology and the accompanying increase in the pressure of survival, the school's vision is becoming more and more shallow, and only the cultivation of "survival skills" is emphasized, and the dimension of moral education has disappeared.
Li Zehou: This trend in American high schools may also be reflected in universities. The rapid development of modern high technology, which is mainly based on utilitarianism, has had a more negative impact on humanities education than a positive one. I'm rather pessimistic about the future. Humanities education and humanities have increasingly become colonies of science and technology in terms of basic concepts, "guiding ideology", pattern arrangement, use of teaching materials, and teaching. Increasingly, man is becoming a half-machine, half-animalistic being. How? I don't know. As a humanities worker, I can probably only make some empty shouts.
Liu Zaifu: Despite the nature of empty shouting, we still have to shout and sound the alarm bell. Recently, I read a news from the International Herald Tribune in the United States: ———Silicon Valley, a symbol of high technology in California, has the most expensive housing market in the United States and the largest concentration of investment funds in the world, but it is also the place where the gap between rich and poor in the United States is the largest. For example, a four-bedroom cottage in Palo Alto was priced at $2.2 million, but it was sold for $3.2 million after a fierce bid. Another one-bedroom house, priced at $495,000, sold for $750,000. On the other hand, many non-tech workers do not have a place to live. Two out of five Silicon Valley residents can't afford a two-bedroom apartment with an average rent of $1,700 a month. More and more teachers, police officers, firefighters, and salespeople who are pulling commissions are seeking the services of homeless shelters. Quite a few pay $400 a month to live in a garage or sleep on the floor of a stranger's living room. California's financial sector calls these people the invisible, poor incumbents.
The situation in Silicon Valley is certainly an extreme example, but it sends a signal that the development of high technology is changing the structure of human life, that it has created enormous existential pressures, and that it may create a dilemma of "nowhere to live" for non-tech sectors and personnel, including those in the humanities and humanities education. Let's call the existential pressures and ecologically changing forces caused by high technology the "Silicon Valley effect," and this effect will affect not only the United States, but also China.
Li Zehou: This effect definitely exists, and it affects all levels of society. The economy, the force of social existence, is indeed too powerful. However, we should not think that Marx's "social existence determines social consciousness" is an absolute truth, but should admit that social psychology and social consciousness have their independent nature, and with the increase of free time, the possibility and reality of material production being restricted by spiritual production have become more and more clear.
Liu Zaifu: The role of humanities and humanities education is to establish the basic norms of human life and maintain the basic values, ethical principles, and spiritual principles of human society. The development of high technology is a good thing, but if it is allowed to expand indefinitely, it will also bring disaster. For example, if left unchecked, the phenomenon of replicating human beings ("cloning") could change the basic form of human existence and disintegrate the basic value system that maintains social order, and it may provoke humanity even more than the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb. Although high-tech is far less developed in China than in the United States, it will also affect the future of China and will also impact humanities education. China's humanities education will face a double squeeze, on the one hand, the pre-existing ideology, and on the other hand, the high-tech squeeze.
Li Zehou: In the face of the development of high technology, it is good to put forward the slogan of "rejuvenating the country through science and education." However, this slogan should not be regarded as a tactic of struggle, focusing only on the "country" and not on the people. In fact, if you really want to rejuvenate the country, you must first rejuvenate the people, in the words of Lu Xun, that is, first establish the people and then the country. The key to establishing people is humanistic education. In the past, humanities education was indeed affected by ideology, and the content of humanities education was mainly ideological. In the shadow of the high-tech age, humanities education may have no place to live.
Liu Zaifu: Education in China, whether it is a middle school or a university, has three dimensions: "intellectual education", "physical education" and "moral education", which is good. However, in the second half of the last century, there was a big problem in "moral education," that is, the education of humanistic cultivation was replaced by ideological education, that is, the basic education of "being a human being."
Li Zehou: Only the education of physical education and intellectual education is based on utilitarianism, and the education of ideology is also based on utilitarianism. And humanistic education cannot be utilitarian. It should focus on the long-term future of the nation and mankind. If we talk about utilitarianism, then literature and art are the most useless. But this kind of "useless use" is precisely a century-old plan.
Liu Zaifu: Humanistic cultivation includes the cultivation of philosophy, history, religion, ethics, law, etc., and one of the most important is the cultivation of literature and art. When I was in Beijing, I called for a reform of textbooks, which mainly meant that from primary and secondary schools to universities, the content of literature and art in textbooks was too one-sided and too pale. The so-called one-sidedness means that it is "too unliterary" and "too unartistic". The so-called pale means that there are only a few ancient Chinese poems with "people's nature", some works of modern and contemporary "progressive" writers, and a few pitiful foreign literary ornaments, and the rest is completely unknown. I don't read Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Faulkner, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, Van Gogh, etc., there is no place for them. Cai Yuanpei is very great, he attaches so much importance to "aesthetics" and humanities, because he knows that the primary mission of education is to "establish the heart" for students. If you can't set your heart for the children, how can you have a heart for heaven and earth?