Interviewee: Xu Ben, a well-known scholar, lives in the United States. He has taught in the Department of Foreign Languages of Soochow University and the Department of English at St. Mary's College in California, USA, and his writing fields include public life, national education, public cultural memory, and civil society construction. He is the author of "Between Fools and Heroes: Two Faces of Mass Society", "Public Life Toward Dignity", "Intellectuals and Public Politics", "What Reasons People Remember", etc., and edited his father's collection of reminiscences, "The Returning Vegetarian: Life in Words". The latest book, The Enlightenment of Advancing with the Times, was published by Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore in January 2021.
Interviewers: Cai Xiang, Wu Xuanran, Zhao Xueshan, scholar Scholar volunteer editor. Lin Dong and Fang Huakang also contributed to this article.
01 Man's ignorance and superstition are not due to the lack of education,
It's because I've only had one kind of education
Scholars: How did enlightenment as a question first enter your academic horizons? And what kind of "depreciation to reaffirmation" process did your study of the Enlightenment go through? What are the specific reasons for this shift?
Xu Ben: For me, the formation of a conscious consciousness of enlightenment is a process of gradual development and gradual clarity. The cause of the shift was to respond to the cultural events I experienced and some of the problems I saw. It starts out as a need for work and writing. I teach in the English Department at American University, teaching courses in literature and literary theory, neoclassical and romantic literature, existential literature, absurd and black humor literature, and anti-utopia literature, which in itself have many humanistic themes with enlightenment significance. The English Department is responsible for teaching science students in various departments of compulsory reasoning writing, and one of the subjects I teach is public reasoning, and later I wrote "Bright Dialogue: 18 Lectures on Public Reasoning" with this part of the teaching content.
"Enlightenment with the Times", by Xu Ben, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, January 2021 edition
I also taught the reading of the humanities from Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment, which was later written as Classic Reading: Humanistic Education in American Universities. I also wrote many commentaries and cultural commentaries, which were later compiled into four collections published by the Oriental Publishing House, all of which had the meaning of enlightenment: "What kind of faith is needed in the age of doubt", "Politics is everyone's side business", "How far can listening to the drums of conscience go", "Decadence and Silence: A Perspective on Cynic Culture".
The humanist enlightenment was distorted and belittled, and I began to pay attention to the issue that began with the "liberal vs. new left" controversy in the 1990s. The New Left used "post-learning" (postmodernism and postcolonial theory) to deny the historical significance of the Enlightenment in creating "modernity". The positives (e.g., freedom, democracy, human rights) and negative elements (e.g., colonialism, imperialism) of modernity are completely and indiscriminately negated.
Under the influence of post-learning, foucault, Lyotard, and others' critiques of the Enlightenment were used to comprehensively negate the contributions of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and even the Enlightenment itself. The same is true of frankfurt's earlier critique of the Enlightenment. I am particularly disturbed by the fact that such a cultural critique directly links the Enlightenment and its critical rationality to the instrumental rationality of totalitarianism in the 20th century. This gave me the idea of justifying enlightenment and reaffirming it. But because I was busy teaching and other things, I didn't start writing until around my retirement in 2017.
At the end of 2018, I began to teach the reading of Western humanistic classics for "Seeing Ideals", and Mr. Liang Wendao suggested that I start from Greece and Rome, because at that time, the book "Enlightenment with the Times" was almost written, so I asked to talk about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment first, so that I could combine the reading of the work with the Enlightenment discourse. The reading section of the Enlightenment classics has nearly 400,000 words and involves more than 20 writers and more than 20 works.
I do this because many of the people who talk about the Enlightenment never seem to have read the works of the writers of the Enlightenment well, but only talk about them with some concepts and no roots. This is true of New Leftists at home, even some prominent liberal figures abroad. Berlin is an example.
Isaiah Berlin's counter-Enlightenment theory is based on an allegory of the difference between a hedgehog and a fox. This witty metaphor is the highlight of his theory, which largely compensates for the shortcomings of practical arguments. The hedgehog represents monism and the fox represents pluralism, which forms the opposition between what Berlin called the 18th-century "enlightenment" and the "counter-enlightenment", and although he himself did not completely deny the enlightenment, as a staunch "pluralist", he was more sympathetic to some of the thinkers he called "counter-enlightenment".
Simply put, the "hedgehog" (monism) establishes an all-encompassing unifying theory of human behavior, historical experience, and political values; the "fox" (pluralism) sees diversity everywhere and fears fanatics who are willing to sacrifice human dignity on the altar of an idea.
Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was an English philosopher, conceptual historian and political theorist
For Berlin, moral, ideological, ethical, and cultural pluralism is consistent with the fundamental values of liberalism, including recognition and tolerance. Monism, on the other hand, is contrary to liberal values, is theoretically wrong, and is politically dangerous. The problem is not the distinction between his monism and pluralism, but the enlightenment of the 18th century was not at all "monism" as he called it.
Commenting on Berlin's accusations of enlightenment "mind madness," Steven Lukes sarcastically said that Berlin's prejudice against the Enlightenment was that "he did not concentrate on reading enlightenment thinkers, and certainly did not talk much about them." He was more interested in how they were perceived and understood." (The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, 54-55)
Without the foundation of reading the classics, the understanding and evaluation of the 18th-century Enlightenment is unreliable. In my reading of the 18th-century Enlightenment writers, from Hume's Theory of Human Nature, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Montesquieu's Spirit of Law and Persian Faith, Voltaire's The Honest Man, Diderot's Nephew of Ramo, Rousseau's On the Origin and Basis of Human Inequality, The Social Contract, Lessing's Nathan the Wise, and Kant's What is Enlightenment, can we find the dangerous extremism and intellectual madness that Berlin spoke of?
I reiterate that the Enlightenment is, of course, not just a position, but a matter of historical facts and rational analysis, and that Enlightenment with The Advancement of Time is only the first part of my Enlightenment trilogy; the second is Reading the Humanistic Classics: The Enlightenment (reading specific and important works, forthcoming); and the third is The Principles of Knowledge Transmission of the Enlightenment (the methodology of the Enlightenment, including the cognition and ethics of the Enlightenment, is yet to be completed). I hope to use these three works to fully express my views on the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Enlightenment itself.
Scholar: What kind of personal concern do you have behind the thinking about the issue of "enlightenment"? What questions have you thought about that personal concern extended to?
Xu Ben: Behind the enlightenment problem is a wish of mine, and I hope that more people can become more aware of some important conceptual issues related to enlightenment, that is, the enlightenment of "enlightenment". As for the other enlightenment work, I have limited ability alone, just do what I can.
For example, I introduce the basic principles of public reasoning, and the book Bright Dialogue is well received. I realized that people really needed this, so I wrote another book on this subject, "The Cognition and Ethics of Critical Thinking.". These two books are sister chapters. The previous book focused on rational logical arguments, but if it is only confined to the side of logical rationality, it is possible to fall into "logic-centrism", the flaw of which is to treat thinking as a logical process that can exclude the complex and contradictory human factors of the thinker himself.
It falsely implies that once the correct thought process is established, every rational person thinks according to it. In this way, the rationality of thinking may ignore different personal factors, such as emotions, mentality, emotions, temperament, habits, the influence of circumstances, and so on. Thus, the mental enlightenment discussed in the latter book on reasoning is a complement to the intellectual enlightenment in the previous book.
Bright Dialogue (2014), Cognitive and Ethical of Critical Thinking (2021)
I also attach great importance to the enlightenment effect of ancient classics and classic reading, especially the inheritance of classical works on the humanistic concepts of our thinking about politics, society, and human nature today. The British mathematician, philosopher and educator Alfred N. Whitehead has a special chapter on "The Aims of Education" to discuss the importance of classical culture to modern education.
In my own experience and experience, I hope that reading the ancient classics will make as many people as possible the kind of "modern people who love the classics" as Peter Guy called in The Age of Enlightenment. In a letter to Moses Mendelssohn in 1756, Lessing wrote, "Let us learn from the ancients, besides nature, who is a better teacher than the ancients?" I presided over the reading of the Western humanistic classics on "Seeing Ideals", and the lectures would be published into books later, hoping to play such an enlightening role.
As the Dutch humanist Johann Heizienha put it in his book The Man of Games, the 18th-century Enlightenment "was only the day before yesterday for us, so how can we lose the explanatory origin of such a close history?" "This source should first and foremost be the source of modern ideas.
"Ideas" are those who have a view of major issues (history, human nature, society, politics), which is often supported by values. The 18th-century Enlightenment thought has a close neighborly relationship with our world today because it provides us with some of the basic ideas that still influence our modern life, beliefs in people underpinned by the values of freedom.
The concepts of enlightenment include: man can use reason to understand the world and man himself, man's independent thought has irreplaceable value, man is a whole existence, self-perfection is the value of man's existence, eternal peace and universal values are the common aspirations of mankind, and mankind should unite with each other in the spirit of the world's compatriots in order to seek common development.
Such a concept is a combination of belief and value. These concepts contain the conviction that human civilization has been formed so hard in the course of historical development that it should only advance, not regress; that constitutionalism and the rule of law are superior to autocracy and dictatorship; that church and state should be separated; that democracy is the mastery of the people, not for the people, and so on. The values that underpin enlightenment beliefs are freedom, equality, fraternity, dignity, tolerance, benevolence, and compassion. These ideas, beliefs and values constitute the concept of justice in today's world and are worth passing on from generation to generation.
Painting "Une soirée chez Madame Geoffrin" depicting the French salon culture of the Enlightenment period
Fundamentally, the problem of enlightenment is the problem of education, not of abstract educational ideas or theories, but of education in a particular political and social environment, limited by the power of domination. Today, many people are ignorant, superstitious, and fanatical, not because they are not educated, but because they have only received one kind of education.
Ignorance without knowledge, and equal ignorance by accepting only one kind of knowledge, probably even more pernicious ignorance. The relationship between power and the masses has thus become a concern for me, and I have written books on this subject, such as Between Fools and Heroes: Two Faces of Mass Society, Domination and Education: From Citizens to Citizens, and A History of Tyranny: Power and the People in the 20th Century.
Enlightenment is inseparable from the enlightener, and intellectually speaking, intellectuals should be enlightened, disseminators of true knowledge, but this is far from the case. Many intellectuals create truth on the one hand and lies on the other. Since ancient times, Chinese intellectuals have had a tradition of using full-belly learning as a stepping stone to political capital or career.
In ancient times, it was "half of the Analects that ruled the world", and now there are high degrees that can be mixed with officials. The Enlightenment could not count on such intellectuals. There are also many "professionalist" intellectuals who have not become officials and are afraid of provoking right and wrong, who "hide in small buildings to unify, and manage him in winter, summer and spring and autumn", running their own academic territory of one acre and three points, and have no interest in public enlightenment.
Among the many different types of intellectuals, I am most interested in the "critical intellectuals" associated with the Enlightenment, which is an interest I have always had. My first English book, Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals (1992), discussed critical intellectuals and their plight. Other Chinese works on intellectuals are "Where Is Cultural Criticism Going" and "Intellectuals: My Thoughts and Our Behavior."
Xu Ben's first English book, The Dilemma of Critical Intellectuals
(Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals)（1992）
Of course, enlightenment also involved some other issues, such as the resources of enlightenment thought, the relationship between enlightenment thought and western ancient classics, the humanism and universal values of enlightenment, the principle of dissemination of enlightenment knowledge, especially reading, writing and knowledge in the Internet age. These are also covered in my book.
02 In societies where there is a lack of interest in serious knowledge,
The Enlightenment had to compete with mass entertainment for possible objects
Scholar: You mentioned in the introduction to Enlightenment that we need to distinguish between the critics of enlightenment and the enemies of enlightenment, and point out that "freedom is the core value of enlightenment and the criterion for distinguishing enlightenment from anti-enlightenment" (P527), however, the contemporary situation is often that different factions and even opposing camps use and compete with each other for the same discourse. For example, "freedom" has been enshrined in the values of different types of regimes around the world.
A more typical example is the term "fascist," which can be seen both in Antifa's attacks on the Trump regime and in the accusations of the conservatives and the extreme left itself, such as Antiva. This aspect can be regarded as a victory for the Enlightenment, that is, even different positions now have to seize the right to speak under the enlightenment erection, but it has also caused confusion in various languages, concepts and thus ideas. In the face of this confusion, do you have a clear and actionable way to distinguish?
Xu Ben: This is a very prominent issue, freedom is the core issue of enlightenment, which is not just to say that there is no true enlightenment without the concept of freedom—including people's free rights, free thought, free speech, free belief, independent and rational thinking and judgment. Moreover, it can be further argued that people or forces opposed to the Enlightenment idea of freedom were likewise compelled to use "freedom" as a discursive weapon against freedom. Today, it is impossible for anyone to oppose freedom on the grounds that "slavery is better than freedom", but against freedom under the pretext of "there is no absolute freedom", "bourgeois freedom", and "hypocritical freedom".
The art of war says that if you can't defeat your enemy, make an ally with him. Of course, this is not a true ally, but only a stopgap measure for interests. The enemies of freedom and democracy deal with freedom and democracy by this strategy of temporarily turning enemies into friends and ultimately eliminating them. In layman's terms, it is "if you can't defeat him, then play with him." There is a line in the TV series "Towards the Republic", "Good things change their taste when they come to China", which is the case with freedom, democracy, parliament, constitutionalism, and people's representatives. This is what Sun Yat-sen's speech at the end of the final episode is about.
Screenshot of the TV series Towards a Republic (2003).
The fact that "good things" are mutilated, distorted, and unrecognizable, shows that it is necessary to explain and explain the "good things" so that people can understand where the good things are, why those fake "bad things" pretend to be good things, and how to identify the bad things that are fake as good things. This is enlightenment.
People are not completely blind to the tricks played by bad things pretending to be good things, there are so many beautiful slogans now, but how many people really believe it? The average person has become more aware than before, which is the enlightening effect of the experience of daily life, and the more people are deceived, the more they will of course become suspicious and unbelieving.
But it is not enough to rely solely on the enlightenment of experience, because the understanding of experience may lead to cynicism and cynicism such as "rare confusion" and "why seriousness". Wang Meng expressed this view in his essay "Avoiding the Sublime" when evaluating Wang Shuo's cynicism:
"The first is that life has blasphemed the sacred ,...... Time and time again, our political movements joked with what sacred things were—doctrine, loyalty, party membership, titles, and even lives,...... It was they who first 'played' cruelly, and then wang Shuo. ”
1946-1951 5 years SED/five years of successful struggle for unity, peace, reconstruction
The 5th Anniversary of the Socialist Party of German Unity /Five Years of Successful Struggle for Unity, Peace, Construction (Source Bilibili User: 194 Wenming Road)
The American sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, who has personally observed and experienced this kind of mass cynicism, writes,
"Traveling through Eastern Europe, what was impressive was the ubiquity of propaganda posters and placards, written with revolutionary slogans, and many public monuments in praise of revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers. Ideological fervor is expressed in the language of newspapers, magazines and popular books. But if you live for a while and listen to what the common people are saying, you will see a huge rift. Official language and rhetoric rarely appear in interpersonal conversations. ...... According to our observation, the people live their lives... Even for a career promotion, this language is not used. ”
Knowing that the common people have no interest and are resentful, but in order to show and consolidate power, they constantly repeat a false language, which is the cynicism of the powerful in Eastern Europe.
The function of language is supposed to reveal the truth and clarify the essence, but this is not always the case in real life. In fact, ambiguous language obscures the truth and obscures the essence. Zhang San said that Li Si was a fascist, and Li Si said that Zhang San was a fascist, and neither of them may be fascist, and they do not really know what fascism is. "Fascists" are just sticks and stones with which they verbally fight each other. Thus, clarifying what fascism really is became the work of the Enlightenment.
I once wrote an article titled "Because of Fascism, Populism Is Terrible" specifically about this issue. In my article, fascism is a social system in which the status of the individual is suppressed under the collective—the state, the nation, the race, or the social class.
Mussolini, whose soul figure, said, "The foundation of fascist principles is its conception of the nature, role, and purpose of the state and the state. For fascism, the state is absolute, individuals and groups are relative." In the name of "movement," "ism," and "belief," fascist absolute nationalism uses all kinds of extreme means to suppress and abolish the freedom of the people, to force individuals to obey the will of the state absolutely, and to act as a tool for taming.
Benito Mussolini (29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was the founder of fascism
The far-fetched and half-understanding involvement of many things that are not fascists into fascism will have the effect of diluting and bleaching the real fascism. An important task of enlightenment is to help people learn to distinguish things that look similar, to recognize the essence of different things, and although the method of operation is not 100% effective, it is available, and it can also be taught and learned.
In the university's argumentation class, the first thing to learn is "definition". If you criticize fascism, then you have to tell others what fascism is, and it is possible to discuss it only if both sides basically agree on a certain definition. Otherwise, they will talk to themselves, chickens and ducks. There are at least five basic methods to define, which often need to be used in combination. The debate most often takes place in different definitions of the concept of the subject, which I have specifically introduced in bright dialogue, and I will not dwell on it here.
Scholar: This discernment is exactly as you quote in your book, "The true meaning of enlightenment is to see all darkness with clear eyes." So, how do you understand the public value of enlightenment in this sentence? What role should intellectuals play in relation to this public value? What do you think of China's current intellectuals?
Xu Ben: Enlightenment is a process of understanding things, which happens to one person after another, and gradually accumulates after one thing. People who understand may not understand when they encounter new situations, and what happens to them will be different from what happens to others.
Enlightenment is not mass education, mass movement. Only the person who is willing to open his eyes can perceive the darkness around him and realize what the darkness means to him. This is what Plato tells of the story of the dark cave and the shadow on the wall of the cave.
The intellectual is like the man in this story who has walked out of the dark cave and gone back to telling his companions what darkness is and what light is. Whether he can work or not has one condition, that is, the people in the cave believe his words and are willing to open their eyes to the darkness and leave the darkness.
The cave metaphor is a famous metaphor by Plato that aims to illustrate the significance of philosophical education as a necessary path to the process of intellectual emancipation. The prisoner in the parable symbolizes a populace who does not think philosophically, and thus is placed in a man-made or imaginary world of a secondary replica
There are such people among China's current intellectuals, but many intellectuals have become accustomed to living with shadows in dark caves. They enjoyed the cave and enjoyed the quiet years in the cave. Such intellectuals are the ones who need enlightenment the most, but are the least willing to accept it, because they feel that they are very knowledgeable, very learned, capable of proving that the system in the black hole is the first in the world, that there is the best way of life in the hole, and that the light outside the cave is nothing more than an illusion or rumor created by bad people with ulterior motives.
The enlightened people who had seen the light outside the cave were now scattered among civil society. They have little means of disseminating Enlightenment ideas except with a pen of their own and a very limited opportunity to speak, and they must use the mass or even the entertainment media to disseminate some limited Enlightenment knowledge in a edutainment form, sometimes sounding like a storyteller or a performer. This enlightenment was essentially the popularization of knowledge, not the dissemination of conceptual renewals like the 18th-century Enlightenment.
In a society where the public lacks interest in serious knowledge, this is no longer an easy task. The Enlightenment had to compete with various mass entertainment for possible objects. It was like the early Roman comedians had to compete with various public entertainment objects. The most popular performers at the time were gladiators, strippers, performers who specialized in imitating pigs, or "big bald heads" who showed iron heads. The "big bald heads" of Rome were some professional performers with shaved heads, and during the festival performance, someone poured boiling asphalt on their heads, or rushed over with a trained ram far away and topped their bald heads with their horns. This is a popular performance in Rome.
The Italian-Roman Colosseum, built between 72 and 80 years
Most Romans entered the comedy theater because they were tired of watching such performances and wanted to change their tastes. In today's era of online film and television, the use of the screen as a mass media enlightenment, its content, form, expression will have the nature of "performance": the enlighteners appear directly on the screen, clothing and appearance are exquisite, they talk to the audience face-to-face, to take into account every detail of the gesture and expression: a gesture, a look, all have intentions; the tone of the tone, the urgency of speaking, the strength of the tone are also to mobilize the audience's emotions, not just to appeal to their rational thinking and understanding.
This inevitable performance (and the pandering and flattery it involves) is determined by the formative medium. Cicero opposed this kind of performance component of court arguments, but his own court arguments had to use performance methods, otherwise the effectiveness of persuasion would be greatly reduced.
The performative enlightenment on the screen is different from the enlightenment that merely influences the reader with words, and it is almost impossible to have the independence and profundity of the latter. Performative enlightenment must take care of the audience's tastes and acceptance preferences, the most important thing to grasp is a "degree", there is nothing wrong with edutainment, but the enlightenment of mass entertainment should be moderate, otherwise it will not attract an audience with thinking requirements, but only fans driven by the worship psychology.
Although some of the current enlightenments have obviously accommodated the orientation of the audience, there are still people who believe that the enlightenment of intellectuals to the masses is a coercive ideological influence that is harmful to democracy. They say that enlightenment transforms the enlightened person into a master of truth, and forcibly instills the self-righteous "truth" to conquer and control the enlightened; the so-called "obedience to the truth" is actually obedience to the will of the enlightened, and such enlightenment is bound to become despotic.
I think that's a very confusing view. To say that extreme enlightenment will lead to vicious transformation is equivalent to not saying that going to the extreme is a vicious transformation, and is there not an extreme of vicious transformation? Don't say "extreme enlightenment", anything that goes to extremes will be transformed into something else, the degeneration of the polity analyzed by Plato and Aristotle's classification of the polity, this is what it says.
To go to extremes is to metamorphose. The degeneration of democracy into a tyrannical form of government is no longer democracy, but has become another type of government, can tyranny (tyranny) be called "extreme democracy"? Horses and donkeys are hybridized into mules, and mules are mules, not "extreme horses." How can one say that the enlightenment that has deteriorated or the enlightenment ("extreme enlightenment")? Should the intellectuals themselves who say this accept a little enlightenment in logic?
Raphael's "Academy of Athens", written between 1509 and 1510, is divided into Plato and Aristotle
Most of China's intellectuals were not educated in the Enlightenment and did not know what the Enlightenment and the Tradition of Enlightenment were all about. In the educational system that trained them all the way from kindergarten and primary school to "scholars" and "doctoral supervisors", they had not received humanistic education, no liberal and democratic civic education, no public reasoning education, not even the minimum logic and critical thinking education. If they don't enlighten themselves, how can they enlighten others?
Scholar: Many intellectuals who should have assumed this public value have been deterred by their mission or responsibility, "hiding in small buildings to become unified." Judging from the books you published in previous years, such as Decadence and Silence: A Perspective on Cynic Culture and Cynicism and Jokes, this cynicism is also a symptom of the times that you have always been concerned about. However, commentators have pointed out that there is a hidden connection between cynicism and enlightenment.
The Enlightenment advocated that man "pursues the banner of righteousness in pursuit of his own values, at any cost in direct opposition to the old order and the old discourse system." On the other hand, "cynic rationality is essentially this self-sustaining desire characteristic of man." Thus, "when enlightenment consciousness is confronted with insurmountable forces, it shifts from aggressive self-preservation to defensive self-preservation." Can you tell us your thoughts on the relationship between cynicism and enlightenment, starting from the point of self-awareness?
Xu Ben: Most of these intellectuals are "professionalists" in the academy, and we can also call them "intellectuals in small buildings", they are not the descendants of the enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, but more like the scholastic scholars in medieval monasteries. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers were social intellectuals, and whatever way they wrote—plays, novels, essays, essays, individual pieces in the encyclopedia, even correspondence—was not bound by disciplinary walls.
Today, public intellectuals have become a derogatory term, which is itself a phenomenon of a cynical society. What's so bad about intellectuals becoming public communicators of knowledge? Why sneer at it?
In His book The Closing of the American Mind, the famous American scholar Allan Bloom argues that unequal intellectuals are unthinkable. In our current Chinese, the word intellectual focuses on "knowledge". But "intellectuals" are not just "knowledge" plus "molecules." "Intellectual" has a specific meaning, not a Chinese original word, but a conceptual noun that needs to be defined. In short, intellectuals are people of insight who have independent, critical thinking and a conscience voice in society and public affairs.
Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, writer, social democrat who wrote articles for the New York Review of Books and was a public intellectual
The late American historian Tony Judt was a public intellectual, and most of his writings have been translated into Chinese. A public intellectual, he said, is an intellectual who pours explicit ethics into the discussion of a problem. I very much agree with him. The public intellectual needs to have clear values and stick to his values. This is not necessary for "knowing molecules".
Another problem that now accompanies anti-public knowledge is anti-universal values. If value is not universal and cannot be applied to every member of humanity, then it can only be the value of small groups and parties. How should intellectuals choose between universal and partisan values? Is it possible to simply not care what is worthless? This is an issue that must be raised when discussing the question of intellectuals.
Public intellectuals are those who dare to tell the truth to the public. As Judt puts it, "The crux of the matter is to be truthful, not to find out what a higher truth is and then follow it." You're going to do everything you can to tell the world everything you know." Paying attention to the small truths and big right and wrong of specific issues, and refusing to give up their due independent thinking, judgment and speech position in the face of the coercion of power and the inducement of money, this is the basic requirement of public intellectuals for themselves.
Another aspect of the public intellectual that distinguishes the average "knower" is his way of writing and style. In terms of writing style and style, there was a shift from academic intellectuals to public intellectuals. Shortly before his death, Judt recalled his transformation from academic to public intellectual, saying that he had gradually broadened the scope of his public writing: withdrawing from French history and entering political philosophy, social theory, the politics and history of Eastern Europe, and then into foreign policy issues in Europe and the United States.
He was reluctant to spend his time and energy solely on the career path of a professional historian, feeling that he had benefited greatly from the writing of non-pure historians. I feel the same way. When we write, we must consider who the audience is. When I teach writing in school, I also tell students that this is the first question, you must find out who you are writing for, especially an intellectual whose career is enlightenment.
03 Reaffirming the Enlightenment: The progress of the world depends on the continuous self-improvement and efforts of human beings
Scholar: Your new book title adds the phrase "keep pace with the times" before "Enlightenment", trying to achieve a reaffirmation of Enlightenment in a realistic context through cross-analysis of enlightenment movements in different countries.
So, what is the meaning of "keeping pace with the times"? You reject the postmodernist statement that "there is no 'universal history' that has led mankind from barbarism to humanism, only the history that developed from the trebuchet to the atomic bomb", so to what extent do you subscribe to a moral progressive view of history?
Xu Ben: Today, "progress" is a very common word, but many people do not know what "progress" means, let alone know that the concept of "progress", which contains a specific historical concept, is itself a modern ideological achievement of the Enlightenment. From Greece and Rome to the Renaissance, there was no concept of "progress."
Ancient historians viewed historical changes in terms of the relationship between the past and the present. The ancients could only imagine changes to the status quo in accordance with a certain "golden age" in the past. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, envisioned a change in the status quo from the future, which was a revolutionary change and one of the hallmarks of Enlightenment thought.
Many people in China today have a seriously backward concept of long-term changes in history, and they imagine the "golden" era of the Tang Dynasty, Kang Yongqian,and even the Great Qin Empire, but they cannot imagine a progressive future in the world that highlights positive universal values, just as Europeans before the 17th century have been looking back at the beautiful social model of the past, and few people believe that the future will be better than the past.
Human cognition and ethics can be improved in history, otherwise what future is worth yearning for? In our real life, we may indeed see weasels under the calves, one nest is not as good as a litter, which will seriously limit our imagination of the future. In a country, it is very dangerous for people to collectively lose their imagination and innovative enthusiasm for the future.
Although the reality of our experience will have setbacks and setbacks for a while and a place, and even many times and places, history is after all moving forward, not backwards. Steven Pinker called the 18th-century Enlightenment a "humanitarian revolution" against Adorno's denial of the universal history of humanism. In fact, whether human beings are progressing was a matter of debate during the Enlightenment in the 18th century.
Statue of Rousseau in Geneva
Among the Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau was an outlier, especially in his pessimistic description of the history of the fall of mankind, which was the opposite of progress. Moreover, Rousseau did not approve of reason, he aspired to action. In Voltaire and Rousseau, we can see the clash of opposing views on the direction of history, which is actually an ancient collision of reason and instinct.
Voltaire always believed in reason: "We can better inspire people through words and words." Rousseau did not approve of reason, he longed for action, appreciating agitation rather than inspiration. He believed that fraternal human friendship — today it is "revolutionary comrades" — could rehabilitate societies dismembered by the failure of ancient customs.
Rousseau firmly believed that by abolishing the law, people would be able to enter an era of equality and justice. He gave Voltaire a copy of "On the Origin and Basis of Human Inequality", expounding his anti-civilization, anti-literary and anti-scientific arguments, hoping to return to the natural world of wild men and animals, Voltaire replied:
"I have received your new book against humanity, thank you very much... No one can be as clever as you in trying to get us back into the beastly state again, and reading your book makes me want to crawl on all fours. But I haven't done this practice in sixty years, and I feel unfortunate that I probably can't do it. ”
Voltaire was so outraged to see Rousseau's passion for barbarism continue to stir in the Social Contract, writing in a letter to a friend, "Sir, you see now that Jean-Jacques is like a philosopher, like a monkey like a man. He was "a mad dog of Diogenes."
But he slammed the Swiss government for burning the book, insisting on his famous view: "I can disagree with every word you say, but I swear to defend to the death your right to speak." As Rousseau escaped the attacks of hundreds of enemies, Voltaire warmly invited him to live in his paradise. (Philosophical Stories, Voltaire and Rousseau, 196)
We need to know what happened in the past and to figure out how today is different from the past in connection with the past. Therefore, keeping pace with the times includes two fundamental aspects, the first is inheritance, and the second is change. Inheriting some modern ideas that were initiated in the 18th century, such as reason, freedom, equality, checks and balances of power, social contract, natural rights, and so on. These are the basic concepts used to understand and discuss human politics and social existence, and we are using these concepts today, rather than the ancient principles of filial piety or fate, virtue, piety, and piety to look at our political, social, and human meanings.
Advancing with the times is a relay transmission of human civilization in change, which is transmitted within the scope of the human community from generation to generation. Without such relay transmission, there would be no human progress. British writer H. G. Wales depicts a chilling trajectory of historical change in his novel Time Machine. He believes that after the peak of human civilization at a certain point, it will continue to decline in a state of stagnation, and finally the whole world will become a desert under the blood-red sun, human beings have disappeared, and the only thing that can survive is some huge crabs crawling sideways. People who doubt the progress of world history, is this the final destination of mankind?
The Enlightenment I would like to reiterate does not accept any fatalism or predestination. The progress of the world depends on the constant self-improvement and joint efforts of human beings, which is a never-ending process of enlightenment.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was a moment in this process, and our Enlightenment today is another, and to advance with the times is to pass on the ideas and values acquired and elaborated by countless thinkers from antiquity to modern times—such as nature, God, justice, law, morality, human nature, freedom, equality, friendship, compassion, power, authority, government, rights, democracy, republicanism, and so on—with an emphasis on transmitting the action itself, rather than simply referring to the specific content of ideas and values.
For example, in the 18th century man's "natural rights" were conceived in terms of a pre-civilization "primordial state" or "creation" (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), today we discuss the civil rights of each individual in terms of universal human rights. Montesquieu, for example, was the first to propose the separation of powers and checks and balances of power, but he envisioned the checks and balances of the power of the nobility on the king, and this aristocratic politics has lost its practical relevance today.
However, some important things of the Enlightenment are still worth passing on, otherwise we may lose the conceptual tools we need to think about the problems of the moment. Here's an example from a not-so-distant time ago.
The Constitution of the American Enlightenment provided for the division and balance of power among the different branches of government, and the First Amendment laid down the right of every citizen to free speech. However, after the 2020 US election, tech giants Twitter and Facebook blocked Trump's voice. This has given rise to a debate about free speech in the age of the internet, which also involves an understanding of the "balance of power."
This is, of course, a new situation that the enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century could not have foreseen, so our understanding of the 18th-century American Constitution's view of free speech and balance of power can neither conform to the rules nor completely ignore the historical documents. We must respect the U.S. Constitution that has been written in history, and at the same time we must proceed from reality and make our own judgments, which is to keep pace with the times.
On the evening of January 8, local time, the US social networking site Twitter issued a statement saying that it would permanently suspend the personal account of US President Trump
Some agree with Twitter and Facebook on the grounds that "Trump remains the most powerful man on the planet, and in this sense, the joint banning of him by social media and mainstream media should be seen first and foremost as a check on power rather than as an infringement of free speech."
But such a claim, in the light of the U.S. Constitution and the view of free speech it encompasses, is untenable. This is because the checks and balances of power upheld by the U.S. Constitution refer to the checks and balances between different government authorities provided for by the Constitution, which arise directly or indirectly from popular elections, and the media is not a power organ of this nature. Therefore, to say that the media also has the role of "checks and balances" stipulated in the Constitution is to wear a crown.
The president is elected by the people, the media is not, what the president says is public information that is relevant to all voters, whether he is right or wrong, all citizens have the right to know, the media has no right to limit or deprive citizens of their right to know under the guise of a ban on the president. If we allow the private media to play this "check and balance" on presidential power, shouldn't unions, guilds, churches, and even gangsters and criminal groups be allowed to play the same check and balance?
Another statement is that "from the perspective of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the main body that constitutes a violation of freedom of expression is government actors, and Twitter and other social media are private commercial organizations and do not have the subject of violation of free speech."
In this regard, the comprehensive ban on Trump on social media, although it effectively restricts Trump's speech, does not harm Trump's right to free speech in the legal sense." This is a sophistry, which is equivalent to acknowledging that Trump's free speech is restricted, while saying that his freedom of speech has not been harmed. It's like if someone demolishes your house, and you say that he doesn't legally forbid you from entering your house?
Discussing Twitter and Facebook's ban on Trump can be an enlightenment to keep up with the times, and there will be debates on this issue, no matter how different the opinions of the two sides, the debate raises a new question: how to look at "free speech" in the age of social media. Open discussion and debate on such issues has enlightenment significance and effect on the public, because enlightenment is meant to take place in argument, not in declarations of truth.
Scholar: Even if it keeps pace with the times, enlightenment also has basic values to adhere to. However, in your book, you use the world's general advocacy of "no killing, no stealing" to counter cultural relativism and reaffirm universal values, but is this argument weak? After all, universal values themselves have different thicknesses, and even cultural relativists may be willing to stop at "no killing and no stealing", but they refuse to admit that there is a further level of universal values. So, for the Enlightenment, how to determine a minimum universal value?
Xu Ben: I'm just giving a ready-made example there, which was borrowed from the Christian Ten Commandments. In the familiar Christian "Ten Commandments", it seems that only "do not kill and do not steal" is a universal value that non-Christians can also recognize. Of course, it may also be possible to add the commandment "Do not commit adultery with the wife of others", but the second half of its sentence " A woman shall not commit adultery with her husband " is difficult to say.
"Do not rape" was not a moral principle of ancient Greece and Rome. There are countless stories of rape of women in Ovid's Metamorphosis, and how to make a modern explanation is another matter. Women's rights were a modern concept that had not been fully taken seriously even at the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, which was one of its limitations. That's why I didn't include "no rape" in the ancient universal values.
In my manuscript The Principles of Knowledge Transmission of enlightenment, I devote myself to the minimum universal values on which enlightenment is based. The political expression can be said to be the universal declaration of human rights of the United Nations. I'm also particularly concerned about what might be called "humanitarian" values, which are cognitive, moral, or both. Enlightenment needs to focus on how to cultivate judgment about the "common moral code" of humanity. I believe that the potential for human moral behavior is deeply rooted in history, which is why we look back at the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century and even more ancient human history.
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man, promulgated in 1789, adopted the 18th-century Doctrine of Enlightenment and the theory of natural rights, declaring that freedom, property, security, and resistance to oppression were innate and inalienable human rights
Human beings can rely on their own reason to discover some ethical principles that have been true throughout the ages: honesty (truthfulness, trustworthiness, sincerity, loyalty); reliability (conscientiousness, trustworthiness); benevolence (good will, no malice, consensual relations between the sexes, good deeds); justice (gratitude, responsibility, justice, tolerance, peace, cooperation), and so on. These principles are cross-cultural. In different historical periods, people of different cultures can identify with such values, even if people have different views on the connotation of these values, even if some people will say one thing and do another, it is difficult to imagine that some people will openly oppose these values themselves, so these values are actually universal.
Source: Public account Scholar
Author: Xu Ben
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