A belated Self-Intro

I forgot to post an introduction of myself... who was born in a tiger year in Shanghai, China. (And this year is also tiger year according to Chinese culture, and now you may know I am 24 now because there are 12 animals altogether.)

I came here as a visiting student in philosophy department, first time studying abroad and half a world away from home. I hope to teach philosophy in the future, for I consider the life of reading and thinking to be most enjoyable.

Inevitably I encounter with some problems here such as reading and writing in English, although I had successfully passed the written and oral tests put by the foundation before I could come here. While most American people think my English is okay as a non-English speaker, using English in philosophy might be a different story. Sounds sad...but I am trying to be better anyway.

Studying philosophy is a frustrating process if you are confident in your intelligence. When faced with many different theories and great philosophers, I for many times almost lost myself. I found them all right, all illuminating, all insightful, while sometimes they are opposite. I think I am far away from finding myself in this pursuit. Sometimes I am willing to become a Christian, but sometimes I prefer the doctrines of Buddhism.

However, most time I would rather to be a happy pagan who respect different kinds of religions. I have my own faith and god, which I am not meant to be a very different or speculative substance, but only one that turns out to be a platitude....Well, that is to love people and to pursue truth. Well it becomes complicated to explain what is love and what is truth and there comes the topic regarding philosophy and life. But not daring to be naive and wrong to say, that is what I hope to do in life.

I made a lot of mistakes in my previous life, and I don't know how many I will continue to make...hope less when I become elder and more mature...

I read a lot about the Neo-Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasty of China, and don't know how to translate them into English...The same situation with Buddhism.

I hope to learn more.

Some Thoughts after Reading the Letter

It was an exciting letter and it still is. In the letter King talks about dream for freedom, justice, and love for brothers all over the world, which are all fundamentally essential and desired by human beings. His wording is eloquent, and his thoughts are plain but powerful. I have to admit that in reading this letter I was moved by his fervent love for those miserably opressed men, while at the same time shocked by the bestial behaviors put on them. King mentioned his disappointment and the question of right time, and further explicated the meaning of “timing” in a new way different from the way people misconceive as “waiting”.

“it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective apraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to creat the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Lots of King’s words lead to my growing sensitiveness regarding my own disappointment. Togeter with the citation above, the other part talking about the two different kinds of laws, just and unjust, and such quotation as “the strange irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills”, are combing together remind me of the condition of my own country, where such websites as youtube, facebook and twitter are forbidden. It is not a country cultivating the spirit of Socrates. Injustice in anywhere is everywhere. Therefore it must be true that injustice is everywhere.

Anyway back to the letter which I really enjoy reading. I admire King's courage and resolute faith. He mentioned Jesus as an extremist for love and justice, but not the kind of extremism as the end, but rather means. It is not violence we are seeking, but the negotiation, peace, equality and truth. But why we have to bring into "the fact of history" the violence?

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was 'well timed' in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation."

Now I found my place in what King criticized as "a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some way they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses." I have faith in truth and love, but I lack something important. I know that, since I don't lack them when I was a teenager. But I feel like there is nothing that can be done as what King has done in my country. We are just waiting and waiting.

about fate

What occupies my mind after finishing the reading assignment are mainly two words, one is Fate and the other is Story, and let me start with fate, on which a good story is possible.

The question of “is there destiny in the world which dominates one’s whole life” has haunted me since I was very little. The answer I have gained via education in the following year, which might not be a good one, or might seem fairly convincing to me just because of its being congenial to me, turned out to be that destiny is determined by one’s character. The force of the question, however, has never waned for me. This character-oriented answer, though in most cases can serve as a good answer in explaining many phenomenon of our lives, seems not philosophical enough, at least before it is put under the philosophical scrunity.

As what the textbook mentioned, Hesiod refers to Muses to explain things for which he is unable to give an explicit account. Homer did so as well in his heroic stories when it comes to where each and every power of human beings come from, no matter courage, swiftness or integrity. If human destinies are in the control of their own hands, their characters and powers, then their hands are in the control of those heavenly gods. But any book regarding the history of philosophy then emphasizes that it is distinction between the reference to mythical power and the pursuit of rationality that marks the lifeblood of philosophy. Therefore what is fate consists at least not in mythical powers. Then where? Logos? Rationality? Characters? Or, contingencies? And why?

Philosophy helps people think, criticize, reform our lives, though sometimes in a trwisting and circuitous way by perplexing us, to faciliate an ideal mode of life in which we contemplate the nature of both the external and internal world, and further to empower us with insightful perspectives enabling us to engage in the world practically wiser. But what is destiny? What does it mean by “destined to be”? But in what extent the ability to think is related to one’s fate? Many platitudes spring to my mind such as “Change your daily attitude toward life and you can change your life”, or in a better formulation that “Cultivate the ability to think philosophically and you can reform both yourself and the world”. Maybe that has been so much to tell about the destiny?

Then comes my answer less inspiring that the power of philosophy is limited and life is destined to be filled with contingencies and fragments. It is all about the matter of how to treat these contingencies. While philosophy is one way in which the uniformity of the universe and ourselves is its basic presupposition, telling story is one of other ways of equal importance in which contingency remains its feature and presupposed uniformity of our lives might be explained in some other way. Fate is not only a combination of a series of consequence of our behaviors variously elicited by our different characters, personalities and ways of thinking, but also a series of outcomes of contingent accidents out of control. Therefore, although I completely concur with Roochnik’s view that mythical stories leave the nature of the beginning of the world unexplained, I am willing to amplify my claim that mythical stories explore and reveal the truth of human lives in their own ways in which the force of emotion usually towers above the systematic formulations offered by rationality. What I am trying to say differetiate here is the gap between internal world of ourselves and the external physical world, the ignorance of both of which leads to fear in our hearts. While capable of shepherding human beings to the truth of how the universe came into being, philosophy is less potent than literature, or some other kinds of art in comforting the fear in the face of the unknown.

Maybe we are able to reconstruct the factors and elements of the physical world in a scientific way by a systematic schema, just as what both modern scientists are and presocratic philosophers were doing, in which we are provided by the power to predict future events such as the eclipse, but are we capable of predicting each and every future in our lives? It is true that the picture of random order given by Hesiod in terms of the beginning of the world in which the chaos comes first and then Earth gives birth to Sky and Hill is diametrically dwarfed by the scientific schemas given by the philosophers emerging afterwards. While historians provide us with rational inferences based on empirical evidences and fragmential materials, why do we keep believing, though maybe in a different sense of believing, that it is a war about an apple, instead of a historical event based on economic and political causes? If I am allowd to make an even unpardonable generalization, I am intended to hold that the effort to figure out the nature of universe has very limited power to help us completely make sense of fate of human lives. And that is exactly why ancient mythical stories still worth reading and why readers today are still touched by those heroic stories.