What is the measure of a man's life achievement in such an age?
December 22nd, 2022

But it is in such a world, I say now, that what is most valuable is the nerd. The basic principle of the contemporary world is materialism. What is the measure of a man's life achievement in such an age? In terms of capital or the connection between his career and capital. We have to be smart in this day and age, and a nerd is the opposite of smart. Why aren't nerds smart? I'm talking here mostly about humanities nerds. If you work hard with a computer textbook, you are not a nerd, because you will be able to exchange money at the command line in the future. If you hold a copy of Schopenhauer's The World As My Will and Representation, you are definitely a bookworm. The world is not your will or your image! The world is constructed in computer language. So, I'll define a nerd as someone who lives, moves, and lives in a world of literary texts. They keep enough distance from reality. Is such a man ridiculous? Poor or not? Sad or not? That's what I want to talk about today. Why on earth would you live in that world of literary classics? The answer is that it is a world in which all the thoughts, all the actions, all the beliefs, all the encounters, all the struggles of a nation in the course of its history are contained. All works can be listed as humanistic classics, indeed record the historical destiny of a nation, as well as the nation's thoughts, beliefs, actions, encounters, struggles, sufferings. Such records imply spiritual experiences in which liberal arts nerds indulge. We ask: if you like this spiritual experience, and can understand these books, can you be judged as "do not know life"? If it is said that understanding life only means that we have a clear understanding of the interests and causality in the real society, then this is a degraded statement about "understanding life". Does not a person who has a deep experience of the historical process of his own nation, and can understand it, understand life in a deeper sense? This is the crux of the whole problem.

Of course, experiences are just experiences. They don't give us any golden rules to guide our lives. If you take a humanistic book and say, "This is the guide to my life," if you take a copy of Schopenhauer's "The World as My Will and Representation," and say, "This is the guide to my life," you cannot understand it in this way. Schopenhauer's work represents his understanding of the suffering of the European nation and the reconstruction of its national homeland. For me, this represents an important spiritual experience, that is, the spiritual experience of Western historical life and its evolution, which means the path of a nation to explore the truth. Don't you want to get the most out of this inquiry? What are humanistic documents? A history of the human spirit. We can also say that the journey of a nation is a huge academic work. This work is made up of its interrelation of religion, art, philosophy, etc. So the study of the humanities is to interpret the history of the human spirit. What's the point of this reading? Our age has made us feel that this interpretation is an idle talk, an activity irrelevant to real life. For a real humanist or bookworm, the study of the great work of National history is not a stepping stone to the door of the Li Lu, but a way to understand, explain and criticize life. Why do we need to understand, explain, and criticize life? Because human existence is fundamentally limited. But if we are only finite, nothing else needs to be said. The problem is, at the same time, one desires infinity. This is the same even for the "silly woman." Everyone in the world longs for infinity. To understand this, we can start with the matter of love. If you were in love, really in love, what would be your most sincere wish? You must hope that the love you yearn for doesn't evaporate as easily as morning dew. You feel love is a great thing. What is great should be immortal. Here, I do not insist on applying philosophical words to the love between man and woman. This is the truth of love. The two of you are so deeply in love, and the assumption is that circumstances are crushing you and preventing your love from bearing the fruit of reality, that you can love but cannot unite. What is the deepest wish that springs up in your heart at this moment? You will think: our love is a miracle, is the fate of the millennium, this life can not be combined, and the hope of the afterlife. Let us have an appointment in this life, the afterlife hand in hand. What is the afterlife? It's a surreal existence. In this case, you naturally transcend the actual experience of the world, naturally believe that something truly belonging to the happiness of life is beyond the limited experience of the moment. You no longer want to believe scientists who tell you that everything changes in nature. You don't want to believe that love and an apple is the same thing, it slowly ripen, plump, and then slowly decay, until finally disappeared. You say, "No, I'm not a scientist at the moment!" He is not a scientist!" in this case, no one is forcing you to give up your faith in science, but because you fall in love, you naturally become a humanist. You know what love is, both earthly, experiential and transcendental. It is immortal, and yet we hope that this immortality is at the same time experientially realized -- and it is in this desire to unite the transcendent and the experiential that all the passion, yearning, and pain inherent in love is contained. Contemporary thinkers believe that there is no such thing as true love today. I'm afraid that's a little pessimistic. It is said that the modern human condition has washed away all transcendental existence, so that the pain of love has become a mere earthly annoyance. People in love no longer have great sadness and joy, the real tragedy of love has disappeared. I don't believe this, because where there are boys and girls, there must be true love. Love will not be eliminated because of the special nature of an era. If today the transcendence of traditional religious belief has been fundamentally weakened, the sublime nature of art has lost its spiritual source, and philosophy today is in a state of aphasia, what is left? There is still love! It is love that continues to remind us of transcendental existence.

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