Zhao Tingyang: Is there any special reason why Chinese "don't pay attention to logic"?

Editor's note: "You reason with him, and he plays hooligan with you; You play hooligan with him, and he talks to you about the legal system; Behind the phenomenon of you talking to him about the legal system, and he talking to you about politics ......" is actually a trick and no logic. The Chinese do not speak logically, which seems to be a sad conclusion. The famous philosopher Zhao Tingyang believes that behind the lack of logic of Chinese, it is different from the way of thinking of China and the West. Mr. Zhao Tingyang, who compiled and distributed today's book, gave an interview to the reporter of "Nanfeng Window" in 2016, which touched on the problem of Chinese not being logical.

Zhao Tingyang, male, born in 1961, is from Shantou, Guangdong. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Chinese Minmin University and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Hosted by the Interactive Knowledge Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Almost 100 years ago, in the face of China's backwardness and slaughter, the intellectual elite showed a posture of "great rejection" of traditional Chinese culture, and summoned the two gods "Mr. De" (democracy) and "Mr. Sai" (science) to come to China.

Today, China seems to have "risen" economically, but it is overshadowed by the entrenchment of classes, the disparity between the rich and the poor, the moral decline, and the lack of fairness and justice. And in the public debate about "China's direction", illogical irrationality is rampant. Political, social, and economic structural risks persist.

"Modernization anxiety", especially "democracy anxiety", has seized many people.

Why is China's modernization and democracy so difficult? More and more voices believe that this is because since ancient times, in the "axial period" of human civilization, China has lacked "Mr. Luo" (logic), and it has been deduced all the way to today's situation. It is the less logical way of thinking of the Chinese that has hindered China's modernization. This voice insists that the distance between the vast majority of Chinese citizens and logic is the distance between China and the world's modernization.

When thinking about it, should we follow logic, and does it really have anything to do with the modernization and democracy of a country and nation? In order to solve the many dilemmas that suffocate this society, what should Chinese today review ideologically? How to think?

The reporter interviewed Zhao Tingyang, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. As a philosopher, he has a profound insight into the question of "what to think" and "how to think" that has influenced the West and China.

Chinese do not lack logical ability, but lack training

Reporter: Not paying attention to logic seems to be a kind of "collective unconscious" of the Chinese now. Debates in the public sphere mostly start with positions and end with personal attacks. And some government departments, "you reason with him, he plays hooligan with you; You play hooligan with him, and he talks to you about the legal system; Behind the fact that you talk to him about the legal system and he talks to you about political ......" is actually a lie and does not pay attention to logic.

There is another illogical way. Everyone is accustomed to playing with analogies, metaphors, symbols, and hints to "reason". We are trained from an early age to play with all sorts of literary rhetorical devices. What are the ideological consequences of these?

Zhao Tingyang: Like you, I don't agree with relying on these literary devices to "reason". They can be fun, but they are not suitable for argumentation. When "rhetoric" (as Aristotle put it) is used in argumentation, it is easy to form sophistry or nonsense. The Greeks were as good at rhetoric as they were at logic, and many of the "leaders of the masses" in ancient Greece liked to use rhetoric in their squares to confuse the people. Aristotle knew for a long time that rhetoric obscures truth.

Reporter: Analogy is probably the most common thing that many people use to "reason". For example, there is a proverb that "horses are good at being ridden, and people are good at being bullied". In doing so, we don't seem to notice that there is a "Ryle Canyon": if you want to prove that B is true from the establishment of A, you must first prove that B and A are similar or equivalent in some way, and that there is a bridge that is "logically equivalent" before it is possible to pass through this "Ryle Canyon".

Zhao Tingyang: I'm not against proverbs. Proverbs say nothing more than clear truths, in which there is no argument, proverbs use rhetoric not to argue, but to create interesting expressions, proverbs are similar in all countries. As for why many people don't talk about logic now, I can't fully understand the reason, maybe for rap, for fun, for nonsense, for avoiding the truth, for deception, etc., in short, deliberately not logical.

But I would also like to use Han Fei's theory of credible rewards and punishments to explain a little: if doing something can always be rewarded with credible rewards (both material rewards and honorable returns), then people will automatically do something. It is conceivable that if propaganda can be credible rewards, then people will be enthusiastic about propaganda, and if there is no credible reward for pursuing truth, there will be fewer people pursuing truth.

Reporter: In terms of logical thinking ability, foreigners seem to be unanimously singing about China. Hegel said that logic cannot be played in China. Albert Einstein believed that China did not have the two foundations of Western science, namely formal logic and finding out causality through systematic experiments, and it was not worth making a fuss about it. Lévi-Bleuer is even more ruthless, suggesting that the "celestial induction" of the ancient Chinese is purely "primitive thinking", and that the "vast encyclopedias of astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, and the like" in ancient China are all nonsense. What do you think of these claims?

Zhao Tingyang: Every logician will tell you that Hegel didn't talk about logic. Hegel imagined "dialectical logic", which was the opposite of logic. Dialectics is a metaphysical "grammar", and allow me to use this less accurate statement, dialectics is logically useless, but philosophically useful, and can be used to discover the "other possibilities" implied by things.

Interestingly, Hegel's "dialectical logic" seems to be quite popular in China, and I wonder what Hegel will say. There is some truth to Einstein's claim, but more explanation is needed. And Lévi-Blühl's statement is probably based on ignorance of Chinese thought, and there is no need to elaborate.

Reporter: Saying that "Chinese logic is not good" seems to belong to the same series of prejudices as saying that "Chinese are the sick man of East Asia" and "Chinese are not smart", and the latter two have long been falsified. How can the former be falsified?

Zhao Tingyang: Where does logical ability come from? This is a problem, intuitionist mathematicians believe that logic comes from mathematics, but the reasons seem to be insufficient. Many philosophers believe that logic is a deep grammar of language. This view is relatively easy to understand, and it turns out that as long as you have the ability to speak, you must have the ability to logic. I would agree to say that traditional China values ideas rather than theory, and it doesn't value logical training. But not enough logic training does not mean that there is no logical ability.

Emotional issues cannot be raised with logic

Reporter: There have always been accusations that the Chinese lack the ability to think logically from ancient classic texts. The first was Mr. Yang Zhenning, a Chinese physicist, who said that the reason why modern science did not sprout in China has a lot to do with the Book of Changes. Then there are others, saying that the I Ching, the Analects, Mencius, etc., are full of contradictory logical errors.

Zhao Tingyang: As I said earlier, most of the ancient Chinese classics express ideas, not theories, and it is not surprising that some concepts are inconsistent with each other, and it must also be taken into account that life itself is full of contradictions, so the ideas that express life are somewhat contradictory, but they reflect life truthfully. It's not illogical.

Reporter: Confucius once said, "Three years without changing the way of the father, can be described as filial piety." Someone asked: why three years instead of two years, four years? There is no reason for this. This is somewhat similar to a logical dilemma of "dialectics": why is it divided into two, and not divided into three and four? How are these allegations evaluated?

Zhao Tingyang: As far as the question of why it is "three years of filial piety" and not something else, I would like to say that there is no logical problem here, only a cultural or emotional issue, and the context of the times should be considered.

If Confucius were to be reincarnated, he would definitely take into account the rhythm of today's life, and I am afraid he would not recommend three years. Why Confucius recommended three years back then, the reason is to be examined, I guess it may be roughly symmetrical with the time of parents raising infants and young children, of course, not strictly symmetrical, but just a choice that is roughly symmetrical in terms of feelings. If you use logic to raise the bar in these matters, IMHO, I am afraid that I will not know what academics are, nor will I have a sense of emotion.

Reporter: According to this statement, can the mystical concepts such as "heaven and man induction" that we talked about earlier not be dismissed with the phrase "no logic"?

Zhao Tingyang: Not everything is an epistemological problem, and it needs to be analyzed in detail. "Celestial and human induction", if it is judged as knowledge, is obviously not true, so it is not credible. Whether Dong Zhongshu himself believes it or not is still a question. As far as the historical context is concerned, the perception of heaven and man is probably not an intellectual judgment, but a fictitious political pressure. In the pre-Qin society, the space for freedom was relatively large, and the people's will could roughly form political pressure on the rule, but since the Qin and Han dynasties, it has become autocratic, and public opinion is not as clear as before. Of course, it is unknown whether Dong Zhongshu thinks so.

The biggest difference between Chinese and Western thinking

Reporter: We agree that logical thinking must pay attention to conceptual clarity. And some classic texts in ancient China seem to like to play vague and mysterious.

Like the "Ke Dao" in the "Tao Te Ching", some people say that it means "can be said", but you say that it means "there are rules to follow". In your essay "Possible Solutions and Understandings of the Dao", you put forward the idea that "the pursuit of knowledge in ancient China has nothing to do with transcendental problems, but is basically the pursuit of knowledge bounded by the problems of life, and even those imaginations about the universal principles of all things in nature, such as the five elements of yin and yang, are artistic commentaries on the knowledge of life, and are by no means 'scientific' inquiry".

I don't know if this can be understood as a few questions: the ancient Chinese didn't like to play mystery outside of life; The ancient Chinese were not interested in the epistemological pursuit of the nature of the world—and therefore did not pay much attention to the logic that Westerners played?

Zhao Tingyang: Ancient Chinese thought usually did not think about transcendent existence, and focused mainly on the problems of human life, such as ethics, politics, war, peace, and so on. But Western thought is equally concerned about these issues. If there is any biggest difference between Chinese and Western thought, I would like to say that Western thought is looking for the concept of eternal, absolute, unchanging, perfect, complete, and ultimate, and the two fundamental ideas of the West, Greece and Christianity, both pursue the eternal "perfect concept", that is, the concept that is too good to be better, God, perfect man, perfect thing, absolutely selfless sacrifice (Jesus), absolutely pure mother (Madonna), a castle that is not bad for thousands of years, an absolutely flawless diamond, an invincible superman, and so on.

Perfection means eternal, super-historical, unchanging, and logic is best suited to talk about such concepts; The intellectual intent of ancient China was to understand the ever-changing, uncertain, and incompleteness of existence. I Ching, Lao Tzu, and Confucius do not assume the concept of perfection, but value the "state of being" that is always on the way.

Reporter: How to understand that the two ideas of China and the West are different in "whether to pursue perfection", but it does not imply that there is a difference between superior and inferior?

Zhao Tingyang: For example, the landmark Gödel's theorem thwarted the dream of completeness and consistency in mathematics (mathematics best represents the concept of perfection), and once made mathematicians worry that truth was lost forever. However, if the ancient Chinese mathematicians or philosophers heard about Gödel's theorem, they would not be troubled, but would have met late, and according to Lao Tzu's view, incompleteness or inconsistency is the truth of all existence. In fact, as long as a fact or problem involves "infinity," it must be incomplete or inconsistent.

I Ching imagines that yin and yang need to be dynamically balanced; In the eyes of Confucius, the sage also had shortcomings; In Lao Tzu's view, existence is like water, and no state of existence is absolutely good or so good that it cannot be changed. This state of "on the road" has no logical and established inevitability, it will always be bifurcated, and there will always be a wrong path, and the wrong path may not be able to turn bad things into good things. This kind of thinking has nothing to do with whether or not there is logical ability, but it is different from the question of thought and intention.

Reporter: Your theory of the "world system" is an attempt to provide an idea for the world today to transcend the "anarchy" of constant conflict, which happens to be fundamentally different from the Western ideas about "world peace".

Zhao Tingyang: The "Tianxia System" tries to solve the problem of globalization that Kant's theory of peace cannot solve. There is indeed a big difference in methodology and basic concepts, Kant and other peace theories are all looking for the possibility of world peace from international conditions, and my method is reversed, which is to reverse the necessary conditions for world peace from the concept of world peace. I believe that the "Tianxia System" is the best theory of peace that can provide ideas for a globalized world system.

More important than logic is rationality

Reporter: Logic is one of the seven basic disciplines identified by UNESCO, which shows its importance. You have planned two sessions of UNESCO's "Philosophy Day" China project, what are your expectations or suggestions for Chinese people to improve their logical thinking skills?

Zhao Tingyang: As mentioned earlier, everyone has logical ability, but the logical level can be improved. The teaching of logic should contribute to the popularization of logical knowledge. However, having knowledge of logic does not guarantee effective application. I have met some PhDs in logic, and I have been surprised to find that they are familiar with logical formulations and derivation techniques, but they seem to show the logic of their thinking only when they do abstract symbolic calculus, and they have no advantage in thinking about other problems, and sometimes they are even very illogical. This strange incident made me realize that logic is not only a technique, but also an attitude, to be precise, a rational attitude. Without a rational attitude, no amount of logical technology can be used.

Therefore, it is more important to learn a rational attitude than to learn the technique of logic – there was a movement to "learn a little logic" during the Mao era, and it seems that it has no obvious effect. As for how we can learn rational attitudes, I don't know. There may be at least two things to be aware of: what you like may not be true; The right idea needs to be argued or evidenced.