—— Perfection of Humanity ——
Self-discipline and objectivity
In search of the normative basis for social solidarity
Written by Bian Shaobin
ISBN：978-7-100-23414-6
Price: 58.00 RMB
The Commercial Press will launch new books in June 2024
Afterword (excerpt)
During his graduate studies, his supervisor, Mr. He Lai, took his classmates to discuss Rorty's essay "Synergy or Objectivity? 》。 I think Mr. Helai chose this paper because he was a Fulbright Scholar and spent a year with Rorty on an academic visit to Stanford University. It was this reading session that started my systematic reading of Rorty's texts, and prompted me to pursue the normative basis of social solidarity as a theme throughout my thinking and writing over the next decade.
In Rorty's view, social solidarity should be sought from a post-metaphysical perspective, that is, our ideological appeal is not to pursue and achieve a transcendent objective reality or universal essence, but to propose more imaginative institutional models and take action by improving the way we speak, or to try to give more progressive and better solutions to social cooperation through verbal expression and communication. Thus, for Rorty, there is no truth that corresponds to reality, and our unique intellectual labor as human beings is to avoid cruelty by reweaving our language. In short, solidarity is constantly created, and democracy precedes philosophy.
Along with reading Rorty, I conducted a discussion on public reason, the politics of difference, multiculturalism, and the reconstruction of community, based on the core appeal of social solidarity, during which I completed my doctoral dissertation on Marx's social concept, and occasionally touched on the reconstruction of Chinese ethical thought, and the main ideological concern was to turn to the study and discussion of moral and political philosophy with Kant and Rawls as the main line.
In the course of reading Rawls's A Theory of Justice, what struck me the most was the chapter on "Self-Discipline and Objectivity". In it, Rawls argues that self-discipline is not a rational choice based on individual preference or status, but acts on the basis of principles to which we as free and equal rational beings will agree and should be understood as such, and that if we obtain a proper general view, we will also require everyone, including ourselves, to follow these principles; Objectivity, on the other hand, is manifested in the achievement of a publicly accepted norm of social cooperation, and the original state expresses the appropriate perspective and reasoning process that tends to this principle. This is also in line with the basic position expressed in his essay "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory", which seems to me that a well-ordered society or a system of social cooperation with fairness and justice is the most fundamental public good sought as an argument for justice for fairness.
I then take Rawls's concept of justice as an ideological mirror to present the basic connotation and value orientation of Confucius thought, with the intention of discovering and clarifying the normative value appeal implicit in traditional and contemporary Chinese social and cultural practices. This normative value is not a self-evident entity or a state of affairs to be discovered, but the result of reflection and deduction based on the paradigm of practical rationality, thus highlighting the common human value intentions in ethical and cultural life, such as the ideal of moral personality, the concept of universal will, and the consciousness of mutual responsibility. I would like to emphasize here that, based on the tradition of cultural self-reconstruction, it is precisely Rorty's emphasis on a more imaginative depiction of the world in which we live, a better depiction that is like the difference between good old poetry and better new poetry, not the difference between the appearance of a real bad and the better appearance with a capital letter, but a greater sense of solidarity than the existing one.
Expanding the boundaries of our thinking and proposing a more creative idea of social solidarity in a broader style of thought is even more evident in Kinrika. In 2012, I received a grant from the Canadian Research Fellowship to go to Queen's University again and have a conversation with Mr. Kinrika on many cutting-edge topics in contemporary political philosophy, during which he touched on several key points of cosmopolitanism. In his view, we should defend a moral cosmopolitanism that is better able to oppose great-power chauvinism and cultural imperialism, and to support, rather than dissolve, the cultural traditions and national identities of different countries, so as to effectively deal with the ills of injustice, intolerance, militarism and colonialism on a global scale. It is not difficult to find that many of the assertions in this book about the search for social solidarity in the context of cultural pluralism benefit from the guidance of Mr. Kinrika's thinking.
It was the study of the works of Rawls and Gingrica that led me to many differences with Rorty's assertions in my understanding of Kant's ethics and political philosophy. Rorty leaned towards Hegel and Dewey, while I re-understood Kant's intellectual ambitions with the help of contemporary scholarship, especially the work of Wood, Blanton, and Gayer. With the help of the Woodian approach to interpreting Kant's ethics, I show that moral self-discipline and the kingdom of purpose based on human dignity are the core tenets of Kant's ethics, the pivot that connects the formulas of Kant's moral law, and the fundamental value premise of Kant's entire practical philosophical system.
Despite being a student of Rorty, Blanton's attitude towards Kant was much more modest, and his elucidation of the great insights of Kant's thought gave me almost enlightenment. The book's interpretation of Kant's philosophical interest based on the ideological approach of the interdependence of responsibility and freedom follows Brandon's assertion. In this sense, Kant's concept of practical reason expresses the moral personality capacity of having a universal legislative will to bear responsibility for each other, and advocates the construction of a responsible ethical and political community based on social reasons, so as to defend and promote the value of equality and freedom. Therefore, compared with Rorty's emphasis on inclusiveness and commonality, I pay more attention to the reasons for responsible judgment, arguing that we do not subjectively and arbitrarily weave and construct desires and beliefs, but through the expression of the moral personality and social ideals of rational beings, we reach defensible or universally valid normative principles in reflective interactions, so as to respect each other and cooperate on an equal footing.
Blanton's articulation of the kinship between conceptual use and conceptual content, between self-structure and conceptual structure, also inspired me to re-examine the entire epistemological intellectual heritage. Later, I tried to interpret Marx's doctoral dissertation from the perspective of pragmatist conceptualism, and showed its profound relationship with the critique of political economy, especially the deontological value orientation contained in it. Of course, more systematic research is my key task in the next stage, and for this reason I have undertaken the undergraduate course of Marx's original philosophical works in the past two years, focusing on rereading Marx from the perspective of social solidarity and the future of mankind, and trying to reconstruct the connection between conceptual theory and capital.
In addition to reading Rawls's texts, my experience of Kant's philosophy owes more to Mr. Gueye's teachings. From 2015 to 2016, I received a grant from the China Scholarship Fund to study at the Department of Philosophy at Brown University, which was a more systematic and in-depth Kant study experience after studying with Jon Mandle in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany. During this time, I participated in the seminars on Kant's ethics, Kant's political philosophy, and modern art philosophy taught by Gueye, and carefully studied most of his writings. It is gratifying to note that in June 2019, I hosted the keynote speech of Gayer at the International Symposium on "Kantian Philosophy and the Future of Mankind" and the inaugural meeting of the Kantian Philosophy Professional Committee held at Peking University, and then invited him to Southeast University to participate in the "Nature and Freedom: Kant's Philosophical Dialogue". Unfortunately, I had just been transferred to Nanjing that year, and I was busy settling down and couldn't listen to his teachings more, so I hope to have the opportunity to invite him to come and give lectures again.
On my path of studying Kant's philosophy, I would also like to give special thanks to Professor Huang Yusheng, Professor Han Shuifa and Professor Nie Minli, who will ask for advice whenever I have some thoughts and experiences, and they have also given me a lot of encouragement and teaching, which has given me more confidence and courage to engage in pure basic theoretical research. Mr. Fan Heping reviewed the manuscript, put forward valuable suggestions for revision, and gave strong support for the publication of this book. Many of my students participated in the proofreading of the book, and some of them read through the entire manuscript and made many pertinent suggestions, which I would like to thank you for. Among the many forms of association, the academic community may be the purer and more permanent form of existence, and it is hoped that this community can continue to extend. …… …… In his 1837 lecture, R. W. Emerson said of the reason why scholars should remain responsible in the face of hardship: "He knows that he is exercising the noblest faculties of human nature, that he is the one who has freed himself from selfish distractions and thus sublimated them, and he breathes and lives by open and vigorous thoughts." He is the eye of the world, he is the heart of the world, and he wants to maintain and disseminate heroic sentiments, noble biographies, beautiful poems, and historical conclusions in order to resist the vulgar prosperity that is constantly regressing towards barbarism. The human psyche should absorb and convey in every critical or solemn moment, whatever revelatory comments on the world of action. Whatever new judgments concerning the past and present are issued by reason on the throne of its authority, he will listen patiently and proclaim them. If these become his duties, he will have complete confidence in himself and will never give in to the hustle and bustle of the world. "Self-sufficiency and access to knowledge are also the expectations of this book.
Bian Shaobin on August 2, 2023 on Changting Street, Jiangning