What does a nation need?

What does a nation need?

The German philosopher Hegel said that only if a nation has some people who pay attention to the sky, they will have hope; if a nation only cares about the things under its feet, it will have no future. Are there any real universities in China? My answer is that for most of the century, China did not have a real university, especially in the past 20 years or so. What is a real university? I'm going to go a little further.

The reason why Confucius is great is that he established a school through which he popularized a theory and passed it down from generation to generation. Around the 5th century BC, several major civilizations in the world each formed their own classics and passed down the culture of their respective nations in words, and the world entered the Axial Age. Today, the reason why Westerners are so powerful is that they later surpassed all other ancient civilizations. Especially in the era of globalization, a powerful force forces other civilizations to change themselves and cater to it. Where does this power come from? It's from college.

The more civilized a society is, the more it needs a group of professional scholars to construct a systematic theoretical system that can become the cultural identity of all members of society. The unified body formed by these intelligent intellectual elites is the university.

When did such a university begin?

The West first established something called Academy in the time of Plato. What did Plato’s Academy do? Westerners believe that things that are visible and tangible are not the most important. Behind them is an abstract Logos that can be accurately expressed using mathematics, logic, and language. According to today's terms, it is a law or a rule. That is the root of all things. As long as you grasp this Logos and grasp the laws of all things, you will grasp all things. This Platonic belief is the basic spirit of ancient Greek philosophy.

This is different from other ideas, especially from the Chinese people’s emphasis on intuition and perceptual thinking. Chinese agricultural culture believes in our intuition and perception, and we establish a vivid, perceptual, and intuitive relationship between people and objects. This is a characteristic of the Chinese people. In Plato's time, he encouraged his students to look for the logic, mathematics, and geometry behind all things, and explore the harmonious order and laws of all things from these abstract ideas and concepts. This wisdom of Plato was passed on to Aristotle, to the science of the Alexandrian period, to the law of the Roman period, and to the Christian theology of the Middle Ages.

The first great synthesis of Christianity by Augustine in the 5th century AD turned Christianity from a religion of faith into a religion of reason, a religion of reason. Christianity became more and more able to reason and pay attention to strict theoretical reasoning, so there were the earliest universities. Two months ago, I went to the first modern university in the West, the University of Bologna in Italy. This oldest university, with a history of nearly a thousand years, still strives to maintain its old appearance. The buildings are already very old and cannot be sustained, so they built a cement pillar to top them up. Some of the ruins are also very good. Land protection in the street. What are these universities doing? They are looking for the laws and rules given by God when he created the world, an abstract truth, and the Logos behind all things.

We know that one of Deng Xiaoping's great wisdom is "no argument": anything you learn or read must be useful, and don't engage in anything that is useless. Reading Marxism-Leninism must be useful, otherwise what would you do? Too much debate hinders action, so it is recommended not to argue. How did that small fishing village in Shenzhen become rich? It depends on "doing" rather than "saying". If you say it, you can't get it done. Do it first and then talk about it. It doesn't matter if you have some "edges". It can't even be called a "sideline". It's completely free. Otherwise, why is it called a special zone? As a result, today's Chinese people all agree that what you say cannot be done, and what you do cannot be said. Making a fortune in silence is the greatest wisdom.

But Western academic civilization is just the opposite. It relies on talking first, and what it says doesn’t work, so what is it talking about? How many angels can stand on the tip of a needle? God turned a rib from Adam into Eve. Will the man be missing a rib? After the bald man is resurrected, will his hair grow in heaven? Can God be a woman? Look; Adam and Eve were not born from their mother’s womb, and did they have belly buttons?

These questions may seem boring and ridiculous, meaningless to us, but they have another meaning. They establish a belief: there is a fundamental truth behind everything, and this truth can be reasoned, found, and Proved and can be fought for. The more we argue, the clearer the truth becomes. The earliest universities began to do these things, and once the principles were clarified, everything could develop in an orderly and rational direction. Therefore, Western elites have believed from the beginning that society must have a truth, a rule, a law, and an order that transcends any personal will and material appearance. Although it is abstract, it strictly abides by logic and mathematics. and empirical rules. This is Greek rational thinking, this is the spirit left behind by Plato’s Academy, and this is the spirit of modern universities. The four major ancient civilizations are all naturalistic civilizations. People's lives depend entirely on the earth and the sky, on the cycle of the four seasons, on things grown in the land to feed people, and on the cycles of natural ecology.

But the Greek civilization corresponding to Plato is another civilization. I went to Greece two months ago. This place seems impossible today to produce a great civilization: the mountains are bare, the ecology is poor, and the soil and water are easily lost. Therefore, after several iterations in Greek history, the Cretan civilization and the Mycenaean civilization always failed in a few hundred years. This may be the reason. Later, the Dorians rose. When the food provided by this land approached the dangerous limit, they were affected by the Phoenician trading activities. They no longer directly relied on the harvest from the land to support themselves, but relied on navigation, commerce, and return. There is handicraft industry, division of labor with external production and mutual trade to achieve the supply of life. Grapes and olives can be grown on their mountains. These two crops not only do not cause soil erosion, but also can maintain water and soil. These two crops cannot be eaten as food, but they can be made into wine and olive oil, and they have extraordinary resources. Good sailing conditions. They traded wine and olive oil with others, and a special civilization emerged.

Businessmen sailing on the monotonous and boring sea are different from farmers who directly contact the earth in a perceptual way. In addition to the vast sea, what they see is the sun, moon, and starry sky, so their astronomy, geometry Learning is very developed; businessmen always calculate numerical proportions, so mathematical thinking is very developed, and Pythagoreanism was born; navigation and trade require a developed handicraft industry, and handicraft products are more developed through commercial promotion, and the handicraft industry Development led to the emergence of atomism and mechanical materialism, which led to the emergence of the original analytical natural science.

We know that today, in addition to using science as a powerful tool to change the world, Westerners also use something to deal with the relationship between people, and that is law. How do Chinese people deal with relationships between people? Through face, through feelings, through human relationships, through morality, and finally through power. Westerners, on the other hand, mainly use laws, contracts, social ethics, and objective standards in everyone's mind to restrict everyone's behavior. This kind of legal thinking is exactly the same as natural science thinking. It believes that above all individual things, there is an abstract rule, law and law that governs everything, and that this abstract rule can be expressed in strict logical and mathematical ways.

The secret of the power of Westerners today is that two things, science and law, both evolved from Greek philosophy. These two things seem to be different. Law governs the relationship between people, and law governs the relationship between all things in nature. However, in Western languages, they are the same thing, and they are both called Law. They all come from Plato, who believe that there is a universal sovereignty governing everything. This thing is intangible and can only be grasped by human rational thinking.

The university is the continuation of Plato’s Academy. In the Middle Ages, it was the School of Medicine, and in modern times, it is the University. It persistently pursues the rules behind all things, and believes that the more arguments are made, the clearer the truth will become. This attitude towards life, which regards seeking knowledge as the highest pursuit, is reflected in almost every philosopher.

Thales was the first person to represent Greek wisdom. He was originally a businessman, but he didn't do business well to make money and was always exploring useless things, so he was very poor and spent the little money he had on traveling. So some people say that philosophers are useless people who can't make money.

It is said that Thales used his knowledge to make a lot of money one year. Of course, this statement may be apocryphal - he knew that the olive harvest in Athens would be bumper that year, so he rented all the olive pressing machines in the city and took advantage of the opportunity. He raised the monopoly price and made a fortune, which proved that if a philosopher wanted to make money, he could make more than others, but he had more important things to do and something he was more willing to pursue. There is another story. Thales was walking in the wilderness one night and looked up at the stars. He predicted that it would rain the next day. When he was predicting that it would rain, there was a pit under his feet. He fell into it and almost fell. After he died, someone rescued him, and he said thank you, you know? It will rain tomorrow! So it became a joke again, a philosopher is a person who only knows things in the sky, but does not know what will happen under his feet. Two thousand years later, the German philosopher Hegel said that only if a nation has some people who pay attention to the sky, they will have hope; if a nation only cares about the things below its feet, it will have no future. No one represents the truth

No one represents the truth, and teachers may not have the truth; the truth is above all else, and in an invisible place, everyone can understand the truth through their own reason. Aristotle said: I love my teacher, and I love the truth even more. There is a big difference between Western universities and Chinese universities. For our book, we specially chose Raphael's "School of Elegance" and "Confucius' Lectures" for the cover to show the difference between the two universities. "The School of Athens" is a very famous painting. In the Vatican Museum, all the people in the picture are in a hall. There is no status hierarchy. Everyone is doing their own things or communicating with each other. Aristotle Walking side by side with Plato, they argued until their faces turned red. No one represents the truth, and teachers may not have the truth; truth is above all else, and in an invisible place, everyone can understand the truth through their own reason. But in Chinese universities, the teacher must be on the stage. The teacher looks very big and in the center, and the students draw very small and on the side. The students don’t know anything, but they are asking the teacher one by one. The teacher knows everything. He is the one who publishes. of truth. This is a Chinese university.

Each of us lives among food, drink, fun, firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, tea, and secular life. But if we only have this, it is impossible for this nation to have the highest civilization. In modern European cities, there is always one center: the Academy or the University, which plays a core and soul role in the entire society. Therefore, it is unimaginable that a successful modern country does not have universities first established.

My conclusion is that modern Western civilization is the result of the echo between the urban movement and the university movement, practical operation and ideal guidance. This is also true. Before the Renaissance, there was the University of Bologna, the rise of France was the University of Paris, the rise of the UK was the Oxford and Cambridge, and the rise of the United States was the Harvard. When Germany was about to rise in the early nineteenth century, there was the University of Berlin. At that time, Germany was torn apart and was beaten miserably by Napoleon. It had to cede territory, pay indemnities, and sue for peace. It was as poor as it could be and as cowardly as it could be. One of the most visionary figures was Humboldt, who influenced the Prussian emperor and believed that the key to a nation's rise was its spiritual rise, and the highest means of spiritual rise was the university. Humboldt became the most important person in the cabinet. He established the University of Berlin. The first president of the University of Berlin was the philosopher Fichte. China's greatest pride and misfortune in the 20th century

For a nation to rise, it must change in three aspects. The first is the change of people's hearts, the second is the change of the political system, and the third is the change of artifacts and economy. The reason why the United States is the United States is that everyone knows that the United States is much richer than Latin America, and it is still at its peak today. Since the 1960s and 1970s, there has been the so-called Latin American phenomenon, which is that Latin America has been stuck in a hopeless trap from which it cannot escape. Why are there such differences between the United States and Latin America? Because the pioneers in Latin America are just like our pioneers in Shenzhen and Hainan, they are just people who want to make a lot of money. In fact, the conditions in Central and South America at that time were much better than those in North America. North America did not even have advanced Indian civilization, while Central and South America had the brilliant Inca civilization, Aztec civilization, and Mayan civilization. But what makes North America so powerful? Today, people all know that the earliest immigrants in North America were the 103 Puritans on the Mayflower. In fact, when the Mayflower arrived in North America, there were already more than a thousand immigrants there, but all American history books began with the Mayflower. .

Why do historians favor these 103 people so much? That's because the beliefs of the people on the Mayflower represent the source of the American spirit and formed what Weber called the Protestant ethics of capitalism. Only 16 years after these Protestants landed, and before they had fully established themselves, they established the earliest university in North America. The next year, it was named Harvard after the largest donor. From this point of view, North American immigrants were special from the beginning. First, they were Puritans. Second, they established universities. This is the secret why the United States is so powerful today. Qin Hui, a famous scholar at Tsinghua University, also studies the differences between Latin America and North America. He believes that the reason why the United States is superior to South America is because it has a good system. I don't object to this statement, but I want to emphasize that when the American system was not yet clear, the Puritans were different from the Iberians as soon as they landed. They only established universities in 16 years. 160 years later The United States and the United States Constitution were founded. Do you think culture is more important or system is more important? Which came first, the university or the constitution? The rise of the heart

All we can do is the rise of our own heart. There is no real university in reality, but we can be a real college student and create a sound campus in our own hearts and actions. college life. Today, in China, everything must be useful, including universities, all majors must be useful, and even people must be useful. However, real universities are useless, because universities train people, and people are not tools to be used by others, but people themselves are the end. To put it in a cheesier way, people are bosses, not talents, not wage earners. The boss I'm talking about is someone who knows what to do and can instruct others how to do it. There are no bosses in China. If there are bosses, they follow others. In the end, they are still their wage earners. Therefore, China today has no influential figures on the world stage, no leading trend fields, brands, and standards. We have exhausted our resources and caused irreparable environmental damage. The greater damage is the disintegration of the human soul and the complete loss of self-confidence and creativity in the inner world. We can only rely on external wisdom in exchange for the consumption required to satisfy the expansion of desires. data in exchange for growth in GDP figures.

The degree of dependence on the West caused by this integration is staggering. Nothing in China can sell for a high price in the West. In Europe and the United States, Chinese people cannot hold their heads high when facing Westerners, because Made in China is synonymous with inferiority. No matter how well you make it or how beautiful it is, you can only sell it for A fraction of other people’s prices.

China must change this path. It must have its own brain, its own wisdom, and its own real university. The only way out for China in the future is to build a nation through culture. All successful modern countries in the world are founded on culture. Japan has long had a cultural foundation, and South Korea has a cultural foundation. But in mainland China, this voice still cannot be heard because countless idiots occupy the stage.

Since the reform and opening up, we are all familiar with the idea of ????centering on economic construction. After N years, a group of intellectuals finally came out and said that system construction is also the key, and system construction is more important than economic construction. However, the Chinese people are unable to accept the change deep inside, which is the real key to all problems.

So, I say that the rise of the Chinese nation depends on the rise of universities, and the rise of Chinese universities today is still far away. What should we do? All we can do is rise within ourselves. There is no real university in reality, but we can be a real college student and create a sound university life in our own minds and in our own actions. The real university is not in high-rise buildings, authoritative forums, or those arrogant things. It is in the life of every soul. It is independent thinking, free expression, and transcendent dialogue and exchange, forming an academic atmosphere, step by step. Spread, wrapping more and more people in it, a real university will be formed, and it will soon become a cultural movement, a group of truly intelligent elites will rise, and the entire country will have hope.