Chapter 13 Pursuit of Evil - Appreciation of Bullock

Ernst Cassier has always been a scholar whom I respect personally. He passed away in the United States in 1945, but he only came out of Sweden in 1941. This means that, along with many others Like the great souls of European origin, luck and misfortune lie in the fact that they could not spend their entire lives in peace and stability as scholars, but had to soak in the most turbulent and confusing era of violent changes and killings in modern history, including the two world wars, Horrible human experiments involving the extreme left camp and the extreme right fascists—the generation of human history suddenly went crazy collectively.

If the knowledge under such experience can be done well, it is usually the most moving.Cassirer cannot be regarded as a scholar with explosive power. I personally think that he is calm, honest, and broad-minded, but he treats people as people very prudently. He is a very good intellectual. Speaking of the word "intellectuals", in Taiwan in recent years, people have always had mixed feelings. I remember Zhu Tianwen once quoted Wu Nianzhen, her film colleague, saying, "Huh, intellectuals?!" This kind of question mark and exclamation point The way of naming, of course, has an element of indescribable contempt. Here, we do not intend to defend intellectuals in Taiwan who are erratic. To some extent, it is not too much to be questioned and exclamated. But I am still willing to defend "intellectuals" The word or the vocation justifies.To borrow a typical line from Isaiah Berlin, I believe that when the word becomes purely a dirty word, our loss is far greater and irreparable than imagined.

What I really worry about most personally is that under such contemptuous and easy accusations, often the speaker deliberately conceals or unintentionally breeds a kind of retreat, weakness, and pleasant laziness. "Knowledge" always has the nature of being difficult, lonely, and difficult to be known and accepted by the world, and it is often not encouraged in our current market economic mechanism. Therefore, it is often unreasonable to individuals, rather closer to a belief.But we have to rely on it to resist the huge secular power, and even bigger, those rigid, false, lazy, existence is the truth "opinions" that are always flowing in the secular world. When it is absent, we cannot Not ruled by some ignorant populist.

Can we say that when an intellectual is not good, we are not going to knock him down or cancel him, but use good intellectuals to solve the problem. What is a good intellectual?Quite a lot, actually, like Mills who says "Only a few people are still capable enough to resist, to combat stereotypes and the passing of the real living thing, and independent artists and intellectuals belong to that group" and take it seriously; or Like the philosopher Kant who said "moral freedom is not a fact, but a hypothesis, not a talent, but a job, the hardest job a man can give himself, it is a requirement, a moral command" - very much, only I am afraid that if we do not seek, there will be no such thing as finding and not finding.

Cassirer is of course also on the list. Here we seem to be talking too far, and we are also excited. In fact, we just want to quote a passage from Cassirer, which comes from his book "The Myth of the Nation". After the formation and evolution of national myths over the millennia, he said: "Destroying political myths is beyond the competence of philosophy. In a certain sense, myths cannot be destroyed, rational arguments cannot penetrate them, and syllogisms cannot refute them, but Philosophy does another important job for us: it makes us understand our opponents." I don't think such a conclusion is depressing, but just a firm perception of the facts.Discussion helps us think, persuade and reveal, but reason is sometimes poor, and the last step of "proving" is often powerless. It enriches those who believe, but cannot convince those who do not believe—this is not just about facing political myths That's all.

Long time no see, Mr. Matthew Scudder. It's been quite a while, and it's been more than half a year since the last one. It's really uncomfortable for the few but determined Scudder fans.All I know is that during this period the publishing house itself has received quite a few inquiries of varying degrees of politeness and wording, among which the most frank one is right here in my hand, this is May A facsimile transmitted at 5:40 p.m. on the 7th, on the paper of TVBS, signed by "Angry Readers Who Can't Accept This Situation at All", here is a copy of the letter: "Why is it completely shut down? Nearly More than half a year? Very unbalanced..."

It's strange that sometimes when people yell at you, you feel a warm feeling that you are close to each other. In order to make amends, here we go one step ahead and quote a short passage from the next and so far the latest Scudder detective book, which is seen by Scudder staring at the dead victim after the murder What comes to mind: He lays down on his stomach, the side of his face that is okay is pressed directly against the open magazine on the table, the blood flows down his cheek, and finally puddles on the magazine, but not too much, usually Well, when the person is really dead, the blood will soon stop. Therefore, he was dead long before the killer rushed out of the door, even before the small gun fell to the ground.

how old is heSixty-one, or sixty-two?About this age, a middle-aged and elderly man, wearing a red polo shirt and khaki trousers, and a tan windproof jacket with an open zipper.He hasn't lost much of his hair, although he has pulled back the forehead area so that the top part appears thinner.He just shaved in the morning and he has a slight cut on his chin, the cut is not visible right now, I noticed it a little earlier, before I went to the bathroom, he used to do that, when he shaves Hurt yourself, often. Ike, Ike from Ike and Mike. I stood there with people buzzing around me, some of which might have been said to me, but nothing entered my brain, and my eyes stayed on a certain sentence in that homeschool article , but the same, my brain did not receive it.I was just standing there, and of course, I heard the sirens, and I knew the police were coming.

A famous NBA critic in the United States once said about Michael Jordan, the god of basketball, "Every time I watch other star players play, I think they are just as good, just as good, but I turn my eyes back to Jordan. , there is no such thing, no one has played better than him, absolutely nothing." Bullock is better, but why is it better? Michael Jordan is better, of course we can use numbers to "explain" him, but his terrific offensive and defensive numbers are only one step better than "other star players who are also very good", there is no inevitable reason to say This limited gap is exactly the boundary line between man and God.He is better because of an indescribable overall feeling that we have watched football for many years. This is really debated. It is easy to be ridiculed as some kind of prejudice or even mysticism, but it is not.Every serious NBA fan who has lived through the '80s and '90s knows that this feeling is built up, and it's absolutely true, except that it can't be proven, and we've spent countless nights of sleepless nights greedily watching After hundreds of thousands of games, the practice of swords generally turned into a plain and seemingly inappropriate digital makeup, but he couldn't convince his wife: he is really better.

This we may tentatively call "taste". Bullock is better, and we can also patiently try to explain why (in fact, since publication, isn’t that what we have been doing in the introductory text before every book?), for example, the previous paragraph of Scudder Looking at the simple writing of the dead, we would say, look, it is not like a rigid standard reasoning text (you must look for clues before anything else), but the complete feeling of a complete person; we would say, look at the horse How sad and tender Hugh Scudder was. He was looking at the immediate end of a life. It was the horrific death of "losing all possibilities" as Calvino said, rather than the incomprehensible death in mathematics class. A simultaneous equation; we'd say, you see, Brokdo is seriously trying to capture that trance that flows and melts away like snowflakes, and he, like Scudder in the book, is trying to Staring at the present moment, desperately trying not to let the noise of pre-existing reasoning reality (a full hundred and fifty years of powerful written memory) take away a sliver of his attention.Although this death is only one of the eight million deaths in New York City he said, it is not necessarily special, but because of the irreplaceable relationship between the deceased and you, there is a special connection that has never existed before and will not exist again. Death becomes unique, the only death; we say, look—

As long as we speak with a face of disbelief in our minds, we tend to go on in a fit of exasperation until we turn up the volume and talk so sloppily that we even turn a very real feeling into an exaggerated one. , extremely attached, and the more you listen to it, the more false it is. Just because we have good intentions to be believed, we are too serious about "proving" the last step of the unprovable, and that happens to be the realm where taste reigns. I remember seeing a magical proof when I was studying mathematics when I was a child: prove that 1+1=2.It's a proof process that takes up two full pages of the book, is extremely complex, and is not easy to understand (as far as my brain was concerned when I was a child).For me, who believed that 1 plus 1 is indeed equal to 2, it is just a novel feeling of being opened up. It turns out that we can take such a simple thing for granted, and we can doubt it and question it. I don’t believe that 1+1=2 will last forever (this is what I did when I was about three years old), it’s just one of the surprising and impressive paths that led me to see the vast and profound world of thinking when I was growing up. In other words, I am not "proven" and my gains lie elsewhere. This is very similar to the times of the Renaissance when reason was most optimistic and high-spirited. Descartes, Leibniz, and even Locke believed seriously that God could and would be proven by them, but history tells us that they missed it. They have successfully opened the way of human rational thinking, but not only failed to replace the ancient way of persuading people to believe in God, but instead led more people to the reverse path of believing in human reason and not believing in God. So I always think that this kind of mathematical "proof" is actually just a deduction after all.Deduction is a careful wandering of our intellect, in which there is hidden a kind of inference, a kind of adventurous nature that accidentally finds a new discovery, instead of going straight forward in a closed world in the known world and finally returning to it. The origin you set is a sailing ship or a caravan, not the size of the land you bought in the back garden of your home. And the revelation of this deduction is not so much a "proof" as a "summoning"-it is not a sharp weapon for confronting the enemy, but a dialogue with a basic goodwill foundation, which tries to make a living in the vast and noisy world. The world calls for the same kind, to make each other feel warm and not alone, so that we can think about it more firmly.Just like the wise wolf Buck in Jack London who walked back to his own world step by step, in the snow of Alaska, he heard it, as if awakening a certain throbbing deep in the instinct of his life, making his blood Speeding up, he wanted to follow those familiar voices to see what happened. But taste is not as good for us as Buck. Buck is a life instinct, but taste is not built-in, but poured into it later—just like watching the ball long enough for us to appreciate Jordan In general, the appreciation of beautiful things always comes from the process of absorbing multiple materials such as viewing, experience, reading, etc., and through our conscious thinking, sorting out and unconscious natural fermentation, so as to obtain a judgment and understanding that does not advance or retreat. Power and sensibility, it does have a difficult side of "those who sweat hard will reap with joy". Understanding its hard-won, its difficult to build, should we also cherish it, protect it and nourish it again, instead of throwing it away because it is useless to some extent (it cannot convince unbelievers)? Mencius boasted that "I am good at cultivating my aura of arrogance", which is actually an interesting statement. He was actually cautious when he said this, because he knew that this so-called aura of arrogance can grow or disappear, and his answer is "Collecting righteousness and nourishing energy" - vernacular translation is to continue to do the right thing and do a good job, so that it will not decline.The same is true for the maintenance of reading appreciation. You have to continue to read good books and take the trouble to distinguish them delicately, just like sharpening the edge of a sword from time to time, otherwise it will still leave you unknowingly, just like we see Taiwan There are so many creators and so many scholars, within two years, not only is there no creativity, but even simple good and bad are no longer recognized. In this way, I think we have partially answered an ever-present question: Can't reading speculative novels for entertainment be a kind of rest?Why bother to work so hard all the time to the point of making a fuss out of a molehill? I am not opposed to rest (although the rest of the mind as I understand it is not like the rest after physical exhaustion, it is not a closed type of not thinking, the way is closer to eating and nourishing than sleeping, so read good books, listen Good music and good things are actually the best way to rest the mind), and I am not opposed to just taking a drink and being satisfied with some clever design and plot, but at the same time, I believe more in , when something better comes along, your taste does not wait for your hard work to kick in, not only does it not prevent you from resting, but it does so when, say, you clearly feel Bullock and Ellery Queen There is so much more contentment and happiness in such a different situation. Isn't this what we have been feeling since we watched it?