On my dear friend's request, I shall translate my Chinese writings into English and post them here on a daily basis. 

A few notes on this:

First of all, this is still a very personal kind of writing. For now I am working on a new project called "Nietzschean Philology" which aims at practicing our understanding on topics related. I am not an expert on Nietzsche, nor am I an expert on philology; such choice of topic is purely whimsical and carry no responsibility to anyone whatsoever. It is highly probable that I interpret the notorious philosopher and his philosophy dead wrong, and if so, please correct me however you like.

Second, since this is originally a mainland China publication, it is doomed to censorship and I have no way of avoiding it given the circumstances. That said, I would have written these posts very differently under a censor-free environment. Maybe someday I will switch to that environment, but for now, bear it with me. (You may even know where I massaged the text, if you know the censor system well enough. But I simply do not have the time to recover the censor-free text in my head for you.)

Third, since this is a translation version, things might get misunderstood under different cultural settings. I will do a little bit of editing but I highly suspect that these cultural differences will hardly go away unless by adding annotations and comments heavily. Even that won't do, maybe. Feel free to ask for clarification though.


Another thing is, as an afterthought of my writings of the past month, it really helped me keep my head busy thinking, even though the thoughts and words weren't that worth reading and thinking through. These are like tissue papers that ought to be used and discarded, but, hey, we have enough garbage writings floating around our digital environment already, so why not just let me produce some more?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Family education is not that important

(translated from my Chinese blog) This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world. The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 11 continues the discussion of external factors hindering genius individuals from the previous section, shifting from professional education (unqualified philologists) to family education. It's no surprise that Nietzsche views the importance of family education very lowly; ultimately, there are too few cases where families can provide the life possibilities for geniuses. Let it be considered how differently a science is propagated from the way in which any special talent in a family is transmitted. The bodily transmission of an individual science is something very rare. Do the sons of philologists easily become philologists? Dubito. Thus there is no such accumulation of philological c...
Read more

The value of life depends to a great extent on pure hazard

(translated from my Chinese blog) This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world. "We Philologists" Section 1. Starting from the two main themes of classical linguistics and education, Nietzsche discusses how the specialization of education leads to premature decisions that result in foolish choices in life. He also explores the dilemma of choosing a career: it’s impossible for a person to know what kind of career they should pursue while actually engaging in that career at the same time. As a result, life becomes something determined purely by chance. To what a great extent men are ruled by pure hazard, and how little reason itself enters into the question, is sufficiently shown by observing how few people have any real capacity for their professions and callings, and how many square pegs there are in round holes: happ...
Read more

Can Writing be fun?

 My dear friend suggested, after reading my last post, that writing can have more than one purpose, and what I was arguing, namely writing as a form of thinking, was merely one of the many purposes for writing. For instance, writing can be for remembering; writing can also be for fun. Now I would like to leave the remembering part for the next post. For now, let's talk about fun. Can writing be fun? Yes. But what kind of fun is that? To answer this question, there are basically two approaches, both of which lead to the same conclusion. I will start with the easy approach: the supply side of the fun. Now, what are the things that are mostly considered fun? Entertainments. Movies. Music. Video games. Hanging out with friends. Partying. Sightseeing. Travelling. TikTok. Youtube. Netflix. These things can be placed into an imaginary spectrum, with one side being totally brainless, and the other side requiring some sort of effort. Let's take music for example. Listening to music can ...
Read more