Thinking in Tension Content Introduction This book is compiled from the audio recording of famous professor Deng Xiaomang’s philosophy speech at Southeast University. The whole book mainly includes reflections on traditional culture and its modernization. The eight lectures, including Kant’s religious ethics, deeply analyze and discuss many philosophical issues, such as life and death, belief in art, spirituality, religious ethics, etc. Author’s brief introduction Returned to the city in 2010 and worked as a porter. In 2010, he was admitted to the Philosophy Department of Wuhan University.
He studied for a master’s degree in the history of Western philosophy. In 2010, he received a master’s degree and stayed at the school to teach. Leader of the foreign philosophy discipline in the School of Philosophy, executive director of the Chinese Association for the History of Foreign Philosophy, vice-chairman of the Hubei Provincial Association for the History of Philosophy New criticism is unique in the academic and ideological circles and has a wide range of influence.
Representative achievements include monographs Speculative Tension: The Dance of the Spirit, The Journey of the Soul, New Criticism, Kant’s Philosophy, Issues, etc. Translated works include three new translations of Kant’s Criticism Criticism of Pure Reason, Practical Rationality, Judgment, Criticism of Yang Zutao’s complete set of books won the first prize of the 4th National University Humanities and Social Sciences Award of the Ministry of Education, etc. Published more than one paper Why do we not have transcendent beliefs? Lecture 3 Reflections on traditional culture and its modernization Lecture 4 Comparison of Chinese and Western views on life and death Lecture 5 Comparison of Chinese and Western beliefs Lecture 6 Comparison of Chinese and Western art spirits Eight Lectures on Kant’s Religious Ethics’ Revelation to Us Editor’s Recommendation There are no difficult concepts, no profound speculation, but full of tense thinking. Behind the thought, a scholar and a thinker’s spirit is left alone. Reflection on facing reality.
Facing the torture of life and death. Exploration is about morality, spirituality, art, ethics, and our lives. Thinking in tension, the author said, this tension is one of extreme wisdom and moderate tension, which is to seek between the most profound philosophical thinking and the most realistic contemporary life.
It is to survive in the tension between Chinese and Western cultures. These two tensions give us the motivation to move forward and continue to explore, and make our contemporary life full of vitality. Losing this tension can only lead to decadence and decline. Integrating into the current life has its own unique thinking, so this book has the double value of both the academic nature of the philosophical proposition reading and the enlightening thought reading. The collected content of the audio recording of the lecture includes the comparison of Chinese and Western artistic spirit, religious belief, ethics, morality, universal value and social and cultural aspects. Southeast University has always emphasized the education of engineering students. The cultivation of cultural literacy, and in my opinion, the best way to cultivate this kind of cultivation is to compare Chinese and Western cultures.
Chinese and Western cultures are the two most distant and most different cultures on our planet. Comparison is the most enlightening.
The conflict between Chinese and Western cultures in the past 20 years has revealed the deepest roots of our human nature.
Through the comparison between China and the West, we can most thoroughly grasp the roots of our Chinese culture and also the roots of Western culture. In this way, we will have the most thorough grasp of the root of human nature. A true in-depth understanding of human nature must be achieved within a huge tension, the most important of which is the tension between Chinese and Western cultures.
Another kind of tension is the ancient and modern.
Tension The debate between ancient and modern is whether to modernize or not to develop. Some people at home and abroad think that modernization and development are some outdated concepts. Some countries, such as Poland, even do this. However, we can envy them, but we cannot learn from them because of China. It is too big and too special.
If China does not develop, it will be a dead end. Maybe a hundred years later, when China completes the modernization, especially the modernization of human concepts, we can return to the ancient ideal way of life like Poland. At that time, we already have We have the capital to return, but it is not possible now, not only objectively, but also subjectively. The current retro is definitely a regression of society. The third tension is the tension between ideal and reality. Now some people resist universal values and reject the West. One of the most important reasons for culture is that it does not conform to the national conditions and thinks that the so-called universal values are just the national conditions of Westerners. They happen to ignore the most important reality, which is the reality of development, and ignore the most important national conditions, which are the restless new national conditions.
The traditional ideal of scholar-bureaucrats in China is obviously not suitable for today’s national conditions, although it has existed in thousands of years of tradition. It has become a deep-rooted national condition, but now it is far away from the national condition. On the contrary, although the universal values of the West are still belittled and rejected under various excuses today, they are playing a real role in our daily life every day.
They are invoked by rights defenders to deal with various Realistic disputes Of course, it will take time for these values to gain a firm foothold in China, but now everyone can see that this is only a matter of time. With the development of society and history, Chinese social life will merge into the general environment of international universal norms. The promotion of an irresistible trend is not a matter of rhetoric and publicity, but a theoretical creation that needs to be practiced.
How much vitality does Chinese culture have?