I FORGOT COMPLETELY TO MENTION how happy I was that I got to Day 50 in my last post -- that's halfway through the goal of one hundred days that I had set for myself at the beginning a few months back. It's been, of course, more than 50 days since I have not been consistent about writing a post a day. I have always been very bad at disciplining myself.
The original plan was to write about 1,000 words a day to reflect on moral and personal issues that I'd anticipate to be facing in the dissertation writing process. But as you know, as I've begun to write passionately, everything and anything have become more and more personal. My posts have become longer and longer, as my ability to restrain myself to write more than I had planned to become more and more limited. At the end, I just gave up altogether.
As I have begun to reflect on my dissertation writing process, "the issue" that I would like to spend the rest of my life unpacking has become clear: the meaning of it all. It's true that I should not try to bite off more than I can chew. Although I have a deep and sincere belief that writing could somehow get me there, I also always wholeheartedly acknowledge the limit to the ability of words in expressing and describing the "things in themselves." Language has its limits.
Language is shaky, as often because more than one interpretations could be derived from even a single word, it's confusing to understand fully the message that the language is being used as a vehicle for sending it across from one mind to the other, and also from oneself to the other-self residing within oneself (i.e., communicating with your own self).
Like the philosophy, Laozi once said, "The way (dao) that can be expressed is not the everlasting way; The names (ming) that can be named are not changeless names." If we're to interpret Laozi in a contemporary way, we might want to resort to Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument about the problematic role of language in philosophy, in which the idea that one cannot think about complex philosophical inquiry without a language (try it, can you?) paradoxically entertains the idea that it is not possible to communicate ideas through language because not everyone understands a concept in a similar way.
For instance, how can we begin to talk about the philosophy of "love," without an absolutely shared and common understanding of love? C an we have an absolutely shared and common understanding of love? Wittgenstein would probably say no, and so would I. That is, language itself may be the obstacle that prevents us in arriving at the meaning of a concept (in this case, love). In this post, I'd like to share an essay written by a student who interviewed me for her journalism class' paper.
The original title of this post is "My Oral History (as Written by Someone Else)," but I changed it to the current title to honour the creativity of the student who wrote the piece. I had guessed that the point of the interview was for this student (and many of her classmates who had to produce similar assignments) to learn how to compose and coherent essay based on a single interview with someone from whom the student had an interest in learning more.
I was more than happy that this student, Kaiwen "Karen" Wu, was interested in my story, as a teacher, and as an architect. So, with her permission, of course, I'd like to share with you this assignment of hers, in which she wrote about me based on an informal yet in-depth interview she had with me one morning a couple of weeks ago.
To make it read better, I have made a few edits throughout the piece, with her permission of course from Karen who would like to call this piece, "It's a Non-Issue." The parts written in different colours are my annotations to help contextualize the piece. It's a Non-Issue Born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1981, Non is a trained architect, urban designer, historian, and anthropologist. Growing up in Thailand until he was 16 [after which he left Thailand for Oklahoma City for high school there], he has a simple childhood.
His great grandparents were from Chaozhou, a small town in the southern province of Guangdong. Unlike his great grandparents who came from China, Non's [both paternal and maternal] grandparents were all born in northeast Thailand in the 1920s [therefore Non considers himself more from northeastern Thailand rather than Bangkok].
As members of the overseas Chinese community, Non's [maternal] grandparents [to whom he had been much closer compared to the grandparents on his father's side, told him that they often] felt as if there were not many interesting things for them to do [as the opportunity for the second generation Chinese migrants like themselves were not abundant, especially before and during the anti- Chinese movement and campaign by the elite Thai in the 1950s-1960s]; they only farmed and made a living by running a small grocery store.
[In fact, his maternal grandparents often told him the "family ethics": always get up early in the morning; always eat fast; and always work diligently. All of these were to reinforce his grandparents' sense of identity, which was the outsiders to the Thai community; hence, working hard was the only possible way to live a decent, dignified, and comfortable life].
His grandparents' frugal lifestyle is the reason why Non believes his childhood life was "pretty simple." He played with his friends in the rice field, and there was not much intellectual stimulation at all. This was the environment in which the young Non grew up. When he was 16, he went to a high school in Oklahoma City as an exchange student. In 2005, he was awarded the Fulbright Program scholarship and was admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
[It's not that there wasn't anything interesting between 1998 and 2005. There're many interesting stories. Some of which have been written about in the I Was Lucky post]. Non received two graduate degrees from MIT: one is history and theory of art and architecture [a field combining architecture, aesthetics, and general philosophy], and the other in urban planning and design. According to him, MIT was the school that was most pivotal to his personal development.
The experience at MIT has contributed immensely to his way of thinking later on in many ways. He has often written about his years at MIT on his blog. For example, he gave an example that if a student said that he or she is "not feeling well that day," whereas that student might get an extra day to work on his or her projects, nobody at MIT would be bothered to care. If your exam result was bad, then you're out.
[MIT during Non's time was one of the toughest schools that were happy to kick you out if you were not good enough to be there]. You may complain to people as much as you wish about your failure, and nobody would care to listen because most people would be fighting their own fights.
Complaining, for instance, that "I am not a native speaker of English [which was something for which Non had blamed himself with regards to his first few unsuccessful semesters there], I have to struggle to learn so much English every day," would not do any good, as no one would show any sympathy. The goal is to achieve good grades. My goal was to learn as hard as I could. If you're not a native speaker of English, then read more books and try harder to promote your English.
There's nothing about which to complain! The reason why MIT made him stronger is that it left him with no room to waste his time by blaming his destiny, or himself, or other people for his failure. "If you fail, you fail," said Non.
[Non's life at MIT got him the first glimpse of an existentialist way of thinking about life, which was to perform his best with the greatest intention without wanting to resort to someone else to be responsible for the outcome of such performance.] Non claimed that this made him very strong because he had to fight his way through everything. After MIT, he was admitted to Oxford University and earned a master's degree in Modern Chinese Studies [with the focus in history and anthropology] from the Oriental Institute there.
Non, however, does not believes that he had learned as much from Oxford as he did from MIT. Oxford was a very lofty place. "People were reading articles from decades, or even centuries ago without any critical mindsets," said Non. Discussions were not based on intellectual engagement, but on the ground that nothing except memorization.
For instance, if students were going to discuss history, they wouldn't be talking about how to understand history, or what they can learn from the history; instead, they would be talking about in a specific year something happened: An example of a typical Oxford discussion that he partook goes in the following manner: Student A: Let's talk about the movement that I believes happened in 1961 Student B: Oh no no no, it's in 1962, it's not 1961; by the way, it's in May and not April," don't you know that?
How could these two students arrive at anything meaningful in history if the objective of the conversation was, simply, to compete in showing off how knew more encyclopedic sort of facts? These people were simply debating facts, which they believed to override the importance of the crucial historical lessons from which they could learn.
Like one of his favourite philosophers Michel de Montaigne, Non only cares about what he can get from studying history and how history tells him how and why one can attempt to "not make the same mistake again." That's the most important thing for which he thinks history is worth studying. When discussing how he has developed his interest in many of his fields of study, Non said that he had been most interested in architecture -- the core around which his other fields of study spun.
He started with architecture but after he has taught it at various universities, and practised it for years, he realized that he did not know enough about the subject and he needs to know more. He believes that to design a building that nobody wants to use is not architecture. He thinks that people, human beings, should be at the centre of architecture. So he wants to engage in a study that allows him to better understand human beings.
By better understanding the users of the architecture – the people – he believes that which will, in turn, make him a better architect, as he writes in an essay in honour of his friend and mentor at MIT, Professor Jan Wampler: When I first started learning about architecture, I too naively thought that excellence was equated with distinctiveness – and to be distinctive and architect would have to invent something from scratch.
Unfortunately, as I have also learned through personal experience that when distinctiveness is created for its own sake, the excitement often dies quickly, giving way to architecture that is soon looked upon as hackneyed, mundane, and obsolete. Personally, I credit my architecture education under Jan's mentorship with my current academic career studying history and anthropology.
While Jan would probably never admit that he is as much an anthropologist as he is an architect, I am always reminded by his teaching that regardless of what I do for a living, I will always be an architect – not because I was trained as one, but because like him I hold paramount the goal of making a better living environment for all. That is why he made the switch from architecture to humanities, to history, and then to anthropology.
Although he was originally trained as an architect and urban designer, Non has taught many courses in humanities and social sciences. As a teacher in these two broad fields, he always make sure that the course's learning goals are set at the beginning. These goals include making sure that his students can learn how to absorb and express ideas critically -- in other words, how to read and write intellectually. He always wants to make sure that his students are able to engage in critical discussions and debate with open-mindedness.
His personal goal is that he always wants his students to learn from his classes not just for grades, but to achieve the goal of becoming better people and to be better at living their lives. Also, there is something, which he believes wholeheartedly -- He believes that as a moral person, he needs to be able to voice his own opinion regarding his personal sense of morality. For instance, with regards to gender equality, he believes that we should be able to make man and woman equal.
There should be only one gender in this world: the human gender. In his spare time, Non likes to bike around Shanghai. He bikes 40 kilometres a day because biking makes he feel liberated. Non cares a lot about faith. He believes that he has good faith, as opposed to "bad faith," which is a concept coined by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He believes that there are two kinds of faith: bad faith and good faith.
Bad faith is when you happen to believe that things "have to" be the way they are, and therefore close the door for other possibilities. In Non's view, speaking to people with bad faith is a waste of time. If he realizes that someone has bad faith, he will not bother trying to talk to him or her again. ["If you have bad faith, you're dead to me," said Non].
He believes people of bad faith do not see the complexity of human diversity -- that there are many unique people and experiences in the world. Talking about his plans for the future, Non told me that he does not usually plan much. He used to plan a lot, but because things didn't always go as planned, therefore he'd stopped spending too much time on planning altogether.
The pivotal moment for him was when he realized that his most important plan, which was to take his father around the world, was shattered into pieces because of his father's abruptly and unexpectedly died. In Thailand, his father worked for the government therefore his retirement age was strictly at 60. Non had hoped that once his father retired, he could take his father around the world with his savings. His father retired at 60, but unfortunately at 61 he passed away owing to his chronic illness.
Non planned really well, but that around-the-world trip didn't happen, because his father's untimely death. Since then, Non had stopped planning altogether. Non told me that if he had known his father would die at 61, he probably wouldn't go abroad. He probably wouldn't have gone MIT. He probably wouldn't have gone to Oxford, and he probably wouldn't have gone anywhere. He probably would have just stayed with his father. Non would have spent the last ten years of his father's life with him in Thailand.
He would have given up everything for his father. So after his father passed away, he simply stopped planning, and instead begun to open himself up for serendipity – by not having fixed plans. He doesn't know what he's going to do for the future. He is still working on everything because he believes that no one really knows what the future will be like. You never know which comes first: tomorrow or an accident that could end your life there.
He is living in the moment, in the present, and therefore he always wants to make the best of his life every day. His goal in life is as simple as in his described childhood: To be able to get up in the morning with energy; to know exactly what he is going to do that day to make his life meaningful; and, then to give it all into whatever that is that gives him the meaning in his life.
If he teaches, he would put everything –passion, energy, love, care, and so on – into his teaching. So when he gets back home in the evening, he could go to bed and rest reassuringly because he knows that he has done his best to do everything he could for those who he cares whether that be his students, colleagues, or the education and the society as a whole. He just lives his day to the fullest. He believes that life is that simple.
At the end of the day, the only right that Non believes he has and will always possess – in the sense that no one can take it away from him no matter what – is his right to be critical.
Like the writer Ernest Hemingway who refused to go on with his life when he realized that his ability to write had been taken away by his illness, Non thinks that he would not be able to live a meaningful life if he were not allowed to be critical [although he rejects suicide as a way to emancipate because he values life -- every life, including his own]. He is most critical about himself. He is mildly critical about his students and his colleagues.
He is somewhat critical about the entire world -- precisely because that's what allows him to be himself. When people talk about Non in the school, they always say, "oh, Non, he is very critical." And he believes that it is usually a good thing.
post Day 52: What Does "God is Dead" Mean?
Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Arguably one of the most misinterpreted quotes of all time is Friedrich Nietzsche's "God is Dead" (i.e., the title of this post in case you haven't noticed). This post is going to be a short one. It occurs to me that many people to whom I have been talking interpret this famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche in a variety of ways.
Since we all have different ideas of "God" based on our faiths (and non-faiths), it's not surprising that we may also have very different ideas of how it would be like for this figure (or non- figure) called "God" to be alive, let alone being dead. As a devoted and practicing existentialist, I feel the urge to try to explain this quote, which, as many might argue, is the basis of the existentialist doctrine.
I'll probably write a long(er) version explaining this quote at some point in the rest of the 100 days, but for now I want to provide you with a short version of my explanation. First, when there's an imaginable omnipotent figure called "God" to look up to, we do not tend to take life seriously. Everything, whether it's god or bad, can be explained as a "God's will," which removes all sorts of human's responsibility from the equation.
When things are good, it's due to God's will, and not to our ability to make good things happen. When things go bad, it's also due to God's will, and not because there is someone, a non-God human, who makes those bad things happen to us. Whatever happens happen because God wants it to happen.
This way of thinking alone is problematic, but for the great philosopher such as Friedrich Nietzsche, he sees through one layer deeper: Nietzsche believes that the idea of God's will is problematic precisely because the idea of the existence of God distracts us from reality. As Karl Marx later put it, "religion is opium for the masses," the idea of "God's will" has the potential of making us feel as though we are in the powerless position owing to our own lack of ability to be in a better position.
Imagining you have a harsh life; and at the moment you are about to explode, rebel, and protest against your employer who unfairly work your ass off and benefit from your labor without paying you adequately, your employer offers you an opium pipe to calm you down. By curiosity, you try smoking it, and almost immediately what dons upon you is the feeling of content -- that life isn't as bad as it seems, and that your employer are actually quite awesome in many ways.
The reason why you would feel that way has nothing to do with the sudden change of attitude because of your employer's kindness in offering you an insatiable taste of opium, but the chemical substances in the opium that give you the euphoric feelings. For Marx, religion is precisely doing that to people. It makes us feel sleepy, drowsy, and euphorically relaxed, to the point that we forget why we were offered the opium to smoke at the first place.
Marx disdains religions because he believes that the money that go into funding religion establishments and their monuments (such as churches) come from the rich -- precisely because they know that by keeping the poor in check by giving them something to look up to would make them slaves forever. Religions, to Marx, is the most cost effective way for the rich to keep the poor believing in the unfortunately life that they live.
Napoleon Bonaparte has a much more straightforward view on this, as he once said: Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. There you have it: Napoleon and Marx are on along the same line when it comes to religions.
Friedrich Nietzsche was never (and never deemed himself being) a social engineer as dealing with his own mind was already hard enough for him, so he never went as far as Napoleon and Marx in denouncing all forms of religiosity. This effect of religion makes us shy away from questioning why we are where we are and only take the difficulty in life as such. For an existentialist, to believe that there's such a thing as a "God's will" is to believe that there's no free will.
To have no free will is to make a choice to choose not to be -- since to be is to choose to believe in your own responsibility to carry on your life -- hence, to believe that God is alive is, by default, to choose not to live altogether. Second, God, especially the anthropomorphic one, has long been a "role model" for human beings. In particular, God provides the model for morality: God is good, and God is great.
But, as Nietzsche has written about in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morals, morality as such is not absolute, but socially and culturally constructed. In one of his famous examples, the idea of "to love your neighbors" is almost universally seen as "good," and mostly everyone would agree that whoever disagree is, by default, a "bad person." Nietzsche argues that this is a wrong way of thinking about morality, which has a long historical root in the teaching of the Christian faiths.
Good or evil depends on the goal of a particular community. For instance, quite often it is in the name of "goodness" to perform an act of atrocity to protect the immediate community (even patriotic, in cases). But is that evil? Or is it just acting to survival (aka evolutionism)? At the end of the day, both goodness and evilness are religious concepts because it is only the normative guidance provided by religion by which believers follow strictly.
Religious people do not have their own mental and moral space to analyze contextually and independently about what is good for them. Questions that arise includes: What and how much do we know about our neighbor, whom God tells us to love? Nietzsche goes so far as to say that not only should we not love our neighbors, but we should also be jealous of them if they're better off than we are. Why?
Because only through the jealously in wanting to have what we do not have that we could push ourselves to be better. In addition, a more crucial question also arises: What does it mean to "love" strangers -- since by definition, a neighbors are not your relatives, and therefore not someone you would know very well? W ouldn't that be considered pretentious to love strangers? Nietzsche does not want us to lie -- neither should you want to do so anyway I believe.
In this sense, Nietzsche urges us to re-think how we come to see things as moral and immoral, and to come up with our own set of morality based on our own free will to be, to exist, and and to be responsible for our own actions. So, "God is dead," for Nietzsche, in my opinion doesn't have much to do with the rejection of the idea of religiosity as such.
Nietzsche, like Marx, may be denouncing the idea of religion on the conventional and conservative grounds that the idea of religion provides nothing but euphoric illusion, but the message that Nietzsche, especially, is trying to send is much more conceptual: to see things as they are, and not as they appear through the reflection on a certain religious mirror. At the end of the day, to refuse the idea of religiosity outright is also killing free will. Finally, let me also apologize for my long absence.
Since I came back from Japan on X'Mas Day, I had been busy working on my actual writings (i.e., my doctoral dissertation) with my adviser, as well as my very good friend from my hometown, who happened to be in town at the same time (both of whom somewhat demanded my full attention, which I'd like to give to them anyway) for the past two weeks; hence, although I had so many ideas about what I'd like to write, I did not have the time to sit down and write anything.
Here're some of the ideas that I had during the last two weeks: My new year's resolution.
The idea of this post is divided into two parts: First, on the things I -- and we all -- can do, and should do to live better, such as drink more coffee (I am not kidding; it's not been proven that coffee, which has long been used in many parts of the world as medicinal substances, is good for you), eat spicy food, consume red wine moderately, and so on; and, second, on what we might be able to do in order to see the world from a different angle, namely the angle that is not relying too much on the convention, such as, what if we do not have to believe that there's a role into which we are born?
What if there's no specific set of belief that is set in stone to be true universally and timelessly? Since they have to do, by and large, with our existing beliefs, the ideas of my new year's resolution that belong to the second set is, almost by default, more difficult to follow than those in the first set. On Sex: Part III.
Since the last three posts on this topic have been receiving a large number of visitors, I have a feeling that I should try to satisfy the demand of my dear readers by providing the last post in the trilogy, which will be on the "ideal society" that I believe would promote both the equality and dignity between the men and the women. I want to write about a society in which both men and women are dignified beings.
As Sigmund Freud might have argued (but still wouldn't be as forceful as what I aim to write), the first thing to achieve is to getting rid of all forms and kinds of sex taboo, which will, almost instantly, put both men and women at the same playing field. In the similar fashion to the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, my ideas for this ideal society are based on both the evolutionary as well as cultural understanding of sexual and gender dynamic.
As Pinker argues in How the Mind Works, some aspects of evolution can explain why men hold the power to decide what women should do. But, no, it's not the evolution as such: I t's not that evolution makes men stronger and therefore could wield more power.
Quite the opposite, in fact, it's that evolution tends to force men who have certain amount of chemical substances in their brains to want and desire to possess certain things (i.e., the genetic continuity of their DNA), and to be willingness to sacrifice their lives for a number of things (i.e., wars) -- all of which have to do with the desire to reproduce and protect their right to do so for the survival for the human species.
Based on the statistics and economic underpinning of the unbalanced availability of reproductive resources (e.g., there, in general, are more women than men in the world in general), it seems plausible that the only function of men in reproductivity is providing a spoon full of semen, and the women could just take over the rest from there. For what both Freud and Pinker have to say about sexuality and the possible origins of gender inequality, I have a feeling that I could work out a blueprint for an ideal society.
So, hang in there, I'll write this eventually (hopefully in the next few days!) Writing by the Yangtze