I am often amazed at how the simple questions of a subject are far more difficult to answer than the complex ones. By simpler ones I mean the ones that a layman would ask to a professional. This is true for most of the disciplines in which I’ve worked, and true for most of the areas in which I have interest. 

The only way to proceed when one cannot answer the simple questions is to dive in and manage to conquer the detailed and concrete ones. For literature, when one cannot understand the meaning of stories or the aesthetics of language, they go ahead and read them, analysing the rhythmic patterns, the symbolic purposes and story structures. From here one can more confidently look back to the initial questions and try again to answer them. If it still doesn’t work, one then has to keep digging in and come back after a while in the same manner. 

Mathematics too. It is very hard to answer questions such as why it is legit to put numerical problems in geometrical forms, what is the difference between 0 and 1, or why prime numbers behave like this. But what we can do is to manipulate our mathematical tools and play the numbers or the shapes around. We can even use the solutions of these questions for practical applications. The juniors try to answer the complex questions, with ornate details and meticulous calculations. The seniors can sit down and think about the simpler ones, and wait for the time to come when they have an inspiration to approach them. 

From this perspective mathematics sound a lot like what the epic poets do: summoning the muse in order to approach the unapproachable, and give credits to some existance larger than themselves that mobilizes the poets’ hands to embody a field of knowledge. 

That is also why I find sufficient reasons to toil when I don’t have a clue for what is going on in the big picture. I used to analyse pedantically every words with their etymology, phonetics and so on. That was something that I could do. The bigger and simpler questions can then be approached when one grasps the shape and mechanisms of building blocks and see exactly how a microcosm works. 

When even the details cannot be understood, most pedagogy would train kids with rote memories and skills, and that is also the only thing left that can be done. All in all, that which is within one’s capability is worth doing. And it is worth putting time and effort no matter how trivial that seems to be. 

All experts in a subject needs an intuition to be extrordinary, instead of being just skilled technicians. This discussion has some more relevance today as artificial intelligence is threatening to invade the cognitive arena. It’s certainly true that a collation of information is powerful, but I doubt that intuition is possible for machines. 

Mathematics is something about which I find intuition to be fundamentally important. Without intuition, mathematics is the work of a drudge, something that is achieveable with automatic force. I don’t mean the boring part of the work is not important, on the contrary, the heavy-lifting labour is what separates a mathematician from a math amateur, but intuition is what separates a math genius from a math practitioner. 

Humanities study needs intuition as well, which sounds like common sense. But intuition here needs more careful handling, because it can be abused due to its high accessibility. Take literature for example, the essence of poetic work is to influence people by creating emotional fluctuation, which can lead to an excess of intuition for readers and researchers. The job of a professional is to differentiate intuitions and discard most of them. Of course, for mathematics and science, this is also true, but as humanities seem to have a low threshold to let intuition happen, professionals in this field ought to be more careful in choosing the correct intuition to wield. 

Or I should more accurately state it as: what matters is the good intuitions. Crudely speaking, bad ones are either true or false, and the true but bad ones are trivial, which wastes our precious time that can be spent with better stuff like idling.   

If a piece of music is composed with an emotional scheme, then the playing should be more strictly controlled. For this kind of music, I prefer the ones with passion to the ones with sorrow, which has something to do with my personality. In any case, I like expressions that are honest and controlled. If it is not controllable, then it is embarrasing to express it out loud with forms like music or poetry. I do get emotional with language sometimes, but I try not to read or use them afterwards. I might do it as a chore to clean up my cognitive space. They are more functional than aesthetic. 

Language surely can be a downpour of emotions, but that is bad taste. The Romantists advocate it, but they themselves are decently controlled with their own works. They are trained to a point where their utmost uncontrolled state is still controlled to a high standard. 

I enjoy listening to music composed with a strong musical regularity, though I also listen to wild compositions, but they have to be played by someone tethered by a rope. Their task is to realize something that has a tendency to chaos, but they regulate it with their enshrined force of restraint. 

You cannot simply go wild with art. That is just insanity. Poetry recently has a fashion to go haywire, which is very unfortunate. 

I don’t even think that is a high-brow aesthetic standard, as some might argue. If you go have a lunch in a humble household, you will almost certainly hear the most down-to-earth conversations and eat with the most honest utensils, which have their solemn beauty. On the contrary, I  find a lot of art created for the wealthier class going towards flamboyance or hollow, or both. 

But when art is created for a much higher purpose, for example, theology, then the hubris is oftentimes much reduced. Although it can be still be played with an individualistic manner and fail the intention of the composer.

Unfortunate event alone is not tragedy. Tragedy is the understanding that tragic events are exactly the same ones that consists of what people might call hope. If tragedy is eliminated, then hope goes away too. The deep sadness exists not in melancholy phrases, but everywhere else. It nurtures hearts, makes people laugh and dance. It is the crucial nutrition. 

There is tragedy in vivacity. But there isn’t tragedy in grandiloquence and sentimentality. If any, there hides a lesser form of comedy, something like a farce, forcing you to laugh, like a tyrant. 

As a friend pointed out in my other article on the Swiss depression, the Swiss education system is not designed to nurture academia solely, which I might have implied there. That is a valuable suggestion to me, and he was correct, although that wasn’t what I meant, I wrote it insufficiently that there was indeed this implicature. But instead of editing it to make it clearer, I think that topic deserves another article on the specific subtopic of morality and legislation.

What I wanted to say then, instead of the problem of education, is actually the situation where a society sets the bar of morality too high as if it were legislation. This is something that I used to think would be good to the human soul: when the bare-minimum legislation is guaranteed, a higher collective morality is a sign of a progressive (a modifier that I used to think was positive, now neutral, if not frowned upon) and better society, because then the morality is motivated by a sense of voluntary integrety. I still think highly about morality, but only when it is followed voluntarily on the microcosmic scale. If people actually think of morality as if it were set in stone, then the de facto effect is that the moral rules are kept with the same standard of legislation, and it can backfire – people can be depressed when they don’t achieve the high moral standard as what the society expects.

The problem is not morality, but the scale of its rigidity. A trite but sufficient metapher is eating fruit – a good amount of it is good for heath, but way too much or way too prescriptive would cause other problems. The question to be asked is then: how much is good enough?

A higher moral standard can also trigger a high standard on mannerism, and thus hinder social interaction, because socializing causes awkwardness, faux pas, and slips of the tongue. A dynamic socializing process is to socialize, err, and reflect. But if the standard is high enough, then quitting the process once for all is the safest bet.

Again, my opinion on Switzerland doesn’t mean I don’t approve of this society. On the contrary, I repect it very much. But I see there are some problems in the society that are causing it harm, namely the mental well-being issue that isn’t caused by material scarcity, and thus cannot be solved by material abundance.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the angels are “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” and this is what I think a society should tolerant. Above the bar of legislation, everybody has the freedom to fall, albeit the choice of not falling is what makes people grow.

On the other extreme, if the morality is not only considered legislation, but also made as legislation, then it produces a corrupted society, which has many examples in the history worldwide.

I am very happy to have talked to a friend yesterday who brought up to me the “chà bù duō (CBD)” concept in Chinese. This is something I often think about as well. Though most of the time the word being mentioned is used to make fun of the Chinese nonchalance with a negative tone, this is one of the central concepts that make up of the Chinese spirit. It is one of the mental instruments that the Chinese use in either good or bad ways. 

If you think about CBD, it shares some meanings with the Taoist philosophy of qí wù (齐物), the equality of things. Zhuangzi advocates the identicalness of all being, either material or spiritual. Much like the monism in western philosophy, but with a big difference that Zhuangzi doesn’t establish a hierarchy among beings despite that they are identical in nature, but promotes the essential equality on all fronts. This by no way means equality in a social distribution manner (social status, wealth – the superficial equality), but epistemologically. This means, for example, a corrupted environment can be identical to a paradisal one from a Taoist perspective, so that a Taoist is able to live in it without being currupted, and takes action in it. (Many interpretations believe Zhuangzi doesn’t promote action-taking, as in “wú wéi”, but I take on the school of thought that argues wú wéi doesn’t avoid action.)

Zhuangzi believes a truely free spirit is xiāo yáo – which doesn’t have a counterpart in English. It is a status of being, living with the disturbance of life but happy and carefree at the same time. As opposed to the buddhist carefree, which is achieved by reclusion and meditaion, xiāo yáo encourage the spirits to face the complexity of the social reality and take action, but remaining a wholesome mind at the same time. A person who achieves xiāo yáo can then live and act in any environment with a noble heart that is incorruptable. 

But Taoism is also an ‘academic’ philosphy, which means its multilayered meaning is only taught at institutions, grabbed by even fewer who are interested in this school of thought and make their efforts. The classical written system is historically removed from the common people, leaving them unable to read with the knowledge of spoken language. The written system is not only ideographic, but also with different syntax and lexicon from the spoken one, which means one cannot understand classical texts at all without a formal education. But after the emergence of Taoist religion based on the philosophy, many of its concepts start to spread out of the elite circle and be adopted into the common spoken language but with lesser meanings. 

Here I don’t mean CBD comes from Taoism, because I am in no way an expert in Chinese linguistics nor philosophy, nor have I done my research with historical evidence. But as a Chinese, the concept of qí wù, which I learned from school as a classical concept, and CBD, which is a prevalent mentality among the daily Chinese conversations, bear a lot of similarity. It is also possible that these two concepts cement each other bottem-up and top-down. 

The common usage of CBD in daily Chinese has nothing ontological but almost always about practicality. The Chinese society, through out its history, has almost always been an authoritarian one with clear social hierarchy and structures. With a huge population, the typical pyramid shape of classes, and the argrarian economy, a large part of the society consists of common people with predictable income and career paths (this doesn not mean stablility in any sense, but they are mostly aware of what at best they can receive and achieve; it is not strict immobility either, but upward mobility through imperial exams is extremely chancy compared to the population). It means they have to be ecnomical with their resources and use them with priorities in mind. CBD is often used in situations where the events in discussion are not important enough in their priority list, such as the color of their wall, which is the example that my friend shared with me. White and pink can be CBD, because the family might have more problems on their plate, and too little time and resources to spend. 

But CBD can also be about situations that seem very important to most people. The difference of life and death can also be said to be CBD, and in this case it is much more similar to qí wù in Taoism. The typical Chinese would take death as factual, and the emotion around it is more considered bēi (悲) than sadness. bēi is sadness in a much less performative manner but considered a human status that is throughout their course of lives. I often discuss death with my aging grandpa, who was not educated in his youth due to the revolutions. He would frequently tell me life and death are CBD. 

Admittedly, CBD is also abused in many professional settings. With the rapid modernisation of the Chinese society, a lot of work require accuracy instead of flexibility. CBD could also be used as excuses for subpar performance, which is one of the reasons for CBD’s bad reputation.