"Practical rationality" is a unique way of thinking of China people.
It is easy for China people to ask whether a knowledge is "practical" or "useful or not".
But more than two thousand years ago, Euclid taught geometry in ancient Greece. Some students asked him what benefits this knowledge could bring. Euclid asked the servant to give him a dollar and sarcastically said, this gentleman should benefit from his study! On his deathbed, Wittgenstein, a philosopher, reviewed his thoughts on life and told people: My life is wonderful.
Writer Wang Xiaobo mentioned in his "My Spiritual Home" that his college math teacher said to them: You may not need my math all your life, but I still want to teach because of good knowledge.
Wang Xiaobo was deeply moved by this, and so was I..
I also want to say that a good knowledge of history.
History is one of many kinds of knowledge, which makes us smart and happy just like all kinds of knowledge.
Whether you can earn money by historical knowledge or win the favor of any leader is not the value of historiography itself.
Even if someone can get a lot of other things with the science of history, this is still the case.
History is just an academic.
It is both profound and rigorous in science and beautiful and moving in art.
Among the nine muses in ancient Greek mythology, Cleo is the first, and she is the goddess of history.
The artistic charm of historiography is indeed eternal in human society.
This charm is not passive water, nor is it a tree without roots. Fundamentally speaking, understanding history is an inherent aspect of human spiritual life.
German philosopher Vendel Ban once said: "Man is an animal with history"; British historian Karel once said, "Some primitive tribes can't even count five arithmetically, but they also have their own history".
Even in primitive tribes, there are often people who specialize in telling history, although the content is full of myths and legends.
The origin of historiography is almost as old as human society.
Legend has it that China had historians when he was in the Yellow Emperor, such as Cang Xie, who invented writing.
There are probably two kinds of early historians that can be determined. One is ignorance of reciting historical facts and genealogy, which seems to be older; The other is the historian who recorded in literature, who appeared in the late period when writing began to develop.
Cicero, an ancient Roman political scientist, said: "If a person knows nothing about history before birth, he has not grown up.
"Animals don't need to know their own history, which is meaningless to their lives.
However, human beings have spiritual life and an inherent desire for self-knowledge.
Clues and laws of crowd composition and evolution are buried in history; Humanity is shaped by tradition.
One of the important ways for human beings to know themselves is to resort to history.
Collingwood said, "Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as human nature. This term refers not to human nature, but to human history.
"karl jaspers's words are also very good:" For our self-knowledge, no reality is more important than history ",which shows the broadest realm of human beings, provides the tradition on which our life is based, points out what standards we should use to measure the world, removes the unconscious bondage imposed by" contemporary "and teaches us to look at people from their highest potential and immortal creativity.
The profound civilization that has been blocked for thousands of years has no "history" but "contemporary", and the world we live in is just a thin and poor plane.
But humans are not like this. A person's life is 10 million years deep.
People should understand all kinds of cultural forms throughout the ages, understand the different understandings of truth, goodness, beauty, falsehood, ugliness and ugliness in different times and nationalities, and understand the causes and consequences of the transformation from one lifestyle to another.
Human beings have accumulated these knowledge and views from generation to generation, and it is their summation that shapes human characteristics and human image, enabling us to break through the "contemporary bondage" and know what we are doing and what we should do.
China people, in particular, have a strong sense of history.
History is like an endless river, connecting the past, present and future.
Only when individual life flows into this long river can it last forever. "Being famous in history" is almost the greatest success in life. In order to "keep the heart of Dan and follow history", sages would rather give their lives for righteousness.
People are used to finding themselves in history: monarchs imitate Yao and Shun, ministers compare themselves with Zhuge, and military commanders track Yue Fei.
The voluminous historical records condense the inherent cultural temperament of the Chinese nation and hide their unique views on the universe, society and life.
History is such an academic discipline, which has its place in human life. Some people will devote themselves to it as their own career, while others will pay attention to their own thinking and exploration.
Academic career is not more noble than other professions, but it is not lower; History is not better than other subjects, but it is not low.
Of course, learning history needs a little stupidity, because you have to pay "opportunity cost" and sacrifice other temptations, so most excellent historians come from indifferent and persistent people.
But why are they clinging to this? Pursuit of a long and distant civilization, insight into the inner mystery of the evolution of the crowd, feeling thousands of years of suffering and singing, examining thousands of years of ups and downs and glory, even discovering the existence of an ancient country from an Oracle bone, and clarifying the process of a war from an inscription. Are these attractive to them enough to keep them going? And what attitude should we take to start studying history? I suggest that history study should not be regarded as employment training, and the history department of Peking University should not be like this.
History provides a unique training. We start with some seemingly boring and difficult things, gradually understand an academic realm, master a skill of seeking truth, accumulate a wisdom that runs through the present and the present, and cultivate a concern for human destiny.
The cultivation of reason and conscience is beneficial to people for life, and it is also the reason why our campus has become a "spiritual home".
I spent a few years in college in my life, and it is a precious opportunity to have a dialogue with 5,000 years of historical civilization.
Let's start studying. You won't get nothing in the history department for four years.
Yan Buke, an ancient history teacher in China