In fact, the true maturity of human beings is to bravely use reason while facing the ignorance that they can never completely get rid of, and to bravely live with uncertainty.
During the Enlightenment, we all think of French thinkers of the Encyclopedia School such as Voltaire and Rousseau. They represent the mainstream tradition of Enlightenment thought: belief in the superiority of human reason and the ability of human beings to discover and master information about The truth of nature and society draws a blueprint for future development and achieves continuous historical progress.
However, the Enlightenment is not monolithic. There is an important branch called the "Scottish Enlightenment" represented by Adam Smith and David Hume. While acknowledging the important role of reason, they oppose "rational omnipotence" and the view that human reason can act as a new God to transform and plan everything in the world. The Scottish Enlightenment tended to view reason as a faculty of doubt, reflection, and criticism rather than the ability to control everything.
One is negative freedom, which is not subject to external interference and hindrance; the other is positive freedom, which is the ability to use reason to control and achieve one's goals.
Negative freedom emphasizes maintaining an area without interference. Negative freedom is more like an opportunity. As long as you keep this opportunity, you will maintain your negative freedom even if you do nothing.
But positive freedom is different. It is the freedom to "achieve a certain goal". If you do nothing, you will be in trouble. Freedom must have an action subject, but in the concept of positive freedom, the subject often has internal divisions: one is the "real, high-level, rational" self, and the other is the "false, low-level, irrational" self "self. The goal of positive freedom often means that the rational self can lead itself to achieve high-level goals.
For example, if you make up your mind to go to the gym to exercise and are lazy, you are abusing your negative freedom. Self-discipline gives me freedom, which is the positive freedom achieved by overcoming the rational side of myself.
The pursuit of freedom is because we can experience the opposite of freedom. We have a universal, profound, strong and simple experience, which is coercion, and the extreme of coercion is slavery.
Young students in the West admire three spiritual teachers. These three names all start with the English letter M and are called the "3M", namely Marx, Mao Zedong and Marcuse.
"False needs" do not originate from your natural life needs, but are created by marketing.
Advertising binds products with "lifestyle" and "self-image", and deeply implants them into your subconscious through various media discourses. Therefore, many times you are not paying for functions, but for a certain "lifestyle" or "self-image" imagination, and you may even pay ten or a hundred times the price.
This consumer society is a self-reinforcing system. It stimulates people's material needs and enjoyment desires to an unlimited extent, making people endlessly pursue the constantly updated "false needs". This system operates in cycles, involving everyone, and eventually makes "commodity fetishism" a common belief that people are accustomed to. This is the secret of "non-terrorist totalitarianism."
Marx said: Only when people use their animal functions-eating, drinking, reproducing, and at most living, grooming, etc., do they feel that they are moving freely and are using human functions. Sometimes, I feel like I am just an animal.
Liberalism
Classical liberalism, represented by Locke, a 17th-century British thinker, emphasized individual freedom and basic rights, advocated minimal state intervention, and advocated the principle of constitutional freedom in politics.
Modern liberalism, represented by the 19th-century British political philosopher John Mill (political philosopher), focused on the values ??of social justice and equality and shifted to emphasizing political democracy.
The most important thing about this intergenerational change is that the Revolution destroyed the hierarchy. Everyone is born equal and has natural human rights. From then on, freedom is everyone's freedom, and rights are equal rights. Therefore, in modern times, if liberalism does not take into account the issue of equality, it will become the theory of a few elites and slowly lose its dominant position. Therefore, one of the characteristics of modern liberalism is that it must take the issue of equality seriously and take into account the two values ??of freedom and equality. Along with modern changes, equal freedom and rights have brought about more diverse life ideals and lifestyles. (Liberalism has rich inherent diversity)
Freedom/equality/pluralism are called the irreversible basic conditions of the modern world.
The greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, Harvard University
"Anarchy, State and Utopia". Harvard University, Rawls's colleague.
It can be said that within Western liberalism, Rawls and Nozick form two opposing poles, with Rawls at the far left and Nozick at the far right, forming the social system of contemporary Western countries. selection boundary. The Nordic countries are closer to Rawls, while the United States is closer to Nozick.
The most critical point in Nozick’s criticism of Rawls is that Rawls did not fully respect individual rights, his theory was not self-consistent, and he could only be considered a “half-libertarian.” .
In the market, as long as we have voluntary transactions, it is justice, and no one should compensate anyone.
According to Nozick, Rawls adhered to the principle of liberalism in terms of political rights, allowing everyone to enjoy basic freedoms. However, in the socioeconomic field, he did not consistently adhere to this principle; Taking equal distribution as the default option, we believe that the only acceptable unequal distribution must meet two constraints (the principle of "fair equality of opportunity" and the constraints of the difference principle). Therefore, Rawls is called an "egalitarian liberal" - he adheres to liberalism in politics and culture, but adopts an egalitarian stance in society and economy. This is an egalitarian stance in Nozick's view. Not a coherent theory - therefore only half a libertarian.
The justice Nozick talks about is not "distributive justice", but "holding justice". Focus on the history of holdings rather than the results.
Nozick’s theory of justice focuses on how property is acquired and how it is transferred. It is a theory of “historical justice” that emphasizes the clean origin of property; while Rawls’s theory is a type of “model justice.” The theory is that social and economic distribution must meet a certain structural pattern.
Nozick opposes any theory of "modal justice". He believes that as long as you allow people to trade freely, then any established structural model cannot be maintained and must be returned to the established model through forced redistribution. In his view, "model justice" is morally unacceptable because it treats some people as tools for the well-being of others, violating Kant's moral ideal of "people are ends, not just means."
Legal scholar and political philosopher. Oxford University, chief professor of jurisprudence; later went to New York University in the United States.
A development trend in modern society is that the pressure for equality continues to rise. The issue of equality is "it's easy to talk about it casually, but it's very difficult to think about it carefully".
"Liberalism and the Limits of Justice." Department of Philosophy, Harvard University
The foundation of liberalism is individualism, which takes the individual as the starting point for all theories. But Sandel thinks, where do individuals come from? Similar to the relationship between chicken and egg. He believes that the individual is not an "atom" of the existence of salted fish society. As an individual, the self is not created out of thin air, but is created in social relationships and is shaped by the community of life.
Proposed "communitarianism", often translated as "communitarianism", emphasizing that individuals are constituted by society. There is the community first, and the community creates the individual, rather than there being isolated individuals first, and then the individuals forming the community.
Princeton
We often say that Chinese civilization is collectivistic, while Western civilization is individualistic. But in fact, all civilizations are group-oriented at first. In traditional societies, whether Eastern or Western, individuals and specific groups are an indivisible whole. This is an "organic unity." Therefore, people often say that individuals, their families, and their hometown are “blood-and-blood connection”.
But in a highly mobile modern society, individuals can always break away from any specific local community. This doesn't make you a completely isolated atom, because you can always enter new communities, voluntary communities of all kinds. At this time, you will find that the only thing that is truly "flesh and blood" is you and yourself. After all, the biological "interface" of human existence is individual. This is a basic biological fact. As social mobility intensifies, people must first see themselves as independent individuals before they are more willing to tell their own stories. After the importance and priority of the individual are highlighted, the significance of the individuality of the biological interface in culture can be revealed.
Therefore, the shift from collectivism to individualism is not the difference between Eastern and Western civilizations, but is caused by changes in ancient and modern times. (Liu Qing)
Canadian, McGill University (Canada’s Harvard University)
Taylor was Sandel’s teacher, and Isaiah Berlin was Taylor’s teacher at Oxford.
Modernity’s dilemma: The ills of individual freedom are real, but the antidote to authoritarian elitism can be poison. This puts people into a dilemma. Modern people cannot give up freedom, but they do not know how to solve the problems caused by freedom.