Jin Guantao on the Authentic Mind

  
Jin Guantao, “The Mentality of Many People Today Marks a Return to the 19th Century”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jin Guantao (b. 1947) is without a doubt one of the “grand old men” of the contemporary Chinese intellectual scene, and he and his wife and fellow scholar Liu Qingfeng 刘青峰 have been an intellectual “power couple” in China since the 1980s.  Both entered Beijing University to study science (chemistry and physics, although Liu later transferred to the Chinese department) in the period immediately before the Cultural Revolution began.  Both had—and have—broad humanistic interests despite their scientific backgrounds; they met because both read a book of study notes on Hegel that was circulating on the Beida campus at the time.  Liu later published a novel based on their relationship, A Public Love Letter 公开的情书.  Despite the chaos of the period, Jin managed to graduate in 1970—Liu must have done so at roughly the same time as well—and the couple married in the early 1970s and eventually taught at Zhengzhou University for much of that decade before returning to Beijing to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  Throughout their career, the couple has worked hand in hand, to the point of rewriting one another’s draft manuscripts or one writing an outline and asking the other to flesh out the ideas.
 
In the 1980s, Jin and Liu were at the center of the whirlwind of intellectual activity that accompanied reform and opening in China.  They led the project “Toward the Future 走向未来,” which selected and translated important scientific works from the West in fields like information theory, systems theory, and cybernetics, including volumes like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which were meant to reach a broad readership.  In 1984, Jin published Prosperity and Crisis: On China’s Ultra-Stable System 兴盛与危机-論中国社会超稳定结构, in which he applied cybernetics and systems theory to the study of Chinese history and argued that traditional China had developed an ultra-stable social structure due to the integration of the peasant economy, the bureaucracy and Confucianism.  The system became a self-correcting mechanism allowing for very little change over the course of the dynastic period.  Later in the decade, Jin was one of main thinkers behind the famous television series “River Elegy 河殇,” which aired during the student demonstrations leading to Tiananmen and argued that Westernization was China’s only hope for the future.  Jin and Liu attempted to intervene on the side of the students during the demonstrations, and after the massacre relocated to the Chinese University of Hong Kong for political reasons.   
  
They stayed in Hong Kong until 2008, at which point they took up positions at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan.  While in Hong Kong, Jin and Liu became founding editors of Twenty-First Century, a bi-monthly journal that serves as an important platform for debates in the Sinophone world, all the while continuing their work on social history.  They also worked to build a “Research Database in Chinese Modern Intellectual History 中国近现代思想史研究数据库,” reflecting a growing interest in intellectual history, an interest which resulted a number of important books, including, among others, The Origins of Modern Chinese Thought 中国现代思想的起源 and Research in Conceptual History:  The Evolution of Political Concepts in Modern China 观念史研究 : 中国现代重要政治术语的形成.  Some of Jin’s work is available in English translation, but not much (Google Scholar will take you to what’s out there).
 
The text translated here reflects Jin’s interest in intellectual history, and is extracted from his recent 2020 book The Loss of Authenticity 消失的真实.  The piece was originally published in the Hong Kong journal Twenty-First Century and reprinted on the online platform of Beijing Cultural Review on November 28, 2022, when anti-lockdown demonstrations were at their height in China.  Jin starts his argument with covid, which surely caught the editors’ eye, but argues that, as a disease, covid has been less deadly then similar pandemic outbreaks in human history, and is more important for what it reveals about the present world:  that faith in globalization has faded because the intellectual consensus undergirding the second wave of globalization (i.e., the one occurring after World War Two) is based on a shoddy, crumbling foundation.

Jin ultimately blames this on the “loss of the authentic mind,” by which he means a shared consensus on facts, values, and ultimate concerns that disappeared with the rise of modernity.  The symptoms of the fracture of this consensus are everywhere:  in the “fake news” that crowds out shared facts on social media, in the feverish worship of science and technology we do not understand (AI, Big Data), and in the return of a self-regarding nationalism that ultimately means a race to the bottom—in the face of issues like climate change—as global governance takes a back seat to the selfish, tribal concerns of nation-states.

I confess that what interested me most about Jin’s text was that the editors of the Beijing Cultural Review chose to republish it during the anti-lockdown demonstrations.  I assume that the editors are serious journalists who would like to be able to comment on the issues of the day, despite political considerations and censorship, and republishing texts at key moments seems to be something that Beijing Cultural Review does fairly regularly (see here, for example).  In this context, Jin’s text can be read as a commentary on China:  China is forsaking globalism for nationalism in terms of covid policy, closing the borders and inflicting a flawed, obsolete, Big Data-driven policy on the long-suffering masses.  There is no more consensus in terms of facts, values, and ultimate concerns in China than elsewhere, and China is hence as “inauthentic” as the rest of the world.  I doubt that this is exactly what Jin means, but it may well be how much of China feels after three years of zero-tolerance.   As Jin puts it in his text:  “Today, we have a prosperous material civilization, but when we look at the human mind, it has never been so fragile, fearful of death, cowardly, and afraid to resist as it is today.  Therefore, the current future of humanity is bleak, as we face a high-tech world without civilization.  In this world, the development of technology is also directionless.” 
 
Translation
 
On the Origins of Contemporary Society’s Intellectual Crisis 

The World of 2020
 
2020 was a landmark year, which witnessed the spread of the coronavirus throughout the world, leading not only to the deaths of many people, but also to a rarely seen “world lockdown,” which plunged global economic activity into an unprecedented recession.  As an article in The Economist pointed out, "The epidemic has exposed the anarchic state of global governance.  France and Britain are arguing over isolation and quarantine rules; the United States continues to sharpen its knives for a trade war.  Despite some examples of cooperation during the epidemic - such as the Federal Reserve's loans to other countries' central banks - the US  is not willing to assume its role as world leader…Public opinion around the world is abandoning globalization."
 
It was precisely during the epidemic that the UK officially left the European Union, that the anti-racism movement "Black Lives Matter" developed, and the US held a new round of presidential elections…all of which brought more uncertainty to the world.  In fact, the coronavirus did not pose a threat to human existence, and is insignificant compared to other infectious diseases that have appeared throughout history.  But strangely enough, its impact on human thought was like a monstrous wave that became the last straw that broke the camel's back.  Ever since, people have turned their backs on the lessons of the 20th century’s two World Wars, as nationalism and anti-globalization have become unstoppable, and the mentality of many people seems to have returned to the nineteenth century, while the twentieth century seems to have never existed.
 
Everyone knows that the nineteenth century was an era of dramatic expansion of the modern nation-state, which took the interests of these nation-states as paramount.   This led the world into the First World War, a catastrophe so horrendous that many came to doubt the value of modern thought.  This led in turn to the rise of Marxism and fascism, resulting in the Second World War and the Cold War.   Thus in the 20th century, humanity faced a huge crisis in the development of globalization.  It was in the process of reflecting on the heavy losses of tens of millions of people in the two World Wars, and the suffering experienced under totalitarian rule, that people finally re-examined the first wave of globalization, as well as the ideas of modernity, the nation-state, and democratic values.   They also reflected on the success of the market economy and the problems it caused, and on that basis rebuilt and improved the value system of modernity, leading to the second wave of globalization.
 
However, after three decades of peace and prosperity, in which the economy and technology developed at an astonishing rate, history seems to be repeating itself.  In the face of the problems caused by the second wave of globalization, especially in the turbulent world produced by this wave, existing modes of social and political philosophy, governance and integration have lost their effectiveness.  The United States, the "Holy Land of liberalism," has reverted to the era of the Monroe Doctrine, with nationalism and protectionism growing increasingly popular, as symbolized by the rise to power of Donald J.  Trump and his championing of the "America First" policy.  
 
The deeper crisis behind these events is that the very public nature of facts is disintegrating.  In the words of Francis Fukuyama, "almost all authoritative sources of information are now suspect, and are subject to the challenge of dubious facts of uncertain origin,” so that "a direct result of the overall dilemma facing democracy is the inability to agree on the most basic facts, which is true in the United States, the United Kingdom, and all around the world.” This tells us that basic values underpinning the second wave of globalization are wavering.  A global economic community without shared values is unthinkable.  As a result, in intellectual terms, humanity in the 21st century has retreated to the 19th century, even if we all know that taking nationalism as our primary goal will lead to constant conflict and even war, causing civilization to regress. 
 
Which leads us to the question of what, finally, is wrong with the world?  To answer this question, we need to look back on two other major events of the twentieth century.  One is the scientific revolutions, especially the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics.  Over the centuries, people have witnessed disruptive scientific revolutions, from the Copernican revolution, to Newtonian mechanics, to relativity and quantum mechanics.  At one point, people optimistically believed that there would be new scientific revolutions in the 21st century, but in fact there have been none.  In other words, relativity and quantum mechanics remain the ultimate foundations of modern science, but philosophers cannot explain why.  Twentieth century philosophers of science – people like Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Karl Popper (1902-1994), and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) - have all been proven wrong in their explanations of the scientific revolution.  One might say that the twentieth century philosophical search for "what is modern science?" ended in failure.  What people have not understood is that this failure is of a piece with the challenges to the intellectual and value foundation of the second wave of globalization.
 
One might say that that the problems facing the fields of science, politics, and society are all extremely difficult.  In terms of politics and society, if we do not understand the values underpinning the second wave of globalization and are unclear about the social mechanism behind it, how can we avoid the conflict of competing nationalisms that will finally lead to the regression of civilization? In terms of science and technology, if we fail to understand what science is and why it is true at a macro level, the consequence will be merely the re-emergence of scientism and the proliferation of scientific utopian thinking, with science eventually becoming a new religion. 
 
Today, despite the rapid spread and application of emerging technologies in all fields, we still lack a macro-level understanding of science.  I once made this point with reference to advances in the life sciences, noting that the dramatic changes brought about by new advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology are unstoppable, but humanity’s macro-level understanding of life is not on a par with our scientific ability to understand and manipulate biology.  The result is that as technology dominates science, humanity is becoming blindly confident that we can play the role of the "creator.”  Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948), the chief futurist at Google, has even predicted that humans will live forever by 2045.  But is this true? If not, why are grand illusions like this so popular? 
 
One might be tempted to argue that historically, people have always manipulated, exploited, and even invested false beliefs in technology before really understanding it.  This was true of steam engines, electricity, and atomic energy, so we should not make a big deal now when we fanaticize about science.  But in the past, theory was only one step behind scientific development, and thought and rationality always sought to grasp the meaning of technology, so that the foundation of scientific truth never wavered.  Today is different, in the sense that the development of the Internet, artificial intelligence, and life sciences has far surpassed the general thought level of our era, and researchers in the sciences have difficulty grasping the overall direction of the movement of science, to the point that ideas about where science is going are often indistinct from illusions or superstitions.  Even more worrisome is that many people have given up thinking altogether. 
 
Over the course of the twentieth century, religion gradually retired from public life.  At one point, it would have been philosophy’s job to think deeply about the foundations of science and technology and to integrate this with modern social value systems, but today's philosophers are trapped in the prison of linguistic analysis, unable to understand social problems and ignorant of modern technology.  There is an oft-repeated theory that the human desire for knowledge is limitless, to the point that it may destroy itself in its search for knowledge.  In fact, this theory is incorrect, because the search for knowledge is of two kinds: macro-level and philosophical on the one hand, and micro-level and detail-oriented on the other.  In my view, it is only when humanity loses the capacity to grasp the macro-level and philosophical meaning of science and modern society that a soulless science and technology come to be able to harm human beings and even threaten the destruction of modern society.
 
It is ironic that the plight of philosophy is the result of the twentieth century's philosophical revolution.  In order to analyze the roots of the current intellectual crisis, allow me to discuss another major event that went hand in hand with the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the 20th century scientific revolution of the twentieth century – the revolution in philosophy. 
 
Everyone knows that human beings understand the world through language (i.e., symbolic systems), and that for thousands of years they have been using language (symbols) to debate philosophy, truth, and history, but we have never quite understood what these “symbols” are.  Why can human beings use symbols? What is the value of discussing symbols?  Another way to say this is:  fish do not know they live in water, nor do they understand the limitations living in water imposes, while the reasons human know their life is different from that of fish is because humans are looking at the fish from outside the water.  For precisely this reason, we can describe the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy in terms of the following analogy:  in the same way that a fish, which has always lived in the water, can leap out of the water and view the world in which it lives, philosophers have discovered that the world and language are isomorphic, allowing them to see that they understand the world in terms of symbols, meaning that metaphysics is an illusion brought about by the misuse of language. 
 
In this sense, the linguistic turn of philosophy was a moment of great emancipation in the history of human thought, a revolution as important as the scientific revolution of the twentieth century.  But unlike the case of relativity and quantum mechanics, the philosophical revolution became a revolution that shackled the human mind.  Marked by the rise of logical empiricism, philosophy's understanding of science became Aristotelian, i.e., it used logical syllogisms as a method for studying the world and hence derived new knowledge; moreover, in doing away with metaphysics, it also excluded humanism and morality from the concerns of philosophy. 
 
The irony is that even as everyone recognizes the genius of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) as representative of the philosophical revolution, philosophy itself is emasculated, its creativity bound in a cage.  As Carnap argued, the philosopher's sole job became linguistic analysis, sorting out and discarding the meaningless metaphysical statements, on the one hand, and dividing the remaining meaningful statements into two categories: those that could be judged as true or false by logic and grammar, and those that described the world in empirically meaningful ways.  The former went to mathematicians, logicians, and linguists for analysis, while the latter were handed over to the scientists.  In this way, it seemed that humans could figure out how language grasps objects and thus outline the larger structure of how thought works.  This was indeed a brilliant philosophical inspiration, but the result was the decline of the human spirit and the atrophy of the "human being.”  With the death of philosophy, humanity’s ideals became the object of ridicule. 
 
People might be tempted to question how one can compare the two World Wars and the Cold War with the scientific revolution and the linguistic turn in philosophy. Because while the first two correspond to dramatic changes in the political order and the material life in the twentieth century, the latter is a case of philosophy finally realizing what it is and then shaking off the burden it had been carrying.  In fact, it is the death of philosophy that has led to the inability of today's humanistic values to respond to political and technological problems.  What I want to emphasize is:  efforts to reflect on modernity and nationalism occurred simultaneously with the rise of a philosophy of science that sought to understand the scientific revolution, and the two also failed simultaneously.  Very few people have thought about the fact that both of these failed.  Is it a coincidence? 
 
My point is that, while on the surface it appears that the coronavirus pandemic has led humanity to retreat to the 19th century in intellectual terms, the deeper reason behind this is that the beliefs on which the second wave of globalization is based are untenable, having been built on a foundation of sand.  This is so because in the face of the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the scientific revolution of the 20th century, we need to improve the intellectual foundation of modern society, meaning that we need to elevate the human understanding of modernity, science, and the meaning of life to a new level.  One of the most important reasons for the failure of this effort is that philosophy is trapped in the prison of linguistic analysis and does not truly understand the relationship between symbolic and empirical reality. 
 
By synthesizing the above analysis, we can arrive at the conclusion that the foundation of modernity is the authentic mind which was the product of traditional society.  The disappearance of the authentic mind is the true problem behind many of today’s intellectual dilemmas, and is the inevitable result of the unfolding of modernity.  The dilemmas encountered by human beings in the fields of politics and society, science and philosophy at first glance may seem unrelated, but in fact share a common essence – the disappearance of authenticity.  The philosophy of authenticity is an effort to return to the original starting point, with the aim of regaining this lost authenticity. 
 
What is Authenticity? 
 
What is authenticity of mind? What is authenticity? This is the most puzzling question in today's thought world, although we are completely unaware of it.  For the sake of analysis, I will first define "authenticity" as the gut-level feeling and evaluation of a subject towards an "object," which in turn defines whether the subject will ignore the object or pay attention to it.  This gut-level feeling and evaluation constitute the precondition for further evaluation of the object and for the relationship between self and object.  Authenticity is the condition of human existence and the epistemological cornerstone of its exploration in the fields of science, politics, social life, and philosophy. 
 
For centuries, people have been the carriers of three kinds of authenticity, and the authenticity of traditional society also exists at three levels: first, all people are constantly in touch with the world around them, and can distinguish whether objects are real or not and on that basis make judgments and react to those objects, which I call the authenticity of facts (including technical perception in a broad sense); second, the subject is aware of himself every day as a carrier of actions and values, and has a sense of the authenticity of the meaning of these actions and values, which I call the authenticity of values; thirdly, human beings face death, and when they realize that death is inevitable, will face the question of the ultimate meaning of life, and will arrive at an answer, accompanied by corresponding thought and action, and I call this the authenticity of ultimate concerns. 
 
In traditional societies, these three levels of authenticity are integrated into a whole and constitute the authentic mind of humanity, which is the cornerstone of traditional culture.  Modernity originated out of the split between ultimate concerns (the Hebrew faith) and cognitive rationality, from which point the three mutually integrated authenticities began to separate and develop an understanding of themselves as they evolved.  This was the great liberation of authenticity, but people did not realize that the three types of authenticity were mutually sustaining.  In the early modern era, certain links remained between the three separate authenticities, meaning that humanity still had an authentic mind.  However, following the disappearance of the mechanism sustaining the three authenticities, over time, they evolved in such a way as to form separate epistemologies.  Each of these three epistemologies, lacking the mechanism to sustain the other, tended toward distortion in its development, and the result is the disintegration of the authentic mind.  This is the source of the growing intellectual crisis from the nineteenth century to the present day. 
 
As early as the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche (1944-1900) declared that "God is dead." With the increasing rise of moral relativism in the 20th  century, morality came to be equated with the pursuit of profit, meaning that ultimate concerns began to withdraw from society and that common values disappeared.  In the realm of political society, the loss of authenticity was accompanied by the separation of facts, values, and ultimate concerns.  The disappearance of common values necessarily leads to the disintegration of value authenticity, which leaves the question of the ultimate meaning of individual life unsettled.  Here we find the intellectual reason for an ever-expanding nationalism.
 
Although the lessons of the two 20th century World Wars have led to the conviction that national sovereignty must be based on human rights and that nationalism is not supreme, nonetheless the fundamental question of "what are the basic values driving the second wave of globalization?" has not been answered.  In fact, in a contract society composed of people without morals and beliefs, national identity (or  nationalism) must necessarily trump modern universal values in terms of meaning, and it is inevitable that claims based on national supremacy will appear repeatedly in the context of social conflicts.  These are the great challenges that human civilization is facing. 
 
When ultimate concerns and value authenticity no longer exist, the continuous development of science, technology and the economy becomes humanity’s unique goal.  But can the authenticity of the facts on which science and technology depend continue to exist forever? Is it possible for a society in which morality and faith are absent to accommodate the further development of science, technology, and the economy? In other words, due to the development of modern society, and especially the rapid changes in science and technology, the other two levels of authenticity have been lost, leaving only fact authenticity.  Over the course of the 20th century, fact authenticity has further metamorphosed into an objective truth that is not related to the subject.  However, can fact authenticity really sustain the open mind of humanity? 
 
In the twenty-first century, the advent of the Internet era and the expansion of virtual reality have led to the disintegration of objective reality, and we are quite likely to live in a world where truth and falsehood are indistinguishable.  Doesn’t Fukuyama’s notion of the "post-factual" era prove precisely this point? On the one hand, the development of Internet technology provides us with a convenient access to information, but on the other hand, social networks are also full of all kinds of false information, and the border between true and false information is increasingly blurred.  A world where truth and falsehood are indistinguishable is bound to be chaotic and turbulent.  Critical reason based on factual authenticity can no longer be the basis of an open society. 
 
Here I’ll give two examples to illustrate the confusion in the contemporary world’s ability to evaluate authenticity.  The first is the confusion between symbolic and empirical reality in science.  In April 2019, several scientists around the world simultaneously published a photograph of a black hole, which was "captured" by more than 200 researchers from eight observation sites on four continents over a period of more than ten years.  The visual evidence confirms Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which predicted the existence of black holes.  The discovery of black holes is undoubtedly a mark of great progress.  Here, I would like to analyze not the veracity of this discovery, but rather what the photographs of black holes might mean.
 
Based on our past experience, we believe that what we see in a photograph is empirically true.  This photograph is undoubtedly proof of the existence of black holes that scientists can show to the public.  But we need to ask nonetheless if this photo really proves the existence of an unknown object in the way that photographs generally do.  In other words, is it authentic? In fact, a black hole is a space-time singularity, which is symbolically real (mathematically real) yet not empirically real.  The so-called black hole photograph "captures" only the halo at the edge of the black hole.  We are confusing mathematical reality with empirical reality when we look at a photograph of a black hole, which the scientists perhaps knew even as they circulated the photographs.  The point is:  society at large has no sense of this confusion. 
 
The authenticity of black holes only exists in a symbolic dimension.  In 1916, the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) calculated a solution to Einstein's gravitational field equations, which showed that if a large amount of matter is concentrated on a point in space, a singular phenomenon occurs around it, namely the existence of an interface around the mass - a "field of view."  Once within this interface, even light cannot escape.  This "unimaginable heavenly entity" was given the name "black hole" by the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008).  We might say that "black holes" are empirically meaningless, but that we imagine them to exist empirically.  To better illustrate this issue, we can look at another question: whether God exists. 
 
According to twentieth-century philosophy of language, the authenticity of symbols must derive from experience, otherwise they are meaningless.  This perspective has penetrated the fields of the humanities, social sciences, and religion.  Mathematics is one system of symbols and natural language is another, and if we replace the above example with natural language examples, people will immediately see that it is not proper to confuse symbols and experience.  Everyone knows that according to the Bible, God exists.  But in the opinion of many philosophers, God is merely a symbol of natural language, and when reading natural language texts, one must strictly distinguish between pure symbols and symbols representing objects of experience.  The former is not real, the latter is real. 
 
But my question is: why is it that in the field of science we think that pure symbols (mathematical reality) and symbols representing empirical objects (scientific reality) can be confused, and we show pictures of black holes to the public, while in the field of humanities and social sciences, in objects expressed in natural language, pure symbols and symbols representing empirical objects should be distinguished? Black holes exist as mathematical realities, so why not God, who also exists as a symbol? It is not my intention here to explore the issue of religion, but to use this example to show that this mode of thinking, which people took for granted in the twentieth century, is the root cause of various intellectual dilemmas today. 
 
Humanity has fallen into a serious type of schizophrenia.  Some people promote science, and mathematical symbols become the new God in their minds, believing that it is very possible that human beings will live in a virtual world created by advanced civilizations; while in the minds of others, religious belief is undoubtedly real, and is not only not constrained by reason, but all sorts of anti-rational, and extremist thoughts thrive under the banner of religion.  How should we understand the relationship between symbols and experience today? Under what circumstances can symbols be embedded in the empirical world? Under what circumstances can they not? No philosopher can give an answer, but it all requires a rigorous philosophical analysis. 
 
Another example is what is known as "data speak."  In recent years, Big Data and truth have become almost synonymous, with people believing that numbers and math can help us see through the chaos and distinguish certainty from uncertainty.  But can Big Data really give us deeper insight into the world? In the coronavirus pandemic, Big Data has played a strange role.  Sometimes the constantly updated, seemingly accurate data didn't help people see where the epidemic was going, but may instead have distorted the facts. 
 
John A. Paulos (b. 1945), a professor of mathematics at Temple University, points out that the apparently sophisticated data on the epidemic actually contain a great deal of uncertainty.  First is the uncertainty of basic information, such as mortality and infection rates; how many people actually died due to the epidemic? How can the actual number of infections be confirmed, given the large number of people who were treated without being tested and those who may have been infected but had no symptoms? The second is the potential for distortion in the way these numbers are reported by medical institutions and the media, such as a tenfold increase in the number of new cases overnight in a given area on a given day, which may simply be the result of insufficient testing of the virus before the reported increase, and the exponential increase in the "number of cases" once the virus is tested more widely.  In this sense, the accuracy of the numbers is more in the realm of pure mathematics. 
 
The ultimate effect of the statistics is to create division and fear in the society; and more importantly, the different “Big Datas” are not consistent with one another.  All of this suggests that behind the different Big Datas lie different patterns of interaction between different cultures, systems, and infectious diseases.  The real impact of the coronavirus pandemic on human society is not the loss of human life, but as a catalyst leading to a dramatic change in different social perceptions.  And this is something that today’s Big Data analysis has a hard time seeing. 
 
Examples like the above abound in everyday life.  Can we tell what is wrong with a theory when the line between truth and falsehood, between experience and symbol, is increasingly blurred? Can we still make reasonable corrections to plans and ideas that constantly change and frustrate our expectations?  If we say that there is no “truth” in the humanities and in history, then what value do historical lessons possess?  In the twentieth century, people believed for a time that history had laws, which resulted in the denial of human free will and the rise of totalitarianism.  In the 21st century, people denied the laws of history, only to find, bizarrely, that the past is repeating itself.
 
The Study of Authentic Philosophy 
 
I believe that the disintegration of the authentic mind is the general source of the social and intellectual crisis in the world today.  When modern society first took form and modern science first emerged, humanity still possessed an authentic mind, which was necessary for changes in technology that have occurred in recent centuries.  The "authentic mind" is a projection of authenticity in the world onto the human mind.  Today, we have a prosperous material civilization, but when we look at the human mind, it has never been so fragile, fearful of death, cowardly and afraid to resist as it is today.  Therefore, the current future of humanity is bleak, as we face a high-tech world without civilization.  In this world, the development of technology is also directionless. 
 
Contemporary human technology is sufficient to support human life on Mars - if we have the courage.  But do we have this courage? Do we have the mind to accommodate such technology? No! I believe that without such a mind, not only will the tragic lessons of history be ignored, and the disasters of history will be repeated, but even our scientific and technological achievements will be forgotten in a hundred years.  So what scholars in the humanities have to do today is to rebuild the true and magnificent mind that belongs to human beings, a mind that can match our technology, something that can never be a mere product of technology, nor a product of scientific professional studies. 
 
Today we often hear the following question:  how can we build a society in which human beings have dignity? In fact, a dignified society can only exist if a dignified life exists.  A person can live with dignity only if he or she has an authentic mind; therefore the core of cultural and social reconstruction is to rebuild the modern authentic mind.  However, we must be clear-headed about the fact that the authentic mind of traditional society cannot be restored.  In modern society, how to lead people have the authenticity of ultimate concerns, how to make this mutually consistent with the authenticity of value and the authenticity of facts, so that people can once again become the bearers of the three kinds of authenticity – this is what our age poses as a problem for philosophers, a challenge I call building a "philosophy of authenticity" 
 
The term "philosophy of authenticity" is of my own coinage.  The reason why I talk about authenticity and philosophical research in the same breath is that I want to grasp the direction of philosophical research today from a higher level.  In fact, only by stepping away from the history of Western philosophy and analyzing the value systems of various civilizations can philosophical research move away from the "philosophia" that originated in ancient Greek civilization, and change direction to explore its hidden essence (i.e., authenticity).  For each civilization has its own ultimate concerns and moral values, as well as authentic facts that are integrated with these ultimate concern and values.  In other words, the true mind of different civilizations is different, and the pursuit of reason and truth in ancient Greece is only one type of authentic mind.  For this reason, we must first analyze the structure of the authentic mind in traditional societies and the disintegration of the authentic mind in the process of transition from traditional to modern; on this basis, we can discuss whether the authentic mind contradicts modernity and the reconstruction of the authentic mind in modern times. 
 
In order to reach this goal, I believe that the discourse of the philosophy of authenticity can be divided into three parts.
 
First, from a historical perspective, why did the authentic mind disintegrate little by little with the establishment of modern society, and especially with the evolution of modern science and technology? In fact, the split within modernity between ultimate concerns (the Hebrew faith) and cognitive rationality in and of itself implies the disappearance of the mechanism sustaining the three kinds of authenticity.  When we talk about authenticity today, we often refer to the authenticity of facts (objective reality), ignoring the more complex connotations of authenticity.  For example, the three kinds of authenticity - facts, values, and ultimate concerns - have an underlying unity that undergirds the authentic mind of traditional society.  Once this unity ceases to exist, the most terrible thing happens: the gradual disintegration of the authentic mind. 
 
In fact, when truthfulness is equated with objective reality, and the truthfulness of values and ultimate concerns disintegrates, the truthfulness of facts (objective reality) is also unsustainable, and human beings will eventually live in a world where truth and falsehood are indistinguishable.  Is there really nothing that humans can do about this fate? Historical research will be necessary to reveal the logic of the disintegration of the authentic mind.  In my view, even if historical research discovers that this disintegration is completely inevitable, I believe that we can nonetheless draw inspiration from Issac Asimov and his science fiction novel Foundation, in which we see that civilization can regress, science and technology can be forgotten, and modern man may live in intellectual darkness, yet the historical study of the authentic mind should enable us to shorten the period of darkness.  How to go about it? I think the most crucial thing is to learn the historical lessons of the loss of the authentic mind.
 
Second, at the methodological level, we need to discuss whether the reconstruction of the authentic mind in modern society is possible.  I have discovered that the basis of scientific truth is the logically consistent expansion of universally repeatable controlled experiments, that is, we increase the set of control variables according to the results of controlled experiments, and do new controlled experiments on this basis, and this new controlled experiment is also universally repeatable.  Mathematics happens to be the symbolic expression of the logically consistent expansion of universally reproducible controlled experiments.  Because mathematical truth and scientific truth are isomorphic, it is possible to build a bridge between the two, which leads to the expansion of scientific truth.  This explains why every scientific revolution is accompanied by a great advance in mathematics. 
 
On this basis, we can draw an important conclusion: there are different fields of authenticity, such as scientific authenticity (universally repeatable), social authenticity (repeatable for some), and personal authenticity (repeatable for individuals); the different fields do not necessarily intersect, the criteria of authenticity are not the same, and there are two levels of authenticity, empirical and symbolic, in each field.  Achieving the integration of different realms and levels of authenticity means building bridges between then.  Once a bridge is built, we can find the interlocking structure of the authenticity of ultimate concerns, the authenticity of values, and the authenticity of facts.  If this analysis is correct, it is possible to rebuild the authentic mind in modern society. 
 
Finally, we should determine what the authentic mind should be like in the twenty-first century by arguing at different levels.  Whether it is scientific authenticity, social authenticity, or personal authenticity, the existence of free will is the prerequisite for all symbolic authenticity, and symbolic authenticity exists in all areas of authenticity, which means that personal freedom is the  basic value, and morality and all other values are introduced by way of personal freedom.  Although the ultimate concerns of traditional society inevitably disappear with the rise of modernity, the pursuit of a modern equivalent is not illusory in terms of the overall structure of authenticity; it is just that philosophers have never explored this structure and are unaware of its existence.  In this sense, ultimate concerns can be rebuilt in modern sense, and these pluralistic, modern ultimate concerns should be integrated with the authenticity of values and the authenticity of facts in order to constitute the authentic mind of modern man, thus laying a new cornerstone for human exploration in the fields of science, political society, and philosophy in the twenty-first century.
 
Notes

[1]金观涛, “当下许多人的心态, 正倒退回19世纪,” originally published in the Hong Kong journal 二十一世纪/The Twenty-First Century in 2020 in the 30 year anniversary issue of the founding of the journal, republished on the online platform of 文化纵横/Beijing Cultural Review on November 28, 2022.