The chaos of philosophy has always meant the chaos of social thought. If the human mind is likened to the ocean, philosophical thinking is about the deepest inaccessible bottom of it. Historically, the surface of the ocean has sometimes been sunny and picturesquely calm, and sometimes it has been stormy and turbulent, with little to no feeling in the depths of the ocean. But in turn, once there is some kind of disturbance in the depths of the ocean, the disturbance of human thought will last for a long, long time.
The world in 2020
2020 is a landmark year. This year, the global epidemic of the new coronavirus has not only led to the loss of many lives, but also caused the world to enter a rare “Great Lockdown” state, and global economic activity has also plunged into an unprecedented recession. As an article in The Economist pointed out: “The outbreak has exposed the anarchy of global governance. France and the UK are arguing over quarantine rules, and the US continues to sharpen the trade war. There are some examples of cooperation (like the Fed lending to other central banks), but the U.S. is not willing to lead the world…Public opinion around the world is turning away from globalization.”
It was during the epidemic that the United Kingdom officially left the European Union, and the anti-racism movement under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” was tearing the United States apart… In fact, the new crown virus does not pose a threat to human existence. Compared with the infectious diseases that have occurred in history, it is trivial, but strangely, its impact on the human mind is like a huge wave, and it has become the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Since then, people no longer cherish the lessons of the two world wars and the Cold War in the 20th century, and nationalism and anti-globalization ideology are irresistible. A lot of people’s mentality goes back to the 19th century.
The 19th century was an era of rapid expansion of the modern nation-state. The concept of the supremacy of the nation-state’s interests pushed mankind into the First World War. The disaster brought about by the war led to the ideological trend of doubting modernity; in order to fight against Marxism, fascism rose, and its The result was World War II and the Cold War. Humanity lost tens of millions in two world wars and suffered from totalitarian rule. After the tragic 20th century, people began to examine the first globalization, modernity, nation-state, democratic values and other issues, learned the lessons of the origin of totalitarian society, reflected on the success of the market economy and the problems it brought, and reconstructed and Improve the modern value system, and this will lead to the second globalization.
However, after 30 years of peace and prosperity, history seems to be repeating itself when the economy and technology have developed amazingly. In the face of the problems caused by the second globalization, the existing experience of social and political philosophy, governance and integration has become invalid. As the “Holy Land of Liberalism”, the United States has begun to retreat to the Monroe Doctrine, and the trend of nationalism and protectionism has become increasingly popular. The deeper crisis behind these events is that the publicity of the facts themselves is disintegrating. To borrow Fukuyama’s words, at present “almost all authoritative sources of information are questioned and challenged by dubious and unexplained facts” and “a direct product of the overall predicament of democratic institutions is the inability to reach agreement on the most basic facts. Unanimously, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the world.”
Facts, unlike values, are considered to have objective truth, which guarantees the publicity of facts. If facts lose publicity, value publicity will be completely destroyed. A global economic community without public facts and shared values is inconceivable. Therefore, even knowing that once nationalism becomes the dominant ideology, it will bring constant conflicts and even wars, and the consequence will be a great retrogression of the human mind, the society of the 21st century still returns to the 19th century in thought.
Scientific Utopia and the Decline of Humanism
What’s wrong with this world? To answer this question, we also need to review two other major events in the 20th century: one is the scientific revolution in the 20th century, especially the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics; the other is the decline of humanistic spirit. Over the centuries, people have witnessed subversive scientific revolutions one after another. From Copernicus’ “heliocentric theory” and Newtonian mechanics to relativity and quantum mechanics, the complete revolution in theory seems to be the norm in scientific development. Everyone once believed optimistically that there would be a new scientific revolution after entering the 21st century, but in fact it did not.
In other words, although scientific theories are still advancing, they have bid farewell to revolution. Why did the scientific revolution take place in the 20th century? With relativity and quantum mechanics becoming the cornerstones of modern science, why are there no more “paradigm shifts” in scientific theories? Philosophers know very little about this. 20th century philosophers of science—from Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper to Thomas Kuhn—whose explanations of the scientific revolution turned out to be Philosophical exploration also ended in failure. That is to say, although human beings have made great progress in scientific knowledge and mastered more and more advanced technologies, they have encountered huge difficulties in understanding modern science as a whole. What people do not realize is that this failure and the setback of the value base of the second round of globalization are twin brothers.
In the 20th century, another major event occurred in the human ideology, that is, the decline of the humanistic spirit. Since Nietzsche declared that “God is dead”, Christianity has withdrawn from public life in the West day by day. Behind the pluralism of values is the loss of humanistic spirit. Since the origin of modern society in the soil of Catholic civilization in the 17th century, humanistic values, including religious belief, have always existed side by side with science. Humanistic spirit and science and technology jointly maintain the basic structure of modern society, but the humanistic spirit in the 20th century faced repeated bombardment by totalitarian ideology. Even after totalitarianism has disappeared, the humanistic spirit is still constantly being impacted by the tide of nihilism. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, the critical humanistic spirit once again tried to revive its strength, but failed to regain its vitality. After the ebb of postmodernism, the humanistic spirit finally came to an end with the end of the 20th century.
A scientific world without humanistic spirit must be deformed, the consequence of which is the rise of scientific utopia, which not only provides legitimacy for a new form of totalitarianism in the 21st century, but also means that technology overwhelms science and becomes a new religion. When people do not know what science is, but only have specific scientific and technological knowledge, the proliferation of scientific utopias is unstoppable. What is a scientific utopia? We can illustrate with the life sciences as an example.
Today, new advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology have triggered unprecedented changes in human life. However, human’s macroscopic understanding of life is far behind the understanding and manipulation of detailed biological knowledge. As a result, technology dominated the entire science, and humans began to blindly believe that they could play the role of creators. Google’s chief futurist Ray Kurzweil even predicted that humans will achieve immortality by 2045. Scientific utopia refers to this blind faith in science and technology.
Behind the disappearance of the public nature of social facts, the inability of people to understand the scientific and technological revolution in the 20th century, and the decline of humanistic spirit, there is a common core, that is, in today’s fast-changing high-tech and productivity growth, people’s understanding of reality Sexual judgment is increasingly narrow and vague. The so-called “narrowness” of authenticity judgment refers to the fact that only specific science and technology can have unquestionable authenticity at present, and most people lose sight of the publicity of social facts and the overall issues of “what is science”. ability to discriminate. The so-called “fuzziness” of authenticity judgment refers to the loss of the ability to reflect on authenticity. Why does the human spirit decline? The reason is that many people think past beliefs and morals are false. So why did people take it to be true in the past? Most people don’t think or have the ability to think about it. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary declared post-truth the word of the year.
Since then, more and more people have begun to believe that human society is entering a “post-truth era”. The so-called post-truth era stems from people’s loss of comprehensive and overall authenticity judgment. We call the comprehensive and holistic judgment of truth as the true mind, so that the ideological origins of the above-mentioned phenomena can be collectively called the disintegration of the true mind.
The epistemological revolution that stopped halfway
The irony is that the loss of man’s comprehensive and holistic judgment of authenticity has something to do with the 20th century philosophical revolution. As we all know, humans grasp the world through language, the symbol system, but we have never known what symbols are. Why can people use symbols? This means that the fish does not know that they live in the water, and it is impossible to understand what kind of restrictions the water brings to them. Because of this, we can use the following metaphor to describe the linguistic turn of philosophy in the 20th century: just as a fish can jump out of the water to see the world in which it lives, philosophers find that the world and language are isomorphic, and realize that metaphysics is brought about by the misuse of language. illusion.
In this sense, the linguistic turn of philosophy is a great liberation of human thought, an epistemological revolution as important as the scientific revolution of the 20th century. Different from the establishment of quantum mechanics and relativity, this is a revolution that imprisoned people’s thinking. Behind Wittgenstein’s recognized genius as the representative of the philosophical revolution, philosophy was castrated and its creativity bound in a cage. We can illustrate this with the rise of logical empiricism and analytic philosophy, where, as Carnap argues, the only job of the philosopher became linguistic analysis, sorting out meaningless metaphysical sentences on the one hand, and sorting out meaningless metaphysical sentences on the other On the one hand, the remaining meaningful sentences are divided into two categories: those that can be logically and grammatically true and false, and those that describe the world and have empirical meaning, the former for mathematicians, logicians, and language Scientists analyze, and the latter are handed over to scientists.
In this way, humans seem to be able to figure out how language grasps objects and thus outlines the large structure of how the mind works. This is indeed a wonderful philosophical imagination, but the result is that philosophy can no longer undertake the task of rebuilding the humanistic spirit, and the “capital man” shrinks. The ideal of man has also become the object of ridicule with the death of philosophy.
Some people may say that whether it is the decline of humanistic spirit or the inability of human beings to understand modern science, they all correspond to certain changes and epistemological dilemmas in the human spiritual world in the 20th century. The turn of linguistics means that philosophy finally realizes what it is and cancels it. burdens on our own, so we can’t connect them. This plausible view ignores the enormous impact of the philosophical revolution on the criterion of authenticity. Since the turn of linguistics, philosophers have clearly recognized that the relationship between symbols and objects is a convention, and a string of symbols expresses the structure of objects with its own structure. Since the string of symbols itself has no truth, it can only obtain truth from experience, so that only science and logic are true. The humanistic spirit has lost its true foundation and is bound to decline. In other words, a scientific statement is true because it is empirically proven and logical. The discovery of signs not only narrows authenticity to scientific fact, it also removes the meaning of signs and any overall investigation of authenticity. Doesn’t this just prove that people’s judgments about the reality of the world are increasingly narrow and vague?
What I want to stress is that it is no coincidence that reflections on modernity, nationalism and philosophy of science have arisen and failed at the same time! On the surface, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a return to a 19th-century state of mind, bringing a resurgence of nationalism and totalitarianism. In fact, the deeper reason is that the various beliefs that are the basis for the value of the second globalization are vulnerable, as if they were built on the beach. This is so because the basic idea of second globalization does not have the same basis of authenticity as modern 17th-century thought. The two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century prompted liberal thinkers to reflect on the basis of modern values, but the object of this reflection was too narrow, limited to social systems, political philosophy and corresponding values. For example, Hayek’s theory just uses the market economy to justify modern society; neither Ronald Dworkin’s philosophy of law nor John Rawls’s theory of justice can only be argued in the field of legal and political philosophy legitimacy in modern society. These liberal theories are bound to fail once social problems transcend the professional realm.
Why is the system of new ideas supporting a second globalization so narrow? The reason is precisely that the philosophical revolution destroyed the authenticity of all grand narratives. After the philosophical revolution, the line between general theory and metaphysics in the humanities remains blurred. For many, a theory as broad and grand as that of early liberalism is academically meaningless. Therefore, we must improve the value foundation of modern society, so that human’s understanding of modernity, science and the meaning of life will rise to a new height. An extremely important reason for the failure of this effort is that philosophy is trapped in the cage of linguistic analysis. In fact, the philosophical revolution not only failed to establish a more solid value foundation for modern society with a new concept of symbolic reality, but instead denied the authenticity of the symbolic system itself, thus intensifying the trend of the disintegration of the real mind
We can now summarize the crisis of social thought in the 20th century and the linguistic turn of philosophy. Since the birth of modern society, human beings’ overall ability to judge authenticity has been narrowing and blurring in technological and economic development. The philosophical revolution destroyed the basis for the authenticity of the sign system itself. As such, any theory that justifies modern values must be based on science, which is impossible. Hence, religion, morality, and general humanistic theories have no authenticity except for specific science and technology. The real psyche, which is the foundation of modern society, is completely disintegrated.
Modernity and the True Mind
Is all this inevitable? In order to analyze the historical process of the disintegration of the real mind, it is necessary to strictly define authenticity. With the explosion of human knowledge in the 21st century, all kinds of details are accurately defined. There is only one thing outside the study of specialization, and that is authenticity itself. In my opinion, authenticity is the most basic feeling and judgment of the subject about the object, which specifies whether the subject ignores or pays attention to the object. This most basic feeling and judgment is the premise of further evaluating the object and defining the relationship between oneself and the object. It is the condition of human existence and the epistemological cornerstone of the exploration of scientific and political social and philosophical fields.
The formation of the true mind can be traced back to the origin of the Axis civilization. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers was the first to notice that a culture of immortality, distinct from the ancient civilizations that disappeared (such as ancient Egypt and the civilizations of the Mesopotamia), emerged in the centuries BC. Since then, Western academia has used the concept of “beyond breakthrough” to deepen this discovery. I developed the above research further in Axial Civilization and Modern Society. I think the essence of “transcendence and breakthrough” is that people walk out of society and seek the ultimate meaning of life that is not dependent on society. A non-social subjectivity thus originates. I call civilizations that have undergone “transcendence breakthroughs” “axial civilizations”. Because man is an existence facing death, in order to overcome death, man must find a meaning that can transcend death, that is, “ultimate care”. I proved in Axial Civilization and Modern Society that there are only 4 different types of transcendental breakthroughs. I call these 4 transcendent horizons, and they are:
(1) Hebrew salvation religion; (2) Indian liberation religion; (3) Cognitive rationality of ancient Greece and ancient Rome; (4) Chinese traditional civilization with morality as the ultimate concern. Any kind of transcendental vision contains the corresponding ultimate concern and its prescribed value and experience, which answer the question of life and death and give the organizational blueprint of the “should society”. Since then, immortal civilizations and socially independent subjects have emerged, which have been the foundation of modern society. Among them, cognitive reason (discovering the laws of nature), because it cannot provide meaning beyond life and death, eventually combined with the Hebrew salvation religion to form Western Catholic civilization.
Man has been the carrier of three realities since the Axial Age. First, everyone faces the external world all the time, and can distinguish whether the object is real or not and make judgments and reactions to it, which I call the authenticity of experience (including feeling through technology in a broad sense); second, the subject faces every day. Self, as a carrier of action and value, there is a sense of authenticity of action meaning and value, which I call the authenticity of value; thirdly, human beings are the existence facing death, and when they realize that death is inevitable, the subject Answers to the question of the ultimate meaning of life, accompanied by corresponding thinking and actions, I call the authenticity of the ultimate concern.
In each Axis civilization, the above three realities are integrated with each other. They constitute the real soul of human beings, and the real soul is the cornerstone of traditional culture. Modernity originated from the separation and coexistence of Hebrew religion and cognitive rationality. In this process, cognitive rationality further evolved into modern science. I discuss this process in detail in Part 1. From then on, the three kinds of realities integrated with each other began to separate, and in their respective unfoldings, they moved towards understanding of themselves. This is the great liberation of authenticity, but people don’t know that these three types of authenticity are inherently interdependent; once a split occurs, each type of authenticity will change with the development of society (modernity unfolds) and the epistemological logic on which it is based. Variety. Only in the early days of modern society did three separate realities still exist, that is, man still had a real mind. With the disappearance of the mutual maintenance mechanism of the three kinds of authenticity, the long-term consequence can only be that the three kinds of authenticity are based on different epistemologies. Due to the lack of high-level reflection, these three epistemologies cannot establish a mechanism to maintain each other, and each tends to distort or even disappear in the development, and the result is the disintegration of the real mind. That is to say, the disintegration of the true mind is an inevitable result of the development of modern society.
The first thing to be shaken is the truthful basis of ultimate concern. As we all know, in traditional society, individual rights do not have legitimacy, because it contradicts the mechanism by which the three kinds of authenticity are mutually maintained. Individual rights come from natural law, which is the result of the separation of belief in God and cognitive reason in Catholic civilization. The birth of modern society is the transformation of natural law into individual rights. Individual rights have become the most basic value in modern society, which means that people can come out of a certain ultimate concern, and even freely choose the ultimate concern. At this time, the basis for maintaining the stability of the ultimate concern no longer exists, and its authenticity will be lost sooner or later.
Once belief in God and cognitive rationality coexist separately, the expanding cognitive rationality will sooner or later realize that empirical facts are objective and values are subjective, resulting in the rise of subjective axiology. In addition, people can freely choose the ultimate concern, and the connection between value and ultimate concern is broken, and the consequence is that both lose their authenticity. This disintegration of the real mind is most obvious and even more magnificent in the process of the spread of modernity. Modernity originated in Calvinist society, and the U.S. Constitution was originally based on covenants, that is, a man’s oath before God, which is directly related to belief in God (ultimate care). It is impossible for other civilizations to learn modernity and build a modern society based on the covenant. Therefore, nationalism arose as a prerequisite for integrating modern values. However, nationalism cannot become the ultimate concern of an independent individual, and its consequence must be the loss of ultimate concern and value authenticity. In fact, as the claim of national supremacy led to world wars, people began to reflect on the ideological disaster brought about by nationalism. At this time, they would once again pin their hopes for modern society on Anglo-American society as the origin of modernity. However, these societies can only use the utilitarian subjective axiology as the foundation of modern values, and the disappearance of the publicity of values will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the true mind.
This shows how important the 20th century philosophical revolution is. It examines authenticity from a new perspective of the relationship between symbols and objects, which means the great liberation of human reality, which should be the premise for rebuilding the modern real mind. The new philosophy should once again demonstrate the meaning of ultimate concern and the human world, pointing out that its authenticity cannot be replaced by scientific truth, but it not only fails to do this, but abolishes the function of philosophy. Therefore, after the real mind formed since the Axial Age has been destroyed, it cannot be rebuilt.
When the ultimate concern and value authenticity do not exist, the continuous development of technology and economy becomes the only goal of human beings, but does the real performance that science and technology depend on always exist? Since the Enlightenment, empirical authenticity has been further transformed into objective reality irrelevant to the subject. Entering the 21st century, the arrival of the Internet era and the expansion of virtual reality have led to the disintegration of objective reality. On the one hand, the development of Internet technology has provided us with a convenient information acquisition channel; on the other hand, social networks are full of various false information. The boundary between true and false information is increasingly blurred, and a world without distinction between true and false must be chaotic and turbulent.
The dilemma brought about by the loss of the true mind
Below I give two examples to illustrate the confusion in the judgment of authenticity in the world today. An example is the confusion of symbolic and empirical truths in the scientific field. In April 2019, several scientists around the world simultaneously released photos of black holes. This photo is visual evidence “captured” by more than 200 researchers from eight observation points on four continents over a period of more than ten years, confirming the predictions of general relativity for the existence of black holes.
The discovery of black holes is undoubtedly a remarkable advance. What I’m going to analyze here is not the veracity of this discovery, but what the picture of a black hole actually means. According to past experience, what is photographed in the photo is empirically real. This photo is undoubtedly proof that the scientific community is showing the existence of black holes to the public, but I have to ask: does this photo really prove the existence of unknown objects as usual photos? Is it true? In fact, black holes are space-time singularities that are mathematically symbolic rather than scientific empirically real. The so-called black hole photo “captures” only the halo around the black hole. When we understand the meaning of this picture, we confuse the truth of mathematical symbols with the truth of scientific experience. Perhaps scientists knew this when they took out the photos. The crux of the matter is that the general public doesn’t feel the confusion.
According to the 20th century philosophy of language, the authenticity of symbols must come from experience, otherwise they will be meaningless. This awareness has penetrated into the humanities, societies and religions. Mathematics is a system of symbols, natural language is another system of symbols, and if we replace the above example of black holes with the example of natural language, it is easy to realize that it is inappropriate to confuse symbols and experience. According to the Bible, God exists. For many philosophers, God is just a sign of a natural language. When reading natural language texts, a strict distinction must be made between pure symbols and symbols representing objects of experience. The former is not true, the latter is true. I want to ask: why in the field of science, we agree that pure symbolic reality and empirical reality can be confused, and take out pictures of black holes, but in the humanities and social fields, when expressing objects in natural language, pure symbols and symbols representing empirical reality are not To distinguish? Black holes really exist as mathematical symbols. Why doesn’t God, who is also a symbol, exist? I have no intention of discussing the issue of religion here. I just want to use this example to illustrate that the misunderstandings brought about by the linguistic turn of philosophy in the 20th century are the inner source of all kinds of ideological predicaments.
Humanity is in deep schizophrenia. Some people highly respect science, they regard mathematical symbols as the new god, and they believe that it is very likely that human beings will live in a virtual world created by advanced civilization. In the hearts of others, religious belief is undoubtedly true. It is not only not bound by reason, but is anti-rational, and various extremist ideas arise under the control of this concept. 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 it not be? No philosopher can answer.
Another example is the so-called “speak with numbers”. In recent years people have almost drawn an equal sign between big data and the truth, but can big data really give us a deeper insight into the world? In the late 2019 COVID-19 outbreak, big data played a strange role. Sometimes, those precise numbers that are updated in real time do indicate the state of the epidemic in different societies, but in many cases, they blind people from seeing the truth. A professor of mathematics at Temple University in the United States pointed out that the seemingly precise epidemic data actually contains a lot of uncertainty. First, the uncertainty of basic data, such as mortality and infection rates, how many people died due to the epidemic? Given the large number of people who are being treated without testing, and the presence of asymptomatic infections, how can the actual number of infections be confirmed? The second is the possible distortions caused by the way medical institutions and the media report these data. For example, the number of new cases in a certain place on a certain day has increased by 10 times overnight. This may simply be due to insufficient detection of the epidemic before. Once the scope of virus testing is expanded, the natural The number of cases will double. What these statistics ultimately bring about is growing social disunity and fear.
More importantly, different big data are not self-consistent. All this shows that behind different big data, there are different interaction patterns of infectious diseases under different cultures and systems. The real impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic on human society is not only the loss of human life, but also acts as a catalyst to lead to great changes in different social concepts. This is something that is hard to see in all big data analytics today.
The above examples abound in everyday life. When the lines between “true” and “false”, experience and symbols are increasingly blurred, can we still judge what is wrong with theories? Can reasonable revisions be made to those plans and constructs that are constantly alienating and surprising us? If there is no authenticity in the humanities and in history, what is the point of the lessons of history? In the 20th century, people once believed that history had laws, which denied human free will and led to the rise of totalitarianism. In the 21st century, people deny the laws of history, but strangely find that history is repeating itself.
The study of the philosophy of authenticity
Today, we have a prosperous material civilization, but in retrospect, the human mind has never been as fragile, fearful of death, cowardly and timid as it is today. Humanity’s current technology is enough to support us to live on Mars – as long as we have the courage. But do we have such courage? Do we have minds that contain such technology? No! I think that without such a mind, not only the painful historical lessons will be ignored, the disasters that have recurred in history will be repeated, but also our scientific and technological achievements will be forgotten more than 100 years later. So what the humanities scholars have to do today is to reconstruct the true and grand human mind, a mind that can be matched with our science and technology, and this will never arise from the technology itself or from scientific professional research.
Today we often hear the question: How can we build a society in which people are dignified? A dignified society exists only if there is a dignified life. A person can live a dignified life only if he has a true heart. Therefore, the core of cultural and social reconstruction is to reconstruct the true mind of modern society. However, we must be soberly aware that it is impossible to restore the true heart of traditional society. In modern society, how to restore the authenticity of the ultimate concern and make it mutually supportive with the authenticity of value and experience, so that people can once again become the carrier of the three types of authenticity, this is the question that the times ask philosophers, I call it For the exploration of the philosophy of authenticity.
The term “philosophy of authenticity” was coined by me. The reason why I compare authenticity with philosophical research is to grasp the direction of philosophical research today from a higher level. In fact, as long as we step out from the history of Western philosophy and analyze the value system of each axis of civilization, philosophy will emerge from the “love of wisdom” that originated in the ancient Greek civilization and turn to its hidden essence, that is, authenticity. discussion. Different axial civilizations have different visions of transcendence, each of which has its own ultimate care and value, as well as the experience integrated by ultimate care and value.
That is to say, the true minds of different Axial civilizations are not the same. The pursuit of rationality and truth by the “love of wisdom” of ancient Greek civilization is only one of the true minds of Axial civilizations. For this reason, cultural studies of today’s Axial civilization and its modern transformation should be framed by the philosophy of authenticity. Corresponding research questions are the structure of the true mind of traditional society and how the unfolding of modernity leads to the disintegration of the true mind of traditional society. On this basis, we can further study whether the true mind must contradict modernity, and how to establish a modern true mind.
To achieve this, I will complete my treatise on the philosophy of authenticity in three steps. First, analyze from a historical point of view why with the establishment of modern society, especially the formation of the structure of modern science and technology, the real mind will be disintegrated step by step. In fact, modernity originates from the separation and coexistence of belief in God and cognitive rationality, and its universalization must disassociate individual autonomy from ultimate concern. At this time, if the true connection between individual rights and authenticity cannot be found, the loss of the authenticity of the ultimate concern is inevitable. Furthermore, when scientific truth is equal to objective reality, sooner or later, human beings will live in a world where there is no distinction between truth and falsehood. Is there really nothing human beings can do about this fate? I call it the history of the philosophy of authenticity.
Second, it proposes the methodology of the philosophy of authenticity, and discusses whether it is possible to reconstruct the true mind in modern society. Through the historical analysis of the evolution of real minds, I found that the real basis of scientific experience is the infinite expansion of universally repeatable controlled experiments, that is, we can always increase the set of control variables according to the results of controlled experiments, and make new ones on this basis. controlled experiments, and this new controlled experiment is also generally reproducible. Mathematics happens to be a symbolic representation of the infinitely expanding structure of universally repeatable controlled experiments. Because the truth of mathematical notation and the truth of scientific experience are isomorphic, an arch bridge can be built across the two, leading to the expansion of scientific reality (as a coherent whole of mathematical notation and scientific experience).
Therefore, every scientific revolution is accompanied by a great development in mathematics. This is precisely the long-misunderstood nature of modern science.
Based on this, I draw an important conclusion: authenticity has different domains, such as scientific truth, social truth, and personal truth. Different domains do not necessarily intersect, and there are different structures of authenticity. Furthermore, authenticity in each domain has both empirical and symbolic types. That is to say, there is the authenticity of a purely semiotic system, and the 20th century philosophical revolution neglected this point and finally gave up halfway, unable to establish a new epistemology based on the study of symbols. To achieve the integration of different realities and types is to build an arch bridge between them. Once a new arch bridge that differs from scientific reality (such as an arch bridge of human reality) is established, we find a structure in which ultimate concern, value, and empirical reality are mutually maintained. If my analysis is correct, it is possible to reconstruct the true mind in modern society. I call it the Method of the Philosophy of Authenticity.
Third, 20th century philosophers tried to use logical language to analyze natural language. However, natural language and logical language have different structures of truth and must be studied as two different symbolic systems.
Just as modern science is an arch bridge spanning the reality of mathematical symbols and the reality of scientific experience, society is a bridge built between the reality of natural language symbols and the reality of human actions. By analyzing the structure of this arch bridge, the relationship between the authenticity and modernity of the human world can be understood. From this, we can demonstrate the structure of the true mind in the 21st century from different levels. Regardless of scientific truth or humanistic truth, the existence of free will is the premise of the authenticity of all symbols, so personal freedom is a meta-value, and morality and all other values are derived from personal freedom.
The modern value system comes from the modern transformation of the axis civilization. During this process, the ultimate concern of the traditional society will gradually disappear. The philosophical research on authenticity shows that although the withdrawal of ultimate concern from society is inevitable, the pursuit of the equivalent of traditional ultimate concern is not vain. It is just that philosophers have never explored the overall structure of authenticity and do not know their existence. In this sense, the ultimate concern in the modern sense can be reconstructed, and they are the modern form of the ultimate concern in the Axial Age.多元的现代终极关怀应该可以和价值甚至科学的真实性互相整合，并构成现代人的真实心灵。故真实性哲学的第三篇是分析人文世界的真实性，重心是现代价值基础的再论证，亦可称为建构篇。
本书是真实性哲学的历史篇，主旨是通过历史研究揭示真实心灵解体的逻辑。我认为，即使历史研究发现这一切是不可避免的，我们仍可以把真实心灵的重建作为自己的任务。为什么这么说呢？因为通过分析这一过程为什么不可避免，有助于理解真实心灵的构成，以及其和现代价值系统的关系。也就是说，一旦认识到现代性的基础是轴心时代形成的真实心灵，以及现代社会作为轴心文明的独特形态，在其发展过程中会导致真实心灵的解体，我们就可能去想象在新时代用什么样的方式重建真实心灵。
行文至此，我想起了阿西莫夫在《基地》一书中所描绘的科幻故事：心理史学预见了文明的大倒退，但其研究可帮助人类去缩短那个“漫长的黑暗期”。现实中当然不存在心理史学这样的学科，我们能够寄希望的，只能是通过不断深入探索什么是科学真实，什么是人文真实，以及有没有历史发展规律，从而发现人类真实心灵的结构和意义。
本文为《消失的真实：现代社会的思想危机》一书的导论，该书由中信出版集团2022年3月出版。
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