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倫理學 -- 開欄文
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瀏覽12,275 ｜回應40｜推薦3 |
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我讀書的興趣和思考的重點在試圖回答：如何「做人」和如何「待人」這兩個問題。我涉獵文學、哲學、心理學、政治學、社會學、認知科學、文化研究等領域，動機都來自試圖回答以上兩個問題。
二十多年來，我在討論不同議題的文章中，依脈絡表達了我對「道德」的看法(我偏向使用「社會規範」這個概念)。今後我將把和它相關的文章集中發表在本欄。
本欄第2篇文章是2002年舊作。該文討論一個案例；同時，它在批評另一位先生大作的過程中，釐清了一些相關概念與盲點；可以做為討論和思考「道德」或「社會規範」的基礎。所以重刊於此。
本文於 修改第 3 次
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0. 前言
傑弗森是《美國獨立宣言》(主要)起草人，美國第三任總統(1801–1809)和第一任國務卿。他是美國的開國功臣和政壇大佬；《美國獨立宣言》在政治學和近代史發展上都有相當大的貢獻(1)。
傑弗森性侵非裔女奴這段過往或醜聞(2)，早就有報導；記得我曾經在一篇短評中提及這件事。以下從倫理學角度略表淺見。
1. 傑弗森事件平議
1.1 事件的時間點
傑弗森生於1743年；美國獨立戰爭那年他33歲。他性侵的非裔女奴賀明絲生於1773年；比傑弗森小了30歲。根據關於此事件的記載(3)，傑弗森開始和賀明絲發生性行為的地點在巴黎；傑弗森時為44 – 46歲，後者時為14 - 16歲；這大概用得上「老牛吃嫩草」這句俗話。依照美國某些州現行法律，由於被害者未成年，傑弗森這種行為等同「強姦罪」。此外，賀明絲是傑弗森夫人同父異母的妹妹；算是傑弗森的半個小姨子(4)。
根據「參考文章」1的報導，傑弗森和賀明絲所生子女中，有四位分別在他年齡為55、58、62、65前後的時間；傑弗森53-57歲期間擔任美國第二任副總統；58-66歲期間擔任美國第三任總統。
如果傑弗森性侵賀明絲發生在他年少輕狂時期，我們或許能夠用弗洛伊德「投射作用」、「補償作用」這些理論，來調和這種行為與傑弗森後來在《美國獨立宣言》所宣揚「原則」或「理想」兩者間的巨大落差。
但是，根據上述「時間點」的分析，傑弗森「言」與「行」之間的落差，應該只能歸類於「偽善」、「欺騙」、或「無恥」(5)。
1.2 「原則」與「行為」
要做到100%的「言行合一」，孔老夫子可能也不敢打包票。我這樣說，並沒有替傑弗森開脫、漂白、或遮羞的意思(請見上一小節)。但是，我們需要把一個「原則」或「理想」，跟鼓吹這個「原則」或「理想」者本身的「行為」做個切割(6)。也就是說，傑弗森不能做到「(維護)人權」、「平等」、或「人生而自由」這些「原則」，並不表示這些「原則」不實際、沒價值、或只是一個空想。
1.3 傑弗森的事功
中國過去某些時段，養孌童、裹小腳、以及娶n房等等，符合當時的「社會習俗」(7)。同樣的，以今天的社會規範，或孔老夫子「古者言之不出，恥躬之不逮也」的標準，傑弗森的行為與道德必須加以深刻批評和嚴厲譴責；但是，這不是一筆抹殺或全盤否定他貢獻的理由。
2. 結論
「傑弗森事件」可以做為支持「局部相對觀」和「『普世價值』概念『無所指』論」兩者的案例(8)。
附註：
1. 這兩點請依序見「參考文章」2、3、和5 (該文「獨立戰爭」一節)。
2. 請見「參考文章」1。
3. 「參考文章」1和4。
4. 賀明絲的父親是傑弗森的岳父；她的母親則是被她父親性侵的非裔女奴。賀明絲出生那年被當做「遺產」的一部分「過戶」給傑弗森夫婦；傑弗森時年30。
5. 傑弗森卒於1826；賀明絲卒於1835。傑弗森一直到過世之前，沒有還賀明絲「自由人」的身份。這是比「性侵」更缺乏「人性」的行為。我不是說，「自由」或「人權」高於「尊嚴」；而是說，「性侵」至少可以歸咎於「人」的「獸性」成份；不費吹灰之力就能給賀明絲「自由人」身份而不為，則毫無任何想像得到的理由；只能以「騙子」、「涼薄」、「冷血」、「殘酷」、和「豬狗不如」來形容。
6. 古人說，「立德」、「立功」、「立言」為「『三』不朽」；可見這三類「行為」並不具有「相關性」。換言之，「立言」者未必「立德」或「立功」；反之亦然。
7. 縱觀古、今、中、外「社會史」，重臣、地主、富商、領主，和他們的官二代、富二代等等，「性侵」奴婢或女奴的行為，未必「司空見慣」或受「法律」保護；但在社會風氣和公權力執法上，屬於「睜一隻眼，閉一隻眼」則無庸置疑。
8. 我否認「普世價值」這個「概念」有任何內涵；我不記得寫過正式討論它的文章。拙作《什麼是「文明世界的價值觀」?》從反面批評這個概念(該欄2006/01/28)。
參考文章：
1. Lawler, A. 2026, 《傑弗森圈牿非裔女奴》, 《時事論壇》/The Atlantic
2. Eicholz, H. 2024, 250 Years of Jeffersonian Constitutionalism, Law and Liberty
3. Lowry, R. 2026, America’s Thomas Jefferson Problem, Coolege Review
4. Wikipedia 2026, Sally Hemings
5. Wikipedia 2026, Thomas Jefferson
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傑弗森圈牿非裔女奴--Andrew Lawler
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Researchers Say They’ve Found the Truth About Thomas Jefferson
A secret 15-year effort has produced genetic evidence that one of the nation’s Founders fathered children with a woman he enslaved.
Andrew Lawler, 09/18/26
Three hours after Thomas Jefferson died at his Monticello home on July 4, 1826, his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, snipped a lock of the Founder’s gray hair, still faintly reddish blond. Trist then tied the hair with orange thread and placed it in a paper packet, along with a short note describing what he’d done.
In an era before photography or modern embalming, hair was an easily preserved reminder of a beloved friend or relative who’d died. Trist did not know that he was also securing physical evidence that, two centuries later, would help resolve one of the nation’s oldest and most contentious historical debates: whether the author of the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s third president, had children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved for half a century and never freed.
After a covert and exhaustive 15-year effort led by the Smithsonian Institution, a team of geneticists, genealogists, historians, and anthropologists believes it has found proof that Jefferson fathered at least two of Hemings’s six children. On Tuesday, Richard Kurin, a Smithsonian cultural anthropologist, who led the multidisciplinary research effort, will publish a book detailing the team’s findings. A scientific paper is currently under review for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers, who agreed to speak with me about their results before publication, relied on the latest genetic techniques to reassemble Jefferson’s genome from the Founder’s hair. They then matched that sequence with DNA from descendants of two of Hemings’s sons, Madison and Eston. (Of her other four children, two died in infancy, and the other two didn’t have any known offspring.) Not only did the researchers find that Madison’s and Eston’s descendants share Jefferson’s DNA; many of them had more of it than do his known descendants by way of his wife, Martha Wayles.
For many Americans, the matter was already laid to rest years ago. In 1998, the scientific journal Nature published a two-page peer-reviewed paper titled “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Newspaper stories declared the case solved, and Oprah Winfrey staged a tearful family reunion of Jefferson’s descendants. Most historians came to accept the finding when it was combined with other evidence from the era.
But a vocal minority has continued to doubt that the two had a sexual relationship. Some have pointed out, correctly, that the limited biological data used in the Nature study did not definitively prove that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children—only that he was one of several candidates in the Jefferson male line. These doubters also disparage as unreliable or wishful thinking the oral histories passed down by Hemings’s descendants who have placed Jefferson in their family tree.
Some detractors saw a more nefarious agenda. One researcher called the 1998 study “a deliberate attempt to select and mold the evidence to fit a pre-selected theory.” Other critics, many of them white Virginians, joined in the defense of the Founder. “Jefferson’s personal reputation has been all but assassinated,” wrote William G. Hyland Jr., a lawyer and author. “The face on Mount Rushmore has been vilified as a slave-owning hypocrite, misogynist, and racist.”
Though the new results might convince some holdouts, the backlash has already arrived, and more will likely follow. The Heritage Foundation has previously criticized Monticello’s depiction of Jefferson in part for failing to tell visitors “that historians disagree about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings.” The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, a nonprofit formed in response to the Nature report, still accuses “historical revisionists” of inaccurately portraying Jefferson as a “liar, fraud, hypocrite, and child molesting slave rapist.” The Trump administration has made clear that it wants to present a version of American history that doesn’t disparage the Founders. In a report released on the Fourth of July, the White House condemned what it asserted is “extreme political activism” guiding the 180-year-old Smithsonian, which President Trump has said is too focused on “how bad Slavery was.”
For Clara Nutt, though, the results are simply confirmation of a long-known fact. Her African American father told his freckled daughter at an early age that she was a direct descendant of Jefferson through Madison Hemings. Nutt provided the researchers with saliva samples that found 5.1 percent of Jefferson’s genetic makeup in her DNA—nearly twice the amount expected by genetic averaging. She was delighted but not surprised to have scientific proof. “I have always known who I am,” Nutt told me.
That the very person who made famous the phrase “All men are created equal” repeatedly impregnated a woman he held in lifetime bondage first surfaced in a Richmond newspaper in 1802. The writer, a Scottish-born journalist named James Callender, had once been a Jefferson champion, and had received financial support from him. But when Jefferson won the 1800 election, he denied a government job to the volatile Callender, who had been jailed during John Adams’s administration for sedition. Ally turned enemy. “By this wench Sally, our president has had several children,” Callender wrote in The Recorder. “The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello.”
The Hemings-Jefferson matter became one of the nation’s first major political scandals—and one of its most enduring. “This engaged six of the seven first presidents,” Richard Kurin told me. “You could call it the longest-running American soap opera”—one, he notes, that involves the issues of race, inequality, and liberty.
Jefferson, after all, declared in 1814 that “amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” By that date, his youngest child with Hemings, Eston, was 6 years old. Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge, in an 1858 letter to her husband, referred to the possibility of a relationship with Hemings as that which “will not bear telling. There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.” The Founder went to his grave without publicly acknowledging the relationship or any children he’d had with Hemings.
A 1974 book by the historian Fawn Brodie reignited the debate with fresh historical evidence of Jefferson’s long-term liaison with Hemings, but Brodie’s assertions gained little traction among scholars and intellectuals. If the Hemings story was true, one skeptical historian wrote in 1977, then Jefferson “deserves to be regarded as one of the most profligate liars and consummate hypocrites ever to occupy the presidency.” Gore Vidal summarized the prevailing sentiment in an interview: “No gentleman would have gone to bed with a slave. Since Thomas Jefferson was the greatest gentleman of his period, he could not have done so either. That takes care of that.”
Two decades later, the Harvard law professor Annette Gordon-Reed sharply criticized the academic community for spending “generations either ignoring or explaining away” the nearly four-decade relationship and accepting white narratives denying the tie while dismissing those left by Black families that asserted otherwise.
The 1998 Nature report brought the new tools of genetics to bear on the dispute. The authors based their biological data on the Y chromosome, passed down by Jefferson’s male descendants. But some researchers accused the authors of misleading the public, and the authors were forced to acknowledge that Jefferson could “neither be definitively excluded nor solely implicated” by their data. Other candidates included his younger brother, Randolph, a frequent visitor to Monticello. One enslaved informant had called Randolph “a mighty simple man” who “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle & dance half the night.”
A month after the Nature study’s publication, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, convened a group of scholars to examine the genetic and historical data. A 2000 statistical analysis by a Monticello archaeologist strengthened the case made in Nature by examining the timing of when Jefferson was present at Monticello and when Hemings’s children were conceived. A majority of the foundation’s panel found “a high probability” that at least one of Hemings’s children had been fathered by Jefferson, and likely all six. A minority, however, rejected the conclusions, calling the research a cynical campaign by academics and the media “to denigrate and destroy the legacy of one of the greatest of our founding fathers and one of the greatest of all our citizens.”
Critics united to form the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which undertook a second independent review of the findings in the Nature study, and declared the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s report “the product of shallow and shoddy scholarship” that had ignored exculpatory evidence “in order to achieve an apparently desired conclusion.” John Works, a Jefferson descendant and founding member of the society, wrote that defending the author of the Declaration “has come to mean defending what America means, and we feel compelled to rise to that defense.” The report that the society’s panel of scholars released in 2001 found the Nature results “almost certainly false,” and insisted that “Sally Hemings appears to have been a very minor figure in Thomas Jefferson’s life.”
The controversy spawned books with subtitles such as An American Travesty, and Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search, which expanded on critiques of the genetic study and the historical data. “Jefferson is completely innocent of this sordid charge,” William Hyland maintained in his book In Defense of Thomas Jefferson, citing “an obsessive agenda on the color of Sally’s skin, and slave status.” Another doubter, David N. Mayer, a law and history professor in Ohio, fingered “‘political correctness,’ radical multiculturalism, and postmodernism.”
Hemings was born in 1773 as the youngest child of the enslaved Elizabeth Hemings, described by one enslaved man at Monticello as “a bright mulatto woman.” Sally, he recalled, was “mighty near white” and “very handsome; long straight hair down her back.” One of Jefferson’s grandsons described her as “light colored and decidedly good looking.” Both enslaved and free contemporaries reported that her father was John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. If true, then Hemings was Martha’s half sister.
On her deathbed in 1782, Martha is said to have made her husband promise not to remarry. Five years later, he was in Paris serving as the minister plenipotentiary when his daughter Maria arrived, accompanied by the 14-year-old Hemings. Madison Hemings later claimed that Jefferson and his mother began a sexual relationship while in France, where she was legally free, and that she agreed to return to the United States on the condition that any future children would be freed at age 21.
In an interview with a journalist, Madison stated that his mother was pregnant by Jefferson on their return to the United States in 1789, though it is unclear whether any child from that time survived. Hemings went on to serve in the main house of Monticello while her owner joined George Washington’s Cabinet as the nation’s first secretary of state, and then became president from 1801 to 1809. As he did with all of his human property, Jefferson recorded the birth of Hemings’s six children, including a son, Beverly, in 1798; a daughter, Harriet, in 1801; a son, Madison, in 1805; and another son, Eston, in 1808. Two other daughters, one born in 1797 and another in 1799, died in infancy. The three sons trained as carpenters, and Harriet spun and wove cloth.
Both Beverly and Harriet fled Monticello in 1822. Jefferson, who often posted rewards or hired slave catchers to return those who escaped, did not attempt to recover either. By Madison Hemings’s account, Beverly went to Washington, D.C., passed as white, and married a white woman. Monticello’s former chief overseer later claimed that Jefferson had arranged for Harriet’s departure, giving her spending money and stage-coach fare to Philadelphia. She “married a white man in good standing” in the capital, Madison recalled in his later years.
In Jefferson’s will, made out months before his 1826 death, he granted Madison and Eston Hemings their freedom once they reached 21, and gave both men “my last, solemn, and dutiful thanks.” He also asked the Virginia government—which required those emancipated to leave the state—to allow the Hemings brothers to remain “where their families and connections are.” Sally Hemings was never officially freed, although Jefferson’s daughter Martha later let Sally live with the freed Madison and Eston in Charlottesville until her death, in 1835. Her burial location, like that of so many enslaved African Americans, is unknown.
Both Madison and Eston later moved to Ohio. Eston died in 1856 in Wisconsin. His two sons fought for the Union in the Civil War, and the family obscured its African American heritage. “We identified as white,” Arthur Westerinen, Eston’s fifth-generation descendant, told me. Westerinen’s mother, Julia, learned of the connection when she stumbled on it while doing a college ancestry project.
Madison’s branch, however, retained its African American identity and passed down the story of Jefferson’s paternity. When a teenage Clara Nutt visited Monticello on a school trip in the early 1970s, she was eager to see the home of her famous ancestors. “I got off the bus with my head held high,” she recalled. Shown Jefferson’s bedroom, she asked a docent where Sally Hemings had slept. “That woman never stepped foot in this house,” the docent snapped. Nutt was devastated. “With every breath,” she said, “I silently sobbed.”
In his new book, History by a Hair, the Smithsonian’s Kurin tells the story of how he and his fellow researchers tracked down Jefferson’s DNA. In October 2011, Kurin was reviewing a film to accompany a Smithsonian exhibit displaying what is known as The Jefferson Bible. After retiring to Monticello, Jefferson compiled the volume by painstakingly cutting and pasting sections of the New Testament that were focused on morality and stripped of what he called the “artificial vestments” of miracles and superstitions. The film included a segment featuring a reenactor working with a sharp penknife under candlelight. Kurin, then the Smithsonian’s secretary for history, art, and culture, mused to himself that if he had taken on such a delicate task, he would have repeatedly cut himself. That idle thought prompted him to contact a curator who had worked on the bible’s conservation to see if he had encountered any blood splotches that might contain Jefferson’s DNA.
The curator told Kurin that he had found no blood but had encountered a couple of hairs. One was pasted down on page 73 and was light red, like Jefferson’s hair. At the time, extracting DNA from old hair was cutting-edge science; light and humidity can quickly degrade genetic material. Only in the previous year had a Danish team succeeded in sequencing an ancient genome using a clump of 4,000-year-old human hair that had been well preserved in the ice of Greenland.
With approval from Smithsonian leaders, Kurin launched an investigation to reconstruct Jefferson’s genome using the hair found in the bible, while also gathering saliva samples from dozens of living individuals who were known or suspected descendants. By comparing the first with the second, he hoped to produce unequivocal evidence of the paternity of Hemings’s children.
From the start, the ambitious effort was kept secret from the public. “We didn’t want people to assume results until we were really, really sure,” Kurin told me. A colleague of his reached out to a couple in the genetics field, the molecular biologist Beth Shapiro and her husband, Richard Green, a computational expert who had made a name sequencing the Neanderthal genome. They were starting a paleogenomics lab at UC Santa Cruz. “We knew the technology was getting better,” Shapiro told me. “And this looked cool, interesting, and fun.”
Years into the project, Shapiro and Green’s lab determined that the bible hairs had not, in fact, belonged to Jefferson. A reliquary at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, purporting to contain hair from the first 14 presidents, also proved a dead end. “I thought that was it,” Shapiro said. Kurin, however, had already begun to scour other collections. Monticello’s storage areas yielded several samples of Jefferson’s hair encased in gold lockets, glass ampules, and the packet assembled by Nicholas Trist. Kurin also found additional corroboration of the latter’s validity: In 1899, Trist’s daughter had mailed the packet to her cousin, writing that the hair was “in the same paper in which they were placed on that day nearly 74 years ago,” and which “I know to be authentic.”
With the permission of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the geneticists examined the hair strands and found viable DNA. “We’ll exhaust it and sequence the crap out of it,” Shapiro assured Kurin in 2017. Lab workers gradually assembled a library of Jefferson’s genome. “We went from a long-shot fishing expedition to a slam dunk,” Green said. “From then on, it was pretty straightforward. We spend a lot of time getting DNA out of difficult things like hair.” (Many of the lab’s recent projects have centered on identifying victims and suspects in cold cases, including the Gilgo Beach murders.)
Kurin, meanwhile, traveled the country to meet with known and possible Hemings-Jefferson descendants, including Julia Westerinen and Nutt. He explained his mission, gained consent, collected saliva samples, and secured promises that they would keep the matter private. This second library of material allowed the geneticists to compare the DNA from descendants of Madison and Eston Hemings with DNA from Jefferson.
The match proved indisputable. On average, a fifth-generation descendant retains 3.125 percent of their ancestor’s genetic material, though the precise amount can vary considerably. Two fifth-generation descendants of Jefferson and Martha Wayles showed 2.6 percent and 2.7 percent of Jefferson’s genetic material. Nutt’s percentage was nearly twice that. Other Madison relations shared significant amounts of the third president’s DNA, as did descendants of Eston. The scientists had found their proof, thanks to Jefferson’s hair. “Once you have a common ancestor,” Green said, “the accuracy is absolutely stunning.”
The research effort has begun to face criticism even before it is publicly released. One descendant of Madison Hemings, Mary Brady-Atkins, provided DNA samples for the study, but criticized Kurin this week in an interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Brady-Atkins said she was concerned that Kurin’s book would be published before the scientific paper.
Last month, the 98-year-old Brady-Atkins asked that her saliva samples be destroyed. “It was her right to withdraw from the study,” Kurin told me today. “And yes, we destroyed her DNA, and withdrew data from the study, but the findings are still the same.” He acknowledged that the book would come out before PNAS has accepted the paper, and noted that Brady-Atkins’s request to be removed from the project came after the book was already printed. But Kurin and Green insisted that the study was undergoing appropriate peer review. Green added that a draft of the paper with detailed data will be released on Tuesday, at the same time as the book.
According to the Chronicle, Brady-Atkins supports a competing research effort led by Works, the Jefferson descendant who helped found the Heritage Society; he has long argued that Randolph Jefferson, rather than his brother Thomas, was the father of Hemings’s children. Last year, Works petitioned a county court in Tennessee to exhume the body of Randolph’s son from a Nashville cemetery, with the goal of extracting DNA that Works believes might clear Thomas Jefferson’s name. The city opposes the petition.
Some descendants worry that the new research from Kurin and his colleagues will only infuriate die-hard Jefferson apologists further. “It will be ugly,” Nutt predicted. Unlike during her first Monticello visit, however, she now feels supported. After the Nature paper came out, she attended a reunion of her late father’s family and was drawn into the community of Hemings’s descendants. In 2001, she participated in a White House event hosted by President George W. Bush that brought together Jefferson’s progeny on both sides of the color line. “Whatever comes, I can lean into my family—and my new family,” she said, including the researchers who gathered the hard data confirming her family’s ties.
One likely flash point will be the policies of the Monticello Association, a private organization that oversees the Jefferson-family cemetery at Monticello. The group has long refused to allow Hemings’s descendants to join the association, much less be buried alongside their white relations. “They are invested in this idea of Thomas Jefferson on a pedestal,” Arthur Westerinen said. He told me that he has been in contact with several association members who have pressed for the acceptance of the Hemings branch of the family, though without success. (Lucy Taylor, the association’s president, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Another “giant question,” Green said, is what becomes of Jefferson’s genome. According to Green, two major National Institutes of Health–funded genetic-data banks recently rejected the team’s request to submit its detailed sequence. This is in part because Jefferson is a known figure; if Jefferson’s genome is made public, then his descendants’ privacy will be at risk. “The descendant community will need to weigh in,” Green said. “My lab worked hard on this, but I don’t want to be the one who decides who gets access.”
At the same time, the data, were they publicly released, could allow individuals to determine their own relation to the third president—and, perhaps, pinpoint descendants of Beverly and Harriet Hemings to see if they, too, were born of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. By recovering the genome of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, researchers also could confirm whether she is Sally Hemings’s half sister.
More broadly, the UC Santa Cruz team’s success might spark a rush to recover the genomes of other famous people—Beethoven’s, for example, was recently sequenced from locks of his hair. Such an effort would have intriguing but unsettling implications. “You could search to see if Abraham Lincoln’s melancholy was genetic,” Kurin suggested. Green fears that rapid technological advances might lead to a genetic Wild West. “Genes are not necessarily fate; most simply create a predisposition,” he said. He worries that members of the media will fail to convey this complexity, much as the 1998 Nature headline was misleading. He also fears a backlash that might result in unreasonable barriers to research.
When it comes to Jefferson and Hemings, Kurin is confident that the team’s careful work over a decade and a half will convince doubters of the accuracy of their finding. “For me, it had nothing to do with an ideological or political agenda,” he writes in his new book. “I was using evidence, logic, and the available tools and methods to follow a trail.” He also takes Jefferson at his word. “There is not a truth existing which I fear,” the Founder wrote two months before his death, “or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
Andrew Lawler is a journalist and the author of A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution.
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* When slavery is erased from plantations
* From the June 2021 issue: Black America’s neglected origin stories
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改變人們認知的9本書 -- The Modern Lens
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How 9 Books Changed the Way We Understand the World
The Modern Lens, 07/28/26
A report on the ideas that defined us as a species — from Plato to Anne Frank
There are books you read that stay with you for life. And there are books that, once read, change the way you see the entire world. The nine volumes below belong to the second category. They are writings that shook the very foundations of human thought — whether we’re talking about politics, science, economics, or the way we relate to one another.
What do Plato’s Republic, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Anne Frank’s diary have in common? Apparently, nothing. But looking closer, they all explore the same fundamental question: what does it mean to be human, and how can we live better together?
Let’s discover them together.
1. The Republic — Plato
What is it about?
A philosophical debate about justice — both at the individual level (the human soul) and at the state level (the polis). Plato constructs an ideal city-state ruled by philosopher-kings, where each social class (rulers, guardians, producers) fulfills its duty. The soul is divided into reason, spirit, and appetite.
What do we learn from it?
Justice means harmony — each part fulfilling its role without interfering with another’s. Leadership must belong to those who know the truth (philosophers), and art and poetry must be censored to prevent corruption of the young. The ideal state is a metaphor for the ordered soul; without education and light (the allegory of the cave), people remain prisoners of their own illusions.
2. The Analects — Confucius
What is it about?
A collection of maxims and short dialogues that lay the foundations of Chinese ethics, centered on family piety, loyalty, correctness in relationships, and self-cultivation. The key concepts are Ren (benevolence/humaneness) and Li (rituals/ceremonies that maintain social order).
What do we learn from it?
A person becomes virtuous through continuous education, respect for ancestors, and emulation of superior models. The ruler must be just in order to guide their subjects rightly. Happiness and social stability come not from punitive laws, but from cultivating personal character and harmonious relationships — between father and son, husband and wife, ruler and subject. It is a practical guide to the good life, not an abstract theology.
3. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
What is it about?
The founding book of modern political economy. Smith demonstrates that the true source of a nation’s wealth is not gold or silver (mercantilism), but productive labor and its division. He introduces the famous metaphor of the “invisible hand” — the individual interest of each person (the pursuit of profit) unintentionally leads to the general good of society through the mechanism of the free market.
What do we learn from it?
Free competition and reduced state intervention in the economy lead to economic growth, lower prices, and innovation. The division of labor exponentially increases productivity. However, the state must provide infrastructure, education, and defense. The market self-regulates, and monopolies are the enemies of prosperity.
4. On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin
What is it about?
It revolutionizes biology through the theory of natural selection. Darwin shows that species are not fixed and created once and for all, but evolve over time through the gradual accumulation of variations favorable to survival in the struggle for existence. All forms of life descend from a common ancestor.
What do we learn from it?
Evolution is a slow, mechanical process without a predetermined purpose — it is not driven by a creator, but by environmental pressure. Complex adaptations (the eye, the wing) appear through small steps, useful to each generation. The human species is no exception, but a point on a branch of the tree of life. This theory fundamentally changed humanity’s relationship with nature and its own origin.
5. The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
What is it about?
A political pamphlet that presents human history as a history of class struggle (between oppressors and the oppressed). It proclaims the inevitable collapse of capitalism due to its internal contradictions (the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie) and calls upon workers of the world to launch a revolution that abolishes private property and establishes communism — a classless and stateless society.
What do we learn from it?
Capitalism is unstable by its very nature — it creates wealth, but also poverty and periodic crises. The only solution, in their view, is the violent overthrow of the existing order. The bourgeois state is merely a committee administering the affairs of the ruling class. Communism represents, for them, “mankind’s leap from prehistory into history” — although later applications massively deviated from this text.
6. 1984 — George Orwell
What is it about?
A dystopian novel depicting an extreme totalitarian regime, ruled by “Big Brother,” where truth is constantly rewritten, and control over thought (language — “Newspeak”) becomes the supreme weapon of oppression. The protagonist, Winston Smith, attempts an individual rebellion but is crushed by the state machinery that destroys even his capacity to love and think freely.
What do we learn from it?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the primary goal of a totalitarian regime is not the happiness of its subjects, but power for its own sake. Control over information and history is more important than physical violence. Freedom means the ability to say that 2+2=4; if that right is lost, everything is lost. It is a terrifying warning against utopias that assassinate their own citizens in the name of the collective good.
7. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
What is it about?
A coming-of-age story seen through the eyes of young Scout Finch, in the racist South of 1930s America. Her father, lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a Black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of rape. The novel explores prejudice, community hypocrisy, and the loss of innocence, using the symbol of the mockingbird — a bird that does nothing but sing — for the innocent destroyed by society.
What do we learn from it?
Moral courage means doing what is right even when you know you will lose. Empathy — “walking in someone else’s skin” — is the only weapon against hatred. Evil is not always monstrous; it can be banal, manifested through good neighbors who tolerate injustice. Growing up means learning to see the world as it is, without losing your compassion.
8. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
What is it about?
A historical and anthropological synthesis that explains the rise of Homo sapiens through three major revolutions: cognitive (the emergence of language and fictional stories that enable mass cooperation), agricultural (the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, which Harari calls “history’s biggest fraud”), and scientific (which brings unlimited power, but also the risk of self-destruction).
What do we learn from it?
Humans are animals that dominate the planet because they can believe in shared stories — gods, nations, money, rights — that do not exist in reality, yet unite millions of strangers. Agriculture did not make us happier; it enslaved us to labor. In the future, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will transform us so profoundly that we might no longer be considered “human.” History has no predetermined meaning — we choose what we become.
9. The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank
What is it about?
The intimate diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl, written while hiding with her family in a secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Anne describes with astonishing maturity daily life in hiding, family conflicts, first loves, as well as fear and hope, despite the horrors outside. The diary ends abruptly upon entry into the camp — Anne dies at 15.
What do we learn from it?
Even in the darkest conditions, the human spirit retains an astonishing capacity for introspection, humor, and faith in the fundamental goodness of people: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” The innocence and intelligence of a single child are more powerful than any historical document in showing the monstrosity of the Holocaust. It is a testimony that every destroyed life is a lost world — and forgetting is the greatest collective sin.
What connects all these books?
Looking at the whole, we observe a common thread. All these writings, each in their own way, attempt to answer the same questions:
How should we live together? (Plato, Confucius, Marx, Orwell)
What truly makes us wealthy and prosperous? (Smith, Harari)
Where do we come from and what place do we hold in the universe? (Darwin, Harari)
How do we remain human when the world around us becomes inhuman? (Lee, Frank, Orwell)
There is no single answer. But there is a way of asking questions. And these nine books offer us precious tools to formulate them better.
For you, dear reader
Which of these books changed your perspective? Or maybe you haven’t read one of them yet — and now you know where to start.
Leave a response below and tell me: if you were to recommend a single book from this list to someone who wants to understand the world, which one would it be?
If you enjoyed this article, share it with a friend who needs a dose of inspiration. Subscribe for more explorations of the ideas that matter.
Written by The Modern Lens
The Modern Lens. Not to inform. To truly understand. Subscribe https://medium.com/@The_Modern_Lens
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「虛無論」槓「存在人本論」– Grace
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索引：
「存在人本論」：「基於『存在主義』思想『人本論』」的簡稱。「存在」在此術語中指「存在主義」，請參見此欄各篇貼文；「人本論」請參見此欄各篇貼文。
Monster：《怪物》，日本漫畫、動漫電視集
Nihilism：請參見本欄2026/07/01、2026/06/28、和2025/06/03等貼文。
如果下文作者真的只有18歲(請見第1段)，則她/他不但早熟，稱之為「奇葩」也可謂實至名歸。
Nihilism vs. Existential Humanism
Feat. Johan and Tenma — Monster 2004
Grace, 07/22/26
Disclaimer: It is not written by an expert but an 18-year-old who has watched a lot of anime… and has read a lot of books [and couldn’t make much of it]
Also, please note that I will be spoiling stuff from the anime — not much though.
Let’s start
The Philosophies:
Nihilism:
Nihilism is the belief that
life has no objective meaning.
No purpose — no cosmic justice.
Morality is made up and that truth is relative.
The universe doesn’t care if you exist or not. You are a speck on a speck hurtling through infinite nothing. In 100 years, everyone you know is dead. In 1,000, your entire bloodline is dust. In a billion, the sun explodes and Earth doesn’t even remember you existed.
Such thoughts.
Yup, that’s nihilism.
And… it is terrifyingly accurate. When you look at the bigger picture, you realize:
There is just indifference.
The universe doesn’t care if you die tomorrow.
There’s no divine plan. No karma and therefore no scoreboard.
People won’t get punished for doing bad to you. They will just move on…
Things have just happened.
You don’t get anything by being good.
Both of you’ll just die at the end.
Okay. I know it sounds panicky. And it should.
Coz, most people hear this and panic. They cling to religion, work, relationships, anything to avoid the void.
They build elaborate lies to pretend it’s not true.
But nihilists don’t panic. They look at the ‘void’ and say, “Yeah. That’s the truth.” And then they sit down and stare back at it.
I use the word void. Because it is that way.
Existential humanism:
Existential humanism agrees with nihilism on the facts. What facts?
1) There’s no inherent meaning.
2) The universe is indifferent.
3) Death is the end.
But then it adds one small bad-ass question: “So what?”
Existential humanism says: because there’s no meaning, you get to make it.
You’re not finding purpose, you’re inventing it. You’re the author of your own life.
You decide what matters and what’s good. You decide what’s worth living for.
It is about acknowledging the void and then building anyway. It’s about choosing to care, even though caring is irrational.
It’s about creating value in a valueless world.
Existential humanists don’t lie to themselves. They know there’s no external reason to be kind, to work hard, to love. They choose to do it anyway.
They say: “I know I will get nothing. But I will still do it. Because I choose to do it.”
Got the difference folks? Now lezz start the fun part.
The Characters: [aha]
Now let’s talk about Monster.
If you’ve never seen it [kindly watch it, pleaseee], it’s an anime about a brilliant neurosurgeon named Kenzo Tenma who saves a kid’s life instead of a mayor.
That kid grows up to become Johan Liebert, a charismatic sociopath who wants to erase humanity [not quiet. Watch the anime]. Tenma spends the rest of the series chasing him, trying to undo his mistake?
But that’s just the plot in a single sentence.
The actual story is a 74-episode masterpiece between these two philosophies and the story telling is brilliant.
Johan Liebert: Nihilism
Johan is pure nihilism. Not the dramatic, “I’m so edgy” kind.
He is literally void in a suit and blonde hair. The cold, quiet, smiley face.
He has a tragic backstory. One thing I will spoil is that he grew up in an orphanage that tried to strip away human emotion. [Again, watch the anime. You’ll know.]
He doesn’t kill because he’s angry. He doesn’t even kill for revenge. He kills because he genuinely believes death doesn’t matter — life doesn’t matter.
He says it:
“Only one thing is equal for all — and that is death.”
“Most of the universe is dead.”
He says it so freaking calmly — like it’s obvious. And it is.
Johan looks at life and sees zero. He looks at morality and sees lies. He looks at connection and sees power dynamics. He doesn’t hate anyone. He just doesn’t care.
THE FACT THAT HE EXPLOITS THESE SYSTEMS TO PROVE THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS AND FLAWLESSLY SUCCEEDS!!
To make everyone see what he sees. To isolate everyone.
“At last, he had found a name, but there was no one to call him by it.”
He doesn’t even care if he wins or dies. In fact, he gets exposed only because he wanted to.
That’s perfect nihilism. Nothing matters.
Dr. Kenzo Tenma: Existential Humanism
[aka mwah character. YOU GOTTA LOVE THIS MAN IF YOU WATCHED MONSTER.]
He’s a doctor and so, he saves lives. Is that his job? Maybe. But much more that that — it’s his choice.
“A doctor’s priority is to save lives!”
He saves Johan as a child because he believes all human lives are equal. That’s a decision and he sticks to it till the end. He chooses to believe it, even though it costs him everything.
And by everything — I mean everything except his humanity!
When Johan becomes a monster, Tenma doesn’t give up.
He says, “I made a mistake, and I’m going to fix it. Because people are dying because of my mistake.”
He chases Johan across Europe for years.
“Tomorrow will be a good day, I promise.”
Tenma is existential humanism in motion:
He creates his own morality. No one told him to stop Johan. He chooses to.
He takes full responsibility. Saving Johan was his fault?? He believes that and doesn’t deflect. He owns it and much more than that — he believes it because people are losing lives.
* He stays human. He doesn’t a monster to catch one. He saves people along the way. He loves people and it radiates.
* He keeps going even when it’s pointless. Johan is always ten steps ahead. No one believes him, but Tenma keeps moving.
That’s the essence of existential humanism. Not finding meaning but making it. Action! Action!
“Doctor Tenma is going to shoot me now, aren’t you Doctor Tenma?” [points gun at a child.]
“No!!” [Gets shot. But it is not Tenma.]
My take? I pity Johan and envy Tenma.
Some days I am Johan. I look at the world — with all the inequality, suffering, pointlessness, and I think, “Why bother? Nothing I do matters. I’m gonna die anyways. None of this is real.”
That’s nihilism. And it’s easy nihilism.
But then I see Tenma. This guy who has every reason to give up, his life is destroyed, he is exhausted… His enemy ffs won’t stop. And he still keeps going…
That’s existential humanism. It’s exhausting.
It means you have to choose to care, every single day.
I don’t know which one is right. Monster doesn’t tell you either. The ending is ambiguous.
But that’s the point. The show isn’t answering the question. It’s asking you:
“Which one are you gonna be?”
Written by Grace
Hi there, Into Science, Tech, AI, Sports, Psychology, Philosophy, Fiction, Poetry, history and Art. Would love to connect :)
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請參考：
* The translator of escalation: Lindsey Graham’s legacy (07/14)
對已經過世的人，我通常保持基本禮貌，不予月旦；即使略有微詞，大多點到為止。當然，大奸大惡之人不在此例。
剛剛往生的參議員格蘭固然算不上大奸大惡(請參見此欄2026/07/13)，但他卻是孔夫子所說：「其無後乎」之徒。
大奸大惡者的危害一般限於一時一地；而污染社會風氣者，往往流毒後世。孔夫子的「春秋之筆」良有以也。
我在這篇拙作中說(該欄2025/11/23)：
「川普對美國最大的傷是：把一個本來就不怎麼『要臉』的國家，在一位『什麼都吃就是不吃虧；什麼都要就是不要臉』國家領導人，每天賤招層出不窮的示範下(請參考此欄各篇報導/評論)，逐漸變成一個幾乎人人以『不要臉』為第一優先的社會。大概要等50 – 100年後，美國老百姓才能從這個惡夢中醒過來。」
美國記者、援嘴(1)、政客、和聯邦最高法院大法官等等之中，「不要臉」者即使還不到「過江之鯽」的程度，那也是俗話說的「多了去了」。在這些一拖拉庫「三客流」裏面(2)，如果參議員格蘭排第二，應該沒有人敢稱第一(3)。
一言以蔽之：在格蘭的辭典裏，找不到「原則」。這段話可以寫進他訃聞中，或刻在他墓碑上。
附註：
1. 「援嘴」：「援交」之「援」和「名嘴」之「嘴」的複合詞
2. 「三客流」：這是我十多年前在網上論政時常用的詞彙。它指的是：精於「擦」、「舔」、「吹」這三種動作/行為之一或三者俱全的人；個別的意思則是：
a. 擦：擦屁股 – 中文俗語。
b. 舔：舔屁股 – “ass-kissing” 一詞的中譯。
c. 吹：吹喇叭 – ”cock sucking” 一詞的中譯；中文有典籍稱此動作為「吹簫」。
3. 上面引用BBC記者惹契爾先生的報導中說：格蘭是「政壇不倒翁」(“political survicor”)；這應該是「英式諷刺」或「反面恭維」的筆法。
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淺談「理性」：《「理性」三重奏》補充
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** 我在2007年曾發表過《淺談「理性」》一文(該欄開欄文)，現在轉貼於此；做為本欄上一篇《「理性」三重奏》的補充說明。
此外，在拙作《「啟蒙」和「啟蒙運動」不是「同義詞」》一文中(該欄2007/05/28)，我對本欄上一篇道璀先生所提及康德大作《「啟蒙」一詞的意義》做了討論；也請參考。
淺談「理性」
0. 前言
0.1 兩種「理性」
我常常使用到「理性」這個概念。網友Dr. Boris Chang曾就此概念賜教(Chang 2006：留言︰#129、130、131、135、和141)，我和他就理性一詞的意義做了一些對談(胡卜凱2006：留言︰#132、133、134、136、和137)。我借這個機會把自己對理性的了解或「用法」做一個比較詳細的說明。歡迎指教和討論。
首先我所用的「理性」不同於哲學中的「理性」一詞的「用法」(1)。
哲學中的「理性」：
「1. 智力。將(事件、事物等)一般化，了解來龍去脈，看出相關性，深思反省，比較同、異等等的能力。2. 推理能力(2)。」
哲學中的「理性論」或「理性主義」：
「一般而言，理性論指認為理性是(人類)知識主要來源的看法。(理性論者)認為(在取得知識過程中)理性先於，高於，和獨立於感官知覺(3)。」
心理分析學中的「合理化」一詞，請看第4.3節 – a中關於「找藉口」的說明。但是在心理分析治療過程中，「合理化」的概念有相當廣泛和複雜的功能，其作用並不限於「找藉口」。這一部分請參考(Horney 1966︰28 - 30頁)。
由於這些術語和相關的(哲學中)「理性論者」過於專門，本文將不討論這些概念。基本上，(哲學中)「理性論者」所說的「理性」這個概念，指人生來就有的一種官能。我所用的「理性」一詞，指人通過經驗而取得或學習到的一種能力。請見以下第1、2兩節的討論。
0.2 我的基本假設
唯物論和經驗論是我接受的許多基本假設中的兩個。我對前者的詮釋請見(胡卜凱2002)。認識論中的「經驗論」：
「1. 所有的觀念來自組織(集合、重組)過去的經驗(觀察到的，直接呈現於感官和感覺的)，並將它們抽象化；2. 經驗是知識的唯一來源；… (4)。」
我正試圖綜合社會建構論和大腦神經網路連接論的說法，來建立一個「唯物人文觀」的論述(胡卜凱2006︰留言#132，第1.2節)。「唯物人文觀」的理論基礎之一，可以用Feldman教授的一段話來說明︰
「思想是有一定條理的神經活動。我們的語言和我們的思想及經驗緊密連結在一起，無法分開。… 我們所有的思想和語言都來自我們的生理結構和經驗(5)。」
這些看法是我了解「理性」這個概念的思想淵源。
0.3 本文結構
a. 第一節討論「理性」一詞的各種用法；
b. 第二節討論社會科學和日常生活語言中，(我所了解的)「理性」一詞中「理」的兩種「意義」或「用法」(5)；
c. 第三節討論我就「理性」所下的定義；
d. 第四節討論和「理性」一詞相關的其他概念；
e. 第五節建議如何批駁我在本文中對「理性」一詞所採取的觀點；
f. 第六節中，我摘譯八段西方學者對「理性」的詮釋，補充我的論述。
1. 「理性」一詞的用法
1.1 「理性」一詞的各種用法
「理性」一詞在中、英文裏都有很多「意思」相近的衍生詞，人們用它們來表達和「理性」相近的一些概念或觀念，例如︰
a. 「理性的」、「合理的」、「講理的」、「有道理的」、「說得通的」、或「務實的」，
b. 「理由」或「判斷依據」，
c. 「『合理』的性質(條件)」，
d. 「推理」，和
e. 「推理能力」
等等以及其他類似的「用法」。以上「『合理』的性質(條件)」︰
一個行動需要或具有這些性質(條件)，才能用「合理的」這個形容詞來描述。
1.2 實質理性和功能理性
Mannheim將社會學中「理性」一詞的意義歸納成兩種，「實質理性」和「功能理性」：
「社會學家在使用『理性』和『不理性』一詞時，有兩種不同的意義：我稱它們為『實質上』和『功能上』理性的或非理性的。『實質上理性的』指在某一個情況下，能睿智的了解到各事件內在關係的思考行為。因此，我以『實質上理性的』來形容睿智思考本身：其他的(思考)行為如錯誤的推理，或非思考行為(例如無論有意識或下意識的欲求、衝動、希冀、和感受等等，我稱為『實質上非理性的』。
另一方面，在社會學和日常生活語言中，我們也用到『理性』的第二個「意義」，例如：這個或那個企業或政府機構已完成『合理化』的過程。…。這一個『合理化』的意思指：為了達到一個預定目標所展開的一序列行動。在這一序列行動中的每一個環節，都有它被預定的功能和角色。更重要的是，當我們能協調規劃這一序列行動，依預定目標，採取最有效的方法來完成這些行動時，『合理化』會發揮它最大的威力。(這就是我所說的『功能上理性的』) (6)。」
1.3 「行動理性」(「工具理性」、「效益理性」)
在當下社會科學和哲學論述中，韋伯的「行動理性」經常被引用。以下是對他這個概念的詮釋之一︰
「行動理性是現代性和資本主義的通性，其特徵是用最有效的方式來達到一個(預定的)目的(7)。」
我認為「行動理性」和「功能理性」是相通的兩個概念。
2. 「理」字的兩種「所指」
在上面各種用法中，「『理』性」、「合「『理』」、和「推「『理』」等詞中的「理」這個「指號」，有兩種「所指」︰
a. 由現實情況(或稱「外在環境」)歸納出來的經驗法則。
b. 在某個社會中，多數人接受或遵從某些約定俗成的「習慣」(規範)或「規則」。
2.1 來自現實情況的「理」
「理性」一詞中「理」字的第一類概念來自現實情況。它相當於日常生活語言中的「務實」。中國古人稱這種處事的方式為「實事求是」；相當於上述曼罕的「功能理性」或韋伯的「行動理性」。這類「理」是人類根據過去某些一再重複或屢試不爽的「經驗」所累積的「法則」。也就是說：
在某種情況下，那種行為模式成功(達到目標或目的)的或然率最大。
所以這類「理」相當於俗話說的「經驗法則」。
以上的「經驗」一詞：
「…，(它)不只指個人經驗，也包括他人經驗(書籍、教育、交往等等)和集體經驗(文化、學問等等)。」(胡卜凱2006︰留言#133)
這是社會科學中「經驗」一詞的通行用法。
此外，「經驗」這個概念本身蘊含它是一個人經歷過某些「現實情況」才得到的記憶或教訓。「現實情況」有兩個部分，「自然環境」和「社會環境」。在本文中，視上、下文的脈絡，「社會」和「文化」兩字有時是同義詞。
a. 「自然環境」並不受「文化」或「社會」因素的「制約」或影響。因此，通過「自然環境」部分而得的「經驗法則」，沒有特別的「文化性」或「社會性」。這是何以不論東、西社會，在大多數情況下，從「現實情況」而來的「理」或「經驗法則」，都有一些「客觀」的判準。例如：一個人為了「失戀」或「輸掉奧運金牌」而自殺；花個500到1,000萬台幣減肥等等，大概都在「非理性」行為之列。至於不要玩火，不要抽煙，不要沉迷於賭博之類也是同一類型的「理性」。因為不論在那個社會，這些行為(自殺、玩火、抽煙、賭博)都會對個人身體或財務帶來具體的負面後果。
b. 「社會環境」則是文化和歷史所建構的環境。歷史在此指有人類以來的活動經過及文字記錄。「社會環境」就是人類意識創造的環境。從這一部分得到的「經驗法則」，雖然也具有「現實性」，但它們受到過去「文化」或「社會」因素的「制約」或影響。也就會或需要被詮釋。
「意識」一詞在這裏完全沒有任何先天或神秘的意涵。(對我來說)它純粹是人類神經系統和外在環境互動的結果。
「社會」一詞在此不但指一個社會當下所面對的種種因素，也包括：一個社會所在地成員的文化和歷史因素，以及和此社會互動的其他社會(成員所建立)的文化和歷史因素。
「主觀性」指個人獨特的經驗。「獨特」除了指一個人的家庭和經歷這些個人因素外，也包括他/她由基因而來的生理結構(包括大腦神經系統的結構及各種神經傳導質)。後者使我們每一個人在相同的外在環境中，有他/她「獨特」的「刺激 -- 反應」模式(8)。我以此解釋何以每個人有其「主觀性」，即個別的「感受」或「主觀性質」。請參考第4.1節「人際相通性」的討論。
用一般語言來說，「社會環境」有其「主觀性」。
2.2 約定俗成的「理」
「理性」一詞中「理」字的第二類概念來自社會和文化，相當於「道理」，它包括：
天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、和規則等。
這類「道理」是「約定俗成」的「理」，也就是「社會『建構(制約)』」和/或「文化『建構(制約)』」的「理」。換句話說，它們的來源或背景是文化傳統和「社會環境」。因此，它們具有個別的「文化性」或「社會性」。以這類「理」為準則的思考中，被某一個社會成員視為「理性」的行為，在某些情況下，未必被另一個社會的成員視為「理性」。反之亦然。「約定俗成」的「理」通常具有「主觀性」。例如︰
古代中國和日本的將領或武士，有「死節」的行為模式或規範。打仗常常要「戰至最後一兵一卒。」敗軍之將有時也以自殺或切腹來表示負責或擔當；或對自己沒有達到預定目標的自我懲罰。
西方軍事傳統中，在兩軍對峙的情況下，一旦一方認為大勢已去，其統帥就和對方協議「不受屈辱的投降」(9)。在西方社會中，達成這種方式的「投降」來避免無謂(「非理性」)的傷亡，才是一個將領「負責任」和「有擔當」的行為。
3. 「理性」的定義
在我接受的基本假設下(第0節)，加上我對「理」這個概念的詮釋(本文第2節)，(我認為)自然就得到我對「理性」這個概念的定義︰
「使用過去經驗來選擇和規劃當下或未來行動的能力。」(胡卜凱2006︰開欄文，4.3 – 2)節)
我相信在我的前提下，我對「理性」的定義是說得通的，而且這個定義有其實際應用。
這個「理性」的定義和「目的」(「目標」)以及「資源」這兩個概念有相當密切或內在的關係。「行動」的定義是：有「目的」的行為；試圖達到「目的」一定需要使用「資源」；「理性」的功能或使用「理性」的動機，在「有效」的達到這個「行動」的「目的」。
所以，沒有「目的」的行為未必需要使用「理性」。而在不需要講究「有效」的情況下，例如一個擁有無限「資源」的行動者，或只有當下這個(而再沒有其他)「目的」的行動者(如決定自殺的人)，也未必需要使用「理性」(胡卜凱2006：留言#159)。
4. 和理性相關的概念
4.1 「人際相通性」
「人際相通性」指：人能了解彼此的意圖、需求、思想、行為等等。
這個概念有兩個基礎：
a. 人類面對的是近似的「自然環境」，因而受到類似的「刺激」；同時，人類具有同樣或近似的生物性，並由98%相同的DNA組合構成；所以，人類在類似的「刺激」下，也會產生類似的「反應」。因而人類的「經驗」是類似的。
b. 「文化」必定在「現實環境」中建立。因為地理環境和歷史發展的差異，不同地區人類的「社會環境」具有不同的型態，但是由於上述「刺激」 -- 「反應」過程具有相同或高度近似的基礎(「自然環境」和DNA)，則「反應」模式的結構自然也有相當的雷同性。因而人類會建立類似的「制度」。「制度」一詞在此是用它最廣泛的意思，也就是指「文化」。
4.2 「客觀」
在我的論述裏，「客觀」一詞用來描述：
當一個判斷過程，或認知、思考活動，至少具備了「現實性」、「合規則性」、和「人際相通性」這三種性質之一。
第2.1節中提到的「天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、和規則」等等，是人們在幾萬年到幾十萬年的生活過程中逐漸建立的。這個生活過程是「文化演化」的過程，也是人和自然環境奮鬥、在社會制度中掙扎和發展的過程(「刺激」 -- 「反應」模式)。
綜合以上的說法，約定俗成的「道理」和從「社會環境」而來的「經驗法則」，雖然有強烈的「文化」色彩或個別社會的烙印，但基本上它們都具有某種程度的「現實性」和「人際相通性」。上面已提到，由「自然環境」而來的「理」或「經驗法則」自然而然的具有「現實性」。
這是一般人通常把「理性」和「客觀」當做同義詞使用或將兩詞連用的原因。
4.3 「合理化」
和以上兩類「理」的概念相關的行為有「合理化」。「合理化」有兩個不同的意思：
a. 它相當於日常生活語言中的「找藉口」。它蘊含的意思是︰
一個人為了修飾一個不合天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、或規則等的行為；不面對現實情況的行為；或違反經驗法則的行為，而舉出一些「理由」(「藉口」)來說明行為者的動機，以取得別人的認可、同情、或支持等。
b. 「合理化」的第二個意思已在以上第1.2節討論Mannheim的功能理性時說明。它指：使得一個制度或組織有效達成其預設目標的行動。我建議用「理性化」來指示這種用法，以免和第一個用法混淆。
5. 相對主義和批駁策略
凡是不接受經驗論、社會建構論、「唯物人文觀」、或以上我所了解的「理性」一詞所指的人，不需要，也很可能不會同意我對「理性」的定義和詮釋。由於我也接受「相對主義」，所以任何根據其他理論做為「前提」而導出的，關於「理性」這個概念的定義，只要能言之成理，即使我未必接受這個或那個「理性」(定義)的內容，我都需要接受它們是「成立」的定義。
由於對「理性」一詞的共識是進行公共論述和執行公共行動的基礎，我歡迎其他人提出自己對「理性」的定義或詮釋，講出一套支持這個定義或詮釋的說法，大家一起切磋琢磨。
如果有人試圖批駁我對「理性」定義，我建議她/他可以從四方面切入︰
a. 指出唯物論、經驗論、社會建構論、「唯物人文觀」、或以上對「理性」的詮釋「不成立」的理由；
b. 指出我的定義不能從a項中的五個論述推出；
c. 指出我的定義和a項中的任何一個論述自相矛盾。
d. 指出我的定義和多數人對「理性」的認知不合。
由於我不接受(目前)有絕對真理或標準的說法，我認為︰
根據我「基本假設」之外的前提來批駁我對「理性」定義的論述，是「不相關」的「批駁」行動。也就是一個「無效」或「不成立」的「批駁」行動。它只能建立一個和我的定義並行，或具有同等「真值」的定義。這個觀點是黑格爾「內部批判」概念的應用(本欄留言#18︰0.2 - 1)節；Stern 2004︰41頁；Rosen 1985︰26 - 30頁)。「真值」指符合既定規則而得到的陳述所具有的性質。
6. 附錄 -- 西方學者對「理性」的詮釋
以下摘譯八位西方哲學家和社會科學家對「理性」的詮釋或觀點，來補充我以上的說明。(雙引號及英文引號都根據原文所用。)
a. 「綜上所述，柯氏認為歷史有四個基本的特性：第一，『歷史是科學的，也就是說，…』；第二，『歷史是人文的，也就是說，…』；第三，『歷史是合理的，也就是說，歷史對歷史問題所提供的答案是基於證據而來』；最後，『…』(10)。」
b. 「在本書中，我將使用韋伯研究新教教義與資本主義關係時，所使用的行動目的論，做為解釋個人層次行動的理論。這一個理論也是大多數社會科學學者，和一般人在使用通俗心理學來詮釋自己和他人的行為時的理論。… 我們說自己了解別人行動的”理由”，相當於說我們了解此人試圖達到的目的，以及何以這位行動者認為其行動能幫助他/她達到這個目的。… (要達到此目的)我將用經濟學中的「理性」概念。這個「理性」概念是經濟學理論中理性選擇者的基礎。其基本想法是行動者認為不同的行動(或物品)對他/她來說，有某些特殊的利得。同時，(此理論)也接受行動者將選擇能達到利得最大化作為這個原則(11)。」
c. 「在Habermas的想法中，理性並不在一個人擁有某些知識，而在此人”如何取得及使用這些知識”(12)。」
d. 「傳統上學者一向把理性分成兩種：『實踐理性』和『理論理性』。實踐理性考慮我們應該做什麼；理論理性考慮我們應該相信什麼(13)。」
e. 「在休姆的思考中，理性只能決定(行動)方式的選擇，它不能決定如何排定兩個不同目的之間的優先順位；在蘇格拉底的思考中，理性也能夠決定如何排定兩個不同目的之間的優先順位(14)。」
f. 「理性選擇論被如此命名的原因是：其基本假設在認為一個人會理性的選擇行動方式，來達到他/她所希望達到的目標(15)。」
g. 「穆勒認為政治經濟學的主題是：它只考慮人唯一的目的在擁有財富，而且一個人有能力判斷這個目的對自己的效用(16)。」
h. 「(理性選擇論者)以一個社會制度對整個社會來說的合理性和功能性，來解釋它何以被建立和可能繼續存在。但他/她們並沒有去考慮個人所做的理性選擇對社會制度可能有的影響(17)。」(此段批判理性選擇論者沒有對個人的「理性選擇」做充分的考慮。)
附註：
1. 請參考Frege對「意思」和「意義」(「用法」)的區分(Frege 1960：57 - 61頁)。
2. 1. The intellect. The capacity to abstract, comprehend, relate, reflect, notices the similarities and differences, etc. 2. The ability to infer. (Angeles 1981：238頁)。Angeles教授然後列舉了13個和reason相關的哲學術語。
3. In general, the philosophic approach which emphasizes reason as the primary source of knowledge, prior or superior to, and independent of, sense perceptions. (Angeles 1981：236頁)。Angeles然後列舉了rationalism的10個要點。笛卡爾和萊布尼茲以後，康德和卻文斯基(或譯為杭斯基)兩位大概是最有名和最有影響力的理性論者。
4. 1. The view that all ideas are abstractions formed by compounding (combining, recombining) what is experienced (observed, immediately given in sensation). 2. Experience is the sole source of knowledge. 3. … (Angeles 1981：75頁)。洛克和休姆是經驗論的開山祖師。古典經驗論和理性論是同屬唯心論下的認識論學說。但近代或現代哲學中的經驗論，則建立在唯物論的假設之上。
5. ... Thought is structured neural activity. Language is inextricable from thought and experience. ... All of our thought and language arises from our genetic endowment and from our experience. (Feldman 2006：第3頁)。我所根據的其他學者著作，散見於我其他相關的文章。
6. Sociologists use the words “rational” and “irrational” in two senses, which we will call “substantial” and “functional” rationality or irrationality. ... We understand as substantially rational as an act of thought which reveals intelligent insight into the inter-relation of events in a given situation. Thus the intelligent act of thought itself will be described as “substantially rational”, whereas everything else which is either false or not an act of thought at all (as for example derives, impulses, wishes, and feelings, both conscious and unconscious) will be called as “substantially irrational”. But in sociology as well as in everyday language, we also use the word “rational” in still another sense when we say, for instance, that this or that industry or administration staff has been “rationalized”. ... but rather that a series of action is organized in such a way that it leads to a previously defined goal, every element in this series of actions receiving a functional position and role. ... a series of actions will, moreover, be at its best when, in order to attain the given goal, it coordinates the means most efficiently. (Mannheim, K. 1940, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Harcourt, Brace, and Co., NYC, quoted in Mills 1961：508 - 509頁)
7. the rationality typical of modernity and capitalism - is characterized by the most efficient use of means to reach an end. (Lindholm, Internet)。行動理性：instrumental rationality。
8. 我同意華生或史金勒的「行為主義」有過於偏執的地方。但我接受「行為論」的基本觀點：我們只能透過「可觀察到的行為」來了解人的性質、思想、意向、傾向、和活動等等。根據這個觀點，我也傾向於接受：凡是不能或不可能被「觀察到的」(人的)性質、思想、意向、傾向、和活動，大概沒有什麼被了解(研究)的價值。
9. 不受屈辱的投降︰honorable surrender。此詞在東方文化中不能譯為「光榮投降」或「榮譽投降」。
10. From this there emerges a view of history as having four essential characteristics; first,‘that it is scientific, or …’; secondly, ‘that it is humanistic, or …’; thirdly, ‘that it is rational, or bases answers which it gives to its questions on grounds making appeal to evidence’; and, finally, ‘…’. (Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, 18頁, quoted in Ayer 1984：210頁) 。上文中以「基於證據」來詮釋「合理的」或「理性的」，就相當於本文第2節中對「理」的第一個詮釋 -- 現實情況的「理」。
11. The individual-level theory of action I will use in this book is the same purposive theory of action used in Weber’s study of Protestantism and capitalism. It is the theory of action used implicitly by most social theorists and by most people in the commonsense psychology that underlies their interpretation of their own and other’s actions. ... We say that we understand the “reasons” why the person acted in a certain way, implying that we understand the intended goal and how the actions were seen by the actor to contribute to the goal. ... For this I will use the conception of rationality employed in economics, the conception that forms the basis of rational actor in economic theory. This conception is based on the notion of different actions (or, in some cases, different goods) having a particular utility for the actor and is accompanied by a principle of action which can be expressed by saying that the actor chooses the action which will maximize utility. (Coleman 1994: 13 – 14 頁)
12. For Habermas, for example, rationality consists not so much in the possession of particular knowledge, but rather in “how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge”(Habermas 1984：11頁, quoted in Turner/Roth 2003：97頁).
13. Rationality is standardly divided into the practical and the theoretical. Practical rationality concerns what we should do ; theoretical rationality concerns what we should believe. (Turner/Roth 2003：110頁).
14. On a Humean account rationality determines only the means, and has nothing to say concerning the relative preference ranking of any two ends. On the Socratic account, rationality determines the preference ranking of the ends also. (Turner/Roth 2003：115頁).
15. Rational choice is so called because it is based on the assumption that human beings are rational in their choice of means to reach their preferred ends (see Elster 1986, interpreted in Turner/Roth 2003：143頁).
16. Mill suggests that political economy “is concerned with him [man] solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of that end.” (Mill 1950: 420頁, interpreted in Turner/Roth：144頁)
17. The emergence and survival of social institutions are explained in terms of their rationality, functionality for society, as a whole, but without an account of the rational choice of the individuals, … (Posner 1980: 第5頁, interpreted in Turner/Roth：160頁 n. 8)
參考書目及文章(我沒有直接引用的文獻，不列於此。)：
Angeles, P. A., 1981, Dictionary of Philosophy, Barnes and Noble Books, NYC
Ayer, A. J. 1984, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vintage Books, NYC
Chang, B. 2006，《「文革」討論 -- 論述方式的分析和檢驗》，http://tb.chinatimes.com/forum1.asp?ArticleID=849041
Coleman, J. S. 1994, Foundations of Social Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. USA
Feldman, J. 2006, From Molecule to Metaphor, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA USA
Frege, G., 1960, Ed., Geach, P. /Black, M., On Sense and Reference, in the Translations from the Philosophical Writings of G. Frege, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, London
Lindholm, C. Internet, Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness, http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/faculty/lindolm/ASCCnotes.html
Mills, C. W. 1961, Ed., Image of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking, George Braziller, Inc. NYC
Rosen, M. 1985, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, 雙葉書店，台北
Stern, R. 2004, Hegel and the Phenomenology Of Spirit, Routledge, London
Turner, S. P./Roth P. A. 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Social Science, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA., USA
胡卜凱2006，《「文革」討論 -- 論述方式的分析和檢驗》，http://tb.chinatimes.com/forum1.asp?ArticleID=849041
中英名詞對照
以；號分開的是不同的意義；以、號分開的是相同或近似的意思。
「合理」的性質(條件)：reasonableness
「非理性」性質、非理性行為(模式)：irrationality
人際相通：intersubjective
人際相通性：intersubjectivity
不成立：invalid
不受屈辱的投降︰honorable surrender
內部批判︰immanent critique
文化性：culture-specific
主觀性質(或「意識內容」)：qualia
功能理性：functional rationality
合理化；理性化：rationalize, rationalization
成立：valid
有效的：effective
行為主義：behaviorism
行為論、行為學派：behavioralism
行動理性(或譯工具理性、效益理性)：instrumental rationality
制約：condition, conditioning
社會性：society-specific
社會建構論：social constructionism
非理性的(不屬於理性的)、不合理、不合理的、不講理的、沒有道理的、說不通的、不務實的：irrational
經驗法則：empirical rules, regularity, uniformity
推理、講理：reason, reasoning
推理能力：rationality, reasonableness
理由、判斷依據：rationale
理性、務實：reason, rationality
理性的、合理的、講理的、有道理的、說得通的、務實的：reasonable, rational
理性論(理性主義)；合理原則(合理主義)：rationalism
理性論者；理性化者：rationalist
無效的：ineffective
意義(Frege)：sense (Frege)
經驗論：empiricism
實質理性(形式理性)：substantive rationality (formal rationality)
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「理性」三重奏 -- P. D'Autry
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下文作者道璀先生討論「理性」的三個面向和意義，以及它們的功能(請參見全文標題下的子標題)。
1) 「講道理」的能力。
2) 「講道理」的行為。
3) 待人處事時，「講道理」的態度和方式。
旁及康德、韋伯、哈伯瑪斯、和蘇格拉底四位對「理性」概念的詮釋、分析、討論、與實踐。值得一讀。
Being “Rational” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
On Rationality, Reason, and Being Reasonable
Peter D'Autry, 06/29/26
0. 前言
“Rational” has turned into something people say to each other in fights. Tell a friend they are being very rational about their divorce and watch the face go cold. Part of the trouble is that the word never settled on one meaning.
Max Weber famously made the trouble plain by pulling the word into 4 kinds.
There is instrumental or purposive rationality, the means-and-ends calculation behind any piece of scientific or technical know-how, the rationality of working out how to land a probe on a comet.
There is formal rationality, the rule-bound, calculable sort that runs mathematics and account books and bureaucracies, where following the procedure correctly is most of the point.
And there is the practical, and substantive kind, broadly the rationality at work when people argue about what is right or simply try to make themselves understood.
1. Rational, reason, or reasonable?
Three different things, all answering to the same word. Tell someone they are being rational and you may be praising one of these while they hear an accusation about another.
Before going further, it helps to pin down three words, because the rest lean on all of them and they do not mean the same thing.
Rationality is the narrow, practical one, a specific structure of mind that a developmental psychologist can point at and chart, and it is the subject of most of what follows.
Reason is the wider faculty it belongs to, the plain human power to offer grounds and weigh them.
Reasonable is that same power at the kitchen table with the lab coat off, the version that asks what your reasons are and whether they hold.
Keep the three apart and much of the usual complaint about cold, calculating rationality turns out to be a complaint about just one of them.
Cognitive psychologists and anthropologists mean something narrower. They use “rationality” for formal operational cognition, which is a heavy phrase for a small trick: thinking about thinking. It sounds trivial right up until you try it in the middle of an argument. Once you can reflect on your own thoughts, you are no longer entirely run by them. You can step back. You can hold a view that is not your own, run a hypothetical, or watch yourself from the outside.
That last move, watching yourself, is the one that does the work.
Once you can watch your own beliefs, you start asking where they came from. Not the teacher, not the president, not the nation, but the reasons. Did Jesus really turn water into wine? Rationality in this sense is mostly the habit of wanting reasonable reasons. What is the evidence? Why should I believe this? Who says so? Where did you get that idea?
There is a gap between being able to ask for reasons and actually daring to, and Kant handed the gap a slogan. Sapere aude. Dare to know, or closer to the Latin, dare to be wise. He did not coin it, but lifted it from Horace, who had dropped the line into a poem about a man forever putting off the work of living.
Immanuel Kant set it at the center of a short essay in 1784, written to answer a question a Berlin magazine had floated: what is enlightenment? His answer was that enlightenment is a person climbing out of an immaturity he imposed on himself. Not the inability to think, but the failure to think without someone holding the other hand.
What makes the immaturity self-imposed, Kant said, is that the cause is not a missing brain but a missing nerve. It is comfortable to let others do the work. A book can stand in for your understanding, a pastor for your conscience, a doctor for your judgment about dinner, and then you never have to risk being wrong on your own account. The guardians who arrange all this are glad to keep it running. They were never going to talk themselves out of the job.
So the demand for reasons turns out to be partly a demand for courage, which could be a less flattering thing to learn about oneself. It is easy to admire the person who asks. It is harder to be the one who asks it out loud, in a room that would rather you didn’t.
2. The charge that reason is cold
The same move that lets you doubt also lets you imagine. Step far enough back from your own assumptions and other possibilities open up, beliefs nobody handed you, horizons you did not inherit. This is the part people forget when they call reason “cold.”
Reason is what lets you picture the world being otherwise.
Even the mystics knew this, which is why they went through reason instead of around it. Look at how the Buddha’s eightfold path is ordered. Right view and right intention, the second sometimes rendered “right thought,” sit at the front, the seeing-clearly and the wanting-well. Only further down do right mindfulness and right concentration appear, the part we now file under meditation and sell as an app.
You are meant to settle what is true and what is worth wanting before you sit down to quiet the mind. The order is not a strict staircase; the old teaching is that the eight factors prop each other up and, far enough along, arrive together. Still, the sequence makes its point. Contemplation that skips the thinking has not climbed above reason.
It has stopped short of it.
So the old complaint, that rationality is dry and has no feelings, gets it backward. Reason opens a wider room for feeling, feelings not chained to your private appetites or to whatever your culture happens to call real.
It can still go wrong. Like any high capacity, it can clamp down on what sits beneath it, sex and aggression especially, and that clamping congeals into something pathological. You have met the type: the man who never raises his voice and never quite seems alive, who answers a quarrel with a flowchart, then gathers his papers and storms out in perfect silence, which is its own kind of shout. The feeling did not evaporate. It went somewhere colder. Reason makes a poor lid. The congealed version is what earned rationality its bad name, but it is not the structure itself.
If the word “rational” carries too much baggage, its everyday cousin “reasonable” carries the same demand with less of the chill. Same question underneath: what are your reasons, why are you doing that?
3. There is just physics
Notice what reason wants. It wants reasons that hold for more than just me and mine. If my reasons only work inside my tribe, nation, or presidency, they are not reasons; they are loyalties wearing a disguise. This is why there is no Hindu physics, no French physics, and no Greek physics. There is just physics. Its truths are not coerced or ideologically imposed; they sit out in the open for anyone who cares to check the work.
None of this flattens cultures into sameness. It does the opposite.
A universal standard sounds like a flattening machine, one correct way to live stamped on everyone. It runs the other way.
The real flattener is the ethnocentric myth, which meets a stranger with only two moves: convert him or conquer him. A shared standard of evidence asks nothing about your gods or your cult, so those can vary as wildly as they like. The Balinese cremation, the Quaker silence, the city hall wedding with the bad carnations all get to stand, precisely because none of them has to win.
Reason is the room that lets cultures sit side by side, a trick no mythology has ever pulled off in defending its own gods.
4. When myth met the question
You can guess what happened when this new habit met the old myths. Someone says Jesus turned water into wine, and someone else asks what that means, exactly, and where the evidence is.
Athens was less gentle about the questioning. The charge against Socrates opened with “refusing to recognize the gods of the State” and closed with “The penalty demanded is death.” Asked, as was the custom, to propose his own punishment, he suggested free meals for life in the Prytaneum, suggesting a reward instead. As such, he turned down an escape that had already been arranged and drank the hemlock. He chose reason over state mythology, and it cost him everything.
Most people did not move that fast.
The first response to the clash was not to drop the myths but to prop them up with reasons, which is a strange hybrid worth its own name: mythic-rational. Jürgen Habermas describes the same move as the rationalization of mythological thought. And propping a myth up with a formal argument already gives the game away. Pure myth never needed defending. It was simply accepted on its own terms.
The universalizing pull of reason showed up early, in an ugly form. Before anyone argued for a shared humanity, empires tried to manufacture one by force. The Incas and the Aztecs, the Khans and the Romans, Alexander and the Aryans: the first planetary move was conquest. Conquered peoples were often handed real citizenship, in some cases extended to women, slaves, and children, but only inside a single mythology.
You could be a citizen as long as you believed in the right god or leader. We still have working examples of this. The faiths offered their own version: equal citizens of the faith, every Christian saved regardless of color, and every Jew damned regardless of anything. Generous and divisive in the same breath.
The empires and the great mythologies eventually hit the same wall. They ran into each other. Two mythologies that cannot argue their case can only fight it, and the only way past the fighting is to give up the particular myth for something that could actually be shared:
A more universal reasonableness.
The bigger change came later, and it was less that reason replaced the gods than that it broke the single sacred world into pieces. The medieval cosmos was one syncretic fabric. Truth, goodness, beauty, law, and salvation hung together under one roof, and the Church held the keys to every room. A comet was at once an astronomical fact, a moral warning, and a hint about your fate, and you could put all three questions to the same authority.
The Enlightenment pulled those threads apart.
Weber called it the differentiation of the value spheres, and Habermas built much of his account of modernity on it: science took the questions of what is true, law and ethics took what is just, and art took what is beautiful, each answering to its own standard and its own specialists.
Once the spheres separate, they can no longer overrule one another by decree. The astronomer settles the comet, and the bishop no longer gets a vote on the orbit. This is messier than the old unity and a good deal less comforting, since nobody runs the whole show anymore.
It is also what lets a believer and an unbeliever share one physics, argue ethics on common ground, and disagree about a painting without anyone getting into a fistfight. The rational philosophies and sciences and even the rational religions (organized according to reason, logical coherence, and ethical consistency) that followed all stood on the same platform, open to anyone of any creed willing to show their evidence and give their reasons rather than shout and claim the gods were on their side.
5. Conclusion
It is a hard thing to sell.
Reason offers no chosen people, no promised land, no enemy to hate on a schedule. All it offers is the slow business of showing your work and letting a stranger check it. That is the whole pitch. It also happens to be the only arrangement under which a Hindu, a Frenchman, and a Greek can disagree about nearly everything and still share one physics, which is more than any god in history ever managed to deliver.
This is also where the three words finally sort themselves out. Rationality is the structure, and reason is the faculty, but “reasonable” is intersubjective, the only one of them you can hand to another person. It asks nothing elaborate, just that you lay your reasons on the table and let someone look.
The man with the flowchart had rationality to spare and was not, for one second, reasonable. The two come apart more often than we like to admit, and when they do, it is the reasonable one you actually want.
Socrates drank the hemlock for it, and the rest of us inherited it for free, which is probably why we hold it so loosely. The habit of asking for reasons took thousands of years to win and can be unlearned in a generation.
It helps to remember what the alternative actually was. Not peace, not brotherhood, just whichever myth showed up with the bigger army.
Reason is the unglamorous thing that finally made violence optional.
Reasonability is what lifts us above ignorance, division, and degeneration.
Written by Peter D'Autry
Skeptical mystic. Amateur mind-mapper. Writing my way through the hard problem of consciousness, depth psychology, and the nature of reality.
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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《虛無主義者宣言》小評
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0. 前言
《虛無主義者宣言》全長在6,200字上下；我只讀了其中的「全文介紹」、第III、第VII、和第XI這四節(1)。就讀過的部份來說，我大致都能接受該文作者的觀點(請見本欄上一篇)。不過，他/她對「虛無主義」的詮釋，並不是一般人對這個概念的了解(2)。例如，他/她兩次強調：「虛無主義者」把「國家、宗教、意識型態、公司、傳統、和道德」等制度視為「工具」(3)。本文略做說明。
1. 虛無主義
首先，「虛無主義」不是一個「全盤概念」；換句話說，在傳統哲學的三個次領域，「虛無主義」一詞有其個別的主張，互不相涉。
尼切給虛無主義的定義是：
「從根本上否定價值、意義、和對目的的追求(欲望)」(4)。
屠格涅夫給虛無主義的定義是：
「一個『虛無主義者』拒絕承認任何權威；她/他也拒絕接受任何一個未經證實的原則，不論該原則被多少人尊重」。
我的了解：
「最簡單的『虛無主義』定義是：「一種不認為社會中有任何『標準』的觀點。」(淺談「虛無主義」，該欄2018/04/10)
拙作《普通(人的)倫理學》第2節對「虛無主義」有詳細討論(該欄2025/06/03)；請參考。
「工具」的概念蘊含並指示「價值」與「目的」，該文作者既然接受「國家、宗教、意識型態、... 」等等的「工具性」，自然就承認並肯定了它們的「價值」與它們意圖達到的「目的」。因此，我搞不懂：該文作者為什麼要以「虛無主義者宣言」做標題。如果他/她把自己的立場稱為：「唯物論」、「理性主義」、「現實主義」、或「務實主義」，應該更符合一般人的認知。
2. 人為建構
該文「人為建構」一詞的「用法」或思路(5)，跟我「人工概念」的思考邏輯相近(該欄開欄文第0.1小節) 。基本上，它們都是人為了解決當時、當地、和特定情況所「發明」、「設計」、或「建構」出來的工具、機制、制度、或意識型態；其內容自然也只不過是「時間」、「地點」、和「文化」的「函數」；並不具有「真理」或「絕對」這類概念所蘊含的「性質」或「價值」。
3. 結論
1) 根據一般學者的主流意見，一位「虛無主義者」不會接受「價值」或「目的」等概念。
2) 我接受在一時、一地、或一個文化中，經由多數人「約定俗成」過程而得到的「價值」、「目的」、和「規範」等等；因此，我拒絕「虛無主義」，接受(溫和或局部)「相對觀」(該欄開欄文)。
附註：
1. 請參考該文「目錄」。
2. 請參考該文「全文介紹」這一節。
3. 請參考該文第III節第1段。
4. Will To Power (平裝版，第7頁，1-1節)
5. 該文第III節 “human constructs” 一詞。
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虛無主義者宣言--NBM House Books
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THE NIHILIST’S MANIFESTO
A Formal Treatise on Rational Objectivity, Cosmic Indifference, and the Pure Burden of Agency
Stripped of Optimism, Spirituality, and Moral Consolation
Document Version 1.0, Philosophical Studies Series
NBM House Books, 06/14/26
Table of Contents & Structural Blueprint
Introduction: The Anatomy of Misunderstanding
I. Begin With the Void
II. Reject Cosmic Entitlement
III. See Human Systems Clearly
IV. Abandon the Search for Final Answers
V. Accept Mortality Completely
VI. Do Not Confuse Preference With Truth
VII. Take Responsibility for Meaning
VIII. Refuse Self-Deception
IX. Treat Civilization as Temporary
X. Cultivate Competence Over Hope
XI. Face Freedom Honestly
XII. Regard Existence as an Event
Final Principle: The Stage and the Curtain
Introduction: The Anatomy of Misunderstanding
A genuinely nihilistic manifesto is often misunderstood. Most people hear ‘nothing matters’ and imagine despair, apathy, or self-destruction. But if you take nihilism seriously, those responses are not logically required. They are emotional reactions, not conclusions. Here’s a version stripped of optimism, spirituality, and moral consolation.
To approach nihilism with intellectual honesty, one must first dismantle the centuries of cultural baggage and emotional distortion that have obscured its core reality. For generations, the word ‘nihilism’ has been wielded not as a philosophical descriptor, but as an epithet — a psychological diagnosis or a warning sign of imminent moral and existential collapse. The common imagination paints the nihilist as a figure paralyzed by despondency, dynamic only in their leanings toward self-destruction, weeping at the realization of an empty cosmos. This caricature is a product of fear, a reactionary reflex born from humanity’s profound discomfort with absolute silence.
This document seeks to rectify that fundamental error. The knee-jerk slide from ‘nothing matters’ into ‘therefore, I must despair’ is not a sequence of logical deduction; it is an emotional tantrum. Despair requires an anchor in missed expectations; it implies that the universe *ought* to have provided meaning, and that its failure to do so is a tragic betrayal. But the universe has betrayed nothing, because it never promised anything in the first place. Despair, apathy, and nihilistic rage are simply the final, frantic negotiations of a human ego that is unwilling to accept its own cosmic irrelevance.
When we strip away these emotional reflexes, what remains is not an invitation to death, but a cold, clear, and uncompromising description of reality. A rigorous nihilism does not advocate for apathy; rather, it identifies objectivity. It observes that human constructs — values, morals, purposes, and gods — are localized phenomena generated by biological organisms to navigate an unscripted environment. This manifesto is written for those who seek truth over comfort, who are willing to look into the blank architecture of existence without demanding that it smile back.
By systematically removing the layers of optimism, spiritual sentimentality, and moral consolation that dilute human thought, we arrive at a baseline understanding of our situation. This baseline is neither cruel nor kind; it is merely factual. It serves as a clearing of the intellectual ledger, allowing us to proceed through existence with an unclouded vision, operating on tangible principles rather than comforting illusions. The journey through these twelve principles requires an abandonment of cosmic sentimentality and a willingness to shoulder the absolute burden of your own operational reality.
I. Begin With the Void
There is no known cosmic purpose. The universe does not appear to have goals, intentions, values, or meaning. Stars explode. Species emerge and vanish. Civilizations rise and collapse. The universe does not explain itself. Human beings are meaning-producing animals living inside a reality that offers no obvious reason for their existence. Accept this. Do not demand comfort.
The foundational axiom of any coherent worldview must be an acknowledgment of the baseline architecture of reality. When we look out into the macrocosm — across billions of light-years of expanding space, through superclusters of galaxies and yawning chasms of dark matter — we find an absolute absence of teleology. The cosmos does not manifest as a structured narrative; it manifests as a sequence of complex, indifferent physical processes. Chemical reactions proceed according to thermodynamic imperatives; gravity condenses matter into spheres; stars ignite, burn through their nuclear fuel, and violently tear themselves apart in supernovas.
In this vast theatre of cosmic indifference, events occur without moral or narrative justification. A star collapsing into a black hole and destroying an adjacent solar system is not an act of malice; it is an exercise in astrophysics. Similarly, on our localized planetary scale, the biological history of Earth is a brutal, unguided chronicle of emergence and total erasure. Species evolve through random mutations and ruthless environmental pressures, only to be wiped out by asteroid impacts, shifting climates, or the inexorable march of ecological competition. Civilizations rise, achieve staggering heights of complexity, and decompose into dust, leaving behind monuments that will eventually be ground into sand by the slow friction of tectonic time.
The universe does not explain itself because it has no vocabulary, no consciousness, and no desire to be understood. It simply persists. Human beings, however, are evolutionary anomalies: we are meaning-producing animals. Our brains are hardwired to detect patterns, assign causes, invent narratives, and seek intentions even where none exist. We look at the stars and see constellations; we look at history and see destiny; we look at our own lives and see a divine plan. This is a survival mechanism gone rogue, an adaptive trait designed for tracking predators on the savannah that has been erroneously scaled up to interpret the cosmos.
To accept the void means to consciously short-circuit this biological reflex. It means acknowledging that your existence is an unintended byproduct of structural laws, a localized pocket of negative entropy that will eventually be reclaimed by the surrounding equilibrium. To demand that this system provide you with an explanation or a soft bed of cosmic comfort is an exercise in futility. The mature intellect accepts the silence of the void not as a wound to be healed, but as the primary, unalterable background of all possible experience.
II. Reject Cosmic Entitlement
You are not owed: Meaning, Justice, Happiness, Love, Success, Immortality. Reality makes no promises. Many people spend their entire lives negotiating with existence as though there must be some hidden contract. There isn’t. The universe never signed anything.
One of the most pervasive psychological afflictions of the human species is the deep-seated assumption of cosmic entitlement. From early childhood, through cultural conditioning and religious indoctrination, human beings are fed the toxic myth of a hidden contract. We are taught to believe that if we perform certain rituals, adhere to specific moral codes, work diligently, or possess a sufficiently virtuous character, reality will respond in kind. We expect history to bend toward justice; we expect bad actions to be punished and good actions to be rewarded; we expect that our deep desire for happiness, love, and immortality constitutes a legitimate claim on the universe.
This expectation is a collective delusion. The universe is a non-signatory to all human desires. It has never entered into a covenant with humanity, nor has it guaranteed any individual a baseline of safety, fulfillment, or continuity. When a catastrophic earthquake strikes a densely populated city, it does not check the moral ledger of those beneath the rubble. When a terminal illness strikes a child, it is not a calculated punishment or a test of faith; it is a mechanical failure of cellular replication. There is no grand balance sheet, no cosmic judge balancing the scales, and no ultimate vindication waiting at the end of history.
Many individuals spend their entire lives trapped in a cycle of bitterness and resentment because they cannot let go of this imaginary contract. When they experience tragedy, heartbreak, or failure, they do not merely experience the physical or emotional pain of the event; they experience a secondary, meta-crisis of indignation. They cry out to the sky, asking ‘Why me?’, as if they had been uniquely singled out for a violation of terms. This indignation is a symptom of arrested intellectual development. The answer to ‘Why me?’ is always the same: because the physical conditions for this event were met, and your preferences are irrelevant to the mechanics of matter.
A nihilist eliminates this secondary suffering entirely by tearing up the imaginary contract. By fully realizing that reality owes you nothing — not a single shred of justice, not a moment of happiness, not an ounce of love — you free yourself from the tyranny of cosmic resentment. If you experience joy, you accept it as a fortunate arrangement of local variables, not as a reward. If you experience tragedy, you endure it as a structural event, not as a cosmic injustice. You cease negotiating with an empty sky and begin dealing directly with the concrete reality in front of you.
III. See Human Systems Clearly
Nations, religions, ideologies, corporations, traditions, and moral systems are human constructions. Some are useful. Some are harmful. None arrive with objective cosmic authority. Every institution ultimately rests on stories people collectively agree to believe. A nihilist neither worships nor automatically rejects these stories. He examines them as tools.
Human civilization is a dense, layered tapestry of intersubjective realities. We live our lives within structures that feel as solid and immutable as mountain ranges — nations with defined borders, religions with ancient dogmas, economic ideologies like capitalism or socialism, multi-billion-dollar corporations, sacred traditions, and rigid moral codes. To the uncritical mind, these structures appear to possess an objective reality, an external authority that demands absolute obedience and reverence. They are treated as if they were discovered written into the laws of nature, rather than invented by human minds.
A clear-eyed nihilistic analysis dissolves this illusion immediately. None of these systems arrive with a stamp of cosmic endorsement. There is no biological gene for a nation-state; there is no chemical element for a corporation; there is no physical law that mandates a specific code of ethics. If tomorrow every human being on Earth experienced a localized amnesia that wiped out our collective memories, the physical world would remain completely unchanged — the trees would grow, the oceans would churn — but every government, currency, stock market, and religious institution would instantly cease to exist. They are ghosts made real by collective compliance, stories that possess power only because we collectively agree to behave as if they do.
Recognizing this does not require a nihilist to become a radical anarchist or a destructive iconoclast. Some of these human stories are remarkably useful. The concept of human rights, though entirely fictitious from a cosmic standpoint, provides a highly effective framework for reducing unnecessary suffering and stabilizing complex societies. The construct of a corporation allows for the aggregation of capital to build infrastructure that improves human life. Conversely, many human stories are catastrophic — ideologies that demand the purge of dissenters, religions that stultify intellectual inquiry, and traditions that institutionalize cruelty.
Therefore, the mature nihilist adopts a stance of radical pragmatism toward all human institutions. He neither worships them as divine nor automatically rejects them out of reactionary contrarianism. Instead, he evaluates them strictly as tools. Does this specific story, this institutional structure, or this moral framework serve a valuable function in reality? Does it optimize human capability, reduce structural friction, or protect localized well-being? If it is functional, it can be utilized; if it is dysfunctional or parasitic, it should be bypassed, modified, or dismantled without sentimental regret. The nihilist remains a free agent, operating within human systems without ever allowing himself to be owned by them.
IV. Abandon the Search for Final Answers
The desire for ultimate certainty is one of humanity’s oldest addictions. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What is the final purpose of history? Perhaps there are answers. Perhaps there are not. A nihilist proceeds without requiring them. Uncertainty is not a temporary problem to be solved. It may be the permanent condition.
Humanity is an species fundamentally haunted by the ghost of certainty. Since the dawn of self-awareness, we have exhibited a profound, almost addictive craving for ultimate answers. We have built massive intellectual and spiritual architectures to answer a handful of recurring questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate purpose of our existence? Toward what grand finale is the long, bloody march of human history heading? This demand for finality is driven by a deep psychological vulnerability — the fact that human consciousness experiences absolute uncertainty as a form of existential vertigo.
To alleviate this vertigo, humans have historically accepted almost any answer, no matter how absurd, over the terrifying alternative of admitting ignorance. We have accepted stories of tribal gods, cosmic battles between light and darkness, cyclical cosmic reincarnations, and utopian political endpoints where history finally achieves perfect resolution. These are the placebos of an anxious species, intellectual narcotics designed to numb the pain of living in an unmapped reality.
A nihilist makes a clean break from this addiction. He looks at the questions — Why are we here? What does it all mean? — and accepts the distinct possibility that these questions are themselves category errors, premised on a flawed assumption that reality operates like a human book with a coherent plotline. Perhaps there are no answers; perhaps the universe simply is, an eternal, self-sustaining brute fact that requires no justification. Or perhaps our cognitive architecture is simply too limited, our localized perspective too narrow, to ever grasp the full scope of the system we inhabit.
Crucially, a nihilist does not stall out in the face of this ignorance. He does not sit down and refuse to move until an answer is provided. He proceeds through existence without requiring an ultimate justification for doing so. Uncertainty is no longer viewed as a temporary deficit of data, an inconvenient gap that will be filled by the next scientific breakthrough or religious revelation. It is recognized as the permanent, inescapable condition of conscious life. To operate effectively under conditions of total, permanent uncertainty is the hallmark of intellectual maturity. You do not need to know the end of the script to make a definitive move on the stage.
V. Accept Mortality Completely
You will die. Everyone you know will die. Everyone who remembers you will die. Eventually humanity itself may disappear. Eventually Earth will disappear. Eventually even the stars will disappear. Most human projects end in erasure. This is not tragedy. This is simply the observed condition. Build your life with this fact visible at all times.
Mortality is the ultimate democratizing reality of existence, yet human culture is largely structured as a vast machinery of death-denial. We build monuments, amass wealth, write books, and establish lineages in a desperate attempt to achieve some form of secular immortality — to leave a permanent dent in the universe. We treat death as an enemy to be conquered, an unnatural interruption of an otherwise continuous narrative, or a transition state to an eternal afterlife. We hide our elderly in institutions, sanitize our funerals, and speak of the deceased in hushed, euphemistic tones to avoid looking directly at the corpse.
A genuinely nihilistic perspective demands that we tear down these defensive screens and confront the reality of absolute erasure. The scale of this erasure is total. It begins at the individual level: you will die, your consciousness will dissolve, and the specific neural network that constitutes your identity will cease to exist forever. This erasure expands outwards: everyone who ever loved you, knew you, or crossed paths with you will follow. The memories of your existence will fade, degrade, and ultimately vanish within a few generations. Even if you achieve historical fame, that fame is merely a stay of execution.
On a macro-scale, the erasure is absolute. Human civilization itself is a temporary phenomenon; our species will eventually meet its evolutionary or catastrophic end. The planet we inhabit has a defined lifespan, destined to be incinerated when our sun expands into a red giant. And the universe itself, according to our best cosmological understandings, is sliding inexorably toward a state of maximum entropy — a cold, dark, uniform expanse where all thermodynamic work ceases, all stars burn out, and even black holes evaporate into a thin hiss of Hawking radiation. Every poem written, every empire forged, every war fought, and every scientific truth discovered will be utterly, completely, and irrevocably erased.
To the sentimentalist, this is an unbearable tragedy, an argument for immediate despair. To the nihilist, it is simply the baseline physical law of reality. Finitude is not a design flaw; it is the structural characteristic of all temporary phenomena. When you accept mortality completely, you stop building your life on the quicksand of an imagined permanence. You do not seek validation from a future generation that will also be dead, nor do you demand that your actions echo into an eternity that does not exist. You build your life with the horizon of erasure fully visible at all times, understanding that the value of an event lies entirely within its occurrence, not its duration.
VI. Do Not Confuse Preference With Truth
You can prefer: Kindness, Cruelty, Art, Wealth, Family, Solitude, Knowledge, Ignorance. Preference creates neither objective truth nor objective value. Your values are yours. Their existence does not prove their universality. A mature nihilist acknowledges this distinction.
One of the primary sources of human conflict and intellectual confusion is the constant, structural conflation of personal preference with objective truth. Because human beings experience their emotional states, moral judgments, and aesthetic tastes with intense internal vividness, they naturally assume that these internal states reflect an external, mind-independent reality. When someone states, ‘Cruelty is wrong,’ they rarely mean, ‘I have an intense personal aversion to cruelty.’ They almost always mean, ‘The universe contains a property called “wrongness,” and cruelty possesses that property.’
This is an epistemological illusion. The universe contains atoms, forces, fields, and physical structures; it does not contain value judgments. Value is not a physical property that can be measured with a spectrometer. It is a relational property generated by a conscious observer. Kindness, cruelty, art, wealth, family, solitude, knowledge, and ignorance are options within the human matrix. You are entirely free to prefer any configuration of these options over another. Your biological wiring, your cultural upbringing, and your personal psychological trajectory will inevitably incline you toward certain preferences. You may find yourself deeply moved by kindness and repulsed by cruelty.
However, a mature nihilist maintains a strict, unyielding boundary between their preferences and objective truth. The fact that you prefer kindness does not mean that kindness is a cosmic law. It does not mean that a cruel person is violating a fundamental axiom of physics, or that the universe will punish them for their behavior. Your values are your values; they belong to your localized cognitive architecture. Their existence does not prove their universality, nor does it give you the right to assume that the cosmos is backing your moral plays.
This distinction is liberating rather than paralyzing. When you stop trying to transform your personal preferences into universal absolute truths, you lose the need for self-righteous moral crusade. You no longer need to prove that your enemies are objectively evil or that your lifestyle is objectively correct. You simply acknowledge your preferences, own them, and act on them with full awareness of their subjective nature. You protect what you care about and oppose what you find abhorrent, not because a god or a cosmic moral framework commanded you to do so, but because that is what you choose to do. This is the transition from dogmatic fanaticism to clear-eyed existential agency.
VII. Take Responsibility for Meaning
If meaning exists in your life, it is because you create, adopt, or discover it. Not because reality guaranteed it. Meaning becomes a project rather than a revelation. You choose your burdens. You choose your loyalties. You choose your obsessions. No cosmic authority validates them. They are yours anyway.
The standard critique leveled against nihilism is that it strips life of meaning, leaving behind a cold, unlivable desert. This critique, however, is based on a profound misunderstanding of how meaning actually functions. The critic assumes that for meaning to be real, it must be objective — it must be an external entity waiting to be discovered, like a buried chest of gold or a divine commandment written across the sky. They assume that if meaning is not guaranteed by a cosmic authority, it is a hollow illusion, a childish game of make-believe.
The nihilist turns this dynamic on its head. The absence of objective cosmic meaning does not destroy localized meaning; it shifts the locus of responsibility entirely onto the individual. If meaning is not an inherent property of the universe, then it cannot be passively received through a revelation. It cannot be handed down by a priest, a politician, or a holy text without that hand-off being an act of self-deception. Meaning must be understood not as a discovery, but as a deliberate engineering project.
When meaning becomes a project, the individual transitions from a passive consumer of pre-packaged values to an active creator of existential architecture. You are faced with a completely blank canvas. If you want a reason to wake up in the morning, you must supply it yourself. You must choose your burdens, because a life without weight dissolves into aimless drift. You must choose your loyalties — the people, ideas, or projects you are willing to defend and sacrifice for. You must choose your obsessions — the domains of knowledge, art, or competence that you will pursue with unyielding focus.
Crucially, you must do this with the full knowledge that no cosmic authority will ever validate your choices. The universe will not applaud your artistic achievements, nor will it validate your devotion to your family or your pursuit of scientific truth. Your projects are completely insignificant on a cosmological scale.
But within the localized boundary of your subjective experience, they are absolute. They matter because *you* have decided they matter, and in an unscripted universe, that is the only form of importance that exists. You own your meaning completely; it is your creation, your burden, and your triumph.
VIII. Refuse Self-Deception
Many people survive through comforting illusions. A nihilist attempts to minimize illusion. This includes: Political myths, Religious myths, Personal myths, Historical myths, Myths about oneself. Reality is often indifferent to what feels good. Truth and comfort frequently diverge. Choose accordingly.
Self-deception is the primary psychological survival mechanism of the human animal. Because the raw, unvarnished reality of our situation — our finitude, our insignificance, the indifference of our environment — is difficult for our hyper-evolved egos to tolerate, we have become masters at manufacturing comforting illusions. We wrap ourselves in dense layers of myth, filtering every incoming data point through a series of narrative screens designed to protect our peace of mind and reinforce our sense of self-importance.
These myths manifest at every level of human organization. Religious myths provide an imaginary escape from mortality and a guarantee of ultimate justice. Political myths tell us that our nation is uniquely virtuous, chosen by history to lead the world toward enlightenment. Historical myths sanitize the brutal, chaotic, and opportunistic reality of human movements into clean narratives of moral progress. Personal myths protect our self-esteem, convincing us that we are the protagonists of a grand story, that our failures are always someone else’s fault, and that our underlying motives are purely noble.
A nihilist commits to a discipline of radical intellectual hygiene: the systematic minimization of illusion. This is not an easy path; it requires a willingness to engage in a continuous, painful stripping away of everything that feels safe and comfortable. It means looking directly at historical records and seeing raw power dynamics instead of moral triumphs; it means looking into your own psychological mirror and admitting your petty vanities, your irrational biases, and your capacity for self-serving rationalization.
The core realization driving this discipline is that truth and comfort are fundamentally decoupled variables in this reality. The universe has no obligation to structure its laws in a way that satisfies human emotional needs. A fact does not become true because it inspires you, nor does it become false because it terrifies or disgusts you. Reality is frequently indifferent to what feels good. When faced with a divergence between a comforting illusion and a harsh, objective truth, the mature nihilist chooses the truth every single time. He prefers a clear, unvarnished view of a desolate cliffside over a beautifully painted mural of an imaginary garden.
IX. Treat Civilization as Temporary
Every civilization believes itself more permanent than it is. History repeatedly demonstrates otherwise. Empires collapse. Institutions decay. Languages vanish. Ideas die. Assume impermanence. Build accordingly.
There is a peculiar form of chronological narcissism that infects every human civilization at its peak. We look at our soaring skyscrapers, our interconnected global communication networks, our sophisticated legal frameworks, and our advanced scientific instruments, and we instinctively assume that we have escaped the laws of history. We treat our current socio-economic paradigm not as a temporary, highly contingent arrangement of historical variables, but as the permanent baseline of human existence — the ultimate destination toward which all prior history was merely a prelude.
A nihilist maintains a profound, structurally grounded historical skepticism. He looks at our current civilization through the long lens of macro-history, understanding that we are bound by the same entropic laws that governed every empire that preceded us. History is an elephant graveyard of collapsed civilizations that once believed themselves eternal. Rome, Babylon, the Maya, the Han Dynasty — each possessed institutions that felt permanent to their citizens, languages that were spoken with absolute confidence, and ideas that were thought to be immutable truths. Today, they are archaeological layers, broken pottery, and dead texts studied by specialists.
Complex systems are inherently fragile. They require an enormous expenditure of energy and resources to maintain their internal order against the constant pressure of environmental and social entropy. When the returns on that complexity begin to diminish, or when external shocks — resource depletion, climatic shifts, pandemics, or systemic conflicts — exceed the coping capacity of the institutional architecture, collapse is not a slow degeneration; it is a rapid, non-linear cascade. Our globalized, hyper-efficient, just-in-time civilization is uniquely vulnerable to these dynamics, balanced on an incredibly complex web of fragile interdependencies.
To treat civilization as temporary is to operate with architectural and social humility. It means refusing to invest your ultimate psychological security into institutions, currencies, or political orders that can dissolve within a generation. You do not assume that the current stability is a guaranteed constant of your future. Instead, you assume impermanence as a structural rule. You build your life, your knowledge base, your relationships, and your survival strategies to be robust in the face of volatility. You enjoy the fruits of civilization while they are available, but you never mistake the temporary theater of society for the permanent foundation of reality.
X. Cultivate Competence Over Hope
Hope is uncertain. Competence is tangible. Learn skills. Maintain your health. Acquire knowledge. Develop judgment. Hope may fail. Competence sometimes works.
In the taxonomy of human virtues, ‘hope’ is almost universally elevated to a position of supreme importance. It is celebrated as the ultimate anchor of the human soul in times of trouble, a beautiful, transcendent force that allows us to endure suffering by looking forward to an imagined future where everything is resolved. We are told to keep hoping, to have faith in the future, and to believe that things will get better. From a rational standpoint, however, hope is an emotional deficit spending. It is a passive mechanism that borrows comfort from an uncommitted future to avoid dealing with the structural problems of the present.
Hope is fundamentally characterized by its passivity and its uncertainty. To hope is to admit that you do not have control over an outcome, and that you are relying on external variables — luck, fate, history, or a deity — to align in your favor. It is a psychological waiting room. If you are trapped in a failing system or facing a catastrophic personal crisis, hoping for a positive resolution does absolutely nothing to alter the physical probability of that resolution. It merely sedates your anxiety while leaving the underlying mechanics of the crisis completely untouched.
A nihilist systematically replaces the passive currency of hope with the hard currency of competence. Hope is an unverified projection; competence is tangible, localized optimization. Competence means focusing your finite time and energy on variables that you can directly influence. It means learning concrete skills — mechanical, intellectual, technological, and interpersonal — that allow you to manipulate your environment effectively. It means maintaining your physical and psychological health, because your biological organism is your primary interface with reality. It means acquiring deep, unvarnished knowledge about how the world actually works, and developing the critical judgment required to parse signal from noise.
When the storms of existence hit — whether they are macroeconomic collapses, institutional failures, or personal tragedies — hope dissolves like a mist, leaving its adherents paralyzed and defenseless. Competence, however, provides a real structural foothold. A competent individual does not spend time praying or wishing for a change in the weather; they understand the physics of the storm, evaluate their options, and execute a survival strategy based on their capabilities. Hope may fail, and in an indifferent universe, it frequently does. Competence is not a guarantee of survival, but it is the only variable that genuinely tilts the odds in your favor.
XI. Face Freedom Honestly
Without objective purpose, freedom expands. This sounds attractive until one realizes freedom also removes excuses. If there is no predetermined script: Your life is largely your responsibility. Your failures are often your responsibility. Your choices become unavoidable. Freedom is less a gift than a burden. Carry it.
The realization that there is no objective cosmic purpose is initially experienced by many as a moment of intoxicating liberation. The chains of religious dogma, historical destiny, and ancestral expectations fall away, revealing a vast, wide-open horizon. You are no longer a servant to a divine master, a cog in an inevitable historical dialectic, or a prisoner of a pre-written destiny. You are entirely free. This is the romantic phase of nihilism, the euphoric celebration of absolute personal autonomy.
However, this euphoria is short-lived for anyone who possesses intellectual honesty. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed, human beings are ‘condemned to be free.’ When you remove the predetermined cosmic script, you do not merely remove your chains; you also remove your armor, your map, and your excuses. If there is no god defining what is right and wrong, if there is no destiny guiding your path, and if there is no natural order dictating your role in society, then you are completely, terrifyingly on your own.
Absolute freedom shifts the entire weight of responsibility onto the individual. If your life is a mess, if you fail to develop your capabilities, if you make choices that lead to your own stagnation or misery, you can no longer blame a cosmic test, a demonic temptation, or a bad astrological alignment. You cannot claim that your suffering is part of a grander plan that will make sense in the end. Your failures are your failures, your choices are your choices, and their consequences are yours to endure. The realization of pure freedom eliminates the possibility of playing the cosmic victim.
This is why most people deeply fear absolute freedom, even as they pay lip service to it. They spend their lives actively seeking out new forms of captivity — submitting themselves blindly to political ideologies, corporate hierarchies, social trends, or toxic relationships — just to escape the suffocating anxiety of having to decide for themselves.
They crave a script because a script removes the terrifying liability of choice. A mature nihilist refuses this cowardice. He faces freedom honestly, recognizing that it is not a glittering gift, but a heavy, unyielding burden. He does not look for an external authority to tell him what to do; he makes his choices, accepts total ownership of the outcomes, and carries the burden of his agency without complaint.
XII. Regard Existence as an Event
You did not choose to appear. You will not choose to disappear. Between those two boundaries lies a temporary phenomenon called your life. Observe it carefully. Participate in it if you wish. Shape it if you can. But never mistake it for something permanent.
Human consciousness naturally slips into the illusion of possession when it thinks about life. We speak of ‘my life’ as if it were a stable piece of property that we own, a continuous substance that we possess and must guard with frantic anxiety. We treat our identities as fixed monuments, our careers as permanent trajectories, and our daily routines as structural constants of reality. This possessive frame of mind is the source of our deep existential clinging — the desperate fear of loss, the panic of aging, and the constant, underlying anxiety that our property is being degraded by time.
A sophisticated nihilism shifts this paradigm from possession to phenomenology. It demands that we view existence not as a thing we own, but as an event that is occurring. Consider the physical parameters: you did not choose to be born. You did not select your genetic code, your place of birth, your historical era, or the fundamental wiring of your brain. You simply coalesced out of the cosmic dark, a localized thermodynamic anomaly engineered by millions of years of biological replication. Similarly, you will not choose the ultimate fact of your disappearance; your biological system will eventually cross its critical threshold of decay or trauma, and your consciousness will drop back into the dark.
Between these two absolute boundaries of non-existence lies a brief, highly contingent, and temporary phenomenon: the localized kinetic event called your life. It is not a permanent monument; it is a flash of lightning across a night sky, a temporary vortex in a fast-flowing river of entropy. When you shift your perspective to view life as an event rather than a possession, your psychological relationship with reality undergoes a profound transformation. The frantic clinging dissolves, replaced by a stance of radical observation.
You begin to observe the event of your life with the careful, detached curiosity of a scientist or an artist. You participate in the event if you wish, engaging your faculties, tasting its experiences, and exploring its possibilities. You attempt to shape the event if you have the competence to do so, directing its vectors toward configurations that align with your personal preferences. But you never make the fatal error of mistaking this passing phenomenon for something permanent. You enjoy the music while it plays, fully aware that the silence is coming, and you do not demand that the song echo forever for it to have been worth hearing.
Final Principle: The Stage and the Curtain
The mature nihilist does not conclude: ‘Nothing matters, therefore nothing is worth doing.’ He concludes: ‘Nothing matters objectively, therefore the burden of choosing falls entirely upon us.’ The universe supplies no script. No final judge. No guaranteed redemption. No cosmic audience. The stage exists. The play is already underway. Act or don’t act. Either way, the curtain falls.
We arrive at the definitive synthesis of the mature nihilistic position — the pivot point where absolute objectivity transforms into radical agency. The immature, emotionally arrested approach to nihilism reaches the void, panics, and collapses into a passive intellectual paralysis. It looks out at the indifferent cosmos and whimpers, ‘Nothing matters, therefore there is no point in doing anything. Why write a book, why build a business, why love a child, why fight for justice if it will all eventually be erased by entropy?’ This conclusion is a philosophical non sequitur, a failure of logic masquerading as profundity.
The mature nihilist looks at the exact same data — the absolute lack of objective cosmic meaning — and arrives at a diametrically opposed conclusion. He realizes that the phrase ‘nothing matters objectively’ is not a decree of execution; it is a declaration of absolute intellectual independence. If the universe does not supply a pre-written script, then you are completely free to write your own lines. If there is no final judge to evaluate your performance, then you are the supreme arbiter of your own actions. If there is no guaranteed cosmic redemption, then the quality of your immediate experience is the absolute value. If there is no cosmic audience watching from the celestial rafters, then the performance is entirely for the actors on the stage.
The stage exists. This is the brute physical reality of our immediate situation. You find yourself alive, conscious, and embedded in a dynamic environment. The play is already underway; you cannot pause the production, nor can you step off the stage into a realm of pure neutrality. Every moment you exist, you are making a choice — even the decision to do nothing is an active choice to let the environment carry you. You are an actor trapped in an unscripted, improvised performance.
Therefore, the final principle is an invitation to pure execution, stripped of all metaphysical noise. Act or don’t act. Pursue competence or embrace ignorance. Build civilizations or watch them decay. Protect those you love or isolate yourself in the wilderness. The universe is completely indifferent to your choice; it offers no cosmic rewards for heroism and no cosmic punishments for cowardice. There is no final ledger where your name will be written in gold. There is only the immediate, passing reality of the performance. Live your life with absolute clarity, shoulder the magnificent, crushing weight of your own autonomy, and play your chosen role with unyielding focus. Do not look for validation from the sky, and do not beg for a stay of execution from the dark. The play is yours. Act or don’t act. Either way, the curtain falls.
Written by NBM House Books
Writer of philosophical fictions, erotic codes, and symbolic systems disguised as stories. Occasionally mistaken for someone else. Possibly not mistaken.
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家教與社會建構的影響-Elaine Mallon
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* Grieving Texas Father Speaks Out After Son Was Stabbed To Death At High School Track Meet
這是一個悲劇，一個可以避免的悲劇。我接受「社會建構論」，自然也就同意巴頓教授所強調：「家教」在塑造一個人行為舉止上的重要性(該欄2026/05/17貼文第4.3節)。轉載下文，在給「社會建構論」提供一個活生生的案例；可惜它牽扯上一條人命和一個少年的前途。
'You failed your son first': Howard prof blames father's values after Karmelo Anthony murdered his son
Dr. Stacey Patton published the Substack opinion piece a day after Karmelo Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison
Elaine Mallon, 06/13/26
Key takeaways
* Howard University professor criticizes father of slain teen Austin Metcalf, arguing that parenting style played a role in the murder, insinuating self-defense by the perpetrator.
A Howard University professor tore into the victim-impact statement delivered by the father of slain Texas teen Austin Metcalf, arguing that the teen's death "did not begin with the knife" wielded by Karmelo Anthony but instead that his father's parenting style was to be blamed as well.
Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Howard University's School of Communications, penned an opinion piece titled "Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries" to Substack on Wednesday on Substack, where she insinuated Anthony was acting out of self-defense.
"YOU failed to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries," Patton wrote. "YOU failed teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person's body is not your jurisdiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child's space is not a challenge to be conquered. YOU failed to teach him that "community" does not mean white boys get to decide who belongs and who does not."
Patton's piece was published a day after Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the murder of Metcalf. The case drew national after now 19-year-old Anthony stabbed 17-year-old Metcalf in the heart during a confrontation at a high school track meeting in April 2025. The case has become a flashpoint in broader debates about race, with Anthony's supporters arguing he has been treated differently because he is Black, while critics have rejected efforts to make the murder of Metcalf, a white teenager, about race.
"YOU obviously failed to teach your son that touching, confronting, crowding, testing, or policing another person can have consequences," Patton wrote. "And YOU failed to teach him that the same world that cheers white boys for being bold and aggressive will not always be there to save them when they mistake somebody else's restraint for permission."
She blasted Jeff for saying that Anthony had failed his parents in his decision to murder his son.
"It is easier to stand in a courtroom and call Karmelo Anthony a failure than it is to admit that Austin's death did not begin with the knife," Patton wrote. "It began with every lesson that told your son that he had the right to approach, challenge, and cross a boundary. It began with every adult who smiled at white boy entitlement and called it leadership. It began with every cultural script that taught him Black boys are the ones to be feared, but never taught him that Black boys might also be afraid.
Jeff Metcalf speaks about the stabbing death of his son, Austin Metcalf, at a high school track meet.
She also alleged that Jeff's victim-impact statement was rooted in racism, homing in on Jeff saying that Anthony does "not belong" in the community because of what he did.
"You don't belong in this community" is not just a father's grief spilling over," Patton wrote. "It is a declaration of removal. And it is the language of somebody who believes he has the authority to decide who gets to stay, who must disappear, and whose presence contaminates the social order. Like father, like son."
"Your words landed on top of centuries of Black children being told they do not belong in white schools, neighborhoods, playgrounds, pools, churches, white juries, white imaginations, and white definitions of innocence," Patton continues. "They landed on top of every Black boy this country has turned into a threat before he ever had a chance to be a child."
She claimed that his son was not the only victim in this case and that Anthony' family was also grieving.
"Austin is dead. Your family is devastated," Patton wrote. "That matters. Karmelo Anthony is alive but caged inside a racial imagination that had already convicted him. And that matters, too. Two families are shattered. And a whole country is using the tragedy to rehearse the same old script about Black guilt and white innocence."
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Patton defended her opinion piece as a "critique of racial power" and said that she was not, "blaming a dead child, attacking a grieving father, excusing violence, and rejecting the legal system."
"My argument is simple: Black children are children," Patton said. "They do not become monsters because white America needs one, and their humanity is not up for debate because a verdict has been rendered."
"Now, run along and feed your propaganda machine," she added, declining to answer several of Fox News Digital's questions. "I'm sure it's hungry for another Black woman's words to mutilate. That is my statement."
Fox News Digital reached out to Howard University and Metcalf's family for comment.
Patton's Substack piece is the latest in a growing chorus of voices arguing that the murder case is rooted in race.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, questioned on her podcast whether Karmelo Anthony's race played a role in his conviction. Crockett asked whether Anthony received a fair trial, spreading a false claim that all jurors were white and that could have impacted their ability to be impartial.
"I'm not necessarily convinced — not that I could tell you the name of one person on this jury — that we had 12 impartial white folk out of Collin County sitting on a jury for this young black man," Crockett said.
Crocket also suggested black mothers have faced far greater agony on a day-to-day basis than the victim's family.
"Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day," she lamented. "A fear and agony that I promise you the Metcalfs probably had never spend a day living that way."
Original article source: 'You failed your son first': Howard prof blames father's values after Karmelo Anthony murdered his son
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