Reprint | Learning and Being a Person
AIAI-assisted translation·Read the source version
- Author: Liang Qichao
- Original work: A speech delivered in 1922
- Chinese source: “Learning and Being a Person” on Wikisource
- Copyright: The original work is in the public domain. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the Chinese text.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been lecturing in Nanjing for nearly three months. The educational community here in Suzhou invited me several times by letter, but unfortunately I had lessons every day in Nanjing and could not get away. I am deeply grateful to gather here today with students from every school in the city. I must ask your forgiveness for one thing: I have been unwell for the past month and am only just carrying on, so I cannot give a long speech today and fear that I may disappoint you.
We study in order to learn how to be human
Let me ask you: “Why do you go to school?” I imagine everyone will answer in unison, “To acquire learning.” But if I ask again, “Why do you seek learning?” and “What do you wish to learn?”, your answers will probably differ greatly, or perhaps you will not be able to answer at all.
Let me answer for all of you: “We study in order to learn how to be human.” Mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, history, geography, Chinese, English, philosophy, literature, science, politics, law, economics, education, agriculture, industry and commerce are all means required for becoming a person. Mastering every one of them does not, by itself, fulfil that purpose. Whether you can truly become a person remains a separate question.
The human mind has three parts: knowledge, feeling and will. Our ancient thinkers called the complete development of these parts the “three universal virtues”: wisdom, benevolence and courage. Why universal virtues? Because they are common standards of human morality, and all three are necessary to form a complete person.
What does their fulfilment look like? Confucius said, “The wise are free from doubt, the benevolent from anxiety, and the courageous from fear.” Education should therefore include the cultivation of knowledge, emotion and will. Intellectual education should teach us not to be confused; emotional education should teach us not to be troubled; education of the will should teach us not to be afraid. Teachers should make these three their ultimate aim, and we should make them the aim of our own self-education as well.
The wise are free from doubt
How do we become free from doubt? Most important is the cultivation of judgement. The first step is to possess a reasonable amount of common knowledge. The next is to acquire specialised knowledge for the work we intend to do. Beyond that, we need the wisdom to judge circumstances as they arise.
Someone without common knowledge may hear thunder and attribute it to the anger of a thunder god, or see a lunar eclipse and blame a greedy toad. Faced with any difficulty, such a person has no judgement and turns to gods, divination, fortune-telling or physiognomy. This is confusion in its fullest sense, and it makes for a pitiable life.
Primary and secondary schools give people basic knowledge so that they need not grope in the dark. But common knowledge alone is insufficient. Each of us will normally have a profession. We are not the first to practise it; countless people before us accumulated experience and discovered principles. That body of experience is specialised knowledge, and anyone who enters the profession should possess it.
A farmer should know how to improve soil and seed and guard against drought, flooding, disease and pests. Workers, merchants, financiers, educators and soldiers all have their respective fields of knowledge. Higher education chiefly provides knowledge of this kind.
But are common and specialised knowledge enough? They are not. The universe and human life are alive rather than fixed. The situations we meet each day are complex and changing, not simple impressions stamped from a mould. If we understand only what we have already studied, we will panic whenever something unfamiliar appears. We must cultivate a more general wisdom before we can possess fundamental judgement.
How is that wisdom cultivated? First, we must train minds that are habitually shallow and restless until they become precise and grounded. Then, however difficult a matter may be, we can think through its structure from beginning to end and avoid confusion. Second, we must nurture minds that have been clouded until they become clear. Then we can judge calmly and transparently when a matter stands before us. Common knowledge, specialised learning and general wisdom are all parts of intellectual education, whose purpose is to make the wise free from doubt.
The benevolent are free from anxiety
How do we become free from anxiety, and why should benevolence free us from it? To understand this, we must first understand the view of life held by the ancient Chinese thinkers. The whole substance and function of the Confucian view of life is contained in the word ren, benevolence. It is difficult to define, but we might call it “the realisation of universal personhood.” Confucius said, “Benevolence is humanity”: completed personhood is benevolence.
Personhood cannot be displayed by an isolated individual. It appears in relationships between people. Self and other must affect and awaken one another and become a unity before my personhood can be realised. If we speak of personhood at all, we ultimately arrive at universal personhood. The universe is human life and human life is the universe; my personhood and the universe are not two separate things. One who experiences this truth is benevolent.
Why is such a person free from anxiety? Anxiety generally has two sources: success and failure, or gain and loss. A benevolent view of life frees us from anxiety over success and failure. We know that the universe and human life will never be complete. Precisely because the universe is forever incomplete, it forever allows room for creation and development.
What we do amounts to advancing an inch or two along a journey of tens of thousands of miles in the evolution of the universe. How can that be called success? Yet what if we do nothing? Then we fail even to advance those few inches, and that is true failure. The benevolent understand that only refusing to act is failure, while acting can never be failure. Thus the Book of Changes says, “The noble person strives ceaselessly for self-improvement.” From another perspective, nothing can ever be finally successful: what is an inch or two in a journey of ten thousand miles? Thus the Analects speaks of “knowing it cannot be done, yet doing it.” With such a view of life, what success or failure remains to trouble us?
Benevolence also frees us from anxiety about gain and loss. Gain and loss exist only when I insist that something belongs to me. Personhood itself does not exist in isolation; I cannot draw a clear line between the part that is mine and the part that belongs to others. What, then, can truly be gained by me? If nothing is mine to gain, nothing is mine to lose.
I study for the sake of learning and labour for the sake of labour, not as tools to acquire something else. Laozi said, “He produces but does not possess; he acts but does not hold on,” and, “The more he does for others, the more he has; the more he gives to others, the more abundant he becomes.” What gain or loss can trouble a person with such a view? One naturally comes to feel that heaven, earth and oneself arise together, and that all things and oneself are one. Life becomes filled with interest and transformed into art. This is the highest emotional education; its purpose is to free the benevolent from anxiety.
The courageous are free from fear
How do we become free from fear? Once we have learned not to be confused or anxious, fear will naturally diminish. But courage belongs to the will. A person with a weak will may possess abundant knowledge and still be unable to use it at the necessary moment; they may possess beautiful sentiments and abandon them when tested.
How, then, can the will become strong? First, the heart must be open and upright. Mencius spoke of a “flood-like vital energy, supremely great and strong,” and said that if we examine ourselves and remain right, we will advance even against thousands and tens of thousands. As the common saying has it, a person who has done no wrong need not fear a knock at midnight. To preserve courage, we must first make all our conduct capable of standing in the open.
Second, we must not be dragged about by inferior desires. Confucius once said that a person ruled by desire could not be firm. When trivial material appetites pull us in every direction, even tempered steel becomes soft enough to wind around a finger.
It is extremely easy for a strong will to become weak, and extremely difficult for a weak will to become strong again. If a person cannot be master of their own will, what can they accomplish? Someone oppressed and enslaved by others may eventually recover freedom through struggle. But when one’s own will becomes the slave of one’s appetites, recovery may never come; life is spent shrinking in fear.
Confucius praised the strength of one who remains harmonious without drifting with the current, stands in the centre without leaning, does not change in prosperity and remains faithful even unto death in adversity. Let me tell you plainly: without such strength, one cannot become a complete person. Yet it is not easily achieved. The will must be trained at every moment. Once it is fully trained, we see what ought to be done, shoulder it without hesitation, and go forward even against thousands. That is what it means to stand upright through a human life. This is the aim of educating the will: the courageous are free from fear.
Wake up
Take these three virtues as standards and ask yourselves: which have I achieved? In which do I have even a little confidence? If you possess none of them and have confidence in none, then you are in danger of failing to become a person at all.
Do not imagine that acquiring fragments of knowledge makes you learned. If you have become a person, the more knowledge you possess, the better. If you have not, the more knowledge you possess, the worse it may become. Consider the traitors, officials and politicians who use their learning to assist oppression and harm ordinary people. Were they educated or uneducated? When they were students, were they not once spirited and innocent like you? How did they fall so far? Nothing is sadder than seeing a group of fine young people walk step by step down a corrupt road. Wake up: those whom you now despise are warnings of what lies ahead.
Are you doubtful, stifled, sorrowful or in pain? Do you feel unable to resist pressure from outside? Your doubt and frustration arise from a lack of wisdom; sorrow and pain from a lack of benevolence; fear of oppression from a lack of courage. Your knowledge, feeling and will have not yet been cultivated and trained.
I hope you awaken sharply to yourselves. Once awake, you will act of your own accord. There is learning everywhere beyond school: open a classic, turn the pages of a history, and you may find good teachers in every place.
Wake up! Establish your fundamental wisdom, experience a view of life grounded in personhood, and protect your free will. Whether you become fully human depends upon these years.
—1922