Riding the wind of rebirth

“Actually, I think Li Diaoyuan’s greatest strength is his quick wit,” Xu Anxin said. “It’s most needed during debates.”

University debate competitions are now highly watched television programs, where students argue eloquently on their respective sides of a topic, captivating the nation.

"That's good. For example, there's the case where he defended Su Dongpo's couplet that he couldn't match. It was Su Dongpo who couldn't match Foyin's couplet, but he insisted that he did. I guess he just made the explanation because Su Dongpo was from the same hometown as him."

"Mai Xiaomiao, you know quite a bit about Su Dongpo!" Li Laosan looked at Mai Xiaomiao with newfound respect for her knowledge of traditional Chinese culture: "You've studied it before?"

"No, when I was watching 'Su Chef,' there were some experts in the comments section introducing Su Dongpo's information. It was very interesting, so I remembered it."

"Huh? There's a comments section? How come I didn't know that?" Li Laosan said, "I'm also watching 'Su Chef'."

"You're following a 'pirated' post from the HKU forum, aren't you?" Zhou Zhi rolled his eyes. "The original is a serialized version in the novel section of the Clover Forum. Reading online novels without reading the comments section takes away half the fun."

The story that Mai Xiaomiao mentioned about Li Diaoyuan forcibly explaining Su Dongpo's situation actually comes from "The Story of Li Diaoyuan's Couplets." It tells of how, not long after Li Diaoyuan took office as the educational commissioner of Guangdong, he went on an outing with local literati. They saw the three characters "Half a Mountain" carved on a cliff, and a stone tablet standing by the roadside below the cliff, with a line of text inscribed on it: "Half a mountain, half a road, half a stream flowing, half a stream dried up."

The companion explained that this was when Su Dongpo, Huang Shangu, and Foyin visited this place together during the Song Dynasty. Foyin gave Su Dongpo the first line of a couplet, but Su Dongpo couldn't match it. So he asked Huang Shangu to have the first line engraved on a stone tablet here to show his admiration and to ask for the second line.

Li Diaoyuan laughed and said, "Scholar Su had already prepared the second line." Everyone was puzzled.

Li Diaoyuan explained: "Actually, the reason why Scholar Su asked Huang Tingjian to write the inscription on this stele was for the purpose of creating a couplet, which is called a 'meaningful couplet.' The second line is actually: 'A stele, a line of words, one sentence forming a couplet, the other sentence being abstract.'"

After hearing this, everyone felt it was beyond reproach and praised it repeatedly.

There are similar examples. When Li Diaoyuan was in Hangzhou, the literati of Jiangnan looked down on the scholars of Sichuan. So he held a literary gathering and won over everyone at the gathering, making the literati of Hangzhou admire him. Only then did he boast: "Even the cowherds in Sichuan are good at composing poems!"

A scholar from Hangzhou, skeptical, decided to travel to Sichuan to investigate. On his journey to Sichuan, he encountered a shepherd boy and asked him, "Little boy, do you know the answer?"

The shepherd boy thought it was a "singing contest," so he nodded to indicate that he could respond.

So the scholar pointed to the towering pagoda halfway up the mountain: "The iron pagoda stands majestically, seven stories high, with eight sides and a square shape. Can you match it?"

The shepherd boy, unsure of what to do, rode his ox across the river, then waved to them and walked away!

The talented scholar later found Li Diaoyuan, recounted what he had seen, and questioned him. Li immediately replied, "Young man, Brother Mu already made arrangements with you!"

The talented scholar asked in surprise, "How is that correct?"

Li Diaoyuan said, “You gave the line: ‘The iron tower stands tall, seven stories high, eight sides, and four corners,’ and someone else replied: ‘The green water ripples, five fingers, three long and two short.’”

From then on, scholars in Jiangnan no longer dared to underestimate the people of Sichuan. It must be said that if these couplet stories were not fabrications but rather true accounts of Li Diaoyuan, then not only was his literary skill profound, but his quick wit was also extraordinary.

However, Zhou Zhi smiled meaningfully and said, "But matching couplets is actually just a method for Chinese people to train their logic."

"Huh? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the reason we Chinese were overtaken by the West in modern times was because we didn't develop logic?" Xu Anxin said.

"People who say such things like to say that the ancient Chinese only valued the humanities and not the sciences because the humanities have no logic, and therefore China has no logic." Zhou Zhi laughed and said, "In fact, this just exposes the truth that they do not understand logic. They are not only ignorant, but also stupid."

"How so?" Li Laosan also became interested. It seemed that he had heard similar statements in Hong Kong but had no way to refute them.

"To answer this question, we must first understand what logic is."

"Logic is the English word, which is a transliteration of a foreign word. However, this English word is also a transliteration of a foreign word in English, and its true origin comes from the Greek word 'logos'."

"This word first appeared in the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Its basic meaning is the organic combination of words, reason, order, and laws. It has the meanings of thinking, reason, thought, and regularity. It is extended to mean the rules and methods of judgment and reasoning that are inherent in human thought processes and expressed in human speech."

"This is the original meaning of the word 'logic.' Once you know this original meaning, especially with the premise of 'expressed in human discourse,' do you think the humanities can exist without logic?"

Zhou Zhi laughed and said, "Actually, it's quite the opposite. Humanities subjects place the most emphasis on logic!"

According to Heidegger and others, the Greeks did not have the word 'language'. They understood the phenomenon of language 'first' as 'speech' or 'discourse', and called the basic framework for understanding speech and its structure, namely the grammatical logic system, 'logos'.

"They incorporated this basic proposition into their philosophical perspective. Therefore, in his History of Greek Philosophy, the British historian of philosophy Guthrie summarized the various meanings of Logos, including 'narration,' 'discourse,' 'cause, reason, argument,' 'correspondence, relationship, proportion,' 'universal principle,' and 'the capacity for reason.'"

"Therefore, in his early work Being and Time, Heidegger specifically examined this issue critically, proposing that 'the basic meaning of λογο is speech,' but this basic meaning has been 'obscured by a large number of arbitrary interpretations in later philosophy.'"

"What do we call it when words and opinions are recorded? So tell me, are these things considered humanities or sciences? China, which has always valued the humanities, can't possibly not value logic?"

"On the contrary, Chinese logic was described in detail in the Mozi as early as two thousand years ago."

"It wasn't until modern times that the West developed inductive logic by Bacon and Mill, as well as Kant's doctrine of logic."

"In the 17th century, the German philosopher Leibniz first applied mathematical methods to logical research, and this approach is called 'mathematical logic.' The so-called modern logic actually refers to the mathematical logic thought established after the mid-19th century. Chinese logic was only lagging behind for more than a hundred years, and this brief lag was made up for after the May Fourth Movement."

"So this becomes what those idiots mean by 'China has no logic'?" (End of Chapter)