Recently, I read a book that made me feel overwhelmed, "Unfacing Life: A Biography of Lu Xun". One of the main points of this book is that Lu Xun is very pessimistic, but his instinct for life drives him to engage in the cultural movement of saving the nation.
The title of this book is very interesting. To face life, one must also believe that life can be faced. If facing life is equivalent to admitting failure, admitting that life has no meaning, admitting that one is a tragic figure, then one will inevitably sink into the abyss of despair, waiting for inevitable destruction. Can you still face it? Once a person thinks about this, they will inevitably become pessimistic and gradually move towards nothingness. The book describes nothingness like this - the feeling of nothingness is a denial of the meaning of life. It is not something that reason can comprehend. In many cases, it is just an emotion, an intuition, a realization. The more things that reason cannot analyze, the more inexplicable frustrations, the easier it is to trigger nothingness.
A person hates life and declares that it has no meaning because they once believed that life had meaning. In a certain sense, it is precisely their original conviction about life that pushed them into the embrace of nothingness.
Many people have realized this kind of nothingness. Dostoevsky was completely disappointed in human nature, Schopenhauer chose suicide, and Nietzsche found transcendence within himself. But Lu Xun's nothingness is even deeper. This sense of nothingness is different from the pessimism of the Enlightenment. You want to eliminate the darkness but find that you cannot succeed, and that darkness may continue to exist in the world. That is pessimism. It can make people lose confidence, but it doesn't necessarily make them stop taking action. Even without the possibility of victory, you can still make a suicidal charge, make sacrifices to shoulder the gate of darkness. This charge and sacrifice themselves can establish your value. Whether you win or not is actually not important.
Let's talk about Chinese-style nihilism. Those maxims that have been passed down through people's mouths and writings for thousands of years, such as "there is no absolute right or wrong" and "helping oneself is helping the world", not to mention "seeing through the world, realizing the emptiness of the four elements". They all have this kind of meaning of breaking free from pessimism deep down, but the depth of their insight and the level of their understanding vary.
I also thought of a discussion on nothingness in a previous book: we have no possibility of understanding nothingness because it is nothingness. We cannot comprehend it, and we cannot know nothing. We can only know something. "Knowing nothing" means "knowing nothing at all". Nothing cannot become the object of knowledge. So, how does nothingness affect us? It affects us in our emotions, in our worries and anxieties. Worry and anxiety are the most essential emotions because they are the realization of nothingness. Only in the realization of nothingness do we grasp existence. Grasping existence means what? It means time. The flow of time is opened up in our grasp of existence.
Let's start with this paragraph and feel the complex and contradictory psychology of Lu Xun. When facing Qian Xuantong's call for submissions, he said, "If there is an iron room with no windows and is impossible to destroy, inside there are many people sleeping, who will soon suffocate to death. However, they will enter death from unconsciousness and not feel the sadness of dying. Now you shout loudly and wake up a few more awake people, causing these unfortunate few to suffer the irreparable agony of impending death. Do you think you have done right by them?" "However, since a few people have woken up, you cannot say that there is no hope of destroying this iron room." "Yes, although I have my own conviction, when it comes to hope, it cannot be erased because hope lies in the future. It cannot be proven that I will not have it." He spoke very frankly. Although he made a determined cry, his state of mind was different from when he was planning "New Life" in Tokyo, and different from when he led students in demonstrations after the liberation of Shaoxing. The belief that truth is in hand and victory is certain, the ambitious ambition for the world, has dwindled. Now his "conviction" often lies on the other side, the "impossible destruction" of the iron room. If we delve into the ultimate motivation behind his writing, there is probably only one "reluctance": he is reluctant to accept such a fate for himself, reluctant to accept society's victory over him.
However, in doing so, a most distinctive aspect of Lu Xun's thinking becomes clear: just as he seems to inevitably fall into a sense of nothingness, he instinctively wants to pull his feet out from there. In order to establish a will to continue fighting that can withstand defeat and disappointment, he is willing to give up all external support, whether it comes from "comrades" or from the "future". He now only seeks motivation for resistance from within himself, and this motivation is primarily not derived from optimistic reason, but from the "hatred" of the darkness outside and inside. This is an emotion that he has never doubted, and once faced with such reality, it is unlikely to diminish. Therefore, the cry and the warrior's spirit that grow from this are truly solid and can be relied upon with confidence. As a result, he renamed his struggle as "the desperate resistance".
Losing one's grasp on oneself is the most serious mental crisis. The more Lu Xun understands this, the more he desperately tries to regain his grasp on himself. The reason why he tirelessly revises his understanding of life, the reason why he repeatedly analyzes himself in novels and essays, is to regain his grasp on society and himself, to restore the so-called hope.