Useless use is great use.
Useless, very useful. The sages have long said that what is useless is of great use. But now many people don't understand the useless use. Look around, learning piano painting is for the exam; Going to college is to find a good job; Learning English is for professional titles, and millions of civil servants in the national examination army are eager to face such a useful and useless education. Rousseau thinks this will lead to some premature fruits.
The sages have long said that "useless use is great use." But now many people don't understand "uselessness" and "great use".
Look around, learning piano painting is for the exam; Going to college is to find a good job; Learning English is for the professional title and the prestige of millions of civil servants in the national examination army ... Faced with such an education of "useful learning, useless learning", Rousseau believes that this "has caused some precocious fruits, which are neither full nor sweet, and will soon rot."
Chinese civilization is full of soup. Thousands of years later, Confucianism emphasized the "six arts", and sage Confucius thought that derby was more important. Virtue, conduct, faith, traditional culture, etc. Pointing directly at the spiritual core seems to have almost no practical use, but it is priceless in the spiritual and humanistic fields. I remember when Cai Chen was short of food, Confucius was still singing in the land of suffering, and his faith was so firm. "Everyone knows what is useful, but they don't know what is useless." It is this kind of underfed scholarship that supports the new world of the East. At present, the Enlightenment Temple, which human beings have been struggling to manage for centuries, is teetering because of its uselessness, playing cultural elegies in the bustling sound, and literature is declining day by day. Mo Yan said in an award-winning interview, "Literature is not grain and cotton ... literature is like hair. Digging the ancient tomb for thousands of years, even the bones turned into mud, but the hair survived ... "Great use" is included in these "useless" things. We call for a culture that is immortal for thousands of years, penetrates the soul and leads the noble soul.
Looking around the world, I seem to see Tolstoy hidden in the Caucasus mountains; The hymn of the great poet Holderlin on the Danube; Thoreau in Walden Lake, USA; Dickens in the "new era, the worst era" and Maxim in the mysterious land of the United States ... they propped up one era after another with spiritual strength. The so-called "useless use" or even "useless use". Nowadays, western modern civilization also cultivates millions of humanistic citizens who read Plato and Aristotle carefully and are familiar with The Republic and Homer's epic. The high wall built by this profound humanistic thought cannot be broken by any 10 thousand Hollywood. It is "useless, but useful in my heart."
Back to reality, "the college entrance examination is for a good job, and studying for a master's degree is for a better job." These concepts overemphasize "usefulness" and we should blush; The idea of "liberal arts students don't like learning mathematics, and science students don't have to learn history and philosophy" ignores "useless and useful". I don't know if Einstein loves violin, and Qian Xuesen's artistic accomplishment is also very high. It is the artistic thinking of images that helps them inspire the spark of innovation. Liberal arts students strengthen the cultivation of abstract thinking, science and engineering students enrich their humanistic background, and useless contains "great use" Only in this way can we better understand the true meaning of life.
Useless, very useful.