A Short Essay | What Kind of Scholar Do I Want to Be?

To study is to seek knowledge. But not knowledge alone. What I want is knowledge that is both coherent and true.

Coherence means finding some logical consistency running through all of knowledge, so that the pieces flow into one another, explain one another, and sit together in harmony within a single web of ideas.

Truth is the sense that knowledge is real: that it comes from finding genuine problems and trying to solve them, rather than inventing problems out of thin air just to pad out another paper. Behind that kind of knowledge there is a scholar who is actually puzzled, who actually cares.

Jin Yuelin, once the dean of the College of Letters at Tsinghua, set out his own understanding of coherence and truth in his collected writings, and then said this: if he could not have both, he would rather have truth.

Many people read only to acquire knowledge. They never go looking for its coherence or its truth.

For me, the wish for coherence grows out of a longing to understand the world, and the wish for truth comes from caring about real problems. I cannot bring myself to give up either one. But as the disciplines split into ever finer divisions, as specialized knowledge swells and piles up, growing too precise and too narrow, both coherence and truth end up buried under that pyramid built of jargon and symbols.

Feynman, in his famous The Feynman Lectures on Physics, wrote something I keep coming back to:

If our small and limited minds, for the sake of some convenience, divide this universe into parts, into physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on, then remember that nature knows nothing of all this.

I do not want to betray my own hunger to know, my own curiosity, by shutting my open and roaming intellectual interests inside a rigid box of disciplinary categories. I treat the knowledge I gather as a process (that heady, intoxicating intellectual experience of turning things over and over across the course of a life), not as a static heap of fixed notions.

For me, the names of the disciplines are only signposts to knowledge, never barriers to it. I believe in the boundless possibilities that live in the spaces between fields. And I believe that the broad fluency I am chasing, across mathematics, physics, biology, information, economics, philosophy, and the social sciences, can bring something genuinely new and different into the world.

So this is a reminder to myself, and to you, my reader: even if you come looking for the "specialist" and walk away disappointed, please make room for the effort I am making toward coherence and truth.

That is all. Be well.

A note afterward: this little piece started life as the preface to an essay I am still writing, Why Read Philosophy?. The preface ran a bit long, so I pulled it out and let it stand on its own, as a small word of encouragement to myself. I wrote it in a hurry, and bringing up all of the above, I could not quite keep my feelings in check, so the words may have gotten ahead of the thoughts. Please bear with me. Most of what is here borrows from Professor Wang Dingding's Basic Questions of the Behavioral Social Sciences; if you turn to the opening of that book's fifth chapter you will find passages much like these. My own grasp is limited, and my understanding of Jin Yuelin's ideas reaches only as far as Professor Wang's retelling of them, so if I have gotten anything wrong, please correct me without mercy. Thank you.

This is Ning Ningjing Hai. Thank you for reading to the end.