5. The deconceptualized concept: how we learned Marxism as dreary memorization

When I was in my second years of grad school, I found one of my teachers were particularly interested in Chinese students. It seemed to him that Chinese students are always special.

Perhaps he was right: we had classes of Marxism from primary school all the way to college, but none of us was able to explain it when he asked us:

“Can any of you explain Marxism you’ve learned during school?”

For me, however, thing has been a little different. I learned Marxism not only in classes, but also in my extracurricular readings about history and philosophy.

When I was asked this question, I was tempted to talk about what I learned in my external readings. But I didn’t feel right, cause that’s not what I learned in class. That’s something I feel entirely different from what I learned in class.

What did I learn in class?

As far as I remembered, I was asked to memorize certain logic and moralities that were almost entirely foreign to me. I knew little about their context. The memorization was hard, dreary and unpleasant, but had to be done cause otherwise I’d fail the exam, which would make my life even more unpleasant.

This was probably the same for everyone else around me: Marxism is a rather dreary, obscure theory required to be memorized.

Wait! That’s not what Marxism is, but that’s exactly what we learned it is.

But why didn’t I, or anyone else, tell that to our beloved professor? Why none of us would say: THAT is what we learned.

Because we have never learned to say so. While we were learning Marxism, we also learned we are supposed to say what we memorized, which was soon forgotten after the exam.

In a sense, although none of us explicitly answered our professor’s question, we’d given away what we learned by being silent. What we learned in words was forgotten, yet what we developed as attitude remained and was reflected in our action. Our professor was right to feel strange when none of us remembered what we learned, yet none of us showed even a tiny bit of a regret.

Apart from ‘Marxism’, I had also developed an impertinent attitude toward ‘social’. I only realized that I was socially inept when I was a sophomore. That was when my true attitude toward ‘social’ came to my attention.

When I was a kid, my parents always thought of studying as the chief thing in school, with socializing at a much lower place. But while my parents think of studying and socializing as two good things I could achieve at the same time, I think of them as highly exclusive: That social means bad at studying. That nerdy means smart. I’m on the smart side, spending most of my spare time figuring out answers – from mathematical to psychological, from cognitive to philosophical.

Even if I’d play with kids, I’d like to be accompanied by kids like me, not kids that are social. For me, social kids are particularly annoying: shallow-minded, impulsive, impatient, bad at study, noisy, showing-off, and enjoy harassing others.

Worse, they bring senior students to our classroom. These students were taller and appeared to me even more bullying. This is probably why I, later as an undergrad, was rather resistant to any social activities.

As you can see, the concepts we learned are often not something we explicitly tell. Rather, they are deconceptualized, as intensified units naturally incorporated into mental motions like knots on intercrossing threads, reflected in our attitudes and behaviors.

Do we understand a concept as it is defined in books?

What did I do in this book to explain concepts?

Is a concept built or incorporated?

4. Turning on the crossroad: how global warming heats up my ambition

Ever since I was a sophomore, I had an ambition of changing how people think about how they think. To my peers, my ambition seems too big to be realistic. They so often joked about me that I learned to make jokes of myself before they came up with a joke.

“I know it is difficult. As difficult as changing the climate – creating global warming for example. Which means, it’s not impossible after all.”

The trick is: there are two aspects of global warming that are somehow connected. It is a global climate change, and it is, as many believe, caused by human activities. James Watt could get the credit for changing the climate, if he so wanted.

Being able to figure out this trick, I believed I was undoubtedly smart. On the flip side, my smartness fooled myself. For a long time, I kept saying:

“I know it is difficult. As difficult as climatologists would think to create El Nino. Which means, it is not impossible after all.”

Only until recently did I realize that ‘climatologists’ only refer to ‘climatologists as I presumed they are’, not what they really are in real life. Do climatologists think that El Nino is difficult to be created? Do climatologists think El Nino is created, rather than just happened? Many of them do believe that that El Nino is intensified (rather than caused) by human activities, but even this belief is not conclusive.

So, climatologists don’t at all think that El Nino is created by human activities. Yet I’d fooled myself by making up this joke.

As much as I was fooled, I bet my words had also fooled my peers about how real climatologists think about El Nino. Wow, fooling people without giving away my intention! That’s something to think about.

If I could use this trick to fool people, I bet some other smart people could also do so. Yes, in advertisement: A nice-looking sofa is placed in a splendid house, with a stylish guy comfortably lying on it. Now you have an impulse to buy the sofa.

Before you pay the price, however, have you asked yourself: Would the stylish guy really feel as comfortable as he appears? Would the sofa fit in your home as nicely as in the advertisement? And why the guy as stylish as he is, with such a splendid house to live in, wouldn’t rather prefer another sofa much more expensive, which your budget couldn’t afford?

How were we fooled by ads without these questions ever came across us? How was my ambition heated up by global warming which seems rather irrelevant?

It happens because different aspects of an intensified unit are linked. It happens because our thinking is naturally associating through these links. These links exist in a somewhat vague, or collective manner. In a manner that we may not even explicitly tell.

3. Intensified unit: why the apple on the tree is the same apple we eat

For a long time, I thought there’s no point in learning a second language – English for instance. Language is just a tool – something that belongs to a different world from the ideas I’m presenting. In so far that my ideas are good, I could easy hire someone else to translate for me. Even better, a computer might do a better job a few years later.

Now, I realize language is part of my natural thinking. Sentences are like threads. Words are like knots. And what I write arises from my own mental web. Whoever is the translator, the translation tends to be awkward compared to the original. Why? Because the translator does not have the same mental web as the author.

When I was learning English as my second language, I used to memorize the meaning of words. I assumed: If I could correlate English words with Chinese words, which I used smoothly, I could speak English as smooth as speaking Chinese. Could I?

What I could is, well, speaking Chinglish. Words in my speech were like bumps and lumps. I created sentences like the one below:

Read books break ten-thousand scrolls, under pen like have god.

(Meaning: If you read ten thousand books, you’ll write like a god.)

You know, I have an inquisitive mind, and I read a lot of science. Science, as I see, is often the finding of an explicit and simple answer. What I found was: 1) scientific literature seldom use commonly used words; and 2) commonly used words often have multiple meanings.

So, I tried using words that are not used commonly. And I made sure to get the grammar right. Here’s what I got:

At the abdomen of whatever language, words abiding adjacent meanings are abundant. Any word’s meaning must be assured if only it is distinctly placed inside a sentence’s chamber.

(Meaning: For any language, there are words with multiple meanings, and meanings that can be expressed by many words. Only after a word is put into a sentence can its meaning be specific.)

Again, I realized something went wrong. But while I was confused by words and sentences, I got something from my science readings. You know, if Sir Isaac Newton could think about gravity by a falling apple, what does an apple mean?

Does it mean a hard fruit that falls from the tree when ripe? Does it mean something that has an apple-ish size, shape, and color? Does it mean a fruit that’s sweet and chewy, or a fruit that contains certain nutrition? Does it mean a fruit to be eaten, or to spread seeds for the apple tree?

Does it mean the Apple phone? The apple that hit Newton? Or the Poison Apple in Snow White?

Why would we use the same word ‘apple’ in all these circumstances? Why we do this for almost every word we use in everyday life?

As I probed deep into this question, I found it even more unnerving. You know, ‘disappear’ may be used for a player in a football game, a small pet raised in a family, or a skill of a sorcerer in a fantasy novel. And Gosh! The meanings are similar, but the connotations are very different.

Why our commonly used words are never as precise as those in the scientific literature?

I kept thinking about this until I overheard my aunt talking to my little cousin.

“You may have never eaten bird meat, but you’ve at least seen a bird flying.”

We don’t usually learn new things from a context that’s entirely new, do we? We learn apple tree from apple, in its environment we are mostly familiar with (e.g. grass and sky we see every day).

If I’ve never seen an apple, could I identify apple from an apple tree?

How could I get an idea of apple if I’ve never seen it before?

What’s the natural way of learning a new word? How natives learn to use words?

Not with grammar. Not from a dictionary. But through experience. Not from any specific logic learned through a particular experience. But by encountering it many many times.

That was when I throw away my grammar book. That was when I start reading English novels. That was when I, whenever referring to a dictionary, would pay more attention to example sentences rather than the words’ meanings. That was when I start using English fluently.

That was also when I realized that a word, a concept, or an idea not only cannot exist separably from the mental motion it resides, but is also built collectively by multiple motions. Just like when we see apple in different contexts, in our brain, it’s like passing a thread through a knot. We didn’t see the knot at the beginning, until a lot of threads have passed over it.

This gives rise to the unit of our thinking – the intensified unit: the unit, or node, intensified by mental motions passing over it.