The Sage Does Not
Talk, the Talented
Ones Talk, and the Stupid Ones Argue
Lin Yutang
Ones Talk, and the Stupid Ones Argue
Lin Yutang
The Chinese hate the phrase “logical necessity” because there is no logical necessity in human affairs. The Chinese distrust of logic begins with the distrust of words, proceeds with the abhorrence of definitions and ends with instinctive hatred for all systems and theories. For only words, definitions and systems have made schools of philosophy possible. The degeneration of philosophy began with the preoccupation with words. A Chinese writer, Kung Tingan, said: “The Sage does not talk, the Talented Ones talk, and the stupid ones argue” - this in spite of the fact that Kung himself loved very much to argue!
For this is the sad story of philosophy: that philosophers belonged to the genus of the Talkers and not the Silent Ones. All philosophers love to hear their own voice. Even Laotse himself, who first taught us that the Creator (the Great Silent One) does not talk, nevertheless was persuaded to leave five thousand words to posterity before he retired outside the Hankukuan Pass to pass the remainder of his life in wise solitude and oblivion. More typical of the philosopher-talker genius was Confucius who visited “seventy-two kingdoms” in order to get a hearing from their kings, or, better still, Socrates who went about the streets of Athens and stopped passers-by to ask them questions for the purpose of hearing himself give wise answers.
The statement that the “Sage does not talk” is therefore only a relative one. But still the difference exists between the Sage and the Talented Ones, because the Sage talks about life, as he is directly aware of it; the Talented Ones talk about the Sage’s words and the stupid ones argue about the words of the Talented Ones. In the Greek Sophists we have the pure type of Talkers who are interested in the play and interplay of words as such. Philosophy, which was the love of wisdom, became the love of words, and in proportion as this Sophist trend grew, the divorce between philosophy and life became more and more complete. As time went on, the philosophers began to use more and more words and longer and longer sentences; epigrams of life gave place to sentences, sentences to arguments, arguments to treatises, treatises to commentaries, and commentaries to philological research; more and more words were needed to define and classify the words they used and more and more schools were needed to differ and secede from the schools already established; the process continued until the immediate, intimate feeling or the awareness of living has been entirely lost sight of, and the layman has the perfect right to ask, “What are you talking about?”
Meanwhile, throughout the subsequent history of thought, the few independent thinkers who have felt the direct impact of life itself - a Goethe, a Samuel Johnson, an Emerson, a William James - have refused to speak in the jargon of the Talkers and always been intractably opposed to the spirit of classification. For they are the wise ones, who have kept for us the true meaning of philosophy, which is the wisdom of life. In most cases, they have forsaken arguments and reverted to the epigram. When man has lost the ability to speak in epigrams, he writes paragraphs; when he is unable to express himself clearly in paragraphs, he develops an argument; and when he still fails to make his meaning clear in an argument, he writes a treatise.
Man’s love for words is his first step toward ignorance, and his love for definitions the second. The more he analyzes, the more he has need to define, and the more he defines, the more he aims at an impossible logical perfection, for the effort of aiming at logical perfection is only a sign of ignorance. Since words are the material of our thought, the effort at definition is entirely laudable, and Socrates started the mania for definitions in Europe. The danger is that after being conscious of the words we define, we are further forced to define the defining words, so that in the end, besides the words which define or express life itself, we have a class of words which define other words, which then become the main preoccupation of our philosophers.
There is evidently a distinction between busy words and idle words, words that do duty in our workaday life and words that exist only in the philosophers’ seminars, and also a distinction between the definitions of Socrates and Francis Bacon, and the definitions of our modern professors. Shakespeare, who had the most intimate feeling of life, certainly got along without trying to define anything, or rather because he did not try to define anything, and for that reason, his words had a “body” which the other writers lacked, and his language was infused with that sense of human tragedy and grandeur that is often missing today. We can no more hold his words down to any one particular function than we can hold him down to any particular conception of woman. For it is in the nature of definitions that they tend to stifle our thought and deprive it of that glowing, imaginative color characteristic of life itself.
But if words by necessity cut up our thoughts in the process of expression, the love of system is even more fatal to a keen awareness of life. A system is but a squint at truth, and the more logically that system is developed, the more horrible that mental squint becomes. The human desire to see only one phase of truth which we happen to perceive, and to develop and elevate it into a perfect logical system, is one reason why our philosophy is bound to grow stranger to life. He who talks about truth injures it thereby; he who tries to prove it thereby maims and distorts it; he who gives it a label and a school of thought kills it; and he who declares himself a believer buries it. Therefore any truth which has been erected into a system is thrice dead and buried.
The dirge that they all sing at truth’s funeral is, “I am entirely right and you are entirely wrong”. It is entirely immaterial what truth they bury, but it is essential that they do the burying. For so truth suffers at the hands of its defenders, and all factions and all schools of philosophy, ancient and modern, are occupied only in proving one point, that “I am entirely right and you are entirely wrong”. The Germans, with their Gründlichkeit, writing a heavy volume to prove a limited truth until they have turned it into an absurdity [1], are perhaps the worst offenders, but the same disease of thinking may be seen or noted more or less in most Western thinkers, becoming worse and worse as more and more abstract they become.
As a result of this dehumanized logic we have dehumanized truth. We have today a philosophy that has become stranger to life itself, that has almost half disclaimed any intention to teach us the meaning of life and the wisdom of living, a philosophy that has lost that intimate feeling of life or awareness of living which we spoke of as the very essence of philosophy. It is that intimate feeling of life which William James has called “the stuff of experience”. As time goes on, I feel that the philosophy and logic of William James will become more and more devastating to the modern Western way of thinking. Before we can humanize Western philosophy, we must first humanize Western logic. We have to get back to a way of thinking which is more impatient to be in touch with reality, with life, and above all with human nature, than to be merely correct, logical and consistent. For the disease of thinking typified by Descartes’ famous discovery: “I think, therefore I exist”, we have to substitute the more human and more sensible statement of Walt Whitman’s: “I am sufficient as I am”. Life or existence does not have to go down on its knees and beg logic to prove that it exists or that it is there.
William James spent his life trying to prove and defend the Chinese way of thinking, without knowing it. Only there is this difference, that if William James had been a Chinese, he would not have written so many words to argue it out, but would have merely stated in an essay of three or five hundred words, or in one of his leisurely diary notes, that he believed it because it is so. He would be shy of the words themselves, for fear that the more words he used, the greater the chances for misunderstanding. But William James was a Chinese in his keen awareness of life and the varieties of human experience, in his rebellion against mechanistic rationalism, his anxiety to keep thought constantly fluid, and his impatience with people who think they have discovered the one all-important, “absolute” and universal truth and have enclosed it in a self-sufficient system. He was Chinese, too, in his insistence on the importance of the artist’s sense of perceptual reality over and against conceptual reality. The philosopher is a man who holds his sensibilities at the highest point of focus and watches the flux of life, ready to be forever surprised by newer and stranger paradoxes, inconsistencies, and inexplicable exceptions to the rule. In his refusal to accept a system not because it is incorrect, but because it is a system, he plays havoc with all the Western schools of philosophy. Truly, as he says, the difference between the monistic conception and the pluralistic conception of the universe is a most pregnant distinction in the history of philosophy. He has made it possible for philosophy to forget its beautiful air-castles and return to life itself.
Confucius said, “Truth may not depart from human nature; if what is regarded as truth departs from human nature, it may not be regarded as truth”. Again he says, in a witty line that might have dropped from James’s lips, “It is not truth that can make men great, but men that can make truth great”. No, the world is not a syllogism or an argument, it is a being; the universe does not talk, it lives; it does not argue, it merely gets there. In the words of a gifted English writer: “Reason is but an item in the mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately, the universe is wild, game-flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all: the same returns not save to be different.” It seems what the Western logicians need is just a little humility; their salvation lies in some one curing them of their Hegelian swelled-heads.
NOTE:
[1] A German writer devoted a whole thesis to proving that genius is due to eye strain. Spengler’s show of erudition is splendid, but his reasoning childish and naïve.
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The above article was published on the websites of the Independent Lodge of Theosophists on 23 May 2025. It is reproduced from the book “The Importance of Living”, by Lin Yutang, The John Day Company, New York, copyright 1937, edition printed in 1939, 459 pp., see pages 417-421.
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Helena Blavatsky (photo) wrote these words: “Deserve, then desire”.
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