Quotes from Liu Xiaobo (5)

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(From Mist of Metaphysics, Chapter 4: Kant - the Copernicus-like Revolution )

Religionizing Science is the most indiscernible and most dangerous (process?), but religionizing faith is the nature of life. The impact of Kant's idea - God had nothing to do with science - to modern philosophy is to remind us: never to religionize science and knowledge. In modern philosophy, Karl Popper's scientific philosophy -that is the denial of religionizing science - is much more important than Nietzsche's denial of God, because what Popper said was what we are capable to do, and what Nietzsche was not.

p215

(Kant) Fallacy originated from the pursue of absolute, ultimate or infinite by our reason, and the belief that this is achievable. This is what I said "mist of metaphysics" - the belief that our reason is capable of deciphering nature, unveiling the secret of life, deducing the existence of God, proving immortality of our soul. But all of these "capabilities" are delusional and fallacious. p226

The blind belief on fallacy is harmful, but not all harmful in terms of ethics. It brings infinite, unlimited and valuable hope to limited, transient and meaningless life. This "hope" can be both positive and negative: when it works as only a reference, it is positive; when it works as an absolute, it is negative. From this perspective, the losing "hope" of modern people is not really so hopeless, not really a collapse of everything, but just a destroy of those "absolute" - which worked as the only value of life, as a bound our hope. p226

No matter how dexterity and smart the Hegel's philosophy seems, overall, there's never been any philosophic systems as "obese" as Hegel's, never been any as "radiant" and "grand", and as stupid and pale. It indeed was a sparkling pyramid, but underneath, it didn't hold a seed of any life, but buried a putrid dead body. A tomb is a symbol of dead, no matter how grand it is. The wit of history is such: the true end of metaphysics was not marked by its sharpest opponent Kant, but by its most loyal follower - Hegel. p262