Recently, I read a book that made me want to kneel down, "The Unfacing Life: A Biography of Lu Xun". One of the main points of this book is that Lu Xun is very pessimistic, but his innate instinct for life drives him to engage in the cultural movement of saving the nation and reviving the culture.
The title of this book is very interesting. To face life, one must also believe that life can be faced. If facing life is equivalent to admitting failure, admitting that life has no meaning, admitting that one is a tragic figure, then one will inevitably sink into the abyss of despair, waiting for inevitable destruction - can you still face it? Once a person thinks about this, they will inevitably become pessimistic and gradually move towards nothingness. The book describes nothingness in this way - the sense of nothingness is a denial of the meaning of life, it is something that reason cannot comprehend. In many cases, it is just an emotion, an intuition, a realization. The more things that reason cannot analyze, the more inexplicable frustrations, the easier it is to trigger nothingness.
A person hates life and declares that it has no meaning because they once believed that life had meaning. To some extent, it was their original conviction that pushed them into the embrace of nothingness.
Many people have realized this kind of nothingness. Dostoevsky was completely disappointed in human nature, Schopenhauer chose suicide, Nietzsche found transcendence within himself. But Lu Xun's nothingness is deeper. This sense of nothingness is different from the pessimism of the Enlightenment. You want to drive away the darkness, but find that you cannot succeed, and that darkness may continue to exist in the world - this is pessimism. It can make people lose confidence, but it doesn't necessarily make them stop taking action. Even without the possibility of victory, you can still make a suicidal charge, make sacrifices to shoulder the gate of darkness. This charge and sacrifice themselves can establish your value. Whether you win or not is actually not important.
Let's talk about Chinese-style nihilism. Those maxims that have been rolling off people's tongues and pens for thousands of years, such as "both sides are right, both sides are wrong", "to achieve both the world and oneself, to be self-sufficient when in poverty", not to mention "seeing through the world, realizing the emptiness of the four elements". They all have a meaning of breaking free from pessimism deep down, but the depth of insight and the level of understanding vary.
I also thought of a discussion on nothingness in a previous book: we have no possibility of understanding nothingness because it is nothingness. We cannot comprehend it, we cannot know nothing, we can only know something. To know nothing is to be "ignorant". Nothing cannot become the object of knowledge. So, how does nothingness give to us? It gives to us in emotions, in worries and anxieties. Worries and anxieties are the most essential emotions because they are an understanding of nothingness. Only in the understanding of nothingness do we grasp existence. Grasping existence means what? It means time. The flow of time is opened up in our grasp of existence.
Let's start with this paragraph and feel the complex and contradictory psychology of Lu Xun. When facing Qian Xuantong's call for submissions, he said, "If there is an iron room with no windows and is impossible to destroy, and there are many people sleeping inside, who will soon suffocate to death, but they will not feel the sadness of dying. Now you shout loudly and wake up a few more awake people, causing these unfortunate few to suffer the irreparable agony of impending death. Do you think you are doing them a favor?"
"But since a few people have awakened, you cannot say that there is no hope of destroying this iron room."
"Yes, although I have my own conviction, hope cannot be erased. Because hope lies in the future, it cannot be proven that I will not have it."
He spoke very frankly. Although he made a determined cry, his state of mind was different from when he was planning "New Life" in Tokyo, and different from when he led students in demonstrations after the liberation of Shaoxing. The belief in truth in hand and the conviction of victory have diminished. Now his "conviction" often lies on the other side, the "impossible destruction" of the iron room. If we delve into the ultimate motivation behind his writing, there is probably only one "reluctance": he is reluctant to accept such a fate for himself, reluctant to accept society's victory over him.
But precisely because of this, a most special aspect of Lu Xun's thought is clearly manifested: just as he seems to inevitably fall into a sense of nothingness, he instinctively wants to pull his feet out from there. In order to establish a will to continue to fight that can withstand defeat and disappointment, he is willing to give up all external support, whether it comes from "comrades" or from the "future". He now only seeks motivation for resistance from within himself, and this motivation is mainly not derived from optimistic reason, but from the "hatred" of the darkness outside and inside. This is an emotion he has never doubted, and it is also a consciousness that is unlikely to fade away once he is immersed in such reality. Therefore, the cry and the warrior's will that grow from this are truly solid and reliable. So, he renamed his struggle: "The Desperate Resistance".
Losing one's grasp on oneself is the most serious mental crisis. The more Lu Xun understands this, the more he desperately tries to regain his grasp on himself. His constant revision of various understandings of life, his repeated analysis of himself in novels and essays, are all attempts to regain his grasp on society and himself, to restore the so-called hope.