Lin Yutang
[1] In modern life, a philosopher is about the most honored and most unnoticed person in the world, if indeed such a person exists.“Philosopher” has become merely a term of social compliment.Anyone who is abstruse and unintelligible is called “a philosopher”.Anyone who is unconcerned with the present is also called “a philosopher”.And yet there is some truth in the latter meaning.When Shakespeare made Touchstone say in As You Like It, “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” he was using it in the second meaning.In this sense, philosophy is but a common, rough and ready outlook on things or on life in general, and every person has more or less of it.Anyone who refuses to take the entire panorama of reality on its surface value, or refuses to believe every word that appears in a newspaper, is more or less a philosopher.He is the fellow who refuses to be taken in.
[2] There is always a flavor of disenchantment about philosophy.The philosopher looks at life as an artist looks at a landscape through a veil or a haze.The raw details of reality are softened a little to permit us to see its meaning.At least that is what a Chinese artist or a Chinese philosopher thinks.The philosopher is therefore the direct opposite of the complete realist who, busily occupied in his daily business, believes that his successes and failures, his losses and gains, are absolute and real.There is nothing to be done about such a person because he does not even doubt and there is nothing in him to start with.Confucius said, “If a person does not say to himself ‘What to do? What to do?’ indeed I do not know what to do with such a person!” one of the few conscious witticisms I have found in Confucius.
[3] I hope to present in this chapter some opinions of Chinese philosophers on a design for living.The more these philosophers differ, the more they agree that man must be wise and unafraid to live a happy life.The more positive Mencian outlook and the more roguishly pacifist Laotsean outlook merge together in the Philosophy of the Half-and-Half, which I may describe as the average Chinaman’s religion.The conflict between action and inaction ends in a compromise, or contentment with a very imperfect heaven on earth.This gives rise to a wise and merry philosophy of living, eventually typified in the life of T’ao Yuanming in my opinion China’s greatest poet and most harmonious personality.