One sunny afternoon during my last few months in UK, a book caught my eye in an Oxfam. Since it was in the same section with Lenin and Marx, combined with the fact that nothing else about that day’s selection particularly appealed to me, I purchased this 600 page brick of a book by Eric Hobsbawm with a cover of Hitler holding up a giant globe, not knowing at the time who the author exactly is, nor exactly what the book will bring me.

It is worthy to note that the only history book with non-trivial event analysis I’ve read is American history, a.k.a a thousand page of colonialism and imperialism. Almost all other aspects of history I have learned from Chinese schooling system in grade 8. ( I stopped going to school after that) So this will not be a scholar review, maybe not even a high schooler’s semester essay, think of it as someone who was extremely ignorant of what happened before they were born finally getting that recap, which is also just common sense to most other people born before this millennium.

The first striking impression was how vital the economy is as an element of modern civilization.  From the First World War onward, the engine that propelled almost all events on big scale to take place has been from economic grounds. For example, Hitler got into power in Germany because as part of the losing party — the Axis, discontent of the Versailles Treaties and nation-wide declining economy brewed internal antisemitism and class conflict. The Great Depression was not due to any nature disaster but merely a built-in cycle of market economy.  I used to, like most of my peer from China who never had a subject called Economics in school, think that the whole business of economics was for people who wish to make money on a very large scale. It wasn’t before I met one of my flatmates in uni who studied Econ that I realized, Economics is a serious study of the distribution of resource and wealth which is essential to a society bonded together by market, division of labor and cooperation. I have previously taken the extremely idealistic stance, perhaps out of sheer naivety, that the study on economy, history, ethics, political philosophy or even just anthropology need not base itself on a few assumptions:

1. That men need to depend on one another to survive.
2. As an implication of 1. a social structure and economy will inevitably form.
3. Central decision making and the necessity of government.
   Anarchism challenges one or more of these assumptions and has thence always been perceived as a synonym of utopianism. I will write more about what I see as a way out for people as a scientist in another blog post, where I will also elaborate my view on political ideologies and their assumption of a collective human nature.
   This brings me to my second point, ideologies.

The clash of ideologies has been a major issue in the later half of the 20th century, most starkly manifested in the Cold War between US and Russia, along with their client countries. When I was a kid, I used to confuse the idea of capitalism and democracy all the time. It wasn’t obvious to me at that time that this confusion stems from direct propaganda of the US scattered around the internet ( Youtube, Twitter…etc. were not banned when in China when I was a 12 year-old) and it took me a lot of history education to erase that connection from my head. Capitalism does not imply democracy and neither does communism inevitably lead to totalitarianism. Animal farm and 1984 are profound fables but not rigorous political philosophical analysis of communism. One thing I find interesting is how much emotion and national sentiment could be incited by a few simple buzzwords and yet how little proportion of those who feel it can even spell out a sentence full of their definitions. Of course one may say that to make any actual impact politically one can’t afford to go into complete semantics or even philosophical analysis of language itself in a Wittgenstein manner. However, eloquence can disguise itself as true knowledge and deceitfully drive those with power to take action. All the wars, hot or cold that took place in recent history to me feel like complete hysteria of charming leaders and swayed masses.

I do not believe in the existence of a collective human nature. It is however the most all-encompassing assumption underlying most societies on earth. The theory of free market assumes such a nature, so does the whole of 21 century identity politics. I think that there are statistical consensus of a group of people that could be extracted by democratic voting, however, there could never come the moment that the collective decision made based on majority voting will eradicate all conflict within the society. This is also why I am never going to be a supporter of violent rebellions nor military coups. The process where one or more individuals first assume that they are in a society in which they themselves share a certain bond with other inhabitants and then believe that certain knowledge they have, either in form of a theory or just a hunch could bring benefit and change their lives for the better is the cause of changes ever made in history. This process started the Second World War, put Stalin and Hitler to power, fuelled the 1789 revolution...as well as germinating the worst massacres on this planet. Of course this process has also brought independence to previous colonies, incited universal suffrage, stopped racial segregation and gave some percentage of women a proportion of men's rights. The problem with changes made in this fashion is that their own verdict can only happen after everything is over and can only then be told by historians.

On the same note I found myself a historical explanation for racism. Racism was something I learned in history and geography class and heard in the news specifically from the US as a kid. Racism is not something built in to a society, for why should people dislike one another just because they look different? On the other hand, xenophobia is, in archaic times already manifested itself in territorial behaviors like tribal conflicts. The fear of unknown has always been with humans since the period of tribe settlements, but in most modern societies stabilized and insured by law enforcement, people have very few reasons to be overly alerted and skeptical of foreigners.  Having lived in both UK and mainland Europe, I gradually came to understand it. Antisemitism stems from direct individual migration instead of large secluded racial settlements. When immigrants are granted less rights than citizens and have to work extra hard to stay, they give employers a much easier choice to make between them and citizens. In post Thatcher UK, an economy whose stability relies on social welfare cannot support the steadily increasing so-called underclass, when legal and illegal immigrants take the jobs that they have to compete for, as well as when hard-working minorities become, very likely, their superiors, mass and popular racism finds its ignition. Whereas in Germany, a country with hard-working as a traditional merit, a longer history of racial diversity and perhaps a hint of fear of the repetition of history, racism is much less infiltrated into each class of the society. Racism is a flavor of societal class conflict that is exacerbated by the labor division between the first and third world.

The way the West narrate the story is nonetheless obsolete. My friends back in UK, whether consciously anti-China or not have made textbook comments about it. “How is your social credit doing?”.  If communism as an ideology is what they are afraid of, there is no reason why the whites are more welcoming to Russians, or for example, Cubans, actually, maybe even the French Maoists should beware too. It is quite common knowledge that China is in most senses of the word no longer communist, just like USSR is no longer a threatening superpower.

The relation between gender inequality and economy is another issue history shone light on. Before I read more in detail what the USSR regime entailed I have already heard from my passionately communist friend that the one of the only country with absolute gender equality written into constitution was USSR. She also recommended me to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels, which includes the speculation of origin of gender inequality in light of the division between the sexes under modern economy. Class conflict is gender conflict. An economic regime that aims to constantly transform itself to always serve the purpose of eradication of class conflict as a byproduct eradicates gender inequalities.
To what extent this argument goes beyond just the economic aspect of gender inequality, I can’t say for sure, but one thing I know is that in a society where women are the child bearer, such equality will never be reached as long as the common societal inter-individual bond is still being assumed as part of human nature.

I used to believe in a mathematical approach to life. When I was lost in this world growing up, I found constants in a few axioms. The topics of epistemology, ethics used to confuse me, because the theories seemingly developed out of nothing, so many points were made yet no convergence of opinions was to be found among all the schools of thoughts. I liked the concept of choice making as well as the debate over human nature in French existentialism. In a way it is itself a practical phenomenological school of thought that does not delve into doctrines or dwell on metaphysics. For a physicist like me, adopting a definition of choice making does not enable the action itself. This is where I decided for myself the axioms of life, the rest follows. My axiom is itself pretty simple: I choose what I choose. It sounds like five words of absolute no meaningful implication. But it gives the freedom of choice to myself without any complication of ethics nor epistemology. What is deterministic about life is its chaos and ineffability. I used to fall into melancholy in a fashion of Einmal ist Keinmal. To quote a movie that triggered a depression episode of mine: Every happiest moment in one’s life there is an invisible knife hovering on their head. It is the question of, if we are all destined to die once and for all, what is the point of living once at all? What is the point to love, to be hurt, or to try?  It took me a while to finally start living in a way, to not question what is the point of my action, why I choose to do it one way over the other. It is perhaps part of one’s growth. In Time must have a stop by Huxley, the saint scholar said:

Men of genius express their knowledge of reality, but they themselves rarely act on their knowledge…They are concerned with writing, not with acting or being. But because they are only concerned with writing about their knowledge, they prevent themselves from knowing more.
—Aldous Huxley, p.223

Up to a point of thinking about life one must start living. Existentialism was created to save an era of chaos and the lost. It serves the time that hatched it. And once known how one wishes to live they must live it. History taught me what philosophy couldn’t tell me. It showed me the world I actually live in and what the people were up to before I was born. It allows me to separate phenomena from the cause. It wasn’t being told by boys that girls would just struggle more studying science that made me a feminist, it is the history and stories told by other women that share the same social gender as me that made me a feminist. To me, knowing I share a belief does not dictate how I wish to act upon it.  And to how I wish to act upon it myself I will turn, in my future blogs.

I spent two weeks travelling in Bulgaria with my boyfriend. Our main purpose for the trip was to visit my uni friend in Sofia, who I haven’t seen since graduation. Other than that however, I needed mostly a getaway from  life in Germany, I love it, but sometimes my inner urge to escape from physically non existing limits catches up with me.

I started thinking on the train at sunset.

Having battled with depression since I was 13, I have had quite a few good years where I am mentally stable and thriving. During term time in uni life was a bliss in a sense because I was so busy, thinking about life wasn’t exactly something I had the time for. When holidays kick in, my old friend depression would sneak in through the backdoor in my head again. Summer after first year was the rock bottom, in scorching heat I lived alone in the tiniest room next to London King’s Cross, had nothing to do after I get off work, only one book sat quietly on my desk collecting dust.

Writing in most formats was a coping mechanism for the better days. I wrote diaries recording my mental state everyday, analysed those of previous days, scanning for traces of relapse. I stopped writing that kind of diaries after that summer. Then I met my boyfriend, who successfully drove my compelling thoughts away by relentless chattering. We are great together because of that, he worries a lot about practical things and people around us while I simply don’t give a fuck and when I have existential dreads and panic on the irrefutability and finality of death, he tells me what happens after death including death itself is non of his living business. It’s funny how I can absolutely peacefully agree with most philosophers such as Wittgenstein on their ice cold rational view on death, being that it is not a part of life and nobody lives to experience it, but at the same time feel the implication of death in terms of finitude of life itself all too harshly. Neither can I dissociate myself from pondering the death of solar system, when the sun’s raging heat engulfs what’s left of earth, what happens to humans? What happens to all the stories about humanity that had chimed through our history? The idea of eternity of nothing in the universe unsettles me, though it’s true that it’s none of my business.

In recent years I have gradually figured out a way to convert all the uneasiness into motivation for living harder. More concretely it translates to a stern principle of being true to myself and constant self reflection. In the book Man’s search for meaning a wise man says that people live their whole life searching for a meaning. I think people find meaning at different points throughout their lives, for me I find my life exactly the meaning if there is ever one to be found. I collect meanings as I live and I use all the past meanings that make up me right now to live some more.  I keep coming back to the last chapter of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in this light,

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

I find that there are a lot speakable in the world, and that mysticism does simplify the latter a lot, and to live harder, one must find their own speakables to not dwell on the unspeakable.

Sitting at my home office on the third floor of an apartment building, the window to my left faces the street that takes incoming people southward into the city . There is a hotel with penthouse cafe that radiates fancy dimmed warm light to a small area outside, next to is a small playground dotted with tall and empty trees, reaching their bare branches into the sky like pilgrims in Mecca. It snowed, from three o’clock in the afternoon, all the way till now, it is five thirty. Today is 7th of March, a Tuesday.  I am currently listening to Nocturne in A major Poco adagio. It suddenly strikes me that as I type furiously into my computer the passage of my consciousness falls like the snowflakes all the way onto the asphalt.

Today I looked through ways to be involved in the local volunteering community just to find out that in a country like this not many mutual aid groups even exist. I question myself all the time whether my choice of life is justified. And then I look outside at the snow. Everything is justified.

Everything in life falls like snowflakes onto the asphalt, history falls like snowflakes onto the asphalt, the earth eventually collapses into the sun like a piece of snowflake falling onto asphalt.

Time annihilates everything, gravity takes its shift without break. There is a profound sense of indifference to be found.

Starting with the viewpoint that a philosopher’s work and the language they use can not be wholly understood by reader in the exact way it originates from the author’s mind, and that what we, as reader, end up taking home from it is but an instance of impressionist recollection of the author’s intention, I proceed to talk about my own interpretation of Heidegger and Sartre. Whether this interpretation is agreed by others, is beside the point of this article.

Before I picked up my first book on Heidegger, I have read numerous fictions and essays from and memoirs on Sartre. Existentialism is the phenomenology for the turbulent 20th century, Sartre himself, just like Heidegger himself (though only for a short while in Heidegger’s case) is extremely political. I think that is what called to me from his philosophy in the first place, the ability to choose and the inevitability of choice become the centrepieces of human existence. Contrasting to Heidegger, who too believes that even not choosing is a choice, Sartre doesn’t go into detail in the case which Heidegger stresses to be the Fallen dasein (being-there), a human being who simply goes with the flow of everyday life and their choices culturally implicit. I do not personally enjoy this distinction between a person who is conscious and aware of the condition of their human lives, i.e. the inevitability of choice and the constancy of it, and a person who is unaware of such philosophical thesis and in turn goes on with their lives according to their own beliefs. Their isn’t space for any other category of dasein in the realm laid out by Heidegger, you are either a resolute dasein who transcends the everydayness of collective societal life and makes decision with knowledge of your freedom as well as solitude in death, or you are someone who drowns in the noise of triviality and custom.  A person may very much understand their freedom and yet not their whole spectrum of possibilities, hence rendering the action of choosing meaningless and impossible. Heidegger argues that death allows any humanly choice to be made because it imposes the finity and urgency of life. This implies that with infinite lifetime one would fall to inaction, however, if someone truly lives forever then by default there could be infinite time of inaction, or rather of anything and everything, infinite action, and this isn’t by active choice, but simply mathematical probability. In infinite, anything that could happen, for whatever reason and chance, WILL happen. And conversely a perfectly free and aware person may choose inactivity for their whole finite life simply because they are free, and they choose to do so. The belief that the awareness of freedom and transcendental reflection on one’s past and future would result in choice of life that results in more truth, which Heidegger defines to be the relative uncovering of being, seems to me but a widening of constraints. Instead of being bound by everydayness, now you are bound by everydayness plus freedom, of course, action taken under the latter circumstance intrinsically comes from a background more revealed than the former.

As I see it, the real freedom which lies in someone who understands such freedom, is the freedom of interpretation, the freedom to view beings in the world with a perspective that is not culturally taught. The freedom to view life and death not as a medical fact nor empirical knowledge. For I can even argue that sleep is no different to death for as far as I am concerned, except I go to sleep with the belief that I will wake up again. Ultimately this freedom allows one to transcend the shared human condition, the common knowledge of mortality which dictates every human act, individually and collectively. This freedom also turns the inevitability of choice to the constant ability of choice.  I enjoy Heidegger’s philosophy that systematically puts the human mind as the pre-condition of metaphysical and epistemological discussion, especially because it indeed precedes every human experience, including with those we deem to be standalone material world.  The spatial world and temporal life I experience is one that I shape with my own mind, in which I possess complete and unreserved freedom.

This isn’t a call for lunacy, nor one that leads to social chaos.  Does this mean that with this freedom suicide and murder are also justified?  I believe suicide yes, and with murder more complicated. Sartre has written many fictions and plays infused with the idea that Hell is other people. How one is never alone even when no one else is around, how the society and the company of other human beings has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.  I have always had a rather peculiar relationship with other people myself, when I was a child, it took me a long time to realise that I shared something in common with the people around me, more so with them than a cat run over by a car on my way to school. It took me even longer to figure out what I shared in common with other people. For I was so sad and cried for days after the sight of that cat, more than I have ever been in my encounter with other people up to that point. There is a crucial step between a child and a social being, to me as a child, the behaviour of other children and adults around me and towards me were hardly taken by me differently than the way busses move and rain pours. They all confused me.  The reason I believe murder isn’t justified is that I also believe murder is a social phenomenon. In order for someone to commit murder, they must first acknowledge the other being they are murdering as another entity who share something in common as themselves.  For otherwise it is not murder, is it slaughter. Then they must also have chosen murder over other possibilities. There is something that sets murder apart from other acts, for it uniquely terminates the other being completely. It deprives the being of any further possibility of action. Some murder for revenge, because they believe they are taking the victim’s most precious possession, life. Some murder because they do not want some particular possibility of action of the victim to come true. All these reasons of murder assumes something either deemed to be human nature or builds upon future possibilities, or rather the lack thereof.  Once these reasons don’t stand, and neither does one assume anything in common with others, murder is as unfounded as cutting down a tree.

The question comes to this: with the complete freedom in one’s mind, how is it possible to choose anything over the other? This speaks of a preference, a metric that sets direction in the previous homogeneity.  Such metric has been proposed by schools of ethics,  systems of value have been studied in metaphysics.  Nietzsche, for example,  advocates for the eradication of all notions of metaphysical value and the creation of individual values. But how is such creation possible? Mathematically directions comes from constraints, under every vector field of flow there is an underlying potential scalar field. In physics, under complete symmetry there is spontaneous broken symmetry that for example gives particles mass. To have complete freedom is having the complete symmetry, symmetry between what was thought of as good and bad, noble and evil. For society and history no longer acts as the scalar potential field dictating the flow of individual life. But the human sensory system isn’t completely symmetric, the body prefers comfort and adverse to pain. The presence of people we enjoy bring us joy and those who threaten us makes us stressed. This sounds like it could easily turn into the hedonistic theory of happiness where people live to maximize sensory pleasure. It is nonetheless a symmetry breaking factor, albeit there exists so many more. Through empathy people care for one another, and the symmetry breaking factors evolve chaotically that they are no longer linear in sensory pleasure.

Empathy, the stimulated feeling in oneself in response to the outward expression or knowledge of experience of others, is the key element that gives rise to human’s collective behavior and binary relationships. It also complicates the case of murder, an analysis for the future, simply because I want to write it down.

Hi, welcome to my brand new website:)

I am Xy, a first year PhD student living in Germany. A typical day for me looks like this:

1. Wake up between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m.
2. Consume a vengeful amount of coffee with my boyfriend
3. Sit myself at my desk and stare blankly into my monitor, which displays a paper on obscure maths that I definitely don't need to do my job
4. Try to figure out if what I try to do is fundamentally or even profoundly so, ridiculous and trivial for the rest of the day
5. 10 minutes before I decide to give up and wrap up for the day, I do something vaguely useful that involves producing some code
6. Try to hide my existential dread and proceed to browse boardgamegeek.com
7. Play board game with my boyfriend and win (most of the time)
8. Put in joint effort to leave the house and scavenge throughout the city
9. Consume content in video format in bed, which involves many accidental white lies("Just one last episode...")
10. Mentally prepare myself for another day of lack of productivity and go to bed knowing I am loved, that everything is fine and will be fine, and that three years later I won't be looking at the exact same paper, wondering if there's somehting wrong with my academic career.

I have a feeling that this isn't a completely relatable day for most people out there, for first of all, not everyone lives in Germany. More importantly, not everyone would choose to do a degree in theoretical physics. Perhaps it is exactly the nature of research in this field itself, but the lack of regular creative output has been inflamatory, causing an ache in my busy head that is only comparable to a day-care playground. (I used to joke that statistians should model the running kids there with stochastic 2-D particle collision with boundary conditions.)

I had been a gigantic bookworm growing up. Oweing to my retrospectively relatively autistic tendencies, I had always preferred spending time by myself and getting lost in books over going outside and meeting my friends. I had a great dream brewed up over the years culminating in junior high. I wanted to be a writer, a novelist. I wrote tens of thousands of words and published them on various websites during primary school until I got a company reaching out to me, offering me a status of official writer for their website. Of course, I was too young to sign the contract myself and for some mysterious reason, about the same time, I made a U-turn and  got myself hooked with physics. And I've been a physicist ever since!

Fast forward to when I was in junior high, my best friend was this brilliant young rebel, a fierce, smart, unyielding and daring girl who dreamt big and would let nothing stop her. She was just as big a book worm as me, we read books after books during classes and lunch breaks, we watched arthouse movies after school. Our secret code language was comics, small square gridded comics in which our classmates and teachers all had their own animated caricature. I was in love with Nietzsche reading Also Sprach Zarathustra while she was in an online anarchist community reading The Good Soldier Svejk. One of the things we so passionately hated was the mentality of people around us. In a Chinese coastal city, progressive minds weren't in danger of overabundance back in 2013. The teachers tried to isolate us from the rest of the class in fear of contamination. We got so much joy out of our quarantine, when they exiled us from classes we climbed up the secret tower in the school chapel all the way to the bell, from there we got onto the roof and enjoyed the bird's eye view of the empty playgrounds.

But it wasn't before I met my best friend after junior high that I truly dived into the world of philosophy. She is the most studious person I've met when it comes to philosophy. I have met many philosophy majors during uni but none compares to her. We used to spend so many afternoons in the city library, searching for Heidegger, Sartre, Camus...It was almost a unison that we both made our transition from metaphysics to existentialism. Perhaps it was a feature of turbulent youth, but it still appeals to us the most even now.

My love for board games started in uni. For people who aren't very familiar with China as a country, board games aren't items common in most households, including mine. There have been a handful of tabletop games my peers were crazy about growing up, however, out of my dislike for video games(I have severe motion sickness) and general scepticism, I never bothered to try them. I minored in computer science during first year of uni in UK, most of my friends were future programmers, future pillars of our society. One of them was the president of gamesoc for about two years and in second year, I finally took on his invitation and showed up at my very first game night. I remember looking at the enormous box full of cardboard boxes thinking: What a bunch of nerds...hyping over some...cardboard boxes.

Well yeah...I became one of those nerds myself. I kept stuffing my Ikea Kallax shelves full with these cardboard boxes because I just can't get enough. One of the luckiest things about my relationship with my boyfriend is that we are both highly competitive gamers at heart. He is a big MTG nerd and I play anything that doesn't involve scary fantasy monsters/demons or some swift walking boots. (Sorry gloomhaven and MTG) I confess that I would totally buy a mechanically mediocre board game just because the art is cute enough, but I am also a strategy nerd that has a very good feeling for the EV of my moves. When it comes to navigating myself in a game with an overwhelming amount of components and scoring mechanisms, accompanied with a library of cards, I am invincible.(against my boyfriend)

So above summed up are the three biggest passions of mine, physics, philosophy and board games. Knowing my yearn for writing and sharing, my boyfriend suggested using this website as a blog. I'm sure blogging here will help me get through my unproductive days, but more importantly, I still believe that the words written act as a timestamp that encapsules my mind at a certain point in time. When I read back the things I've written in the past few years, I see in front of me snapshots of my head, a circus with changing audience.