After setting myself a KPI of reading at least 10 hours a week, the results have been remarkable. I’ve decided to start writing longer reading notes to improve my expressive abilities. My goal is to deconstruct the fragmented insights from the books I read, reassemble them into new knowledge, and integrate them in a logical way to systematically enhance my understanding and memory. This process feels incredibly magical. When reading a great book, the introduction or footnotes sometimes mention other related books. Based on my personal interests, I select the next book to read from these references.
“One Can Love Humanity Even Without God”
The first book I finished in 2025 was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky, through the character Ivan, raises one of the book’s central questions: “If God does not exist, is everything permitted?” Dostoevsky lived in 19th-century Russia, a time when the Industrial Revolution was at its peak. Against the backdrop of rapid scientific advancement, society inevitably developed scepticism toward religion and nihilism.
Reflecting now, the direct cause of my depression during high school was falling into nihilism. My grandmother often warned me, saying, “Your stubborn personality will make it hard for you to survive in society.” With my limited understanding, I was terrified by her repeated warnings. If I couldn’t survive in society, why waste my family’s resources and energy? What was the point of living? I might as well die. Back then, no one told me that people can change, that weaknesses in character can become strengths, and that everything will fall into place in time. I never believed in religion, and without God, I lost all hope.
The phrase “everything is permitted” is misunderstood by the character Smerdyakov in the book: “If God is dead, and there is no afterlife, can’t we do whatever we want?” Nietzsche also proclaimed “God is dead” in 1882. However, Ivan’s meaning in the book is that without God, people would lose their rationality and moral framework, leading to chaos. Nietzsche, in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, emphasised that humans need to create new values to fill this void. This resonates with Dostoevsky’s idea in the book: “If God does not exist, it is necessary to invent Him.” People need miracles, need “God,” and need hope. Only then can we resist the inherent loneliness, emptiness, and absurdity of life. It is extremely difficult for everyone to understand and accept this reality. The most convenient and effective way to make most people happy and maintain order is to create a new “God,” which could be morality, reason, or a new religion.
Growing up in a small city in a very traditional and ordinary Chinese family, I used to have a very petty and calculating personality, often harbouring the kind of cynicism that Lu Xun described: “I have always been inclined to suspect the worst of my fellow Chinese.” However, after reading The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, I was convinced that the ultimate solution for making the world a better place must be altruism. Although I did not become a Buddhist, the principles of altruism and self-reflection in Buddhism helped me through the most difficult times. I suddenly realised that the underlying logic and starting point of all religions seems to be “love” for the world.
We should recognise that each of us has a dark side, but out of love for humanity, we are willing to weave a cage to restrain ourselves. As the book states: “One can love humanity even without God.”
The Limits of Dimensions: Is the World We See Real?
After finishing The Brothers Karamazov, I read reviews that referred to Dostoevsky as a foundational figure of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre considered the line “If God is dead, everything is permitted” as the starting point of existentialism. This piqued my interest in Nietzsche’s ideas and Sartre’s existentialism, leading me to read Lin Xinhao’s What Have the Philosophers Done?.
This was my first systematic introduction to the history of philosophy. I observed how philosophy evolved alongside geography, war, religion, and science, while also influencing them. Philosophers inherited, refuted, and established ideas generation after generation. Many philosophers believed they had reached the end of truth, only to be challenged and overturned by the next. This is similar to the development of art history. As E.H. Gombrich wrote in The Story of Art: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” The same applies to philosophy. We may never fully understand truth; there are only philosophers who constantly doubt, explore, and strive to find patterns and build systems. The same is true for science. Previously, I unquestioningly accepted science as truth. But before Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, everyone thought Newton’s theories were flawless. Even when experiments showed discrepancies, other factors were blamed rather than Newton’s theories. So, what is the true nature of reality?
In Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, the author uses “Flatland” and “Lineland” as analogies to make us realise that we can never imagine a higher-dimensional world because we have never experienced it or even conceived of it. Even if we did experience it, we would not recognise it as a projection from a higher dimension but would instead try to summarise and explain it through our limited understanding. We might call it miracles, philosophy, science, or religion. It is possible that all our current “common sense” and “science” are merely shadows of actions by higher-dimensional beings, and “miracles” are moments when their world intersects with ours (the three-dimensional world). What we perceive as reality may not be real at all but merely shadows of a higher-dimensional world.
Nevertheless, we must continue to explore and summarise. What all artists, philosophers, and scientists are pursuing is the attempt to derive patterns from the world we perceive. Human nature loves to find patterns, and this pursuit is our way of resisting the absurdity of life and creating meaning for ourselves. Therefore, disciplines are essentially pragmatic. The meaning of life lies in this: we may never understand the unknown, and all truths may be illusions or projections, but through exploration and pursuit, we can make our lives a little better.
And death may simply be someone leaving our dimension and moving to another we cannot perceive.
From this perspective, ghosts might exist, so we should respect all things, because what we cannot see or perceive does not mean it does not exist.
We spend our entire lives constructing meaning. Philosophy, science, and art are merely different ways of exploring. In the end, what meaning is doesn’t matter. What matters is that, in the process of seeking meaning, we create our own life’s value.
The Reflection of Philosophical Ideas in My Diary
After learning some philosophical theories, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the values I had developed from various sources and incorporated into my own system of thought could be traced back to different philosophical schools. For example, some thoughts I wrote in my diary:
“Recently, I’ve started to feel that humans are not separate individuals. All humans together form a single life. We are like cells in a giant, ever-moving being. The fall of one life is followed by the rise of another. Humans are immortal. The unique experiences of one life will be re-enacted in others. Their personality, preferences, everything about them—though they may disappear, they become countless molecules, and all their stories, pursuits, and details are scattered among humans of the past or future, replayed over and over. From this perspective, we need not grieve the death of a single life as an irreparable loss.
From a micro perspective, we are merely cells of the giant. As long as we do not harm others, nothing can bind us. From a macro perspective, we are the giant. We are each individual, and we are everyone. We are both cells and the universe.”
This aligns with Heraclitus’s theory of “everything flows,” which later developed into Whitehead’s process philosophy.
“During the pandemic, my grandmother passed away. One day, I suddenly remembered how she liked to add orange peel to her soup. I felt deeply sad, knowing I would never taste her orange peel soup again. But then I thought, although my grandmother is gone, there are always grandmothers in this world who love their grandchildren, and there are always grandmothers adding different ingredients to their soups. From this perspective, my grandmother may have left this world, but love continues to exist in various forms.”
This reflects Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence.”
“During a root canal treatment in China, the dentist didn’t use anaesthesia. The pain was so intense that I lay there, seeing a ring of white light, my dizzy mind repeating a Buddhist saying: ‘All physical pain is an illusion.”
This relates to dualism and phenomenology.
“We can alter our memories. The truth and essence of events don’t matter. What matters is how we felt at the time and how we interpret it later. This is also called self-deception. If one can deceive oneself for a lifetime, it’s a form of happy self-consistency. Who am I to judge? So, no matter what happens, mindset is the most important. As long as you’re happy, that’s what counts.”
This echoes Kant’s “a priori forms of cognition,” Nietzsche’s idea that truth is a “useful fiction,” and Foucault’s postmodernism.
I’ve also started reading The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, which critiques elitism. The book’s discussions on class and politics resonate with the ideas in Flatland. I will summarise this connection in the future.
The philosopher Zeno said that human knowledge is like a circle. The more knowledge we acquire, the larger the circumference of the circle becomes, and the more we realise our own ignorance. This is exactly how I feel recently.
Ratings for the Books I Read in the Past Month and a Half
(Purely Personal and Biased, for Reference Only):
- The Brothers Karamazov: 10/10
- What Have the Philosophers Done?: 9/10
- Flatland: 9/10
- A Man Called Ove: 9/10
- Small is Beautiful: 9/10
- We Three: 8/10
- The Tyranny of Merit: 7/10 (not finished yet)
- Business Insight: 7/10
- A Life Without Limits: 5/10
- Boundless Growth: 6/10
- Lychees of Chang’an: 5/10
- How the Steel Was Tempered: 3/10