Pursuing Scholarship: Beyond 'Serving the World' and 'Because the Mountain Is There'

Recently I reread Wang Xiaobo’s essay collection The Silent Majority. It is full of black humor, yet beneath that surface runs a deep admiration for science. His essays on Sinology, science, and logic enlightened me once again. Looking back now, I realize that one reason I have always resisted describing my original motivation for studying economics as “serving the world and benefiting the people” is precisely Wang Xiaobo’s influence.

People often ask: what is the use of so many social-science papers? Economics studies money in order to guide monetary policy; finance is for making money. Many people say, “I study economics to serve society and strengthen the country.” Others speak of the humanities as disciplines that “carry forward the learning of the sages and bring peace to future generations.”

Taken in ordinary terms, these are all respectable reasons. They may arise from personal survival, social responsibility, or the hope of collective prosperity. But once such reasons are treated as the only legitimate ones, the logic changes. A discipline becomes valuable only insofar as it performs some concrete social function. And then one has to ask: if a problem has no obvious practical use, are we simply not supposed to study it?

Ask someone whether studying black holes is useful, and they may not be able to give a clear answer. Yet most people still feel that the natural sciences, however abstract they seem, will eventually prove useful. Social science can of course answer in the same way.

But I have never found that answer satisfying. At bottom, it still says: we persist only because the discipline may someday become useful. That is still the language of utility, pragmatism, and “usefulness above all else.” It is still, in another form, the mentality of “serving the world.”

I think that what ultimately drives people to learn, whether in the natural sciences or the social sciences, is something more common and more fundamental. It is not utilitarianism. It is the human ideal celebrated again and again in literature: why climb the mountain? Because it is there.

Liu Cixin’s “Seeking the Truth,” The Climbers, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea all point in this direction. Common sense tells us to weigh costs and benefits and choose the lesser harm, yet there are always people who make choices that exceed narrow calculations of utility.

As a science-fiction reader, my position is simple: research is for solving problems, and solving problems is for answering questions. Many questions arise from practical concerns, of course. But some questions simply stand before us whether they are useful or not, and once they do, we want to answer them.

That is why a problem does not need some grand external justification. Sometimes you pursue it simply because you want to know the answer. You want to follow it to the root. You do not need to wrap that desire in slogans about righteousness or suffering. Curiosity is enough.

This is also why Wang Xiaobo opposed certain attempts to over-glorify “Sinology,” why he pushed back against the moral prestige surrounding Confucian orthodoxy, and why he admired Russell. One of the Cheng brothers once described “benevolence” as something like a fluffy newborn duckling, and many people become so enchanted by such mysterious formulations that they can no longer free themselves from them. But do we really need to rediscover benevolence by meditating on duck feathers? Likewise, many people treat the I Ching as the summit of predictive wisdom and therefore stop pursuing actual answers. In all these cases, what they really seek is usefulness. They hope to reach useful ends through mysterious means, caring little for process, explanation, or proof, as long as the result appears lofty, correct, and sanctified by tradition.

I used to wonder why the phrase “because the mountain is there” is quoted so often. Now I understand: it captures a simple truth. The pursuit of answers does not always need a reason beyond itself. That is also what I hear in Wang Xiaobo. One day I will be gone, he says in effect, but as long as there are still people walking this road in search of truth, that alone is enough to make me happy.