Curiosity vs. Responsibility

“With great curiosity, comes great responsibility.”

If no one else has said this, I’ll claim it. The phrase crossed my mind when I realized my identity has been formed from my dialectic struggle between curiosity and responsibility.

In many cases, curiosity makes me more responsible. When I was nine, my sister was born with Down Syndrome, a condition I had never heard of. This piqued my curiosity. Over the next month, I asked everyone I knew what Down Syndrome was, and after searching enough information on my new ThinkPad, I proudly shared every bit with my parents. They were not impressed, however, since they were busy arguing over whether to abandon my sister or not. In China, people with Down Syndrome were not socially accepted: they were considered incomplete beings that exist only to waste resources. Once again I was curious: what made my sister somehow “unworthy” of living? This curiosity brought me no answer except people’s prejudices: even though my sister would be somewhat different from us, she possessed human emotion and sentimentality just like us. I grew protective of her and strongly advocated to keep her. In so doing, I took on the responsibility of a brother.

Sometimes, however, curiosity brings me unexpected responsibility. In eighth grade, education reform was en vogue in China. I was curious why our school system was inefficient, and after reading a few articles, I believed I knew the answer. In an essay titled “Hunger and Utilitarianism,” I attributed the ills of the Chinese education system to Confucian influences. I didn’t know, however, that it would be published by an online journal and receive more than 200,000 views, nor did I expect that criticisms would flood the journal’s comments page, informing me in a harsh way that my view on Confucianism was misleading and, perhaps, very ignorant. The name “Huo Dawei” at the top of the article started to sting my eyes, and I regretted submitting that article so prematurely. Since then, this experience has taught me to be a responsible scholar who researches and writes with caution.

In some cases, curiosity comes out of responsibility. Last year, at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing, I discovered the beauty of Chinese philosophy and its importance to the ongoing intercultural dialogue in the world. As someone raised by the language and culture, I felt an urge of responsibility to present it to a global audience. Over the next year, I immersed myself in the ontological discourses of Zhou Dunyi, the Christian-like cosmology of Zhang Zai, and the complexity of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian system. The deeper I dove into Chinese philosophy, the more curious I became — of not just the intellectual discourses, but the underlying cultural edifice as well. This curiosity led me to a thrilling exploration of my heritage.

During this cultural exploration, my curiosity and responsibility have intertwined so much that they’ve become inseparable. As with the case of my sister, the more I investigate something, the more I feel responsible for it. In studying Chinese folksongs, I fell in love with one, “A Placid Brook,” and decided to harmonize it to perform in a choral setting. For each chord, I spent a moment carefully balancing between keeping the cultural elements and twisting them into choral harmony. During my research on Neo-Confucianism, I noticed a historical figure, Wen Tianxiang, whose stories are fascinating yet often overlooked. I decided to write a play with the same title, depicting him in light of an intellectual struggle within Neo-Confucianism. In the end, I’ve come to identify as a cultural philosopher interested in starting a reformation within Neo-Confucianism through literature and music.

And regarding what’s to come:

Uncertain it may be, yet

Certain am I to uphold

My open mind and square shoulders.

The rest shall be left

To the great dialectic,

Flowing with vigor,

Backward and forward,

Again and again and again.