I went to the Presidential Palace on Sunday to see an exhibition of calligraphy and calligraphy by dignitaries of the Republic of China. I happened to see through the window a room with the door closed and no lights on, with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's handwriting "It's difficult to do it" embedded on the wall. "Easy" and took a photo of it. Because in normal times, a saying that I often hear is “Easier to tell than to do”. The two are completely different from each other. I'm very curious: Which statement is correct?
I read a lot of books and found that "it is difficult to know but easy to do" or "it is easy to know but hard to do" is an eternal philosophical proposition. Philosophers and scholars throughout the ages have different opinions and cannot agree on this issue. The father-in-law says that the father-in-law is right, and the mother-in-law says that the mother-in-law is right. No one can convince anyone. "Pseudo-Ancient Wen·Shang Shu·Shuo Fate" says: "It is not difficult to know, but difficult to do." There is also a folk proverb: "A three-year-old child can know something, but an eighty-year-old man cannot do it." According to this, it should be "easier said than done". And "Mencius: Doing the Heart" said: "Those who do it without hesitation, get used to it without noticing it; those who live by it all their lives without knowing the way are the common people"; "Ideological Construction" also clearly states that "it is difficult to know but easy to do". According to this, it should be "easy to do, easy to know".
To borrow from Zen Buddhism, a series of "gradual enlightenments" lead to a sudden "enlightenment" - the realization that "knowing is easy, doing is easy" and "knowing is easy, doing is hard" are seemingly incompatible. The formulation is actually correct under different conditions. Specifically speaking, for the generally easy-to-understand "knowledge", it is indeed "easy to know but difficult to do". For example, everyone knows that corrupt officials are bad, but once the power is in hand and there is no supervision mechanism, it is very difficult to stay clean under the temptation of money and beautiful women; as for the truth about life and the laws of nature ( The ancients called it "Tao"), and it is indeed "difficult to know but easy to do", so much so that "if you hear the Tao in the morning, you will die in the evening". For those who have mastered the laws of life and nature, following the Tao is as simple as the instinct of breathing.
Marx’s materialist dialectics tells us that any truth is relative rather than absolute; those who have studied mathematics and physics should also know that the coordinates are different in different reference systems. Without a certain theoretical basis as a standard, we can draw completely different conclusions. This is why there are so many opposing theories, beliefs, and religions in the world, each with its own loyal followers, and no one can convince anyone. Different people, regarding the same or different objects, under the same or different conditions (time, environment, technology, material, etc.), will come to different conclusions about the difficulty of "knowing" or "doing". Many important theories that have changed our understanding of ourselves, such as Pyrrho's (Greek philosopher) skepticism, Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Darwin's theory of evolution, Lorenz's theory of human nature, Watson's behaviorism, Kinner’s empiricism, and Wang Yangming (Shouren)’s theory of “unity of knowledge and action” of Neo-Confucianism in the mid-Ming Dynasty... We say that they are not absolute ultimate truths, and they all have conditional limitations.
In fact, the cause of most disputes in the world may be due to human nature - people's laziness and unwillingness to admit their mistakes. Perhaps, this debate will continue endlessly...