Chapter Ten: Laziness

He was a slave, but there is one issue you need to pay attention to: if you are terribly lazy, lying there with your eyes closed while a slave beside you reads to you, you can still hear him, right? That would be a problem, wouldn't it? If he skipped a few words, you would be completely confused about what it meant. Right? Reading is not something that can be entrusted to someone else. I still hope that students will read carefully on their own; this is extremely important. Plato had his own ideas, and Aristotle differed from his teacher in some respects, right? We just mentioned one point: one valued reason, or that ideal world, while the other focused on objective reality. Here, we especially admire this saying, Aristotle's famous quote: "I love my teacher, but I love truth more." Respect for one's teacher is love, but this kind of love is emotional love, isn't it? It is a feeling. You have an inner affection for your parents, teachers, elders, and all kinds of friends. That is a good thing, a fine thing. But if you blindly follow someone because you love them and neglect the pursuit of truth, then you are actually showing great disrespect to your teacher. What I want to tell you students here is that if you can recognize that teachers can make mistakes, that teachers may not necessarily be capable of being correct in many areas, and that even now, for many questions, we cannot say what is correct and what is not—there is no absolute correctness or incorrectness—then I hope you will understand this: no matter what authority or teacher it is, no matter how close you are to them in private, how much you respect them, or how amazed you are by