Useless Utility

What did this "non-utilitarian usefulness" mean? It did not mean that people at Fudan University denied the importance of utility. We never went to extremes—going to extremes was the least technically demanding thing there was. And so, this did not mean denying the importance of utility. When making major choices in life, you would value practical benefits, but you would not place them first. We believed money was important, but money was never the most important thing. I thought material things were wonderful, but we did not believe they were the only wonderful things. We cared about useful things, but deep in our hearts, we also pursued and longed for things that were useless. There were many useless things in this world. For all of you here, love was the most useless of them all. Aside from bringing you pain, aside from leaving you without enough time for self-study, it kept you from throwing yourself wholeheartedly into student work and delayed your path to success, right? Morality was useless too. Could you get anything from it? Could it give you bread? Character was useless too. Friendship was useless too. Once friendship became useful, it was called connections, not friendship. Friendship was useless. It was enough that it existed, enough that this person existed in the world. So when we spoke of Fudan University's free and useless soul, we did not mean that we did not care about usefulness. We cared about usefulness, but we never put usefulness in the number one place among our values. We cared about material things, and we cared about fame and profit, but they were never the only things we cared about. They were never what guided us. Only a free and useless soul, only such a spirit, could fly. Einstein once said this: "I