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of escaping from its threat. In both cases we can say the person who is
afraid of something in the world responds by trying to push something out
of the world-either the feared object or one's own self (see Figure XII.1a).
By contrast, existential fear is a response in the depths of a person's being
to the general human situation, especially when that situation reveals
within us the presence of non-being or "nothingness" in some way. The
natural human response is to flee from the threat, since it seems impossible
to fight against "nothing"! But in this case we flee not by seeking to escape
the world, but by immersing ourselves more fully into the empirical objects
of our ordinary experience (see Figure XII.1b). This may be done in many
ways, such as by pursuing hobbies, watching television, becoming an avid
sports fan, or even becoming a scholar and immersing oneself in books.
Heidegger's point is that the usual (unhealthy) way of escaping from the
threat of non-being is merely to pretend it is not there, by immersing
oneself in being.
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the ideas of an earlier philosopher, who also had much to say about the
nature and function of existential fear. Sren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is
generally recognized as the father of theistic existentialism (as opposed to
the atheistic existentialism fathered by Nietzsche). Kierkegaard
(pronounced "Keerkagore", meaning "churchyard"-i.e., graveyard) was a
lonely Danish philosopher who wrote twenty-one books (as well as 8000
pages of unpublished papers) in twelve short years, and whose ideas were
never well received during his own lifetime. He expounded his main
philosophical ideas in a series of books written under several different
pseudonyms (some arguing against each other!). But in the last few years of
his life he wrote a number of books using his own name, mainly attacking
the corruptions he perceived in the Christianity of his day. Of his many
interesting ideas, the only one we will have time to investigate here is his
use of the Danish word "angst" to refer to what I have called "existential
fear".
Although angst is sometimes translated as "dread" or "anxiety", neither of
these words captures the full depth of the existential fear of non-being
Kierkegaard intended this word to denote. Dread is too often associated
with extreme displeasure or apprehension at the thought of facing some
empirical threat, as when I say I dread going to the dentist. Likewise,
anxiety is too often associated with ordinary "stress", as when students say
they feel anxious about their ability to pass an examination. In order to
guard against the temptation to connect angst too closely with ordinary
empirical types of fear, many scholars have adopted the habit of simply
using the original Danish word-a practice I shall follow today. When I do
refer on several occasions to dread or anxiety, we should, of course, identify
these with angst, not empirical fear.
Kierkegaard's first book, Either-Or (1843), distinguished between two basic
ways of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. The former is based on feelings
and focuses on enjoying the pleasures of life; the latter is based on duty and
focuses on doing what is good. As such, this distinction corresponds to the
distinction we discussed in Lecture 22, between utilitarianism and
deontology. Those who first read the book debated over which of these two
opposing points of view the author actually wished to support. But
Kierkegaard's true intention was to demonstrate that either choice on its
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never progress to the stage of spirit. In the original state of innocence angst
arises as a response to the "nothing" (i.e., the person's ignorance) of the
future: "anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility" (CA
313). To ignore this freedom is actually idolatry when it causes the person
in the aesthetic stage of life to grasp innocence, peace, happiness, beauty,
etc., as if they were good in and of themselves. For to do so is to separate
oneself from the spiritual depths of one's own human nature: "The most
effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless" (385). Yet
once this freedom is utilized, an awareness of sin arises, causing a new kind
of angst, in the form of "anxiety about evil" (381-386). This comes in three
forms: (1) the desire to return to a state of innocence; (2) the threat of
falling deeper into sin; and (3) the wish that mere repentance were enough
to atone for sin. Unfortunately, the attempt of many religious people to
overcome such anxiety by means of outward goodness only gives rise to
more angst, in the form of "anxiety about the good" (386-420).
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The truly religious person turns away from both aesthetic and ethical aims
in order to become inward. "Inwardness" refers to immediate
self-understanding in action (CA 408), requiring a person to be open to the
eternal in one's own self. To turn toward oneself in this way is therefore
identical to turning toward God. As a result, it always begins by heightening
a person's awareness of guilt:
In turning toward himself, [the religious "genius"] eo ipso turns toward
God, and ... when the finite spirit would see God, it must begin as guilty. As
he turns toward himself, he discovers guilt. The greater the genius, the
more profoundly he discovers guilt....
In turning inward he discovers freedom....
To the degree he discovers freedom, to that same degree the anxiety of sin is
upon him in the state of possibility.... (376-377)
Such a person will then recognize that anxiety really points beyond itself to
faith:
The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith,
courage to believe that the state [of sin] itself is a new sin, courage to
renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do; faith does not
thereby annihilate anxiety, but ... extricates itself from anxiety's moment of
death. (385)
In other words, the proper response to anxiety is to stop being anxious
about anxiety, accepting it in the belief that it exists for a higher purpose.
Whereas pagan anxiety expresses itself most profoundly as fate, and Jewish
anxiety as guilt, the anxiety of the true Christian (whom Kierkegaard
regarded as practicing the most advanced form of religion) is therefore
expressed in the form of suffering (see Figure XII.2)
Kierkegaard argued that the key to solving the problem of angst is to learn
to face it courageously, with the paradoxical feelings of "sympathetic
antipathy" and "antipathetic sympathy" (CA 313). Anyone who "has learned
to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate" (421). For "anxiety
is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends"
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(CB 152-153)
Like Kierkegaard, Tillich therefore saw the threat of non-being as an existential problem whose only adequate solution is essentially religious. This
word "religious" should not be misunderstood as referring to religious
practices, such as going to church, singing hymns, etc. For as we saw in
Lecture 33, such things can be misused to keep us away from truly religious
courage. Instead, the point here is that to be religious means to be open to
an experience of the Being who, by transcending the distinction between
being and non-being, can alone supply us with the courage to be.
This basic experience of receiving the gift of the courage to be is closely
related, according to Tillich, both to mystical experiences of participation
in God, and to more ordinary experiences of a personal encounter between
man and God. Such experiences are rooted in a recognition that the
presence of non-being within us estranges us from our true nature, and that
this problem can be solved only if we are willing to be "grasped by the power
of being itself" (CB 153). For only when we "participate in something which
transcends the self" (161) will we be prepared to experience the most
profound manifestation of the courage to be, in the form of the "courage to
accept acceptance" (159-166). This courageous self-affirmation is not
merely "the Existentialist courage to be as oneself. It is the paradoxical act
in which one is accepted by that which infinitely transcends one's
individual self." Nor does this ultimate acceptance require us to deny our
guilt, for "it is not the good or the wise or the pious who are entitled to the
courage to accept acceptance but those who are lacking in all these qualities
and are aware of being unacceptable" (160-161).
At the beginning of the process of accepting acceptance, we experience the
courage to be as the bare "courage of despair [angst]" (CB 170):
the acceptance of despair is in itself faith on the boundary line of the
courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair
about the meaning of life. But as long as this despair is an act of life it is
positive in its negativity.
By living our life in the paradoxical power of the courage to be, we will
eventually be ready to welcome death itself not as a tragic confirmation of
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angst, but as the final step in this life-long process. Along these lines, Tillich
claimed that Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul were
"attempts to interpret the courage of Socrates", who had clearly recognized
that "the courage to die is the test of the courage to be" (164). We will look
more fully at the experience of death itself in the following lecture. For now,
however, it will suffice merely to summarize Tillich's theory of courage in
terms of the following map:
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arise in the ordinary world. This could indeed be regarded as the basic
message of the Psalms and Proverbs: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom" (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7) means we will learn best how to
respond to the threats within the world only when we have courageously
responded to the threat outside the world. In other words, angst and
wisdom are best regarded, paradoxically, as two sides of the same coin.
If we do not merely ignore the basic ontological question raised at the
beginning of this lecture, then we seem to have a choice between two
possible answers: either the existence of the world is meaningless and the
courage to be has no basis, or else there is a God who is, paradoxically,
beyond the very distinction between something and nothing, and who
thereby lends meaning to both being and non-being, thus forming the
ultimate basis of faith, and so also of our courage to be. But as Kant,
Kierkegaard, Tillich, and many other religiously-minded philosophers have
pointed out, this God cannot lend meaning merely by being a doctrine
imposed on us by the social pressures of a religious community; rather, we
must experience God as a reality that gives us power to cope with the
paradoxes of life, providing us with faith in the face of doubt, peace in the
face of turmoil, acceptance in the face of guilt, and courage in the face of
dread.
35. Death and the Mystery of Life
One of my students once defined silence as the state of no longer needing to
ask any questions. This suggests an interesting paradox in the claim that
the final goal of philosophy is to experience inner silence, since one of the
philosopher's main tasks is to raise questions whose answers are usually
not immediately apparent. Yet I believe it expresses a deep insight into the
nature and purpose of doing philosophy. If silence is actually a questionless
state, then have we merely been wasting time raising so many difficult
philosophical questions here in Part Four and throughout these lectures?
Not at all! Such questions must be raised, or the deeper levels of silence can
never be enjoyed: for the questions stir up in us the wonder that draws us
out beyond the noise of the world to meet the meaning of the world.
Wittgenstein expressed this basic paradox by saying the meaning of life is
found outside of life, which is why he believed we cannot speak about that
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Figure XII.5:
Four Basic Ways of Conceiving Life After Death
I will acquire a new body. If not, then I will simply cease to exist (--): my
individuality will discontinue altogether-though in some versions of
extinction, such as the mystical application of Aristotle's "spark of the
divine" (see Lecture 6, especially Figure II.9), something other than my
body and mind continues to exist. If, by contrast, I do acquire a new body,
then I will reappear as another person (-+), whose memory will be
discontinuous with my present memory. People who believe in reincarnation often claim we can learn to become conscious of memories from our
"past lives". We have to learn how to regain such memories precisely
because there is normally no conscious continuity between our different
reincarnations, even though there may be some deeper spiritual "core"
connecting the lives of these apparently different persons.
Those who, like Plato, believe in the immortality of the soul are actually
closer to those who believe in extinction than to those who believe in
reincarnation. For, although the immortality theory disagrees with both of
these two theories by claiming that we have a soul (i.e., a capacity for
continuous, conscious memory) that survives our body's death (+-), it
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actually agrees with the extinction theory's claim that our dead body will
not be replaced with a new one, as the reincarnation theory believes it will.
This might seem rather surprising, especially to those who view Plato's
belief in the immortality of the soul as the ancient Greek equivalent of the
Christian belief in life after death. The latter, however, is not based on any
logical arguments for the necessity of the soul's immortality, but on a
religious hope that people will be saved from extinction through divine
intervention in the form of resurrection.
The theory of resurrection must be clearly distinguished from each of the
other three theories. As the direct opposite of resurrection, extinction is
properly regarded by those who believe in resurrection as being our natural
fate, should resurrection not occur. By contrast, the other two theories
share with resurrection common factors that sometimes overshadow their
differences. Like immortality, resurrection assumes a person's conscious
powers will continue, more or less uninterrupted, after death. And like
reincarnation, resurrection assumes a person will have a new body after the
present body dies. But in opposition to Plato, resurrection focuses primarily
on the body, assuming like Aristotle that, without a resurrected body, the
soul itself would also die. And in opposition to reincarnation, resurrection
views the new body as a new kind of body, not just another body of the same
kind. The pictures that sometimes appear in religious literature, of bodies
floating out of their graves up into the sky, misrepresent the real meaning of
resurrection. For in the New Testament, a person's earthly body is
described as a mere "seed" in comparison to the fully matured "spiritual
body" to be given after death (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-44). That is, our
conscious life in the present body will somehow be united in a continuous
way with this new spiritual body (++), so that all our unrealized potentials
in this life will blossom and bear fruit in the life to come.
Although we do not actually experience our own death from within our
present life, we do experience other people's death as the ultimate end of
their life as we know it. As a result, none of us can know for certain until
after we die which of these four views best describes what lies on the "other
side". Perhaps this is why philosophers are often less interested in the
questions death raises about a possible afterlife than in the questions it
raises about life itself. Plato, for example, insisted that the fear of death is
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appropriate only for those who are still bound to the "cave" (cf. Figure II.7).
Transcending this fear by "learning how to die" is one of the basic tasks any
good philosopher must perform. Plato was referring here, I believe, to the
lifelong task of learning how to live with the darkness of the unknown, even
before we die; for when we do so, we discover that this absolutely real
mystery paradoxically sheds light on how we should live. In other words, by
raising the question of the meaning of life, death points us directly toward
the need to live what existentialists call an authentic life.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to the authentic or truly
human life as the life that attains "self-actualization". This now common
term has often been wrongly criticized for promoting a selfish, "do your
own thing" lifestyle that permits a person to ignore the needs of other
people. However, this is a gross misunderstanding. For Maslow and many
others have been careful to point out that the inward focus of
self-actualizing people does not mean they care only about their own
egotistical interests, but that they are self-transcending people, whose
understanding of themselves has led them to reach outward to others in
love and compassion. Interestingly, one source of the misunderstanding of
such terms is that the self-actualizing life is itself essentially paradoxical.
The more he studied self-actualizing people, the more Maslow came to
realize that they are people who can resolve paradoxes within themselves:
instead of being either selfish or unselfish, they are somehow both (see e.g.,
TPB 139). Socrates' famous "know thyself" carries essentially the same
message: we know ourselves not in order to become self-enclosed solipsists,
but in order to become self-giving saints. And the more we know ourselves
(i.e., the more apparently selfish we are), the more we are capable of
knowing others (i.e., the more unselfish we can be).
Learning to transcend ourselves in this way will prepare us to accept death
with open arms as a gift. For we can view death as the ultimate gift only if
we have learned to live with death-that is, to live with our own non-being
through such acts of self-transcendence-while we are still alive. As we saw
in the previous lecture, the importance of recognizing the presence of
non-being in all beings was one of the key insights of the existentialists. The
ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, expressed a similar insight when he
claimed non-being is actually more useful than being (TTC 11). For example,
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a window would be useless for seeing through if not for the blank space in
between the edges of the frame. And a cup would be useless for holding
liquids if it were not hollow inside. Such examples show that what is would
often be unable to fulfill its proper function if it did not make use of what is
not. Likewise, people should view their own death as a natural part of the
life process.
The two ways of describing transcendent reality, as either "being-itself" or
"nothing" (see Figure VI.2), suggest two corresponding ways of viewing the
"natural" relationship between life and death. I would guess nearly all of us
feel more inclined to hold one or the other of these two views. According to
Lao Tzu, a person who treats death as a natural part of life will no longer
need to search for the "infinite", or "eternal life". Viewing death as the
ultimate end of all life, he believed such a search is bound to fail, and will
only succeed in producing anxiety (see Figure XII.6a). Yet the anxiety we
feel at the prospect of our own death need not cause us to give up the search
for the infinite, provided we view death as a boundary, with the object or
purpose of our quest lying on the other side (see Figure XII.6b). Only in this
latter sense does it make sense to regard death as a gift that can truly be
affirmed as a natural part of life. If there is nothing after life but death and
extinction, then regarding death as a natural part of life makes no more
sense than regarding the wall as part of the window, or the space outside the
cup as part of the cup. A boundary is part of the thing it defines; but the
space outside the boundary is wholly other.
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Whichever view of death is correct, the issue raised by Lao Tzu highlights
the central paradox of life itself: an essential part of the human task is to
seek after the infinite, yet this search is bound to fail because death makes
life itself finite. But the search "fails" only if success is judged in terms of
analytic logic. If we affirm the paradox, if we affirm (with Lao Tzu) the
presence of non-being within all being, if we affirm (with the
existentialists) our finitude in the very process of seeking the infinite, then
we have grounds for hope that meaning will break through in the midst of
our struggle. Even if this breakthrough occurs only after our death, it
legitimates the search within this life. Indeed, Lao Tzu's real point is not
that the search itself is wrong, but that we should not expect to discover the
infinite in a form we can grasp within this life.
We must therefore always be careful not to think we can resolve the
paradox of life by making something less than infinite the source of our
life's meaning. For example, I cannot count the number of students who
have written insight papers claiming "happiness", or perhaps "satisfaction",
is the purpose for which people ought to live their lives. Yet the problem
with this view is that, as we learned from Tillich in Lecture 30, once
happiness is reached, it ends. Those who live their lives in order to fulfill
their own desires inevitably end with a sense of emptiness and
meaninglessness, even if they are lucky enough to have those desires
fulfilled. Satisfaction is not ultimately satisfying. So the paradox is
accentuated to the point of absurdity if we direct our lives toward a finite
end. Lao Tzu's advice, coming from a person whose basic message was that
we must live in the presence of the mysterious (i.e., infinite) "Tao", should
not be taken to imply that there is nothing infinite worth searching for;
rather, it implies that the ultimate goal of the quest for the infinite is to
teach us that it is present now in the midst of our finitude, so that we can
give up the quest in order to rest in that presence.
The lesson we learn by facing the paradox of death, in other words, is that
the search for the infinite must be pursued in the context of a recognition of
the finitude of life as we know it. The need for a recognition of both human
finitude and an eternal context beyond human life is an insight recognized
by most religions. For example, one of the many ways the Bible expresses
this paradox comes in Isaiah 40:6-8:
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... All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
When the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of the Lord stands forever.
This "word" here is the same word John spoke about at the beginning of his
Gospel; and it is, paradoxically, a word that can be heard only in the depths
of silence: "'In the beginning was the Word....' The Word did not come into
being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the
silence and the silence was made of it" (HMD 90-91).
The latter quotation suggests that life is to death as words are to silence.
Similarly, just as life ends in death yet draws its meaning from the mystery
that death veils, so also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the
questions of philosophy end in a silence that no longer has use for
questions. Life is, in fact, full of such mysteries and paradoxes. The few we
have touched upon here in the fourth part of this course only represent the
tip of the iceberg. Our dreams, for example, put us in touch with a huge area
full of mystery and paradox. If we had more time we could look in greater
detail into some of these other dark and interesting aspects of our lives.
Indeed, I devote an entirely separate course to the subject of dream
interpretation and the unconscious aspects of self-knowledge (see DW). So
instead of developing that topic any further here, we shall return in the final
lecture to the question this course began with, in order to examine how it
too reveals the paradoxical mystery at the heart of human experience.
36. What is Philosophy?
This course began with a discussion of the question "What is philosophy?"
Some of you offered some interesting suggestions, demonstrating that even
before taking this course you had some good ideas about what philosophy is.
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relativism: your facet is true for you and mine is true for me. However,
when I step back far enough to see the whole diamond,I suddenly recognize
that there is a pattern: each facet is related in such a way that the whole
does, in fact, display an absolute (fixed) design, in spite of the great
diversity of the individual facets. Those who continue to view philosophy as
entirely a matter of subjective opinion, and fail to see its potential for
bringing us to an objective truth, are merely chaining themselves to their
particular facet of the diamond, much as the prisoners in Plato's cave can
see nothing but the shadows on their particular section of the wall. But if
you have begun to take the step from a philosophy that suits you to a
philosophy that can be true for everyone, then I think you will have learned
at least something of the importance of the principle of recognizing your
ignorance: we can never see all the facets of the diamond at once, no matter
how far back we step! When you have learned to distinguish between "my
philosophy" and "philosophy", and when you have begun to transform the
former into the latter, you will then be prepared to begin constructing a
truly philosophical answer to the question "What is philosophy?"
You may have noticed that this entire course has, to a large extent, been an
attempt to answer this basic question. With that in mind, let me suggest one
last answer. When we consider how philosophy is different from other
academic disciplines, its virtually unending concern with self-definition
stands out, suggesting that philosophy may be defined as "the discipline
whose purpose is to define itself"-or more simply, "philosophy is the
self-defining discipline." For when any other discipline asks the question of
its own nature,it strays into the realm of philosophy. A history teacher is
doing philosophy, not history, when he or she asks students to reflect on the
very nature of history. But throughout this course we have discovered that
the focal point of most (if not all) good philosophers is precisely this
question: what am I doing when I practice philosophy? Of course, defining
philosophy as the self-defining discipline relates only to its form; the
content (i.e., the details of how philosophy actually goes about defining
itself ) has been the topic of this entire course.
Having now finished my attempt to introduce you to philosophy in such a
way that you can begin to participate in its self-definition, I shall take this
opportunity to summarize the entire course by relating the myth of the tree
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knowledge can be unified by the power of the mystery. The paradoxes of life
then cease to be so troublesome. They are still paradoxes, for the reality of
our ignorance is not diminished but intensified by our experience of the
mystery. The difference is that we now have within us an ultimate concern
enabling us to cope with the fact that there are some things we can never
hope to know. Kant aptly expressed this ability to cope with ignorance when
he wrote (CPrR 148): "the inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not
less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in [respect to]
what it has granted."
The capacity to wonder in spite of, or even because of, our ignorance is
actually one of the main characteristics distinguishing a good philosopher
from a bad one. That wonder is childlike may be why some philosophers,
wishing to appear "mature", shun the temptation to wonder. This is also
why children so often make such profoundly philosophical statements. The
difference between a child and a full-grown, childlike philosopher is that
the latter has added self-consciousness to the original instinct to wonder.
The problem is that self-consciousness tends to negate the instinct to
wonder: self-consciousness puts up with ignorance in its search for the
unity of the "I", whereas wonder wants to achieve knowledge in response to
its apprehension of the diversity of the world. Bad philosophers, as we have
seen, limit the philosophical task to only one of these two opposite goals.
Good philosophers, by contrast, will continually seek after the best way of
resolving (or at least coping with) the tension between these two forces.
One of the best ways of doing this, I believe, is to direct our
self-consciousness to the higher goal of self-understanding. For the neverending task of coming to "know thyself", rightly recognized by Socrates as
the ultimate goal of doing philosophy, requires us to reach ever-increasing
levels of both self-consciousness and wonder.
With this in mind, I would like us to consider a passage from a book that
encourages us to hear the wonder of silence throughout the busyness of our
everyday life. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's little book, Gift from the Sea, is a
series of meditations on her holidays at an island beach, focusing especially
on the symbolism of the activity of collecting sea shells. In considering the
following summary of her reflections on the prospects of returning home
(GS 113-116,119-120), let's interpret the "island" as a metaphor for studying
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D1 staweb.hkbu.edu.hk
https://www.readability.com/articles/lndniaen
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D1 staweb.hkbu.edu.hk
https://www.readability.com/articles/lndniaen
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D1 staweb.hkbu.edu.hk
https://www.readability.com/articles/lndniaen
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D1 staweb.hkbu.edu.hk
https://www.readability.com/articles/lndniaen
Original URL:
http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/tp4/top12.html
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