By Jiahao Shen
Modern societies rarely appear spiritually oppressive in obvious ways. Institutions function, economies operate, and professional life continues through routines of productivity and adjustment. Yet beneath this stability, a quieter form of exhaustion increasingly defines modern life: the growing difficulty of inwardly believing in the worlds within which one continues to function.
Across many modern societies, individuals continue participating successfully within systems that remain externally stable and functional, yet the relation between participation and inward conviction has grown progressively weaker. One continues to adapt, perform, and remain socially integrated, while increasingly struggling to experience the surrounding world as fully meaningful or spiritually convincing.
The problem, therefore, extends beyond economics, overwork, or institutional pressure alone. It concerns the growing difficulty of preserving an inward world under forms of life that demand continuous participation without necessarily commanding genuine belief.
Although this condition appears intensely modern, similar spiritual tensions have emerged repeatedly across history. One of the most revealing examples appeared in medieval China during the Wei–Jin period following the collapse of the Han order.
The collapse of the Han dynasty did not simply destroy political institutions overnight. Many structures of public morality, official legitimacy, and elite participation continued to exist. Yet for many intellectuals, the connection between these surviving structures and any genuinely convincing inner truth had already begun to fracture. The external world remained functional, but inward recognition increasingly became difficult.
It was under these conditions that figures such as Ruan Ji and Ji Kang emerged.
In my own research on Wei–Jin metaphysical Confucianism, I have argued that what appears in Ruan Ji and Ji Kang is not simply political dissatisfaction or aristocratic withdrawal. Rather, it is the emergence of what may be described as a “painful mind”: an inward condition formed through the irreconcilable tension between external participation and internal spiritual truth.
For Ruan Ji, this tension became increasingly impossible to ignore. Earlier ideals concerning harmony between moral order and reality gradually lost their persuasive force under conditions of political domination and social compromise. The problem was not merely corruption itself, but the growing realization that participation increasingly required inward adjustment to realities no longer experienced as spiritually legitimate.
This is why the emotional intensity of Ruan Ji’s writings matters philosophically. His criticism of collective life organized around reputation, profit, conformity, and false moral performance was not merely rhetorical anger. It reflected a deeper recognition that certain forms of social participation demand self-distortion in exchange for acceptance within the existing order.
Under such conditions, inwardness becomes difficult to preserve precisely because the surrounding system does not openly forbid it. Instead, it absorbs individuals gradually through continuous adaptation.
Ji Kang pushes this tension even further. What makes him historically significant is not simply political defiance, but his insistence that genuine inward freedom could not survive unchanged within structures increasingly dominated by ritualized conformity and instrumental social values. Participation itself became spiritually dangerous because prolonged accommodation risked transforming the inner self.
What appears in these thinkers therefore extends beyond medieval Chinese history alone. Their experience reveals a broader human problem that continues to emerge whenever inherited spiritual ideals remain psychologically alive while surrounding social systems become increasingly impersonal, technocratic, and structurally absorptive.
This is why the Wei–Jin period remains unexpectedly relevant today.
Modern systems rarely require explicit ideological belief. Instead, they demand functionality, psychological adjustment, continuous optimization, and the ability to remain permanently compatible with institutional realities. Under such conditions, spiritual exhaustion no longer appears primarily through direct oppression. It emerges through prolonged accommodation.
The danger of modernity is therefore not simply stress or overwork. It is the gradual disappearance of inward distance itself.
When every aspect of life becomes organized around optimization, visibility, performance, and integration into increasingly total systems of participation, the inward world risks losing the separation necessary for genuine spiritual independence to survive. Individuals may continue functioning successfully while slowly losing the ability to distinguish inward conviction from externally required adaptation.
This is precisely what gives the experience of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang its enduring philosophical seriousness.
Importantly, this does not mean romanticizing withdrawal, pessimism, or alienation. Human life necessarily requires institutions, cooperation, and participation in collective reality. Yet Wei–Jin philosophy reveals that there are moments when the preservation of inward integrity depends upon maintaining a certain distance from realities that continue functioning externally while no longer fully deserving inward assent.
For this reason, the significance of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang lies not in offering a final political solution or complete philosophical system. Their importance lies in revealing that spiritual freedom may sometimes survive only through the painful refusal to allow external structures to define reality completely.
This question has not disappeared in the modern world. If anything, it has become quieter, more psychologically continuous, and therefore more difficult to recognize.
For the deepest pressures of contemporary civilization no longer operate primarily through visible coercion. They operate through systems so comprehensive that participation itself begins to appear indistinguishable from reality. Under such conditions, preserving an inward world increasingly becomes not a luxury of retreat, but one of the final conditions under which genuine selfhood can continue to survive.
(The writer is an independent history researcher and studies at King’s College London)
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.