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如果你有留意教学大纲，就能发现教学大纲里列出了不少人的著作，包括亚里士多德，约翰·洛克，伊曼努尔·康德，约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒及其他哲学家的著作。在教学大纲中还能看到我们不仅要读这些著作，还会探讨当代政治及法律争议所引发的诸多哲学问题。我们将讨论平等与不平等，平权行动，自由言论与攻击性言论，同性婚姻，兵役制等一系列现实问题 If you look at the syllabus, you’ll notice that we read a number of great and famous books, books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, and others. You’ll notice too from the syllabus that we don’t only read these books; we also take up contemporary, political, and legal controversies that raise philosophical questions. We will debate equality and inequality, affirmative action, free speech versus hate speech, same-sex marriage, military conscription, a range of practical questions.
为什么呢？不仅是为了将这些深奥抽象的著作形象化还为了让我们通过哲学辨明，日常生活 包括政治生活中什么才是最关键的。所以我们要读这些著作，讨论这些议题。并了解两者是怎样互相补充互相阐释的。 Why? Not just to enliven these abstract and distant books but to make clear, to bring out what’s at stake in our everyday lives, including our political lives, for philosophy. And so we will read these books and we will debate these issues, and we’ll see how each informs and illuminates the other.
也许听起来蛮动人，不过我要事先提个醒那就是，通过用这样的方式阅读这些著作来训练自我认知必然会带来一些风险，包括个人风险和政治风险，每位学政治哲学的学生都知道的风险 This may sound appealing enough, but here I have to issue a warning. And the warning is this, to read these books in this way as an exercise in self-knowledge, to read them in this way carries certain risks, risks that are both personal and political, risks that every student of political philosophy has known.
这风险源自于以下事实，即哲学就是让我们面对自己熟知的事物，然后引导并动摇我们原有的认知 These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know.
这真是讽刺 There’s an irony.
这门课程的难度，就在于传授的都是你们已有的知识，它将我们所熟知的，毋庸置疑的事物变得陌生 The difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange.
正如我们刚举的例子，那些严肃而又不乏趣味的假设性问题，这些哲学类著作亦然
That’s how those examples worked, the hypotheticals with which we began with their mix of playfulness and sobriety. It’s also how these philosophical books work.
哲学让我们对熟知事物感到陌生，不是通过提供新的信息，而是通过引导并激发我们 用全新方式看问题，但这正是风险所在.一旦所熟知的事物变得陌生,它将再也无法回复到从前,自我认知就像逝去的童真，不管你有多不安，你已经无法不去想或是充耳不闻了。 Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing, but, and here’s the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it’s never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling you find it, it can never be un-thought or un-known.
这一过程会充满挑战又引人入胜，因为道德与政治哲学就好比一个故事，你不知道故事将会如何发展，你只知道这个故事与你息息相关 What makes this enterprise difficult but also riveting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead. But what you do know is that the story is about you.
以上为我提到的个人风险 Those are the personal risks.
那么政治风险是什么呢？介绍这门课程时，可以这样许诺: 通过阅读这些著作讨论这些议题，你将成为更优秀更有责任感的公民，你将重新审视公共政策的假定前提，你将拥有更加敏锐的政治判断力，你将更有效地参与公共事务，但这一许诺也可能片面而具误导性。因为绝大多数情况下，政治哲学并不是那样的。你们必须承认政治哲学可能使你们成为更糟的公民，而不是更优秀的，至少在让你成为更优秀公民前先让你更糟 Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues, you will become a better, more responsible citizen; you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise. Political philosophy, for the most part. Hasn’t worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one,
因为哲学使人疏离现实，甚至可能弱化行动力追溯到苏格拉底时代，就有这样一段对话：在《高尔吉亚篇》中苏格拉底的一位朋友，卡里克利斯试图说服苏格拉底放弃哲学思考，他告诉苏格拉底: 如果一个人在年轻时代有节制地享受哲学的乐趣那自然大有裨益，但倘若过分沉溺其中，那他必将走向毁灭。听我劝吧，卡里克利斯说，收起你的辩论。学个谋生的一技之长，别学那些满嘴谬论的人。要学那些生活富足，声名显赫及福泽深厚的人 and that’s because philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating, activity. And you see this, going back to Socrates, there’s a dialogue, the Gorgias, in which one of Socrates’ friends, Callicles, tries to talk him out of philosophizing. Callicles tells Socrates “Philosophy is a pretty toy if one indulges in it with moderation at the right time of life. But if one pursues it further than one should, it is absolute ruin.” “Take my advice,” Callicles says, “abandons argument. Learn the accomplishments of active life, take for your models not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles but those who have a good livelihood and reputation and many other blessings.”
言外之意则是，放弃哲学，现实一点去读商学院吧 So Callicles is really saying to Socrates “Quit philosophizing, get real, go to business school.”
卡里克利斯说得确有道理，因为哲学的确将我们与习俗，既定假设以及原有信条相疏离 And Callicles did have a point. He had a point because philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs.
以上就是我说的个人以及政治风险，面对这些风险，有一种典型的回避方式，这种方式就是怀疑论。大致的意思是刚才争论过的案例或者原则没有一劳永逸的解决方法 Those are the risks, personal and political. And in the face of these risks, there is a characteristic evasion. The name of the evasion is skepticism, it’s the idea…It goes something like this. We didn’t resolve once and for all either the cases or the principles we were arguing when we began.
如果亚里士多德，洛克，康德以及穆勒花了这么多年都没能解决这些问题，那今天我们齐聚桑德斯剧院，仅凭一学期的课程学习就能解决了吗？也许这本就是智者见智，仁者见仁的问题。多说无益，也无从论证。这就是怀疑论的回避方式。对此我给予如下回应。诚然，这些问题争论已久，但正因为这些问题反复出现，也许表明虽然在某种意义上它们无法解决，但另一种意义上却又无可避免，它们之所以无可避免，无法回避，是因为在日常生活中，我们一次次地在回答这些问题。因此怀疑论让你们举起双手，放弃道德反思，这绝非可行之策。 And if Aristotle and Locke and Kant and Mill haven’t solved these questions after all of these years, who are we to think that we, here in Sanders Theatre, over the course of a semester, can resolve them? And so, maybe it’s just a matter of each person having his or her own principles and there’s nothing more to be said about it, no way of reasoning. That’s the evasion, the evasion of skepticism, to which I would offer the following reply. It’s true; these questions have been debated for a very long time but the very fact that they have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they’re impossible in one sense, they’re unavoidable in another. And the reason they’re unavoidable, the reason they’re inescapable is that we live some answer to these questions every day. So skepticism, just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution.
康德曾很贴切地描述了怀疑论的不足，他写道：怀疑论是人类理性暂时休憩的场所，是理性自省，以伺将来做出正确抉择的地方，但绝非理性的永久定居地。康德认为：简单地默许于怀疑论，永远无法平息内心渴望理性思考之不安 Immanuel Kant described very well the problem with skepticism when he wrote “Skepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement.” “Simply to acquiesce in skepticism,” Kant wrote,”can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.”
以上我是想向大家说明，这些故事和争论展示的风险与诱惑，挑战与机遇。简而言之，这门课程旨在唤醒你们永不停息的理性思考，探索路在何方。 I’ve tried to suggest through these stories and these arguments some sense of the risks and temptations, of the perils and the possibilities. I would simply conclude by saying that the aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason and to see where it might lead.
谢谢 Thank you very much.
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来自： 联合参谋学院 > 《国家政治社会民众》
