【作文素材】牛津通识读本《The Meaning of Life》摘抄Chapter2
第二章 意义的问题
人生的意义也许只有在时间的尽头才能得到揭示，化身为弥赛亚，款款而至。或者，全宇宙不过是某个超级巨人的拇指指甲中的一个原子。
The meaning of life may only be revealed to us at the end of time, in the form of Messiah who seems to be taking his time arriving. Or the universe might be an atom in the thumbnail of some cosmic giant.
我们可以谈及某人时说：“他说的一个个字我都理解，但连起来我就不理解了。”我熟悉他用的那些词的含义，但我搞不懂他对这些词的用法——他想指称什么，他暗含的态度是什么，他希望我明白什么，他为什么要我明白，诸如此类。
It would be possible to say of someone: ’I understood his words; but I didn’t understand his words. ’ I was familiar enough with the significations he was using, but I didn’t grasp how he was using them – what he was referring to, what kind of attitude he was implying towards it, what he wanted me to understand to by his words, why he wanted me to understand it, and so on.
发觉人生无意义的人，并不是在抱怨他们不知道自己身体的构造，或者抱怨自己是陷入了黑洞或是坠入了海洋。
People who find life meaningless are not complaining that they cannot tell what kind of stuff their body is made out of, or that they do not know weather they are in a black hole or under the ocean.
他们所要表达的是，自己的生活缺乏深意（significance）。所谓缺乏深意，就是说缺乏核心、实质、目的、质量、价值和方向。这些人不是在说他们不能理解人生，而是他们没有什么东西值得为之生活。不是说他们的存在不可理解，而是空洞无物。
They mean, rather, that their lives lack significance. And to lack significance means to lack point, substances, purpose, quality value, and direction. Such people mean not that they cannot comprehend life, but they have nothing to live for. It is not that their existence is unintelligible, merely empty.
… …熄灭了吧，熄灭了吧。短促的烛光！
人生只不过是一个行走的影子，
一个在舞台上指手画脚的拙劣的演员，
登场片刻，就在无声无息中悄然退下；
它是一个愚人所讲的故事，充满喧哗和骚动，
却没有一点意义。
… Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard on more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
《麦克白》这段台词至少体现了两种关于“无意义”的概念。其中一个概念是存在主义的：人的存在是一片虚无，或一场空洞的闹剧。确实有许多意义存在着，但都是糊弄人的。另一个概念是所谓语义学的，暗指人生没有意义，就像一段疯子的话没有意义。这是一个白痴讲述的故事，不表达任何意思。
At least two notions of meaninglessness are at work in the passage. One of them is existential: human existence is a void or empty farce. There are meanings in plenty, but they are specious. The other notion we might call semantic, implying as it does that life is senseless in the way that a piece of gibberish is. This is the tale tole by an idiot, signifying nothing.
有些事物的出现纯属意外，比如生命看起来就是如此，但仍然可以展现出某种构思。 “意外”不等于“不可理解”。交通意外并非不可理解。它们并非完全毫无来由的反常事件，而是一系列具体原因所导致的后果。只不过这个后果并非当事人有意为之罢了… …我们经历的时候可能觉得毫无意义，但对于黑格尔而言，比方说，当时代精神越过自己的肩头回望，对自己所创造的一切投去赞赏的一瞥时，一切都有了意义。在黑格尔眼中，甚至历史的愚蠢错误和盲目小道最终都是这宏大构思的一部分。与之相反的另一种观点，体现在一个老玩笑中：“我的人生充满光彩夺目的角色，但我不知道该怎么安排情节。”从一个时刻到另一个时刻看起来都有意义，但全部归在一起则出了毛病。
Something which comes about accidentally, as life seems to have done, can still exhibit a design. ‘Accidental’ does not mean ‘unintelligible’. Car accidents are not unintelligible. They are not freakish events entirely without rhyme or reason, but the consequence of specific causes. It is just that this consequence was not intended by those involved… … It may seem pretty meaningless while we are living it, but for Hegel it all makes prefect sense when, so to speak, the Zeitgeist looks back over its shoulder and casts an admiring eye upon what it has created. In Hegel’s eyes, even the blunders and blind alleyways of history contribute in the end to this grand design. The opposite view is the one implicit in the old joke ‘My life is full of fascinating characters, but I don’t seem to be able to work out the plot ’. That seems meaningful from one moment to the next, but it doesn’t appear to stack up.
由于意志纯粹由自己决定，它的目的完全内在于自己，仿佛是对上帝的恶意模仿。这意味着，它不过是在利用我们人类和世界上的其他生命，来实现自己的神秘目的。我们也许自认为，我们的生命拥有价值和意义；但真相却是，我们的存在只是在无助地充当意志的工具，为其盲目而无意义的自我再生产服务。
Because the Will is purely self-determing, it has its end entirely in itself, like a malevolent caricature of Almighty. And this means that it simply uses us and the rest of Creation for its own inscrutable purpose. We may believe that our lives have value and meaning; but the truth is that we exist simply as the helpless instruments of the Will’s blind, futile self-reproduction.
它的做法是，在我们脑海中培育一种自我欺骗的拙劣机制，即“意识”，我们由此而获得一种幻象，觉得自己的人生有目的、有价值。它让我们误以为，它的渴望即我们的渴望。在这个意义上，叔本华眼中的一切意识都是虚假意识。就像老话说的那样，语言是我们掩饰思想的工具，同样，意识也是蒙蔽我们，让我们无法看到自身存在之徒劳本质的工具。
The will must fool us into supposing that our lives indeed have meaning; and it does so by evolving in us a clumsy mechanism of self-deception known as consciousness, which permits us the illusion of having ends and values of our own. It dupes us into believing that its own appetites are ours too. In this sense, all consciousness in Schopenhauer’s eyes is false consciousness. Just as it was once said of language that it exists so that we can conceal our thoughts from others, so consciousness exists to conceal from us the utter futility of our existence.
如此说来，叔本华属于哲学家中的以下谱系：这些哲学家认为虚假意识远不是需要用理性之光驱散的迷雾，而是绝对内在于我们的存在中的。早期著作受到叔本华影响的尼采，也属于这类哲学家。“真理是丑陋的。”他在《权力意志》中写道，“我们拥有艺术，是为了防止被真理摧毁。”西格蒙德·弗洛伊德是另一位深受他那位悲观的德国同胞影响的人。弗洛伊德将叔本华称为“意志”的那个东西重新命名为“欲望”。对弗洛伊德来说，幻象、误解和对真实（the Real）的压抑都是自我的构成要素，而非附属部分。一旦失去这些补救性的遗忘，我们将无法度日。会不会事实是这样：人生确实有其意义，但这个意义我们还是不知道比较好？我们倾向于假设发现人生的意义是自然而然值得努力的事，但如果我们这个想法是错的呢？如果真实是一只会把我们变成石头的怪兽呢？
Schopenhauer, then, belongs to a lineage of thinkers for whom false consciousness, far from being a mist to be dispelled by the clear light of reason, is absolutely integral to our existence. Nietzsche, whose early writing were influenced by Schopenhauer, was another such thinker. ‘Truth is ugly ’, he writes in The Will to Power. ’We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ Sigmund Freud was yet another who was profoundly shaped by his pessimistic compatriot. What Schopenhauer names the Will, Freud re-baptizes as Desire. For Freud, fantasy, misperception, and a repression of the Real are constitutive of the self, not accidental to it. Without such saving oblivion, we would never get by. What, then, if there was indeed a meaning to life, but that it was preferable for us not to know it? We tend to assume that discovering the meaning of life would naturally be a worthwhile thing to do, but what if this is a mistake? What if the Real was a monstrosity that would turn us to stone?
启蒙运动时期的思想家们则不会这么想问题，他们认为，应该勇敢地分清是非对错。然而18和19世纪之交，“救赎的谎言”或者说“有益的虚构”这种观念，逐渐流行开来。或许，人类将被真理摧毁，倒在它无情的目光之下。兴许虚构和神话不只是需要清除的谬误，更是能让我们存活下去的有效幻象。生命也许不过是一次生物学上的意外事件，甚至不是受到盼望的意外；但它在我们体内培育了一种随机现象，即心灵，我们可以依靠心灵来抵御由于知晓自己的偶然性而产生的恐惧。
This is not the kind of thought which would readily have occurred to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, for whom error was to be courageously combated by truth. As the eighteenth century turns into the nineteenth, however, the notion of the redemptive lie or salutary fiction swims gradually into view. Perhaps human beings would simply perish of the truth, withering beneath its remorseless glare. Maybe fictions and myths are not just errors to be dispelled, but productive illusions which allows us to thrive. Life may be no more than a biological accident, and not even an accident that was waiting to happen; but it has developed in us a random phenomenon known as the mind, which we can use to shield ourselves from the frightful knowledge of our own contingency.
仿佛在为我们施行顺势疗法，大自然既给了我们毒药，也好心地给了解药，而毒药和解药是同一种东西——人的意识。我们可以转而去徒劳地猜测，大自然关心作为整体的人类却对个体生命如此冷漠的原因。或者，我们可以把思绪转向建构那些赋予生命的神话——宗教、人文关怀等——它们也许可以在这个不友善的宇宙给我们一些地位和意义。这些神话从科学的角度来看也许是不正确的。但我们在科学真理上或许过于自负，以至于认为它是唯一真理。
It is as though a homeopathic Nature has kindly furnished us with the cure along with the poison, and both are known as consciousness. We can turn our minds to bleak speculations on the way that Nature seems so indifferent to individual lives in its ruthless concern for the species as a whole. Or we can divert our thoughts to the business of building life-giving mythologies-religion, humanism, and the like-which might assign us some status and significance in this inhospitable universe. Such mythologies may not be true from a scientific viewpoint. But perhaps we have made too much of a fuss of scientific truth, assuming that it is the only brand of truth around.
就像总体上的人文学科一样，这些神话可以说含有自己的真理——不在于它们提出的命题多么雄辩，而在于它们所产生的实效。如果这些神话能让我们怀着价值感和目的感去行动，那么，它们就足够真实，值得继续。
Like the humanities in general, such myths can be said to contain their own kind of truth, one which lies more in the consequences they produce than in the propositions they advance. If they allow us to act with a sense of value and purpose, then perhaps they are true enough to be going on with.
我们如果去看20世纪马克思主义理论家路易·阿尔都塞的著作，就会发现，这种思维方式甚至渗入了马克思主义，带着其对意识形态所带来的虚假意义的坚决抵制。但如果意识形态是极其必要的呢？如果我们需要用意识形态来说服自己，让我们相信自己是能够自主行动的政治主体呢？马克思主义理论也许觉得，个体没有很大程度的联合性和自主性，甚至没有现实性，但每个个体自身必须相信他们有，如果他们想有效行动的话。在阿尔都塞看来，保卫这种补救性的幻象是社会主义意识形态的任务。对弗洛伊德而言，心理学意义上的“自我”亦是如此，自我不过是无意识所衍生出来的，而它却把自己当作世界的中心。自我觉得自己是一个完整的、独立的实体，而精神分析学知道这不过是幻象；但不管怎么说，是有益的幻象，我们根本离不开它。
By the time we arrive at the work of the twentieth-century Marxist theorist Louise Althusser, this way of thinking has even infiltrated Marxism, with its stern opposition to the false consciousness of ideology. What if ideology, after all, were vitally necessary? What if we need it to persuade ourselves that we are political agents capable of acting autonomously? Marxist theory may be aware that the individual has no great degree of unity or autonomy, or even of reality; but individuals themselves must come to trust that they have, if they are to act effectively. For Althusser, it is the task of socialist ideology to secure this saving illusion. For Freud, much the same is true of the ego, which is so organized as to regard the whole world as centered on itself. The ego treats itself as a coherent, independent entity, which psychoanalysis know to be an illusion; but it is a salutary illusion all the same, without which we would be unable to operate.
看起来，我们无法谈论人生的意义了，也许还面对着人生与意义之间的选择。如果真理将摧毁人类的存在呢？如果它如年轻时的尼采所想，是一种毁灭性的酒神力量；如叔本华阴郁地沉思的，是一种贪婪的意志；或如弗洛伊德所设想，是一种吞噬一切、冷酷无情、超越于个人之上的欲望呢？对精神分析学家雅克·拉康而言，人的主体要么“意指”，要么“存在”，不可能两者兼具。一旦我们进入语言，进而步入人性所谓的“主体的真理”，即存在本身，就被分割在没有尽头的局部意义的锁链之中。我们只能放弃存在以追求意义。
It seems, then, that far from speaking of the meaning of life, we might be faced with a choice between meaning and life. What if the truth were destructive of human existence? What if it were an annihilating Dionysian force, as the early Nietzsche considered; a rapacious Will, as in Schopenhauer’s sombre speculations; or a devouring, ruthlessly impersonal desire, as for Freud? For the psychoanalytical thinker Jacques Lacan, the human subject can either ‘mean’ or ‘be’, but it cannot do both together. Once we enter into language, and thus into our humanity, what one might call the ‘truth of the subject’, its being-as-such, is divided up into an unending chain of partial meanings. We attain meaning only at the price of a loss of being.
即便如此，还是有各种道德和政治上的紧迫理由要求我们假装相信这些概念、价值和理念有坚实的基础。如果我们不这么做，一个人们不愿意看到的结果将是社会的无政府状态。甚至可以说，我们怀有信念的这个事实比我们相信的具体内容更加重要。这种形式主义接着就进入到存在主义，对后者而言，介入的状态本身，而不是介入的实质内容，才是本真性存在的关键。
Even so, there are pressing moral and political reasons why we should behave as if they were firmly grounded. If we do not, social anarchy might well be one unwelcome consequence. There is even a sense in which what we believe is less important than the sheer fact of our faith. This brandof formalism than passes on into existentialism, for which it is the fact of being committed, rather than the exact content of our commitments, which is the key to an authentic existence.
“所有意志的行为”，叔本华写道，“都来自匮乏、缺陷，因而都来自痛苦。”欲望是永恒的，而欲望的满足则是罕见而不连续的。只要自我持续存在，被我们称作“欲望”的致命传染病就不会消失。只有无我的审美沉思，以及一种佛教史的自我克制，才能治愈我们因匮乏而产生的散光病，重新看清这世界的本来面目。
‘All willing’, Schopenhauer writes, ‘springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.’ Desiring is eternal, whereas fulfilment is scanty and sporadic. There can be no end to the fatal infection we know as desire as long as the self endures. Only the selflessness of aesthetic contemplation, along with a kind of Buddhist self-abnegation, can purge us of the astigmatism of wanting, and allow us to see the world for what it is.
无需多言，事情还有另一面。然而，如果叔本华仍然值得阅读，那不只是因为他比几乎任何哲学家都要更坦诚、更严酷地直面了人生的某种可能性，即人的存在在最卑劣、最可笑的层面上都毫无意义。还因为，他讲的大部分内容都是对的。总的来说，实际的人类历史更多地是以匮乏、苦难和剥削，而不是以文明和教化为主要内容。那些想当然地认为人生必定有意义，并且是令人振奋的意义的人，必须直面叔本华的阴郁挑战。他的著作让这些人不得不尽力避免自己的观点沦为安慰性的止痛剂。
There is, needless to say, another story to tell. Yet if Schopenhauer is still well worth reading, it is not only because he confronts the possibility, more candidly and brutally than almost any other philosopher, that human existence may be pointless in the most squalid and farcical of ways. It also because much of what he has to say is surely true. On the whole, human history has indeed been more a tale of scarcity, misery, and exploitation than it has been a fable of civility and enlightenment. Those who assume that there must indeed be a meaning to life, and an uplifting one at that, have to confront the cheerless challenge of a Schopenhauer. His work forces them to struggle hard to make their vision seem anything more than anodyne consolation.
