当前位置：首页 > 论文 > 法学 > 法学理论

分析哲学与叙事哲学

来源：岁月联盟作者：罗蒂时间：2010-07-06

理查德·罗蒂著
李小科节译

　　已经在很大程度上游离出许多知识分子所能触及的范围。当今哲学家们在争论的问题，与柏拉图－尼采的对立联系在一起。这种争论的结果将决定哲学作为一门学科的前景。其中之一就是，对哲学的研究在将来否会独立于思想史去进行。这一争论通常发生在“分析”与“非分析”哲学分裂的讨论过程之中。

　　1，当今哲学争论的两个主要议题：

　　第一、分析哲学与非分析哲学之争（有时被称作“大陆哲学”）；第二、发生于存在于分析哲学（心灵与语言哲学）内部的争论，即原子论与整体论之争。原子论者认为，哲学与认知的结盟对自身会大有好处；整体论者则不这样认为。

　　当代哲学系里对哲学的划分1）伦理、社会哲学；2）心灵和语言哲学。从事前者的哲学家很少读后者写的书，他们更多地阅读政治学教授和法教授所写的书，而不是读那些在研究身心关系、语言与实在关系的同事们所写的书。人们可以这样说，这两类人同处一个系，不是由于有什么共同的兴趣，而是由于机构划分的原因。

　　“分析”哲学与“非分析哲学”的分野与道德和政治学作品关系不是很大。它们也与罗尔斯、哈贝马斯、Noberto Bobbio, 詹托尔·默菲(Chantal Mouffe) 、伊赛亚·柏林以及加斯托等没有多大的牵连。所有这些思想家与非哲学家（如米契尔·沃尔泽、波斯纳、伊格纳提夫（Michael Ignatieff）、贝克等讨论着同样的问题――我们何以能改变我们的社会政治制度，以便更好地将秩序与正义结合在一起。

　　人们一旦将道德政治哲学框起来存而不论，便发现分析哲学与大陆哲学的分裂就凸现出来了。这种分裂就如同人们对罗素哲学的评价一样。有的哲学家将罗素的幕状词理论视为哲学的一种范式；而另外一些哲学家则认为，罗素所做的工作没有哪一点能与黑格尔的《精神现象学》或海德格尔的《人道主义书信》相比。　　自认为是心灵和语言分析哲学的人们，肯定对罗素的幕状词理论极其熟悉。但她有可能从来就没有读过黑格尔和海德格尔的东西。如果一个人在非国家教哲学，她肯定读过《精神现象学》和《书信》，或要装出读过的样子来；但她完全可以理直气壮地跳过幕状词理论。巴西、土耳其、波兰的哲学家们不太理解，英语国家的同行们为什么将罗素看成一个重要人物。

　　崇拜罗素的人可精确地讲清楚他们在回答一些什么样的问题。黑格尔和海德格尔则对不大关注常识或日常语言。他们告诉你有关精神本质或存在意义的内容，而且通常是在非常特殊或不为人所熟悉的意义上使用“精神”与“存在”（being）。弗莱格和罗素希望使事物变得清晰明白；而黑格尔和海德格则希望事情出现差异。

　　读黑格尔和海德格尔书，读时有收益，有思考；但在放下书以后，你会感觉什么事都没有发生。你可能会得出结论，认为他们二人的思想有毛病。实际上，分析哲学家就是这么看他们二人的。

　　哲学家之间的相互攻伐：分析哲学家有时认为黑格尔和海德格尔描述“不是在真正意义上搞哲学”。非分析哲学则认为，这些分析哲学的同行们是知识懦夫（intellectual cowards ），因为后者对他们自己所熟悉的职业以外的环境没有安全感。这种相互攻伐已经持续了近50年。

　　在我看来，弗莱格、罗素、黑格尔、海德格尔，他们四人可以被有效地归于一类。原因在于，他们都在以自己的方式回答着最先由柏拉图明确提出的问题：何以使得人类独特？其它动物为何缺少人类之特性？我们所独有的为什么如此重要？人以什么样的姿态（self-image-自我形象）出现时相对于这一独特性来说不失为正义？

　　柏拉图的回答是，我们不象动物，我们可以认识事物（包括我们自己）是什么样的。在他看来，实在－现象的区分对智慧的获得极为重要，人之为人在于把握事实（truth）。弗雷格与罗素认为柏拉图的回答在总体没有什么错。他们的工作就是帮助人们回答柏拉图的问题：我们的信念（beliefs）之间有一种什么样的关系？

　　弗罗二人认为，以前对这些问题的回答不充分，原因在于从柏拉图到康德的哲学家们没有关注作为中介的语言；在这些中介中，人类将实在展现给自己。从这个意义上讲，以前的答案没有能充分反映语言与实在之间的关系。

　　尼采对以上问题的回答不同于柏拉图的回答。

　　尼采嘲讽柏拉图对现象－实在的二分。而这一划分至今被许多分析哲学家看成是理所当然的东西。他要求人们“从的视角看科学，从生活的角度看艺术”。　　（对黑格尔的尼采式阅读）

　　当今认真对待黑格尔和海德格尔的哲学家们，同意尼采对现象－实在二分所做的怀疑，从而代之以对世界精神发展所做的过去与现在、早期与晚期的划分。在这些哲学家眼里，黑格尔和浪漫派诗人被看作尼采反叛柏拉图主义的先驱。黑格尔强调我们在进程中发展和改变着我们自身。黑格尔的这一观点，为尼采“人类的指向就是通过对自我重新描述来进行自我创造”这一论断铺平了道路。

　　（对海德格尔的尼采式阅读）

　　海德格尔是第一个试图调停柏－尼冲突（关于什么东西使得人类如此特殊）的思想家。海氏的晚期著作告诉人们，西方知识分子始于对获得自我知识的渴望，终于对实现自我创造的期盼。因此，黑格尔和海德格尔的成熟之作，均力图去解释我们人怎样变成了我们现在这个样子这一问题。所有这些讨论与对知识的范围与界限、事物如何使得句子为真等问题的回答没有任何关系。

　　2.分析哲学的任务：探寻心智与语言是如何起作用的。

　　在这个题目下有原子论与整体论（atomists and the holists）之争。原子论旨在解释心灵与语言是如何发挥作用的。这也是原子论者的一贯追求。整体论者则认为，（1）原子论者所做的工作不会有成果；（2）原子论将语言与心灵看成实体，这种作法是一种错误；（3）意义与信念不是一种事物。但二者都同意，（1）人之特殊性体现在人拥有心灵和语言；（2）当代哲学面临的一个大问题就是用与现代科学相一致的方法去解释心灵和语言的存在，而不用求助于柏拉图、奥古斯汀、笛卡尔等提出的非物理的实体；因此，（3）它们都是物理主义者。但原子论与整体论的相似到此为止。

　　原子论者把心灵与语言分解成许多部分，将其与大脑紧密地联系在一起；心灵即大脑。他们花大量时间分析类似“信念”和“意义”这样的概念，以此企图说明信念与意义如何居于人类的中枢神经之内。

　　在整体论者看来，将心灵与大脑视为同一这种作法明显是一种误导。即使是理想的神经生理学也不可能告诉我们有关心灵与语言的东西。整体论者虽然同意在探索大脑何以运作方面有许多事情要做，但同时又怀疑，即便是理想的神经生理学可能不会告诉我们更多有关心灵和语言的东西。他们坚持，心灵不是电脑硬件意义上的大脑；心灵与大脑、文化与生物学，其相互之间的自由度如同硬件之于软件。

　　整体论认为，认识心灵与语言实际上是对我们所身处其中的社会行为（实践）变迁的认识；当然，我们不能缺少神经学方面的手段与工具。但从神经学或进行生物学方面解释人的行为，并不能将人与猩猩区分开来。猩猩是不会绘制出洞穴里的壁画，更不会建造出驶往特洛尹城的巨船。

　　整体论者认为，提出批判性的意见这一社会行为与智力和语言不可分。原子论者认为，我们在没有语言之前就已经有心灵；人以外的动物也有心灵。要想解释人类为何能够获得有关存在于物理世界之中的那些事物的事实，我们就必须联系到语言表现。这就将我们的科学理论引向原始语言表现，最终至知觉性的表现。

　　希望认知科学帮助我们理解人类的殊性，这是洛克留给后人的做法。他将心灵看成是简单观念和观念的仓库，最后引出休谟的“动物理性”、十九世纪的联想心理学、被艾耶尔语言学化了的休谟版，以及被麦克道尔语言学化了的康德版。整体论者遗憾洛克将我们引向此途，也因此谴责笛卡尔对洛克的误导。　　在整体论者看来，在神经元与社会行为（实践）之间并不存在认知科学要去研究的中介。要研究人何以具有不同于大猩猩的特殊属性，就要去研究那些实践，去研究文化。在神经元与实践之间，没有（也不需要有）什么桥梁，这就像软件与硬件之间关系一样。正如软件只是一种让硬件运行的方法，文化只是一种使我们的神经装置投入使用的方法。原子论者同意并引用了Steven Pinker话，“心灵理论是知识史上的伟大思想之一，因为它解决了构成身心问题的谜团之一”。

　　当今语言哲学中的整体论者有：戴维森（随奎茵），布兰德姆（随塞拉斯），以及追随赖尔和维坦根斯坦的其他哲学家。原子论者有：乔姆斯基、Pinker, Jerry Fodor,以及那些试图创立一种心智表现的语义理论。

　　3、分析的明晰性与对话的明晰性

　　罗蒂认为，他的以上论述能帮助读者理解以下三方面的问题：为什么

　　（1）许多原子论者怀疑，整体论将分析哲学的核心思想置于危险的境地；

　　（2）像内格尔这样的哲学家，他们认为维特根斯坦、戴维森等向黑格尔、海德格尔所从事的那类坏哲学敞开了大门;

　　（3）布兰顿将自己称为一个新黑格尔主义者。

　　原子论与整体论之争最后似乎落到了对两个问题的争论：（1）哲学家们应该做的事情类型；（2）哲学的自我形象。

　　这体现在罗素与维特根斯坦两人对概念的不同看法上。罗素主张，概念或意义可以被分离并当作信念的元素来对待，应该承认它们的存在。然而在维特根斯坦看来，概念只是对一个词的使用。

　　大多数分析哲学家同意，罗素及其追随者将我们的学科（哲学）引入可靠的科学途径。分析哲学家认为，分析哲学的训练可以锻炼和提高心灵的明晰性。他们之所以抵制整体主义是出于一种担心，担心如果他们偏离科学，他们将为蒙昧主义敞开大门。哲学将回归到罗素以前的岁月，即Jowett （乔伊特）and T. H. 格林的时代，或二十世纪的法国。正是因为这个原因，分析哲学非常厌恶“哲学是一种人文学科”这一观点，而坚持哲学是一种科学。

　　整体论者认为，要想研究心灵和语言是如何运作这一问题，最好是讲故事，那种由塞拉斯、布莱顿所讲的故事：元语言学的词汇与心灵主义的词汇同时产生；文化如何超越生物的进化。

　　4.确定的存在和非确定的存在（Determinate and indeterminate being）

　　很明显，我赞同整体者，赞同那些讲述故事的哲学家，而非那些提供分析的哲学家。“在物理世界中，心灵表现、意义、价值处于什么位置？”我认为，人们应该放弃这样的问题。他们应该把对物体（粒子）、信念、理应被做的事情等所做讨论描述成文化活动。这些活动所实现的目的都很明确。……哲学家们遵循卡斯托里阿迪的建议，即放弃他所说的“只有确定的存在才是真实可信的存在这一假说”。

　　确定的存在是那种可以断然确定为真的存在。数学所研究的对象之间的关系就是这样。同样的还有：诺曼征服以来英国国王的名称、尹拉克战争中死亡的大体人数、二十世纪牛津的年平均降雨量。不确定的存在事例有：《哈姆莱特》的意义、邱吉尔的性格特征、人类存在的时间点等。　　我对确定存在与不确定的存在之间的划分是从社会学意义上做出。确定性只是一种程度。只将确定的存在视为真实可信的，这种作法是用一种无用的形而上学的区分代替一种有用的社会学意义上的程度区分。接受前一种区分，就是承认有关于某些话题的“事实”的存在，就是在认真地对待有关实在论与反实在论之间的争论。只有在分析哲学家们眼里，这种争论有实际的意义。只有你相信所有的存在都像拼图玩具的每一个碎片一样可以拼贴到一块，认为那些不能被拼到一块的存在就不真实可靠，就不是拼图的碎片，这个时候你就将加入到这种争论之中。　　拼拼图的类比从整体上看适合于许多领域的研究，如古生物学、粒子物理学和学等。在有些文化领域中，可以说我们能够最终得到正确的东西（get things right）。通过引入可靠的科学方法使得哲学成为上述文化领域之一的思想，以及曾经催动罗素和其他分析哲学家的观点，它们只有在概念和意义被看成能够孤立于社会实践、孤立于历史的情况下，才有可能站得住脚。

　　一旦放弃原子论，人们就不再使用获得确切事实的比喻和追寻核心骨架的比喻了，并像维特根斯坦一样怀疑以往被视为神圣的逻辑。这将导致以下三种结果：（1）人们认真地对待发生于社会准则方面的变化；（2）用水平的知识发展比喻去替代垂直的知识发展比喻；（3）放弃心灵和语言可以像其他许多事物一样被彻底搞清楚这一观念。

　　那些善待黑格尔的哲学家们，他们大都用我们如何与我们的祖先不同，如何可能与我们后代不同等这样一些问题，代替人类何以在普遍意义上具有特殊性这一问题。换言之，历史主义使得我们认为，非确定的存在比确定的存在更有魅力。它使得我们把对过去（历史）的解释和重新语境化（recontextualize）视为最为重要的人类活动，而不是把最为重要的人类活动视为对拼图的组合。

　　对什么东西最值得思考这一问题存在着不同的回答。这种分歧也说明了为什么被我一直称之为“叙事哲学”（ narrative philosophy）的东西常常被叫做“解释哲学”。 “解释”这一术语标志着研究兴趣的转移：从讨论什么东西绝对可靠（正确）转向没有止境的解释与语境再造。

　　人何以具有其人之为人所具有的特殊性？如果人们接受柏拉图（而非尼采）对此问题的回答，那么对心灵本质或语言本质的研究就似乎显得格外必要和紧迫。分析哲学家所从事的工作显然值得受过的公众的注意。人们也就更有理由指出洛克和康德在西方文化史上的重要地位，指出当代分析哲学家正在追问洛克和康德　曾问过的问题。

　　然而黑格尔指出，尽管洛克和康德两人为人类自由的原因做出了不可估量的贡献，但他们所问的问题并不怎么好，因为他们没有认识到，历史是具有自然意识的人类的历史，而非自然的历史。布莱顿将心灵主义的词汇看作使得某种社会规范变得清楚明白的一种方式，而不是像洛克那样将其看作对位于两耳间的实体的描述。就像萨特和海德格尔一样，对于黑格尔和布莱顿来说，人类是非确定的存在。就像那些使我们成为现在这个样子的和诗歌一样，我们需要的是永无止境的　解释。我们永远也不会得到绝对正确的东西。

　　 5. 结论

　　这些讲演是叙述哲学的一个例证。哲学在当代西方文化中的位置：开始于17世纪对身心问题、知识的范围、意志的自由等问题所做的清楚明白的说明。这些问题的产生要追溯很远。在西方，人们已经习惯了德谟克利特和卢克莱修对事物所做论述。这样，我们在对自身进行描述的时候总想达到和实现按其二人标准为对的层次。在寻求对这些方法进行折中的过程中，上面的三个问题产生了。洛克、斯宾诺莎、休谟、康德等对这些问题的讨论，对文化的世俗化发挥过重要的作用。

　　随着时间的流逝，这些问题已经被研究得很透，几乎再也挤不出什么新东西了。法国大革命和浪漫运动彻底转移了世俗知识分子的视线。黑格尔第一个洞察出这些事件的意义，并试图使哲学跟上时代的步伐。到尼采和杜威的时代时，大多数知识分子，甚至许多哲学教授已经深信，确定文化纲领（大纲）的不是什么上帝（或自然），而是历史。

　　然而，在有些国家，有些哲学教授们仍然死守着黑格尔以前的那些问题不放。他们试图通过将其语言化的方式来复活或拯救它。这种运动造成的结果就是比以往为严重的专业主义与边缘化现象。语言的转向最终导致后维特根斯坦对17世纪式哲学问题的摒弃，这也同样体现在塞拉斯和布兰顿的历史主义观点当中。所有这些发展有可能使得分析哲学家们去认真对待黑格尔的论断――哲学是以思想的形式反映一个时代。他们是否将利用这一机会，还有待观察。

　　（李小科节译）

　　April 21, 2003

　　原文对照：

　　ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND NARRATIVE PHILOSOPHY

　　Richard Rorty

　　1. Two kinds of philosophy

　　I said in last week's lecture that philosophy had pretty much drifted off the radar screens of most intellectuals, and that this was not necessarily an occasion for regret. But there are still interesting debates going on among philosophy professors. These debates that tie in with the Plato-Nietzsche opposition I described in my first lecture, and their outcome will determine the future of philosophy as an academic discipline. One of these is about whether philosophy can be studied independently of the history of ideas. This debate usually takes place in the course of discussion of the split between "analytic" and "non-analytic" philosophy.

　　 The second of these debates is going on within the sub-area of analytic philosophy known as "philosophy of mind and language". This is between the atomists, who think that philosophy can profitably ally itself with cognitive science, and the holists, who do not. In this lecture I will briefly review both of these debates. Then I will try to show the relevance of both to the question of whether or not to retain what I last week called "the jigsaw puzzle view of things".

　　When one attempts to describe what is going on in the worlds' philosophy departments these days, the first distinction to draw is between moral, social and political philosophy on the one hand, and philosophy of mind and language on the other. Those who work in the former area do not have much to say to those working in the latter, and conversely. Philosophy professors who write on ethics and politics usually read more books by professors of political science and of jurisprudence than books by fellow philosophers who discuss the relation between the mind and the body, or that between language and reality. That both are members of the same department is more an accident of institutional history than a result of shared interests.

　　The difference between these two broad areas of concern is highlighted by the fact that the split between "analytic" philosophy and "non-analytic" philosophy (the kind sometimes called "Continental") has little relevance to books about morals and politics. Those labels are largely irrelevant to such figures as John Rawls, Juergen Habermas, Noberto Bobbio, Chantal Mouffe, Isaiah Berlin, and Cornelius Castoriadis. All these thinkers are concerned with the same questions as are non-philosophers like Michael Walzer, Richard Posner, Michael Ignatieff, and Ulrich Beck-questions about how we might alter our social and political institutions so as better to combine freedom with order and justice.

　　Once we bracket off moral and political philosophy, however, the analytic vs. Continental split becomes salient. I think of this split as between the philosophers who are inclined to agree with Frank Ramsey that Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions is a paradigm of philosophy and those who would argue that nothing Russell did compares in importance with Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit or with Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. It is a division between philosophers who think that you can do first-rate philosophy without knowing much intellectual history and those who think that philosophy is at its best when it takes the form of a dramatic narrative, a narrative ending with the words "Thus far has the world-spirit advanced."

　　Someone who thinks of herself as an analytic philosopher of mind and language will almost certainly be familiar with, and will probably have views about, Russell's theory. But she may never have read, and may have little ambition to read, either Hegel or Heidegger. Yet if you teach philosophy in most non-anglophone countries, you must have read and pondered both The Phenomenology of Spirit and Letter on Humanism, or at least pretend to have done so. But you can skip the theory of descriptions. Brazilian, Turkish and Polish philosophers manage to get by with only a vague idea of why their Anglophone colleagues believe Russell to have been an important figure.

　　In order to convey the profound contrast between the self-images of these two kinds of philosophers, I shall briefly describe the theory of descriptions. Russell designed it to answer such questions as "Given that the words used to form the subject of a sentence refer to things, and that a sentence is true if things are as the sentence says they are, how is that a true sentence containing a referring expression can become false if one substitutes another expression that refers to the same thing?" Russell's example of two such sentences were "George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverly", which is true, and "George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott", which is false.

　　The theory of descriptions answers this question by saying that the words "the author of Waverly", unlike the word "Scott", do not pick out a particular individual. They do not form a referring expression. What George IV really wanted to know, Russell said, was whether there was an individual who had the property of being the author of Waverly and who was identical with Scott. Putting the matter that way, he claimed, reveals the true "logical form" of the sentence in question.

　　That it has this logical form can be revealed, Russell said, by distinguishing carefully between the use of the word "is" to express identity, as in "Scott is Scott", and to express predication, as in "Scott is the author of Waverly". That distinction was built into the new symbolic logic developed by Russell's master, Gottlob Frege. A knowledge of this logic is still regarded by most Anglophone philosophers as essential to philosophical competence. Many of their non-Anglophone colleagues find it optional.

　　If you suspect that Russell's theory provides a good answer to a bad question, you are in good company. You have many eminent contemporary philosophers on your side. These philosophers do not think that either the general question of the relation between language and reality, or the more particular question about when and how things in the world make sentences true, is of much interest. They take such questions to be good examples of what Berkeley called "kicking up the dust and then complaining that one cannot see". Hegel and Heidegger, had they read Russell, would probably have had the same reaction.

　　One big difference between the kind of philosopher who admires Russell and the kind who prefers Hegel and Heidegger is that the former spell out exactly what questions they are trying to answer. Whether or not you find the analytic philosophers' problems intriguing, at least you know what they are. The only question is why you should care about them. Analytic philosophers typically claim that their questions should intrigue you because certain intuitions that you yourself had before you ever opened a philosophy book are in tension with one another. It is, they say, the job of philosophy to reconcile these convictions. One such intuition is that beliefs are made true by the extra-linguistic entities that they are about, and the value of the theory of descriptions is that it rescues this intuition from some apparent counter-examples.

　　 Hegel and Heidegger, by contrast, did not care much about making contact either with common sense or with ordinary language. Their books offer to tell you something about the nature of Spirit, or the meaning of Being, but they use the terms "Spirit" and "Being" in idiosyncratic, unfamiliar, ways. They make up novel meanings for these words. Whereas Frege and Russell hoped to make things clearer, Hegel and Heidegger hoped to make things different. Russell's admirers want to get things straight by finding perspicuous relations between your previously existing intuitions. Hegel, Heidegger, and their admirers hope to change your not only your intuitions but your sense of who you are and your notion of what it is most important to think about.

　　In the hope of getting you to change your self-image and your priorities, Hegel says such things as "the Absolute alone is true". Heidegger says that "Language is the house of Being". If you stop at each such sentence and pause to ask yourself whether it is true, you will never finish their books. To get through them, you must temporarily suspend disbelief, get into the swing of the story that is being told, pick up the jargon as you go along, and then ask yourself, after having given the entire book the most sympathetic reading you can, whether you have been given a promising new way of talking about some of the things that interest you most.

　　If you lay down their books feeling that nothing of that sort has happened, you may conclude that Hegel and Heidegger are fuzzy-minded thinkers who substitute rhetoric for argument. If this is your reaction, you will be in good company. You will have many eminent contemporary philosophers on your side. Willingness to define one's terms, list one's premises, and argue in a straight line is regarded by most admirers of Russell as essential to doing good philosophy. That sort of argument requires that you be able to judge the truth of each sentence in a philosophy book independently of its surroundings. For admirers of Hegel and Heidgger, however, that sort of argumentation is, though all very well in its place, out of place in philosophy. They see requests for definitions of terms and lists of premises as symptoms of unwillingness to let philosophy attempt its transformative task.

　　Given all these differences between analytic and non-analytic philosophy, one might wonder whether there is any point in treating Frege, Russell, Hegel and Heidegger as all in the business. One may wonder whether it is more than an historical accident that the books of all four are shelved in the same section of the library. Analytic philosophers sometimes describe Hegel and Heidegger as "not really doing philosophy". Non-analytic philosophers rejoin that their analytic colleagues are intellectual cowards who do not feel safe outside a familiar professional environment. This sort of reciprocal excommunication has been going on for about fifty years, and the insults exchanged have remained much the same throughout this period.

　　My own view is that all four of the thinkers I have just mentioned are usefully grouped together. This is because they were all trying to answer questions first formulated explicitly by Plato: What makes human beings special? Why do we have that the other animals lack? Why is what we have so important? What self-image will do proper justice to this uniqueness?"

　　Plato's response was that we are special because we, unlike the animals, can know how things, including ourselves, really are. He made the reality-appearance distinction central to the search for wisdom, and urged that our self-image should be that of beings capable of grasping truth. Frege and Russell thought that Plato's answer was roughly right. They thought of their own work as helping us answer a question Plato also tried to answer-namely, what is the relation between our beliefs such that we can have the knowledge we do?

　　 Earlier answers to these questions were inadequate, Frege and Russell thought, because philosophers from Plato to Kant had not zeroed in on language as the medium in which human beings represent reality to themselves, and therefore had not sufficiently reflected on the relation between language and reality. So they had not paid proper attention to logical form, nor to the questions to which Russell's theory of descriptions offers answers. You will not think discussion of the relation between George IV and Scott as silly as it seems once you have understood that Russell's and Frege's puzzles must be solved before we can understand how sentences are made true by reality.

　　Nietzsche, however, gave a different answer than Plato's to the question about what makes human beings special. He said it was our ability to transform ourselves into something new, rather than our ability to know what we ourselves really are or what the universe is really like. He mocked Plato's appearance-reality distinction, a distinction that most analytic philosophers still take for granted. He asked us "to view science through the optic of art, and art through that of life".

　　Most contemporary philosophers who take Hegel and Heidegger seriously share Nietzsche's doubts about the utility of the appearance-reality distinction. They usually replace it with the distinction between the past and the present-between earlier and later stages of the world-spirit's progress. Such philosophers read both Hegel and the romantic poets as precursors of Nietzsche's revolt against Platonism. On this reading, Hegel is a John the Baptist figure. His emphasis on the way we have transformed ourselves in the course of history prepares the way for Nietzsche's claim that the point of being human is to achieve self-creation through self-redescription. The autobiography of the world-spirit that Hegel offers in The Phenomenology of Spirit is a story about how Spirit comes to consciousness of itself in the course of human history.

　　Those who read Hegel in this way typically go on to read Heidegger as the first thinker to have tried to mediate the conflict between Plato's and Nietzsche's suggestions about what makes us special. So read, Heidegger's later writings tell a story about how Western intellectuals started off hoping to gain self-knowledge and wound up hoping to achieve self-creation. Hegelian and Heideggerian narratives of maturation are not attempts to say something about human beings in general, but rather attempts to explain how we in the modern West became the kind of people we are. Telling stories of the sort Hegel and Heidegger tell has nothing to do with answering questions about the scope and limits of human knowledge or about how things make sentences true.

　　2. The analytic project: finding out how mind and language work

　　So much, for now, for the split between analytic and non-analytic philosophy. I shall come back to that topic later, but now I turn to the second debate that I mentioned at the outset-the one going on within the ranks of the analytic philosophers of mind and language between the atomists and the holists. The ambition of the atomists is to explain, as they often like to put it, how the mind works and how language works. The holists doubt that this is a fruitful project, because they think it a mistake to treat mind and language as entities that have either elementary parts, or a structure, or inner workings. They do not believe that there are things called "beliefs" or "meanings" into which minds and languages can usefully be broken up. Atomists, they think fail to realize that rationality-the thing that makes us special--is a social phenomenon, not one that a human organism can exhibit all by itself.

　　Both atomists and holists agree that what makes human beings special is their possession of mind and language. They also agree that the big problem for contemporary philosophy is to explain the existence of mind and language in a way that is consistent with modern science-that is, without appealing to the sort of spooky non-physical entities postulated by Plato, Augustine and Descartes. Both are physicalists, believing that, as Frank Jackson has put it, "if you duplicate our world in all physical respects and stop right there, you duplicate it in all respects." (FME, p. 12).

　　But there the similarities end. Atomists think that by breaking mind and language down into parts we can get psychology in touch with neurology in roughly the same way that chemistry has been brought together with physics and biology with chemistry. They find it useful and important to say that the mind is, in some important sense, the brain. So they spend much of their time analyzing concepts like "belief" and "meaning" in order to show how beliefs and meanings might reside within the collection of physical particles which is the human central nervous system.

　　 The holists find this identification of mind and brain thoroughly misleading. As they see it, the atomists are simply taking for granted that what worked for matter-namely, the explanation of macrostructural behavior by reference to transactions between microstructural compnents-will work for mind. The holists agree that there is much to be discovered about how the brain works, but they doubt that even an ideal neurophysiology would tell us anything interesting about mind or language. For, they insist, the mind is no more the brain that the computer is the hardware.

　　A perfect understanding of its electrical circuits, holists points out, does very little to help you understand how your computer manages to do all the wonderful things it does. To understand that you have to know a lot about software. For the brain will run a fabulous variety of different programs while remaining indifferent to which ones it runs, and the same program can be run on many different sorts of hardware. According to the holists, mind and brain, culture and biology, swing as free from one another as do software and hardware. They can and should be studied independently.

　　Understanding mind and language, the holists say, is a matter of understanding the evolution of the social practices in which we presently engage. We could not, they cheerfully admit, have engaged in those practices unless we had the requisite neurological equipment. Cultural evolution could not begin until biological evolution had reached a certain point. But this fact does nothing to support claims of the sort made by Steven Pinker saying, in his book How the Mind Works. Pinker says, for example, that "The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life". (p. 21)

　　The holists point out that explanations of human behavior that tie in either with neurology or with evolutionary biology, will tell us only about what we share with the chimpanzees. It will not tell us about what we, but not the chimpanzees, share with the creatures who painted pictures on the walls of caverns, nor with those that built the ships that sailed to Troy. We can learn about the processes that mediated between those organisms and ourselves only by constructing a narrative, telling a story about how they became us.

　　Holist philosophers of mind and language think that the best way to show that we need not postulate immaterial entities to explain our uniqueness is to tell an imaginative story about how grunts mutated into assertions. This is the story of how, to use Robert Brandom's terminology, sapience replaced mere sentience. To count as an assertion, and thus as a sign of sapience, on Brandom's account, a series of noises must be explicitly criticizable by reference to social norms. Such a norm is already in place when a hominid first realized that, having grunted "P", she might well be beaten with sticks if she does not grunt "Q" on appropriate occasions. But the norm only became explicit, and what Brandom calls "the game of giving and asking for reasons" only began, a few hundreds of thousands of years later. That was the period in which a descendant of the original grunter realizes that, since she has asserted "P" and also asserted "If P then Q", she will deservedly be called "irrational" if she cannot produce a good reason for refusing to assert "Q".

　　Whereas the holists take the social practice of criticizing assertions to be indispensable for both mentality and language, the atomists think that we had minds before we had language, and indeed that non-human animals have minds. This is because they think that the crucial notion in this area of philosophy is "representation" rather than, as Brandom does, "inference". Atomism in philosophy of mind and language is closely tied to the idea that cognitive science will help us see the mind as the central nervous system by linking up physiological representations of the environment, such as retinal patterns and cochlear reverberations, with mental representations. Atomists think that to explain how human beings were able to learn the truth about how things in the physical world work we must relate the linguistic representations which make up our scientific theories to more primitive linguistic representations and, ultimately, to perceptual representations.

　　The hope that cognitive science will help us understand why we are so special is a legacy from Locke. It derives from his suggestion that the mind should be viewed as a storehouse of simple and complex ideas. This suggestion led to Hume's deliberately provocative reference to "the reason of animals", nineteenth-century associationist psychology, Ayer's linguistified version of Hume and McDowell's linguistified version of Kant. Holists think that it was pity that Locke put us on this path, and they blame Descartes for misleading him. For Descartes provided Locke with the image of the mind as an inner theater-a room equipped with a screen on which immaterial representations are displayed and in which an immaterial spectator decides what the extra-mental world is like on the basis of the clarity or the coherence of those representations.

　　Holists also blame Descartes for the idea that the mind is a thing that has workings that might be better understood. To think of it this way-as what Gilbert Ryle mockingly called a non-material mechanism-is, they argue, a fundamental mistake. For the mind should be thought of not as a mysterious entity but as a cluster of capacities brought into existence by the enforcement of social norms. Holists think that cognitive science may help us understand sentience better, for the notion of "mechanisms of perception" does have a use. As long as you stick to sentience, and do not go on to sapience, it makes sense to connect physiological states with dispositional responses. But, holists insist, to have very complex dispositional responses, is not yet to have mentality, as long as these responses are not subject to criticism by reference to prevailing social norms. Even the chimpanzees, after all, have complex dispositional responses.

　　As holists see the matter, there is nothing intermediate between the neurons and the social practices for cognitive science to study. To study what makes human beings special, and so very different from the chimpanzees, is to study those practices-to study culture. We neither have nor need a bridge between the neurons and the practices, any more than we need one between hardware and software. Software is just a way of putting hardware to use, and culture is just a way of putting our physiological equipment to use. To understand how hardware works is one thing, but to understand the uses to which it is put is something quite different. Understanding electrical circuits, in the brain or in the chips, does nothing to help us understand how the sophisticated software of the 1990's evolved out of the primitive software of the 1950's.

　　The atomists think, to quote Steven Pinker again, that "the computational theory of mind...is one of the great ideas in intellectual history, for it solves one of the puzzles that make up the mind-body problem". This is the puzzle first posed by Descartes: the problem of how beliefs, which do not seem to be physical objects, can cause physical events. Pinker says that the computational theory resolves the paradox by saying that beliefs are

　　information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The

　　symbols are physical states of bits of matter, like chips in

　　computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs...Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles and behavior happens...The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused." (p. 25)

　　For the holists, however, there never was a mind-body problem to be solved, because there never were little mental entities called "beliefs", or little linguistic entities called "meanings" that needed to be placed within the physical universe. Not all causal explanation, the holists say, proceeds by picking out little things that bump into other little things.

　　Atomism went largely unchallenged among analytic philosophers during the first half of the twentieth century. But the holist reaction began about fifty years ago, with the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Sellars' "Empiricism and the Concept of Mind", and Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Wittgenstein, as Michael Dummett rightly says, cast doubt on the very idea of a systematic theory of meaning. Quine thought that the idea that there were entities called "meanings" associated with linguistic expressions was a relic of Aristotle's pre-Galilean notions of scientific explanation. Ryle thought that Pinker-like projects of replacing little spooky explainers with little non-spooky explainers resulted from taking seriously Descartes' silly idea that what couldn't be explained by a physical mechanism had to be explained by a non-physical mechanism. Sellars followed up on Wittgenstein by arguing that what makes human beings special is the ability to argue with one another, not the ability to have inner mental states that are somehow isomorphic to states of the environment. For even if there are such states, the frogs and the chimpanzees have them too.

　　The holists of the present day include such philosophers of language as Donald Davidson, who follows up on Quine, and Brandom, who follows up on Sellars, and also a host of philosophers of mind who are following up on Ryle and Wittgenstein-notably Vincent Descombes, Jennifer Hornsby, Helen Steward, Arthur Collins, and Lynn Baker. These holists are locked in battle with atomists such as Noam Chomsky and his student Pinker, Jerry Fodor, and with all the other philosophers and cognitive scientists who are trying to develop what Fodor calls "a semantic theory for mental representations". Holists think that there is neither a need for such a theory nor any chance of getting it.

　　3. Analytic clarity and conversational clarity

　　So much for my sketch of the battle lines within contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language. I hope that what I have said helps to explain why many atomists suspect that holism puts the very idea of analytic philosophy in danger, why philosophers like Thomas Nagel see Wittgenstein and Davidson as opening the gates to bad philosophy of the sort practiced by Hegel and Heidegger, and why Brandom describes himself as a neo-Hegelian. As the battle between the holists and the analysts has worn on, it has come to look more and more like a disagreement about what sort of thing philosophers should take themselves to be doing, about the self-image of the discipline.

　　This is because, if philosophy is to be analytic, there must be some little things to analyze bigger things into. Philosophical analysis of the sort Russell envisaged requires that there be such things as concepts or meanings that can be isolated and treated as elements of beliefs. But if, as Wittgenstein suggested, a concept is just the use of a word, and if the proper use of the words that interest philosophers is always going to be a matter of controversy, it is not clear how philosophical analysis could possibly help. For a philosopher's claim to have discovered the contours of a concept will always be just a persuasive redefinition of a word. Philosophers' diagnoses of "conceptual confusion" look, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, as disingenuous ways of going about the transformation of culture, rather than ways of making clearer what has previously been going on.

　　Atomist philosophy of mind requires that minds be aggregates of mental representations. If, as Davidson claims, the notion of "representation" is of no use in figuring out what beliefs someone has or what her assertions mean, then the claim that cognitive science will help us better understand what makes human beings special seems dubious. For truth, on Davidson's view, is not the sort of thing that beliefs and assertions can be bumped into having by their encounters with bits of non-linguistic reality. If there are no interesting isomorphisms to be discovered between true beliefs and what those beliefs are about---isomorphisms that Russell and his followers took for granted-then we shall have to give up the idea that philosophy can reconcile our common-sensical intuitions with one another. We may just have to pick and choose among those intuitions. In particular, we may have to treat "correspondence with reality" as a metaphor which cannot be pressed. That would permit us to set aside the questions that Russell invoked the the notion of logical form to answer.

　　The thought that Russell and his followers put our discipline on the secure path of a science a path is very dear to most analytic philosophers, as is the claim that training in analytic philosophy makes for increased clarity of mind. So one of the reasons they resist holism is the fear that if they walk away from the natural sciences they will open the gates to obscurantism. Philosophy, they suggest will revert to being what it was in the pre-Russellian days of Jowett and T. H. Green, or what they fear it became in twentieth century France-a species of edifying belles-lettres. This is why many analytic philosophers dislike the idea that philosophy is one of the humanities, and insist that it is one of the sciences.

　　Holists, however, see no more promise in inquiry into how mind and language work than inquiry into how conversation works. So they think that that the best we can do in the way of understanding how mind and language work is to tell stories, of the sort told by Sellars and Brandom, about how metalinguistic and mentalistic vocabularies came into existence in the course of time, as well as stories about how cultural took over from biological evolution. The latter stories recount how we got out of the woods and into the painted caverns, out of the caverns and into the villages, and then out of the villages into the law courts and the temples. The kind of understanding that narratives of this sort gives us is not the sort that we get from seeing many disparate things as manifestations of the same underlying thing, but rather the sort that comes from expanding our imagination by comparing the social practices of our day with those of past times and possible future times.

　　4. Determinate and indeterminate being

　　It will have by now have become obvious that my own sympathies are with the holists, and with philosophers who tell stories rather than offering analyses. I think that philosophers should give up on the question "What is the place of mental representations, or meanings, or values, in a world of physical particles?" They should describe talk about particles, talk about beliefs, and talk about what ought to be done, as cultural activities that fulfill distinct purposes. These activities do not need to be fitted together in a systematic way, any more than basketball and cricket need to be fitted together with bridge and chess. As I was saying last week, the many purposes that are served by our various discourses should not be viewed as subordinate to an overarching project called of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. If we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding.

　　One way to epitomize this view is to say that philosophers should follow Castoriadis' advice to give up what he called "the assumption that only determinate being is authentic being". Determinate being is the kind that can be gotten right, once and for all. The relations between mathematical objects are like that. So are the names of the English sovereigns since the Conquest, those of nine orders of angels, the approximate number of people who died in the Iraq War, and the mean annual rainfall in Oxford during the twentieth century. Examples of indeterminate being are the meaning of Hamlet, the moral character of Winston Churchill, and the point of human existence.

　　The distinction between determinate and indeterminate being, as I am drawing it, is sociological. Determinacy is a matter of degree-degree of controversiality for the inhabitants of a particular time and place. To think of only determinate being as authentic is to replace a useful sociological distinction of degree with a useless metaphysical distinction of kind. To adopt the latter distinction is to think that there is a "matter of fact" about some topics but not about others, and to take seriously the debates about realism and anti-realism that analytic philosophers, but no one else, find profitable. Philosophers who think that only determinate being is authentic being are the only people who are interested in the question of how to situate values, or minds, in a world of elementary particles, how to make room for the inauthentic in the authentic world. You will enter into these debates only if you believe that all beings fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and that beings that cannot be made to fit are inauthentic, not really pieces of the puzzle at all.

　　The analogy with fitting together pieces of a puzzle is entirely appropriate for many areas of inquiry-for example, paleontology, particle physics and philology. These are all areas of culture in which it is plausible to think that we may eventually get things right. The idea that philosophy can become such an area by being put on the secure path of a science, the idea that motivated Russell and the other founders of the analytic movement in philosophy, remains plausible only as long as concepts and meanings are seen as isolable from social practices and from history. For only if such isolation is possible would we be able to identify atoms of thought or of language whose relations with one another would remain constant no matter what use is made of them, in the way that the relations between bits of hardware remain constant no matter what program is being run. Suspicion of attempts at such isolation becomes explicit in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which is why Russell's review of that book was so furious. Russell was appalled by the suggestion that we stop asking about meaning and start asking about use. He was right to suspect that if Wittengestein were taken seriously, philosophy would not be a matter of analysis, and th=e movement he initiated would be repudiated.

　　Once one gives up on atomism, one will cease to use metaphors of getting down to the hard facts as well as metaphors of looking up toward grand overarching structures. One will start treating hardness as just non-controversiality and will begin to wonder, as Wittgenstein did, why logic was once thought to be something sublime. One may instead start thinking of logic as Brandom does-as a device for making our social norms explicit. This will leads to taking changes in social norms seriously, to substituting horizontal for vertical metaphors of intellectual progress, and to abandoning the notion that mind or language are things that can be gotten right once and for all.

　　As I suggested last week, most philosophers who take Hegel seriously substitute questions about what makes us, in our time and place, special for questions about what makes human beings in general special. They replace questions about what we share with every human everywhere with questions about how we differ from our ancestors and how our descendants might differ from us. Another way to put the point is to say that historicism makes us think indeterminate being more interesting than determinate being. It leads us to think of the most important human activity not as fitting togther pieces of a puzzle but as reinterpreting and recontextualizing the past.

　　This difference of opinion about what it is important to think about explains why what I have been calling "narrative philosophy" is often called "hermeneutic philosophy". The term "hermeneutic" signals a shift of interest from what can be gotten right once and for all to what can only be reinterpreted and recontextualized over and over again. That is why Brandom's paradigm of inquiry is the common law rather than the discovery of physical microstructure. A model which would do as well is literary criticism, whose necessary inconclusiveness is nicely explained in a remark that Brandom quotes from T. S. Eliot: "what happens when a work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it".

　　Brandom generalizes Eliot's point by saying that Hegel taught us how to think of a concept on the model of a person-as the kind of thing that is understood only when one understands its history. The best answer to a question about who a person really is a story about her past that provides a context in which to place her recent conduct. The most useful response to questions about a concept is to tell a story about the ways in which the uses of a certain cluster of words have changed in the past, as a prelude to a description of the different ways in which these words are being used now. The clarity that is achieved when these different ways are distinguished from one another, and when each is rendered intelligible by being placed within a narrative of past usage, is analogous to the increased sympathy we bring to the situation of a person whose life-history we have learned. Such narratives decrease the temptation to use such epithets as "nonsense", "unintelligible" and "confused."

　　Most of the philosophers whose books read more like narratives than like analyses have no doubts about the physicalist claim that the behavior of physicists and poets is supervenient upon that of electrons and protons. But they think that explaining the relations of the more complex entities to simpler entities, though eminently useful in the natural sciences, have not done much for philosophy. Breaking down organs into cells, cells into molecules, and molecules into particles, permits very useful interventions in causal processes. But philosophical analyses of concepts used to describe higher level entities in terms of those used to describe lower level entities do not facilitate any such interventions. Wheras technology keeps scientific analyses honest, nothing exercises a similar control over philosophical analyses.

　　The marginalization of philosophy in contemporary intellectual life means that the only people who try to keep philosophy professors honest are other philosophy professors. This is, of course, a fairly common state of affairs in the academic world. Classical philologists, for example, are kept honest only by other classical philologists. But the philologists do not claim to be doing something that everybody should be interested in, whereas philosophers do. When explaining to budget-cutters why it would be better to abolish the classics department than the philosophy department, they frequently claim that their discipline looks into basic, fundamental issues-questions that deserve the attention of anyone with any pretensions to intellectual sophistication.

　　The question that I said was common to Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Russell-what makes human beings special?-does have a good claim on our attention. If one accepts Plato's rather than Nietzsche's answer to it, then the study of the nature of mind, or of language, can easily seem necessary and urgent. So there is a prima facie plausibility to the idea that the sort of thing analytic philosophers of mind and language are doing is worth the attention of the educated public as a whole. This claim can be made to sound even more plausible by pointing out that the importance of Locke and Kant to the cultural history of the West, and noting that contemporary analytic philosophers are asking the same questions Locke and Kant did.

　　Hegel, however, thought that both Locke and Kant, though they were of invaluable service to the cause of human freedom, had nevertheless asked bad questions because they did not grasp that self-conscious beings have histories rather than natures. If one follows Brandom in thinking of a mentalistic vocabulary as a way of making explicit certain social norms rather than, as Locke did, a description of entities located between the ears, then one can also follow Hegel in saying that human beings are in themselves what they are for themselves. For Hegel and Brandom, as for Sartre and Heidegger, human beings are indeterminate beings. Like the laws and the poems that make us what we are, we require endless reinterpretation. We can never be gotten right once and for all.

　　 5. Conclusion

　　These lectures have been an example of narrative philosophy, and I shall end them by summarizing my story about the place of philosophy in modern Western culture. It begins, in the seventeenth century, with the explicit formkulation of what became the textbook problems about mind and body, the scope of human knowledge, and the freedom of the will. These problems were created by the difficulty of reconciling the ways in which we human beings in the West had become accustomed to describing ourselves with the realization that Democritus and Lucretius had been right all the time about how things work. Discussion of these problems by such writers as Locke, Spinoza, Hume and Kant played an important part in the secularization of culture that was encouraged by this realization.

　　But these problems had been milked dry by the time that two events diverted the attention of the now thoroughly secularized intellectuals. These two events were the French Revolution and the Romantic Movement. Hegel was the first of the canonically great philosophers to spot the significance of these events and to try to ,eep philosophy au courant. By the time of, Nietzsche and Dewey, most intellectuals, and even most philosophy professors, had beco, , me convinced that it was History rather than either God or Nature that set the cultural agenda.

　　Nevertheless, in some countries the philosophy professors tried to hang on to the pre-Hegelian problematic. They revived it by linguistifying it-a move that resulted in both greater professionalism and greater marginality. The linguistic turn, however, eventually produced its own rejection of the seventeenth century problematic in the work of the later Wittgenstein, and its own version of historicism in that of Sellars and Brandom. These developments have made it possible for the analytic philosophers to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophy is its time held in thought. Whether they will take advantage of this opportunity remains to be seen.

转自思与文网刊