Category: Excerpt

War is illegal.

Published March 27, 2018

Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case. Might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. If one country felt it had been wronged by another, it could declare war, conquer some territory as compensation, and expect the annexation to be recognized by the rest of the world. The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. That cannot happen today: the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council. States are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, and any country that indulges in a war of conquest can expect opprobrium, not acquiescence, from the rest.

The legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that it’s the outlawry of war that deserves much of the credit for the Long Peace. The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, the conquest taboo has occasionally been enforced with a military response, such as when an international coalition reversed Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990–91. More often the prohibition has functioned as a norm—“War is something that civilized nations just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

natural food?

Published March 23, 2018

“Natural food.” Whenever I hear those words crooned, my inner crank cranks up. “Natural!” I would rail if I gave it voice. “No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!”

Stewart Brand. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline

《正义之心》与《当代启蒙》

Published March 11, 2018

最近读的这两本书刚好有一些微妙的思想碰撞（Pinker 的那本才刚开始读）。

Haidt 这位道德心理学家，在当年听耶鲁大学心理学导论公开课时就已经知道了，对他的研究也很感兴趣，但他这本 The Righteous Mind（《正义之心》）我一直拖到最近才看完。应该说最打动我的还是那些原来就已经知道的东西，比如 moral dumbfounding 相关的实验和解释，但 Haidt 对 WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries) 世界之外的道德观的同情与认可还是没有说服我。本来按他自己所说，他只是在做描述性的工作，但有意无意之中，其实讲了很多「应该」。并且他似乎还认为「应该」是不能被理性、数学和逻辑讨论的。

这本书让我想到那句「存在即合理」，不是说黑格尔的原意，而是说很多人的一种观念：一件事既然长期、广泛地存在，那必然有它的道理，有为什么得以长存的原因，我们应该尝试去理解它，而不是盲目批判。然而大到等级社会、种族歧视、压迫、战争，小到男尊女卑、三从四德、守贞、闹婚，世界上有很多事，都长期、广泛地存在，背后也的确有原因，但这些原因只不过是改善中的障碍，而不是抵制批判的辩护词。读 Pinker 的 Enlightenment Now，这种感觉就更加强烈。

[I]n psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic.

Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind

We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

[T]he economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations” (inadvertently proving his point with the expression men’s minds). “What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction.” This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

1930 年代的中国绑匪

Published February 8, 2018

Derek Parfit 出生在 1942 年的成都，当时他父母都在中国做医生、教医学，不过 Derek 出生一年后，他们就离开了中国。所以这位英国哲学家与中国有很微妙的关系。

刚看到 Parfit 在 On What Matters Vol. 1 里讨论康德伦理学中的 merely as a means 问题时，写到他母亲在 1930 年代的中国的遭遇：

In a case that is less clear, when my mother travelled on a Chinese river in the 1930s, her boat was held up by bandits, whose moral principles permitted them to take, from ordinary people, only half their property. These bandits let my mother choose whether they would take her engagement ring or her wedding ring. If these people treated my mother as a means, they did not treat her merely as a means. Were they close to doing that? I am inclined to answer No. But this may be a borderline case, in which this question has no definite answer.

顺带一说，我认为中文里「20 世纪 30 年代」这种说法就像把 2018 年说成「21 世纪第 18 年」一样累赘而愚蠢，然而大陆的正式出版物中似乎还不允许「1930 年代」这种说法。

Derek Parfit 说康德

Published January 14, 2018

今天在看 Derek Parfit On What Matters 第一卷的 Preface。Parfit 说西季威克和康德是影响他最深的两位哲学家。然后说了几页西季威克之后开始讲自己读康德的感受，摘录几段大家感受一下：

Unlike our first reading of Sidgwick’s Methods, our first reading of Kant’s Groundwork is, in some ways, the best. There are some striking and inspiring claims, and we are not worried by what we can’t understand. But when we re-read the Groundwork, many of us become discouraged, and give up. We decide that Kant, though he may be a great philosopher, is not for us.

The first problem is Kant’s style. It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?’

Kant did not have a single, coherent theory.

Kant makes many conflicting claims, and such claims cannot all be true.

As Kemp Smith points out, Kant often ‘flatly contradicts himself’ and ‘there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting senses. He is the least exact of the great thinkers.’ (To avoid provoking Hegelians, we should perhaps say ‘one of the least exact’.)

When I first re-read Kant, what I found most irritating was not Kant’s obscurities and inconsistencies, but a particular kind of overblown, false rhetoric.

…since I knew that Kant believed in a Categorical Imperative, I was surprised by Kant’s second sentence. I asked a Kantian, ‘Does this mean that, if I don’t give myself Kant’s Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?’ ‘No,’ I was told, ‘you have to give yourself a law, and there’s only one law.’ This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said ‘But I haven’t given myself Kant’s Imperative as a law’, I was told ‘Yes you have’. This reply was even worse. My irritation at such claims may have left some traces in this book.

当然，最后 Parfit 还是说 that irritation has gone.

What it means really to understand an equation?

Published July 4, 2017

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

It will take you some time to understand what should happen in different circumstances. You will have to solve the equations. Each time you solve the equations, you will learn something about the character of the solutions. To keep these solutions in mind, it will be useful also to study their meaning in terms of field lines and of other concepts. This is the way you will really “understand” the equations. That is the difference between mathematics and physics. Mathematicians, or people who have very mathematical minds, are often led astray when “studying” physics because they lose sight of the physics. They say: “Look, these differential equations—the Maxwell equations—are all there is to electrodynamics; it is admitted by the physicists that there is nothing which is not contained in the equations. The equations are complicated, but after all they are only mathematical equations and if I understand them mathematically inside out, I will understand the physics inside out.” Only it doesn’t work that way. Mathematicians who study physics with that point of view—and there have been many of them—usually make little contribution to physics and, in fact, little to mathematics. They fail because the actual physical situations in the real world are so complicated that it is necessary to have a much broader understanding of the equations.

What it means really to understand an equation—that is, in more than a strictly mathematical sense—was described by Dirac. He said: “I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.” So if we have a way of knowing what should happen in given circumstances without actually solving the equations, then we “understand” the equations, as applied to these circumstances. A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.

http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_02.html

家族・自立

Published April 23, 2017

いつかは親のかわりに扶養してくれる男性、身の回りを世話してくれる女性と結婚しなければならず、とうてい自立しているとは言えない。

——菅原真理子『新・家族の時代』(1987)

N1 考试选用过的这篇阅读短文里，作者先是说日本年轻人不像美国年轻人那么自立，总是在经济和生活上依靠上一代，过着奢侈的生活。最后又说了这句话——（这些年轻人就算是今后结婚成家），女性总是要嫁给一个代替父母养活自己的男性，男性总是要和一个照顾自己生活起居的女性结婚，说到底仍然谈不上自立。

–

前两天一直觉得手机右上角的图标少了点什么怪怪的，但又想不起到底是什么，直到刚刚才知道，周六监考之前把所有闹钟都关掉了……

Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in.

Published October 25, 2016

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in. Now, Newton used the second and third of Kepler’s laws to deduce his law of gravitation. What did he predict? First, his analysis of the moon’s motion was a prediction because it connected the falling of objects on the earth’s surface with that of the moon. Second, the question is, is the orbit an ellipse? We shall see in a later chapter how it is possible to calculate the motion exactly, and indeed one can prove that it should be an ellipse, so no extra fact is needed to explain Kepler’s first law. Thus Newton made his first powerful prediction.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_07.html

The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew …

Published October 12, 2016

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

How does the chemist find what the arrangement is? He mixes bottles full of stuff together, and if it turns red, it tells him that it consists of one hydrogen and two carbons tied on here; if it turns blue, on the other hand, that is not the way it is at all. This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done—organic chemistry. To discover the arrangement of the atoms in these enormously complicated arrays the chemist looks at what happens when he mixes two different substances together. The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at such molecules (not quite as complicated as this one, but some which contain parts of it) by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom, not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!, the chemists are almost always correct.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html

胡適：四論問題與主義｜問題與主義論戰（五）

Published May 16, 2010

文本据《胡适文存》卷二录入。

胡適：四論問題與主義

（論輸入學理的方法）

上一期裏，我已做了五千多字的『三論問題與主義』一篇文章。後來我覺得還有幾點小意思，不曾發揮明白，故再說幾句。

我雖不贊成現在的人空談抽象的主義，但是我對於輸入學說和思潮的事業，是極贊成的。我曽說過：

我們應該先從研究中國社會上，政治上，種種具體問題下手，有什麽病，下什麽藥，診察的時候，可以參考西洋先進國的歷史和學說，用作一種『臨症須知』，開藥方的時候，也可以參考西洋先進國的歷史和學說，用作一種『驗方新編』。

若要用這種參考的材料，我們自然不能不做一些輸入的事業。但是輸入學理，不是一件容易做到的事，做的不好，不但無益，反有大害。我對於輸入學理的方法，頗有一點意見，寫出來請大家研究是否可用。

（１）輸入學說時應該注意那發生這種學說的時勢情形　凡是有生命的學說，都是時代的產兒，都是當時的某種不滿意的情形所發生的。這種時勢情形，乃是那學說所以出世的一個重要原因。若不懂得這種原因，便不能明白某人爲什麽要提倡某種主義。當時不滿意的時勢情形便是病症，當時發生的各種學說便是各位醫生擬的脈案和藥方。每種主義初起時，無論理想如何高超，無論是何種高遠的烏託邦，（例如柏拉圖的《共和國》），都只是一種對症下藥的藥方。這些藥方，有些是後來試驗過的，有些事從來不曾試驗過的。那些試驗過的（或是大試，或是小試），藥方遇着別時別國大同小異的症狀，也許可以適用，至少可以供一種參考。那些沒有試驗過的藥方，功用還不能決定，至多可以在大同小異的地方與時代，做一種參考的材料。但是若要知道一種主義，在何國何時是適用的，在何國何時是不適用的，我們須先知道那種主義發生的時勢情形和社會政治的狀態是個什麼樣子，然後可以有比較，然後可以下判斷。譬如藥方，若要知道某方是否可適用於某病，總得先知道當初開這方時的病狀，究竟是個什麼樣子。當初診察時的情形，寫的越詳細完備，那個藥方的參考作用便越大。單有一個藥方，或僅加上一個病名，是沒有甚麼大用的，是有時或致誤事的。一切學理主義，也是如此。一種主義發生時的社會政治情形越記的明白詳細，那種主義的意義越容易懂得完全，那種主義的參考作用也就越大。所以我說輸入學說時，應該注意那發生這種學說的時勢情形。

（２）輸入學說時應該注意『論主』的生平事實和他所受的學術影響　『論主』兩個字，是從佛書上借來的，論主就是主張某種學說的人。例如『馬克斯主義』的論主，便是馬克斯。學說是時代的產兒，但是學說又還代表某人某人的心思見解。一樣的病狀，張醫生說是肺炎，李醫生說是肺癆。爲什麽呢？因張先生和李先生的經驗不同，學力不齊，所受的教育不同，故見解不同。診察時的判斷不同，故藥方也不同了。一樣的時代，老聃的主張和孔丘不同。爲什麽呢？因爲老聃和孔丘的個人才性不同，家世不同，所受教育經驗不同，故他們的見解也不同。見解不同，故解決的方法也不同了。即如馬克斯一個人的事跡，就是一個明顯的例。我們研究馬克斯主義的人，知道馬克斯的學說，不但和當時的實業界情形，政治現狀，法國的社會主義運動等等，有密切關係，幷且和他一生的家世，（如他是一個叛猶太教的猶太人等事實），所受的教育影響，（如他少時研究歷史法律，後來受海智兒一派的歷史哲學影響等），都有絕大的關係。還有馬克斯以前一百年中的哲學思想，如十八世紀的進化論及唯物論等，都是馬克斯主義的無形元素，我們也不能不研究。我們須要知道凡是一種主義，一種學說，裏面有一部分是當日時勢的產兒，一部分是論主個人的特別性情家世的自然表現，一部分是論主所受古代或同時的學說影響的結果。我們若不能仔細分別，必致把許多不相干的偶然的個人怪僻的分子，當作有永久價值的眞理，那就上了古人的當了。我們對於論主的時勢固然應該注意，但是對於論主個人的事實與教育，也不可不注意。我們雇一個廚子，尚且要問他的家世經驗，討一個媳婦，尚且要打聽他的性情家教；何況現在介紹關於人生社會的重要主張，豈可不仔細研究論主的一生性情事實哪？

（３）輸入學說時應該注意每種學說所已經發生的效果　上面所說的兩種條件，都只是要我們注意所以發生某中學說的因緣。懂得這兩層因緣，便懂得論主何以要提倡這種學說。但是這樣還不算不得眞懂得這種和主義的價值和功用。凡是主義，都是想應用的，無論是老聃的無爲，或是佛家的四大皆空，都是想世間人信仰奉行的。那些已經充分實行，或是局部實行的主義，他們的價值功用，都可在他們實行時所發生的效果上分別出來。那些不曾實行的主義雖然表面上沒有效果可說，其實也有了許多效果，也發生了許多影響，不過我們不容易看出來罷了。因爲一種主張，到了成爲主義的地步，自然在思想界，學術界，發生一種無形的影響，範圍許多人的心思，變化許多人的言論行爲，改換許多制度風俗的性質。道都是效果，幷且是很重要的效果。即如老聃的學說未通行的時候，已能使孔丘不知不覺的承認『無爲之治』的理想；墨家的學說雖然衰滅了，無形之中，已替民間的鬼神迷信，添了一種學理上的辯護，又把儒家提倡的『樂教』的勢力滅了許多，又如法家的勢力，雖然被儒家征服了，但以後的儒家，便不能不承認刑法的功用。這種效果，無論是好是壞的，都極重要，都是各種主義的意義之眞實表現。我們觀察這種效果，便可格外明白各種學說所涵的意義，便可格外明白各種學說的功用價值。即如馬克斯主義的兩個重要部分：一是唯物的歷史觀，一是階級競爭說，（他的『贏餘價值說』，是經濟學的專門問題，此處不易討論）。唯物的歷史觀，指出物質文明與經濟組織在人類進化社會史上的重要，在史學上的開一個新紀元，替社會學開無數門徑，替政治學說開許多生路：這都是這種學說所涵意義表現，不單是這學說本身在社會主義運動史上的關係了。這種唯物的歷史觀，能否證明社會主義的必然實現，現在已不成問題，因爲現在社會主義的根據地，已不靠這種帶著海智兒臭味的歷史哲學了。但是這種歷史觀的附帶影響——眞意義——是不可埋沒的。又如階級戰爭說指出有產階級與無產階級不能幷立的理由，在社會主義運動史與工黨發展史上固然極重要。但是這種學說，太偏向申明『階級的自覺心』一方面，無形之中養成一種階級的仇視心，不但使勞動者認定資本家爲不能並立的仇敵，幷且使許多資本家也覺得勞動眞是一種敵人。這種仇視心的結果，使社會上本來應該互助而且可以互助的兩種大勢力，成爲兩座對壘的敵營，使許多建設的救濟方法成爲不可能，使歷史上演出許多本不須有的慘劇。這種種效果固然是階級競爭說本來的涵義，但是這些涵義實際表現的效果，都應該有公平的研究和批判，然後把原來的主義的價值與功用一一的表示出來。

以上所說的三種方法，總括起來，可叫做『歷史的態度』。凡對於每一種事物制度，總想尋出他的前因與後果，不把他當作一種來無蹤去無影的孤立東西，這種態度就是歷史的態度。我希望中國的學者，對於一切學理，一切主義，都能用這種歷史的態度去研究他們。

我且把上文所說的三條作一個表：

當日的時勢
論主的才性
古代學說的影響
同時思潮的影響

主義

政治上的影響
社會上的影響
思想上的影響
他項影響

這樣輸入的主義，一個個都是活人對於活問題的解釋與解決，一個個都有來歷可考，都有效果可尋。我們可拿每種主義的前因來說明那主義性質，再拿那主義所發生的種種效果來評判他的價值與功用。不明前因，便不能知道那主義本來是作什麽用的；不明後果，便不能知道那主義是究竟能不能作什麽用的。

輸入學說的人，若能如此存心，也許可以免去現在許多一知半解，半生不熟，生吞活剝的主義的弊害。

民國八年七月。