Tang Syau | 唐逍 Posts

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

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。

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.