Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life (Ep. 125)

On philosophy and rationale

论哲学和原理

What do you think is the most underrated tool in the rationality toolbox for practical reasoning?

您认为实用推理的理性工具箱中最被低估的工具是什么？

The tacit ideology is that people are supposed to know what they want already and then they try to figure out how to get it, but you learn what’s important and what matters from experience.

隐含的意识形态是，人们应该已经知道自己想要什么，然后他们尝试找出如何获得它，但你可以从经验中了解什么是重要的以及什么是重要的。

And if you don’t pay attention to your own experience, you’ll go off marching in some direction that you in the end are going to find probably really disappointing.

如果你不关注自己的经历，你就会朝着某个方向前进，最终你可能会发现它非常令人失望。

Yes, everyone somehow in the end pays attention, but it’s really underrated.

是的，每个人最终都会以某种方式关注，但它确实被低估了。

There’s a lot of that, but I think the other thing that is being overrated is what you think you already know about what’s important and what matters.

这样的事情有很多，但我认为另一件事被高估了，那就是你认为自己已经知道什么是重要的、什么是重要的。

It’s inertia.

这是惯性。

Inertia of your own assessments.

你自己评估的惯性。

Since I don’t know what’s wrong with the — whichever other argument it is, I don’t have a view.

因为我不知道 — 无论哪个其他论点有什么问题，所以我没有观点。

But let me say something a little bit to the meta level, and then I’ll speak to the view that I would be a one-boxer.

但让我在元层面上说一些话，然后我会谈谈我将成为一名单拳手的观点。

I live in a world where I feel disqualified from a privilege that almost everybody around me has.

在我生活的世界里，我感觉自己没有资格享受周围几乎每个人都拥有的特权。

People are supposed to have opinions about all kinds of things.

人们应该对各种事情有看法。

They have opinions about politics, and they have opinions about sports teams, and they have opinions about who knows what.

他们对政治有看法，对运动队有看法，对谁知道什么有看法。

I’m in the very peculiar position of being in a job where I’m paid to have opinions.

我的处境很奇特，我的工作是靠发表意见来获得报酬的。

I feel that I can’t have opinions unless I’ve worked for them and I can back them up, and that means that unless I’ve done my homework, unless I have an argument for the opinion, I don’t have it — so I don’t.

我觉得除非我为他们工作过并且我可以支持他们，否则我不能有意见，这意味着除非我做了功课，除非我对这个意见有论证，否则我就没有它 ——所以我没有。

Now, going back from the meta level, kind of one level down: let’s stop and think about what’s built into the .

现在，从元级别回到下一层：让我们停下来思考一下内置的内容。

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When you explain dominance to a classroom, you say, “Look, here are the different options you have,” and I guess the options are used to the column, “and here are the different states of the world, and you can see that for each state of the world this option does better than that option.

当你向课堂解释主导地位时，你会说，“看，这是你拥有的不同选项，”我猜这些选项用于专栏，“这是世界的不同状态，你可以看到对于世界的每个状态，这个选项都比那个选项更好。

So you should take .

所以你应该采取。

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There’s a lot built into that already.

其中已经内置了很多内容。

For example, that the world is carved up into these different — the state space is carved up, and your option space is carved up, and you don’t get to rethink, recharacterize — the characterization of the things that you do is already given to you, and it’s fixed.

例如，世界被分割成这些不同的 ——状态空间被分割，你的选择空间被分割，你无法重新思考、重新表征——你所做的事情的特征已经给你了，而且是固定的。

It’s an idealization.

这是一种理想化。

Until the situation arrived and I had a chance to face it and think about it, I wouldn’t know whether to accept that idealization.

直到情况到来，我有机会面对它并思考它时，我不知道是否要接受这种理想化。

I know that sounds really coy, but the principled view is that since I don’t have an argument, I don’t have an opinion.

我知道这听起来很腼腆，但原则性的观点是，既然我没有争论，我就没有意见。

Let’s say that the Quinean turn — there’s different versions of the Quinean turn, right?

假设奎因转 ——奎因转有不同的版本，对吗？

Different things you could mean by that.

你可能有不同的意思。

But let’s say that it means this: Quine’s slogan was “To be is to be the value of a variable.” So if you’re a philosopher, you’re doing metaphysics, and you want to say what the world is composed of.

但我们可以说，它的意思是这样的：蒯因的口号是“存在就是变量的值”。因此，如果你是一名哲学家，你正在研究形而上学，你想要说明世界是由什么组成的。

That’s kind of the — right?

这就是 —— 对吗？

Well, you have a theory which is continuous of science and maybe has logic at the very middle of it, but it’s all one seamless — this phrase was “web of belief” — and you see what the theory tells you exists, and of course that’s what you think exists.

好吧，你有一个连续的科学理论，也许在它的中间有逻辑，但它是一个无缝的 ——这个短语是“信仰之网” ——你看到理论告诉你的东西存在，当然这就是你认为存在的东西。

It sounds very low key and down to earth and naturalistic, but now .

这听起来非常低调、脚踏实地、自然主义，但现在。

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Quine went into his program thinking that what you start with, your raw material, is people agreeing and disagreeing with things — you show them a rabbit and you say “gavagai” and they say yes or no; they make an ascent or descent response, and you collect these and you build your interpretation up of the people, and then you — right?

蒯因在进入他的程序时认为，你的起点，你的原材料，是人们对事物的同意和不同意——你给他们看一只兔子，你说“gavagai”，他们会说是或否；他们做出上升或下降反应，你收集这些并建立你对人们的解释，然后你  -  对吗？

That assumes that you can already understand their ascents and descents before you understand everything else.

这是假设你在了解其他一切之前就已经了解了它们的上升和下降。

Now, Dave Barry has a really funny riff —

现在，戴夫·巴里（Dave Barry）有一段非常有趣的重复片段 ——

His riff is — I guess his wife is trying to book travel plans to Japan, and she can’t communicate with the travel agent because the travel agent doesn’t think she can say no politely.

他的即兴表演是 — 我猜他的妻子正在尝试预订去日本的旅行计划，但她无法与旅行社沟通，因为旅行社认为她不能礼貌地拒绝。

My problem isn’t so much that there’s circumlocution around saying no. Although you know if you ask somebody for a date — if somebody asks you for a date and you’re going to turn them down, you don’t do it by saying no. There’s other ways to do it.

我的问题不在于迂回地说“不”。尽管你知道如果你邀请某人约会 ——如果有人邀请你约会并且你打算拒绝他们，你不会通过拒绝来做到这一点。还有其他方法可以做到这一点。

My complaint is that all the interesting, informative responses to somebody asking me “Is that the way they are?” usually turn out to split the difference.

我的抱怨是，当有人问我“他们就是这样的吗？”时，所有有趣的、信息丰富的回答都是如此。通常结果是平分差额。

“Well, it’s true in a way.” “It’s kind of true.” “It’s sort of true.” “There’s something to that.” “It’s technically true.” “It’s officially true.” “It’s got a grain of truth in it.” I can go on like that.

“嗯，从某种程度上来说这是真的。” “这确实是真的。” “这确实是真的。” “这确实有道理。” “这在技术上是正确的。” “这是正式的事实。” “这有一定道理。”我可以这样继续下去。

You can’t understand that stuff without already speaking the language very, very fluently.

如果你没有非常非常流利地讲这种语言，你就无法理解这些东西。

Quine’s entry point into his program is a nonstarter.

奎因进入他的计划的切入点是不可能的。

I think it wasn’t going to go where he thought it was going to go.

我认为它不会去他认为会去的地方。

So you’re familiar with the Bayesian argument that an advanced civilization can create a lot of simulations.

所以你熟悉贝叶斯论点，即先进文明可以创建大量模拟。

Odds are, if you feel you’re alive, you’re in one of those simulations, right?

可能性是，如果你觉得自己还活着，那么你就处于这些模拟之一中，对吧？

What’s your counterargument?

你的反驳是什么？

If you were in a simulation, unless you simply had no taste, unless you were taste blind, you were aesthetically crippled, you’d be able to recognize the style.

如果你在模拟中，除非你根本没有品味，除非你味觉失明，审美有缺陷，否则你就能识别出这种风格。

It will be obvious .

这将是显而易见的。

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If it turned out that you looked and your world — there are parts of the world that are definitely styled.

如果事实证明你的外表和你的世界 —— 世界上的某些地方肯定是有风格的。

PT Cruisers.

PT 巡洋舰。

I don’t know if they’re still around, but they’re styled for sure.

我不知道它们是否还在，但它们的风格肯定是存在的。

These were cars that were meant as an allusion to, I guess, the Dick Tracy strip.

我猜这些汽车是为了暗示迪克·特雷西的地带。

I’ll fill in the argument.

我来补充一下论证。

If you think of them as sort of omnipotent, then I don’t know.

如果你认为他们是无所不能的，那我不知道。

This isn’t — I don’t think I can — if we get theological, I’m not confident anymore.

这不是 —— 我认为我不能 —— 如果我们得到神学，我就不再有信心了。

Think about it this way.

这样想吧。

The simulation we’re talking about (this we’ll have in common with the space aliens): it’s going to be complex.

我们正在谈论的模拟（这一点我们与太空外星人有共同点）：它会很复杂。

It has to be built up of many working parts.

它必须由许多工作部件组成。

The kind of working parts I mean — if you look at trade journals for the CGI industry, they enthuse over — people have figured out a way to make the backwash of a rocket look right; here’s how you do it.

我的意思是那种工作部件 ——如果你看看 CGI 行业的贸易期刊，他们会热情洋溢地告诉你——人们已经找到了一种方法，可以让火箭的反流看起来正确；方法如下。

People have figured out a way — there’s a really old Scientific American article which is nice as an example of this — people have figured out a way to make weathered surfaces look right.

人们已经找到了一种方法 ——《科学美国人》上有一篇非常古老的文章，作为一个很好的例子 ——人们已经找到了一种方法，可以让风化的表面看起来正确。

To get the simulation to look right, it has to be an accretion of a lot of these devices.

为了让模拟看起来正确，它必须增加许多这样的设备。

You’re looking at something that — you’re looking at a tradition in the background of the simulation, the tradition that builds up the devices and learns to integrate them and to produce these appearances.

你看到的是模拟背景中的传统，即构建设备并学习集成它们并产生这些外观的传统。

Now you ask what the result of having this tradition will be.

现在你问拥有这个传统会带来什么结果。

How are these devices going to make it into the tradition?

这些设备将如何成为传统？

Well, some of them will be realistic in some very naive sense, but some — they will strike the simulators as vividly realistic.

嗯，其中一些在某种非常幼稚的意义上是现实的，但有些——它们会给模拟器带来生动的现实感。

They’ll induce suspension of disbelief.

他们会让人停止怀疑。

Now there’s two possibilities: the simulators are like us or they’re not.

现在有两种可能性：模拟器和我们一样，或者不是。

If these devices are in there because they induce suspension of disbelief in them but not in us, if they’re there, then we’ll notice them immediately.

如果这些设备在那里，因为它们会引起人们对它们的怀疑，而不是对我们的怀疑，如果它们在那里，那么我们会立即注意到它们。

But if they are there because they do suspension of disbelief in people like us, suspension of disbelief requires complicity on your part.

但如果他们在那里是因为他们对我们这样的人停止了怀疑，那么停止怀疑就需要你的同谋。

There’s a recognition involved in it that you can train yourself to notice it.

其中涉及到一种认识，您可以训练自己注意到它。

So style in this sense, the creation of a repertoire of devices that work together to produce the appearance, pretty much guarantees that if you’re looking out for it, you’ll see it.

因此，从这个意义上说，风格，即创建一系列协同工作以产生外观的设备，几乎可以保证，如果您正在寻找它，您就会看到它。

Is that a useful tool of practical reasoning, or is that worthless?

这是实用推理的有用工具，还是毫无价值？

I talk to my philosophical conversation partner.

我和我的哲学对话伙伴交谈。

I’ve come up with an objection to her view or her argument, and she goes home and comes back.

我对她的观点或论点提出了反对意见，然后她就回家了。

And her argument has changed and the view has changed, but not to agree with me.

她的论点变了，观点也变了，但不同意我的观点。

But she has an objection to my view and my argument, and I take the point.

但她反对我的观点和论点，我接受了她的观点。

I go home, but I come back not agreeing with her.

我回家了，但回来后并不同意她的观点。

I come back with a — my view has mutated to swallow the objection, going in a different — right?

我带着一个 — 我的观点已经变异，吞下了反对意见，进入了一个不同的 — 对吧？

And I have a new argument.

我有一个新的论点。

Maybe philosophers are a special case, but these conversations — the really productive, interesting ones — they don’t seem to produce agreement.

也许哲学家是一个特例，但这些对话——“真正富有成效、有趣的对话”——他们似乎没有达成一致。

What I observe empirically is people move bit by bit toward a new position, and in essence, their position a week later from today is somewhat predictable — at least the direction of change from their position now.

我凭经验观察到，人们一点一点地转向新的立场，从本质上讲，从今天起一周后他们的立场在某种程度上是可以预测的——至少是从现在的立场变化的方向。

Maybe people are more interested in being interesting, a word you used, and they’re just not that much truth seekers, because the evolution should then be a random walk.

也许人们对变得有趣更感兴趣，这是你用的一个词，他们只是不太追求真理，因为进化应该是随机游走。

Now, maybe you think they’re all not truth seekers; they’re just after being interesting or something like that.

现在，也许你认为他们都不是真理探索者；他们都是真理的追求者。他们只是为了变得有趣或类似的东西。

But it’s hard to believe over that kind of stretch of time.

但在这么长的时间里很难相信。

Instead, it looks to me like there are patterns of ideas or dialectical patterns that people are forced into, that don’t produce the convergence but which they’re helpless against.

相反，在我看来，人们被迫接受某些思想模式或辩证模式，这些模式不会产生趋同，但他们却又无可奈何。

I even have a meta example from last night.

我什至有昨晚的元示例。

I once wrote a paper where I argued that philosophy goes in cycles.

我曾经写过一篇论文，认为哲学是循环的。

The positions evolve in a predictable way, and then they collapse and somebody reinvents the wheel again.

这些职位以可预测的方式演变，然后崩溃，有人再次重新发明轮子。

Sure enough, I’m reading — I guess I’m not sure how you pronounce his name; it’s either Étienne Gilson or Gilson , right?

果然，我正在读 —— 我想我不知道你如何发音他的名字；要么是艾蒂安·吉尔森，要么是吉尔森，对吧？

On Nietzsche as a philosopher

论尼采作为哲学家

The project you’re working on now is a new book project.

您现在正在进行的项目是一个新书项目。

It’s tentatively titled Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?

暂定标题为“为什么尼采没有行动起来？”

Right?

正确的？

But when I read Nietzsche today, he doesn’t actually seem to me like a great philosopher; he seems to me like a once-important philosopher, that so much of his work is very context specific.

但今天当我读尼采时，我觉得他实际上并不像一位伟大的哲学家；他是一位伟大的哲学家。在我看来，他就像一位曾经重要的哲学家，他的大部分著作都是针对特定背景的。

“Will to power” is a phenomenal insight, but we now have better explications of the will to power.

“权力意志”是一个非凡的见解，但我们现在对权力意志有了更好的解释。

If I look at his maxims, they seem to me worse than what I see on Twitter every day.

如果我看看他的格言，我会发现它们比我每天在推特上看到的还要糟糕。

So I pulled a few out from the Sue Prideaux book on Nietzsche.

所以我从苏·普里多（Sue Prideaux）关于尼采的书中摘录了一些内容。

Let me just read three of them.

让我读一下其中的三篇。

One: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Another: “Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice.” The final one: “The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” Now, none of those seem very profound to me; they seem OK.

一：“没有事实，只有解释。”另：“即使是最美丽的风景，在我们住了三个月之后也不再能保证我们的爱情，而一些遥远的海岸会吸引我们的贪婪。”最后一个：“损害一项事业的最背信弃义的方式就是故意用错误的论据来捍卫它。”现在，这些对我来说似乎都不是很深奥。他们看起来还不错。

Like I said, worse than Twitter.

就像我说的，比 Twitter 还糟糕。

I understand the historic importance of Nietzsche — but why is he today a great philosopher that we can learn from?

我理解尼采的历史重要性——但为什么他今天成为我们可以学习的伟大哲学家呢？

But I want to step back a second and ask — and think about the form for a moment.

但我想退后一步问一下“并考虑一下形式”。

Some of these quotes, they belong to a period where Nietzsche was trying to be the next Rochefoucauld, right?

其中一些引言属于尼采试图成为下一个罗什福科的时期，对吗？

So they sort of sound like Rochefoucauld.

所以他们听起来有点像罗什福科。

Let me try to point out two or three ways of seeing Nietzsche that make him out to be philosophically interesting.

让我尝试指出两三种看待尼采的方式，这些方式使尼采在哲学上变得有趣。

One of the reasons for the choppiness is that Nietzsche couldn’t work for more than 20 minutes straight.

造成这种不稳定的原因之一是尼采不能连续工作超过20分钟。

He simply couldn’t stay on point.

他根本无法坚持要点。

He was really sick.

他真的病了。

As I’m sure you know, and I guess people listening to this probably know, during the period he was writing the books that we think of as most characteristically Nietzschean, he was coming apart at the seams.

我相信你知道，而且我想听这个的人可能知道，在他写我们认为最具尼采特色的书的时期，他正在分崩离析。

His life was a series of lurches from one plateau of psychic disintegration to the next one down until finally, I guess, he collapsed.

他的生活经历了一系列的坎坷，从一个精神崩溃的阶段到下一个阶段，直到最后，我猜，他崩溃了。

In the last 10 years of his life, he was first a psychiatric patient and then a ward of his mother and then a ward of his sister, and he was a coma boy for a lot of that.

在他生命的最后十年里，他首先是一名精神病患者，然后是他母亲的监护人，然后是他姐姐的监护人，他在很多时候都是一个昏迷的男孩。

He was coming apart, and his writing style reflects that.

他正在分崩离析，他的写作风格反映了这一点。

If you’re a philosopher but also not if you’re a philosopher — if you’re a philosopher, you take for granted a way of thinking about people that — you can think of it as a notation that we don’t have an alternative to.

如果你是一个哲学家，但也不是如果你是一个哲学家 —— 如果你是一个哲学家，你会理所当然地认为一种思考人的方式 —— 你可以将其视为我们没有其他选择的符号。

You ask, “What does he think?” It’s as though there’s a hook, and then there are the various beliefs or things the person wants or is after that sort of hang off of that hook.

你问：“他怎么想？”就好像有一个钩子，然后这个人想要或在摆脱这个钩子之后就有各种信念或事物。

Built into that picture is a kind of presumption of a certain amount of coordination and consistency and taking responsibility for those attitudes.

这张图片中内置了一种对一定程度的协调和一致性的假设，并对这些态度负责。

This is the default view in philosophy.

这是哲学中的默认观点。

The phrase that you’ll see to label this is unity of agency.

你会看到标记这一点的短语是代理的统一。

There’s a lot of discussion, starting with Harry Frankfurt maybe in about 1970, of what it takes to get that full ownership.

从 1970 年左右开始，关于如何才能获得完全所有权，人们进行了很多讨论，从哈里·法兰克福开始。

The assumption always is that it’s a good thing, and mostly we have it.

人们总是认为这是一件好事，而且大多数情况下我们都拥有它。

People who don’t are lost causes, hopeless.

不这样做的人就会失败、绝望。

Here’s another: You know Nietzsche was — if you had to describe his program in a phrase, it would be — the program he’s offering people would be inventing values.

这是另一个：你知道尼采是“如果你必须用一个短语来描述他的计划，那就是他为人们提供的计划将创造价值。

Let me give you a characterization of — nowadays (not in Nietzsche’s own day) we have a subspecialty of philosophy, metaethics, which you can think of as the metaphysics of values or of the things you should do.

让我给你一个描述——当今（不是在尼采的时代）我们有哲学的一个分支，元伦理学，你可以将其视为价值观或你应该做的事情的形而上学。

For about 100 years, over the course of the 20th century, if you were thinking metaethics, you basically fell in one of two camps.

在大约 100 年的时间里，在整个 20 世纪，如果你思考元伦理学，你基本上属于两个阵营之一。

You could be — I hate this phrase, but you could be a moral realist.

你可以是 —— 我讨厌这句话，但你可以是一个道德现实主义者。

You think that the values are out there already and what you should do is some special fact, and you just have to be responsive to this truth, this fact about what you have to do or what’s important.

你认为价值观已经存在，你应该做的是一些特殊的事实，你只需要对这个事实做出反应，这个事实关于你必须做什么或什么是重要的。

Or you could be (I hate this word too) a noncognitivist.

或者你可能是（我也讨厌这个词）一个非认知主义者。

The evaluations, or the shoulds: they’re expressions of your feelings, or they’re commands that you give other people and maybe also yourself, or they’re expressions of your commitments that you’ve taken on.

评价或应该：它们是你的感受的表达，或者是你向他人（也许还有你自己）发出的命令，或者是你所承担的承诺的表达。

Now, notice what happened in that ethics.

现在，请注意道德规范中发生的事情。

Whichever branch you took, this was a mythologizing of the abdication of responsibility.

无论你选择哪一个分支，这都是对放弃责任的神话化。

It’s making it OK to be the subject in the Milgram experiments.

这使得成为米尔格拉姆实验的对象变得很容易。

(No relation.)

（没有关系。）

Yes.

是的。

So if the facts about what you should do are already out there — well, you’re not responsible.

因此，如果关于你应该做什么的事实已经存在 —— 好吧，你不需要负责。

You’re just doing what the — and if it’s, like, your feelings, well, you’re not responsible for your feelings and you can’t control them.

你只是在做那些事情，如果是你的感受，那么你不需要对自己的感受负责，你也无法控制它们。

When Nietzsche says what you do with values is invent them — we’ve done that always inadvertently, but now it’s time to do it self-consciously.

当尼采说你对价值观所做的就是发明它们时——我们总是在不经意间这样做，但现在是时候有意识地这样做了。

Not all the same for everybody; you could have idiosyncratic values, you could have temporary values, and they’re not whims.

并非每个人都一样；你可以有特殊的价值观，你可以有临时的价值观，而且它们不是突发奇想。

No more than other inventions, maybe the ones coming out of — you’re in San Francisco now, right?

只不过是其他发明，也许那些来自 —— 你现在在旧金山，对吧？

The ones coming out of Silicon Valley.

那些来自硅谷的人。

They’re not whims.

他们不是心血来潮。

If they fly, there’s a story about why they make sense.

如果它们能飞，就会有一个故事来解释它们为何有意义。

That’s an invitation to assume the responsibility that, within philosophy anyway, people have gone very far out of their way to slough off.

这是对承担责任的邀请，无论如何，在哲学中，人们已经竭尽全力地摆脱了这种责任。

That’s a big deal.

这是一件大事。

It’s one way to think about it again, in this next-step thing.

在下一步的事情中，这是重新思考它的一种方式。

The alternative that’s been emerging to these two camps in the last maybe few decades sometimes gets called constructivism.

在过去的几十年里，这两个阵营出现的另一种选择有时被称为建构主义。

One way to think about Nietzsche’s proposal is it’s in the spirit of constructivism, but it’s much more sophisticated.

思考尼采的提议的一种方式是，它本着建构主义的精神，但它要复杂得多。

It’s a few steps up from where we are right now.

距离我们现在的位置还有几步之遥。

We’re in a place where that gesture will help some people to appreciate it, but he’s doing way better than we are.

我们所处的位置，这种姿态会帮助一些人欣赏它，但他做得比我们好得多。

We have many parts of the world where Christianity is not as important anymore.

在世界上许多地方，基督教不再那么重要。

The gospels that have replaced the previous influence of Christianity — they’re not like Zarathustra very much at all.

取代了基督教先前影响的福音书——它们一点也不像查拉图斯特拉。

It just seems empirically wrong to me.

对我来说，这在经验上似乎是错误的。

I take you as presenting the Heinrich Meier view that the book Zarathustra is a parody rather than an honest attempt to create a successor to Christianity.

我认为你提出了海因里希·迈耶的观点，即《查拉图斯特拉如是说》这本书是一部戏仿作品，而不是创造基督教继承者的诚实尝试。

Why is that an interesting project under either interpretation at this point in time?

为什么在这个时间点，无论哪种解释，这都是一个有趣的项目？

Nietzsche thought it was his most significant work.

尼采认为这是他最重要的作品。

When I read it, I’m actually bored.

当我读到它的时候，我其实很无聊。

Of course, I had to make sure.

当然，我必须确认一下。

I actually trekked off to Weimar to look at Nietzsche’s personal library.

事实上，我长途跋涉前往魏玛参观尼采的私人图书馆。

I even equipped myself to be a spy, an industrial spy, because I needed to see his marginalia.

我什至让自己成为一名间谍，一名工业间谍，因为我需要看到他的旁注。

You know that German handwriting has changed in the last hundred years along with the printed script.

您知道，在过去的一百年里，德语手写体随着印刷文字的变化而发生了变化。

I didn’t know that I could read it, but I also thought they wouldn’t let me photocopy it, so I brought a concealed camera so that I could take pictures of the pages.

我不知道我能读懂它，但我也认为他们不会让我复印它，所以我带了一个隐藏的相机，以便我可以拍摄页面的照片。

But of course then I didn’t have to.

但当然我不必这样做。

Mostly, Nietzsche — it turns out he underlines, and even I can read an underline; I don’t have to read Gothic handwriting.

大多数情况下，尼采——结果他划了下划线，甚至我也能读懂下划线；我不必阅读哥特式手写体。

Meier thinks (the guy you mentioned) — he thinks that Zarathustra is a parody of the New Testament.

迈尔认为（你提到的那个人） ——他认为《查拉图斯特拉》是对《新约》的戏仿。

That’s not exactly right.

这并不完全正确。

It is a parody of the New Testament, but also of the Old Testament, and also apparently of the Quran, and also of Buddhist writings that Nietzsche knew about.

它是对《新约》的戏仿，也是对《旧约》的戏仿，显然也是对《古兰经》的戏仿，也是对尼采所知道的佛教著作的戏仿。

It’s meant to be a parody or satire of religious scripture, but not the scripture of any particular religion.

它是对宗教经文的模仿或讽刺，但不是任何特定宗教的经文。

My entry point is more the Bible we’re familiar with because we have both Nietzsche’s copy of a book about the Old Testament, with his markings, so we know how he read it.

我的切入点更多是我们熟悉的《圣经》，因为我们都有尼采的一本关于《旧约》的书，上面有他的标记，所以我们知道他是如何阅读的。

We don’t have his copy anymore, but we know that he read David Strauss’s Life of Jesus.

我们不再有他的书，但我们知道他读过大卫·施特劳斯的《耶稣传》。

Here’s how this ties to the program of inventing values that I described for you a few steps back.

这就是这与我之前为您描述的创造价值计划的关系。

Nietzsche writes Zarathustra as the holy text of a nonexistent religion in a way that conforms to the views of the critics he was reading.

尼采将《查拉图斯特拉如是说》写成一个不存在的宗教的圣典，其方式符合他所读到的批评家的观点。

This is a school of Bible criticism that we’ve pretty much forgotten about.

这是一个我们几乎已经忘记的圣经批评学派。

The common denominator of this school, the shared view, is that the people who actually write the holy texts of a religion come much later, and they systematically misunderstand and misrepresent and have — their own values are flipped upside down from the values of the founder, and so they misrepresent the history and the doctrines of the person founding the religion completely.

这个学派的共同点，即共同的观点是，真正撰写宗教经典的人来得晚得多，他们有系统地误解和歪曲，并且他们自己的价值观与创始人的价值观颠倒过来，因此他们完全歪曲了宗教创立者的历史和教义。

Zarathustra is obviously meant to somehow stand in for Nietzsche’s views.

查拉图斯特拉显然是想以某种方式代表尼采的观点。

He talks about views that are familiar from other works.

他谈到了其他作品中常见的观点。

It seems to me that the exercise is to show that if you try to institutionalize the values Nietzsche wants you to invent and the values he’s inventing, if you try to make it — in the way that a religion institutionalizes values, the results will be completely perverse.

在我看来，这个练习是为了表明，如果你试图将尼采希望你发明的价值观和他正在发明的价值观制度化，如果你试图以宗教将价值观制度化的方式，结果将是完全相反的。

They’ll be turned upside down and inside out.

他们将被颠倒过来。

That’s the last thing you want.

这是你最不想要的。

In Zarathustra — this just seems interesting to me — Nietzsche is setting up a problem which he tries to solve in the books he was working on till the end of his life, for the rest of his life.

在《查拉图斯特拉如是说》中——“这对我来说似乎很有趣”——“尼采正在提出一个问题，他试图在书中解决这个问题，直到他生命的最后一刻，在他的余生中。

The awfulness of the — I mean the schlockiness of the book, the horrific sentimentality and sappiness, and the over-the-top — all of that stuff, that’s Nietzsche showing you what scripture looks like.

可怕的——我指的是这本书的粗俗，可怕的多愁善感和愚蠢，以及过分的——所有这些东西，这就是尼采向你展示的圣经是什么样子。

But there’s an internal flip side to that.

但这也有其内部的另一面。

You have to change people’s tastes so that the new value becomes natural to them, that you’re changing their sensibility.

你必须改变人们的品味，让新的价值观对他们来说变得自然，你正在改变他们的感受力。

I think Zarathustra’s surface style is meant as an illustration of what that sensibility would look to us now, before we have it.

我认为《查拉图斯特拉如是说》的表面风格是为了说明在我们拥有这种情感之前，我们现在会看到这种情感。

You’re supposed to look at this .

你应该看看这个。

.

。

.

。

If you look at the King James Bible, it’s a classic of English literature.

如果你看一下《英皇钦定本圣经》，你会发现它是英国文学的经典之作。

It’s up there with Shakespeare; every sentence almost is quotable.

它与莎士比亚齐名；每句话几乎都可以引用。

It’s just wonderful, right?

太棒了，对吧？

If you look at Luther’s Bible in German also, it’s a classic of the German language.

如果你也看看德语版的路德圣经，它是德语的经典。

Every sentence is quotable.

每句话都可以引用。

And If you look at the Hebrew Bible, it’s a reference point for every modern Hebrew-writing author, right?

如果你看一下希伯来语圣经，它是每个现代希伯来语作家的参考点，对吗？

It’s a classic.

这是一个经典。

If you look at the Quran .

如果你看《古兰经》。

.

。

.

。

OK, how can this happen?

好吧，怎么会发生这种事呢？

There’s two explanations.

有两种解释。

One is that every time somebody writes a holy book, it turns out to be a classic of world literature just on its own.

一是每当有人写出一本圣书时，它本身就成为世界文学的经典。

The other possibility is when a book occupies a particular role in a culture, when it’s that sort of reference point, the sensibilities of people in the culture reshape themselves around the book so that it is in retrospect a classic.

另一种可能性是，当一本书在一种文化中占据特定的角色时，当它成为那种参考点时，该文化中人们的情感就会围绕这本书重塑自己，从而使之成为经典。

Zarathustra, which is awful schlock, is inviting you to think, “What would have to happen to me for me to look at this book and have it seem to me as though it were like the King James, a classic of world literature?” At that point, you’re supposed to go, “Whoa, maybe this is a decision I need to think twice about.”

《查拉图斯特拉如是说》是一本很糟糕的书，它邀请你思考：“如果我看到这本书，并且让它看起来像《詹姆斯国王》那样的世界文学经典，那么我身上会发生什么？”那时，你应该说，“哇，也许这是我需要三思而后行的决定。”

The point is sort of a relative of — I don’t know if you remember Martha Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness.

这个点有点像 —— 我不知道你是否还记得玛莎·努斯鲍姆的《善良的脆弱》。

Nussbaum goes on to talk a little bit about what the world is like in which people have done this: Tragedy doesn’t make sense to them anymore because there are no tragic choices; it’s just a matter of quantities of pleasure.

努斯鲍姆接着谈到了人们这样做的世界是什么样子：悲剧对他们来说不再有意义，因为不存在悲剧性的选择；这只是快乐数量的问题。

If your friend or lover dies, it doesn’t matter because they were just the bearer of a certain quantity of pleasure, and you go look for the pleasure elsewhere.

如果你的朋友或爱人去世了，那也没关系，因为他们只是一定数量的快乐的承载者，而你却去别处寻找快乐。

The idea is you’re supposed to start to look inhuman.

这个想法是你应该开始看起来不人道。

Then you’re supposed to think, “What kind of decision was it supposed to be, anyway?

然后你应该想：“无论如何，这应该是一个什么样的决定？

We’re supposed to be looking to the reform program to make things better for us.” Better by whose lights?

我们应该寻求改革计划来让我们的情况变得更好。”谁的灯更好？

I think Nietzsche is prodding you in the same way.

我认为尼采也在以同样的方式刺激你。

On John Stuart Mill as a philosopher

约翰·斯图尔特·密尔作为哲学家

A life that’s full of projects in the plural might well be fine, I think.

我认为，充满复数项目的生活可能会很好。

But it really does matter, and here’s I think why.

但这确实很重要，我想这就是原因。

If you have one big project, a project that you think is the meaning of your life, or that has that function, that role: Not only does it tend to push everything else out, but you end up being very, very focused on getting the project to cohere internally, figuring out how to make all the parts fit together.

如果你有一个大项目，一个你认为对你生命有意义的项目，或者具有那个功能、那个角色：它不仅倾向于将其他一切都推倒出去，而且你最终会非常非常专注于让项目内部保持一致，弄清楚如何使所有部分组合在一起。

As your very, very ambitious project gets more and more tightly wound .

随着您非常非常雄心勃勃的项目变得越来越紧。

.

。

.

。

Here’s the actual punchline of the book: If what you were looking for was the unified project that will occupy your whole life and be the meaning of your life, as the project gets more and more tightly wound, it starts to develop fissures and you end up not having the unified project and the unified life.

这本书的真正妙语是这样的：如果你正在寻找一个统一的项目，它将占据你的一生，成为你生命的意义，那么随着这个项目越来越紧，它就会开始出现裂痕，你最终会失去统一的项目和统一的生活。

It’s like Hume’s card players, except you get to be in Parliament and write incredible books and essays.

这就像休谟的纸牌玩家，只不过你要进入议会并写出令人难以置信的书籍和论文。

If at the end of it all it wasn’t that coherent, Mill’s self-deception kicked in.

如果到最后一切还不是那么连贯的话，穆勒的自欺欺人就开始了。

He still thought he did wonderful things; it was a somewhat self-validating self-deception.

他仍然认为自己做了很棒的事情；这是一种自我验证的自我欺骗。

Why should we be so worried about that?

我们为什么要这么担心呢？

Take the people who did the mRNA vaccines: they had these incredible projects, which — the vaccines work; there’s a coherence to that.

以研发 mRNA 疫苗的人为例：他们有这些令人难以置信的项目，这些项目使得疫苗发挥了作用；这是有连贯性的。

By the end of their lives, they’re likely to feel very good about this.

在他们生命的尽头，他们可能会对此感觉非常好。

Why don’t we just take the money and run, and applaud?

我们为什么不拿了钱就跑，然后鼓掌呢？

Of course, what roles something can play depends on what the architecture of the personality in the life is.

当然，一个东西能扮演什么角色取决于生活中人格的架构是什么。

People have differently structured personalities.

人们具有不同结构的个性。

Mill is interesting to me because he was a very mobilized personality.

我对密尔很感兴趣，因为他是一个非常积极主动的人。

I mean he accomplished remarkable amounts, and it’s all very, very structured: subprojects inside subprojects inside subprojects.

我的意思是，他取得了巨大的成就，而且一切都非常非常结构化：子项目内的子项目内的子项目。

He was able to sustain this over most of his life.

他能够在一生的大部分时间里维持这种状态。

For him, for a personality like that, the natural role for the meaning of his life is to be something that guides action, because he’s so good at acting.

对于他来说，对于这样的性格，他生命的意义自然就是指导行动，因为他太擅长表演了。

At the other extreme (we were already talking about Nietzsche), you have somebody who is completely disintegrated.

在另一个极端（我们已经在谈论尼采），你会看到一个完全崩溃的人。

Giving him a big project, to which he’ll refer his decisions, that’s simply not going to work because he can’t make plans and execute them.

给他一个大项目，让他参考他的决定，这根本行不通，因为他无法制定计划并执行它们。

For him, something you’d think — he invented a number of values that you could think of as successive meanings of his life for the different configurations of his disintegrating personality, and because they couldn’t tell him what to do, they had a different role.

对他来说，你会认为他发明了许多价值观，你可以将这些价值观视为他的生活的连续意义，以适应他正在瓦解的个性的不同配置，并且因为它们无法告诉他该做什么，所以它们扮演着不同的角色。

It’s like by appealing, by serving as a pole star to his different psychologic — his psychic parts, they could keep the parts flying more or less in the same configuration, and that’s how Nietzsche managed to actually write his last books.

这就像通过吸引他，通过充当他不同心理的北极星——他的精神部分，他们可以让这些部分或多或少地以相同的配置飞行，这就是尼采真正写出他最后几本书的方式。

For people, I guess, like myself, and I suppose most of us, who are somewhere in the middle, who aren’t so tightly wired — as wired as Mill or as fragmented as Nietzsche, there are other functions a meaning of life could have.

我想，对于像我自己这样的人，以及我们大多数人来说，他们处于中间的某个位置，没有像密尔那样紧密相连，也没有像尼采那样支离破碎，生命的意义还可以具有其他功能。

On the Mill extreme, I think what you see in Mill is that turning your life into a single unified project and being as tightly wired as that isn’t, in fact, an option; it doesn’t work out to be as tightly wired as that, and so you should just give it up as an objective.

在米尔的极端，我认为你在米尔身上看到的是，把你的生活变成一个单一的统一项目，并像这样紧密地联系起来，事实上，这不是一种选择；而是一种选择。它并没有那么紧密，所以你应该放弃它作为一个目标。

The thing you might end up with might look to you like you’re pursuing a single project, if you’re self-deceived about it, as you say, but we’re already moving towards the middle of the spectrum.

正如你所说，如果你对此自欺欺人，那么你最终可能会觉得你正在追求一个单一的项目，但我们已经朝着中间的方向发展了。

But people are built differently.

但人的构造不同。

Again, if you think of there’s something like a spectrum, with more tightly wired people on one end and more disintegrated people on the other end and different configurations in the middle, it’s not as though there’s any one thing we should be encouraging people to do.

再说一次，如果你想到有一个类似频谱的东西，一端有更紧密联系的人，另一端有更多分散的人，中间有不同的配置，那么我们不应该鼓励人们做任何一件事。

Different ways of approaching their lives are going to suit different people.

不同的生活方式适合不同的人。

Bentham on usury is smarter than Adam Smith — on gay rights, on animal welfare.

边沁在高利贷问题上比亚当·斯密更聪明——在同性恋权利和动物福利问题上。

His pamphlet on interest-bearing currency.

他关于计息货币的小册子。

Fragment on Government is quite good.

关于政府的片段相当不错。

Mill sees this, so why be so down on Bentham?

密尔看到了这一点，那么为什么如此看不起边沁呢？

Why isn’t he just a brilliant, wonderful philosopher with serious limitations — along with most of the other brilliant, wonderful philosophers?

为什么他不像其他大多数才华横溢、出色的哲学家一样，只是一位才华横溢、出色的哲学家，但有严重的局限性？

OK, think about it this way.

好吧，这样想吧。

Mill — because I’m interested in Mill under the heading of thinking about the meaning of life.

米尔 ——因为我对米尔在思考生命意义的标题下感兴趣。

Mill started out as a protégé of Jeremy Bentham, and so Bentham’s view of the utilitarian project is we all struggle out of our teenage conceptions of what we’re about and what we’re going to do.

密尔一开始是杰里米·边沁 (Jeremy Bentham) 的门生，因此边沁对功利主义项目的看法是，我们都在努力摆脱青少年时期关于我们是什么和我们要做什么的观念。

Sometimes we turn our back on them, right?

有时我们会背弃他们，对吗？

That’s normal.

这很正常。

Sometimes what we do, and this is what Mill did, is he worked his way to a different version of the utilitarian program that he was comfortable with and that he could live in.

有时我们所做的，这就是穆勒所做的，是他努力实现一个他感到满意并且可以生活在其中的不同版本的功利主义计划。

That meant fighting his way out from under the father figure’s conception of that program and of the key concepts in it, like utility.

这意味着他要从父亲形象对该计划及其关键概念（如效用）的观念中挣脱出来。

So it’s not surprising that there’s an emotional tone that I see in that essay of somebody dismissing their father.

因此，我在这篇文章中看到某人对自己父亲不屑一顾的情绪基调，这并不奇怪。

Even though he does recognize that Bentham had real accomplishments, there’s still that tone.

尽管他确实承认边沁有真正的成就，但仍然是那种语气。

On Pierre Hadot as a philosopher

论作为哲学家的皮埃尔·阿多

The philosophical texts that survive, that we keep reading, all have this feature, or we wouldn’t keep reading them.

现存的、我们不断阅读的哲学文本都有这个特征，否则我们就不会继续阅读它们。

The objection to written philosophy, as opposed to philosophy as dialogue — maybe it’s been addressed, though not all of us can do it — I don’t know if I can do it.

对书面哲学的反对，而不是作为对话的哲学 ——“也许它已经被解决了，尽管不是我们所有人都能做到”—— 我不知道我是否能做到。

You said yourself about Mill in your book — the fact that he in some ways had to attempt to rule parts of India made you think much more of him as a political philosopher, right?

你在书中谈到了穆勒——事实上，他在某种程度上不得不试图统治印度的部分地区，这让你更多地认为他是一位政治哲学家，对吗？

I’m an enthusiast for, recently, Norbert Elias, who I guess started out as a philosopher, but we remember him for The History of Manners, which is something else entirely.

最近，我很喜欢诺伯特·埃利亚斯（Norbert Elias），我猜他一开始是一位哲学家，但我们因为《礼仪史》而记住了他，而这完全是另一回事。

And yes, you have to — I just finished reading the — I guess it’s the latest iteration of the Boyd and Richerson project.

是的，你必须 —— 我刚刚读完 —— 我想这是博伊德和里森项目的最新版本。

It’s a book by, I guess, a student of one of theirs, Joseph Henrich.

我猜这是他们的学生约瑟夫·亨利奇写的一本书。

If you’re too narrowly boxed into your field, especially if it’s philosophy, that won’t be good for you — but then there is also this: it’s often hard to get the nonphilosophers to engage you philosophically in the way that a philosopher would.

如果你对自己的领域太过狭隘，特别是如果它是哲学，那对你不利 —— 但还有一个问题：通常很难让非哲学家以哲学家的方式与你进行哲学接触。

Talking with philosophers ends up being a large part of your diet.

与哲学家交谈最终成为你饮食的重要组成部分。

On what it is to be philosophical

论什么是哲学

Philosophy is an applied science.

哲学是一门应用科学。

It’s the machine-tool industry of the mind.

这是心灵的机床工业。

We make the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools.

我们制造智力工具，制造智力工具。

We’re engineering and engineering science.

我们是工程和工程科学。

We’re very high up in the value chain so people don’t notice, but that’s what we do.

我们在价值链中处于很高的位置，所以人们不会注意到，但这就是我们所做的。

On that take, I have all of these colleagues — most of my colleagues who think that what they’re doing is completely useless, and they’re proud of it.

在这一点上，我所有的同事——我的大多数同事都认为他们所做的事情完全没有用，他们为此感到自豪。

They have the attitude that John Dewey complained about where you think of yourself as a member of the leisure class and you’re glad that you don’t do anything useful.

他们的态度就像约翰·杜威所抱怨的那样，你认为自己是有闲阶级的一员，而你很高兴自己没有做任何有用的事情。

There’s a second take on philosophy that I can’t get away from, which is that it’s a response of a certain kind to the imperative of the Delphic oracle: “Know thyself.” Philosophy requires you not to take things for granted and just — OK, I had a colleague in a previous job who remarked to me that there’s a phrase that nonphilosophers use that philosophers never use.

我无法摆脱对哲学的第二种看法，那就是它是对德尔斐神谕“认识你自己”的某种要求的回应。哲学要求你不要把事情视为理所当然，只是 —— 好吧，我之前工作的一位同事对我说，有一个短语非哲学家使用，哲学家却从不使用。

It’s starting a sentence with “My philosophy is,” and he pointed out that what’s going to follow is some view that the person simply will not reconsider or give up — but that’s not what philosophy is about.

它以“我的哲学是”开始一个句子，他指出接下来会出现一些人们根本不会重新考虑或放弃的观点——但这不是哲学的意义所在。

Philosophy is about noticing that there’s something you’ve been taking for granted, and maybe it’s time to have second thoughts about it.

哲学是要注意到有些事情你一直认为是理所当然的，也许是时候重新考虑它了。

Again, if that’s your view of what philosophy requires, there are a great many people in my line of work who don’t live up to that.

再说一次，如果这就是你对哲学要求的看法，那么在我的工作中，有很多人没有达到这一点。

That is just disappointing.

这真是令人失望。

They’re just very, very confident in the way they do things, and they’re not going to have second thoughts.

他们只是对自己做事的方式非常非常有信心，而且不会再三思而后行。

Then there’s a third way of seeing what philosophy is.

还有第三种方式来了解什么是哲学。

It’s got central questions that somehow don’t go away.

它的核心问题无论如何都不会消失。

Plato’s Socrates asks — the question is, How should you live?

柏拉图笔下的苏格拉底问道：“问题是，你应该如何生活？”

That’s one of them, and Kant had these four questions, right?

这是其中之一，康德有这四个问题，对吗？

What can you know, what should you do, and what can you hope for — and the fourth question was, What is it to be a human being?

你能知道什么，你应该做什么，你能期待什么 ——第四个问题是，作为一个人是什么？

I think one of these questions is, What’s the meaning of life?

我认为这些问题之一是，生命的意义是什么？

Well, just on that last score, the meaning of life in analytic philosophy has been pushed to the very, very, very, very distant margins of the field instead of getting — as I think it should get — our most serious attention.

好吧，就最后一点来说，分析哲学中生命的意义已经被推到了该领域非常非常非常遥远的边缘，而不是得到“——正如我认为它应该得到的——”我们最认真的关注。

So, when you ask that question, I end up feeling sort of depressed.

所以，当你问这个问题时，我最终感到有点沮丧。

Is it that the philosophers have such better answers, but the rest of us are not up to digesting them?

难道哲学家们有更好的答案，而我们其他人却无法消化它们？

Or are philosophers simply not usefully engaged with those questions?

或者哲学家根本就没有有效地参与这些问题？

What’s your diagnosis of what’s going on there?

您对那里发生的情况有何诊断？

Because there’s articles about trolley problems for what, 50, 60 years?

因为有关于电车难题的文章已经有 50 年、60 年了？

And at the end of the day, there’s —

归根结底，还有——

I mean, think about that genre of philosophizing.

我的意思是，想想那种哲学思考的类型。

There’s some kind of a thought experiment, maybe something about a trolley swerving from one track to the other and — or, I mean, there were a lot of these thought experiments.

有某种思想实验，也许是关于一辆电车从一条轨道转向另一条轨道的事情，或者，我的意思是，有很多这样的思想实验。

Maybe thought experiments about cutting people’s brains in half and putting them in different bodies.

也许可以考虑将人的大脑切成两半并将它们放入不同的身体中的实验。

Philosophers invite people to have reactions, snap judgments.

哲学家邀请人们做出反应，做出快速判断。

These snap judgments get dignified with the term intuition, but they’re just snap judgments.

这些仓促的判断被“直觉”这个词冠以尊严，但它们只是仓促的判断。

You might think, “What could the value of these snap judgments be, and why would you want to systematize them?

你可能会想，“这些仓促判断的价值是什么？为什么要将它们系统化？

Why would you think they were worth anything at all?”

你为什么认为它们有价值？”

That’s a very, very — this is the methodology in philosophy that when you know that something has been produced by this methodology, you should go into it being very skeptical that anything of value could come out of it.

这是一种非常非常的哲学方法论，当你知​​道某种东西是通过这种方法论产生的时，你应该非常怀疑是否能从中产生任何有价值的东西。

I mean, nothing — unless you have some special reason to think that the snap judgments going in are high quality and they somehow are guaranteed to capture something important, you shouldn’t think that systematizing them is going to give you anything important or be of high quality.

我的意思是，没有什么——除非你有特殊的理由认为快速判断是高质量的，并且它们以某种方式保证捕捉到重要的东西，否则你不应该认为将它们系统化会给你带来任何重要的东西或高质量的东西。

I TA’ed for him once, and I discovered how he taught.

我给他做过一次助教，我发现了他的教学方式。

He would assign huge piles of material that he wanted to read, but he wouldn’t write a lecture.

他会布置大量他想读的材料，但他不会写演讲。

He would just read the reading assignment all week in parallel with the class.

他整个星期都会在上课的同时阅读阅读作业。

He would turn up five or ten minutes early before class and lock himself in his office.

他会在上课前提前五到十分钟出现，然后把自己锁在办公室里。

He refused to be disturbed in those five minutes.

在那五分钟里，他拒绝被打扰。

And then he would get up in front of the class and he would open his mouth — and a lecture would come out.

然后他会在全班同学面前站起来，张开嘴——然后演讲就会出来。

I can’t imagine being able to teach that way.

我无法想象能够以这种方式教学。

When I lecture, I spend most of my week preparing for my lectures.

当我演讲时，我一周的大部分时间都花在准备演讲上。

I can’t imagine just having it happen like that.

我无法想象事情会这样发生。

Here’s another: This I think is philosophically interesting.

这是另一个：我认为这在哲学上很有趣。

At one point I realized that when you discussed something with Nozick, he instantly saw arguments — a sheaf, a panoply of arguments for and against and counterarguments — that would just appear to him all at once.

有一次我意识到，当你与诺齐克讨论某件事时，他立即会看到论点——一捆，一大堆支持、反对和反驳的论点——这些都会立刻出现在他的面前。

This came up in a conversation in his office when — maybe we have a little bit too much in common that way.

这是在他办公室的一次谈话中提出的，当时“也许我们在这方面有太多共同点”。

I was an advisee and he said, “Well, what about this point?” I said, “Give me a minute and I’ll think of an argument,” and he looked at me and he said, “That’s the problem.” That I will think of an argument.

我是一名顾问，他说：“那么，这一点呢？”我说，“给我一点时间，我会想一个论据，”他看着我说，“这就是问题所在。”我会想到一个论据。

The way a lot of philosophers make up their minds about things is they consider some question and then they find an argument, and if the argument seems like it gets them a conclusion, that’s enough for them: they stop, because they can’t think of any more arguments.

许多哲学家对事物做出决定的方式是，他们考虑一些问题，然后找到一个论证，如果这个论证似乎给了他们一个结论，那对他们来说就足够了：他们停下来，因为他们想不出更多的论证。

If you could only think of one argument, this is a good way of — anyway, like Peirce would say, of settling on something.

如果你只能想到一个论点，那么这是一种很好的方式——无论如何，就像皮尔士所说的那样，解决某件事。

That wouldn’t work for Nozick because he could — arguments just sprang to his mind, more and more of them, instantly.

这对诺齐克来说行不通，因为他可以——他的脑海里立刻就会出现越来越多的争论。

He ended up thinking of arguments as — the idea that you could force somebody to believe something by giving them an argument, that’s just taking advantage of somebody’s disability: that they could only think of one argument, they can’t think of more.

他最终将论证视为“通过给某人一个论证来强迫他们相信某事的想法，这只是利用了某人的残疾：他们只能想到一个论证，他们无法想到更多。”

That’s why he titled his book (I guess it’s his second book) Philosophical Explanations.

这就是为什么他将他的书（我想这是他的第二本书）命名为“哲学解释”。

His line was, “OK, I know better than this.

他的台词是：“好吧，我比这更清楚。

I’m not going to try to twist your arm with arguments.

我不会试图用争论来扭转你的局面。

I’m going to give you explanations for things and you can buy them or not, but hopefully they’ll be illuminating.”

我会给你一些解释，你可以买也可以不买，但希望它们能有所启发。”

That’s a very interesting place for somebody to be in.

对于某人来说，这是一个非常有趣的地方。

You have to be as smart as him to be in the place that he was.

你必须像他一样聪明才能达到他现在的位置。

I don’t know, if a philosopher over the course of his professional life has a few cool ideas that you’re happy to have heard about — I mean, he did good, so I’m not going to complain about Popper.

我不知道，一位哲学家在其职业生涯中是否有一些很酷的想法，你很高兴听到这些想法——我的意思是，他做得很好，所以我不会抱怨波普尔。

I don’t, myself, see the idea of being a Popperian that you would — this would be a school you would join, or something like that — but I’m glad I heard about those ideas.

我本人并不认为你会成为一名波普尔主义者——“你会加入一所学校，或者类似的东西——”但我很高兴听到这些想法。

Let me give you an example.

让我举个例子。

When I meet a philosopher, I actually tend to assume they’re not that interested in the quality of the food they eat relative to people of similar education and income classes.

当我遇到一位哲学家时，我实际上倾向于认为，相对于具有相似教育和收入阶层的人来说，他们对自己所吃的食物的质量并不那么感兴趣。

Because that’s what I’ve observed empirically.

因为这是我凭经验观察到的。

What have you observed empirically?

您根据经验观察到了什么？

What signals or correlates of knowing formal philosophy do you see?

您看到了哪些了解形式哲学的信号或关联？

I found myself thinking, “OK, maybe that’s a reasonable way to direct — to shape policy when you have a population of people who know how to enjoy themselves and who do taste the food they eat.” And how often do you see that?

我发现自己在想，“好吧，当你有一群知道如何享受自己并且确实品尝他们所吃的食物的人时，也许这是指导制定政策的合理方式。”您多久会看到这种情况？

What I see actually is geographical variation.

我实际上看到的是地理差异。

Actually in the East Bay — and you’re in San Francisco, right?

实际上在东湾 ——而且你在旧金山，对吧？

Elsewhere, in Salt Lake City, when you run across somebody who tastes what he eats and notices, you think, “Wow, that’s unusual.”

在盐湖城的其他地方，当你遇到某人品尝他吃的东西并注意到时，你会想，“哇，这很不寻常。”

But when I cast about thinking about philosophers I’ve known, they’re — inside, they’re often surprisingly different.

但当我思考我所认识的哲学家时，他们的内心往往有着惊人的不同。

Surprisingly different in the way they live their lives and what matters to them and what they think is reasonable.

他们的生活方式、对他们来说重要的事情以及他们认为合理的事情有着惊人的不同。

I can think about it some more, but I actually don’t know what I would come up with.

我可以再考虑一下，但实际上我不知道我会想到什么。

It’s a really good question.

这是一个非常好的问题。

You can see that the environment had somehow whittled him down or thinned him down.

你可以看到，环境在某种程度上削弱了他的力量，或者让他变得瘦弱。

I don’t know enough to say for sure how it happened, but that’s my impression.

我不太清楚它是如何发生的，但这就是我的印象。

It’s too cloistered an environment for you to want to spend that much of your life in it.

这是一个与世隔绝的环境，你不想在其中度过一生的大部分时间。

Suppose you’re in some other field; maybe it’s economics or it’s a lab science.

假设你在其他领域；也许这是经济学，或者是一门实验室科学。

When you turn up to give a talk, your talk is describing something else: the results you got in your lab or — right?

当你发表演讲时，你的演讲描述的是其他东西：你在实验室得到的结果或者 —— 对吗？

But when you’re a philosopher and you turn up to give your talk, the result is the talk, and so you want to make sure that it’s as carefully crafted as you can make it — because you can’t just point over somewhere else to your — the graphs you got.

但是，当你是一名哲学家，你来发表演讲时，结果就是演讲，所以你要确保它是尽可能精心设计的 ——因为你不能只是指向其他地方你的 ——你得到的图表。

So I do understand why people do it that way; it makes sense to me.

所以我确实理解为什么人们这样做；这对我来说很有意义。

I mean, they make it boring, right?

我的意思是，他们让它变得无聊，对吧？

There’s no reason that when you read a paper, it has to come out boring; that’s just bad staging.

当你读一篇论文时，没有理由觉得它很无聊。那只是糟糕的舞台表演。

But I understand why they script it.

但我理解他们为什么要编写它。

I do see why you want to make sure that your formulations are precise and you’re not sacrificing interest for that.

我确实明白为什么你想确保你的表述是精确的，并且你不会为此牺牲兴趣。

You want to make sure you said it exactly right, not because you’re competing with other people, but because the formulation is what you have to convey.

你要确保你说的完全正确，不是因为你在与其他人竞争，而是因为你必须要传达的内容。

Now, here’s something you could be thinking.

现在，您可能正在思考以下问题。

We could just get rid of the talks.

我们可以结束谈判。

In previous stages in my life, I thought, “Why do I bother going to talks?” I mean, I can read way faster than I can hear, and if I zone out for a moment when I’m reading, I can just go back, but if I zone out while they’re giving the talk, I can’t raise my hand and say, “Can you just repeat the last five minutes?” It’s just not efficient.

在我人生的前几个阶段，我想：“我为什么要费力去演讲呢？”我的意思是，我的阅读速度比我听到的速度要快得多，如果我在阅读时走神了，我可以回去，但如果我在他们演讲时走神，我就不能举手说：“你能重复最后五分钟吗？”只是效率不高。

The reason you go to talks is for the Q&A: it’s that point of Plato’s — you want to see if the person can answer questions about the view they presented.

你参加演讲的原因是为了问答：这就是柏拉图的观点——你想看看这个人是否能够回答有关他们所提出的观点的问题。

Then you want them to have the view presented clearly; you don’t want the questions to be them cleaning up the sloppiness in the presentation because they haven’t stuck to the way they thought it out.

然后你希望他们清楚地表达观点；你不希望他们提出的问题是为了清理演示中的草率问题，因为他们没有坚持自己的想法。

Here’s how I teach.

我是这样教的。

The class — they turn up having read something, maybe it’s some of Reasons and Persons, and it has teletransporters and things like teletransporters.

班级 ——他们出现时读过一些东西，也许是一些《原因》和《人物》，其中有远程传送器和类似远程传送器的东西。

And I come to class with an outline of arguments that I’ve extracted from the reading, and maybe they come to class — I often assign as homework something like that — they come to class with an outline of an argument they’ve extracted from a passage in the reading, and we step through one of these arguments, and I asked them what’s wrong with it.

我带着从阅读材料中提取的论点大纲来上课，也许他们来上课 —— 我经常布置类似这样的家庭作业 ——他们带着从阅读材料中提取的论点大纲来上课，我们逐步讨论其中一个论点，我问他们哪里出了问题。

I have really bright students, so it might take them a little while to get going, but they get going and they start producing objections, and more objections, and more objections — and the objections don’t run out.

我有一些非常聪明的学生，所以他们可能需要一段时间才能开始，但他们开始提出反对意见，更多的反对意见，更多的反对意见，而且反对意见不会消失。

At some point I say, “OK, it’s time to move on; we’re moving to the next argument,” but not because they ran out of objections.

有时我会说，“好吧，是时候继续前进了；我们要进行下一个争论”，但这并不是因为他们没有反对意见。

I’ll give you a data point, actually.

实际上，我会给你一个数据点。

Sometimes I teach the same thing more than once, and there’s a paper that I found works to start a practical reasoning class off with: it’s Michael Smith’s “Humean Theory of Motivation.” You might know it or you might not.

有时我不止一次地教授同一件事，我发现一篇论文可以用来开始实用推理课程：它是迈克尔·史密斯的“休谟动机理论”。你可能知道，也可能不知道。

It works for the purpose.

它是为了这个目的而工作的。

When students come up with an interesting, decisive, trenchant, cool objection, I type it up for them and give it out to them in the next class, but I also save it.

当学生提出一个有趣的、果断的、尖锐的、酷炫的反对意见时，我会帮他们打印出来，并在下堂课时分发给他们，但我也会保存起来。

I’m compiling these objections.

我正在整理这些反对意见。

I think this paper is something like 25 pages.

我认为这篇论文大约有 25 页。

And I now have a document that’s more than 30 pages of objections.

我现在有一份超过 30 页的反对意见的文件。

The objections don’t run out.

反对意见还没有结束。

When you ask me, “What’s your resolved view in this problem space,” where I’ve been looking at arguments where I know very well that the objections don’t run out, I don’t really have a view.

当你问我“你在这个问题领域的解决观点是什么”时，我一直在研究各种论点，我很清楚反对意见不会消失，但我并没有真正的观点。

Before I left Salt Lake, some guy turned up on my doorstep, and he had this story about why I should install solar panels on my roof.

在我离开盐湖城之前，有人出现在我家门口，他讲了一个关于为什么我应该在屋顶上安装太阳能电池板的故事。

It made economic sense, and I just shrugged and said, “It’s a distraction.

这在经济上是有意义的，我只是耸耸肩说：“这是一种干扰。

I’m trying to stay focused.”

我正在努力保持专注。”

Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that, “Well, OK, aesthetics — it’s housed in philosophy departments for historical reasons,” but everybody has the attitude that we already know.

不知何故，我们有这样的想法：“好吧，美学 ——由于历史原因它被安置在哲学系”，但每个人都有我们已经知道的态度。

We don’t need to listen to anything these people have to tell us; we don’t care.

我们不需要听这些人告诉我们的任何事情；我们不需要听这些人告诉我们的任何事情。我们不在乎。

And they also think — and the people who do aesthetics have somehow internalized this — they typically don’t expect anyone else to be interested in what they do and have a use for what they do.

他们还认为，“而从事美学研究的人已经以某种方式内化了这一点”，他们通常不期望其他人对他们所做的事情感兴趣，并且对他们所做的事情有用。

This is terribly wrong.

这是极其错误的。

Here’s more experience, since we’re talking about philosophical experience.

这里有更多的经验，因为我们谈论的是哲学经验。

My experience is that when you look at issues in aesthetics that crop up, when you’re thinking about one thing or another — including logic, epistemology, Frankfurt stuff about what it takes to own what you think — there’s aesthetics at the heart of it.

我的经验是，当你审视突然出现的美学问题时，当你思考一件事或另一件事时——包括逻辑、认识论、法兰克福等关于如何拥有你的想法的东西——美学是它的核心。

When you look at the aesthetics problem, the rest of it changes; you get leverage.

当你审视美学问题时，其余的事情就会发生变化；你得到了杠杆作用。

So yes, you should absolutely pay attention to aesthetics if you’re in philosophy.

所以，是的，如果你研究哲学，你绝对应该关注美学。