How to Unself in Order to Be Who You Really Are

To recognize that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives is to step outside the self, beyond its particular conceptions of beauty — which includes, of course, moral beauty — and walking beside it with humble, nonjudgmental curiosity about the myriad other selves afoot on their own paths, propelled by their own ideals of the Good.

认识到美丽的生活有无数种，就需要走出自我，超越它对美的特定概念——当然，其中包括道德美——并带着谦卑、不带偏见的好奇心与自我同行，对无数其他自我在自己的道路上行走，在他们自己的善的理想的推动下。

Such recognition requires what the great moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) termed unselfing — a difficult, triumphant act for which, Murdoch argues in her 1970 masterpiece The Sovereignty of Good ( public library ), nature and art uniquely train us.

这种认识需要伟大的道德哲学家和小说家艾丽丝·默多克（Iris Murdoch，1919年7月15日至1999年2月8日）所说的“无私”——默多克在她1970年的杰作《善的主权》（公共图书馆）中指出，这是一种艰难而胜利的行为，自然和艺术以独特的方式训练我们。

A century and a half after Emerson observed that “the question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things,” Murdoch defines what we commonly call beauty as “an occasion for ‘unselfing’” — an occasion most readily experienced in our communion with nature and our contemplation of art.

在爱默生观察到“美的问题让我们脱离表面，思考事物的基础”一个半世纪后，默多克将我们通常所说的美定义为“‘无私’的场合”——这是我们在与自然的交流和对艺术的沉思中最容易经历的场合。

She writes:

她写道：

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness.

美是艺术与自然共有的事物的方便而传统的名称，它为体验质量和意识变化的概念提供了相当清晰的含义。

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige.

我怀着焦虑和怨恨的心情望着窗外，忘记了周围的环境，也许正在沉思着我的威望受到的损害。

Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.

然后突然我观察到一只盘旋的红隼。

In a moment everything is altered.

刹那间，一切都改变了。

The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.

沉思的自我和受伤的虚荣心已经消失了。

There is nothing now but kestrel.

现在除了红隼，什么也没有了。

And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

当我回过头来思考另一件事时，它似乎就不那么重要了。

And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

当然，这也是我们有意识地做的事情：关注自然，以清除我们心中的自私关怀。

Oliver Sacks would come to echo the sentiment decades later in his observation that meeting nature on its own terms and timescales broadens our perspective by effecting “a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life.” But this unselfing, Murdoch cautions, cannot arise from a straining of the will, for the will is a clenching of the very self which true beauty deconditions; rather, it comes as a gladsome relaxing of the spirit, of our essential nature, into the shared pulse of existence:

几十年后，奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks）在他的观察中回应了这样的观点，即按照自然的条件和时间尺度来迎接自然，可以通过“脱离日常生活的时间尺度、紧迫性”来拓宽我们的视野。但默多克警告说，这种无私不能产生于意志的紧张，因为意志是对自我的紧握，而真正的美却使自我变得颓废。相反，它是一种令人愉快的精神放松，我们的本质放松到存在的共同脉搏中：

A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced.

对我来说，自我导向的自然享受似乎是被迫的。

More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.

更自然、也更恰当的是，我们对动物、鸟类、石头和树木这种完全陌生、毫无意义的独立存在感到一种忘我的快乐。

This “self-forgetful pleasure” calls to mind Jeanette Winterson’s wonderfully paradoxical notion of active surrender as the crucible of our joy in art and the fulcrum for art’s transformative power over the self.

这种“忘我的快乐”让人想起珍妮特·温特森（Jeanette Winterson）的奇妙自相矛盾的概念，即主动投降是我们在艺术中享受快乐的熔炉，也是艺术对自我的变革力量的支点。

But while there is a distinct difference between how nature and art each effect unselfing, Murdoch argues that what separates great art from the bad and the mediocre is precisely this capacity for stripping down the self rather than inflating the ego — a notion evocative of Tolstoy’s insistence that “a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” Murdoch writes of this dissolution of the self in the presence of great art:

尽管自然和艺术在实现无私方面存在明显差异，但默多克认为，伟大艺术与劣质和平庸艺术的区别恰恰在于这种剥离自我的能力，而不是膨胀自我的能力——这一概念让人想起托尔斯泰的坚持，即“真正的艺术作品在接受者的意识中摧毁了他自己与艺术家之间的分离。”默多克这样描述自我在伟大艺术面前的消解：

The experience of art is more easily degraded than the experience of nature.

艺术的体验比自然的体验更容易退化。

A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of its consumer’s consciousness.

大量的艺术，也许是大多数艺术，实际上都是自我安慰的幻想，即使是伟大的艺术也无法保证其消费者意识的质量。

However, great art exists and is sometimes properly experienced and even a shallow experience of what is great can have its effect.

然而，伟大的艺术是存在的，有时可以得到适当的体验，即使是对伟大艺术的浅薄体验也能产生其效果。

Art, and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent.

艺术，从现在起我所说的“艺术”指的是好的艺术，而不是幻想的艺术，它为我们提供了对优秀事物的独立存在的纯粹喜悦。

Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession.

无论是从它的起源还是它的乐趣来看，它都是完全反对自私的痴迷的东西。

It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul.

它激发了我们最好的才能，用柏拉图的语言来说，它激发了灵魂最高部分的爱。

It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.

它之所以能够做到这一点，部分归功于它与自然共有的东西：一种完美的形式，它会引发非占有性的沉思，并抵制被吸收到意识的自私梦想生活中。

And yet, Murdoch argues, any real understanding of goodness is necessarily an embrace of imperfection — something philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in many ways Murdoch’s only worthy intellectual heir, would argue brilliantly a generation later in her incisive case for the intelligence of emotions .

然而，默多克认为，任何对善的真正理解都必然是对不完美的拥抱——哲学家玛莎·努斯鲍姆，在很多方面是默多克唯一值得尊敬的知识继承人，在一代人之后，她在她关于情感智慧的精辟案例中出色地论证了这一点。

Murdoch writes:

默多克写道：

The concept of Good…

良好的概念...

is a concept which is not easy to understand partly because it has so many false doubles, jumped-up intermediaries invented by human selfishness to make the difficult task of virtue look easier and more attractive: History, God, Lucifer, Ideas of power, freedom, purpose, reward, even judgment are irrelevant.

这是一个不容易理解的概念，部分原因是它有很多虚假的替身，人类自私发明的跳跃式中介，使美德的艰巨任务看起来更容易、更有吸引力：历史、上帝、路西法、权力、自由、目的、奖励、甚至判断的观念都是无关紧要的。

Mystics of all kinds have usually known this and have attempted by extremities of language to portray the nakedness and aloneness of Good, its absolute for-nothingness.

各种神秘主义者通常都知道这一点，并试图用极端的语言来描绘善的赤裸和孤独，以及它的绝对虚无。

One might say that true morality is a sort of unesoteric mysticism, having its source in an austere and unconsoled love of the Good.

有人可能会说，真正的道德是一种深奥的神秘主义，其根源在于对善的朴素和无忧无虑的热爱。

When Plato wants to explain Good he uses the image of the sun.

当柏拉图想要解释善时，他使用了太阳的形象。

The moral pilgrim emerges from the cave and begins to see the real world in the light of the sun, and last of all is able to look at the sun itself.

道德朝圣者从洞穴中走出来，开始在阳光下看到现实世界，最后能够看到太阳本身。

[…] We may also speak seriously of ordinary things, people, works of art, as being good, although we are also well aware of their imperfections.

[……]我们也可能认真地谈论普通的事物、人、艺术品，认为它们是好的，尽管我们也很清楚它们的缺陷。

Good lives as it were on both sides of the barrier and we can combine the aspiration to complete goodness with a realistic sense of achievement within our limitations.

美好的生活就像在障碍的两边一样，我们可以将对完全善良的渴望与在我们的限制范围内的现实成就感结合起来。

With an eye to the legacy of the Romantics, who married nature and art in their model of happiness and transcendence , Murdoch returns to the notion of unselfing and the beautiful tessellation of possibility and limitation that defines our nature:

着眼于浪漫主义者的遗产，他们在幸福和超越的模式中将自然与艺术结合起来，默多克回归到无私的概念以及定义我们本性的可能性和限制的美丽镶嵌：

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.

自我，我们居住的地方，是一个幻象的地方。

Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness.

善良与试图看到自我、根据美德意识来看待和回应现实世界有关。

This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness.

这就是超越观念的非形而上学意义，哲学家们在对善的解释中不断地诉诸这种观念。

“Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

“善是超越的现实”意味着美德是试图刺破自私意识的面纱并加入世界的本来面目。

It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

这种尝试不可能完全成功，这是关于人性的经验事实。

The Sovereignty of Good is an immensely insightful read in its entirety.

《善的主权》从整体上来说是一本极具洞察力的读物。

Complement this particular fragment with Robinson Jeffers on nature and moral beauty and Oliver Sacks on the healing power of gardens , then revisit Murdoch on art as a force of resistance to tyranny , the key to great storytelling , and her uncommonly beautiful love letters .

罗宾逊·杰弗斯（Robinson Jeffers）关于自然和道德之美的论述和奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks）关于花园治愈力量的论述对这一特定片段进行了补充，然后重温默多克关于艺术作为抵抗暴政的力量、伟大故事讲述的关键的观点，以及她异常美丽的情书。