Project and Freedom 筹划与自由

前几天一个同学在网上看到了赵元任《施氏食狮史》这篇奇文，中文加拼音加英文翻译，自然是惊呼了一阵汉语可怕。另一位常年对语言学有兴趣，订阅了好几个语言学博客的同学，这时就做出一副什么就见过的样子，站出来拍肩，“莫怕，我们英语里也有这种玩意！” 于是指出了著名的水牛句：

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

大写的Buffalo是地名，第2,4和最后一个buffalo是名词，水牛，第五个和第六个buffalo是动词：欺负，吓唬。这句话语法上是完美无瑕的，只是念出来有点爽口。试译一下如此：水牛城的水牛欺负的水牛欺负水牛城的水牛。

我将这个水牛句分享给朋友，没想到朋友投桃报李的分享了这句：

That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is

和前几句有所不同，这句是需要断句的，断句如下：

That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is. （存有者有，无者无，是否如此？是的。）

或 That that is is that that is. Not is not. Is that it? It is.（存有者有，无者无，是否如此？是的。）

或 That "that is" is that "that is not" is not. Is that it? It is. （存有者非无。是否如此？是的。）

理解毫无困难啊，这不就是巴门尼德吗？

多种断句可能性的句子，让我想起小时候我爸经常用来逗我的一句“下雨天留客天留不留”，大家自己就此玩耍吧。

上面我们欣赏了动物学的疯狂句子和哲学的疯狂句子，下面我们欣赏一句语法学的疯狂句子：

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

这个相对简单，只要断句如下：

James, while John had had "had," had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

就可以轻易破解：

John使用了“had”，而James使用了“had had”；"had had"让老师更满意。主要的笑点是had有时候是表示过去完成时的助动词，有时候是实意动词（如have a effect）。

而同样的不加标点就看不了的中文，有这么一句：

一个客栈老板请一个木匠做个牌匾，客栈名为“马和车”。牌匾做好后，客栈老板揭开一看，一下就急了：

“ ‘马' 和 '和' 和 '和' 和 ‘车’ 离得太远了！”

于是我又想起，本科上一门英美文学选读课，曾经读过一首宗教诗，里面诗人向上帝说：

whatever whatever is is is what I want. 

无论“无论如何”是如何，我都愿意。

最后，如果这些语法完美无缺的句子都无法打动你，而且你还不解风情的觉得搞这些的人都是蠢货的话，那我们只好用沪语说：

一刚一刚一刚！

Zarathustra appears to be a fragmented work, scattered into small sections and containing many different metaphors, but it is by all means coherent, and every section can and should be read within a larger context in mind.  Here I’ll try to contextualize the chapter “On the despisers of the body” in Zarathustra as well as with reference to another Nietzsche’s work, Toward A Genealogy of Morals.

The self and the ego

The word “ego” in German is “das Ich”, it is the same with first person pronoun but capitalized.  Therefore, we can start our discussion of the self and the ego from this passage on the word “I”.  “‘I’, you say, and are proud of the word.  But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith – your body and its great reason: that does not say ‘I’, but does ‘I’.” (146)

To Nietzsche, the word “I”, the ego and the notion of subject are less directly related to body.  We may say that these notions are more related to our consciousness and our use of language, that the ego is whatever we have in mind when we say the word “I”: a subject that we assume to be a coherent, rational being, and capable of making decisions and operating the body; and it is always a notion in our consciousness. 

Nietzsche thinks that it should be the other way around: our consciousness is not in control of our body, and our body is not a tool for our consciousness.  The “self” that lies behind all sense and spirit, is the representation of such a body, and particularly, it is the body’s feeling and movement.  This existential self is not a subject of language, but a subject of action. This bodily and acting self is in control of the ego, and it invents the sense and spirit as its tool. “The creative self created respect and contempt; it created pleasure and pain.” (147)

The soul and the body

The discussion of body appears long before this section.  The dead body, the corpse, of the tight rope walker used to be Zarathustra’s companion and responsibility for a while, and it is a “dead companion and corpse whom I carry with myself wherever I want to” (135), until Zarathustra has an insight that he should have living companions, instead of dead ones.

Is this an example of the wrong attitude towards body? One that sees body as something inert, something that needs to be carried along in our journey, and ever a burden? If we think so, then burying the body of the tight rope walker may be seen as fulfillment of a promise, and may also be seen as abandoning a wrong attitude toward the body, to be ready to welcome a new one.  (Also notice that when Zarathustra decides to find living companions, his two animals come to him.)

What is this new attitude toward body? Nietzsche turns the notion of soul and body in Christian tradition upside down. As we have already seen, for Nietzsche, the body is not a tool for the sense and spirit, but the other way round. The sense and spirit are ordered by body to perpetuate body’s pleasure and to eliminate body’s pain.

But Nietzsche goes further than this. He is not only asserting the value of body and its feeling, or suggesting that we be faithful to our body; Nietzsche’s rejection to the notion of the soul is more radical. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche gives a radical critique to the values mainly found in a Christian tradition. To Nietzsche, there are two kinds of people: the strong and the weak; the strong act and will, and weak repress their will to power and endure.

 A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise. (45)

There is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. (45)

The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every king, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit. (46)

For those who are strong, there is no need for the notion of a soul; their self is grasped in their very action, and their action is concrete, material and bodily. The invention of the soul is only needed by the weak people, because they need this fiction of a free soul as a subject behind the real, concrete deeds, so that they can give a picture of themselves as willingly suffering and freely impotence, as if there was some other value other than the concrete deeds of the body.

The despisers of body and the overman

“Body am I, and soul.”  This is what the child says, the child in the three metamorphoses.  The child is not the overman, but a new beginning.  It says yes to the body and to the soul, because it wants to embrace both possibilities to go on.  But “the awakened and the knowing” know better: “body am I entirely, and nothing else.” (146) For Nietzsche, this is the free and honest acknowledgement of oneself.

The despisers of body is never the bridge to the overman.  In despising the body, they already put themselves into the trap. The trap of despising the body is the trap of a set of established values, of values higher than concrete human life experience and creation, compared to which body is only a temporary passage or an illusion. Nietzsche rejects all these, because this body and this embodied life is all we have; in despising the body and valuing some other values or fictions, we chain ourselves to something given, and we lose the possibility to create.

 Reference

Zarathustra: http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Nietzsche-Library/dp/0140150625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328478710&sr=1-1

Genealogy: http://www.amazon.com/Genealogy-Morals-Ecce-Homo/dp/0679724621

“我们都有点神经症“——用精神分析理论看《危险方法》

http://movie.douban.com/subject/4221515/

今天和同学一起看了这部我们期待已久的电影。我们几个都是哲学系学生，但是对于弗洛伊德、荣格、拉康等人的精神分析理论有很大兴趣。我这学期第一次系统读了点弗洛伊德和拉普朗虚（Laplanche，台译），所以看这部电影觉得像看侦探片一样，充满了值得琢磨的细节。虽然自己并不是专业的心理学学生，还是愿意把自己的一些想法抛砖出来，希望更多的精神分析学朋友可以指正和讨论。片中弗洛伊德与荣格的分歧越来越大的时候，荣格曾写信让弗洛伊德正视自己的神经症（neurosis）和对他人的控制欲，而弗洛伊德回信说：“我们每个人都有点神经症。“需要说明的是，在接下来的分析中，我讨论的更多是电影中的角色，以及电影中的故事所具有的典型意义，而不是历史中的人物。

（不知道有哪些敏感词，实在是发不出来，只好截屏做成图片发了……）