Isaiah Berlin
以赛亚•伯林

Centennial impressions
百年印象

Jun 4th 2009
From The Economist print edition

WHEN the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlin’s letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page.

已故的以赛亚•伯林当年受封为爵士时，一位朋友曾调侃道，这一荣誉是为了表彰他对聊天事业所作的贡献。这位自由主义的杰出理论家确实堪称一名才华横溢的健谈者和狡黠诡异的八卦客；而伯林信笺的读者将在纸上发现同样翻滚奔流的恶念、智趣与人性洞察力。

A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlin’s centenary year—he lived from 1909 to 1997—his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine.

第一套信笺在五年前问世。如今，为了适逢伯林（1909-1997）百年诞辰，其遗嘱执行人[注1]亨利•哈代以及一个共同编辑团队已经将厚厚的第二卷带到了读者面前。这次的文本处理压力更大，因为自1949年起，伯林开始向机器口授信件。

Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlin’s professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public servants, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu.

如自传一般，这些信件引导读者见证了伯林从一名聪颖的年轻教师成长为牛津教授、公共教育家和跨大西洋学术明星的职业上升历程；它们也追踪了其享有的战后英国权势阶层知识瑰宝这一社会地位的巩固过程；每页三到四个脚注可能（更为读者）引见了一千名或更多的、伯林所了解或谈及的政治家、公职人员、学者、音乐家和社会名流；单凭最后一点，他的信笺便是对往昔社会环境的一份独特记录。

Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis in 1956 he writes to the wife of the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown “great moral splendour”. The next letter, to Berlin’s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action “childish folly”. His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Strawson, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial.

伯林并非“言必由衷”之人。他会在信中对写信对象不吝溢美之词，却在给其他人的信中将前者贬得一文不名。1956年苏伊士危机期间，他致信英国首相安东尼•艾登爵士的夫人，信中伯林称赞艾登展示了“伟大的道德光辉”；而在下一封写给其在哈佛的继子的信中，英国的行动又被伯林冠以“幼稚的愚行”之名。他的简短评断时而透出机敏，时而带着嘲讽。杰出的当代哲学家彼得•斯特劳森爵士成了伯林口中的乡巴佬。

Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents that his work is rot.

当谈及敏感的自身时，伯林变得更加尖锐。他（在信中）贬低自己巨大的哲学才能，称其出版的著作给自己带来痛苦，并向通信人倾诉对其作品只是满纸胡言的担忧。

Mr Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those Berlin wrote in 1946-60. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection of old and new tributes, “The Book of Isaiah”, also edited by the tireless Mr Hardy, partly answers both questions.

哈代表示这批信件大约代表着1946年至1960年期间，伯林所写信件的四分之一。但本书没有收录对这些信件的回复，因此此处展示的只是经编辑挑选的、伯林自己的讽刺独白。只读过这些信件的读者可能会产生两点疑问：伯林何来那么多感激的生徒与忠诚的朋友？为何他能跻身那个时代最重要的自由主义思想家之列？由孜孜不倦的哈代先生所编纂的另一本汇集有新老颂文的《以赛亚之书》部分地回答了这两个问题。

Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlin’s gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas.

约翰•罗尔斯等思想家通过更多的论证为自由主义诸原则辩护；而思想史家，如昆廷•斯金纳则将更多精力用于将其学科职业化；他们都没有伯林所具备的将抽象观念戏剧化、拟人化地加以表现的禀赋。

Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others (negative liberty) is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential (positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong.

伯林不断地回归三个核心信念。（首先，）他提出免受他人强制约束的自由（消极自由）比实现自我潜力的自由（积极自由）更为紧要或基本。左派不相信这一分野，右派则盗用这一概念，而哲学家们继续着仔细的检查。其次他认为，如果自由主义不能将普遍归属的需要证明为合法，那么它就会衰败。

But perhaps Berlin’s strongest conviction was that the basic commitments—to friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achievement, nation and principle—clash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically attempt to subordinate some concerns to others.

但或许伯林最强的信念是另一点，即人们对友谊与真理、公平与自由、家庭与（个人）成就、民族与原则等事物所承担的基本义务常会彼此冲突，并且不可平稳顺利地得以调谐。伯林暗示思想家和政治家们应当承认这些冲突，而非用教条原理加以压制或专横地试图使其中的某些考虑屈从于另一些。

The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in these letters. In personal form, that third conviction—that people are to be taken in full, not in formulae—runs throughout, and was surely one source of Berlin’s charm. More volumes of letters are to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument. He was an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays.

上述前两点理念在这些信件中不时闪现；而第三点则贯穿于伯林的身体力行之中，即人必须全面地得以理解，而不能被当成一堆公式；毫无疑问，这一理念正是伯林魅力的一大来源。更多的信件还将在今后被整理出版，读者将产生这样的好奇：对于这样一座越堆越高的纪念碑，伯林会作何自嘲。正如读者现在所见，信中展现出的伯林正如餐桌边的伯林一样，都是博学的诙谐之人。但他首先是一位思想家，他的文论才是了解其思想不可替代的途径。

注1：A literary executor is a person with decision-making power in respect of a literary estate.
The literary estate of an author who has died will often consist mainly of the copyright and other intellectual property rights of published works, including for example film and translation rights. It may also include original manuscripts of published work, which potentially have a market value; unpublished work in a finished state or partially completed; and papers of intrinsic literary interest such as correspondence or personal diaries and records.
完整直译过来应该是“遗嘱中知识财产部分的执行人”。

 

lilywizardry:  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=19755&extra=page%3D1