中国科学院大学研究生学术英语读写教程 Unit1 Psychology TextA 原文和翻译

中国科学院大学研究生学术英语读写教程

Unit1 Psychology TextA 原文和翻译

Descartes Was Wrong: “A Person Is a Person Through Other Persons”
笛卡尔错了：“人之所以为人，在于他人”
Abeba Birhane

1
According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without “ena”, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the “self”/“other” distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am. "

根据起源于古代非洲的乌班图哲学，新生儿不是人。人出生时没有“ena”，即自我，而是必须通过长期的互动和经历获得它。因此，西方哲学中公认“自我”/“他人”的区别在乌班图思想中要模糊得多。正如肯尼亚出生的哲学家约翰·姆比蒂在《非洲宗教与哲学》（1975 年）中所说：“我存在是因为我们存在，因为我们存在，所以我存在。”

2
We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many “others”: my family, my friends, my culture, my colleagues. The self I take grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviours from the self that talks to my PhD supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticise, or those who praise me.

我们从日常经验中知道，一个人的成长部分是在社会的严酷考验中形成的。人际关系可以加深对自我的理解。我是谁取决于许多“他人”：我的家人、我的朋友、我的文化、我的同事。比如说，我去杂货店购物时的自我，其行为举止与我与博士生导师交谈时的自我不同。即便是我最私密、最个人的反思，也会与不同人的观点和声音纠缠在一起，无论是那些同意我的人，批评我的人，还是赞扬我的人。

3
Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self- sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. While Descartes didn’t single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours.

然而，自我的波动性和模糊性这一概念可能会让人感到不安。我们可以将这种不适感在很大程度上归咎于勒内·笛卡尔。这位 17 世纪的法国哲学家认为，人类本质上是自给自足的；是一个天生理性、受思想束缚的主体，应该以怀疑的态度面对头脑之外的世界。虽然笛卡尔并不是唯一一个创造了现代思想的人，但他在定义现代思想的轮廓方面做出了很大贡献。

4
Descartes had set himself a very particular puzzle to solve. He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature. But Descartes believed that there was a trade-off between certainty and a kind of social, worldly richness. The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito – the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic. So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.

笛卡尔给自己设定了一个非常特殊的难题。他想找到一个稳定的视角来看待世界，而不依赖上帝赋予的智慧；从这个视角，他可以辨别出自然变化现象之下的永恒结构。但笛卡尔认为，确定性和某种社会、世俗的丰富性之间存在着一种权衡。你唯一能确定的就是你自己的我思——你在思考的事实。其他人和其他事物本质上都是变化无常和反复无常的。所以它们一定与认知自我的基本构成无关，认知自我是一个必然是独立、连贯和沉思的整体。

5
Few respected philosophers and psychologists would be identified as strict Cartesian dualists, in the sense of believing that mind and matter are completely separate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look. The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.

很少有受人尊敬的哲学家和心理学家被认为是严格的笛卡尔二元论者，认为精神和物质是完全分离的。但笛卡尔的“我思”仍然无处不在。例如，记忆测试的实验设计往往基于这样的假设：自我和世界之间可以划出一条清晰的界限。如果记忆仅仅存在于头骨中，那么将一个人从她的日常环境和人际关系中移除，并在实验室的人工环境中使用抽认卡或屏幕来测试她的回忆是完全可以接受的。一个人被认为是一个独立的实体，与她周围的环境无关，作为一系列认知过程铭刻在大脑中。记忆必须只是你拥有的东西，而不是你在特定环境中做的事情。

6
Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society. But even then, the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not selves that co-evolve with others over time. In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulted on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnessed the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a series of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to observe what people did. They were the first to identify the so-called “bystander effect”, in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around.

社会心理学旨在研究认知与社会之间的关系。但即便如此，研究通常也假设笛卡尔主体的集合才是研究的真正焦点，而不是随着时间的推移与他人共同进化的自我。20 世纪 60 年代，美国心理学家约翰·达利和比布·拉坦对基蒂·吉诺维斯谋杀案产生了兴趣，基蒂是一名年轻的白人女性，一天晚上在纽约回家的路上被刺伤并殴打。许多人目睹了犯罪过程，但没有人介入阻止。达利和拉坦设计了一系列实验，模拟了危机，例如癫痫发作或隔壁房间滚滚浓烟，以观察人们的反应。他们是第一个发现所谓“旁观者效应”的人，即如果周围有其他人，人们似乎对处于困境中的人反应更慢。

7
Darley and Latané suggested that this might come from a “diffusion of responsibility”, in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people. But as the American psychologist Frances Cherry argued in The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (1995), this numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people’s real motives. Genovese’s murder had to be seen against a backdrop in which violence against women was not taken seriously, Cherry said, and in which people were reluctant to step into what might have been a domestic dispute. Moreover, the murder of a poor black woman would have attracted far less subsequent media interest. But Darley and Latané’s focus makes structural factors much harder to see.

达利和拉坦内认为，这可能源于“责任分散”，即反应的义务被分散到更大的人群中。但正如美国心理学家弗朗西斯·切里在《社会心理学的固执细节：研究过程论文集》（1995 年）中所说，这种数字方法抹去了可能有助于理解人们真实动机的重要背景信息。切里说，吉诺维斯的谋杀案必须放在这样一个背景下看待，即对妇女的暴力行为没有得到认真对待，人们不愿意介入可能是家庭纠纷的事件。此外，一名贫穷的黑人妇女被谋杀，随后媒体的关注度会低得多。但达利和拉坦内的关注点使得结构性因素更难被发现。

8
Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world- embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By “looking through the screen of the other’s soul”, he wrote, “I vivify my exterior.” Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.

有没有办法调和这两种自我观——关系型、世界型自我观和自主型、内向型自我观？20 世纪俄罗斯哲学家米哈伊尔·巴赫金认为答案在于对话。我们需要他人来评估自己的存在，并构建连贯的自我形象。想想那个光辉时刻，当一位诗人捕捉到你曾感受但从未表达过的某种东西；或者当你努力总结自己的想法，却在与朋友的交谈中具体化时。巴赫金认为，只有通过与他人的接触，你才能欣赏自己独特的视角，并将自己视为一个整体。通过“透过他人灵魂的屏幕看”，他写道，“我使自己的外表生动起来。”自我和知识是不断发展和动态的；自我永远不会完成——它是一本打开的书。

9
So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,” Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929). Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.

因此，现实并非简单地存在着，等待着被发掘。巴赫金在《陀思妥耶夫斯基诗学问题》（1929 年）中写道：“真理并非诞生于个人的头脑中，也不存在于个人的头脑中，而是诞生于集体寻找真理的人们之间，诞生于他们对话互动的过程中。”没有任何东西是简单地存在于它所出现的关系矩阵之外。相反，存在是一种必须在自我与世界之间的空间中发生的行为或事件。

10
Accepting that others are vital to our self-perception is a corrective to the limitations of the Cartesian view. Consider two different models of child psychology. Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development conceives of individual growth in a Cartesian fashion, as the reorganisation of mental processes. The developing child is depicted as a lone learner an inventive scientist, struggling independently to make sense of the world. By contrast, “dialogical” theories, brought to life in experiments such as Lisa Freund’s “doll house study” from 1990, emphasise interactions between the child and the adult who can provide “scaffolding” for how she understands the world.

承认他人对我们的自我认知至关重要，是对笛卡尔观点局限性的纠正。让我们来看看两种不同的儿童心理学模型。让·皮亚杰的认知发展理论以笛卡尔的方式构想了个人成长，即心理过程的重组。成长中的孩子被描绘成一个孤独的学习者，一个有创造力的科学家，独立地努力理解世界。相比之下，“对话”理论在实验中得到了体现，例如 1990 年丽莎·弗洛因德的“玩具屋研究”，强调孩子与成人之间的互动，成人可以为孩子理解世界提供“支架”。

11
A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner’s thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen. A perfect policy for the reform of Cartesian individuals. But, in fact, studies of such prisoners suggest that their sense of self dissolves if they are punished this way for long enough. Prisoners tend to suffer profound physical and psychological difficulties, such as confusion, anxiety, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy, and a distorted sense of time. Deprived of contact and interaction – the external perspective needed to consummate and sustain a coherent self-image – a person risks disappearing into non-existence.

一个更残酷的例子可能是监狱中的单独监禁。这种惩罚最初是为了鼓励反省：让囚犯的思想转向内心，促使她反思自己的罪行，并最终帮助她以道德清白的公民身份回归社会。这是改造笛卡尔个人的完美政策。但事实上，对这类囚犯的研究表明，如果他们长期受到这种惩罚，他们的自我意识就会消失。囚犯往往会遭受严重的身心困扰，如困惑、焦虑、失眠、自卑感和时间感扭曲。如果被剥夺了接触和互动——这是完善和维持连贯的自我形象所需的外部视角——一个人就有消失的危险。

12
The emerging fields of embodied and enactive cognition have started to take dialogic models of the self more seriously. But for the most part, scientific psychology is only too willing to adopt individualistic Cartesian assumptions that cut away the webbing that ties the self to others. There is a Zulu’ phrase, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu", which means “A person is a person through other persons”. This is a richer and better account, I think, than “I think, therefore I am”.

新兴的具身认知和行为认知领域已经开始更加认真地对待自我对话模型。但在大多数情况下，科学心理学非常愿意采用个人主义的笛卡尔假设，切断自我与他人之间的联系。祖鲁语中有一句短语“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”，意思是“一个人通过其他人而成为一个人”。我认为，这比“我思故我在”更丰富、更好。