谁在抽象思维

G.W.F. Hegel, Wer denkt abstrakt (谁在抽象思维 ). 那么谁抽象地思维呢？人们以敬而远之的态度对待抽象思维，如同对待某种高超事物一样；他们所以回避它，倒不是因为轻视它，认为它枯燥寡味，而是因为把它当作某种特殊事物，无从借以在日常社交中显身扬名。然而，在现实生活中，进行抽象思维的往往不是有教养的人，毋宁是些无教养的人。抽象地思维，就是幼稚地思维。       “我只须为我的命题举几个例子。人人都会承认，这几个例子证实了这个命题。       “且说一个凶手被押往刑场。在常人看来，他不过是个凶手。太太们也许会说，他还是个强壮的、俏皮的、逗趣的男子呢。那个人却认为这种说法骇人听闻：什么？凶手俏皮？怎么能想入非非，说凶手俏皮呢？你们大概比凶手也好不了多少吧。这是上流社会道德败坏的表现！深通世道人心的牧师也许会这样补充一句。       “研究人的专家则不然，他要考察一下这个人是怎样变成罪犯的，他会从他的生活经历和教养过程中，发现他的父母反目已久，发现他曾经为了轻微的过失而受到某种严厉的惩罚，于是他公民社会忿忿不平，接着还发现他刚一有所反抗，便被社会所屏弃，以致如今只靠犯罪才能谋生。——大概有不少人听了这番话会说：他想替凶手辩护呀！我不禁想起年轻时候听人说过，一位市长发牢骚，说作家们搞得未免过分，竟然想挖基督教和淳厚风俗的墙脚；有位作家甚至写小说为自杀行为作辩护；可怕呀，真可怕！——经过进一步了解，原来他指的是《少年维特之烦恼》。       “在凶手身上，除了他是凶手这个抽象概念之外，再也看不到任何别的东西，并且拿这个简单的品质抹杀了他身上所有其它的人的本质……，这就叫做抽象思维。       “呀，老太婆，你卖的是臭蛋呀！一个女顾客对女商贩说。这个女商贩可恼火了：什么，我的蛋是臭的？我看你才臭呢！你敢这样来说我的蛋？你？要是你爸爸没有在大路上给虱子吞掉，你妈妈没有跟法国人跑掉，你奶奶没有在医院里死掉——你就该为你花里胡哨的围脖买件称身的衬衫呀。谁不知道，这条围脖和你的帽子是打哪儿搞来的；要是没有军官，你们这些人现在才不会这样打扮呢；要是太太们多管管家务，你们这些人都该蹲班房了——还是补补你袜子上的窟窿去吧。——总而言之，她把那个女顾客骂得一钱不值。她这就是在抽象地思维，仅仅因为女顾客说了一句她的蛋是臭的，得罪了她，于是就把女顾客全身上下编派了一番——从围脖、帽子到衬衫等等，从头到脚，还有爸爸和所有其他亲属，一切都沾上了那些臭蛋的气味；可是，女商贩谈到的那些军官们（如果他们当真和这件事有什么关系，尽管这是大可怀疑的），说不定在她身上看到了一些完全不同的东西。       “谈到女仆，再来谈谈男仆。在地位低、收入少的家庭，仆人的境遇比在任何地方都坏；相反地，主人愈高贵，仆人的境遇就愈好。在这方面，常人又要搞抽象思维了，他对仆人摆架子，把他只当作仆人看待；他牢牢记住这个唯一的名称。给法国人当仆人，日子最好过。贵人对仆人很随便，法国人甚至和仆人交朋友；主仆二人在一起的时候，仆人就高谈阔论。狄德罗的《雅克和他的主人》就是这样，主人除了嗅嗅鼻烟，看看表，别的什么也不管，全让仆人自便。这位贵人知道，仆人不仅仅是仆人，他还了解城里各种新闻，认识许多姑娘，脑子里点子很多；他向仆人打听这一切，仆人就尽自己所知，回答主人所打听的一切。在法国主人那儿，仆人不仅这样，甚至敢于主动提出话题，发表议论，坚持自己的意见。主人要他干点什么事情，不能采用命令口吻，而得首先提出自己的意见，委婉地劝他接受，如果他照办了，主人还得给他道乏。”       黑格尔丝毫并不反对科学的抽象。他不过指出，恰恰世俗的日常的意识才可能是抽象的，也就是片面的，而且大多数实例正是如此。 （阿尔森·古留加《黑格尔小传》，刘半九等译，商务印书馆1978年第一版，第64-66页） G.W.F. Hegel, Wer denkt abstrakt (谁在抽象思维 ).收录於:Jenaer Schriften(耶拿时期著作)1801-1807, Frank./M. 1977, P. 575-580:「Wer denkt abstrakt Der unge-bildete Mensch, nicht der gebildete」 [der so den internen Selbstentfaltungsproze eines Sachverhaltes zu rekonstruieren vermag]. 信仰和知识——单纯理性限制内的宗教的两个来源（一） 德里达 著；杜小真 译 　　1.如何“说宗教“？如何谈论宗教？特别是谈论今天的宗教？如何能够在今天敢于毫无顾忌、胆祛地谈论“单数的”宗教，并且如此简单又如此快捷？谁能那么唐突地声称：在此同时涉及可同一的和新鲜的主体？谁能奢望为之补充某些警句？为了显示勇气，必要的傲慢或公正，可能需要假装制造一个抽象化时刻，抽象化一切或几乎一切，某种抽象化。可能应该把宝押在最具体和最可理解的东西上，但同样也要押在最少抽象化的东西上面。 　　人应该通过抽象化自救、还是由于抽象化而被救？拯救何在？（黑格尔在1807年写道：“Wer denkt abstrakt？”—谁思考抽象？“Denken？Abstrakt？”—“思考？抽象？-- 逃命吧！” 他开始并且用法文表达这个叛徒的呼喊“Rette sich，wer kann！”，后者要象逃避“瘟疫”那样凭借唯一的运动逃避思想、抽象化和形而上学）。 　　2.拯救，被救，自救。第一个问题的借口：人们能否把有关宗教的话语和有关拯救的话语、也就是关于健康、圣徒、神圣、安全、金刚不坏、免疫的话语区分（sacer， sanctus， heilig，holy — 在很多语言中都有它们的对应词）开来？而拯救是否必然是在罪恶、过错或原罪之前或之后的拯救呢？现在：罪恶 — 今天明显的罪恶 — 在哪里？假定有一种新颖的典型罪恶形态，甚至显得是标志着我们时代而不是任何其它时代的极端罪恶。这是否就是认同人们将它引入可能成为我们时代的拯救的形态和诺言的东西之中的罪恶，因此也就是这种宗教事物的特殊性，人们现在在各种各样的报纸中涉及时都说到它的回归？ 　　最终，我们要把宗教问题和抽象化的罪恶的问题联系起来。也就是与极端的抽象化联系起来。不是与死亡、罪恶或致命疾病的抽象形态、而是与人们传统地与彻底超脱也就是与抽象化的拔根相连的罪恶的各种形式联系起来，在这个过程中，凭借——然而，这是要更迟一些—— 抽象化的发生形式，比如机器、技术、技术科学，特别是通讯技术的超越性而实现的。《宗教和机械》，《宗教和网络》，《宗教和数码》，《宗教和数字化》，《宗教和潜在时空》：为的是在我们特定的经济中评估有关这些论题的讨论，设想一种话语的小机器，这种机器对于成为有限和可完善的，并非那么无能为力。 　　今天，为了抽象地思考宗教，我们从这些抽象化的力量出发，以最终有可能得到如下假设：就所有这些抽象和分离的力量而言（拔根，迁移、非物质化、形式化，普遍图式化，通讯，等等），“宗教”同时存在于反作用对立和竞相许诺的重新肯定之中。在那里，知识和信仰，技术科学（“资本的”和信用的）和信仰，信贷，可靠性，信仰活动将永远在同样的地方拥有这样的部分：这个部分与它们的对立连接点相连。疑难问题——缺少方法、途径、出路和解救——和两种根源的问题由此产生。 　　3.为了进行抽象化并解决没有出路的难题，可能应该首先隐退荒漠，甚至退到孤岛，讲述并非神话的简单故事。类型：“从前”，有一次，那一天，在一个岛上或在荒漠中，为了“说宗教”，设想一下：有几个人，几个哲学家，教授，解释学家，隐士或隐居者模仿小修道院的生活，秘密而又平等、友好而又博爱地共渡时光。可能，还必须把这个话题置于并限定在时空中，就是说地点和背景，已过去的时刻，一天；应该抓住转瞬即逝的时光，就像对待将要撕毁其中某几页的日记那样把过去时日个别化。类型规律：同日大事记（读者已经能滔滔不绝地谈论一个日子）。时间：1994年2月28日。地点：卡普里岛。在一个旅馆里，我们朋友般地围坐在一张桌子旁交谈，没有次序、时间限制，也没有指令约束，除了那个最清楚也最模糊的词：宗教。我们相信能够作出相信隐居行为的样子，相信我们都同意某种先-领会。我们做的事情就好象我们通过我们相信的（对这一天的相信，已经！）各种语言，也就是我们懂的语言，对所谓“宗教”取得共识。我们相信这个词的最低可靠性。就象海德格尔所谓的存在词法的事实性（《存在与时间》的开始部分），我们认为（或者相信应该）事先理解这个词的意义，是为了能够提问并且让我们对这个主题提出问题。不过，我们在后面还要回到这个问题上来，没有任何东西比这样一种“事实”更加没有事先的可靠性（恰恰在这两种情况下！），而宗教的全部问题可能都回归到这很没有保证的问题上了。 Who Thinks Abstractly? Written: by Hegel c. 1808; Source: Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: Texts and Commentary; Published: Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 113-118. Think? Abstractly? — Sauve qui peut! Let those who can save themselves! Even now I can hear a traitor, bought by the enemy, exclaim these words, denouncing this essay because it will plainly deal with metaphysics. For metaphysics is a word, no less than abstract, and almost thinking as well, from which everybody more or less runs away as from a man who has caught the plague. But the intention here really is not so wicked, as if the meaning of thinking and of abstract were to be explained here. There is nothing the beautiful world finds as intolerable as explanations. I, too, find it terrible when somebody begins to explain, for when worst comes to worst I understand everything myself. Here the explanation of thinking and abstract would in any case be entirely superfluous; for it is only because the beautiful world knows what it means to be abstract that it runs away. Just as one does not desire what one does not know, one also cannot hate it. Nor is it my intent to try craftily to reconcile the beautiful world with thinking or with the abstract as if, under the semblance of small talk, thinking and the abstract were to be put over till in the end they had found their way into society incognito, without having aroused any disgust; even as if they were to be adopted imperceptibly by society, or, as the Swabians say, hereingezäunselt, before the author of this complication suddenly exposed this strange guest, namely the abstract, whom the whole party had long treated and recognized under a different title as if he were a good old acquaintance. Such scenes of recognition which are meant to instruct the world against its will have the inexcusable fault that they simultaneously humiliate, and the wirepuller tries with his artifice to gain a little fame; but this humiliation and this vanity destroy the effect, for they push away again an instruction gained at such a price. In any case, such a plan would be ruined from the start, for it would require that the crucial word of the riddle is not spoken at the outset. But this has already happened in the title. If this essay toyed with such craftiness, these words should not have been allowed to enter right in the beginning; but like the cabinet member in a comedy, they should have been required to walk around during the entire play in their overcoat, unbuttoning it only in the last scene, disclosing the flashing star of wisdom. The unbuttoning of the metaphysical overcoat would be less effective, to be sure, than the unbuttoning of the minister's: it would bring to light no more than a couple of words, and the best part of the joke ought to be that it is shown that society has long been in possession of the matter itself; so what they would gain in the end would be the mere name, while the minister's star signifies something real — a bag of money. That everybody present should know what thinking is and what is abstract is presupposed in good society, and we certainly are in good society. The question is merely who thinks abstractly. The intent, as already mentioned, is not to reconcile society with these things, to expect it to deal with something difficult, to appeal to its conscience not frivolously to neglect such a matter that befits the rank and status of beings gifted with reason. Rather it is my intent to reconcile the beautiful world with itself, although it does not seem to have a bad conscience about this neglect; still, at least deep down, it has a certain respect for abstract thinking as something exalted, and it looks the other way not because it seems too lowly but because it appears too exalted, not because it seems too mean but rather too noble, or conversely because it seems an Espèce, something special; it seems something that does not lend one distinction in general society, like new clothes, but rather something that — like wretched clothes, or rich ones if they are decorated with precious stones in ancient mounts or embroidery that, be it ever so rich, has long become quasi-Chinese — excludes one from society or makes one ridiculous in it. Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter. The prejudice and respect for abstract thinking are so great that sensitive nostrils will begin to smell some satire or irony at this point; but since they read the morning paper they know that there is a prize to be had for satires and that I should therefore sooner earn it by competing for it than give up here without further ado. I have only to adduce examples for my proposition: everybody will grant that they confirm it. A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts. One who knows men traces the development of the criminal's mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! After all I remember how in my youth I heard a mayor lament that writers of books were going too far and sought to extirpate Christianity and righteousness altogether; somebody had written a defense of suicide; terrible, really too terrible! — Further questions revealed that The Sufferings of Werther [by Goethe, 1774] were meant. This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality. It is quite different in refined, sentimental circles — in Leipzig. There they strewed and bound flowers on the wheel and on the criminal who was tied to it. — But this again is the opposite abstraction. The Christians may indeed trifle with Rosicrucianism, or rather cross-rosism, and wreathe roses around the cross. The cross is the gallows and wheel that have long been hallowed. It has lost its one-sided significance of being the instrument of dishonorable punishment and, on the contrary, suggests the notion of the highest pain and the deepest rejection together with the most joyous rapture and divine honor. The wheel in Leipzig, on the other hand, wreathed with violets and poppies, is a reconciliation à la Kotzebue, a kind of slovenly sociability between sentimentality and badness. In quite a different manner I once heard a common old woman who worked in a hospital kill the abstraction of the murderer and bring him to life for honor. The severed head had been placed on the scaffold, and the sun was shining. How beautifully, she said, the sun of God's grace shines on Binder's head! — You are not worthy of having the sun shine on you, one says to a rascal with whom one is angry. This woman saw that the murderer's head was struck by the sunshine and thus was still worthy of it. She raised it from the punishment of the scaffold into the sunny grace of God, and instead of accomplishing the reconciliation with violets and sentimental vanity, saw him accepted in grace in the higher sun. Old woman, your eggs are rotten! the maid says to the market woman. What? she replies, my eggs rotten? You may be rotten! You say that about my eggs? You? Did not lice eat your father on the highways? Didn't your mother run away with the French, and didn't your grandmother die in a public hospital? Let her get a whole shirt instead of that flimsy scarf; we know well where she got that scarf and her hats: if it were not for those officers, many wouldn't be decked out like that these days, and if their ladyships paid more attention to their households, many would be in jail right now. Let her mend the holes in her stockings! — In brief, she does not leave one whole thread on her. She thinks abstractly and subsumes the other woman — scarf, hat, shirt, etc., as well as her fingers and other parts of her, and her father and whole family, too — solely under the crime that she has found the eggs rotten. Everything about her is colored through and through by these rotten eggs, while those officers of which the market woman spoke — if, as one may seriously doubt, there is anything to that — may have got to see very different things. To move from the maid to a servant, no servant is worse off than one who works for a man of low class and low income; and he is better off the nobler his master is. The common man again thinks more abstractly, he gives himself noble airs vis-à-vis the servant and relates himself to the other man merely as to a servant; he clings to this one predicate. The servant is best off among the French. The nobleman is familiar with his servant, the Frenchman is his friend. When they are alone, the servant does the talking: see Diderot's Jacques et son maître; the master does nothing but take snuff and see what time it is and lets the servant take care of everything else. The nobleman knows that the servant is not merely a servant, but also knows the latest city news, the girls, and harbors good suggestions; he asks him about these matters, and the servant may say what he knows about these questions. With a French master, the servant may not only do this; he may also broach a subject, have his own opinions and insist on them; and when the master wants something, it is not done with an order but he has to argue and convince the servant of his opinion and add a good word to make sure that this opinion retains the upper hand. In the army we encounter the same difference. Among the Austrians a soldier may be beaten, he is canaille; for whatever has the passive right to be beaten is canaille. Thus the common soldier is for the officer this abstractum of a beatable subject with whom a gentleman who has a uniform and port d'epée must trouble himself — and that could drive one to make a pact with the devil.