中国科学院大学研究生学术英语-全文-翻译（Unit 1）

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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.’

乌班图哲学起源于古代非洲。依据它的说法，新生儿尚不能称为“人〞。初生时，人没有自我。随着时间的推移，在互动和经受中才能习得它。因此，西方哲学中自我／他者之间清楚的分野在乌班图哲学中变得模糊起来。诞生于肯尼亚的哲学家约翰·姆比蒂〔John Mbiti〕在著作?非洲的宗教与哲学?〔African Religions and Philosophy〕中如是说：我在，由于我们在；由于我们在，所以我在。

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 work 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.

日常经受告知我们，一个人一局部从社会的历练中锻造出来。社会关系赐予我们自我认知。我是谁，这个问题的答案依靠于众多他者：家庭、伴侣、文化背景、同事等等。在杂货店购物的我和与博士导师交谈的我不是同一个自我。即便是私密、最个人的思绪也不同人的观点和声音纠缠在一起，无论是那些赞同我的人，还是那些批判我的人，抑或是那些赞美我的人。

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.

但是，自我的摇摆不定和布满歧义让人担忧。很大程度上，我们可以把这份担忧归因于笛卡尔。这位17世纪的法国哲学家认为，人类本质上是自给自足的；省而理性、受其思想约束的个体，应当以疑心的态度面对他头脑之外的世界。尽管笛卡尔没有单独制造消灭代思维，但他在定义其框架上起到了很大的推动作用。

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.

笛卡尔给自己提出了一个特殊的谜团。他想要找到一种稳定的观点，而非依靠上帝赐予的才智，来观看这个世界；由此，他可以透过自然界中变幻莫测的现象辨别出永久性的构造。但笛卡尔认为，稳定性和来自社会的、世俗的多样性之间存在权衡关系。你唯一能确定的，就是“我思故我在〞——即，你思考的状态。其他人和其他事物是不稳定且难以猜测的存在。因此，它们和生疏自己的根本律条毫无关系。生疏自我从来都是单独进展的，需要不断的深思。

Few respected philosophers and psychologists would identify 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.

在生疏到精神和身体是完全独立存在的根底上，很少有备受敬重的哲学家和心理学家被认为是个彻底的笛卡尔式的二元论者。但笛卡尔式的我思故我在目之所及，已遍布每一个角落。记忆测试的试验设计趋于从一个假说动身，即自我和世界之间是可能存在明确界限的。假如记忆仅仅存在于我们的头颅中，那么，将一个人从他的日常生活的环境和社会关系中剥离出来，并在人造的封闭试验室中使用卡片或荧幕来检测他的记忆是百分百可行的。人被视作独立的个体，区分于环绕他的一切，是在大脑中被篆刻为一系列认知过程的存在。记忆肯定是你拥有的事实，而不是你在特定环境下的行为产物。

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.

社会心理学标榜自己致力于检验认知和社会间的关系。但即便如此，其争辩经常假定如下主见：“询问〞这一行为，其真正焦点在于一系列笛卡尔式议题的集合，而不是始终与他人共同演化的自我。在二十世纪六十年月，美国心理学家约翰·达利(John Darley)和比布·拉塔内(Bibb Latané)对吉诺维斯案产生爱好。吉诺维斯是一位年轻的白人女性，在回家的路上遭到攻击，被歹徒刺伤。很多人看到了这起罪行，却无人挺身而出。达利和拉塔内设计了一系列试验，模拟日常中的危机状况，比方癫痫发作、隔壁房间冒烟等，以此来观看人们的反响。他们首次发觉了所谓的“旁观者效应〞，即四周有他人存在的时候，人们对处于紧急状况中的个体的响应会变慢。

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 make structural factors much harder to see.

达利和拉塔内认为，这种现象归因于“责任分散〞。在这个过程中，供应挂念的义务在人数众多的群体中被稀释了。但美国心理学家弗朗西斯·切利〔Frances Cherry〕对此有不同意见。在?社会心理学中的偏执细节：论争辩进程?〔The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process〕中提到，这种通过数字解释行为的方法剔除了重要的语境，使得人们难以理解当事人的真正动机。谢里认为，吉诺维斯杀案反映了当时的社会并不关注女性患病的暴力困扰，人们也不愿介入一桩可能是家庭纠纷的暴力攻击中。她进一步说，一个贫困的黑人女性被谋杀也很难吸引媒体的关注。但是，达利和拉塔内关注的焦点让这些构造性的因素变得更加难以觉察。

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.

自我有两种面孔，一种是关系化的、与世界严密相拥的；另一种是自主内向的——有没有一种方法，可以消退它俩之间的分歧？二十世纪，俄罗斯的哲学家米哈伊尔·巴赫金〔Mikhail Bakhtin〕认为，答案在于对话。我们需要他人来对自己的存在进展评估，并借此构建完整连贯的自我印象。想一想那些醍醐灌顶的时刻：诗人捕获到你所感受到的却从未表达出来的东西；或者在与伴侣交谈时你灵光一现，信口而出你曾难以总结、难以表达的一些想法。巴赫金信任，只有在与他人的交往中，你才能观赏自己独一无二的观点，才能将自己视作一个实体存在。他这样写道：“透过他人的灵魂之窗，我看到了自己的外在〞。自我和生疏不断演进，永久处于动态；自我也永不消亡——这点一目了然。

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 Dostoyevsky’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，现实并不是就在那儿等着我们去发觉。“真理不会诞生于或被发觉于一个人的头脑中，它诞生于人类集体对真理的追寻之中，诞生于人们之间对话形式的互动中〞。这句话出自巴赫金写的?陀思妥耶夫问题?〔Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics〕这本书。“没有任何东西单纯地是它本身，完全脱离它所处的关系网络〞。“存在〞这个动作或大事肯定发生在自我和世界之间的空间。

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.

想要订正笛卡尔式观点的局限性，就要成认，他人对于我们的自我认知有着重要意义。来思考两个不同的儿童心理学模型。简·皮亚杰〔Jean Piaget〕的认知开展理论提出，笛卡尔式的潮流下个体的成长伴随精神进程方面的重组。不断成长的儿童被描述成一个孤独的学习者，一个富有创新的科学家，孤身一人，奋力要搞清世间的真相。另一个理论——对话理论那么不违反。相比之下，从1990年开场，对话理论才在莉萨·弗罗因德的“玩偶屋争辩〞等一系列试验中得以呈现。该理论强调孩子和成年人之间的互动，认为成年人可以为孩子们了解世界供应“脚手架〞。

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.

这里举一个略残酷的例子：监狱中的单人囚室。这项惩处最初被用于促进犯人自省，转变囚徒的内心想法，促使他们反思罪行，最终挂念犯人在重返社会时变成一个良好公民。但是，事实上，对这些囚犯的争辩说明，假如承受此类惩处太久，其自我意识就会消融。囚徒们更简洁患病生理和心理上的熬煎：焦虑、紧急、失眠、无能感，以及扭曲的时间观念都是困扰他们的问题。假如失去联系与沟通这种完善和维持清楚自我形象的外部因素，人会面临失去自我的危急。

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.’

具身认知和生成认知的领域开场严峻 对待自我的对话模式。但是在大多数状况下，科学意义上的心理学格外乐意接受个人颜色深厚的、切断了自我与他人相互联系的笛卡尔式假说。有句祖鲁族谚语，Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu，意思是“他人在，故我在〞，在我看来，这句话比“我思故我在〞更完满贴切。