在北京读施特劳斯

在北京读施特劳斯.txt
在北京读斯特劳斯

马克·里拉 著 吴万伟 译

本文谈论中国对西方哲学家的独特爱好。

几年前，我还在芝加哥大学教书时第一次遇到来自中国的研究生。这几个认真的北京人来到“社会思想委员会”希望碰见列奥·斯特劳斯（Leo Strauss）的幽灵，这个德国犹太人政治哲学家就是在这所大学确立了他的学术地位。考虑到他们习惯于对教授表现出来的无言的尊重，人们很难弄清这些年轻人到底想在芝加哥大学或者斯特劳斯身上找到什么东西。他们上课认真，学习刻苦，但很少与人交流。他们身在海德公园，却没有海德公园的自由交流的风格。

在第一年年底时，我请其中一个学生来到办公室想给他们提些建议。显然，他是严肃认真和善于思考的人，在北京知识界圈子中已经因为写作和翻译西方社会学和哲学著作而小有名气。但在我的课堂上，因为无法用英语表达自己的意思，无论是写作还是交谈，这使得我们两个都很沮丧。我开始问他暑期有什么打算，最后把话题转向英语强化学习课程，我建议他参加英语学习班，他问“为什么？”稍微有点困惑，我说了再明白不过的话“熟练掌握英语将使他能够与外国学者自由地交流，同时也能提升自己在国内的学术地位。他不无优越感地笑了笑，说“我不敢肯定。”现在我真的困惑了，就问他那你打算做什么。“我是要学习语言，不过不是英语而是拉丁语。”这次轮到我问为什么了。“我觉得我们不仅仅要研究希腊，研究罗马人也很重要。罗马人建立了持续几个世纪的大帝国，我们必须向他们学习。”显然，在他离开的时候，被抛弃的是我而不是他。

在前往北京讲学和访谈几个月返回美国后不久，我再次想起这次谈话。我曾经听说斯特劳斯在中国很受欢迎，令我吃惊的是，同样受欢迎的人还有魏玛时期反自由派（反犹太主义）法学家卡尔·施米特（Carl Schmitt）。《纽约客》甚至登过一篇文章“新一代新保守派民族主义者”，提到了他们对斯特劳斯的兴趣是一种令人担忧的发展。尤其是在和我交流的年轻人中，我发现了一些更有趣和更重要的东西。斯特劳斯和施米特位于思想辩论的中心，无论政治倾向是什么，人人都在读他们的著作。正如上海一个自由派记者在散步时告诉我的，“如果你对这两个人及其思想不了解的话，没有人会把你当回事的。”人们的兴趣与民族主义这个术语在19世纪的含义没有多大关系。这种兴趣是人们对危机的反应，他们普遍认为中国历史千百年来的持续性已经断裂，现在无论是在政治上还是思想上，

任何选择都有可能。

我在中国的谈
话令我想起80年代中期我在共产主义时期的波兰所习惯的谈话。当时政变刚刚结束，团结工会的权力处于最低点。令我吃惊的是，我遇见的学者、记者、艺术家、作家都迫切地渴望谈论柏拉图和黑格尔而不是时事，他们这样做也并非作为逃避的手段。在他们看来，经典是黑暗时代所需要的东西。给我印象尤其深刻的是印在低劣蜡纸上的地下出版物（samizdat）的出版商把一切都和柏拉图对话联系起来。在后共产主义的波兰没有能满足他很高的期待后，他就加入右翼卡钦斯基（Kaczyński）政府，当了部长，在某种程度上他是把克拉科夫（Kraków）当成了雅典，把华沙当成了锡拉丘兹（Syracuse）。

我不记得波兰朋友当时是否在阅读施米特，但他们确实把斯特劳斯当作重新发现超越共产主义大学体制的政治哲学传统的领路人。在某种意义上，他们是在重新追寻斯特劳斯自己的足迹。面对“西方的危机”，在二战前人们对纳粹主义以及后来的共产主义的虚弱反应中，斯特劳斯开始重新发现和表述位于西方政治传统核心的最原始问题。他是通过引导学生和读者在时间上井然有序地回归历史来实现的，即从尼采到霍布斯，然后再到中世纪犹太人和伊斯兰政治哲学（他回避基督教）最后到柏拉图、色诺芬、阿里斯托芬（Aristophanes）、修昔底德（Thucydides）。面对真正的、现有的社会主义带来的贫困、无能、虚弱的独裁政权，我认识的许多波兰人开始了类似的思想探索历程。如今，轮到中国的年轻人了，只不过他们见证的不是共产主义的崩溃而是共产主义演变成专制的国家资本主义。中国人的反应是学习希腊语、拉丁语和德语。

这些年轻人与波兰朋友不同的地方在于他们没有把自己描述成“自由派”。开始于80年代延伸到90年代，不仅在东欧而且传到世界各地的思想自由主义时代已经结束，毁灭它的因素包括政治性伊斯兰、西方人对自由主义的反应、以及给我们带来“新自由主义”的全球化力量（全世界的人都把不受约束的市场、劳工剥削、环境恶化、政府腐败与新自由主义联系起来）。在毛去世15年后成长起来的中国知识分子参与到竞争性的现代化道路的激烈辩论中，他们认真看待人权，这个阶段的高潮是198@9年的天@安#门￥运动。但几年后，当党的口号变成了“致富光荣”时，中国人开始追求这种光荣，知识分子背离了自由派政治传统。

年轻人现在认为，自由主义思想既不能帮助他们理解当今中国为什么充满活力也无法为未来提供一个模式。比如，与我交谈的人无论

政治倾向如何都同意中国需要强大的政府，这个国家要讲究法治、保持稳定、能
控制地方腐败、能执行和实施长期计划。他们的不同点似乎在于这个强大的国家对经济应该如何使用权力，在国际事务中该如何使用新发现的力量。同样的，在中国捍卫民族利益的权利问题上完全一致，差别仅仅在于这些民族利益到底是什么。轮到我谈论美国政治的时候，我试图解释茶叶党运动的目标就是“把政府从背上甩掉”，但我遭遇的是一脸的茫然和讽刺的笑容。

现在我们谈谈卡尔·施米特。四十年来，这个曾经的纳粹合作者短小、流畅的书吸引了大批西方激进分子，他们心肠太软受不了马克思主义的经验论，却着迷于任何东西开始于宗教的敏感性最终都成为政治生活的激烈争吵（tout commence en mystique et tout finit en politique）的观点（并非因为阅读了法国史学哲学家、诗人查尔斯·佩吉（Charles Péguy）的著作）。但在中国，对施米特的兴趣似乎更严肃，也更容易理解。

施米特是挑战20世纪反自由派国家主义者的思想最深刻者。他是在人类学意义上反对自由主义的。经典的自由主义认为自我满足的个人自主性，把冲突当作错误的社会性或机构性安排的功能，调整这些安排，自然就带来和平、繁荣、学识和优雅。施米特认为，冲突居于优先地位：人是政治动物，其最根本特征是有能力区分敌人和朋友。经典自由主义把社会看作拥有多样的、半自主性的领域，而施密特把社会整体视为优先（他的理想是中世纪的天主教会），他认为经济、文化或宗教的自主性是危险的幻想。（“政治性的是整体性的，因此，我们知道任何否定某些东西的政治性的决定其实总是政治性决定。”）经典自由主义认为主权是一种个人天然拥有的硬币，但他们在为自己建造合法的政治机构时就已经花出去了。施米特认为主权是简单地认为“应该这样做”的领袖、政党、阶级或国家的随意性自我创造行动的结果。

古典自由主义对战争和国际事务几乎不置一词，给人留下的印象是如果人权得到尊重，市场保持开放，太平盛世的国际秩序将随之到来。在施米特看来，这是自由主义最大、最说明问题的思想弃权。如果你对战争不置一词，你对政治也就无话可说。他写到“绝对不存在自由派政治，只有政治学的自由派批评。”

考虑到普遍存在的人们对中国经济现代化的速度和特征的不满，考虑到新自由主义在起作用的认识，施米特的这些观点似乎不仅仅聪明而且具有了先知的味道。在左派来看来，无需求助于马克思主义，他解释了为什么区

分经济和政治是虚假和恶毒的，自由主义是如何作为意识形态来起作用的，忽略或者解释位于政治生活核心的现象。他有
关主权的观点（通过法令确立起来，并得到隐蔽的意识形态的支持）也帮助左派认识到自由市场观影响人们思想的奇怪支撑点，使他们抱着一丝希望---政变、灾难、革命等东西或许能重新确立中国在世界上的地位，其思想基础既不是儒家学说、或毛思想也不是资本主义。（这里正是让人感到神秘（the mystique）的地方）

比较保守的学生实际上同意左派对新的国家资本主义以及它造成的社会分裂的大部分批评，虽然他们主要关心的是维持“和谐”，对中国再次经历革命性的转型不再抱有幻想（噩梦）。他们对历史的阅读使他们相信中国的持久挑战一直是维持领土完整统一、维持社会和平、防止外国入侵、捍卫国家利益---这些挑战因为全球市场力量和理想化个人权利、社会多元主义和国际法的自由主义意识形态而进一步凸显。像施米特一样，他们还没有认定自由主义思想究竟是对我们生存的世界一无所知，是不可救药地天真，还是在以危害社会和国际秩序的方式改变我们的世界。这些学生尤其感兴趣的是施米特在战后初期谈到全球化如何加剧而不是减少国际冲突的作品（这是在1950年）和谈论恐怖主义将如何作为对全球化的有效反应而传播开来的作品（这是在1963年）。施米特的结论----考虑到政治天然的对抗性本质，如果存在由少数大国划分势力范围的机制的话，我们所有人可能还更好过些。这个观点在我遇见的中国许多年轻人中都非常受欢迎。

施米特的政治主张是残酷的现代国家主义，这在中国会造成一些问题。虽然施米特是法学家，精通宪法和法治，但他的思想中根本没有承认国家权威自然边界的内容，除了维持国家的存在并打败敌人之外，他再也无法解释国家的目的。开始于孔子的中国政治思想传统虽然在某种程度上也是国家主义的，但取向完全不同：中国传统的目标是建立一个公正的社会等级制度，包括君主本人在内的每个人都有一个位置，都受到对他人的清晰义务的束缚。在这个制度中，君主也是为人服务的。这样的国家运行的核心是“君子”（gentlemen）（在有些儒家翻译中是“贵族/上流人士”（gentry），有道德有良心的人被推举成君主，这个宝座使他提高修养，变得更理性，更关心民众疾苦。虽然我遇到的学生常常提到施米特试图令我和其他老师们惊讶（épater），但真实的情况是他们渴望美好的社会，并非仅仅是国家的强大。

再次说到斯特劳斯。考虑到

他的某些追随者在最近的伊拉克战争中所发挥的作用，斯特劳斯的思想过去十年在美国引起具大争议的方面是他对“君子”的看法。受到亚里士多德的启发，斯特劳
斯区分了哲学家和实践家，即体现公民美德，献身于公共利益的人。他教导说，虽然要认识到什么是美好的社会需要哲学，但要把这个理想变成现实并维持其存在则需要君子。贵族制认识到了这种需要，而民主制则没有。这就是为什么君子教育在民主社会难以开展，需要悄悄进行的原因。斯特劳斯去世后，斯特劳斯追随者圈子大力传播这种观点，年轻的斯特劳斯追随者加入共和党的外交政策团队（apparat），这始于里根政府时期。许多人开始把自己看作开明贵族阶层的一员要带领美国度过“西方的危机”（这一幕仍然在等待其讽刺作家）。在这个意义上，斯特劳斯主义和伊拉克战争确实有联系。

不过，对我遇见的中国年轻人来说，圣人和政治家的区分以及受到良好教育的精英阶层为大众利益服务的思想根深蒂固，因为这些思想早已扎根于中国政治传统中。斯特劳斯对他们特别具有吸引力的地方除了他确立的西方政治理论宏伟壮丽的画面外，还在于斯特劳斯使得这种理想无需求助于孔子或者宗教或中国历史而具有哲学上的可敬性。斯特劳斯成为他们的古典传统和自己思想之间的桥梁。因为明显的原因，我遇见的年轻人都没有谈到后共产主义的中国，但他们确实公开谈论了新精英阶层指导中国事务的需要，通过让国家更聪明、更公正从而使国家更强大。他们没有入党的迫切渴望，他们说该党甚至与最独立的思想家合作。当下，他们似乎满足于学习古典语言、获得博士学位、找到教书的工作，显然是希望培养出哲学家和君子。他们并不着急，罗马不是一天建成的。

作者简介：

马克·里拉（Mark Lilla）哥伦比亚大学文科教授。

译自：Reading Strauss in Beijing by Mark Lilla


Reading Strauss in Beijing

China’s strange taste in Western philosophers.
中国对西方哲学奇怪的品味
? Mark Lilla

? December 8, 2010 | Reading Strauss in Beijing





https://www.wendangku.net/doc/0e1561705.html,/group/topic/16376468/



A few years ago, when I was still teaching at the University of Chicago, I had my first Chinese graduate students, a couple of earnest Beijingers who had come to the Committee on Social Thought hoping to bump into the ghost of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who established his career at the university. Given the mute deference they were accustomed to giving their professors, it was hard to make out just what these young men were looking for, in Chicago or Strauss. They attended co

urses and worked diligently, but otherwise kept to themselves. They were in but not of Hyde Park.

At the end of their first year, I called one of them into my office to offer a little advice. He was obviously thoughtful and serious, and was already well known i
n Beijing intellectual circles for his writings and his translations of Western books in sociology and philosophy into Chinese. But his inability to express himself in written or spoken English had frustrated us both in a course of mine he had just taken. I began asking about his summer plans, eventually steering the conversation to the subject of English immersion programs, which I suggested he look into. “Why?” he asked. A little flummoxed, I said the obvious thing: that mastering English would allow him to engage with foreign scholars and advance his career at home. He smiled in a slightly patronizing way and said, “I am not so sure.” Now fully flummoxed, I asked what he would be doing instead. “Oh, I will do language, but Latin, not English.” It was my turn to ask why. “I think it very important we study Romans, not just Greeks. Romans built an empire over many centuries. We must learn from them.” When he left, it was clear that I was being dismissed, not him.



This conversation came to mind recently after I returned from a month of lectures and interviews in China. I had heard that Strauss was popular there, as was, to my surprise, Carl Schmitt, the Weimar anti-liberal (and anti-Semitic) legal theorist. The New Yorker had even run a piece that spoke of “the new generation’s neocon nationalists,” mentioning the interest in Strauss as some sort of disturbing development. What I discovered, especially among the many young people I spoke with, was something much more interesting and important. Strauss and Schmitt are at the center of intellectual debate, but they are being read by everyone, whatever their partisan leanings; as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.” And the interest has little to do with nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. It is a response to crisis—a widely shared belief that the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history has been broken and that everything, politically and intellectually, is now up for grabs.

My conversations in China reminded me of political discussions I used to have in Communist Poland in the mid-’80s, after the coup and while Solidarity’s power was at its nadir. To my surprise, the people I met then—academics, journalists, artists, writers—were more anxious to talk about Plato and Hegel than about contemporary affairs, and not as a means of escape. For them, the classics were just what dark times demanded. I was particularly impressed with the publisher of a small samizdat magazine printed on terribl

e, waxy paper, who referred everything back to the Platonic dialogues. When post-Communist Poland failed to meet his high expectations, he became a minister in the right-wing Kaczyński government, somehow confusing Kraków with Athens, and Warsaw with Syracuse.

I don’t remember if my Polish friends were readin
g Schmitt at that time, but they did rely on Strauss as a guide to the political-philosophical tradition they were rediscovering outside the confines of the Communist university system. In a sense, they were retracing Strauss’s own steps. Faced with the “crisis of the West” he saw in the weak response to Nazism before World War II, and to Communism after it, Strauss set out to recover and reformulate the original questions at the heart of the Western political tradition, which he did by leading his students and readers on a methodical march back in time, from Nietzsche to Hobbes, then to medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy (he avoided Christianity), and finally to Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Thucydides. Faced with the poverty, incompetence, and weak tyranny that real, existing socialism had delivered, many Poles I knew had begun a similar intellectual journey. And today, it’s the turn of some young Chinese, who are witnessing not the collapse of Communism but its metamorphoses into a form of despotic state capitalism. Their response has been to learn Greek, Latin, and German.

What distinguishes these young men and women from my Polish friends is that none would describe themselves as “liberal.” The era of intellectual liberalism that began in the ’80s and spread in the ’90s, not just in Eastern Europe but in pockets around the world, is over—done in by political Islamism and Western responses to it, and by the forces of globalization that have given us a “neoliberalism” that people everywhere associate with unregulated markets, labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and official corruption. Chinese intellectuals who came of age in the decade and a half after Mao’s death were involved in intense debates over competing paths of modernization and took human rights seriously, and the period culminated in the Tiananmen movements of 1989. But, a few years later, once the party’s slogan became “to get rich is glorious,” and the Chinese began to pursue this glory, intellectuals turned against the liberal political tradition.

Liberal thought, the young ones now feel, just doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future. For example, everyone I spoke with, across the political spectrum, agrees that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one—a state that follows the rule of law, is less capricious, can control local corruption, and can perform and carry out long-term planning. Their disagreements all seem to be about how a strong state should exercise its power over the ec

onomy and how its newfound power should be exercised in international affairs. Similarly, there was complete consensus about China’s right to defend its national interests, just differences over what those interests are. When my turn to talk about American politics came, and I tried to explain the Tea Party movement’s goal of “getting government off our backs,”
I was met with blank stares and ironic smiles.
Enter Carl Schmitt. For four decades now, the short, elusive books by this once Nazi collaborator have attracted Western radicals too soft-minded for Marxian empiricism and charmed by the notion that tout commence en mystique et tout finit en politique. (Not that they’ve read Charles Péguy.) In China, though, the interest in Schmitt’s ideas seems more serious and even understandable.

Schmitt was by far the most intellectually challenging anti-liberal statist of the twentieth century. His deepest objections to liberalism were anthropological. Classical liberalism assumes the autonomy of self-sufficient individuals and treats conflict as a function of faulty social and institutional arrangements; rearrange those arrangements, and peace, prosperity, learning, and refinement will follow. Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary. Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction. (“The political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision.”) Classical liberalism treats sovereignty as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves; Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.” Classical liberalism had little to say about war and international affairs, leaving the impression that, if only human rights were respected and markets kept free, a morally universal and pacified world order would result. For Schmitt, this was liberalism’s greatest and most revealing intellectual abdication: If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”

Given the widespread dissatisfaction with the pace and character of China’s economic modernization, and the perception that it is neoliberalism at work, these ideas of Schmitt seem beyond wise; they seem prophetic. For the left, he explains, without appeal to Marxism, why the distinction betw

een economy and politics is false and pernicious, and how liberalism functions as an ideology, ignoring or explaining away phenomena central to political life. His idea of sovereignty, that it is established by fiat and is supported by a hidden ideology, also helps the left make sense of the strange hold free-market ideas have on people today and gives them hope that something—a disaster? a coup? a revolution?—might re
establish the Chinese state on foundations that are neither Confucian, Maoist, nor capitalist. (This is where the mystique comes in.)

Students of a more conservative bent actually agree with much of the left’s critique of the new state capitalism and the social dislocations it has caused, though they are mainly concerned with maintaining “harmony” and have no fantasies (only nightmares) about China going through yet another revolutionary transformation. Their reading of history convinces them that China’s enduring challenges have always been to maintain territorial unity, keep social peace, and defend national interests against other states—challenges heightened today by global market forces and a liberal ideology that idealizes individual rights, social pluralism, and international law. Like Schmitt, they can’t make up their minds whether liberal ideas are hopelessly na?ve and don’t make sense of the world we live in, or whether they are changing the world in ways that are detrimental to society and international order. These students are particularly interested in Schmitt’s prescient postwar writings about how globalization would intensify rather than diminish international conflict (this was in 1950) and how terrorism would spread as an effective response to globalization (this was in 1963). Schmitt’s conclusion—that, given the naturally adversarial nature of politics, we would all be better off with a system of geographical spheres of influence dominated by a few great powers—sits particularly well with many of the young Chinese I met.

Schmitt’s political doctrine is brutal modern statism, which poses some problems in China. Though he was a jurist with a lot to say about constitutions and the rule of law, nothing in his thinking recognizes natural limits to state authority or even explains the aims of the state beyond keeping itself together and besting its adversaries. The Chinese tradition of political thought that begins with Confucius, though in a way statist, is altogether different: Its aim is to build a just social hierarchy where every person has a station and is bound to others by clear obligations, including the ruler, who is there to serve. Central to the functioning of such a state are the “gentlemen” (or “gentry” in some Confucius translations), men of character and conscience trained to serve the ruler by making him a better one—more rational and concerned with the people’s good. Though the Chinese students I met c

learly wanted to épater their teachers and me by constantly referring to Schmitt, the truth is that they want a good society, not just a strong one.

Enter Leo Strauss, again. The most controversial aspect of Strauss’s thought in the United States over the past decade, given the role some of his devotees played in concocting the latest Iraq war, is what he had to say about the “gentleman.” Taking a cue from Aristotle, Strauss distinguished between philosophers, on t
he one hand, and practical men who embody civic virtue and are devoted to the public good, on the other: While knowing what constitutes the good society requires philosophy, he taught, bringing it about and maintaining it requires gentlemen. Aristocracies recognize this need, democracies don’t—which is why the education of gentlemen is difficult in democratic societies and may need to take place in secret. Much was made of this gentlemanly idea in Straussian circles after his death, and as young Straussians became part of the Republican foreign policyapparat, beginning in the Reagan administration, many began seeing themselves as members of an enlightened class guiding America through the “crisis of the West.” (This episode still awaits its satirist.) In this sense there was indeed a connection between Straussianism and the Iraq war.

But for the young Chinese I met, the distinction between sages and statesmen and the idea of an elite class educated to serve the public good make perfect sense because they are already rooted in the Chinese political tradition. What makes Strauss additionally appealing to them, apart from the grand tapestry of Western political theory he lays before them, is that he makes this ideal philosophically respectable without reference to Confucius or religion or Chinese history. He provides a bridge between their ancient tradition and our own. No one I met talked about a post-Communist China, for obvious reasons. But students did speak openly about the need for a new gentry class to direct China’s affairs, to strengthen the state by making it wiser and more just. None of them seemed particularly eager to join the Party, which they said co-opted even the most independent thinkers. For the moment, they seem content to study ancient languages, get their Ph.D.s, and take teaching jobs where they evidently hope to produce philosophers and gentlemen. They are not in a hurry. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Mark Lilla is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This article ran in the December 30, 2010, issue of the magazine.