Is There a Self at All? 真的有一個「我」嗎？

🔊Hume offered an image and at once withdrew half of it. “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” Then: “The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented.” There is a performance. There is no stage on which it happens and no one in the stalls. This is the difference between Hume and Descartes, who had made the same inward turn a century earlier and reported finding a thing that thinks. Hume’s reply is that Descartes found thinking and added the thing.

休謨提出了一個意象，又立刻收回了一半。「心靈是一種劇場，種種知覺相繼登場：走過、再走過、滑走，並且以無窮多樣的姿態與情境交融在一起。」接著他說：「劇場這個比喻不可以誤導我們。構成心靈的，只是那些前後相續的知覺；至於這些場景在什麼地方上演，我們連最模糊的概念也沒有。」有一場演出。沒有它在上面進行的舞台，觀眾席裡也沒有人。這就是休謨與笛卡兒的差別；笛卡兒早一個世紀做了同樣的向內轉向，回報說他找到了一個思考的東西。休謨的回答是：笛卡兒找到的是思考，那個「東西」是他加上去的。

🔊The same conclusion had been defended in debate nineteen centuries before, and the record survives in Pali and in Chinese. Around 150 BCE a Greek king named Menander ruled a realm in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, one of the states left behind by Alexander’s conquests. Indian tradition calls him Milinda. He liked to argue with holy men, and one day he called on a Buddhist monk and asked his name. “I am known as Nāgasena,” said the monk, but that is “only a generally understood term, a designation in common use,” and no permanent individual is involved in the matter. The king saw the difficulty immediately. If there is no Nāgasena, who receives the robes and the food? Who keeps the precepts, and who breaks them? If a man killed you, there would be no murder.

同樣的結論，早在十九個世紀之前就有人在辯論中為它辯護過；紀錄以巴利文與中文保存了下來。大約西元前 150 年，一位名叫米南德的希臘國王，統治著今天阿富汗與巴基斯坦一帶的一個國度，那是亞歷山大的征服所留下的諸國之一。印度的傳統稱他為彌蘭陀。他喜歡跟修行人辯論；有一天，他去拜訪一位佛教比丘，問他的名字。比丘說：「人們稱我為那先」，但那「只是一個通用的稱呼、一個日常使用的名稱」，這裡面並不涉及任何恆常的個體。國王立刻看出了困難。如果沒有那先，是誰接受衣服與飲食？是誰持戒？又是誰破戒？如果有人殺了你，那就沒有殺人這回事了。

🔊He then conducts Hume’s search aloud. Is the hair Nāgasena? The nails, the teeth, the skin, the heart, the brain? Is it the body, or the feelings, or the perceptions, or the impulses, or the consciousness? All of them together? Something apart from them? To each question the monk answers no. “Then thus, ask as I may, I can discover no Nāgasena. Nāgasena is a mere empty sound.” The monk asks how the king traveled there. In a chariot. Then what is the chariot? Is it the pole, the axle, the wheels, the frame, the yoke? All these together? Something apart from them? Now it is the king who must say no each time, and the monk who announces to the applauding crowd that there is no chariot and the king has told a lie. The king’s answer, and the point of the dialogue, are in the exercise below.

接著，他把休謨的那場尋找，出聲進行了一遍。頭髮是那先嗎？指甲、牙齒、皮膚、心臟、腦呢？是身體嗎？是感受、認知、意志的衝動，還是識？是它們全部合起來嗎？是它們之外的某個東西嗎？每一問，比丘都答「不是」。「那麼，我不管怎麼問，都找不到那先。那先只是一個空洞的聲音。」比丘問國王是怎麼來的。坐車來的。那麼車是什麼？是轅嗎？軸嗎？輪子、車廂、軛嗎？是這些全部合起來嗎？是這些之外的某個東西嗎？現在輪到國王每一次都得說「不是」；而比丘向鼓掌的群眾宣布：根本沒有車，國王說了謊。國王怎麼回答，以及這場對話的要點，就在下面的練習裡。

🔊Zhuangzi carries out the same inventory in three sentences. “The hundred joints, the nine openings, the six organs are all present and complete. Which of them should I feel closest to? Are you pleased with them all, or is there one you favor? Are they all servants? Then can servants not keep one another in order? Or do they take turns as ruler and subject?” He draws a conclusion that is more guarded than Hume’s. “It seems as though there were a true ruler, and yet we find no trace of him.” Something makes joy and anger arise, day and night, and “no one knows from where they sprout.” He does not deny that anything governs. He reports that the governor cannot be found, and he lets the matter rest there.

莊子用三句話做完了同一份清點。「百骸、九竅、六藏，賅而存焉，吾誰與為親？汝皆說之乎？其有私焉？如是皆有為臣妾乎？其臣妾不足以相治乎？其遞相為君臣乎？」他引出的結論，比休謨的更有保留：「若有真宰，而特不得其朕。」有某個東西使喜怒日夜生起，而「莫知其所萌」。他並沒有否認有什麼在主宰。他回報的是：那個主宰找不到；然後他就讓事情停在那裡。

🔊The most serious reply to Hume came from Kant, who had been, he said, awakened by him. Hume describes himself as searching, stumbling on perceptions, failing to catch anything further. Who is this “I” that searches and fails? A heap of perceptions cannot look through itself and notice that something is missing. For there to be experience at all, Kant argued, the perceptions must be capable of being brought together as mine: “The ‘I think’ must accompany all my representations,” or they would be nothing to me. So the unity of the self is not one more item to be found on the stage. It is the condition of there being a stage. But Kant refused to give the old view its victory. From this unity, he said, nothing follows about what I am. It is a form that every experience must have, and it tells us no more about an underlying soul than the frame tells us about the painter.

對休謨最嚴肅的回應來自康德；他說自己是被休謨喚醒的。休謨描述自己在尋找，碰到一個個知覺，卻抓不到更多的東西。這個尋找而失敗的「我」是誰？一堆知覺不可能把自己翻過一遍，然後察覺少了什麼。康德論證：要有經驗，這些知覺就必須能夠被匯集起來，成為「我的」：「『我思』必須能夠伴隨我的一切表象」，否則它們對我來說就什麼也不是。所以，自我的統一，並不是舞台上另一件有待尋找的東西。它是「有舞台」這件事的條件。但康德拒絕把勝利交給舊的看法。他說，從這個統一，推不出關於「我是什麼」的任何事。它是每一個經驗都必須具有的形式；它告訴我們的關於底下那個靈魂的事，並不比畫框告訴我們的關於畫家的事更多。

🔊If Hume is right, a stubborn appearance needs explaining. The brain sciences have added three pieces. No place has been found in the brain where everything comes together for a single observer, and processing is spread over many regions working at once. Patients whose hemispheres have been surgically separated will act on an instruction shown only to the mute right half and then, when asked why, give a fluent explanation that the speaking half has invented on the spot. The talking part of us appears to be a commentator who takes itself for the author. And the sense of owning a body can be moved: in a well-known experiment, people who watch a rubber hand being stroked while their own hidden hand is stroked in time come to feel the touch in the rubber one.

如果休謨是對的，就有一個頑固的表象需要解釋。腦科學補上了三塊拼圖。在腦裡，找不到一個「一切都匯集起來、呈給單一觀察者」的地方；處理的工作分散在許多同時運作的區域。兩個腦半球被手術分開的病人，會依照只給不能說話的右半邊看的指令行動；被問到為什麼的時候，卻能給出一個流利的解釋，那是會說話的那一半當場編出來的。我們身上那個會說話的部分，看來是一個把自己當成作者的評論員。而「擁有一個身體」的感覺是可以被搬動的：在一個著名的實驗裡，受試者看著一隻橡膠手被刷，自己那隻藏起來的手同時被同步地刷，後來就感覺那個觸感是在橡膠手上。

🔊Daniel Dennett proposed that the self is like a center of gravity. Every object has one, and engineers cannot do without it, yet nobody expects to find it by cutting the object open. It is an abstraction that lets us summarize how a complicated thing will behave. A self, on this view, is the center of the story a brain tells in order to hold a life together. The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger says that the brain builds a model of the organism and cannot recognize the model as a model, so that we look through it as through a window and take ourselves to be what it shows.

丹尼特提議：自我就像重心。每一個物體都有重心，工程師少了它不行；可是沒有人指望把物體切開就能找到它。它是一個抽象，讓我們得以概括一個複雜的東西會怎麼表現。照這個看法，自我是一個腦為了把一段人生維繫在一起而講的那個故事的中心。德國哲學家梅辛格說：腦為這個有機體建造了一個模型，卻認不出這個模型是模型；於是我們像透過一扇窗那樣透過它往外看，並且把自己當成它所呈現的東西。

🔊Hume was the first to see that his account was incomplete. A year after the first volumes of the Treatise he added an appendix in which he reviews his section on the self and writes: “I find myself involved in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.” If perceptions are distinct existences, something must explain why these ones belong together as one mind and are not scattered among many, and he could find nothing that does. He never returned to the subject. The puzzle he left has three parts, and every later theory is an attempt at one of them. Something makes experience unified at a moment. Something makes it seem owned. And something makes the thought “there is no self” so hard to feel, even for someone who is sure it is true.

休謨是第一個看出自己的說明並不完整的人。《人性論》前兩卷出版一年後，他加了一篇附錄，回頭檢視談自我的那一節，寫道：「我發現自己陷在這樣一座迷宮裡；我必須承認，我既不知道怎麼修正先前的意見，也不知道怎麼使它們前後一致。」如果知覺是各自獨立的存在，就必須有某個東西說明：為什麼這些知覺同屬於一個心，而不是散落在許多個心當中？而他找不到任何這樣的東西。他此後再也沒有回到這個題目。他留下的難題有三個部分，而後來的每一種理論，都是在嘗試解決其中之一。有某個東西，使經驗在一個時刻是統一的。有某個東西，使它看起來是「被擁有的」。還有某個東西，使「沒有自我」這個想法這麼難以感受到，即使是對確信它為真的人也一樣。

🔊None of this abolishes the person who signs your letters. Nāgasena went on answering to his name. The claim is that the name refers to a great many things working together, and that our habit of picturing one small owner inside them is a picture and nothing more. What follows from the claim is taken up on another shelf.

這一切並沒有取消那個在你的信上簽名的人。那先仍然繼續回應別人叫他的名字。這裡的主張是：那個名字指的是許許多多一起運作的東西；而我們習慣在它們裡面想像一個小小的擁有者，那只是一幅圖像，僅此而已。從這個主張會推出什麼，是另一個書架的題目。