What Is Philosophy? 哲學是什麼？

🔊The word is Greek: philosophia, from philein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. An ancient story, told by Cicero some five centuries after the supposed event, credits it to Pythagoras, who is said to have declined the title sophos, wise man, and called himself only a lover of wisdom. The story is probably legend, but it has survived because it captures something true. A philosopher is defined by a relation to wisdom, and the relation is desire rather than possession.

這個字是希臘文：philosophia，由 philein（愛）與 sophia（智慧）組成。有一個古老的故事說它出自畢達哥拉斯：他不肯接受 sophos（智者）的稱號，只說自己是「愛智慧的人」。這個故事是西塞羅在事隔約五百年後記下的，多半是傳說；它流傳下來，是因為說中了一件事。哲學家是由他跟智慧的關係來界定的，而那個關係是渴望，不是擁有。

🔊Plato has Socrates say that “philosophy begins in wonder” (Theaetetus 155d), and Aristotle agreed: “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (Metaphysics 982b). The wonder they had in mind is not the pleasant awe of a sunset. It is closer to puzzlement, the discomfort of noticing that something you took to be obvious does not, on inspection, make sense. Everyone knows what time is until asked to say. Everyone knows what a fair share is until two people claim the same thing.

柏拉圖筆下的蘇格拉底說「哲學始於驚奇」（《泰阿泰德篇》155d），亞里斯多德也同意：「人們現在開始、以及最初開始做哲學思考，都是由於驚奇」（《形上學》982b）。他們說的驚奇，不是看夕陽時那種愉快的讚嘆，比較接近困惑：你發現一件向來以為理所當然的事，仔細一看竟然說不通，心裡因此不安。人人都知道時間是什麼，直到有人要他說出來。人人都知道什麼叫公平的一份，直到兩個人要同一樣東西。

🔊Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) made a method of that discomfort. He wrote nothing. What we have are portraits by people who knew him, above all Plato, and in those portraits he does one thing again and again: he finds someone who claims to know what courage or justice or piety is, asks for a definition, and tests it against cases the speaker himself accepts. A general says that courage is standing firm in the line; Socrates points out that soldiers sometimes fight bravely while retreating. The definition is revised, tested again, and fails again.

蘇格拉底（約西元前 470–399 年）把這種不安變成一套方法。他一個字也沒寫。我們有的是認識他的人為他畫的像，其中最重要的是柏拉圖；在這些畫像裡，他反覆做同一件事：找到一個自稱知道什麼是勇敢、正義或虔敬的人，請對方下定義，再拿對方自己也承認的例子來檢驗這個定義。一位將軍說，勇敢就是在陣線上堅守不退；蘇格拉底指出，士兵有時是一邊撤退一邊英勇作戰的。定義修改了，再受檢驗，又垮了。

🔊The technical name for this cross-examination is the elenchus, and its usual result is aporia, a state of being at a loss. Socrates considered that result a gain. A person who has discovered that he does not know is at least in a position to start looking.

這種詰問的術語叫 elenchus（詰問法），通常的結果是 aporia，也就是不知所措、無路可走的狀態。蘇格拉底認為這個結果是收穫。一個人發現自己並不知道，至少就站到了可以開始尋找的位置。

🔊Three neighbors help to mark the borders. Philosophy is not science, because its questions are not settled by measurement, though it reasons about what measurement can show. It is not religion, because it accepts no conclusion on authority, though it asks many of the same questions. And it is not mere opinion, because a philosophical claim has to be argued for, and an argument can be checked by anyone.

有三個鄰居可以幫我們標出邊界。哲學不是科學，因為它的問題不是靠測量解決的，雖然它會推敲測量到底能證明什麼。哲學不是宗教，因為它不憑權威接受任何結論，雖然它問的許多問題跟宗教相同。哲學也不只是意見，因為哲學主張必須有論證支持，而論證是任何人都能檢查的。

🔊The discipline lives on that last point. You are free to believe whatever you like, but once you give reasons, your reasons become public property, and other people may show you that they do not support what you thought they did.

這門學問就靠最後這一點活著。你愛相信什麼都可以；可是一旦你給出理由，你的理由就成了公共財，別人可以指給你看：這些理由並不支持你以為它們支持的結論。

🔊Over twenty-five centuries the questions have sorted themselves into branches. Logic studies what follows from what. Epistemology asks what knowledge is and whether we have any. Metaphysics asks what there is and what it is like: time, causation, the self, free will. Ethics asks how one should live, political philosophy how we should live together, and aesthetics what beauty and art are. Around these have grown the “philosophies of”: of mind, of language, of science, of religion, of education. The borders are porous. Ask whether a machine can think, and within a few minutes you will be doing metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics at once.

兩千五百年下來，這些問題自己分成了幾個分支。邏輯學研究什麼可以從什麼推出來。知識論問知識是什麼、我們到底有沒有知識。形上學問有什麼東西存在、它們是什麼樣子：時間、因果、自我、自由意志。倫理學問人應該怎麼活，政治哲學問我們應該怎麼一起活，美學問美與藝術是什麼。在這些周圍又長出一批「某某哲學」：心靈哲學、語言哲學、科學哲學、宗教哲學、教育哲學。分支之間的邊界是透水的。問一句「機器會不會思考」，幾分鐘之內你就同時在做形上學、知識論和倫理學了。

🔊The Greek word should not mislead us about ownership. Confucius died about a decade before Socrates was born, and by then he had spent a lifetime asking what makes a person humane. The Buddha, whose dates are less certain, taught in the same era that what we call a self is a process and not a thing. Neither had a word for “philosophy.” The Chinese term 哲學 was coined only in 1874, by the Japanese scholar Nishi Amane, to translate the European word.

這個字是希臘文，但我們不該因此弄錯這門學問歸誰所有。孔子過世大約十年後蘇格拉底才出生，而孔子已經用了一輩子追問：什麼使一個人成為仁者。佛陀的年代比較不確定，但他在同一個時代教導：我們稱為「我」的，是一個過程，不是一個東西。他們兩位都沒有「哲學」這個詞。中文的「哲學」要到 1874 年才出現，是日本學者西周為了翻譯這個歐洲字而造的。

🔊Yet a tradition does not need the label to do the work. Wherever people have given reasons for claims about knowledge, reality, and the good life, and have answered objections to them, philosophy has been going on. This series therefore follows three lines, Greek, Chinese, and Indian, and pays attention to the places where they meet.

不過，一個傳統不需要有這個標籤，也能做這件工作。只要有人為自己關於知識、真實與美好人生的主張提出理由，並且回應別人的反駁，哲學就在進行。所以這個系列沿著三條線走：希臘、中國、印度，並且特別留意它們相遇的地方。

🔊Bertrand Russell faced the obvious complaint, that philosophy never seems to settle anything, and gave two replies. First, the complaint is partly an illusion: when a philosophical question becomes answerable, it gets a new name. Physics was once “natural philosophy”; psychology left home in the nineteenth century. What remains under the old name is, by definition, the unfinished business.

最常見的抱怨是：哲學好像從來沒有解決過任何問題。羅素正面回應了這個抱怨，給了兩個答覆。第一，這個抱怨有一部分是錯覺：一個哲學問題一旦變得可以回答，就會換一個名字。物理學從前叫「自然哲學」；心理學是十九世紀才離家的。還留在舊名字底下的，按定義就是沒做完的事。

🔊Second, the unfinished business is worth doing for its own sake. Philosophy, he wrote, is to be studied “not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions,” but “for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible.” A mind that has never doubted its own assumptions is confined by them. Socrates put the point more severely at his trial. The unexamined life, he told the jury, is not worth living.

第二，沒做完的事本身就值得做。他寫道，研究哲學「不是為了它的問題有什麼確定的答案」，而是「為了這些問題本身；因為這些問題擴大了我們對於什麼是可能的想像」。一個從來沒有懷疑過自己預設的心靈，就被這些預設關住了。蘇格拉底在受審時把話說得更重。他對陪審團說：沒有經過省察的人生，不值得活。