我们身处这个大变革的“新时代”，如阿伦特所言，不想独处，不会思考，懒得思考，让别人替我做主思考，作出判断，而这种无思之境况存在于身边的任何一个普通人。试想在这个娱乐至死的时代里，我们陷入了疯狂的消费主义深渊，技术文明的发展已经远超人类的想象。就连读书，也有专门的团队来帮你梳理和总结，让你轻易“得到”知识，长此以往的结果就是，思考的能力再也不复存在。过去不再启示未来，人心在昏暗中徘徊，我们何以作出抉择？
作者：Jennifer Stitt
译者：泮海伦
校对：朱小钊
导读&笔记：朱小钊
策划： 杨婧娴
本文选自 Aeon | 取经号原创翻译
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In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. ‘He refuses to be alone,’ Poe wrote. He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the crowd.’
1840年，埃德加·爱伦·坡描述了一位老人在伦敦街头从黄昏踱步到黎明的“疯狂”。他感到极度绝望，只能靠淹没于一群来来往往的城市居民中才能得到片刻的缓解。“他拒绝独处，”坡写道。他“是那种极高明的罪犯……他是人群中的人。”
Throng [θrɒŋ] n. a crowd of people一大群人;人群
译注：埃德加·爱伦·坡：美国诗人、文学评论家，于1840年出版《人群中的人》。《人群中的人》揭示了现代人的悲哀：人们企图逃避孤独，但是当涌入人群的时候仍然感觉自己是人群之外的人。坡以他独到犀利的描述，把一个老头独一无二的神情展现在读者的面前：“那魔鬼的原型。当我在那转瞬即逝的一瞥之间力图从那种神情中分析出某种意义之时，我脑子里闪过一大堆混乱而矛盾的概念：谨慎、吝啬、贪婪、沉着、怨恨、凶残、得意、快乐、紧张、过分的恐惧――极度的绝望。” 表达了爱伦·坡对人类的生存困境和发展危机的深刻焦虑和无限关怀。
Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras, he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible.
同过往众多的诗人与哲学家一样，坡强调了独处的意义。他认为，一个人若失去了独处的能力，在人群中随波逐流，丢失了自己的特质，在舒适中变得麻木，就是“莫大的不幸”。二十年后，拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生对独处的见解略有不同，他引用古希腊哲学家毕达哥拉斯的话：“早晨适宜独处；……大自然会与人的精神世界互动，而在他人的陪伴下这是不会发生的。”爱默生鼓励老师们要让学生腾出独处的时间，养成独处的习惯，这样才是明智的。这种良好的习惯能够让学生深入、客观地思考。
Singularity [ˌsɪŋɡjuˈlærəti] n. the quality of sth that makes it unusual or strange奇怪，古怪
In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.
在20世纪，独处也是汉娜·阿伦特的思想核心。阿伦特是德国犹太人，为逃离纳粹流亡到了美国，她的人生中有很长时间都用来研究个体与“城邦”（即公共政治生活）之间的关系。对于她来说，自由关乎两个领域，即私人领域——沉思性生活，公共政治领域——积极生活。阿伦特认为，自由不仅意味着自发性和创新性的公共行为，还需要个人有独立思考与判断的能力，在独处时反思自己，发展良知，远离喧嚣的人群，并最终听到内心的声音。
译注：1、阿伦特已经对哲学家的沉思生活不感兴趣了，沉思无法解决现实问题，书斋里的哲学家要么只能成为隐士，要么成为帮凶，而她想成为的是一个思考着、进行判断的行动者。现代世界里，人人退守到自己的私人领域，通过电子媒介构建一个自我的世界，在我们看来，微博、微信、甚至微信公众号可以代替公共领域的存在。以公号的打赏为例，很多写作者通过粉丝的打赏赢得关注，打赏的数量代表他们在公共领域的巨大影响力，但是阿伦特分析道：“公众赞赏也是某种能够使用和消费的东西，公众赞赏被个人虚荣心消费……但是这种赞赏不足以构成一个让事物免于时间毁灭的空间。相反，在现代世界中，公共赞赏空洞地、每天以越来越大的数量消费着，以至于货币酬劳这个最空虚的东西反而显得更为‘客观’和真实。”
2、希腊城邦是公共生活组织的一个榜样，是作为一种人类活动的政治之意义与重要性的典范。长期以来，它的魅力一直深深地吸引着政治理论家和政治行动者。可以说是地中海沿岸的整个希腊世界--特别是公元前五世纪的雅典--的那150个左右'城邦国家'的经验，对西方思想和实践发挥了决定性的影响。希腊城邦表现的是全面的公民身份的理想，它使得人们不是孤立的个体，而是社会有机体的一分子。这种理想后人不断重新提出，直至今日；它似乎可以满足那绵延不绝的迫切的人类需要或渴望。/2016年上海外国语大学MTI考题
In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.
艾希曼是纳粹SS（党卫军）的高级将领，曾策划犹太人大屠杀，1961年接受审判，这一年，《纽约客》杂志社派阿伦特记录整个审判过程。她无法想象，一个人怎么能犯下如此罪大恶极之事？想必只有一个邪恶的反社会者才会参与这种大屠杀。然而，艾希曼头脑简单，又极其循规蹈矩，这让阿伦特很意外。阿伦特认为，尽管艾希曼的行为是罪恶的，但他本身个性平庸、并不丑恶，也看不出来他有什么明显的犯罪思想。”她以“思维的匮乏”来解释艾希曼屡屡犯罪等不道德的行为。艾希曼会策划大屠杀，归根到底是因为他缺乏思考能力。
Perpetrate [ˈpɜːpətreɪt] v. to commit a crime or do sth wrong or evil犯（罪）；做（错事）；干（坏事）
译注：划重点！看完这段注解，才能更好理解文章中的许多概念。阿伦特所说的“思维”是一种活动，它的现象本质在于，人之自我反思，这种自我反思乃介于我和我自己的对话。这种思维的作用“揭露一切未经审问明辨之意见的偏颇，继而铲除了那些我们习以为常，而且经常冥顽不化之价值、学说、教条，甚至是信念的偏执迷妄”。另一方面，思维活动亦酝酿出良知，这种良知是道德情感，让我们在当下的行动处境中，能立即分辨善恶、对错。因这种道德情感，人才得以感受“有愧/无愧良心”。这种思维活动能确保人的道德完整性，人一犯错，如果他尚存自我反思的思维能力，那么，这个犯了错的自我无法跟另一个自我和平对话，而终至不能共处一室。否则在独处时不会有自我责难的不安。
Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.
正如坡认为“人群中的人”身上潜藏着一股邪恶的力量，阿伦特也认为：“如果一个人不具备和自己进行对话的能力，那他无恶不作、做出违背自身信条的事也不足为奇，因为他无法也不愿为自己的行为做出解释，甚至会马上遗忘自己的罪行。”艾希曼避开了苏格拉底式的自我反思。他不了解自己，对独处也毫无概念。他没有过沉思生活，他没有进行一问一答式的反思，从而思考事物的意义，抑或是区分事实与虚构、真相与谎言、善良与邪恶。
Shun [ʃʌn] v. If you shun someone or something, you deliberately avoid them or keep away from them. 刻意避开;有意回避
Return home to：To bring something home to someone means to make them understand how important or serious it is. 使清楚地领会;使深切地感到
‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.
“宁可承受他人之罪行加诸己身所受的磨难，也不愿自己为恶”阿伦特写道，“因为一个人遭遇了不幸，他的朋友不一定离开他；可是谁会想和一个杀人犯做朋友，和他一起生活呢？就连另一个杀人犯也不愿意。”这不是说无思之人就是怪物，也不是说世上那些伤心的梦游患者在独处面对自己之前，就会先杀人。从艾希曼这个例子中，阿伦特体会到只有当社会成员都乐于思考，学会在独处时思考，社会才能更自由和民主。她认为“要与他人相处，首先得学会与自己相处”。
译注：梦游症通常与抑郁症、焦虑症等精神疾病有关，患者在半醒状态下活动，严重时伴随着暴力活动，如杀人等。
But what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.
然而我们可能会有这样的疑问，如果在独处时感到孤独怎么办？如果我们变成孤立的个体，失去了与朋友相处的乐趣，不是很危险吗？其实哲学家们早已仔细地对独处与孤独这两个概念作了重点区分。柏拉图在《理想国》中（约公元前380年）写了一个寓言故事，故事中，苏格拉底赞美了那位善于独处的哲学家。在地穴寓言中，哲学家从一个黑暗的地下洞穴中逃离出来，同时离开了地穴中其他人，沐浴在象征着思考的阳光下。哲学家虽孑然一身，但她并不孤独，她能感知内在的自我和外在的世界。在独处中，“灵魂与自我完美契合”的无声对话终于发出美妙的召唤之音。
Proffer [ˈprɒfə(r)] v. to offer something by holding it out, or to offer advice or an opinion 提供，提出
Parable [ˈpærəbl] n. a short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson, especially one of those told by Jesus as recorded in the Bible寓言故事
Celebrate [ˈselɪbreɪt] v. to express admiration and approval for something or someone 赞扬，赞美；歌颂
Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’
正如柏拉图的观点，阿伦特认为：“从存在主义来看，思考是一件独立却不孤独的事；独处是一个人自己陪伴自己的状态。而孤独……是当我独自一人需要陪伴却苦寻不得时产生的感觉。”在独处时，阿伦特从不渴望陪伴或者友情，因为她不是真正的孤单。她的内在是她可以对话的对象，她可以与自己进行苏格拉底式的对话：“你说的到底是什么意思呢？”，这至关重要。阿伦特坚信，“唯一无法逃离的就是你自己，除非你不再思考。”
Crave [kreɪv] v. to have a strong or uncontrollable want for something 渴望，热望；难以抑制的渴求
Camaraderie [ˌkæmə'rɑ:.dəri] n. a feeling of friendliness towards people that you work or share an experience with 同志情谊；友情
Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.
当我们独处时，要谨记阿伦特的忠告。我们处在一个高度互联互通的世界，可以每时每刻都在互联网上进行交流，却总是忘记腾出一些时间来独立思考。我们每天要查看邮件上百次；我们每个月要发出上千条短信；我们着魔似的浏览推特、脸书以及Instagram，渴望每时每刻都与密友或是普通朋友保持联系。我们在网上搜寻着朋友的朋友、前任、不了解的人甚至根本不认识的人。我们时时刻刻都渴望得到陪伴。
have no business doing sth：to have no right to do something 无权做…
But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.
然而，阿伦特提醒我们，如果我们失去独处的能力，无法一个人待着，那么也将失去思考的能力，成为“人群中的人”。正如她所言，我们可能会被他人的所思所想、所作所为所裹挟，缺乏思考，墨守成规，无法辨别“对错、美丑”。独处不仅代表着致良知、激发个体意识的精神状态，更能为参与公众政治生活服务。在和他人相处之前，我们必须先学会与自己相处。
Conformity [kən'fɔ:mɪti] n. behaviour that follows the usual standards which are expected by a group or society 循规蹈矩
译注：阿伦特试图恢复被政治生活所遮蔽的公民能力，她希望能够重新激起人们思考的必要性和积极性。思考活动意味着人们能认识自己所处的公共生活中的危机与机遇。思考不是为了知识或真理，更重要的功能是以自己的方式理解人类政治事务，阿伦特希望能重新回到思考人类事务本身。阿伦特的伟大之处在于她敏锐地意识到，一旦我们丧失了思考能力之后，我们就丧失了跟自己的良心对话的能力，自然也不会进行判断，作出抉择，我们只能浑浑噩噩地跟从他者的判断，成为别人的的精神寄生虫。所以，为了避免这种情况，我们要发掘新的现实和新的概念，因为只有如此才能终止陈词滥调，拒绝不假思索接受的观念，破除陈腐的分析，揭穿谎言和政治空话，帮助人们戒掉对假大空宣传形象的迷恋，从而可以摆脱不思考的诱惑。
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