龔鵬程x漢密爾頓｜語言與肉身和理性的分合

龔鵬程對話海外學者第九十九期：在后現代情境中，被技術統治的人類社會，只有強化交談、重建溝通倫理，才能獲得文化新生的力量。這不是誰的理論，而是每個人都應實踐的活動。龔鵬程先生遊走世界，并曾主持過“世界漢學研究中心”。我們會陸續推出“龔鵬程對話海外學者”系列文章，請他對話一些學界有意義的靈魂。范圍不局限于漢學，會涉及多種學科。以期深山長谷之水，四面而出。

約翰·漢密爾頓教授（Professor John T. Hamilton）

哈佛大學德語和比較文學教授

龔鵬程教授：您好。您《肉身的語言學》一書，引人入勝。一方面哲學思辨落實于身體，乃近年一大趨勢；另一方面，源于基督宗教的“道成肉身“概念，又內涵豐富，可引人去思索詞（logos）與愛（philia）的問題；再者，以“軀殼“為重心的語言學家，會將詞語理解為具有核心意義的物質容器，而以“肉身”為重心的語言學家則專注于語言的內在性質，拒絕把詞語僅僅當作容器，故其間大有思辨空間。對此，我很喜歡。您能對"肉體的語言學家堅持形式和內容的不可分割性"予以闡釋嗎？

約翰·漢密爾頓教授：龔先生，您好。語言的功能可以用兩種從根本上來說很不同的方式來理解：詞語可以被看作是一種容器或 "形式"，它包含著一個思想核心-- 意義或者“內容”區別于表達方式，因此與表達方式脫離；或者，語言表達可以被看作是與內容無法區分的。

在第一種情況下，一個詞指向一個與它無關的意義，而在第二種情況下，一個詞只能代表它自己本身的意義。

這種語言上的區別，類似于神學上的區別。語言形式與思想內容可分離的前提與身體神學相呼應，人們認為身體內包含著一個看不見的、有意義的靈魂。例如，在荷馬（Homer）的《奧德賽》中，當雅典娜前往與忒勒馬科斯（Telemachus）交談時，她必須以人類的形式掩蓋她的神性；她以老船長門特斯（Mentes）的身份出現，從而使人類忒勒馬科斯（Telemachus）免受她的神性力量影響。一旦雅典娜完成了她的使命，她就會回到奧林匹斯山；她的神性只是被安置在一個人形中，并保持獨立于這個外在的形式。由于這個原因，她的神性決不會因為她出現在人類的身體里而受到影響。

基督教關于 "道成肉身 "的教義則大不相同。根據《約翰福音》，被認定創造 "上帝之言 "的基督并不僅僅是占據了人類的外形；相反，他成為了人類的肉體。與荷馬筆下的雅典娜不同，基督發現自己的神性遭到了嚴重的破壞——被折磨、被褻瀆、被交付于死亡。因此，關于肉體語言學研究的對象，是那些接受形式與內容不可分離的觀念的詩學、文學和哲學作品。

根據這種觀念，意義被認為是存在于表達本身之中的，因而語言并不是可有可無的。身體的語言學家一旦掌握了通過語言表達所傳達的思想，就可以不使用語言表達，而肉體的語言學家則堅持把詞語本身作為一種自我指涉的、非載體的表達。

The function of language can be understood in two fundamentally different ways: The word can be regarded as a kind of vessel or “form” that contains an ideational core—a meaning or “content” that is distinct from and therefore detachable from the mode of expression; or the verbal expression can be seen as indistinguishable from the content. In the first case, a word points to a meaning that exists apart from it, while in the second case, the word points to nothing apart from itself. This linguistic distinction is analogous to a theological one. The premise that verbal form is separable from ideational content corresponds to a theology of thebody, which is believed to contain an invisible, meaningful soul within. For example, in Homer’s Odyssey, when Athena travels to speak with Telemachus, she must conceal her divinity in a human form; she appears as the old sea captain Mentes and thereby shields the human Telemachus from her numinous power. Once Athena has completed her mission, she returns to Mount Olympus; her divinity was simply housed in a human shape and remained independent of that outer form. For that reason, her divinity was in no way compromised by her appearance in a human body. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is much different. According to the Gospel of John, Christ, identified as the creative “Word of God,” did not merely occupy a human shape; on the contrary, he became human flesh. Unlike Homer’s Athena, Christ found his divinity severely compromised—tortured, violated, and delivered to death. A philology of the flesh accordingly attends to poetic, literary and philosophical works that embrace this conception of the inseparability of form and content: a conception whereby meaning is thought to inherent in the expression itself and whereby language is not taken to be dispensable. Philologists of the body may dispense with the verbal expression once they grasp the idea it conveys, while philologists of the flesh adhere to the word itself as a self-referential, non-vehicular expression.

龔鵬程教授：在您的著作《尋求黑暗：品達的晦澀和古典傳統》中，您仔細研究了希臘詩人品達的作品，以及各種對品達作品的解釋。 您認為是什么原因讓如此之多的作家和哲學家品達的詩歌著迷？

約翰·漢密爾頓教授：早在古代，品達就被認為是古希臘最偉大的抒情詩人，這一聲譽被賀拉斯（Horace）加強并宣揚，他把品達的詩歌比作從山腰沖下來的一條強大的河流，淹沒了傳統的河岸（詩頌 4.2）。對賀拉斯來說，品達詩歌的純粹力量代表了一種崇高的風格，一種適合贊揚宏大主題的風格，而并非較溫和主題中，更輕巧、更易控的風格。

在歐洲文藝復興時期，品達風格的頌歌因此與高貴和宏偉聯系在一起，或者說，在路德教會改革時期的詩人那里，品達風格的頌歌與神圣的主題和贊美聯系在一起。雖然品達根據韻律模式創作了他的勝利之歌，但這種韻律的復雜性讓早期的現代讀者感到困惑，他們認為品達是用 "自由詩體 “的格式來寫作的。作為一種不受權威規則約束的詩歌方式，作為一種打破傳統的傳統，品達風格的詩歌模式被用來支持詩歌獨立于宮廷的贊助。

這種獨立性似乎在《第一首奧林匹亞頌》這樣的典范詩作中得到了進一步的證明，在這首詩中，從表面上看，詩人把自己的精力投入到眾神和一個相當黑暗的神話，即人類的過度擴張。品達從而代表了超越人類局限，超越認知限制的詩意愿望。現如今的詩人，如果作品不是太晦澀的話，她們的偉大直接與其作品的難度及其深不可測的程度聯系在了一起。

正是這種近乎神圣的崇高贊美詩吸引了歐洲各地的詩人和思想家，從法國的朗薩爾（Ronsard）和七星詩社詩人到17世紀英國的亞伯拉罕·考利（Abraham Cowley）。

鑒于品達詩歌引起的困惑，接受理論在某種意義上成為反接受理論，一個關于失敗的理解或激進的超越的故事，它吸引并啟發了約翰-喬治-哈曼（Johann Georg Hamann）對理性主義的批判，約翰·戈特弗里德·赫爾德(Johann Gottfried Herder)對酒神贊美詩和古希臘民族精神的描述，以及弗里德里希·赫爾德林(Friedrich Hoelderlin)獨特的詩學和翻譯。

Already in classical antiquity, Pindar was regarded as the greatest of the Ancient Greek lyric poets, a reputation that was enhanced and promulgated by Horace, who likened Pindar’s poetry to a powerful river rushing down a mountainside and flooding over the banks of convention (Odes 4.2). For Horace, the sheer force of Pindaric verse represented a sublime style, one that was fitting for praising grand subjects, as opposed to a lighter, more containable style reserved for more modest themes. In the European Renaissance, the Pindaric ode thus came to be associated with nobility and grandeur, or, in the case of poets of the Lutheran Reformation, with divine topics and praise. Although Pindar composed his victory songs according to prosodic patterns, the complexity of this prosody baffled early modern readers, who assumed that Pindar wrote in “free verse.” As a poetic approach unbound by authoritative rules, as a tradition of breaking with tradition, the Pindaric mode was enlisted to endorse poetic independence from court patronage. This independence appeared to be further evidenced by exemplary poems like the First Olympian Ode, where the poet ostensibly devotes his efforts to the gods and to a rather dark myth of human overreach. Pindar thereby stood for the poetic aspiration to transcend human limitations, including cognitive restraints. The poet’s greatness now linked directly to the difficulty and incomprehensibility, if not the utter obscurity, of his work. It was this quasi-divine, hymnic sublimity that attracted poets and thinkers across Europe, from Ronsard and the Pleiade poets in France to Abraham Cowley in seventeenth-century England. Given the perplexity that Pindar’s poetry caused, the reception history became, in a sense, an anti-reception history, a story of failed understanding or radical transcendence, which fascinated and inspired Johann Georg Hamann’s critique of rationalism, Johann Gottfried Herder’s accounts of the dithyramb and the spirit of the Ancient Greek peoples, and the idiosyncratic poetics and translations of Friedrich Hoelderlin.

龔鵬程教授：在您的書《音樂、瘋狂和語言的失靈》中，您研究了浪漫主義作品中經常出現的音樂與瘋狂之間的聯系。音樂和瘋狂之間的聯系源自哪里？作家們在他們的文學作品中是如何使用這種聯系的？

約翰·漢密爾頓教授：作為一種非語言藝術形式，器樂可以被理解為是有意義的，而沒有嚴格意義。通過規避概念上的測定，音樂可以因此被認為是超越表達和認識論限制的口頭交流方式。

在這個意義上來講，作家和思想家，特別是那些與德國浪漫主義和理想主義有關的作家與思想家，開始將音樂與瘋狂聯系起來，這可以被解釋為避開了理性的、概念性的邏輯。

音樂和瘋狂，似乎屬于那些徘徊在語言交流的慣例之上或遠遠低于慣例的領域。浪漫主義時代出現的許多關于瘋狂音樂家的描述，在狄德羅（Diderot）塑造的拉莫的侄子形象中已經有所預見，因此被賦予了打破理性、計算性思維的角色。克萊斯特關于四兄弟被音樂的暴力力量逼瘋的故事（”圣塞西莉亞 “ Saint Cecilia ），瓦肯羅德（Wackenroder）關于神秘作曲家約瑟夫·伯格林格（Joseph Berglinger）的虛構傳記，以及霍夫曼（Hoffmann）對約翰內斯·克萊斯勒（Johannes Kreisler）的刻畫，都表明音樂和瘋狂具有共同的潛力，以推翻對概念化語言的目的性設計。

因此，文學作家可能會呼吁音樂的反理性和瘋狂令人不安的非理性，將語言表達推向理解的極限。

總的說來，音樂和瘋狂——尤其是從浪漫主義的角度來看——可以被喚起作為一種質疑和破壞傳統和慣例的手段，用來打破期望或違背理智及行為規范。

Considered as a non-verbal art form, instrumental music could be understood as being meaningful without being strictly significant. By eluding conceptual determination, music may be thus regarded as transcending the expressive and epistemological limits of verbal communication. In this sense, writers and thinkers, particularly those associated with German Romanticism and Idealism, came to link music to madness, which could be interpreted as eluding rational, conceptual logic. Music and madness appeared to belong to realms that either hovered above or coursed well below conventions of verbal communication. The many depictions of mad musicians that emerged during the Romantic era, already anticipated in the figure of Rameau’s nephew by Diderot, were thus accorded a role of breaking with rational, calculative thinking. Kleist’s story of four brothers who were driven mad by the violent power of music (“Saint Cecilia”), Wackenroder’s fictional biography of the mystical composer Joseph Berglinger, and above all Hoffmann’s characterization of Johannes Kreisler, all speak to the shared potential of music and madness to unwork the purposive designs of conceptual language. As a consequence, literary writers might appeal to the trans-rationality of music and the unnerving irrationality of madness to push verbal expression to the limits of comprehension, either from above or below. Taken together, music and madness—especially from a Romantic perspective—can be evoked as a means for interrogating and undermining conventions and routines, for shattering expectations or transgressing intellectual and behavioral norms.

龔鵬程教授：您最近的學術研究項目“法國/卡夫卡：一位理論上的作家” 聽起來很有趣，有別于以往對于卡夫卡的研究。您能介紹一下嗎?

約翰·漢密爾頓教授：該書籍描述了弗朗茨·卡夫卡在法國的受歡迎程度，從1928年第一部譯作出現一直到20世紀80年代初結束。具體來說，這本書描述了法國思想史的發展，包括現在被稱為“法國理論”的發展，在多大程度上是與卡夫卡的作品直接接觸產生的。對卡夫卡的接受程度以及法國哲學這兩項工作并駕齊驅，緊密相連，以至于很難判斷出因果關系：法國思想在多大程度上影響卡夫卡的理論建構，卡夫卡的作品又在多大程度上詮釋了法國思想。簡而言之，卡夫卡是一個典型的案例，關于一個作者（撰寫者）如何成為一個理論上的作家。從超現實主義到存在主義，從結構主義到精神分析主義和馬克思主義批判、女性主義和解構主義，卡夫卡的存在是恒久的。與這一遺留問題共存的是，許多創造性的干預，促使或回應了哲學工作，這些作品更傾向于卡夫卡作為一名作者（撰寫者），而不是理論上的作家，有時會確認并增強現有的概念與假設，有時又會具有批判性地挑戰現有的概念與假設。在描述和評價這一國家歷史時刻的過程中，我試圖評價卡夫卡，作為作者和作為理論對象的卡夫卡這兩種形象之間的區別。它們在哪里沖突，在哪里重疊？它們是如何匯合的，又是如何背離的？我們是否應該努力把作者卡夫卡從他作為理論作家的命運中救贖出來？卡夫卡被鎖在一個永久的鏡像舞臺的回路中，通過這個回路，文學及其理論回應相互形成，相互傳遞，相互轉化，這是一種對反思的影射，每一方都獲得了它的認可與力量。

The project provides account of Franz Kafka’s reception in France, beginning with the appearance of the first translation in 1928 and ending in the early 1980s. Specifically, the book shows to what extent the development of French intellectual history, including what has now come to be known as “French Theory,” emerged out of a direct engagement with Kafka’s work. The two endeavors, Kafka reception and French philosophy, progressed side by side, so closely allied that it is often difficult to decide on questions of causation: To what extent was French thinking responsible for producing theoretical constructions of Kafka and to what extent did Kafka’s works contribute to the articulation of French conceptions. In brief, Kafka serves as an exemplary case of how a writer might become an author in theory. From Surrealism to Existentialism, from Structuralism to psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism, feminism and deconstruction, Kafka’s presence was persistent. Parallel to this legacy are the many creative interventions that prompted or responded to the philosophical labor, works that tended to side more with Kafka the writer than with the author in theory, at times confirming or enhancing, at times critically challenging the concepts and presuppositions at hand. In the course of delineating and evaluating this national-historical moment, my study attempts to assess what separates the two images of Kafka—Kafka the writer and Kafka the theoretical object. Where do they conflict and where do they overlap? How do they converge and how do they diverge? Can one—should one—strive to ransom the writer from his fate as an author in theory? Locked within the circuit of a perpetual mirror stage,France/Kafka attends to a genealogy through which the literature and its theoretical responses mutually form, inform, and transform each other, a projection of reflections whereby each side acquires its countenance and cogency.

龔鵬程，1956年生于臺北，臺灣師范大學博士，當代著名學者和思想家。著作已出版一百五十多本。

辦有大學、出版社、雜志社、書院等，并規劃城市建設、主題園區等多處。講學于世界各地。并在北京、上海、杭州、臺北、巴黎、日本、澳門等地舉辦過書法展。現為中國孔子博物館名譽館長、美國龔鵬程基金會主席。