What Use Is Philosophy?
哲学有何用处？
By J.B.S. Haldane
J.B.S. 霍尔丹
G. Alexandrov and four colleagues have just been awarded a Stalin prize of 200,000 roubles for a three-volume book on the history of philosophy. Most of the other prizes went to scientists. Many people will be inclined to say, “Why rank with scientists men who have merely described the opinions, mostly false, held by a number of people in the past? No doubt this has some interest, like a history of fairy tales or astrology, but it isn’t much use, particularly at the present grim moment.”
亚力克山德洛夫与四位同事因出版了三卷本哲学史著作一起获得了二十万卢布的斯大林奖。其它的大多数奖都授予了科学家。许多人都会认为“那些只是描述了过去的某些人认定的一些观点的人们，其中大都存在着谬误，为什么却与科学家们相提并论？这无疑有某种趣味，像神话故事或占星术的历史一样，但它没有什么用处，特别在当下这种严峻的时刻。”
There are a great many reasons for studying what philosophers have said in the past. One is that we cannot separate the history of philosophy from that of science. Philosophy is largely discussion about matters on which few people are quite certain, and those few hold opposite opinions. As knowledge increases, philosophy buds off the sciences.
有太多的理由去研究哲学家们在过去预言过什么。一个原因就是我们不能分离哲学源自科学的历史。哲学主要是讨论那些很少有人能够确定，以及那些极少有人能持反对观点的事物。随着知识的增加，哲学从科学中荫发出新枝。
For example, in the ancient world and the Middle Ages philosophers discussed motion. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas taught that a moving body would slow down unless a force were constantly applied to it. They were wrong. It goes on moving unless something slows it down. But they had good arguments on their side, and if we study these, and the experiments which proved them wrong, this will help us to distinguish truth from falsehood in the scientific controversies of today.
以古代和中世纪的哲学家讨论过运动为例。亚历士多德和圣·托马斯·阿奎纳认为一个运动着的物体，除非有外力的持续作用，否则它就会慢下来。他们俩都错了。除非某物使运动的物体慢下来，否则它会一直运动着。但他们拥有自己充分的论据，如果我们加以研究，通过实验证明他们的错误，这将有助于我们在今天的科学争论中辨别真伪。
We also see how every philosopher reflects the social life of his day. Plato and Aristotle, in the slave-owning society of ancient Greece, thought man’s highest state was contemplation rather than activity. In the Middle Ages St. Thomas believed in a regular feudal system of nine ranks of angels. Herbert Spencer, in th time of free competition between capitalists, found the key to progress in the survival of the fittest. Thus Marxism is seen to fit into its place as the philosophy for the workers, the only class with a future. But we can hardly guess what the world will look like to men and women with several generations of communism behind them, who take the brotherhood of man for granted, not as an ideal to be aimed at, but a fact of life and yet know that this brotherhood was only achieved by ghastly struggles.
我们也看到了，每一位哲学家如何反映他那个时代的社会生活。在古希腊奴隶社会，柏拉图与亚历士多德认为人的最高境界是沉思，而非行动。在中世纪，圣·托马斯信奉正统的九级天使封建制度。在资本主义自由竞争的年代，赫伯特·斯宾塞发现适者生存为进步的关键。同样马克思主义注意到了哲学对工人，在未来唯一的阶级的作用。但是我们很难猜想在他们身后经过几代共产主义者的奋斗，那时的男人和女人们如何看待那个世界，他们接受理所当然的友爱，不是作为一种理想的目标，但生活的现实让人们知道，这种友爱只有通过卓绝的斗争才能实现。
The study of philosophies should make our own ideas flexible. We are all of us apt to take certain general ideas for granted, and call them common sense. We should learn that other people have held quite different ideas, and that our own have started as very original guessed of philosophers.
研究哲学可以使我们的思想更为灵活。我们所有的人都会理所当然地遵循某种公众的观点，并称它们为常识。我们应该知道，其他人也会持有完全不同的观点，而且我们也有我们自己的看法，如同哲学家们最原始的猜想那样。
If a dog could speak, it would probably not distinguish between motion and life. Some primitive men do not do so, and travellers interpret them as saying there are spirits everywhere. In our age of machines we are apt to look for mechanical explanations of everything, yet it is only three hundred years since machines had been developed so far that Descartes first suggested that animal and human bodies were machines.
假如一只狗能够说话，它可能无法将运动与生命区别开来。某些原始人也不能进行这样的区别，但是那些旅行者对它们进行了说明，如同在说精神无处不在一样。在我们这个机器的时代，我们倾向于对所有的事物都寻求机械的解释，在笛卡尔首次提出动物与人类的身体都是机器的观点到今天，也只有三百年的历史。
A scientist is apt to think that all the problems of philosophy will ultimately be solved by science. I think this is true for a great many of the questions on which philosophers still argue. For example Plato thought that when we saw something, one ray of light came to it from the sun, and another from our eyes, and that seeing was something like feeling with a stick. We now know that the light comes from the sun, and is reflected into our eyes. We don’t know in much detail how the changes in our eyes give rise to sensation. But there is every reason to think that as we learn more about the physiology of the brain, we shall do so, and that the great philosophical problems about knowledge and will are going to be pretty fully cleared up.
科学家会认为哲学的所有问题最终都会通过科学加以解决。我认为此观点适用于那些哲学家们仍在争论的众多的问题。例如柏拉图认为当我们看物体时，一束阳光照在了物体上，而且另一束光线来自我们的眼睛，看到的东西就像一根棍子那样。现在我们知道那光线来自太阳，然后反射进我们的眼睛。我们还不了解在我们眼中是如何引发感觉变化的许多细节。但有充分的理由认为，随着我们对大脑生理机能的更多了解，我们将会了解其规律，而且有关认知和意愿的一些重大的哲学问题会愈发地清晰起来。
But if our descendants know the answers to these questions and others which perplex us today, there will still be one field of which they do not know, namely the future. However exact our science, we cannot know it as we know the past. Philosophy may be described as argument about things of which we are ignorant. And where science gives us a hope of knowledge it is often reasonable to suspend judgment. That is one reason why Marx and Engels quite rightly wrote so little on many philosophical problems which interested their cotemporaries.
然而，即使我们的后代知道了今天困扰着我们的这些疑问及其它的问题，对他们而言，依然存在一个他们所不了解领域，那就是未来。不管我们的科学发展到何等地步，我们都无法像了解过去一样地了解未来。哲学也许会被描述成有关我们对未知事物的争论。科学给了我们认知的希望，对疑问不妄加判断常常是有道理的。那就是为什么马克思和恩格斯对同时代都感兴趣的许多哲学问题很少论及的一个原因。
But we have got to prepare for the future, and we cannot do so rationally without some philosophy. Some people say we have only got to do the duties revealed in the past, and laid down by religion, and God will look after the future. Others say that the world is a machine, and the course of future events is certain, whatever efforts we may make. Marxists say that the future depends on ourselves, even though we are part of the historical process. This philosophical view certainly does inspire people to very great achievements. Whether is is true or not (and I think it is true) it is a powerful guide to action.
然而我们已做好了面对未来的准备，而且没有哲学，我们便不能做得如此理性。有些人说我们只要尽到揭示过去及宗教规定的那些责任就行了，上帝会关照未来的。另一些人说这个世界是机械的，而且无论我们做什么努力，未来的事物发展已是确定了的。马克思主义者认为未来全靠我们自己，即使我们是历史进程中的一部分。这一哲学观点必然会鼓舞人们去创造极其伟大的成就。无论正确与否（我认为是正确的）它都会给人类的行动以强有力的指导。
We need a philosophy, then, to help us to tackle the future. Agnositicism easily becomes an excuse for laziness and conservatism. Whether we adopt Marxism or any other philosophy, we cannot understand it without knowing something of how it developed. That is why a knowledge of the history of philosophy is important to Marxists, even during the present critical days.
我们需要哲学，以便帮助我们把握未来。不可知论很容易变成懒惰与保守的借口。无论我们采用马克思主义或其它什么哲学，我们不了解哲学的发展规律便无法理解它。那就是为什么即使在当下批判一切的时代，有关哲学史的知识对于马克思主义者也是重要的原因。
--From A Banned Broadcast and Other Essays
选自《被禁止的广播与其它随笔》
二0一二年一月六日译自《Readings in Modern English Prose》上册
About the Author
J.B.S. Haldane was born in 1892 and educated a New College, Oxford. He became President of the Genetical Society and was on the committees of the Royal Society and the Biochemical Society. A Fellow of New College, Oxford, Haldane became Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge, then Professor of Genetics at London University. He died in 1966 of cancer.
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