【英文原声版08】Doris Sommer: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

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Why do adults need to play?

成年人为什么需要游戏？

Play is an essential part of childhood. Kids learn how to share and cooperate, how to build and problem solve, how to create and imagine—all through play. 

童年时代少不了游戏。孩子们在游戏中学会分享与合作、构思和解决问题、创造和想象。

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us stop going to playgrounds or dressing up in costumes. But according to the German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller, play was a key part of adulthood, too.

成年后，我们大多不再去游乐场玩耍，也不再穿戏服。不过德国哲学家约翰·弗里德里希·冯·席勒认为，玩耍对成年人来说也很重要。

Schiller, who lived from 1759 to 1805, thought that play was much more important to human life than we usually give it credit for.

席勒出生于1759年，1805年去世。他认为，对人类生活而言，游戏对人类生活的重要性，远比我们想象的还要高。

In fact, he believed the only way we could achieve the utopian society he longed for was to make play a much more central aspect of society. 

事实上，他相信，只有让游戏在社会中发挥更核心的作用，我们才能实现他理想中的乌托邦。

Schiller’s writings advocate for a vision of humanity that is built around creativity and play. 

席勒在书中主张，通过培养创造力与嬉戏玩耍来塑造我们的人文精神。

Doris Sommer: It has put human creativity at the center of our history and our future.

这本书将人类的创造力置于人类历史与未来的中心。

Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down in a Harvard student center with Professor Doris Sommer, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African American Studies at Harvard University. We talked about Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨某一本书带给世界的影响。本集中，我在哈佛学生中心采访了多丽丝·索默教授，她在哈佛大学从事罗曼语言与文学研究以及非裔美国人研究。我们探讨了席勒的《审美教育书简》。

A developer of Enlightenment thinking

启蒙思想的先驱

Doris Sommer: Schiller was a very well known, still is a very well-known poet and dramatist. We still see his plays and his lyrics have been put to music as well.

席勒是一名诗人和剧作家，至今都颇负盛名。直到今天，他的戏剧台词和诗歌片段仍会出现在音乐里。

The composer Ludwig van Beethoven set Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” to music in the 1820s. It has since become one of the world’s most recognizable songs. 

19世纪20年代，著名作曲家路德维希·凡·贝多芬为席勒的诗《欢乐颂》谱曲，此后这首曲子在全世界广为流传，成为最负盛名的曲子之一。

But Schiller didn’t just write plays and poetry—he also wrote very influential philosophical essays in the fields of ethics, metaphysics, political theory, and aesthetics.  

席勒的造诣不仅限于戏剧和诗歌。在伦理学、形而上学、政治学和美学方面，他也佳作频出，饱含哲思，颇有建树。

Doris Sommer: And he was one of the most important disciples of Immanuel Kant. So he is a co-developer of Enlightenment thinking.

在思想上，他是伊曼努尔·康德最重要的继承者之一。两人都是启蒙思想运动的先驱。

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who revolutionized European thought and was the primary philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment.

伊曼努尔·康德是德国哲学家，他彻底改变了欧洲人的思想，是启蒙运动时期至关重要的哲学家。

Enlightenment thinking grew out of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. This was a period in which great leaps in scientific understanding were made and new methods of observation and skepticism were developed. The Age of Enlightenment continued and evolved this worldview, emphasizing reason and observation over faith or aesthetic values.

启蒙思想发端于十六、十七世纪的科学革命。那时人们在科学理论方面取得了重大进展，提出了新的观察方法，也培养了批判怀疑的精神。启蒙运动时期，这些思潮进一步发展。相比于信仰和美学价值，人们更看重理性与观察。

At its most fundamental, the Enlightenment encouraged people to trust less in the traditional authority of kings, priests, and more in their own capacity for reason. 

启蒙运动最核心的思想是，鼓励人们质疑国王、教士的权威，相信自己的理性思考能力。

This emphasis on the authority of individual reason led to new movements that opposed the existing power structures. These movements were led by people like Schiller.

启蒙运动强调了个体理性的权威性，这催生了一场反对当时权力结构的运动。而掀起这场运动的正是席勒等人。

What made Schiller write these letters?

席勒为什么会写这些书简？

Doris Sommer: Friedrich Schiller, from a very young age, was a revolutionary.  

弗里德里希·席勒从年轻时就富有革命精神。

Although he was German, Schiller became involved in The French Revolution, which began in 1789. The most influential political organization that was founded during the revolution was The Society of the Jacobins. The Jacobins fought against the French monarchy and established a revolutionary dictatorship. The group was originally made up of deputies from regions throughout France, but it soon opened its membership to anyone, whether they lived in France or not.

尽管席勒是德国人，但他也投身到了1789年开始的法国大革命中。大革命初期，最具影响力的政治团体是雅各宾派，他们推翻了君主专制，建立了革命专政。其成员最初由法国各地代表组成，但很快面向所有人开放，甚至不限国籍。

Doris Sommer: He befriended most of the French Jacobins. He was honored to be called a citoyen by the French, and he was very much in favor of the French Revolution until one day he got a message that the Jacobins had cut off the king's head. He sat down with his own heart broken, and he started to write these letters.

席勒因而结识了法国大多数雅各宾派成员。法国人称他为公民，他也深以为荣。那时他基本上还是支持大革命的。直到有天，他听说雅各宾派把国王推上了断头台。他痛心疾首，开始坐下来写这些书简。

Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man was published in 1794 and were addressed to a friend, a Danish Prince named Friedrich Christian. He wrote the letters during a very violent period of the French Revolution called the Reign of Terror, and in the letters, he examined where the French Revolution had failed and how to prevent such failures in the future. 

1794年，席勒的《审美教育书简》出版，这些书简是写给他的朋友、丹麦王子弗里德里希·克里斯蒂安的。书简写于法国大革命的“恐怖统治”时期，当时暴乱横行。在书简中，席勒审视了法国大革命的失败之处，并提出今后应当如何避免这些失败。

Doris Sommer: Schiller had the very strong sense that the Jacobins had gotten drunk on the concept of reason, that anyone who didn't belong to the reasonable sect should simply be eliminated. And so Schiller sat down to think about the limits of reason.

席勒明显察觉到，雅各宾派太过醉心于理性，甚至认为任何非理性派都要被摧毁。于是，席勒开始静下来思考理性的局限。

And this is in the spirit of Immanuel Kant. Kant wrote a whole book on aesthetics to rescue judgment from enlightenment thinking, which was devolving into just mathematical reason.

这就牵扯到伊曼努尔·康德的思想。康德曾用一整本书来探讨美学。当时，启蒙思想正演变成纯粹的数学理性，而康德想要把“判断力”从启蒙思想中解放出来。

Just imagine today if we would say that all human life is organized by algorithms. Where is sentiment, where is judgment, where is creativity? 

试想一下，假如今天我们说人类所有生活都是由算法构成的，那情感、判断力、创造力会被置于何处？

What did Kant think of aesthetic judgment?

康德如何看待审美判断力？

Kant published the Critique of Judgment in 1790. It is the third critique in his Critical project, after the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason.

1790年，康德发表了《判断力批判》。这是他的“三大批判”之一，是继《纯粹理性批判》和《实践理性批判》之后的第三次批判。

Doris Sommer: Kant wrote his third Critique on aesthetic judgment not because he was particularly interested in aesthetics. He was interested in judgment. But the only way to develop judgment is to think about things that don't make any practical, or moral, or intellectual difference in your life. What is it, Kant asked himself that will get you to think intensely with disinterest, without any greed or purpose? What is it? And he said the only thing that will get you excited enough to want to stay with an issue that doesn't do you any good is beauty, beauty and the sublime.

康德写这第三本书来评论审美判断力，倒不是因为他对美学兴趣浓厚。他感兴趣的是判断力。可培养判断力的唯一方法，是思考对改善现实生活、培养道德、增长见识毫无用处的事情。康德在想，是什么让人们不偏不倚、不带功利地积极思索呢。到底是什么呢？他总结道，人们之所以会热衷于解决毫无现实裨益的问题，唯一的原因是受美与崇高的感召。

Aesthetic judgment is entirely irrational. There’s no formula for beauty. It’s also personal.

审美判断是完全非理性的，没有什么美学公式。审美是私人的。

Doris Sommer: The judgment that you come to about something that is either beautiful or sublime is a subjective judgment.

判断某个东西是否美、是否崇高，是完全主观的判断。

There is no objective measure of beauty. You can’t predict what someone will find beautiful, and you can’t create an artwork that every single person will like.

美没有客观衡量标准。你没法预测别人会觉得什么东西很美，也没法确保自己的艺术作品能受到每个人的喜爱。

Doris Sommer: So that's the one enormous takeaway for thinking about beauty. That it's free. It's disinterested. It doesn't do any good.

所以这是思考美的一大妙处。这种思考自由、公正、不功利。

For this reason, Kant proposed that art and aesthetic judgment could be a tool to balance out the two extremes of reason and sentiment. 

康德因此指出，艺术和审美判断力可以用来平衡极端理性和极端感性。

Doris Sommer: It's the training ground for judgment, which then, of course, you have to use for everything else. For law, for science, for morality. But if you try to train judgment on economics or morality or intellectual pursuits, you're already subjugating that possible freedom, that possible disinterest to predictable answers. It's only when you think about beauty that there is nothing predictable. You have nothing to hold on to.

通过这些审美训练，你可以培养起判断力，当然随后你要将判断力用在别的领域，比如法律、科学、道德。但一旦你尝试训练对经济学、道德、知识的判断力，你就丧失了获得自由的可能性，那种无所谓有没有确定答案的自由的可能性。而只有在思考美的时候，所有答案都毫不确定、难以预测。没有什么是你能准确把握的。

The other wonderful takeaway about thinking aesthetically is that the doubt you have doesn't go away. Since there is no reasonable necessary right answers, you come to a conclusion, but you're never sure. So you have to talk to other people. And so aesthetic judgment is the foundation for inter-subjective social behaviors. You need other people to come to a decision.

思考美学的另一个妙处是，你的疑惑不会消失。因为没有绝对正确的理性答案，所以就算你得出了某个结论，你永远都不确定它对还是不对。所以你不得不与别人交流。审美判断因而成了主体间社会活动的基础。你需要和别人商量才能下定论。

Beauty is subjective, but, Kant writes, no one person can deem something beautiful alone. So, Kant decided to reframe the idea of “common sense” to reflect this co-creation of aesthetic judgment. Common sense typically means an idea that is obvious, self-evident, and doesn’t require any meaningful thought.

不过康德还写道，虽然美是主观的，但美不美不是一个人说了算的。康德决定重新定义“共通感”这个概念，来表明审美判断需共同完成。共通感通常指某个显而易见、不言而喻、无需特别意义的观点。

Doris Sommer: But let's re-signify common sense, he proposed, to mean the sense that we co-create and that we have in common. So if I call a sunset beautiful, it's because someone else might also think it's beautiful. And in fact, we've talked about it. And since neither one of us are quite sure, even in the dialogue, we have to open the dialogue to a broader conversation and ask this person and that person and the other until this subjective becomes objective.

让我们重新定义共通感，定义成我们共同创造且共同拥有的某种感觉。所以如果我觉得某天日落很美，那是因为另一个人也这么想。其实我们刚刚也提到，因为两个人哪怕交流了，还是会不确定，这时，我们就不得不开启更广泛的交流，问问这个人，再问问那个人，再问问其他更多的人，直到主观的判断成为客观的标准。

How did Schiller  respond to French Revolution?

席勒如何回应法国大革命？

So with that notion of aesthetic education, Schiller writes a response to the terror and the French Revolution. He says, you may think that my writing about aesthetics is out of tune with the desperate times. But he says, on the contrary, its most urgent thing we have to do, because if you respond to violence with more violence, you know where we're going.

而席勒就从这种审美教育的角度分析了当时的恐怖局势和法国大革命。他写到，你或许觉得，我这些讲审美的文章与这个绝望的时代不相称，但这个问题反而是我们的当务之急。因为如果继续以暴制暴，结局如何一想便知。

According to Schiller, the civilized way to respond to violence was to approach it with an aesthetic judgment: to step back, interrogate it, and talk to other people. 

席勒认为，要想以文明应对暴力，就得靠审美判断来解决。人们须后退一步，质问暴行，并寻求与他人的沟通。

Doris Sommer: And for Schiller, because he was not only a philosopher, but an artist, he knows that stepping back means figuring out what you can do that's different. Kant wasn't a doer. He was a thinker. And Schiller was both.

席勒不仅是哲学家，还是艺术家，所以他知道后退一步是要挖掘自己能做什么与众不同的事。康德是思想家却并非实干家，而席勒兼有这两种身份。

In Letters, Schiller proposed that humans are driven by two drives: the form drive and the sense drive. The form drive is based on rationality and concerned with freedom. The sense drive is based on physical needs and appetites and is concerned with the limits of the human condition. And, Schiller says, there is a risk to focusing only on reason, as Enlightenment thinkers often did.

席勒在《审美教育书简》中提出，人类受两种力量驱使——形式冲动和感性冲动。形式冲动来自理性，与自由紧密联系；感性冲动基于人的生理需求与偏好，与人自身条件的限制相关。席勒还说，如今有种唯理性的错误倾向，启蒙思想家们就经常如此。

Doris Sommer: He says, look, what happens when you think that the human condition is reasonable without any other distractions. You end up cutting off people's heads because you're telling them they're unreasonable. Because the human condition is reason. But it's also passion, greed, sensuality. We have bodies. We have heads that are connected to bodies. So we have those two drives.

他写道：看看吧，若是相信人应当处于完全理性的状态，不受其他因素干扰，会发生什么恶果。人们会因为觉得别人不合常理，就把他送上断头台，因为人的状态应是理性的。但激情、贪婪和感官之乐也同时左右着人的状态。我们有身体，我们还有和身体紧密连接的大脑。所以我们会受那两股力量驱使。

He says, how do we survive that every day civil war in our own selves? How do we do it? We're always pulled into different directions. He says, Well, obviously the way we do it is because we have a third drive that nobody has named yet, but I'll name it now. It's the play drive.

席勒还写道，那我们是如何解决每天发生在人内心的天人交战呢？我们是怎么做的呢？我们总是被不同的方向拉扯着。不过显然我们是靠第三股驱动力来解决它的，还没有人给它命名，那我就叫它游戏冲动吧。

How does play drive benefit us all?

游戏冲动对我们有何裨益？

The play drive is all about creativity, which humans have in abundance.  

游戏冲动与创造力全然相连，人类的创造力十分丰富。

Doris Sommer: Human beings make things. They do things every day. Every time you make a meal, every time you get dressed and combine one shirt with another pair of pants with socks that may or may not match and decide what color hair you're going to use or smile you're going to give one person or another. We keep making ourselves up. We are artifices, not only natural beings. And so Schiller invented a word to describe that creative spirit that we have. He called it the play drive.

人类创造事物，每天都在做各种事情：每次做饭；每次穿衣打扮，套上衬衫，配上或搭或不搭的裤子袜子， 决定染什么发色、决定怎样对别人微笑。我们不断做出决定，我们不止是顺其自然，还精心做着种种策划。席勒发明了一个词描述我们这种创造精神，那就是“游戏冲动”。

The play drive doesn't run away from conflict. It says, oh, there's a conflict. What are we going to do with it? An artist doesn't look at a problem as an obstacle, but as a challenge. So there is a joy in the difficulty of addressing the challenge. And you pull out a new form with the play drive, the Spieltrieb.

游戏冲动让人直面困难。它会告诉人们，嗯，遇到了困难，要怎么办呢？艺术家不会将困难视作绊脚石，而是视它为挑战。应对挑战纵然艰辛，但也趣味十足。这时“游戏冲动”就以新的形式出现，德语中称为“Spieltrieb”。

So it's his genius in identifying what can help us get out of conflicts, everyday snags, obstacles, the intractable that makes him for me the go-to person, and has made him the go-to person for generations and generations of creative people.

席勒有这样一种天赋，可以帮我们扫除难以解决的困难、日常的麻烦与阻碍。这种天赋让他成了我的导师，也成了一代代创造者的导师。

One person he inspired was Jurgen Habermas, a 20th century German philosopher and sociologist whose work addresses how citizens deliberate about matters of public concern.

在受他鼓舞的人里，有一位叫尤尔根·哈贝马斯。他是二十世纪德国哲学家与社会学家，致力于研究公民应当如何思考公共议题。、

Jurgen Habermas is well-known for developing a concept called Communicative Action. When you're in a political crisis, what do you do? Do you go to war or you talk it out? So communicative action is the nonviolent intervention into political crisis, but since he is an experienced reader of history and a victim of history, he knows that just talking to people won't necessarily get them to change their opinion about anything. 

尤尔根·哈贝马斯因提出交往行为理论而闻名。面临政治危机时，你会怎么做？你会选择战争还是选择对话？交往行为是要通过非暴力手段介入政治。不过因为他广泛涉猎历史，也深为某些历史所累，他深知仅仅靠对话不一定会改变别人的想法。

So in his book on modernity, his hefty book, 12 chapters on modernity, he has a first chapter on Hegelians, a second chapter on neo Hegelians, but between those chapters, he has a bridge you don't get from one to the other without the excuses on the letters of Aesthetic Education of Man by Friedrich Schiller.

所以他写了本鸿篇巨制来探讨现代性。全书共有十二章，第一章探讨了黑格尔哲学，第二章探讨了新黑格尔主义。不过在两章之间他做了点衔接，用的正是席勒的《审美教育书简》中的观点，不然书就没法从第一章过渡到第二章。

And he lays out there that it's the creative move that allows us to come into a meeting with a proposal, with an idea, or just with the desire to listen and then put something together collectively and create that common sense that we all learned from Kant. But it's the creative moment that allows us to make a new agreement.

席勒在书里指出，创造性活动让我们齐聚一堂，提出某个提议或想法，或是倾听彼此意见，融会贯通，共同创造出一些东西，形成康德所说的共通感。正是有了这些创造性的时刻，我们才能够达成新共识。

And those agreements, which are universally valid because we all agree to it, are precarious. The universal is not stable. The universal is precarious, and it’s precious. Many people are writing it off. We know that it's precious, but it's worth putting together. And the way we put it together is to recognize ourselves and each other as artists. 

我们都赞同这些共识，因而它们也广为认可，但其实它们并非绝对稳定，不受一丝质疑。共识并不绝对稳定，它是思想精华，但并不稳定，不过弥足珍贵。很多人都低估其价值，但我们知道它很宝贵，值得我们去整合贯通。而整合贯通的方法就是把我们自己和别人都看作艺术家。

Use your charm, but not your remarks

用魅力打动，而非用言语劝服

Zachary Davis: So it seems Schiller was really interested in non-instrumental ways of being in the world, this disinterestedness towards beauty and this place called play, which exists for its own sake. Could you speak about Schiller's relationship to the Enlightenment or romanticism and kind of the worry that Enlightenment rationality was, you know, shrinking our possibilities for creative imagination?

席勒似乎对人存在于世的非工具性一面颇有兴趣，比如对美的这种非功利评判和所谓的游戏冲动，它们是出于自身而存在的。您可以谈谈席勒与启蒙运动或者浪漫主义的关系吗？还有他对启蒙运动所推崇的理性的担忧，比如担心理性会限制我们的创造性想象等等。

Doris Sommer: Exactly. Exactly. And that worry, as I say, is very well articulated by his teacher, by Kant. And look at this interesting contradiction. He sat down to write on aesthetic education with a purpose. It was to respond to the terror in the French Revolution and to intervene to stop the terror. Right. 

当然。我也说过，席勒的老师康德也曾明确表达过这种担忧。你看，这倒是个挺有意思的矛盾之处。席勒是抱着现实目的去写《审美教育书简》的，这是他对法国大革命中的恐怖暴行的回应，他想要通过写这本书来制止这些恐怖行为。

But as you say, he took a disinterested tack because he says if you tried to make political art, you fail both as a political interventionist because it doesn't work, and as an artist because it’s too frontal. 

但正如你所说，对此他又故意表现得无所谓，因为他觉得如果你把政治和艺术刻意拼凑，那你既做不好政治宣传，因为根本行不通，而且也做不成艺术，因为太直截了当。

If it's not indirect, if it doesn't surprise people beyond their expectations and their habits, it's not art. So to do political pamphleteering in any kind of obvious way is boring and ineffective. You have to do something that will jolt people out of their expectations and therefore make them available for conversation because they say, as Kant would have taught us. What was that? Talk to me.

如果不含蓄委婉，如果没有不同寻常，没有打破大众习惯来叫人大吃一惊，那就称不上艺术。所以政治宣传太过直白，就会索然无味，也收效甚微。你需要打破人们预期，让他们深受震动。就像康德说的一样，人们会好奇你说的是什么，这样你才能和他们有效对话。

One way to understand the indirect way that Schiller is thinking about politics is to remember where he says that in addressing the enemy, one cannot talk about issues because everyone has their stake already taken, right. So he says charm them, don't lecture. And I hear I'm quoting he says, because their taste is purer than their hearts. 

举个例子，我们就可以更好地理解， 席勒说的宣扬政治观点要含蓄是什么意思。他说我们若想动摇反对者，不能跟他说教，因为每个人都已经站在了符合自己利益的一边。所以他说不要跟他们长篇大论，而是要靠魅力打动他们。用他的话来说，因为“他们的审美比他们的内心更纯净”。

When they see something that's beautiful or sublime or surprising, their taste is activated. And since taste is not rational. Taste belongs to judgment. You you're always in doubt and you always need to talk to people. Their taste is purer than their hearts. Their hearts are passionate. They're contaminated. They're already occupied.

当看到美丽、崇高或是非同凡响的东西，他们的审美细胞被激活了，而审美又是非理性的，审美是一种判断力。你会经常自我怀疑，想要跟别人聊聊。他们的审美比他们的内心更纯净。他们内心狂热，已经蒙尘，容不下别的观点了。

And so I prefer to see Schiller as a real expression and continuation of Enlightenment philosophy than what we're used to calling Romantic philosophy when we talk about romantic thinking. We talk about the subjective, the individual. And that's legitimate for the Enlightenment as well. What's lovely about the Enlightenment is that it understands subjectivity as where we all start from. And as a necessary first step to inter-subjectivity, some romantics will stay at the singular eye. But the Enlightenment cannot would conceived very pithily is that one can enjoy.

所以我更愿意把席勒的思想看作启蒙思想的真意与延伸，而不是人们提到浪漫主义思想时一贯认为的浪漫主义哲学。这些关于主体、个人的思想，在启蒙运动时期其实也是合理的。启蒙运动的奇妙之处在于，它是从根本上理解主体性的，而且把它视作实现主体间性的第一步，而浪漫主义在这点上就有些片面。不过启蒙运动没有深入探讨的是，人会欣赏享受。

One can stay with the agreeable. You can say that you like something. You like chocolate ice cream, but you cannot say that you personally find something beautiful. The individual cannot opine on beauty. Beauty has to be subjected to other people's disinterested judgment. Aesthetics is always social. So that's something that Schiller conserves as a necessary element of aesthetics. That's why it works for politics.

人会亲近令他愉悦的事物，你会说你喜欢什么东西。你喜欢巧克力冰淇淋，但你不能单凭自己就说什么东西一定很美。美不是某个个体可以定义的，要有别人不偏不倚地做出同样的判断才行。审美总是社会性的，席勒认为这是审美的必要因素。也正因此，审美可以用于政治。

How does beauty relate to freedom?

美与自由有何联系？

Zachary Davis: Could you speak about the relationship that Schiller sees between beauty and freedom?

您能谈谈，席勒如何看待美与自由的关系吗？

Zachary Davis: Enlightenment is partly about liberating us from tradition and from social constraints. How does beauty relate to freedom and has in his mind?

启蒙运动的部分目的是让我们摆脱传统与社会的桎梏。他是如何将美与自由联系起来的呢？

Doris Sommer: Well, again, here he’s Kantian. Beauty is always a surprise. It always breaks patterns. It always makes you reflect and reflect in public and therefore it's related. And at the foundation of freedom for both Kant and Schiller. Another thing that Schiller talked about as an artist is the experience of freedom. Precisely because he is vulnerable to making mistakes. 

嗯，这方面他也信奉康德的思想。美总是会让人惊喜，总是会打破常规，需要你在公开讨论中不断思考，因而与自由相关联，而且康德和席勒都认为这是自由的基础。席勒身为艺术家，还探讨了另一个话题，那就是自由的体验他之所以探讨这点，正是因为发现自己很容易犯错。

Say how do I know I'm free? Because I can write a verse and scratch it out or crumple the page and start again. How do I know I have judgment? Because when I write something that might work, I ask myself, do I like it? Don't I? How am I going to continue at that moment of making something? And we've all had that experience, whether we're writing an essay or a letter or getting dressed. Does that look right? Does that sound good?

比如说，我怎么知道我是自由的？因为我会写诗，可以把它擦掉或者把纸揉成一团，从头再写。我怎么知道我有判断力？因为当我写或许有用的东西时，我会想我喜不喜欢它？在这种创作的时候，我要怎么继续往下写呢？我们都有这样的经历，要么是写文章，要么是穿衣打扮。这样看起来好吗？听上去好吗？

It's that moment when we identify in the clearest possible way that faculty of judgment that contest still considering post creativity. Schiller understands it also as part of creativity. So it's in that exercise of judgment, always making something new, because that's what art is, that freedom is felt and it's felt exquisitely when, you know, you made a mistake.

正是在做这些事情的时候，我们会最清楚地看到自己有判断力，看到自己在判断、优化，这仍然展现了我们的后天创造力。席勒也将它理解成创造力的一部分。所以，正是在我们练习判断力的时候，正是在我们创造出新事物的时候，也就是创造艺术的时候，我们可以感受到自由，尤其是当我们犯错的时候，我们更能清楚地感受到自由。

Zachary Davis: And the ability to make a mistake represents our agency. The fact that we can choose.

犯错的能力反映了我们的能动性，说明我们可以自由选择。

Doris Sommer: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

没错，确实如此。

Zachary Davis: What is the text like? What is the book like to read? What’s the form?

这本书怎么样？读起来感觉如何？它的形式又是什么呢？

Doris Sommer: The text itself is about 70 or 75 pages long. It's a series of letters addressed to a Danish prince who probably gave him a stipend to write, you know. So you write thanks to your benefactor and it's addressed in a personal style. It's me to you. And so it has that intimacy. And it appeals to the subjectivity that he's theorizing. 

这本书有七十、七十五页左右。这本书是写给丹麦王子的一系列信件，这位王子可能资助了席勒写作，所以这些信其实是写给恩人的，并且个人风格很浓，读起来很有亲切感。信里还透露了他正在研究的主体性问题。

Everybody can be an artist

人人都可以是艺术家

Schiller’s text is a centerpiece of an initiative at Harvard that Professor Sommer directs called Cultural Agents. Cultural Agents seeks to quote “kindle our innate human creativity to revive a long humanistic tradition that combines arts and research in the service of civic development.” Essentially, it works to use the play drive to foster powerful new kinds of engagement with texts.

席勒著作传达的精神，正是哈佛教授索默主导提出的“文化代理人”的核心所在。文化代理人设法“激发人类内在的创造力，复兴长期的人文主义传统，将艺术与研究结合，来启迪民智”。从本质上讲，它是利用“游戏冲动”来增进与文本更有效的新型互动。

We like to use the letters as raw material for playing pretexts. And pretext is my passionate enterprise as a cultural agent, because I can teach people to read very difficult texts with pleasure simply by treating them as raw material for art making. So I not only read Schiller, I use him as a teacher. I identify all the people in the workshop, in the classroom as artists. 

我们喜欢把这些书信作为前文本“游戏”的材料。而且，我作为一名文化代理人，也对前文本的应用充满热情。在我的指导下，人们可以将颇有难度的作品直接当作艺术创作的原料，并愉快地阅读它们。因此，我不仅读席勒，还把他当作老师。在我看来，车间里的工人，教室里的学生，都是艺术家。

And first we read out loud and I love this medium of podcast because listening to people talk or read is a pleasure. So we take that practice of reading out loud and then we ask questions of the text.

我们首先要做的就是大声读，我个人很喜欢播客这种形式，也很享受听人与人的谈话或别人的朗读。因此，我们采取朗读的方式熟悉文本，然后再根据此提出问题。

Texts are weaves full of holes, full of extra knots. They never satisfy you. That's what I know as a literary critic. You begin dealing with a text by poking holes in it, by asking it questions, and then we submit those questions and that reading to different artistic practices. And if you dance an essay or sing it or cook it or make fashion out of it or do or make a mural, do anything that the people in the workshop want to do with that text, you master that material. 

文本像是张网，满是洞和多余的结，永远无法令你完全满意，这就是我作为文学批评家的感受。与文本的初次接触后，我们会通过提问题的方式进一步思考，就像在戳这张网上的洞，然后我们再将问题和阅读感悟融入不同的艺术实践。如果你用各种艺术形式来表达，比如跳舞、唱歌、做饭、时尚设计或画壁画等各种工作室里的形式，你就真正读透了文本。

So we teach people to read with actualarian lessons. We're all artists. Material is there to work on. And once you work on it, you become a co-producer of the world and not a victim of it. And since we know that literacy is one of the most stable indicators for any kind of development economic, political, personal, gender, health, development, we have an obligation to make the world literate. There is no one we know in universities who can't read and write well. We can all teach people how to do that by getting to play with difficult texts.

因此，我们教人们在动手实践中学习文本。我们都是艺术家。文本材料就在那儿，我们可以继续创作。一旦开始创作，你就一同参与了创造世界，而不是任由世界摆布。而且，我们知道读写能力是各类经济、政治、个体、性别、健康，发展的最稳定指标之一，所以我们有义务让全世界人都学会读写。大学里我没见过谁读写不好。我们可以让人们参与复杂的文本游戏，来教会他们读写。

Zachary Davis: It shouldn't be seen as a kind of add on. It's vital to democracy, to society.

不应将其视为可有可无的东西，这对民主、对社会都至关重要。

Doris Sommer: Everything we said about Kant and Schiller makes that freedom of manipulation and of judgment vital to democracy. How can we have freedom and democracy without disinterested judgment? And how do we learn disinterested judgment except for playing with material and seeing how it looks? We don't do any harm in the world, but we develop a sense, a knack for feeling what is beautiful, what is not. And then we still are dependent on other people's opinions.

按照我们提到的康德和席勒的理论，自由操作、自由判断对民主都至关重要。没有公正的判断，何谈自由与民主？如果不参与这种文本游戏与文本观察，我们又从何学习公正的判断？我们不会破坏这个世界，我们逐渐培养出了一种分辨美丑的直觉与技巧。我们仍然依靠他人意见来做出判断。

How do we see Schiller’s ideas today?

如今我们要如何看待席勒的思想？

Zachary Davis: What ideas of Schiller's are still with us today? How would people recognize Schillerean ideas in their current society?

席勒的思想对今天的我们还有什么启发？在当下社会，人们要如何认识席勒的思想？

Doris Sommer: You know, in an interesting, maybe perverse way, modern media work both for and against an answer to that question. On the one hand, we're more isolated than ever. We develop relationships by texting. There's very little face to face conversation. People go to cafes with headphones and with computers. No one talks to anyone in a bar. There are no real public spaces anymore because we're involved in what are called social media and an isolated in that way. 

你知道，现代媒体有意思又稍显反常的一点是，它既解决了这一问题，又阻碍了这个问题的解决。一方面，我们比以往更孤立。人们通过发送消息来社交，几乎没有面对面的交流。人们带着耳机和电脑去咖啡馆，酒吧里人们也互不搭讪。如今不再有真正的公共空间，因为我们寄身于所谓的社交媒体，并以这种方式将自己封闭起来。

On the other hand, those very media make possible the independent creation of artworks that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. People are mixing music. People are posting paintings. People are sharing their creativity and putting it out in the world rather than leaving a poem in  the drawer.  So  you know, I'm struck by that paradox. And it would be wonderful if you and your listeners would help think along how to manage that paradox towards good outcomes.

另一方面，也正是因为这些媒体，独立的艺术创作才成为可能，这在50年前根本无法想象。人们自己混音，把画作发到网上，在网上尽情施展创造力，让整个世界都看到，而不是默默地写诗，又默默地把它藏在抽屉里。这种矛盾实在令我惊奇，如何让这种矛盾带来好的结果？如果你们节目和你们的听众能找到答案，那就太好了。

Schiller wrote his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in response to his deep worries about the politics of his time. His answer was that the most urgent task wasn’t to build stronger armies to defeat our enemies, but to strengthen our appreciation of art and beauty in order to learn to live together in peace. 

席勒写《审美教育书简》，是出于他对当时政治形势的深切忧虑。他认为，当务之急不是建立更强大的军队来击败我们的敌人，而是要增强我们对艺术和美丽的鉴赏水平，这样大家就能学会和平共处。

Art, according to Schiller, isn’t mere ornament to the more serious parts of life, but its highest expression. Through beauty and play we can unite spirit and matter, thought and feeling, and become more complete, and harmonious beings. 

席勒认为，生活中有更严肃的那一部分，但艺术不仅是那一部分的装饰品，更是他的最高表现。通过美与游戏，我们可以将精神与物质、思想与情感结合在一起，完善自我，也更懂得和谐共处。

Writ Large is an exclusive production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening.

本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！