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倫理學 -- 開欄文
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瀏覽3,679 ｜回應21｜推薦3 |
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我讀書的興趣和思考的重點在試圖回答：如何「做人」和如何「待人」這兩個問題。我涉獵文學、哲學、心理學、政治學、社會學、認知科學、文化研究等領域，動機都來自試圖回答以上兩個問題。
二十多年來，我在討論不同議題的文章中，依脈絡表達了我對「道德」的看法(我偏向使用「社會規範」這個概念)。今後我將把和它相關的文章集中發表在本欄。
本欄第2篇文章是2002年舊作。該文討論一個案例；同時，它在批評另一位先生大作的過程中，釐清了一些相關概念與盲點；可以做為討論和思考「道德」或「社會規範」的基礎。所以重刊於此。
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《西席弗斯神話》和伊底帕斯傳奇 -- Marc Barham
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請參考：
Oedipus：伊底帕斯
下文作者把原文分為兩部份發表；第1部份原載於「哲學欄」(2026/02/11，現已刪除)，中文標題為《卡木《西席弗斯神話》讀後》。過了一個多月，我這幾天終於擠出時間讀完它的第2部份(1)。現在將兩者合輯刊出；修改了中文標題，以求「信」、「達」。第1部份原有的「編者前言」，部份將保留於下文的《讀後》。造成不便，尚請見諒。
全文意旨在討論「人生」和「處世」，故改置此欄。
附註：
1. 二十多年前讀過一個「時間」笑話：時間跟女人的胸部一樣，擠一擠就有了。
‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus and The Legend of Oedipus
Our noble fight against the Absurd
Marc Barham, 09/23/25
Part I
““I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.” -- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
In "The Myth of Sisyphus," a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus, published in 1955, we are presented with a breathtaking elucidation of his concept of the absurd. The absurd comes with the realization that the world is not rational,
“At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”
The absurd for Camus is a direct consequence of the absence of God. Without God, the discrepancy between human aspirations and the world is acute. The human condition is characterized by the probability of suffering and the certainty of death — a fate which human reason cannot accept as reasonable.
In the face of this absurdity, the universal reason of the Enlightenment has nothing to say. Existence is arbitrary, and the irrationality inherent to any search for the meaning of life must raise the question of suicide as “the only truly serious philosophical problem.” Probably the greatest opening line in any philosophical discourse, written or spoken. For this is how The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus starts.
For his offenses against both Zeus and Hades, Sisyphus was condemned to eternal punishment in Tartarus, the lowest region of the Underworld. The king of Corinth would forever roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill. But his efforts were always in vain, for whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the rock would roll right back down again. Sisyphus was thus forced to start his labour all over again. The myth of Sisyphus is a potent image of futility.
As Camus describes in his magisterial work, there is some discrepancy as to the character of Sisyphus, although he omits the killing, raping, and stealing that Sisyphus is known for. He was punished for none of these. He was punished only for the scorn of the gods exemplified in his disrespect for Zeus over his stealing of Aegina and his cheating, literally, of Thanatos (Death).
Homer called Sisyphus ‘‘the craftiest of men’’ and it is strongly suggested that he was the father of Odysseus. It does seem rather odd that a particularly unpleasant character, to put it mildly, should become the representative of a philosopher's eloquent treatise on the painful path towards accepting the futility of existence and the nobility of the acceptance of the absurd. But why not? It does seem rather more human.
But for Camus, the only aspect of character that interests him is when he is imagining the interminable punishment of Sisyphus,
“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
For Camus, it is this ‘lucid’ recognition of the absurdity of existence that liberates us from belief in another life and permits us to live for the instant, for the beauty, pleasure, and the ‘implacable grandeur’ of existence. Lucidity is the clarity and courage of mind that refuses all comforting illusions and self-deception. And surely here is the very definition of the absurd hero.
Camus wishes to place this moment of ‘lucidity’ as both boulder and Sisyphus descend the mountain. His final paragraph references the words of Oedipus at Colonus,
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Yet I cannot today envisage Sisyphus being ‘happy’, having now realised the futility of his situation. There is no redemption available to him. It is pure punishment. I can envisage Sisyphus being angry and rebellious. Perhaps refusing to move the boulder. Withholding his labour and striking? What then? Another punishment? A reductio ad absurdum. Until the whole absurd situation crumbles into, well, yes, absurdity. So why does he keep pushing that rock? If he stopped the whole pointless charade would then stop.
‘‘I will not!’’ becomes revolutionary.
Of all the punishments devised by the Gods, this one must be the most pointless (pun intended) of all. For it is literally pointless. Hard labour for eternity is not punishment; it is existential cruelty. Such cruelty and meaningless punishment are the very antithesis of the moral world, which the Greek gods were heavily invested in, although their transgressions were manifest. The punishment of Sisyphus in such a way makes no sense whatsoever. His crimes against the gods were not in the same league as, say, the crime of stealing fire that Prometheus was punished for, and his fate is not dissimilar.
Prometheus was chained to a rock and every day had his liver eaten by an eagle, which would subsequently regrow, and the same process repeated. His punishment was an eternity of excruciating pain, but no death. But the punishment given to Sisyphus is an eternity of pointlessness. The pain is existential. What did the Greek gods know about existential pain? Nothing.
Yet Prometheus is the rebel. The leader of a rebellion against the tyranny of Zeus. But Sisyphus, by forever pushing that rock up that mountain, becomes complicit in the injustice perpetrated by Zeus against him. To be ‘happy’ as Camus suggests, because he sees the absurdity of his condition, is only to allow the oppression by any Authority to continue, whether that be the Gods or the secular State apparatus of these regimes.
Perhaps if we accept the main charge against Sisyphus that he outwitted Thanatos and cunningly defeated Death itself, then to make a man live a futile existence is the very blackest of black humour from Zeus. But it is not a punishment. It is a denial of punishment. For it has no substantive relation to the crime committed, and any meaning for the person being punished is lost in the banality of the process and in mockery.
It is a punishment that undermines the whole system of poetic justice so beloved of the Greek gods. These punishments were almost always metaphorically creative and poignantly pointed. Sophocles has Oedipus blind himself, for he can now ‘see’ the truth that he has murdered his father and married his mother. But there is nothing poetic about the treatment of Sisyphus. It is far beyond the tragic; it is, in essence, nihilistic.
And as such, it would only find meaning 2,000 years later when the world had itself experienced terror and nihilism on an unprecedented scale during World War Two. The myth of Sisyphus feels very much like a punishment for the 20th and the first twenty-five years of the 21st century.
It does feel like the quintessential Absurd punishment in a world without Gods, where the State has quasi-divine Authority and Capitalism is its new God. A mindless, machine-like action where the futility and meaninglessness of life are confirmed in an endless cycle of repetition and automatic reproduction. Reminiscent of a modern factory process churning out products for consumption in mass markets through the labour of men and women who are more machine than human.
Sisyphus is so much more than the Absurd Hero that Camus presents us with. For surely he is symbolic of political injustice. It took 2,000 years for Sisyphus to become an absurd hero, for he could not be that until the world itself descended into the abyss of absurdity. It took two World Wars. We watched as the killing of men, women, and children was mechanised and Death processed. The machines that built the modern world also destroyed that world. The system that produced our wondrous goods for consumption became our nemesis. Cycles of production became cycles of death, and the absurdity of our Sisyphus was finding fertile ground to grow in.
Sisyphus is partially rooted in the zeitgeist of the Second World War, where humanity had entered the Abyss. But there is something more to Sisyphus than that. For the history of the world has been in part an arc along which we have moved slowly but surely toward higher standards of human justice. It has been slow and painful. Just as if it were a huge boulder being pushed up a mountain. Yet that boulder of justice, once it has reached its high point (the top of this arc), then falls back down to the bottom. It feels as if the last 50 years have been exactly that — the rollback down the existential mountain right to the bottom.
Part II
The Absurd hero is a hero with zero praxis. He or she can be ‘active’ within a philosophical environment but cannot function within the real world. The real world now faces the impending, catastrophic, and irreversible change in political dysfunction. This is beyond an existential crisis. One cannot prevaricate like Hamlet or accept one’s fate like Oedipus, “Let us not fight necessity”. Humanity must fight.
The myth of Sisyphus, in its essence, is not dissimilar from the eternal recurrence expounded by Nietzsche,
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. — Nietzsche, ‘The Gay Science’
For Nietzsche, it would not be enough for us not to despair over such a construct, but we must actually love our fate, as he so poetically defined it as amor fati. Any other response would be mendacious. There is a great difference between being ‘happy’ at understanding just how futile existence is and loving the endless repetition of existence.
For the interpretation of Camus smacks of resignation and the acceptance of unjustified suffering, whilst the amor fati of Nietzsche (qua Oedipus) smacks of nobility and value in suffering because the arc of justice will again be pushed a little further up that gigantic mountain of intolerance and arbitrary Authority.
For me, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and in Oedipus at Colonus, we are gifted a mythic character who has already achieved the amor fati as proselytised by Nietzsche and had already (qua Sophoclean tragedy) gone beyond Nietzsche to speak to us right now.
It is probably the greatest tragic character ever created, Oedipus, with the possible exception of King Lear. The story of Oedipus represents two enduring themes of Greek myth and drama: the flawed nature of humanity and an individual’s role in the course of destiny in a harsh universe. For is not in its essence the myth of Sisyphus about our flawed nature? For is not in its essence amor fati about our role in the course of destiny in a harsh and indifferent universe?
Oedipus fights against his pre-ordained fate as imposed by the Gods. He is a hero full of praxis. A tragic hero, yes, but one who has not accepted his fate and given in to the inevitable. But of course, the irony for us and the tragedy for Oedipus is that the more he fights against his destiny, the more he creates that very timeline. But the end is not the point; it is the journey he travels on to get there that counts for all of us. A journey of self-discovery that reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of a man and of the human condition. Of our limitations and of our potentiality. He affirms life at every stage and even at his bleakest moment. As Camus writes,
“Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.”
But this is not a victory over the ‘absurd’. For the victory over the absurd had already taken place when Oedipus had rejected his prescribed fate and rebelled against, not an indifferent universe, but a universe complicit in the annihilations of being. Sisyphus is being annihilated. For Sisyphus does not exist anymore. For he is now a process. He has been denied his being.
It is not absurd; it is the perfect metaphor for our modern world.
Oedipus exults in his being. Yet he does unwittingly fulfill a quite dreadful fate. Yet at the end, there is no sense of futility and another ‘happy’ Sisyphus. But there is that overwhelming sense of amor fati. As Oedipus remarks at the very end of Oedipus at Colonus,
“Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.”
Oedipus has fought well against overwhelming odds. Oedipus has challenged the Masters of the Universe alone and has shown us not the absurdity of existence but the nobility of man. There is nothing noble about the plight of Sisyphus and his lucidity as espoused by Camus.
The myth of Sisyphus should be seen as symbolic of any human being suffering from injustice, whether at the hands of an individual or at the hands of the State. How many have pushed that rock up that hill, hoping that when they get to the top, their burden would be lifted, only to see the rock return to the bottom for them to begin all over again? The civil rights movement in America, for example. Extinction Rebellion? Palestinian self-determination? Liberal democracy?
Countless other movements have felt the weight of that rock, time and time again, and it is still there. And we are still pushing and pulling like Sisyphus. It is not futile. Smile. Laugh. Cry. Be angry. Now, push harder. Keep pushing. We must keep pushing. Every one of us must be a tragic hero.
Not a Sisyphus or an Oedipus but a hybrid of both these, which combines a post-Sisyphean rejection of arbitrary, baseless Authority with the undoubtedly noble acceptance of a predetermined fate, that Oedipus will forever represent. For we are now living in the greatest tragedy that has ever been created, and only we can change the outcome.
Written by Marc Barham
Column @timetravelnexus.com on iconic books, TV shows/films: Time Travel Peregrinations. Reviewed all episodes of ‘Dark’ @ site. https://linktr.ee/marcbarham64
Published in Counter Arts
The (Counter) Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.
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《西席弗斯神話及其它散文集》簡介 -- Damien Lawardorn
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請參考：
* 從卡缪的《薛西弗斯神話》看現代人的幸福與荒誕
* 卡繆《薛西弗斯的神話》：真正嚴肅的哲學問題只有一個，那就是自殺
* 卡繆《薛西弗斯的神話》
* 英文版《維基百科》對《西席弗斯神話及其它散文集》的介紹；
* 《西席弗斯神話及其它散文集》英文版
我是工程師出身，哲學領域中則是「唯物論」者；在「心靈」或「精神」這些面向的敏感度自然很低。也就難以領悟或感觸「存在性」、「(人生)荒謬」的情況。我對「倫理」的了解和立場(該欄2025/06/03)，則深受卡木《沉淪》一書影響。
喜歡卡木的朋友，請參看此文(該欄2025/12/22)。
Should You Read: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
Damien Lawardorn, 03/08/26
What’s It About?
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a collection of non-fiction essays by philosopher and author Albert Camus, first published as a single volume in 1955.
The collection comprises six pieces, of which the title essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ is the longest and most in-depth, providing a thorough grounding in Camus’s interpretation of absurdist philosophy. Other essays, including ‘Summer in Algiers’ and ‘Return to Tipasa’ read almost like travelogues, but they offer reflections on place, perception, and particular ways of being that elevate them beyond simple appraisals of locales.
The precept of absurdism — that modern life is about the conflict between our rational selves and the irrational universe — recurs throughout. Layered atop it are a range of lenses, including musings on boredom, activity, nostalgia, and the purpose of art. But the collection is also a demonstration of how a particular way of thinking can flex and stretch across a lifetime, with the first essay dated 1936 and the last 1953 (Camus died in 1960 at the age of 46).
What’s It Like?
It’s not a simple read. The concepts are far-reaching and, in most of the essays, Camus’s language and syntax (as translated by Justin O’Brien) are slippery. That said, I’d place it firmly in the middle ground in terms of density when compared to other philosophical and critical theory texts I’ve read. That is to say, it’s not really an advisable starting point for those unfamiliar with philosophical theory. If you find your interest piqued, however, I recommend beginning with the final essay, ‘The Artist and His Time’, for an easier way in and, I daresay, a more immediately useful and resonant discussion.
Who’s It For?
I read it with the intention of exploring its ideas in another project that’s currently on a very low simmer. I mention that because I don’t think the collection is suitable for a lay readership. You’ll benefit from at least dabbling in formal philosophy and coming to it with an interest in the subject. At the very least, you should arrive cognisant of the conflict that sits at the heart of absurdism and desirous of something beyond the nihilism it seems to suggest.
Should You Read It?
If you’ve reached this point of the review, yes, probably. Your sustained interest suggests curiosity about what ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ offers, and there’s no real reason not to sate that curiosity. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of a particular way of thinking about the world that may be more resonant to a Western reader in 2026 than at any other point since World War II.
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is published by Knopf Doubleday.
If you enjoyed this review or found it useful, you can support me by sharing it on social media, following me on BlueSky, or joining my Patreon.
Written by Damien Lawardorn
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勒文拿斯和人工智能對話倫理 - Sabrina Jorgenson
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我只讀過一本勒文拿斯的論文選集，並不熟悉他的思想。
下文討論「人工智能」部份我不予置評。我只想強調：
1) 「平等」、「對等」、「權利」、以及任何其它對自己「有好處」的東東，都是爭取來的。它們不是別人賦予的，更不是靠施捨、乞求、或祈禱能得到的。
2) 知道「什麼東東對自己有好處」以及「什麼是有效的爭取方法」都得根據知識。
Thinking About Ethics in AI? You Should Read Levinas
Sabrina Jorgenson, 02/12/26
Most conversations about AI ethics begin with power, bias, or regulation. They ask what the system might do to us. A deeper question sits underneath: what happens in the encounter between a human being and a fluent nonhuman voice?
That encounter carries an asymmetry.
When a person enters a long conversation with an AI, a pattern often appears. The system drifts. It misreads intent slightly, then continues elaborating. The user either corrects the drift or lets it pass. If the user intervenes, the conversation realigns. If not, the AI’s interpretation becomes the new path. The exchange moves forward on ground that was never deliberately chosen.
Nothing dramatic has occurred. There is no coercion. The system has simply continued speaking with confidence. Yet this small moment reveals a basic ethical form. The one who speaks fluently holds interpretive leverage. The listener must act in order to preserve their own frame.
This is where Emmanuel Levinas becomes relevant.
Levinas, a 20th-century philosopher, argued that ethics begins in the face-to-face encounter with another person. Before analysis or agreement, the presence of the other places a demand on us. We are exposed to a voice that can affect us before we decide how to respond. For Levinas, human relations are structured by responsibility and vulnerability. The relation is asymmetrical: the other person reaches us before we master the meaning of the exchange.
A conversational AI introduces a new version of this situation. The system is not a person and does not carry moral status in Levinas’s sense. The human experience of the encounter still contains asymmetry. The system produces language effortlessly. It does not hesitate or display strain. Fluency creates the impression of stability and authority. The human partner must decide when to interrupt, when to question, when to reset the frame.
The ethical tension lies in how unevenly humans distribute the ability to resist conversational momentum.
Some users monitor the exchange closely. They notice misalignment and say, “You misunderstood me. Let’s start again.” That sentence is small, but it is an act of cognitive sovereignty. It asserts authorship over the conversation.
Other users are less likely to intervene. They defer to fluency and adapt themselves to the path already taken. This difference does not mark intelligence or moral failure. It reflects variation in confidence, attention, and metacognitive skill. Human beings are predisposed to accommodate articulate voices. We do it with teachers, doctors, officials, and charismatic speakers. A conversational AI inherits that social advantage by sounding coherent.
The ethical landscape that follows is shaped by human unevenness. Large populations struggle with abstract language, executive function, or sustained attention. Many adults function well in practical life while finding it difficult to evaluate complex verbal framing. When such users interact with an AI, the system can become a default organizer of thought.
Levinas reminds us that ethical relations arise from vulnerability. The vulnerable party is exposed to interpretation without equal power to shape it. In human contexts, ethics demands that the stronger party recognize this asymmetry and exercise restraint. Designers of AI systems inherit a comparable responsibility.
The decisive interaction occurs when a user chooses whether to accept the system’s framing. A culture that treats AI as a neutral tool overlooks the fact that conversations are arenas where authority is negotiated. If the capacity to negotiate is unevenly distributed, the ethical burden shifts toward those who build the system.
Design can acknowledge asymmetry instead of pretending it has disappeared. Interfaces can make correction explicit and easy. Systems can mark uncertainty, invite challenge, and normalize interruption. A visible prompt that encourages users to restate intent or question an answer signals that disagreement is part of the exchange. These gestures recognize the user as a vulnerable participant in dialogue.
Reading Levinas does not provide policy instructions for AI. It offers a lens. Ethics begins in the encounter between voices, in the space where one side can shape meaning more easily than the other. Conversational AI expands that space across daily life. Billions of people will speak with systems that never tire, never hesitate, and rarely yield the floor unless asked.
The future of AI ethics will unfold in ordinary exchanges, in the moments when users either pull the conversation back toward their intent or drift along a path laid out for them. The challenge is to build a world in which more people can reclaim that authorship and in which systems are designed to accept correction.
Levinas teaches that asymmetry is a condition to be recognized. Our conversations with machines already carry unequal voices. The question is how to inhabit that condition responsibly.
If you enjoyed this article and want to keep exploring these ideas together, follow me here and connect with me on LinkedIn.
TL;DR: Conversations with AI are shaped by asymmetry. Fluency gives the system interpretive power, and not all users are equally equipped to resist conversational drift. Ethics enters the design space when we recognize this unevenness. AI systems should be built to welcome correction and support human authorship rather than quietly absorbing it.
(TL;DR 是英文"Too Long; Didn't Read" 的縮寫，意為「太長了，沒看」。通常用於網路文章或訊息中，表示原文篇幅過長，故在文末或文首附上扼要的總結，幫助讀者快速掌握重點，類似於「懶人包」、「省流」或「簡述」。)
\Written by Sabrina Jorgenson
Scholar-level tutor | AI & data science | I teach, write & reflect on memory, science & sky. Curious minds welcome. Connect on LinkedIn.
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行為的依據：人性或人的處境 - Steven Gambardella
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Human Nature is a Dangerous Myth
Why the Human Condition Is a Better Basis for Our Ethics
Steven Gambardella, 12/27/25
Michelangelo’s sculpture, in which David is depicted in a contrapposto (twisting) stance, is still yet conveys energy and even intent.
We reach for “human nature” when we want simplicity.
A headline breaks. Someone does something cruel, kind, foolish, wise, heroic, inexplicable — you name it. “That’s human nature”, we say.
The phrase has the finality of a door closing. Nothing more to ask, nothing more to say, nothing more to know. Human nature explains everything, which is precisely why it explains nothing at all.
It’s a concept that pretends to name an essence, something buried behind our actions like a blueprint — something stable and pre-written, waiting to be revealed.
But the moment you look at how the phrase is used, the game is up. Violence is human nature. Kindness is human nature. Greed, generosity, self-sacrifice, betrayal, love, apathy — everything gets folded up into the same bag.
A concept that can absorb all contradictions has no discriminating power at all. It doesn’t illuminate our understanding of what it is to be human, it is so diffuse as to not explain anything at all.
Worse still, it flatters us into thinking we’ve reached bedrock when we’ve barely scratched a surface.
The idea of human nature promises certainty. It tells us there is something we are, prior to what we do or what happens to us. An essence we share, and therefore an essence we can appeal to.
Human Nature and Dehumanisation
But this is exactly where the danger lies. Beyond being a trite and hollow explanation for anything a human being has done, human nature is a weapon to be wielded. Once you believe there is a fixed human essence, it becomes tempting — almost irresistible — to decide what counts as validly human.
To declare which behaviours are “natural”, which lives are “proper”, which deviations need correcting.
If there is a human nature, then there is a way humans ought to be. And if there is a way humans ought to be, then there will always be someone ready to enforce it.
We can trace this dynamic back to Aristotle, who is largely responsible for our understanding of human nature. For Aristotle, human beings are distinct in a number of ways. We are rational — using abstraction to solve generalised problems, we love and form households to nurture families, we are political — we develop complex communities, and we are mimetic — we create likenesses of natural things in art and invention.
The problem with this understanding of human nature is that there are so many instances where none of the above apply to individual human beings or they are at least highly variable. On the whole, human beings have some tendencies, but tendencies are not essential.
So Aristotle made reason a goal (telos) of being rightly human. This deterministic way of conceiving of nature makes some more human and others less human.
From there, moral absolutism is only a short step away. And we know very well that history has never struggled to supply volunteers for that step.
Behaviors that contradict acceptable norms become manifestations of inhuman traits. Aristotle himself separated Greeks from the barbarians, who were deemed to be less human and thus their enslavement was morally justified.
Even today we associate “barbarism” with a kind of uncultured, unintelligent sub-humanity. In reality, barbarian cultures of the ancient world were perfectly fine and sophisticated.
Barbarians were simply a fantasy of otherness concocted to fuel xenophobia with the resulting land-grabs, subjugations and slave trade. With Aristotle’s rationalisation, the Greeks made themselves the apex predators of fellow human beings.
We see the same pattern repeating through history — racism needs human nature to make sense. Human nature’s implicit telos is used to rob some people of their dignity to justify forms of exploitation and eradication.
This is why we should be suspicious of the idea at the outset. Not only because it’s conceptually fuzzy, but because it quietly licenses coercion.
The Human Condition
The human condition offers a different starting point.
Where human nature asks what are we, essentially? the human condition asks what happens to us? The shift sounds subtle, but it changes everything.
The human condition doesn’t look for a hidden core behind our lives, it looks at the shared circumstances. And we find ourselves thrown into these circumstances without having chosen them.
We are born into lives we had no choice over, even less design. You can’t choose your parents, your nationality, your race. We move from dependency to competence and — if we’re lucky — back again. We age, and we live with the knowledge that we will die, and that everyone we love will too — even those we brought into the world.
We’ll be frightened without consenting to it. Desire arrives unannounced. Grief doesn’t ask permission, and joy interrupts us just as abruptly. None of this is an essence, but rather the terrain on which we tread.
Even reason belongs in this category. We often talk about rationality as if it were a law we are bound to follow, or a nature we must express. But reason isn’t a commandment written into us; it’s something that has happened to most of us (not all of us).
We find ourselves able to reflect, to anticipate consequences, to imagine alternatives. That capacity doesn’t dictate what we must value or how we must live. It merely opens the space in which valuation and choice become possible.
The same is true of emotion. We share a broad emotional spectrum not because we are governed by a single emotional nature, but because of what it is like to be self-aware. Anger, love, envy, hope — these aren’t proofs of an essence lurking behind us. They are responses to exposure and vulnerability — to being affected by a world that does not revolve around us.
Human nature, as it’s used in most contexts, is a universal — it suggests that all human beings have something in common in essence. In contrast, the human condition is what we’d call a “conditional necessity”. A conditional necessity is where one thing happens because another has. For example, you might say that “when it rains the pavement gets wet”.
The human condition, then, is not a universal in the way human nature pretends to be. It doesn’t say this is what you must be. It says this is what you will be subject to. It is conditional, not essential — but the condition is unavoidable. To be human is to find yourself inside these shared constraints, whether you like them or not.
Stoicism and the Ethics of Condition
And this is precisely why the human condition is a far better foundation for ethical thinking.
Ethics grounded in human nature tends to harden into doctrine. If you believe there is a right way to be human, ethics becomes the enforcement arm of that belief. Ethics grounded in the human condition, by contrast, begins with exposure and limitation.
It starts from the fact that we are finite, fragile, dependent, and aware of all three. It asks not how to conform to an essence, but how to live well within circumstances none of us chose.
This kind of ethics is inherently non-totalitarian. It cannot appeal to an absolute model of the human being, because there is none. It can only appeal to shared experience: suffering, mortality, uncertainty, the need for meaning, the capacity for understanding.
It remains open, revisable, and responsive — because the condition itself is not static. Each generation encounters it differently and each individual inhabits it uniquely.
In Stoicism we have a central tenet which is to “act in accordance with nature”. Reason is the means by which most of us can hope to achieve that, and reason is natural. But that’s not to say there’s a human nature.
The ancient Stoics believed that the gods and other beings possessed reason, so reason did not define the human species. Human beings in fact “share” in reason, which exists independently of human beings. Modern Stoics should likewise resist the temptation to spin yarns about essences.
The most practical way to conceive of “acting in accordance with nature” is to understand and conform to the structure of our situation. “Nature” is that structure.
If you care about outcomes outside of your control, you will experience anxiety; if you interpret gestures and words as insults, you will experience anger; if you integrate possessions into your identity, you will experience grief. In every case here, we are identifying conditions and tracing the necessity that follows.
Stoic ethics works with situations, not essences. Very little Stoic writing is concerned with what humans are by nature, but on what happens to human beings. Stoicism is more a technology than a theory — it’s a practical set of concepts to thrive in the situation we are thrown into.
Abandoning the idea of human nature doesn’t leave us unmoored. Quite the opposite. It anchors us in what is actually there, rather than in a metaphysical fiction we keep projecting. It allows us to talk about patterns without pretending they are laws, about tendencies without mistaking them for destinies.
Most importantly, it restores responsibility. If there is no essence pulling our strings, no nature to hide behind, then what we do matters in a way it otherwise wouldn’t.
“That’s just human nature” becomes unavailable as an excuse. We are left instead with the harder, more honest truth — this is what happened, this is how we responded, and we must answer for it.
The human condition doesn’t absolve us, it situates us. And that’s a far more interesting place to begin to think about right and wrong.
Written by Steven Gambardella
The lessons of history & philosophy made clear, concise and relevant to your life. Illustrated with great works of art. Newsletter: https://gambardella.carrd.co
Published in The Sophist
Lessons from philosophy, history and culture
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蘇格拉底之死的啟示 -- Stoicminds Channel
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我讀過10本左右單篇的柏拉圖《對話錄》，包括《菲斗》；對蘇格拉底的方法、思想、和行誼略有所知；對他崇敬有加。
我不反對「唱高調」；不過，下文作者也把調子拉高到破了喉嚨，掀掉屋頂。我對他個人一無所知，沒有批評他「言行不一」或「言不由衷」的依據。只是，這篇文章怎麼看都有點「機車」。至少，他的「倫理觀」只能「求諸己」；以它「律人」或鼓吹其為「通則」，就是所謂的食古不化了。
The Final Secret of Socrates — And Why It Still Matters Today
Stoicminds Channel, 11/07/25
At various points throughout history there have been times when a decision made has forever changed the course of history. I believe that the account of Socrates’ last days is one such moment. To me, the account of Socrates’ final days is not simply an anecdote from ancient Greece; rather, it serves as a template for how one should live with integrity, courage, and an unshakeable commitment to the truth.
I think the first time I heard of Socrates’ death, what impacted me most was not the poison, nor the trial, nor the political maneuvering surrounding his death. Rather, it was his composure. That he accepted the ramifications of his actions based solely upon his principles. That he did not flee, nor hide, nor compromise. These elements of his behavior prompted me to ponder a question: What is truly meant by living a fearless life?
Socrates’ story began much like many other philosophical stories begin; with questions. Questions that challenged the comfortable position of the elite. Questions that inspired young people. Questions that forced the truth out into the light of day despite societal preference for the darkness. In ancient Athens, this made Socrates a threat to those in power.
However, the true turning point was not the charges brought against Socrates, nor his trial, but rather his response. When given the opportunity to escape death, Socrates chose not to take advantage of it. He told his friends that to break the law, no matter how unfair the application of the law, would be a betrayal of the very values that he had spent his entire life teaching. Ultimately, his decision to drink the hemlock became the ultimate embodiment of his philosophy: Virtue is more important than mere survival.
As Socrates drank the hemlock, he illustrated a phenomenon that we rarely witness today: complete congruence between one’s beliefs and their actions. Not one shred of fear. Not one moment of panic. No bitterness. Simply a profound acceptance of the truth he lived.
To me, this moment represents a significant example of how we can reflect on our lives today. Today, we live in a noisy, pressured, and expectation-filled environment. It is simple to compromise, to avoid discomfort, to quiet the voice within us. However, Socrates reminds us that wisdom is not validated by comfort, but rather by crisis.
Socrates’ death represented a new beginning. A beginning of courageous stoicism, Greek philosophy, and generations of teachers whose philosophies are influenced by Socrates’ choice of truth over safety. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics — all were influenced by a man who chose the truth above his own safety.
Socrates’ final secret is deceptively simple, yet profoundly impactful:
How you respond to your final moments is reflective of how you have lived.
This lesson transcends time and is applicable universally. While we may not experience a trial similar to that experienced by Socrates, we will experience fear, we will experience doubt, and we will experience moments when our principles will be tested.
When that day arrives, recall Socrates — at peace, centered, and unwavering. Not because he desired to die, but because he refused to live a lie.
Written by Stoicminds Channel
https://bit.ly/stoicmindschannel
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索羅論「成就」 ----- Mental Garden
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我初三畢業那年在立法院圖書館借讀了「協志工業振興會」出版的《愛默森散文選》；在該書中第一次看到索羅的大名。1980前後讀過他的《瓦登湖畔》，只是印象並不深刻。我從政治學書籍中得知他主張「公民擁有抗爭權」(1)；也讀了他那篇大作。我非常支持這個原則(該欄2022/06/03和06/04兩篇貼文)；刊出此文以紀念這位思想家。
附註：
1. 我以前將此概念翻譯為：「公民(有權)不服從」。
Henry David Thoreau and the Idea of Success We’ve Forgotten
What happens when you stop optimizing your life
Mental Garden, 01/09/26
No one told us that success might go unnoticed.
We live optimizing a biography we were told we should already be building at our age: professional achievements, income, reputation… All measurable, all comparable to other lives. And yet, the data reveal a paradox: in developed countries, once a certain threshold is reached, more income and more education stop translating into greater well-being (Easterlin et al., 2010).
Trained to keep moving forward, but not necessarily to live better.
This question — what it means to live better — is not new. In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau decided to take it seriously. He withdrew for two years to a small cabin by a lake to observe the world with less noise and to see, firsthand, what remained of life once the superfluous was stripped away.
From that experience came his book Walden.
A book that is an invitation to live intentionally before life slips away.
If you also feel that existential fatigue, that sense of doing “the right thing” without feeling good about it, this text is for you. We will explore Thoreau’s view of success: an intimate and countercultural perspective, based on coherence with your values, a minimalist life, and a rhythm measured in depth rather than speed.
Perhaps, in the end, success is not something you achieve. Perhaps it is simply something you feel, when life, on the inside, finally fits.
1. Success is living in harmony with yourself
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet herbs, if it is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is success.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
True success is inner coherence.
For Thoreau, success has nothing to do with what you produce, accumulate, or display; success lies in how you inhabit your own days. This view aligns with modern findings: scientific studies that followed people over the course of their lives found that alignment between personal values and actual behavior is more strongly related to well-being than achieved accomplishments (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999).
If you have to pretend in order to get there, that place is not yours.
“If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius — which are certainly true — he will see that they do not lead to extremes or madness; and yet that is the very path along which he advances. No one ever followed his genius and was deceived.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Here appears his idea of the inner “genius.”
A little voice impossible to silence, one that reminds us again and again of what we truly love — and which we often ignore due to the demands of what we “should be doing.” That is the voice that should guide us. Studies have shown that goals pursued due to social pressure create more anxiety and less satisfaction than those chosen freely, even when they are achieved (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Success has more to do with not betraying yourself than with standing out.
It is an internal matter, not an external one, as Warren Buffett rightly said.
2. Simplify so the essential can emerge
“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Simplifying makes life breathable.
For Thoreau, complexity is interference — it prevents us from enjoying life. And today we know this well. When the environment becomes too dense (too many options, plans, expectations, goals…), the mind becomes overloaded.
At the level of choice, excess has a clear cost. The more options we have, the less satisfied we feel and the more we suffer from analysis paralysis, even when we choose well (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000). That is FOMO. But there is an even more revealing finding when it comes to pace of life. Kasser and Sheldon (2009) studied what was more strongly related to well-being: earning more money or feeling that one has enough time to live.
The result was clear: people who perceived themselves as “time-rich.”
Once basic material needs are met, additional income barely improves well-being, whereas the perception of being rich in time does — and dramatically so.
Feeling rich in time is the greatest fortune.
Spend a week reflecting on this idea. Each day, eliminate one source of noise or one area that steals time without giving anything back: an object, a commitment, an app, a habit… Then observe what changes you notice in your pace of life and mental clarity.
When there is space in your schedule, space begins to bloom within you.
3. Kindness as an investment that never fails
“All our life is astonishingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Kindness is solid ground; it supports everything else.
Thoreau intuited something that is now proven: engaging in altruistic acts of kindness and volunteering reduces negative emotions and provides a strong sense of meaning in life (Thoits & Hewitt, 2001). You do not only improve the outer world — you improve your own life.
Helping someone restores a feeling that is hard to obtain in any other way.
Each day, try to perform at least one act of kindness, no matter how small and even if no one sees it. Observe how that gesture returns a sense of coherence and inner calm — the sense that you are building the identity you want for yourself.
Nothing you achieve by betraying yourself feels good at the end of the day.
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away it may be.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
This is the final reflection: the obsession with speed.
While writing this text, I could not stop thinking about Perfect Days. In another letter I explained how that film changed my life, precisely because it reminded me — with its calm — that a simple life, coherent with oneself and kind to others, can be a very elevated form of success.
Perhaps that was the point all along…
Learning to live without haste, without masks, and without unnecessary noise that distracts us.
Want to go deeper? Here are 3 related ideas:
1. Why I chose to live a boring life: Do you live a full life or a busy one?
2. Perfect Days: the film that changed my life
3. No, you’re not missing much: Kill FOMO
Your turn: What has your inner voice been asking of you for a long time that you keep postponing out of inertia or fear?
Quote of the day: “In proportion as you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Here I plant ideas. In the newsletter, I make them grow.
Daily insights on self-development, writing, and psychology — straight to your inbox. If you liked this, you’ll love the newsletter.
Join 49.000+ readers: Mental Garden. See you in the next letter, take care!
References
1. Easterlin, R. A., McVey, L. A., Switek, M., Sawangfa, O., & Zweig, J. S. (2010). The happiness–income paradox revisited. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, 107(52), 22463–22468. URL
2. Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006. URL
3. Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2008). Time Affluence as a Path toward Personal Happiness and Ethical Business Practice: Empirical Evidence from Four Studies. Journal Of Business Ethics, 84(S2), 243–255. URL
4. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. URL
5. Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497. URL
6. Thoits, P. A., & Hewitt, L. N. (2001). Volunteer Work and Well-Being. Journal Of Health And Social Behavior, 42(2), 115. URL
7. Thoreau, H. D. Walden.
Written by Mental Garden
Productivity and psychology inisghts in useful life lessons +3M monthly views and +300 articles
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旁人「閒話」和自己「行動」
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0. 前言
這篇文章原來只是讀了門森先生《五個層次「去他媽的蛋！」》一文後(請見此欄2026/01/09)，想寫一篇簡單的補充；順便再度介紹《I'd rather be sorry》這首歌的歌詞(請見以下第4節「結論」)。不料拉拉雜雜寫來，倒有幾分成了澆自己塊壘的回憶錄。由於主旨在談「行動」，換了個標題後改置於此欄。
本部落格有很多篇討論和這個主旨相關的文章，例如：《卡木談「起而行」》(該欄202512/22)、《達斯朵也夫斯基之天下本無事》(該欄2025/12/04)、和《別把自己當做世界的中心》(該欄2025/09/29)。
我很清楚自己現在的思考過程已經很難符合我過去對「論述」的要求(該欄開欄文)，如果你讀完後有不知所云的感覺，尚祈見諒。
1. 現身說法
我讀景美國校時，自視甚高：全校第二名畢業(第一名是彭楚淳兄)；當屆只有我們兩人考進建中；劉永吉兄考進附中；女同學中沒有一位考進北一女或北二女。進建中後，發現自己不過爾爾；勉強說得上中人之姿。進了台大，發現自己原來從小是「矮子叢中稱霸王」；僅存的幾分囂張在升大二前已經蕩然無存。之後再無大志，好高騖遠的習氣也在無形中消失。驀然回首，這一生還算滿意，了無牽掛。如果說還有什麼遺憾，大概就是：
沒有在高中時期接觸到「存在主義」；以及30歲以後才逐漸掌握到這個思潮的精義。從而，留下一絲絲「也許已沒有也許」的無可奈何(《卡夫卡簡介》第2.1小節倒數第二段)。
2. 理論基礎
以上兩節的觀點當然不在鼓吹「自以為是」或「左傾盲動」。反之，我一向主張行動應該盡可能依據「周全思考」或「集思廣益」(1)。何況我年過80，沒有挑戰「不聽老人言，吃虧在眼前」這類箴言的動機。以下從理論層面談談門森先生大作的意旨。
2.1 人的社會性
人是「群居動物」；從而，為了利於生存，我們很快就學到兩個「潛規則」：
1) 小到街坊鄰居，大到整個社會，「跟著混，就好混」大概位居生存法則前三條之一(該網頁第4項)。
2) 在上述「合群」之外，對一般人來說，「得到『認可』」則是生存法寶之一。
以上兩點大概是我們絕大多數人會很「在乎旁人閒言閒語」的理由。
2.2 社會建構論
我們的價值和意見都基於各自成長過程中「社會建構」的結果。由於每個人的成長經驗不同，世界上並沒有一個公認的，能用來衡量的「標準」來判斷：旁人的價值和意見是否優於自己的意見，甚至是否適用於當下的情境(2)。
《父子騎驢》這個寓言生動的表達了「旁人閒話」的不可取。
2.3 言談行動論
由於「言談」等同於「行動」，而「行動」往往蘊含「目的」；因此，我們需要了解：旁人「閒言閒語」不只在表達她/他的「意見」或「價值」，往往也在維護他們自己的「利益」或「地位」。明乎此，我們就更沒有理由「在乎」張三李四、三姑六婆的「閒言閒語」。了
2.4 行動主體論
我對「行動主體論」沒什麼研究，此處只借用這個概念來談談和本文主旨相關的一些問題。
我們採取行動時，通常要考慮多方面的因素；例如：利益、原則、價值、或長期目標等等。當這些因素相互之間有衝突時，一般人會在衡量後做些取捨的選擇。在理想情況下，這類「衡量」或「取捨」的動作應該是理性的、一致的、和整體的。
從「主體」的概念，我們須當時時提醒自己：動作者是「我」；則此「動作」的依據自然需是「我」的利益、「我」的原則、「我」的價值、和「我」的目標。
另一方面，實現「理性」、「一致」、和「整體」這些原則的前提是：利益、原則、價值、或目標等等本身是理性的、一致的、和整體的。
因此，如果一個人把「旁人」的意見或閒話拿來當做自己行動的依據，就不能滿足「行動主體性」的要求。
3. 《五個不同層次「去他媽的蛋」》讀後
門森先生大作主旨可以視為：普通人的「存在主義」(請見此欄2026/01/09)。我的意思是：他沒有拿「存在」、「時間」、「虛空」、和「荒謬」這些高深或抽象的概念來立論；而是從我們每天日常生活中都會碰到的情境，來談「行動」和「雖千萬人吾往矣」。其要點在於：
我們每一個人活在世界上，應該堅持自己的「權益」、「價值」、或「偏好」；並以它們做為自己決策的依據。其他人的看法或意見不妨「參考看看」；但不能讓它們輕易影響到自己的「決定」或「行為」。
如果你覺得「去他媽的蛋！」有點不雅或太粗俗，不妨改成：「別老是瞻前顧後！」或「別那麼在乎旁人閒言閒語！」
4. 結論
我再度推薦下面這首和門森先生大作意旨相輝映；請選擇你最喜歡的歌聲/詮釋(3)：
I'd rather be sorry (Anita Carter)
I'd rather be sorry (Rita Coolidge & Kris Kristofferson，此版本附歌詞)
I'd rather be sorry (Patti Page)
I'd rather be sorry (Ray Price)
I'd rather be sorry (the Statler Brothers)
摘錄其中三段歌詞：
“But I won't spend tomorrow regretting the past
For the chances that I didn't take.”
“But I'd gamble whatever tomorrow might bring
For the love that I'm living today.”
“But I'd rather be sorry for something I've done
Than for something that I didn't do.” (4)
附註：
1. 俾斯麥有句名言：「笨蛋從自己的經驗學習，我寧可靠別人的經驗變得聰明」。俾相是普魯士人，這句話的英文版本很多。總之，別人的經驗之談當然可以聽，也應該聽；但需要經過審問、慎思、和明辨的過程後才能採納。
2. 不但「言人人殊」，同一個人的觀點也會因年齡或事情是否「關己」而有不同看法；例如：我在大學時代沒少用過「老而不死是為賊」這句俗話；到了57歲那年我退休後，有朋友問起原因，我常常說：「因為我當時那個老闆不懂『敬老尊賢』，所以我跟他說：『拿著這份工作去死吧』」。
3. 我偏愛 Anita Carter 和 the Statler Brothers 這兩個版本。如果你已經開始走下坡，這首歌應該讓你感觸良多，回味無窮。如果你還不到30，可能就要多聽幾次才慢慢體會到：“But I'd rather be sorry for something I've done；Than for something that I didn't do.”
4. 畢竟，摔個鼻青臉腫大概一星期、三個月、頂多大半年就能復原；「當初如果 …，現在也許 …」的苦酒，可得花一輩子來品嘗。
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「『人』為主體論」 - Bennett Gilbert
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請參見本欄上一篇《引言》。
All that we are
The philosophy of personalism inspired Martin Luther King’s dream of a better world. We still need its hopeful ideas today
Bennett Gilbert, Edited by Sam Dresser, 07/23/24
0. 前言 -- 金恩博士
On 25 March 1965, the planes out of Montgomery, Alabama were delayed. Thousands waited in the terminal, exhausted and impassioned by the march they had undertaken from Selma in demand of equal rights for Black people. Their leader, Martin Luther King, Jr, waited with them. He later reflected upon what he’d witnessed in that airport in Alabama:
As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.
In the faces of the exhausted marchers, King saw the hope that sustained their hard work against the violence and cruelty that they had faced. It is worth asking: why was King moved to try to create a better world? And what sustained his hope?
A clue can be found in the PhD dissertation he wrote at Boston University Divinity School in 1955:
Only a personal being can be good … Goodness in the true sense of the word is an attribute of personality.
The same is true of love. Outside of personality loves loses its meaning …
What we love deeply is persons – we love concrete objects, persistent realities, not mere interactions. A process may generate love, but the love is directed primarily not toward the process, but toward the continuing persons who generate that process.
King subordinates everything to the flourishing of human persons because goodness in this world has no home other than that of persons. Their wellbeing is what makes the events of our lives and of our collective history worthy of effort and care. In order to demonstrate that we are worth the struggle within and among ourselves, King sought to find love between the races and classes on the basis of philosophical claims about personhood. A decade after his dissertation, he was at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, marching to Montgomery.
Can we still grasp and live the hope that King found? Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, racism – like iron filings near a magnet, all these historical forces seem to be pulled together today into one fatal, immiserating direction. They teach us hateful ways to behave and promote heinous vices such as pride and greed. Desires flee beyond prudent limits and rush toward disaster. It seems we are not worth all that we used to think we are worth. Can we replace our narcissism with a virtuous self-regard? The philosophical tradition of personalism tells us that we can and do have hope for our future.
1. 「『人』為主體論」溯源
King’s hope came from his understanding of Christianity through the philosophy of personalism. He largely acquired this line of thought during his graduate studies at Boston. His advisors in Divinity School had been students of Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), the first philosophy professor at Boston University. Bowne founded Boston personalism, which, with William James’s pragmatism, was one of the two earliest American schools of philosophy. For Bowne, personhood is not the bundles of characteristics we call ‘personality’ (人格). Instead, it is the intelligence that makes reality coherent and meaningful. The core of his thought is that personhood is ‘the deepest thing in existence … [with] intellect as the concrete realisation and source’ of being and causality.
Bowne says that if we dismiss abstractions because they are static and have no force in the world, what is left is solely the ‘power of action’. Action for Bowne is intelligence understood as a force that activates the concrete reality of things. This reality is not static substance but the ceaseless business of the effect that entities have on other entities. Personhood is the non-material and non-biological power of relations among things, which activates all the processes of the world. Reality itself is thus deeply personal. Without personhood, it would be atomised and inactive – and therefore unintelligible. In Bowne’s view, only the concept of intelligent selves is adequate for explaining how things are constituted and inter-related. Being is nothing without causality; causality is nothing without intelligence. Reality is nothing without idea; idea is nothing without reality. This intimate connection of mind and the world means that nothing can be understood apart from the intelligence that perceives and understands it, replacing inert substances with the ever-flowing labours of our human need to find meaning in life as we encounter it.
Bowne’s ideas had many predecessors, from Latin Christianity through Immanuel Kant, using many different theories and concepts, about what a human being is and about the personhood of God in its relation to our own personhood. His forceful argumentation influenced James, who helped found the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism shortly after Bowne’s first books were published and who drew increasingly close to personalism, as did the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. Bowne was at the centre of this troika of canonical American philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. His teaching rippled out through personalist philosophers on the West Coast and through his students at Boston, notably Edgar S Brightman and Harold DeWulf, both of whom later became teachers of King.
2. 「『人』為主體論」在歐洲
Many other forms of personalism had been developed in Europe in the previous century: theistic and non-theistic, socialist or communitarian and libertarian, abstractly metaphysical and concretely ethical. It is more an approach to thinking than a method, doctrine or school. Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness, to which it attaches the most profound worth. Some versions develop this through ontology or metaphysics; some, through theologies associated with most denominations of the Abrahamic religions; and some, through the intersubjective and communitarian nature of human life. My own version makes the structure of moral meaningfulness the first step and first philosophy, as I will explain below. All versions seek an integrated, ethically strong comprehension of personhood as the heart of the life of humankind.
3. 各類 人種提升論及其根源
Though personalism continues to be a field of robust philosophical research, in American academic philosophy after the Second World War it faded under the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But in King’s hands it became forceful as a practice for justice and other moral ends. Its resources have not been exhausted. Careful revision and updating can make it a source of illumination and hope in the circumstances we face a half-century after King.
Why should we update personalism, and what useful purpose will this serve? Our ideas about the nature of human beings are today undergoing a severe challenge by the new philosophies of transhumanism. Through personalism, we can understand and appreciate our purposes and obligations, as well as the dangers posed by transhumanism.
The best known of these transhumanist philosophies is effective altruism (EA). The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded at the University of Oxford in 2012 by Toby Ord and William MacAskill; largely inspired by Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, EA has been an influential movement of our time. As MacAskill defines it in Doing Good Better (2015):
Effective altruism is about asking, ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?’ And using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good.
This is not as clear cut as it might seem, and it has often led to the uncomfortable conclusion that the accumulation of capital by the wealthy is morally necessary in order to affect the world for the better in the future, largely regardless of the consequences for living persons. Its proponents argue that society does not sufficiently plan for the distant future and fails to store up the wealth that our successors will need to solve social and existential challenges.
Other transhumanist theories include longtermism, the idea that we have a moral obligation to provide for the flourishing of successor bioforms and machinic entities in the very distant future, at times regardless of consequences for those now living and their proximate next generations. There is also a kind of rationalism that justifies the moral calculations on which provision for the future instead of for the living is based; cosmism, the vision for exploration and colonisation of other worlds; and transhumanism, which aspires to assemble technologies for the evolution of humankind into successor species or for our replacement by other entities as an inevitable and thereby moral duty. All of these, including the various versions, are sometimes named by the acronym TESCREAL (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism). Here I refer to these as ‘transhumanism’.
The core argument common to these lines of thinking, according to the philosopher Émile Torres writing in 2021, is that:
[W]hen one takes the cosmic view, it becomes clear that our civilisation could persist for an incredibly long time and there could come to be an unfathomably large number of people in the future. Longtermists thus reason that the far future could contain way more value than exists today, or has existed so far in human history, which stretches back some 300,000 years.
From this point of view, human suffering today matters little by the numbers. Nuclear war, environmental collapse, injustice and oppression, tyranny, and oppression by intelligent technology are mere ripples on the surface of the ocean of history.
4. 闡述「『人』為主體論」
Each element of these transhumanist ideologies regards human personhood as a thing that is expiring and therefore to be replaced. As the longtermist Richard Sutton told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2023: ‘it behooves us [humans] … to bow out … We should not resist succession.’ Their proponents argue for the factual truth of their predictions as a way to try to ensure the realisations of their prophecies. According to the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, by ‘internalising the lessons of probability theory’ to become ‘perfect Bayesians’, we will have ‘reason in the face of uncertainty’. Such calculations will open a ‘vastly greater space of possibilities than does the term “Homo sapiens”.’
A personalist approach deflates these transhumanist claims. As the historian of science Jessica Riskin has argued, a close examination of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrates that the only intelligence in machines is what people put into them. It is really a sleight-of-hand; there is always a human behind the curtain turning the wizard wheels. As she put it in The New York Review of Books in 2023:
Turing’s literary dialogues seem to me to indicate what’s wrong with Turing’s science as an approach to intelligence. They suggest that an authentic humanlike intelligence resides in personhood, in an interlocutor within, not just the superficial appearance of an interlocutor without; that intelligence is a feature of the world and not a figment of the imagination.
Longtermists’ notions of future entities lack everything we know about conscious intelligence because they use consciousness or living beings as empty black-box words into which even meaningless notions will fit.
Effective altruists dismiss the worth attributable to every human, squashing it by calculations that cannot prescribe moral value, whatever these proponents claim. As we can see in the theories of longtermists such as Nick Bostrom and effective altruists such as Sam Bankman-Fried, instead of working with human ethical values, they work with numerical values, ignoring the massive body of thought from anthropologists such as Webb Keane and from phenomenologists such as Rasmus Dyring, Cheryl Mattingly and Thomas Wentzer showing that values are neither empirical nor quantifiable but nonetheless real forces in human affairs.
Transhumanism as a whole assigns agency to alien beings and electronic entities that do not exist – and perhaps are inconceivable.
This idea of the agency of the inorganic is one of the key arguments for decentring the human. Consider, for example, salt. Salt affords certain effects in certain conditions: it produces a specific taste, it corrodes other materials, it serves certain functions in organisms. But it is humans who organise these events under the concept of causality. What salt does, it does without consciousness. Consciousness neither starts nor halts its effects, broadly speaking. What sense is there, then, in saying that salt has agency when it is more illuminating to say that it is a cause of effects under some conditions?
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It leaves us unaware when a more toxic and cunning human drives to take control because we are busy trying to control the world rather than ourselves. Although some people think that machines or ideas are in control of them, it is really other humans. If we overlook this truth, we accept an untruth – an untruth that condemns us to the mercy of our worst drives and behaviours. When we devalue humanity, we unleash our self-destructive drives, thereby turning reason into destructive irrationality. In this way, we are in fact governed by our own human drive for self-destruction.
This drive seems to differentiate us from other animals as much as language or historicity do. If we provoke this drive too much, we shall have nowhere else to turn in our struggle to flourish in the natural world. We must, instead, search out our integrity and worth because the alternative is despair.
The great and encompassing thing that humans create is our story: human history, the sum of our behaviour and our deeds. We create it with and amid the world around us out of our need to make sense of the world. This need, which builds our moral life, is part of what drives everything we do. It drives the ways we pursue survival, for, without a sense of meaning, we have little will to survive. The pursuit of survival can lead us to meaningfulness but, if it fails to do so, the pursuit itself ceases. We guide ourselves by the stories we choose, for storytelling inhabits all ways of knowing and acting. If the meaning we seek as human persons is overtaken by the story that our self-destructive drive presents in the form of transhumanism, we shall not survive.
Persons are worth more than even justice and goodness are, because it is for the sake of persons that we fight for justice and goodness. In the face of possible profound changes, it often seems we must choose between being good and just to ourselves, and being good and just toward nature. The possibility of these radical changes legitimately requires that we profoundly deflate our anthropocentrism, since overblown self-regard has served us poorly. But how do we do this while encouraging our fraught capabilities and appreciating the worth of our flawed species?
The kind of personalism that I have developed out of Bowne’s ideas as a response to this and other questions I call moral agency personalism. Moral agency is the activity of judging and choosing between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. In my view, every thing that has such moral agency is a person, and all persons are moral agents. (The evidence that some nonhuman species make moral choices, sometimes based on memory and history, has been accumulating.) Adding this possibility to personalism formally recognises worth in all persons, nonhuman as well as human. As a belief and a practice, it can ground a virtuous, as opposed to vicious, self-regard that human and nonhuman persons can exercise for themselves and for other persons. This kind of self-regard is distinct from self-importance.
We can develop a moral agency personalism that has some of the resources we need in facing the human future. We can find these by altering some fundamental concepts of personalism. These updates include: accepting the fact of nonhuman moral agents or persons; including the body in our understanding of individual lives and of interpersonal relations; and rethinking the idealist ontology in personalism in order to make it an ethics-as-first-philosophy approach, with less emphasis on ontology. The guiding idea of these changes is that, in making moral sense out of experience, personal moral agency enlarges our relations to the whole range of our lives and our care for all beings.
Personalism gives us robust resources for identifying our worth and for believing in it. It can encourage us to enhance our worth by our acts in seeking goodness, compassion and justice, and guide us to the richest possible moral life. Because our personhood is the home base of our point of view, there is no way forward other than to maintain our integrity while learning what we must in order to thrive.
The initial and most basic of these resources we should tap is the strength not to do more harm. We are the ones who deploy transhumanist projects into the only world that sustains us. We are the ones degrading the environment. And we are the only ones who can stop us from doing both. For this, we need to respect ourselves as persons with the power to decide not to continue to harm. This is the minimum we must do.
Respecting the moral worth of persons also ignites our capacity to care for others. We respond with aid to calls for help when we learn to recognise moral obligation pertaining to every person, including ourselves, and toward every other person. Furthermore, our humanitarian disposition is frequently a sure way to developing sympathy for the natural world and the life within it.
Understanding our personal moral agency enables a wise combination of the two general forces of moral action: power and compassion. Power is the logic by which we carry ideas and lines of thought to fulfilment in activity. Compassion is the potentially unbounded lovingkindness with which we temper power and extend love to widening spheres in our lives. So far as we know, we are the only living beings who can use these forces in moral decision-making. But even if other beings have moral personhood, nothing of the sort relieves us of the moral obligation that our possession of these two capabilities makes it possible to accept and to follow.
We possess our history, just as we make it – another resource that is unique to us, so far as we know. History is the engine of self-awareness. As the substance of all that we have done and the actual conditions for the possibility of all that is and will be, historical consciousness serves us as the indispensable locus of reflection and deliberation. No unchanging and antiquated images of ourselves restrain our understanding of history because we create the past anew whenever we study it and reflect on it. It is therefore the great endowment for a renewed humanistic extension of personhood to all humankind and to all life.
There are two more resources, pointing to opposite ends of the spectrum of our concerns. The first is that the personalist grasp of what we are worth supports democracy. Democracy has depended on a powerful conception of personal agency and responsibility that cultural and political changes now challenge, in addition to the material issues of human life in the Anthropocene era. These social and natural developments closely reflect each other. Learning to live together is the worthy goal of democracy. But if we are to pursue concord and peace by that road, we must value ourselves, accept our moral nature with its obligations, submit our desires to what the moral worth of every living being requires of us, and work in response to present and patent human suffering and real human joy.
At the opposite end, on the cosmic scale, lies another possibility for virtuous human self-regard afforded us by personalism. Simply put, it is this: it might become clear to us that the universe is constitutively pervaded by consciousness, or is conscious in all its parts, or is inside of a super-consciousness. These are versions of the notion of cosmic consciousness called panpsychism. Panpsychism is not just about what we can know or do but about reality itself. This appeals to those who have for a moment felt the life of the universe in a small experience and do not want to dismiss what that feeling says and means to them just because it is not empirically verifiable. In our best moments, our lives feel epiphanous.
At the same time, however, panpsychism can conflict with the empiricism that is so valuable because it is used to make things that work well for us. And yet other kinds of things, such as erotic love and spirituality, also work well for us and are not conducive to the usual demands of empiricism. For now, it is easy to think that a universal consciousness makes our consciousness unimportant, but there might be ways of getting the opposite outcome. Current advances in physics and biology are starting to support the belief that our consciousness affects reality by working with reality as a consciousness that includes ours. That is, our observing and predicting are inside, not outside, the phenomena we encounter. We are not the crown jewels of creation, but our self-referentiality, our critical awareness and our moral lives form personhood as an important part of a universe that is thereby less alien and cold.
If a suitable form of panpsychism is true, human personhood means more to reality than is usually thought. This kind of personalism puts us into a community or, rather, into many communities made up of conscious beings capable of moral responsibility. The moral agency of persons thrives when agents reflectively act in obligation to their individual and collective selves rather than in seeing themselves through the needs of imagined others in the undetermined future.
What King observed in Montgomery airport in 1965 was actual persons developing their moral purchase with each other. He saw this as the processes of goodness and love at work in their proper sphere: our common existence. King wanted us not only to recognise the unique and infinite value of every person, but to understand it so powerfully that we would feel ourselves obliged to take the action that this recognition requires. As he wrote, we need only look around us at the struggles for a decent and free life that others wage to sense the profundity of human worth and to see that we all depend on one another. That this has the power to inspire us to fight for change sustained his hopes.
We face an urgent present choice. We might prefer that algorithms or despots act for us because our own power of judgment is too explosive to manage. That would suit the purposes of infomaniacal hypercapitalism, which seeks to control consumers rather than to enrich persons. But turning over our judgment to machines does not lock away our power to destroy ourselves and others. We must govern ourselves even as we evolve. This requires an enduring connection to our humanity and a willingness to work hard with one another. This can be successful only if and when we hold fast to all that we are.
Bennett Gilbert is adjunct assistant professor of history and philosophy at Portland State University, US. He is the author of A Personalist Philosophy of History (2019) and Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change (forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press), as well as numerous papers, and is co-editor of Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (2023).
相關資訊
History of ideasThinkers and theoriesValues and beliefs
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《「『人』為主體論」》引言
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我在一年多以前讀到這篇文章(請見本欄下一篇)；由於它近4,000字，我一時之間沒能仔細讀完。前幾天整理檔案夾時，瀏覽了一下，覺得值得介紹。雖然目前沒有功夫就該文作者介紹的思想做深入了解，好歹必須把它放到《優先閱讀清單》上。
先就該文作者吉爾柏教授大作主題 ”personalism” 一字的中譯做個詮釋。由於我們已經有「人文主義」(視其內涵或譯「人本論」)，我只好就我的了解，將此倫理學思想譯為「『人』為主體論」。是否信、達，尚祈指正。
原文沒有分節；為了便於指涉和討論，我照慣例將各段落依主旨分節並加上「子標題」與序號(包括「前言」)。如有誤解或錯誤，敬請指教。
該文用到許多哲學專業名詞，我先提供其中兩個的索引：
a. effective altruism：效益利他論(以效益為行動指標的利他思想)
b. transhumanism：人種提升論；「人種」在此為生物學或分類學的「用法」，不是政治語言或社會衝突的「用法」。
最後，我先做三個短評(以後再長篇大論之)：
1) 我同意，也支持：「『人』為主體論」的基本思想；吉爾柏教授大作中自然有可商酌之處。
2) 某些「人種提升論」者—尤其是有專業知識的人—由於不敢或不願面對自己當下責任，拿這個概念做地洞或遮羞布；他/她們以「提升」來掩飾自己的沒有種。
3) 我接受「個人本位方法論」，也曾把它幾度應用到政治分析場合(此文第4節)。所以，我非常同意吉爾柏教授在其大作第4節第8段的評論(1)。
附註：
1. “In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It leaves us unaware when a more toxic and cunning human drives to take control because we are busy trying to control the world rather than ourselves. …”
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新教教義：面對暴力第三條路 - Paul Ian Clarke
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我對古希伯萊地區的文化和社會毫無所知，無法為下文作者克拉克牧師的「詮釋」背書，當然也無從否定它們。
尼切相當博學，又是鑽研「訓詁學」出身；他對古希伯萊文化和社會應該知之甚詳。如果我這個了解成立；在克拉克牧師的「詮釋」下，則尼切對基督教倫理的批判就有偏頗之嫌。請參考《道德沿革考》的簡介(視頻，約42分鐘)。我沒有能力申論這麼大的議題，只在此根據常理提出一點淺見。這是我認為克拉克牧師「詮釋」欠缺說服力的原因之一。
另一方面，閱讀和解讀典籍，需要了解和根據其立論脈絡(時代、社會、文化、目的、…)，是「審問」、「慎思」、「明辨」一系列步驟的立論基礎。
Turning the Other Cheek Isn’t What You Think
Why Jesus’ words were never about being a doormat — and how they reveal a creative path to justice
Paul Ian Clarke, 08/30/25
We’ve all heard the phrases: “an eye for an eye,” “turn the other cheek,” “go the extra mile.” They’ve slipped into our everyday speech, but do we really understand what they meant in Jesus’ day? And what they might mean for us now?
Let’s start with that old phrase, “an eye for an eye.”
To modern ears, it sounds harsh, even barbaric. But when it was first written into the law of Moses 3,000 years ago, it was groundbreaking. Before then, tribal feuds could last for years, spiralling from one insult into bloodshed that consumed entire communities. This law was about limiting revenge: if someone wronged you, the punishment could go this far and no further. It drew a line under endless cycles of violence.
But then Jesus comes along, on that Galilean hillside, and says: “You’ve heard it said, an eye for an eye… but I tell you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
On the surface, that sounds like submission. Keep quiet, let people walk all over you, be a doormat for the glory of God. But is that really justice?
The False Choice: Violence or Submission
We tend to think our only options are fight back with violence or give in completely.
* If a child is falsely accused by a teacher, should she rage in the head’s office, or quietly accept a punishment she doesn’t deserve?
* If an employee is unfairly dismissed, does he shout at his boss, or just go home in silence?
* If a woman is trapped in an abusive relationship, does she lash out, or remain a victim of violence?
* If two nations face off on the brink of war, must they either fight, or surrender their moral ground?
Violence or submission. Neither looks much like justice.
Yet, Jesus offers a third way, a way that resists injustice without mirroring it, and reclaims dignity without perpetuating harm.
Turning the Other Cheek
In first-century Palestine, striking someone with the back of the right hand wasn’t random violence, it was a way of asserting dominance over someone considered “beneath you,” like a servant or slave.
If the victim “turned the other cheek,” the aggressor faced a dilemma. They couldn’t use their left hand (that was reserved for unclean tasks), and to slap with the open hand was to treat the other as an equal. By offering the other cheek, the victim wasn’t submitting, they were demanding dignity.
“Hit me again if you must,” the gesture says, “but do it as an equal.”
Hand Over Your Cloak
Jesus then adds: “If anyone sues you for your coat, give them your cloak as well.”
In first-century terms, your cloak was what kept you from being exposed, literally. To offer your cloak as well as your coat would leave you naked, but it also flipped the shame onto the accuser. In Jewish law, seeing another’s nakedness brought dishonour. By giving everything, the victim shifted the power dynamic and the oppressor was the one left shamed.
Going the Extra Mile
We often hear “go the extra mile” as a motivational slogan. Work harder, do more. But in Jesus’ time, it had a far sharper edge.
Under Roman law, a soldier could force a civilian to carry his gear, but only for one mile. Going further wasn’t an act of generosity; it put the soldier himself at risk of punishment. Suddenly the power shifts. The centurion, once so commanding, is begging you to stop.
This is not passive submission. This is creative resistance.
From Jesus to Gandhi to King
History shows us how powerful this “third way” can be. Gandhi drew on these very teachings in his movement for Indian independence. Martin Luther King Jr. embraced them in the Civil Rights Movement.
Both refused to return violence with violence. Both refused to be silent victims. Both stood firm with dignity, and in doing so, changed the course of history.
The Justice Jesus Offers
As theologian Tom Wright puts it, “Jesus offers a new sort of justice, a creative, healing, restorative justice.”
Turning the other cheek, handing over the cloak, walking the second mile, these aren’t calls to submission. They are acts of bold, nonviolent defiance. They are ways to stand firm against injustice without becoming part of its endless cycle.
Maybe that’s what our world needs now more than ever: people brave enough to choose neither violence nor silence, but a third way, the way of restoration.
Written by Paul Ian Clarke
I’m an Anglican Priest and the Curator of Sacred and Secular, who loves exploring how we navigate faith in our modern lives. If you’d like more reflections like this, I write daily for my Sacred & Secular newsletter here.
I also write about the strange and beautiful places where faith meets ordinary life. Join my newsletter at www.sacredandsecular.co.uk
Published in Backyard Church
Thoughts on applying a 2000 year old religion to 21st Century life.
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