Russian Thinkers

看了二分之一了，真的是我第一次独立自主在没有人指导或者讲解的情况下尝试着啃完一本英语书。说起来真的很丢人，因为以前看英语书要么是课堂需要要么就是老师的推荐，读之前因为有了导读，会对这本书有一个大概的了解。神奇的缘分让我看起了柏林的书，也是神奇的缘分让我在试图确认这本书原文是不是和译本一样晦涩之后捧起了原著。事实证明它没有我想得那么难，再加上柏林的文笔真的很好，读起来十分舒服。

与此同时也在思考俄罗斯那个时候的思想变迁。在书中柏林提到了liberator这一个概念，并指出1830s－40s的俄罗斯思想家和创作者们不约而同地从黑格尔派中寻找属于自己的liberator。他们寻找的不仅仅是真理之门，更是一种能够解释他们落后的文化以及庸腐政府机构和社会中存在的种种问题的万能法典。这是最让我觉得难过的，因为他们寻找着不存在的唯一解，而驱使着他们寻找唯一解的动力源泉是对自己文化中哲学体系缺失的自卑。读的时候我其实更多想到自己，那种自身缺少某种成熟的自我思辨体系的自卑，对于自己的思考的不自信和疑虑，似乎这一切从我接触到英语以及埋藏在英语之下的那个庞大丰富的批评理论体系时就已经确定了。也许从一开始知识的传递里就带有某种一方低下头去的姿态。如果不是因为惧怕无知的黑暗，又怎么会拼命地抓住一团星火，便把它当做世间唯一的光。

Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedge dog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be diong. (P26)

Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy’s violently unhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all efforts to explain and justify human action and characters in terms of social and individual growth, or ‘roots’ in the past; this side by side with an absorbed and lifelong interest in history, leading to artistic and philosophical results which provoked such queerly disparaging comments from ordinary sane and sympathetic critics. (P32)

Russian Thinkers

9.5

Isaiah Berlin / 2008 / Penguin Classics

Herzen: ...they (the masses) are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are offended by those who stand alone...they want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one, against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter their head.(p100) Dulism is for Herzen a confusion of words with facts, the construction of theories employing abstract terms which are not founded in discovered real needs, of political programmes deduced from abstract principles unrelated to real situations. These formulae grow into terrible weapons in the hands of finatical doctrinaries who seek to bind them upon human beings, if need be, by violent vivisection, for the sake of some absolute ideal, for which the sanction lies in some uncritisied an uncriticisable vision - metaphysical, religious, aesthetic; at any rate, unconcerned with the actual needs of actual persons - in the name of which revotionary leaders kill and torture with quiet conscience, because they know that this and this alone is -must be - the solution to all social and political and personal ills. (p101)

柏林论老愤青巴枯宁