哲学试译 | 罗伯特·皮平《顶峰：海德格尔、德国观念论与哲学的命运》序
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2025-01-09 16:01
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In the course of writing a recent book about Hegel's Science of Logic (2019) and so about Hegel's metaphysics, I recalled that the only other commentator known to me to take as seriously as I did (in the way that I did) that at the heart of Hegel's enterprise was the identification of logic (a theory of pure thinking) with metaphysics (an account of being) was Martin Heidegger.' But Heidegger did not mean to offer a mere interpretation. He was also trying to say that all metaphysics up to and including Hegel had been working under the same assumption, starting with Plato's claim that reality was Idea and on through scholastic and early modern meta-physics. Moreover, Heidegger claimed that this assumption about the primary availability of being to discursive thinking, in all the developing variations in later philosophy and especially in modernity, had set in place by its implications various notions of primacy, significance, orders of importance, social relations and relations with the natural world that had led to a disastrous self-estrangement in the modern West, and a forgetfulness and lostness that ensured a permanent and ultimately desperate homelessness. For Heidegger, Hegel had taken that mostly implicit assumption as far as it could be taken, and so was its "culmination" in the claim that the Absolute had been achieved, that all dualisms had been reconciled and that a complete account of the intelligibility of being and thereby an account of any possible being had been realized. But for Heidegger, this culmination allowed us to see, in its very radicality and ambition, the disclosure of the inner dynamic of all Western philosophy, and thereby that the most fundamental question of metaphysics, the meaning of being qua being, had not yet even been posed or acknowledged as such since the pre-Socratics. This primary identification of Being with knowability had become so fixed in place that it was not even noticed anymore, ensuring that it was also not questioned and that its implications for what by contrast was taken to be merely subjective, psychological, and insignificant had simply been accepted.在撰写我那本关于黑格尔《逻辑学》（2019 年）以及黑格尔形而上学的近期著作时，我回想起来，在我所知的所有诠释者之中，能像我一样（并以我所采用的方式）严肃对待“在黑格尔的事业核心中，将逻辑（纯粹思维的理论）和形而上学（对存在的论述）视为同一回事”的，只有马丁·海德格尔（Martin Heidegger）一人。然而，海德格尔并不打算只做简单的诠释；他同时想要说明的是，一直到黑格尔为止的所有形而上学——可以追溯到柏拉图提出“现实即理念（Idea）”的主张，乃至经院哲学和近代早期形而上学——都遵循了同样的假设。更进一步，海德格尔认为，这种关于“存在对于思维（discursive thinking）而言具有根本可把握性”的假设，在之后形形色色的发展版本（特别是在现代）中，已经奠定了若干观念的优先次序、重要性的排列、社会关系以及人类和自然界之间的关系，最终导致了现代西方严重的自我疏离，以及一种遗忘与迷失的状态，使人陷入一种永久且最终绝望的无家可归之中。对海德格尔来说，黑格尔将这种大多是隐含的假设推向了极致，也因此成为它的“顶峰（culmination）”，体现在黑格尔所宣称的“绝对”已经达成：一切二元对立都被调和，所有关于存在可理解性的面向，乃至任何可能存在之事物，都可以被完整地加以说明。然而在海德格尔看来，正因为黑格尔立场极端且雄心勃勃，也让我们得以看到整个西方哲学内部的动力究竟如何运作，并让我们发现，自前苏格拉底以来，“存在自身作为存在”的最根本问题从未真正被提出或被正视。由于将“存在”的首要意义同“可被认识性”等同起来已经牢固到几乎不被察觉的地步，人们自然不会加以质疑，也就顺理成章地接受了它对其他领域——那些相反只被视为主观、心理层面、缺乏重要性的事物——的否定。This raised a pointed question that arises for anyone who, like me, still thinks of Hegel as a powerful philosophical thinker from whom we still have much to learn: is Heidegger right about what remained unasked, and, more importantly, is it true that its remaining unasked counts as a serious objection to Hegel's culmination, an objection that was existential as well as theoretical? This question turned on an issue that can seem quite extravagant outside of the world of Hegel scholars: is there, could there be, such an Absolute, and if not, what implications follow for the underlying assumption identified by Heidegger as the basis for such an absolute claim: that logic is metaphysics (as the inner dynamic of all metaphysical thought) — that, in other words, being qua being should be understood as intelligibility and ultimately, in principle, knowability, that the domain of the knowable exhausted the domain of all possibly meaningful being? That came to seem to me an unacceptable claim and even a chimerical goal for pure thinking or first philosophy to aim at. To many philosophers after Kant, this might seem far too obvious to mention, but that now seems to me a simplification of the problem. There is no such absolute congruence of thinking and being, but that then means that the philosophical desideratum, the identification of the meaning of being with intelligibility and ultimately knowability, cannot claim to comprehend all that there meaningfully is and could be. If the conceptual in Hegel's sense is not unbounded but bounded with respect to the meaning of Being, Heidegger's only topic, how should philosophy respond to this revealing culmination?这就引出一个对所有像我一样，仍然认为黑格尔是一位颇具力量的哲学思想家、并相信我们依然能从他身上学到很多东西的人而言非常尖锐的问题：海德格尔对黑格尔所忽视内容的指控是否正确？更重要的是，如果黑格尔确实忽视了那个问题，这种忽视是否构成了对黑格尔“顶峰”地位的严重质疑？而且，这样的质疑不仅在理论上有效，同时也带有生存（existential）意义？这个问题主要围绕着一个或许在黑格尔研究圈以外显得极端的议题：是否真的存在所谓“绝对”？如果不存在，那么海德格尔所指出的那个作为此“绝对”主张基础的核心假设——即“逻辑就是形而上学”（作为一切形而上学思想的内在动力），换言之，“就存在本身（being qua being）来说，它应该被理解为可理解性，最终在原则上是可知的；可被思维所掌握的领域能涵盖所有可能有意义的存在”——会产生哪些后果？对我来说，这样的主张渐渐显示出不可接受，甚至是一个纯粹思维或“第一哲学”并不切实际的目标。对许多康德之后的哲学家而言，这似乎再明显不过，不必多言，但如今我认为这是一种对问题的过度简化：并不存在任何绝对的“思维与存在相吻合”，这样一来，在哲学中所追寻的目标——将“存在的意义”和“可理解性”乃至“可知性”等同起来——就无法声称涵盖所有可能有意义的事物。倘若在黑格尔那里，“概念性（the conceptual）”并非无限，而是在“存在的意义（the meaning of Being）”面前是有限度的，那么我们就不得不面对这是海德格尔唯一关心的主题——哲学该如何回应这场“顶峰”所暴露出的问题？Heidegger realizes that the issue of Hegel's culmination could not be addressed except within the context of German Idealism. The major figures for Heidegger were Kant and Hegel, so I address mostly his work on those two. His lectures discuss Fichte, but he essentially treats him as a Kantian, at least during the phase of Heidegger's career when he considered Kant a righteous champion of the finitude of thought in the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. (Heidegger later changed his mind and rejected that view.) And Heidegger's interest in Schelling requires its own category.海德格尔清楚，若要探讨黑格尔“顶峰”的问题，就不能脱离德国观念论的背景。对他来说，康德和黑格尔是关键人物，所以我主要聚焦于他对二者的研究。他在课堂中也讨论过费希特（Fichte），但基本上还是将费希特视作康德的延伸，至少在海德格尔生涯的那个阶段，他仍把康德（在《纯粹理性批判》第一版中）视作一位捍卫思维有限性的“正义斗士”。（海德格尔后来改变了想法，不再持这一看法。）至于海德格尔对谢林（Schelling）的兴趣则需要专门探讨。As I will try to show in what follows, the issue will come down to the very broad problem of the sources of meaningfulness for human life, the status of the horizon of possible meaningfulness in a historical world. For Hegel, as the culmination of the philosophical tradition, the answer to that question is (and has always been, from Plato on) reason, that the exfoliation of all possible intelligibility is the way in which human beings reconcile themselves to their world and so find themselves at home in it. This is true from the heights of speculative thinking to the self-legislated authority of moral law, to the claim for the rationality of modern ethical life, to the sweeping claim about our possible reconciliation with the course of history itself. For Heidegger this is ultimately dogmatic; it can be shown to be inadequate and that there must be sources of meaningfulness other than this, which, by being ignored, send the fate of reason so understood into misleading, obscuring, and ultimately unacceptable directions. The question of just what Heidegger thinks has been forgotten, obscured by this dogmatic insis-tence, poses the greatest difficulty in any overall interpretation of Heidegger, but on the main issue, as I just stated, I think Heidegger is right. Neither Kant nor Hegel is in a position to give a defensible, nondogmatic, non-question-begging answer to the question of the Sinn des Seins, the meaning of being. Again, to many this will seem so obvious as not to be worth mentioning any longer, but I think Heidegger is also right in charging that all enterprises in philosophy as such, including those in the twenty-first century, whether the metaphysics of modality, new metaphysical realism, or resting content with the analytic clarification of our con-cepts, still subscribe to the basic premise Heidegger has identified: that the primary availability of the beings to human being is as material for cognition, possible contents for assertoric judgment, in whatever subfield of philosophy undertaken, or else they content themselves with isolated intellectual exercises without much sense of why any of it should matter? If pressed on the question of mattering, something like the assumption Heidegger has identified will emerge.我接下来要说明的是：最后问题会回到一个更宏大的主题——“在人类生活中，意义（meaningfulness）的来源是什么”，以及“在一个历史性的世界中，可能的意义地平线具有什么地位”。对黑格尔而言，身为哲学传统的顶峰，这个问题（从柏拉图开始就是如此）一直有一个答案：理性。通过展开所有可能的可理解性，人类就能够与其所处的世界和解，进而找到自己的归宿。这一见解从最高层次的思辨思维，到道德律的自主立法权威，再到论证现代伦理生活的合理性，以及我们是否可能与历史进程本身达成和解的宏大主张，始终贯彻如一。然而在海德格尔看来，这种立场终究是教条式的；他认为可以证明它并不充分，而且一定还存在其他意义来源。正因为这些来源被忽视，将“理性”（按照这种理解方式）带向了错误的方向，加上被蒙蔽和扭曲，最终变得难以接受。至于海德格尔所谓“被遗忘”或“被遮蔽”的究竟是什么——在任何对海德格尔做整体阐释的尝试中，这都是最大的难题。然而，就我所说的关键议题上，我认为海德格尔是正确的：无论康德还是黑格尔，都无法给出一个可捍卫的、非教条、且不先预设结论的答案，来回应“Sinn des Seins”（存在的意义）这一问题。对很多人来说，这或许再明显不过，无须再提，但我也赞同海德格尔的批评：当代所有形式的哲学工作——不管是可能世界的形而上学研究，还是新兴的形而上学实在论，亦或是仅仅满足于对概念进行逻辑澄清——依然认同海德格尔所指认的那一基本前提：就人而言，存在（beings）首先是作为可供认知、可进行断言式判断（assertoric judgment）的材料而出现；或者，很多哲学只是在孤立的智力活动中徘徊，并没有去想为什么这些活动本身值得重视？如果进一步追问“它为何重要”，就会出现海德格尔所指出的那个假设。罗伯特·皮平（Robert B. Pippin）是美国著名的哲学家，长期研究康德与德国观念论、尼采、现代性以及黑格尔思想在当代语境中的意义。《顶峰：海德格尔、德国观念论与哲学的命运》这本书聚焦于海德格尔对黑格尔及德国观念论的批判与继承，并以此反思整个西方哲学在面对“存在的意义”时所面临的挑战。皮平通过细致剖析黑格尔的形而上学与海德格尔的根本存在论，揭示它们在诠释“理性”和“存在”问题上的可能局限，并指出当代哲学如何在二者的张力之下寻找新的方向。这不仅涉及学术探讨，也关乎人类在历史与文化脉络中的自我理解与生存意义。
