新美学·每日翻译 | 生态化 ｜第一章（一）

Chapter 1（part 1 ）| Being Ecological | Timothy Morton

第一章（第1部分） | 生态化 | 蒂姆▪莫顿

翻译者：LONG Yunru

1. And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction

你可能会发现自己正生活于一个大规模灭绝的时代

Exactly what is the current state of play, ecologically speaking? Let's explore this first. When I've told some people about the title of this chapter, they have accused me of being weak. That's right: this chapter is really lame. Some people wanted me to say"You ARE Living in an Age of Mass Extinction,"as if the"You may"was the same as"You are not.”

从生态学角度讲，目前的游戏状态是指什么？我们先来探索这个问题。当我告诉一些人这一章的标题时，他们指责我太软弱了，没错：这一章确实毫无说服力。有些人想让我改为“你正生活在一个大规模灭绝的时代”，好像“你可能”就是“你没有”。

This in itself is interesting, this understanding of"may"as"not."It has to do with the logical"Law"of the Excluded Middle. It affects all kinds of areas of life. The normal rule for voting interprets abstaining as saying"No"when it comes to counting up the votes. You can't interpret it to mean"Maybe yes, maybe no."We live in an indicative age, an active one indeed, where a word processing program is prone to punish you with a little wavy green line for using the passive voice; heaven forbid we use the subjunctive, as in"you might.”

这本身是有趣的，把“可能”理解为“没有”与“排中律”的逻辑法则有关，它影响到生活的各个方面。在统计选票时，投票的一般规则是将弃权解释为“否决”。你不能把它理解为“可能赞成，可能否决”的意思。我们生活在一个指示性的时代，一个真正活跃的时代。在这个时代，如果你使用被动语态，文字处理程序很容易用一条绿色的波浪线来惩罚你；我们也被禁止使用虚拟语气，比如“你可能”。

Not being able to be in the middle is a big problem for ecological thinking.

不能思考中间位置是生态思维的一个大问题。

But not being able to be in the subjunctive is also a big problem for ecological thinking. Not being able to be in"may"mode. It's all so black and white. And it edits out something vital to ourexperience of ecology, something we can't actually get rid of: the hesitation quality, feelings of unreality or of distorted or altered reality, feelings of the uncanny: feeling weird.

但不能使用虚拟语气也是生态思维的一个大问题。 无法进入“可能”模式，所有事情非黑即白。它删除了一些对我们的生态体验至关重要的东西，一些我们实际上无法摆脱的东西：犹豫不决的特质，对非真实、扭曲或改变的现实的感觉以及离奇的感觉。

The feeling of not-quite-reality is exactly the feeling of being in a catastrophe. If you've ever been in a car crash, or in that minor catastrophe called jet lag, you probably know what I mean. Indeed, editing out"may"edit out experience as such."You ARE"means that if you don't feel like it, if you don't feel something officially sanctioned about ecology, there's something wrong with you. It should be transparent. It should be obvious. We should deliver this obviousness in an obvious way, like a slap upside the head."You may find yourself in"includes experience. In a sense, it's actually much stronger than a simple assertion. Because you can't get rid of yourself. You can agree or disagree with all kinds of things—there you are, agreeing or disagreeing. In the words of that great phenomenologist Buckaroo Banzai, Wherever you go, there you are.1

不完全真实的感觉正是处于灾难中的感觉。如果你曾经历过车祸，或是那次叫做时差的小遭遇，你可能明白我的意思。事实上，删除“可能”也在删除经历本身。“你是”意味着如果你不喜欢它，如果你对生态没有官方认可，你就是有问题的。它应该是透明且显而易见的，我们应该以一种显而易见的方式传达这种显而易见的感觉，就像打耳光那样。“你可能会在其中发现自己”包括经历。在某种意义上，它比一句简单的断言强得多，因为你无法摆脱自己。你可以同意或不同意你所处的一切，但无论如何你都在那里。用伟大的现象学家巴卡罗▪万扎伊（Buckaroo Banzai）的话来说，“无论你走到哪里，你都在那里。”

Philo-sophy

There is something rough and ready about truth, just as there is something rough and ready about philosophy. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, not wisdom as such. It's definitely a style of philosophy to delete the philospart. There are too many philosophers to mention, and I blush to name them, but you know the type: the kind of person who knows they are rightand that you are talking nonsense unless you agree with them. Needless to say, this is a style I don't like at all. Love means you can't and don't grasp the beloved—that's what you feel, that's what you realize when you love someone or something."I can't quite put my finger on it ...I just love that painting ...”

有一些粗略的关于真相的事物，就像也有一些关于哲学的一样。哲学意味着“对智慧的热爱”而不是智慧本身，删除“热爱（philos）的部分绝对是哲学的一种风格。有太多哲学家我无法一一提及，我不好意思说出他们的名字，但你懂这种类型：那种知道”自己是对的“，”除非你同意他们否则就是在放屁“的人。不用说，这是我不喜欢的风格。爱意味着你不能也不要抓住所爱的人——这是你感受到的，这是你在爱某人或某物时所意识到的。“我不能把手指放在上面......我只是喜欢那幅画......"

Throughout this book, we'll be seeing how the experience of art provides a model for the kind of coexistence ecological ethics and politics wants to achieve between humans and nonhumans. Why is that?

通过这本书，我们将看到艺术的体验如何为人类和非人类想要实现的生态伦理和政治共存提供一个模型。为什么会这样呢？

In the late eighteenth century the great philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between things and thing-data, as we have begun to see. One reason why you can tell there is a sharp distinction here, argued Kant, is beauty, which he explored as an experience, the kind of moment in which we exclaim"Wow, that's so beautiful!"(What I'm going to be calling"the beauty experience.”) That's because beauty gives you a fantastic,"impossible"access to the inaccessible, to the withdrawn, open qualities of things, their mysterious reality.

十八世纪末，伟大的哲学家伊曼纽尔▪康德（Immanuel Kant）将事物和事物的数据区别开来，正如我们已经开始看到的那样。康德认为，你之所以能分辨出这里有一个明显的区别原因之一是美，他将美作为一种体验来探索，在那一时刻我们会惊叹“哇，那太美了！（我将称之为“美的体验”）这是因为美给了你一个绝好的“不可能”的机会去接近那些无法接近的、回撤的、开放性的事物，以及它们神秘的现实。

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good; instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves. Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of"pretty."It's strange, this feeling. It's like the feeling of having a thought, without actually having one. In food marketing there is a category that developed in the last two decades or so called mouthfeel. It's a rather disgusting term for the texture of food, how it interacts with your teeth and your palate and your tongue. In a way, Kantian beauty is thinkfeel. It's the sensation of having an idea, and since we are so committed to a dualism of mind and body—so was Kant—we can't help thinking this is a bit psychotic: ideas shouldn't make a sound, should they? But we do talk all the time about the soundof an idea: That sounds good. Is it possible that there is some kind of truth in this colloquial phrase?

康德把美描述为一种不可理解的感觉：这就是为什么美的体验超越了概念。你不可能吃一幅画着苹果的画；你不觉得它是道德高尚的；相反，它告诉你苹果本身的一些奇妙之处。美不必与“美”的预设概念相一致，这种感觉很奇怪，就像是有拥有一种想法的感觉，而实际上却没有。在食品营销中，有一个在过去二十年间发展起来的用词叫作“口感”（mouthfeel），这是用来形容食物质感，食物是如何与你的牙齿、味觉和舌头相互作用的一个恶心的术语。在某种程度上，康德的美是一种“思感”（thinkfeel）。这是有了想法的感觉，既然我们和康德一样，致力于精神和身体的二元论，我们就禁不住认为这是有点精神病的：观念不应该发出声音吗？但我们总是在谈论观念的声音：听起来不错。这句口语短语中是不是可能有某种真理？

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is a controversial figure, because for some of his career he was a member of the Nazi party. This very dark cloud is a big shame, because it pre- vents many people from engaging with him seriously. And this is despite the fact that Heidegger, like it or not, wrote the manual on how thinking should proceed in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I hope I'll be able to demonstrate this as I go along, and in addition I hope I can show that Heidegger's Nazism is a big mistake—obviously, but also from the point of view of his very own thought.

德国哲学家马丁▪海德格尔（MartinHeidegger）是一个有争议的人物，因为在他的一段职业生涯中他曾是纳粹党的成员，这是一个巨大的污点，阻止了许多人认真地了解他。不管你喜欢与否，尽管海德格尔写了一本关于思考如何在二十世纪后期和二十一世纪初前行的手册，我希望随着我的写作能阐明这一点。除此之外，从他自己的观点出发，我能证明海德格尔的纳粹主义是一个严重的错误。

Heidegger argues that there are no such things as truth and untruth, rigidly distinguished like black and white. You are always in the truth. You are always in some kind of more or less low resolution, low dpi jpeg version of the truth, some kind of common, public version, truthiness (we first met Stephen Colbert's handy term in the Introduction). I know the jpeg analogy doesn't work properly. No analogy works properly. The analogy of truth as more or less pixelated is itself more or less pixelated.

海德格尔认为，事物不像真理和非真理一样被严格区分。你总是在真理中，在低分辨率，低清晰度版本的真相中，某种常见、公开的版本，“感实性（我们在序言中第一次提到这个斯蒂芬▪科尔伯特（ Stephen Colbert）的术语）。我知道用图片来类比不太好，没有一个类比是合适的。事实的类比和它本身都或多或少地被像素化了。

And beauty is truthy. Actually, since I'm not Kant I'm going to say that beauty isn't thinkfeel, it's truthfeel. If you want to use the language scientists now use you can say truthlike. So if you think about it, we are now at a point where we must acknowledge a subtle flip in our argument. We've been criticizing factoids as misleading, but why can they be misleading at all? It's because somehow we don't always recognize false things as false. Which means that there isn't a thin or rigid true versus false distinction. In a strange way, all true statements are sort of truthy. There is not a sudden point or rigid boundary at which the truthybecomes actually true. Things are always a bit fumbly and stumbly. We are feeling our way around. Ideas sound good. Truthfeel. And you may find yourself living in an age of mass extinction.

美丽是感实的。我不是康德，我要说的是美不是“思感”，而是“实感”（truthfeel）。如果你想使用科学家使用的语言，你可以说“像真实的”。你想想，我们正处于必须承认我们的论点出现微妙转变的节点上。我们一直批判仿真陈述具有误导性，但为什么它们会有误导性呢？这是因为不知何故，我们并不总能分辨出错误的东西是错误的，这意味着没有细微或严格的真假区别。奇怪的是，所有真实的陈述都是感实的。没有一个突然的点或严格的边界让感实真正成为真实。事情总是有点笨手笨脚，我们在摸索着前进。”听起来不错“，”实感“，然后你可能会发现自己正生活于一个大规模灭绝的时代。

The Phenomenon of the Anthropocene

人类世的现象

The Anthropocene is the name given to a geological period in which human-made stuff has created a layer in Earth's crust: all kinds of plastics, concretes, and nucleotides, for example, have formed a discrete and obvious stratum. The Anthropocene has now officially been dated as starting in 1945. This is an astounding fact. Can you think of another geological period that has such a specific start date? And can you think of anything more uncanny than realizing that you are in a whole new geological period, one marked by humans becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale?2

人类世是一个地质时期的名字，在这个地质时期人造物质在地壳上形成了新的一层：各种塑料、混凝土和核苷酸组成了一个互不相连而明显的地层。人类世已经正式确定起始日期为1945年，这是一个令人震惊的事实。你能想出还有哪个地质时期有这样一个特定的开始日期吗？你能想到比意识到你正处于一个全新的地质时期，一个在行星范围由人类标记，成为地球物理学的力量更不可思议的事情吗？

There have been five mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The most recent one, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, was caused by an asteroid. The one before that, the End Permian Extinction, was caused by global warming, and it wiped out all but a few lifeforms. Extinctions look like points on a time line when you look them up on Wikipedia—but they are actually spread out over time, so that while they are happening it would be very hard to discern them. They are like invisible nuclear explosions that last for thousands of years. It's our turn to be the asteroid, because the global warming that we cause is now bringing about the Sixth Mass Extinction. Maybe it would make it more obvious if we stopped calling it"global warming"(and definitely stopped calling it"climate change,"which is really weak) and started calling it"mass extinction,"which is the net effect.

地球生命史上有过五次大规模灭绝。最近的一次也就是灭绝恐龙的那次，是由小行星引起的，在此之前，二叠纪末期的灭绝由全球变暖引起，它消灭了除少数生命形式以外的所有生命形式。当你在维基百科上查到它们的时候，灭绝看起来只是时间线上的一个点，但它们实际上是随着时间的推移而扩散的，所以当它们真的发生的时候很难进行辨别，就像是持续数千年的看不见的核爆炸。轮到我们成为小行星了，因为我们造成的全球变暖现在带来了第六次大规模灭绝。如果我们停止称之为“全球变暖”（并最终停止称之为毫无震慑力的“气候变化”），而开始称之为“大规模灭绝”，也许会使情况更加明显。

Now it may sound strange, but something about the vagueness of kinda sorta finding yourself in the Anthropocene, which is the reason why the Sixth Mass Extinction event on planet Earth is now ongoing—something about that vagueness is in fact essentialand intrinsicto the fact of being in such an age. This is like saying that jet lag tells you something true about how things are. When you arrive in a very distant strange place, everything seems a little uncanny: strange, yet familiar, yet familiarly strange—yet strangely familiar. The light switch seems a little closer than normal, a little differently placed on the wall. The bed is oddly thin and the pillow isn't quite what you're used to—I'm describing how it feels whenever I arrive in Norway, by the way. Day begins about 10 a.m. during winter. It's pitch dark at 9 a.m. It's still the day, but not quite as you have become habituated to it.

这听起来可能有些奇怪，但关于在人类世中发现自己的模糊性就是为什么地球上第六次大规模灭绝事件正在进行的原因——事实上，在这样一个时代，这种模糊性是必不可少的，也是固有的。这就像是在说时差反应可以告诉你事情的真相，当你来到一个遥远陌生的地方，所有事情都显得有点不可思议：陌生又熟悉。电灯开关看起来比平常更近一些，在墙上的位置有些不同。床反常地很薄，枕头也不像你习惯的那样——我在描述我刚到挪威时的感觉。冬季的白天从上午10点左右开始，早上9点天色很暗，那也是白天，但不像你习惯的那样。

Heidegger's word for how light switches seem to peer out at you like minor characters in an Expressionist painting is vorhaden, which means present-at-hand. Normally things kind of disappear as you concentrate on your tasks. The light switch is just part of your daily routine, you flick it on, you want to boil the kettle for some coffee—you are stumbling around, in other words, stumbling around your kitchen in the early morning light of truthiness. Things kind of disappear—they are merely there; they don't stick out. It's not that they don't exist at all. It's that they are less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. This quality of how things seemingly just happen around us, without our paying much attention, is telling us something about how things are: things aren't directly, constantly present. They only appear to be when they malfunction or are different versions of the same thing than we're used to. According to this, you go about your business in the Norwegian hotel room, you go to sleep, and when you wake up, everything is back to normal— and that's how things actually are; they are, as Heidegger says, zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy.3 You have a grip on them, as in the phrase Get a grip! Or the slightly more amusing English version, Keep your hair on! (Implying before you quite notice that you are wearing a wig ...)

海德格尔所说的“灯光开关如何像表现主义绘画中的人物一样盯着你看”是Vorhanden，意思是“现前在手”。通常情况下，当你专注于你的工作时，事物就会消失。电灯开关只是你日常生活的一部分，你打开它，你想把水壶烧开泡杯咖啡——你跌跌撞撞，换言之，在清晨感实性的光中，你在厨房里蹒跚而行。事物好像消失了——它们只是在那里，但并不显眼。不是他们根本不存在，只是它们不怪异，没有展现自身显眼的一面。这种事物看似只是发生在我们周围，不需要我们多加注意的性质，就在告诉我们事物不是直接连续的在场，它们只在发生故障或是出现同一事物的不同版本时才出现。根据这一点，你在挪威酒店的房间里继续你的工作、睡觉，当你醒来时，一切都恢复了正常——事实就是这样；正如海德格尔所说，zuhanden，“上手”。你可以抓住他们，就像短语“抓紧点”！或者更有趣的英文版本，“保持你的发型！”（寓意在你注意到你戴着假发之前.......）

Things are present to us when they stick out, when they are malfunctioning. You're running through the supermarket hell bent on finishing your shopping trip, when you slip on a slick part of the floor (someone used too much polish). As you slip embarrassingly toward the ground, you notice the floor for the first time, the color, the pattern, the material composition—even though it was supporting you the whole time you were on your grocery mission. Being present is secondary to just sort of happening, which means, argues Heidegger, that being isn't present,which is why he calls his philosophy deconstruction or destructuring.4 What he is destructuring is the metaphysics of presence, which is saying that some things are more real than others, and the way they are more real is that they are more constantly present.

事物只有突出或发生故障时才会显现出来。例如，当你正全神贯注地在超市里跑来跑去一心只想完成购物时却摔倒在光滑的地板上（有人用了太多的抛光剂），在你尴尬地摔向地面的那一刻，你可能第一次注意到地板的颜色、图案、材料组成——即使在你购置杂货的整个过程中，它一直支撑着你。海德格尔认为，在场对于发生来说是次要的，也就是说“存在者不在场”，这就是他称他的哲学解构或毁灭的原因。他所解构的是在场的形而上学，也就是说有些事物比其他事物更真实，它们更真实的方式是它们更经常的在场。