中国作家协会主管

评论的价值

在写作和写文学评论的时候，我们会同时遇到两个的问题：从何起笔？为何起笔？这两个问题息息相关。今天我想谈一谈理解、解读、教授和价值。

这几点和含义这个概念相关。所以总的来说我想谈谈五点，其中理解我会分两次讲，都和“含义”相关。

1．理解（直觉）

从何起笔？为何起笔？从理解处起笔，但这种理解不能无凭无据，必须有出处证明你的理解确有其义。

在古希腊哲学家柏拉图的对话录《伊安篇》中，苏格拉底解释了为什么艺术家通常自己都不知道自己是如何，以及为何获得真理的，连荷马，就连最伟大的艺术家们都不例外。《伊安篇》以伊安为例，他既是一位专业吟诵荷马史诗的诵诗人，也是荷马史诗的评论家。但似乎评论家伊安和诵诗人伊安一样，并不完全了解真理，更没有意识去获得建构真理的基础知识。

美国当代哲学家尼古拉斯·帕帕斯提出，要解释这个问题，只有两种可能。第一种就是，艺术家是骗子，那评论家就是傻瓜，比如当一位作家善用修辞的时候，艺术家技巧高超，哪怕自己并不了解真相，也能说服别人相信事物的真实性。如此，他们便可以让人相信不实的真实。

第二种可能的答案，是真正的艺术家获得了“灵感”。也就是说，艺术家受到了神明的启发，所以才能在自己不了解真理的情况下传递真理，，接着又通过作品将这种“灵感”传递给读者和评论家。

尽管“灵感”这一理念已经过时，沦为艺术创作理想化的注脚，但是西方哲学中“直觉”的概念却一脉相承了“灵感”的概念，即受神明灵感启迪的“理解”。不论是“灵感”还是“直觉”，都包含一种自发的“理解”，“理解”我们所了解的、感知的真相。

柏拉图之后，他的学生古希腊哲学家亚里士多德是真正讨论“直觉”的第一人。亚里士多德的“直觉”和“灵感”一样，都需要对事物的即时理解，对基础真理的瞬时掌握。可能有人会问了，为什么需要这些？为什么我们需要基础性概念？人是如何开始带着确定性思考的这一问题困扰了亚里士多德和后世的很多哲学家。亚里士多德认为，人们从预设正确的“前提”开始构建自己的思考，通过逻辑的手段达到真理。这像是数学、几何学的常见方法。但是，人究竟是怎样开始这样的思考的？

亚里士多德给出了答案，从“即时理解”、某种对真理的感知开始。正是在即时理解之后我们才得以由此推论、判断，从而发现更深刻的真理。

许多个世纪以后，法国近代哲学家笛卡尔继承了亚里士多德的思想，也认为知识的基础始于“直觉”，并用“我思”的概念例证了“直觉”的作用。他的名言：“我思故我在”就强调我们最先感知物之绝对性。这个首要前提，即笛卡尔所认为的“直觉”，就是建构准确世界的基石。

十七世纪，笛卡尔之后的荷兰哲学家斯宾诺莎则认为，我们最先感知的真理，是存在本身的存在，是所有事物的存在。我们首先确认存在的绝对性，然后由此推论，构建对世界的理解。

但是这些和（文学）批评又有什么关系呢？

2．理解（在长时间学习之后获得）

当我们读书时，至少是那种让我们评论家愿意提笔一评的书，我们读到这样一本好书才愿意动笔写书评，因为我们受到了启发。，，我们觉得这种启发是正确的，想把它讲给别人听，教给学生，感染这本书潜在的读者、或是其他因个人原因有兴趣理解的人。

但是“理解”的过程，其实早就开始了，它和我们的阅读语言和所受的教育紧密相连。

“理解”是需要长时间学习才能获得的，虽然这一点经常被人忽视。

我在西悉尼大学的一位同事，迈克·阿默德最近办了一场关于非裔美国思想家马尔克姆·X的讲座。马尔克姆·X年纪轻轻就入狱了，然后决定靠读书改变命运。但是他完全读不懂，只能加倍刻苦，学着去“理解”，通过字典学习词句的意思。这个过程也很不可思议。人到底是如何做到“理解”的？诚然，这需要长时间的学习，熟悉每个词本身的意思以及与上下文的关系，但一旦这些都完成后，有另外一种东西早就存在，一种自始至终都存在的东西，让我们在最开始听到词语的解释时就能立刻明白它的含义。如此的理解更像是一种瞬时的直觉。

3. 解读

在长时间学习后，评论家理解了作品的含义，受到了启发，这促使评论家对其进行解读，产生向别人阐释自己感受的愿望。这时，评论家需要用力所能及的方法，将自己的理解表达出来。

在西方，这通常意味着写一篇给大众看的随笔，或者一篇给内行人的评论。批评家会将自己看过的这本书和其他东西联系起来，以助于阐释其阅读过程中的感受。

解读方法多种多样，但鉴于时间限制，在此也就不一一赘述，而是引述一二，以得出结论。

4. 教授（慢读）

在某些方面评论家跟他们所评论的作家很像，但在其他方面又有所不同。一项基本的不同点就在于作家无需解释自己创造的“含义”，但评论家尝试解释“含义”。作者引导读者思考，但评论家要研究人们的所思所想，拒绝“被引导”。所以评论家会尝试某种特殊的教学法，但我们不清楚作家是否需要教学”，或者可能希望教授什么。。

但有一点，人们认为作家和评论家都会传授的，那就是“慢读”。

19世纪末德国哲学家尼采，在成为哲学家之前是一名语言学者，专门研究词语的含义。他写道，“人们不是无端成为语言学者的，，语言学者同时也是一个教授‘慢读’的老师。”

我认为所有和我一样从理解出发的评论家，都在教“慢读”。他们用心研读书籍，并且希望所教之人也能同样用心研读。

如今，这一观点在西方争议颇大，同时其它解读方法盛行，比如“遥读”则是将文学作品看作是任意文化中整体趋势的表现。

但是我以为，“遥读”不关心文学本身，而是关心文学的社会功能。这是一种评论，毋庸置疑，但却不一定完全是文学评论而更像是社会评论。当然，我无意贬低社会评论，仅想论证文学评论的价值而已。

5. 价值

关心文学的社会功能的评论家有某些基于社会形态和同代人的价值评判模式，他们会就文学在社会形态框架内所能扮演的角色对文学做出评价。

教“慢读”的老师们呢，对价值有着不同理解。这种对“价值”的理解，很不幸和开始时我提到（且一直会首先提到的）的“直觉”的概念一样引人深思。

价值即指含义本身的价值。细心研读文学作品的评论家们所关心的“价值”，正是评论家研读的作品给他们带来的意义。

评论就是对一本好书的“含义”（且必定和许多其他书籍相关）进行充实、强调或例证，评论的价值高低取决于评论家能将充实、强调或例证做到什么高度。相应的，这也给了其他人学习如何“理解”的材料，从而帮助他们理解得更深刻。（就像马尔克姆·X把字典从头翻到尾，这本字典就是他学习如何“理解”的材料。）

The Value of Criticism

Anthony Uhlmann

In writing and writing criticism there are two related questions that come up at the same time. Where do you start and why do you start? I want to say something about understanding, interpretation, teaching and value.

All of these things are tied to an idea of meaning. So on the whole I want to say five things (because I will talk about understanding twice) that relate to that one thing, meaning.

1. Understanding (intuition)

Where do you start and why do you start? You start with understanding, but something needs to ground or underwrite that understanding. Something needs to tell you that what you have understood has meaning. 

In the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogue Ion, the philosopher Socrates explains that artists often do not know how or why they arrive at the truth claims they arrive at. This is true even of the greatest, even of Homer, but is exemplified in the dialogue through Ion, a performer of Homer who is also a commentator on Homer. The critic Ion, like the artist Ion, seems to work without either absolutely knowing the truth, or being conscious of possessing the adequate foundational knowledge on which it must be built.

Writing about this the contemporary American philosopher Nikolas Pappas argues there can only be two possibilities. The first is that the artist is a fraud (and so the critic would be a dupe). This is the case with the one who makes use of rhetoric. That artist has mastered techniques through which they might convince others of the truth of something without themselves knowing the truth. In this way they might convince others that things are true which are not in fact true.

The second possibility, however, is that the true artist might be saved by ‘inspiration’. That is, the artist can convey the truth without knowing it themselves if they are inspired by the gods. In turn this inspiration is passed on to the readers and the critics through the work.

While the idea of inspiration has fallen from fashion and has come to be associated with an idealized notion of artistic process, the idea of an inspired understanding, as that which founds the truth, survives in Western philosophy through the concept of intuition. That is, both intuition and inspiration involve a sense of understanding that seems to occur unbidden, as something that we know and sense to be true. 

After Plato, his student, the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is the first to genuinely talk of intuition. Aristotle’s intuition, like inspiration, involves an immediate understanding of things, an immediate grasping of a foundational truth. One might begin by asking why is this necessary? Why do we need some foundational concept? For Aristotle, and for many who came after, the problem of how one begins to think with certainty is troubling. For Aristotle, one begins with premises, which one knows to be true, and builds from these premises, through logical method in order to build certain truths. This is the kind of method one sees in mathematics or geometry. But how does one start?

Aristotle answers: we begin with some immediate understanding, some feeling of truth. It is the moment of immediate understanding that allows us to begin to reason, and thereby discover further truths.

Many centuries later an early modern French philosopher, René Descartes, continuing the tradition of seeing intuition as the foundation of knowledge, offers an example of how intuition works with the concept of the cogito. He famously states: ‘I think therefore I am’. This realisation, he argues comes to all of us as something that is certain, something we cannot doubt. From this first premise, which comes to Descartes as an intuition, he argues, the world can be built up with precision.

For the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, on the other hand, who came just after Descartes in the 17th century, it is the existence of existence itself, or all being, that, he claims, first strikes us as true. We know existence exists with absolute certainty and this too can allow us to build up through reason, an idea of the world.

What has this got to do with (literary) criticism?

2. Understanding (after long study)

When we read books, at least books that make us, as critics, want to write about them, when we read ‘good’ books, we want to write about them because they make us feel something. Something we think of as true, and we want to convey that to others, to students, for example, or potential readers of the book, or others who might be interested in understanding for reasons of their own.

But this process has already begun long ago, this process of understanding. It is tied to our education, our relationship to the language we read, in which the good book we have read lives.

We tend to forget it, but it takes long study before we can understand.

A colleague of mine at Western Sydney University, Michael Mohammed Ahmad recently gave a lecture about the African American thinker Malcolm X. Malcolm X went to prison as a young man and decided to change his life by reading books. When he tried to read the books, however, he could not understand them. He had to study hard to learn to understand. He studied the dictionary to learn meanings. This process too is mysterious. How does one come to understand? It is clear it requires long study, knowledge of meanings of words and how they relate to contexts, but once that is achieved there is already something else. It is something that was there at the beginning and allowed us to grasp the meanings of the words when they were explained to us. A sense of understanding that seems to be intuitive and immediate.

3. Interpretation

After long study, then, the critic is given by the good book a feeling of understanding and this feeling drives the critic to interpret. That is, this feeling drives the critic to want to explain to others what the critic has felt. Having been driven to this the critic has to find ways to express this understanding, within the forms open to the critic.

In the West this usually means through the essay for a general audience, or the critical essay for a more specialised audience. Here the critic will usually link the work the critic has read with other things which help the critic to explain the kind of meaning the critic has felt while reading the work. 

There is not enough time here to talk about the various methods of interpretation, of which there are many. I will just pass on to one more idea which will lead me to one claim.

4. Teaching (slow reading)

In some ways the critic is like the writer they write about, but in other ways different. The writer does not have to explain the meaning they create, whereas the critic attempts to. This is a fundamental difference. The writer leads the reader to think, the critic tries to move from being lead to think to examining what it is that one is thinking about. So the critic attempts a specific kind of pedagogy or teaching. It is not clear that the writer has to teach, however, or what they might wish to teach.

There is one thing, however, both the critic and the writer might be said to teach. They both teach ‘slow reading’. 

In the late 19th century the German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, who began his career not as a philosopher but as a philologist (that is, someone who studied the meanings of words) wrote “It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading.”

I would claim that all those critics who work from understanding, in the way I have set out, teach slow reading. That is, they attend with care to the books they read and try to make those they teach also attend to those books with care.

This is a controversial claim nowadays in the West, as other methods are used and promoted, such as ‘distant reading’ which considers works of literature to be manifestations of general tendencies in any culture.

To my mind, however, distant reading is not really concerned with literature itself; rather, it is concerned with literature as a social function. This is clearly criticism, but it is not specifically literary criticism, it is social criticism. I do not mean to dismiss social criticism here, on the contrary, I merely wish to argue for the value of literary criticism.

5. Value

Critics who consider the social function of literature will have certain models of value, related to social formations and their generation. They will judge literature, insofar they do, with regard to the role it might be understood to play within these social formations.

The teacher of slow reading, however, will have a different idea of value. This is an idea of value which is, unfortunately, as challenging as the concept of intuition with which we began (and with which we always begin). 

The value is the value of meaning itself. The value involved for the critic who reads literature closely is the sense of meaning that the work the critic has read has given to the critic.

The value of criticism, then, is the extent to which it is capable of amplifying, underlining or exemplifying some of the kinds of meaning the good book (no doubt in relation to many other books) has caused that critic to feel. This in turn will allow others to understand. It will give others materials with which to learn to understand (just as Malcolm X read the dictionary from cover to cover to have materials with which to understand).