|
|
题目：用萨特的观点探究迈克尔杰克逊的意义
作者：Prospect 常驻作家/哲学家Nigel Warburton
2009年7月23日第161期Prospect
Speechlessme 译注, 跟大家分享。
这个夏天所有人都在试图去理解迈克尔杰克逊之死。当医生们还在不时探究他瘦长的遗体，文化专家们就像秃鹫一样乘人之危，围绕着他的声名而叽叽喳喳。他应当被人记住怎样的形象？伟大的歌手？可能的恋童癖？试图把脸漂白的标志性黑人艺术家？（由此可见对于迈的污蔑有多根深蒂固！）1980年代的弗莱德阿斯泰尔？MTV流行录影带的首位大师？怪人杰克？（这是迈最讨厌的英国小报炮制的称呼）还是专制父亲造成的痛苦的牺牲品？
从不幸福的童年，到古怪的类似成年期（不能接受迈的人总是称他为古怪），他的艰难历程在全世界一遍又一遍被讲述。
然而，杰克逊所处的困境是会发生在我们所有人身上的一个过程，而他是极端的版本。因为正如让-保罗 萨特（法国最著名的存在主义哲学家）所指出，死亡使我们成为“他者”的猎物—区别我们不同于他人的特质会消散为他人对我们看法的总和。当我们活着时，萨特说，我们能够抵制这个压力：即我们可以抗拒他人试图强加给我们的观点。我们无法抹掉过去，但是我们总是能够颠覆未来的期待。萨特认为这是一种挣扎，它是有道德的人类生存的核心内容：我们必须超越他人为我们所规定的角色。
这是人类的生存状况—我们是自己生命的艺术家，尽管因注定要获得自由而受苦。迈克尔杰克逊肩负的期待要远远超过常人所能够感受。这种压力反映在他一生中对自我外表的改动上。路德维格 韦特根斯坦曾宣称，人的身体是人的灵魂的最佳图画。而在杰克逊最后的岁月里他的身体清晰地表现了他所受的折磨（在电影This is it 中迈虽然瘦得让人心疼，但留给我们的是多么美好而魅力四射的形象！）。
当然，死亡把一切都带走。杰克逊歌曲的重版目录现在就是所有的目录。然而，萨特说，死亡不是一首曲子的最后一个和弦，它并不会突然结束，并使之前的旋律有意义。相反，它仅仅是新的一轮对于意义的无休止的争吵的开始，而意义的核心—那个真实的人—则永远缺席。迈克尔杰克逊不再与我们同在。相反，“迈克尔杰克逊”正在成为他人所希望对他的了解的总和。
Subject: Intellectuals & ideas
Everyday philosophy
作者：Nigel Warburton
23rd July 2009 — Issue 161 Prospect's resident philosopher explores the meaning of Michael Jackson, as seen in the light of Sartre
Everyone has been trying to understand Michael Jackson’s death this summer. While medics are still picking at his slender carcass, cultural pundits squabble like vultures over his reputation. Should he be remembered as a great singer, a possible paedophile, an emblematic black artist who tried to bleach his face white, the Fred Astaire of the 1980s, the first to master the MTV pop video, “Wacko Jacko” or a troubled victim of a domineering father?
His difficult journey from unhappy childhood, to weird quasi-adulthood has been told and re-told ad nauseam across the world.
Yet Jackson’s current predicament is an extreme version of a process that will happen to us all. For, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, at death we become prey to the “Other”—our identity dissipating into the sum total of what is thought about us. While we are alive, Sartre explained, we can resist this pressure: we can defy the opinions that other people try to project onto us. We can’t erase our pasts, but we can always subvert future expectations. It’s a struggle Sartre saw as central to our existence as moral beings: we must do more than act out the roles others have scripted for us.
This is the existential condition of humanity—we are the artists of our own lives, albeit with the anguish that comes from being condemned to be free.
Given the weight of expectations heaped on his shoulders, it’s something Michael Jackson felt more crushingly than most: a burden reflected in his lifelong modifications of his own appearance. The human body, Ludwig Wittgenstein once declared, is the best picture we have of the human soul. And Jackson’s body in his last days legibly expressed torment.
Death, of course, takes everything away. The back catalogue of Jackson’s songs is now the complete catalogue. Yet, according to Sartre, death is not the final chord of a melody that suddenly resolves and makes sense of what went before. Instead, it merely begins an endless new squabbling over meanings from which the core—the real person—is perpetually absent. Michael Jackson is no longer with us. Instead, “Michael Jackson” is becoming the sum of what others hope to make of him. |
|
狗仔卡
发表于 2009-12-10 22:35:14
变色卡
显身卡
楼主
发表于 2009-12-11 10:00:03
发表于 2009-12-11 14:24:29