[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]

本字幕中在涉及《聖經》原文時 所採用譯文均以《國語和合本》（「上帝」版）為準

Well, thank you all very much for coming to this.

《聖經》故事的心理學意義 喬丹 · B · 皮特森博士 第一講 2017 年 5 月 16 日

It's really shocking to me that you don't have anything better to do on a Tuesday night. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

感謝各位的到來

No, but seriously, though, it is.

挺讓我吃驚的是

I mean, it's very strange in some sense that there's so many of you here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

大家在週二晚上真的閒得沒事幹

It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there's a ready audience for it.

真的 從某種程度上講太奇怪了

So that's good, so we'll see how it goes.

能有這麼多人來聽

I'll start with this because this is the right question.

關於《聖經》故事的心理學意義的系列講座

The right question is why bother doing this.

我想做這件事已經很久了

And I don't mean why should I bother doing it.

但讓我吃驚的是竟然真的會有人樂意來聽

I have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange, old book at all?

太好了 我們走一步看一步

And...

我想以此作為開始 是因為這個問題非常合理

That's a good question.

何苦要做這件事呢

You know,

我的意思不是說為什麼應該費這個勁

Umm

我有我自己的理由

It's a contradictory...

但你可能會想

document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years.

何苦要和這本奇怪的古書過不去

It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms, you know?

這是個好問題

It's very interesting, it turns out that a book is more durable than stone.

這份矛盾的文獻已經被拼湊成書好幾千年了

It's more durable than a castle.

它的存續超越了無數個王國

It's more durable than an empire.

這真是很有意思 一本書比磐石還堅韌

And that's really interesting.

它比城堡和帝國還能經得住歲月的考驗

That something, in some sense, so evanescent, can be so long living.

這真是很有意思

So there's that, that's kind of a mystery.

如此轉瞬即逝的東西會存續這麼久

I'm approaching this whole scenario, this Biblical stories as if they're a mystery, fundamentally.

所以如此說來 這就像是一個謎了

Because they are, there's a lot we don't understand about them.

我是這麼看待《聖經》故事的

We don't understand how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put together.

它們就好像是一個謎團

We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization.

因為從根本上講它們就是

We don't understand how people could have believed them.

其中還有很多我們不理解的東西

We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them.

我們不知道它們是怎麼來的

And then, on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but is certainly relevant to me,

我們不明白他們是以何種方式拼湊在一起的

that no matter how educated you are, you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

我們不清楚為什麼

But I'm going to do my best.

它們會對文明有如此難以置信的影響力

Partly because I want to learn more about them, and one of the things I've learned is that the best way to learn about something is to talk about it.

我們不明白怎麼人們還相信過這些故事

And when I'm lecturing, I'm thinking, you know, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case.

我們也不知道如今不相信它們意味著什麼

Because there's lots of things I don't know for sure to be the case.

或者我們甚至都不知道

I'm trying to make sense out of this.

如果我們相信這些故事意味著什麼

And I have been doing this for a long time.

另外 還有一個問題

Now, you may know, you may not,

這個問題不是僅限於我 但一定與我相關

that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche.

那就是 不論你受教育程度有多高

Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity.

你都積累不了足夠的學識去討論

Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions.

《聖經》故事中的心理學意義

I suppose... although he's a very paradoxical thinker.

但我會盡我的全力

For example, one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground

部分是因為我想更加了解它們

if it hadn't been for Christianity.

就我所知

And more specifically, for Catholicism because he believed that over the course of, really, a thousand years,

學習某件事物的最佳途徑之一就是講述

the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single, coherent framework.

在我講課的過程中我也在思考

Coherent if you accept the initial axioms.

我並不是力圖告訴你我確信的事實

A single coherent framework.

因為這其中還有很多我不確定的東西

So Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations

我只是努力理清其中的道理

and then concentrating on something else.

並且我做這件事已經有很長一段時間了

Which, in this particular case, happened to be the natural world.

你們可能知道 也可能不知道 我很仰慕尼采

And so Nietzsche believed that, in some sense, that Christianity died at its own hand that spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth.

尼采是教條式基督教的強有力的批評者

Absent corruption and all of that, that's always part of any human endeavor.

這裡是指當基督教由機構具現化時的狀況

And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity.

然而 他是一個自相矛盾的思想家

And everyone woke up and said or thought something like, "Well how is it that we came to believe any of this?"

尼采就曾經說過這樣一件事

It's like waking up one day and noting that you really don't know why you put the Christmas tree up.

他不相信如果不是因為基督教的話

You'd been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do, you know, and there are reasons that Christmas trees came about.

科學革命會開始或成功

But the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.

確切的說這裡指的是天主教

So, now Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity, and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity, because you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was

他相信 在一千年的歷史程序當中

it's not possible to be free, in some sense, unless you have been a slave.

歐洲人已經將他們的思維方式訓練成了

By that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality.

將所有事物都解釋在

You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery,

一個單一的連貫框架當中

to self-imposed slavery, that would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific,

如果你接受初始公理的話它就是連貫的

before you might be able to re-attain the generality that you had as a child.

一個單一的連貫框架

And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization.

尼采認為將生命和歷史現象的天主教化

But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead.

催生了一種思維方式 它能夠超越

And you often hear of that as something triumphant.

它的教條基礎並聚焦於其他事物之上

But for Nietzsche, it wasn't because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded.

在這種情況下 它恰好就是自然世界

See, Nietzsche understood that, this is something I'm going to try to make clear, is that

尼采覺得基督教是葬送在自己手裡的

there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality.

並且它花了很長時間設法去

And we have our articulated representations of the world, and then you can think of outside of that: there are things we know absolutely nothing about.

讓人們意識到真理的必要性

And there's a buffer between them.

讓人們遠離墮落

And those are things we sort of know something about.

而墮落往往是人類企圖中的一部分

We don't know them in an articulated way, here's an example.

真理 真理精神 是從基督教發展出來的

You know sometimes you're arguing with someone close to you and they're in a bad mood, you know?

但也反噬了基督教的根基

And they're being touchy and unreasonable and you keep the conversation up.

每個人醒來後嘟噥或者思忖

And maybe all of the sudden they get angry, or maybe they cry.

我們怎麼就開始相信這些東西了

And then when they cry, they figure out what they're angry about and it has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument.

這就像是有一天你醒來然後發現

And that's an interesting phenomena as far as I'm concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another.

你確實不知道為什麼要立起一顆聖誕樹

So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions.

但你已經這麼做很長時間了

And we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner.

而這往往就是人們的行為模式

So we have this articulated space that we can all discuss and then outside of that we have something that is more akin to a dream that we're embedded in.

聖誕樹的出現是有原因的

It's an emotional dream that we're embedded in.

原因被遺忘之後這項儀式卻依舊存續著

That's based, at least in part, on our actions, I'll describe that later.

尼采不僅是基督教的批評者

And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all.

也是其紀律能力的擁護者

And in that dream, that's where the mystics live, and that's where the artists live.

另一件尼采所認同的事是

And they're the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure.

若你不曾是奴隸便無法獲得自由

You see, what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand.

他的意思是說

And that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream,

你不會從童稚時期躍向成熟的成人個性

then we become dissociated internally.

你會從童年走向一種紀律狀態

We think things we don't act out and we act out things we don't dream.

這就可以理解為類似自我施加的奴役

And that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit.

這會是最好的狀況了

And that sickness of the spirit, its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation.

在你有可能重拾孩提時期的一般性之前

And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure

你必須自律成為某種確切的個體

to try to organize their thinking, and then that's a catastrophe.

他相信基督教正是

And that's what Nietzsche foresaw.

為西方文明扮演了這樣的角色

You see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this "god ideal," let's say,

但是在 19 世紀末他宣佈「上帝已死」

that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology.

你會經常聽到這句話以得意洋洋的口吻呈現著

He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology.

但對於尼采來講並非如此

He believed and predicted this in the late eighteen hundreds, which is really an absolute intellectual tour-de-force of staggering magnitude.

他遠非如此頭腦簡單的思想家

He predicted that in the twentieth century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these

尼采心裡清楚 而這就是我想澄清的東西

underlying dreamlike structures with this rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world.

那就是有關體驗的結構我們還知之甚少

And we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right, in some sense, ever since,

我們並不瞭解現實

with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there, and despair.

我們有的是對世界的明確表述

In some sense, that's the situation of the modern Western person and increasingly, of people in general.

在此之外我們一無所知

You know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up, with regards to the West to such a degree, I mean there's many reasons, and not all of them are valid, that's for sure,

在這其中有一個緩衝帶

but one of the reasons is that they, being still grounded in a dream, let's say, they can see that the rootless questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture.

這就是我們似乎有所瞭解的地方

And it does, I mean, Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect.

但我們對其並沒有清晰的認識

And I'm not complaining about that.

舉個例子

There isn't anything easy that can be done about it.

當你和你的親友爭論時恰逢其情緒低潮

But it's still a sort of fruitful catastrophe.

他們會變得敏感易怒而且蠻不講理

And it has real effects on people's lives.

你如果繼續講

It's not some abstract thing.

他們也許突然會拍案而起 甚至哭喊

Lots of times, when I've been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues, you know?

當他們開始哭喊的時候

It's not just some psychiatric condition.

他們就能明白是因為什麼而生氣了

It's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although sometimes that happens to be the case.

而這並不是你的緣故

It's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it.

儘管本來可能是你引發了這場爭論

They can feel the terrible negative meanings of life, but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings.

就我看來 這是個很有趣的現象

I had one client who's a very brilliant artist and as long as he didn't think he was fine.

因為這意味著人們能夠在一定程度上了解他人

Because he'd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist.

卻難以用用語言表達出來

He had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating.

從某種意義上講 思想是從身體昇華而出的

But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then, it's like a drill or a saw, he'd saw the branch off that he was sitting on.

它會作用於 情緒 視訊 和行為

He'd start to criticize what he was doing, even the utility of it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful.

在我們條理明晰地認知一個事物之前

And then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create.

我就已經能在某種層面上了解它了

He alway struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being.

我們有一個可以明確解釋的空間

Divorced enough that it actually questions the utility of your being.

在其中我們可以討論一切

And it's not a good thing, it's not a good thing.

但在這之外我們所接觸的就是

It's really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology, but also in social psychopathology,

類似於的夢的東西 我們就會深陷其中

and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.

我們身陷其中的是一種情緒化的夢

They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.

並且它是建立在 至少是部分建立在 我們的行為上的

And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.

關於這點我後面會再描述

And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.

在這部分之外我們就一無所知了

That's how it looks to me, anyways.

這個夢就是神祕主義者和藝術家賴以生存的地方

So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.

他們是全知之域與未知之域之間的媒介

I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.

這就意味著我們所知道的是建立在

I've thought that for a long, long time.

我們實際上並不瞭解的知識形式上的

Probably since the early eighties,

如果這兩者不是一致的

when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.

如果我們可清楚表述的知識

You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.

與我們的夢不同步的話

It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?

那麼我們就會從內在撕裂

What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?

我們的所想非所為 所為非所夢

People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.

這就會引發一種精神病變

[LAUGHTER]

這種精神病變

And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.

而它的解藥是某種類似一種

But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.

信仰與表徵綜合系統的東西

It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.

人們就會求助於類似意識形態這樣的東西

They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.

這在我看來就是附著於

It's like, drown in what?

潛在宗教基礎上的寄生蟲

What are the logs protecting them from?

以便於組織他們的思想

Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?

這種災難正是尼采所預見到的

These are not obvious things.

他早就意識到

So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.

當我們通過摧毀表徵的手段

I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.

層層剝離西方文明的基礎時

Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.

這個表徵所指就是上帝這個理想典範

You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.

我們就會變得不穩定

So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.

在虛無主義和意識形態極端之間劇烈搖擺

Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.

他尤其在意激進的左翼意識形態

Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,

並且早在 19 世紀末就預言到

constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.

這真是令人驚愕的洞見

He understood that.

在 20 世紀將會有上億人死亡

But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.

正是因為替換了這種潛於底層的似夢構架

And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.

取而代之的是理性的

And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.

但極度錯誤的對世界的表述方式

And we know what happened with that.

我們從那以後就一直在左右之間來回搖擺

That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.