The interview: Robert Pirsig

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.

The interview: Robert Pirsig

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.

Tim Adams
Sunday November 19, 2006
The Observer

At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of ‘quality’. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.

Pirsig doesn’t do interviews, as a rule; he claims this one will be his last. He got spooked early on. ‘In the first week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35,’ he says, in his low, quick-fire Midwestern voice, from behind his sailor’s beard. ‘I found it very unsettling. I was walking by the post office near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: it’s happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I’d done. At that point I took a camper van up into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book.’
It is that second book, recently republished, that has prompted him to talk to me now. He sits in a hotel room in Boston and tries, not for the first time, to make some sense of his life. He is, he suggests, always in a double bind. ‘It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness … If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it no one knows it is there.’ Generally, rather than analysing, he says, he would rather ‘just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees’. Reclusion has its discontents, however. ‘In this country someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect.’ He pauses, laughs. ‘I guess I fall somewhere in between.’

Ever since I first read Pirsig’s motorbike quest for meaning, when I was about 14, I’ve been curious to imagine its author. Part of the compulsion of that book, which has sold more than five million copies, is the sense of autobiographical mysteries that remain unexplained. While Pirsig’s narrator tries to marry the spirit of the Buddha with western consumerism, discovers the godhead in his toolkit, and intuits a sense of purposive quality independent of subjects and objects, he also constructs a fragmentary picture of his own past. His pre-shock-treatment former self, the ghostly Phaedrus, haunts his travels across the Midwest.

‘What I am,’ he writes at one point, ‘is a heretic who’s recanted and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has savd is his skin.’ My 14-year-old self double-underlined this and put two Biro exclamation marks in the margin. Twenty-six years, and several revisionist readings of the book later, I’m still wondering what Pirsig thinks of when he thinks of himself.

He suggests a lot of that idea still goes back to his childhood as a disaffected prodigy. He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man – he was at university at 15 studying chemistry – he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. ‘Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.’

He went to search elsewhere. After the army he majored in philosophy and persuaded his tutor to help him get a place on a course in Indian mysticism at Benares, where he found more questions than answers. He wound up back home, married, drifting between Mexico and the States, writing technical manuals and ads for the mortuary cosmetics industry. It was when he picked up philosophy again in Montana, and started teaching, that Phaedrus and his desire for truth overtook Pirsig once more.

At that time, he recalls, in his early thirties, he was so full of anxiety that he would often be physically sick before each class he taught. He used his students to help him discover some of the ideas that make up what he calls the ‘metaphysics of quality’ in his books, the ideas that led him to believe that he had bridged the chasm between Eastern and Western thought. No two classes were the same. He made his students crazy by refusing to grade them, then he had them grade each other. He suggests that by the end of each term they were so euphoric that if he had told them to jump out of the window they would have done. The president of the university gave a speech, and he contradicted him in the middle of it by shouting: ‘This school has no quality.’ He saw clearly how American society was disconnected from life and he believed he could help it connect. He was reading Kerouac, and trying to live in truth.

Alongside that, I say, as he describes that time with some fervour, I guess there was some depression setting in? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘there was fear. All these ideas were coming in to me too fast. There are crackpots with crazy ideas all over the world, and what evidence was I giving that I was not one of them?’

Such evidence proved harder and harder to present. One day in the car with his six-year-old son Chris, his mind buzzing, Pirsig stopped at a junction and literally did not know which way to turn. He had to ask his son to guide him home. What followed was the point where he either found enlightenment, or went insane, depending on how you look at it (really the root of all the questions in his first book).

‘I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,’ he recalls. ‘I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers …’

It was like a monastic experience?

‘Yes, but then a kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realised that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either – in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.’

Midwestern American society of 1960 took the psychiatrist’s view. Pirsig was treated at a mental institution, the first of many visits. Looking back, he suggests he was just a man outside his time. ‘It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the culturl norms, the culture has to protect itself.’

That immune system left him with no job and no future in philosophy; his wife was mad at him, they had two small kids, he was 34 and in tears all day. Did he think of it at the time as a Zen experience?

‘Not really. Though the meditation I have done since takes you to a similar place. If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness. And you get a lot of opportunities for staring in an asylum.’

When he was released, it only got worse. He was crazier; he pointed a gun at someone, he won’t say who. He was committed by a court and underwent comprehensive shock treatment of the kind described by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I wonder if he remembers the mechanics of it?

‘Well they put a little rubber thing in your mouth and then they gave a drug like curare, used by South American Indians in their darts. It stops your lungs before it stops your mind. Before you go under you had a feeling like you were drowning. I woke up one time and I thought: where the hell am I? I had a feeling I was in my Aunt Flossie’s house, which I had liked as a child. I thought I must have passed out drunk.’ He laughs. ‘This was after the 14th treatment I think.’

When his wife came to see him he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital. ‘The funny thing about insane people,’ he says, ‘is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.’

Pirsig was able to keep a tenuous grip on his former self, despite the treatment. He figured that if he told anyone he was in fact an enlightened Zen disciple, they would lock him up for 50 years. So he worked out a new strategy of getting his ideas across. He embarked on a book based on a motorcycle ride he made with his son, Chris, from Minnesota to the Dakotas in 1968. ‘It was a compulsive thing. It started out of a little essay. I wanted to write about motorcycling because I was having such fun doing it, and it grew organically from there.’

When the book came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father’s mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. ‘I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still,’ he says now. ‘He wasn’t a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son …’

I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig’s face strains a little.

‘He didn’t like it. He said, “Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.” It threw him terribly. There is stuff I can’t talk about still. Katagiri Roshi, who helped me set up the Zen Centre in Minnesota, took him in hand in San Francisco. When Katagiri gave Chris’s funeral address tears were just running down his face. He suffered almost more than I did.’

When his son died, Pirsig was in England. He had sailed across the Atlantic with his second wife, Wendy Kimball, 22 years his junior, whom he had met when she had come to interview him on his boat. She has never disembarked. He was working at the time on Lila, the sequel to his first book, which further examines Phaedrus’s ideas in the context of a voyage along the Hudson with Lila, a raddled Siren, as crew.

The book is bleaker, messier than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though it carries a lot of the charge of Pirsig’s restless mind. ‘If I wrote it today,’ he says, ‘it would be a much more cheerful book. But I was resolving things in Lila; the sadness of the past, and particularly Chris’s death, is there. Zen was quite an inspiring book, I think, but I wanted to go in the other direction with Lila and do something that explored a more sordid, depressing life …’

He hoped Lila would force the ‘metaphysics of quality’ from the New Age shelves to the philosophy ones, but that has not happened. Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. ‘Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that “quality” can not be defined,’ he says.

This desire to be incorporated in a philosophy canon seems odd anyhow, since the power of Pirsig’s books lie in their dynamic personal quest for value, rather than any fixed statement of it. But maybe eventually every iconoclast wants to be accepted.

He still sails. He lives in rural New England and has just been up to the islands of Maine with his wife on the same boat that he describes in Lila – perfectly maintained, of course. He lives these days in cyberspace, he says, where his ideas circulate. He plans to learn to tango, and visit Buenos Aires. He’s just discovered YouTube. He doesn’t write any more, though, and he hardly reads. I wonder if that old depression ever returns?

‘I’ve been hit with it lately,’ he says. ‘It did not seem related to my life in any way. I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. But I did for the first time go to a psychiatrist. He said it’s a chemical imbalance and he prescribed some pills and the depression has gone.’

Otherwise, he says, he tries to live as best he can to the dictates of ‘his dharma’: to stay centred. I ask if he fears death.

‘I’m not depressed about it,’ he says. ‘If you read the 101 Zen Stories you will see that is characteristic. I really don’t mind dying because I figure I haven’t wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn’t screw up.’

He smiles. ‘It was just that I was listening to a different drummer all along.’

Pirsig’s pearls

· The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.

· Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.

· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?

· The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Now and Zen

Born 6 September 1928, Minneapolis.

Family Father was a law lecturer and mother was Swedish-born. Pirsig married Nancy Ann James in 1954. They had two sons: Chris, and Ted, now 48. Now married to journalist Wendy Kimball, with whom he has a 25-year-old daughter, Nell.

Education Judged to have an IQ of 170 at age nine. Went to University of Minneapolis at 15, but joined the army in 1946, serving in Korea before returning to the university to study philosophy. Then studied at Benares in India.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Appears in Guinnes Book of Records as the bestselling book rejected by the largest number of publishers (121). Sold 5m copies worldwide.

· Lila is published by Alma Books (£7.99). A slipcased, signed limited edition is available at selected Waterstone’s (£45)

‘I want more than my share’ Kingsley Amis had a vast appetite for work, words, women… and conflict. A lifetime of excess makes him an irresistable subject, says his biographer Zachary Leader The first Amis novel – exclusive extracts Barnes and Amis – the big row ‘Into our china shop of familial sensitivities,’ Martin Amis wrote of a previous biographer, ‘[he] had come lurching and bucking and blundering. Every time he bent over to inspect a shattered vase, he would clear another shelf with the sweep of his backside. What was he doing in here?’ Air of confrontation: Kingsley Amis Martin was my friend, and when he asked me to write his father’s authorised biography, my first thought was to turn him down. I had already edited Kingsley Amis’s Letters (2000), and though my admiration for Amis’s writing had grown over the years, as had my fascination with the man, I was wary of signing on for another long stint. There was also the ‘bucking and blundering’ passage. Martin tried to reassure me: it wouldn’t be like that, I wouldn’t be like that. In the end, two factors helped to change my mind: time, to recover from the task of editing the correspondence, and the realisation that if I declined I would have to pass on to someone else hundreds of unpublished letters I had collected, as well as the detailed chronology I’d constructed to make sense of them. It was not just that I couldn’t relinquish all that work, I couldn’t relinquish the task of explaining Amis’s life. Writing the biography turned out to be great fun, but it was not without difficulties. To begin with, there was the matter of Amis’s productivity. He wrote 25 published novels, seven volumes of poetry, 11 works of nonfiction, several dozen short stories, nine plays for radio and television, more than 1,300 pieces of uncollected journalism and almost 2,000 letters. He also edited 17 books of verse and prose. As one of my aims in the biography was to make a case for the breadth and depth of Amis’s literary achievement, the book was unlikely to be short. Then there was the matter of Amis’s influence, admitted even by those who deplored it. advertisement For about 40 years, from the publication of Lucky Jim, in 1954, to his death, in 1995, Amis was a dominant figure in the writing of his age: at the hear of the pre-eminent poetical grouping of the period, the Movement, and complexly implicated in its various schemes of self-promotion; the earliest of redbrick novelists and Angry Young Men (it is Amis’s face, not John Osborne’s, that features on the front cover of Humphrey Carpenter’s 2002 study of the ‘Angries’); the most prominent literary figure among political, cultural and social polemicists, for elite and popular audiences alike. Nor was Amis’s life away from the desk without incident, as he claimed the lives of most writers were. Deprivation may have been to his friend Philip Larkin what daffodils were to Wordsworth, but Amis wanted no part of it. That he was a man of alarming energies and appetites, the funniest man most people had ever met, or the cleverest, or the rudest, helped to make him a celebrity, everywhere quoted in newspapers and periodicals. His excesses, though, took their toll, on others as well as himself, as his writings make clear. ‘I want more than my share before anyone else has had any,’ a joke catchphrase, eventually found its way into Take a Girl Like You (1960), uttered by Patrick Standish, ‘the most unpleasant person I’ve written about.’ Few have been as perceptive or funny about bad behaviour as Amis, or been as consistently accused of it. What truth was there in these accusations? What, moreover, were Amis’s motives in writing about his sort of bad behaviour? To understand or excuse or apologise for it? Such questions are implicitly raised in the novels themselves, as when Patrick Standish tells Jenny Bunn: ‘I’m not trying to get credit with you by saying I know I’m a bastard. Nor by saying I’m not trying to get credit. Nor by saying I’m not trying to by saying& trying& You know what I mean. Nor by saying that. Nor by saying that.’ Comparably self-conscious passages occur throughout Amis’s novels: like all his central characters, he was rarely simple or single, even at the end of his life, when the person and the persona often seemed indistinguishable. Second wife: the writer at home with Elizabeth Jane Howard If stamina was an important requirement in writing the biography, so was tact. The contract I signed with the Amis estate allowed me exclusive access to unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. Thanks to a letter of introduction from Martin Amis, almost everyone I approached agreed to be interviewed. The very few exceptions were women, usually ex-lovers (in Martin’s phrase, Amis was ‘a heroic adulterer’). I went three times to Ronda, in Andalucia, to interview Martin’s mother, Lady Kilmarnock, Amis’s first wife. There I also interviewed Martin’s older brother Philip, an amusing, nervy man, as brilliant a mimic as his father. The family was open and generous, as was Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. Though Amis was rarely out of the public eye, aspects of his life, often painful ones, remained hidden, or known only to a small circle of friends. If I thought these aspects revealing, either of the life or the work, I wrote about them. In my contract with the estate, which had no right of veto as to style or content (bu could deny permission to quote from unpublished materials), I undertook to show the executors what I had written before the book went to press. When I did so – not without trepidation – only a single objection was raised, to an unflattering description of Amis by one of his supervisees at Cambridge. This description struck Martin as unbelievable as well as cruel. Given everything else that he and Jonathan Clowes, the estate’s other executor, let pass, I agreed to cut it. Among the most difficult or delicate material I included was an account of Martin’s sister, Sally, whose life was calamitous from the start. At two years and nine months, she fell from a table in the garden, landing on her head and fracturing her skull, went into convulsions, then a coma and nearly died. Some months later, while staying with her paternal grandparents, her grandmother died in her presence. The circumstances of her death were particularly upsetting, for the grandfather had just gone to work and Sally was left alone all day with her grandmother’s body. When Amis’s father returned home, he discovered his wife lying dead on the bedroom floor, her face smeared with the lipstick Sally had removed from her handbag and clumsily tried to apply to her lips. ‘When Sally got back to Swansea,’ commented a friend, it was clear ‘how anxious the experience had made her. If she saw her father asleep& she would try to prise his eyes open for fear that he, too, had died.’ Her adolescence was no less troubled. She became an alcoholic while still at school, married disastrously and died at 46. Amis’s relations with her were complex and revealing, in ways that disturb but also bring credit to them both. The task of gathering evidence took two-and-a-half years, not counting the four years I’d spent editing the Letters. One of these years was spent at the principal repository of Amis’s papers, the Henry E. Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, a paradise of rare books and manuscripts, botanical gardens and 18th-century English paintings. The Amis archive at the Huntington consists of 68 boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, pocket diaries, correspondence, and ephemera. The Huntington also possesses Amis’s library, including a number of books with witty or telling annotations, as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s archive, about 90 boxes to date. Elizabeth Jane Howard was – and is – a great giver of dinner parties and houseparties, and Amis, too, loved company. Among her papers are hundreds of bread-and-butter notes, many from celebrated guests, among them Iris Murdoch, John Betjeman, Julian Barnes, C. Day Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis, who at 16 wrote charmingly to thank Jane for advice over homework (‘There was exactly the right pressure on me to make me work,’ a sure touch Jane also showed with Martin at this time) and over how to get on with his parents. I probably know more about the bread-and-butter note than any man alive. Amis sold his archive to the Huntington in 1984 for $90,000 and wasn’t the least bit embarrassed about having done so. When in 1960 Philip Larkin sought to enlist him in a campaign to preserve British literary manuscripts – a campaign now taken up by Larkin’s biographer, Andrew Motion – Amis’s reply was characteristically forthright: ‘I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or another about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more inconruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University, should have a collection of Robert Graves’ manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied.’ The Amis archive in the Huntington is full of gems and mysteries. Among the unpublished manuscripts are three substantial novel fragments, each more than 100 pages, plus a completed novel entitled The Legacy, the immediate predecessor to Lucky Jim. The Legacy is interesting for a number of reasons, not least for its Modernist tricks (beginning with the hero’s name: ‘Kingsley Amis’). It was rejected by 14 publishers before Amis’s agent gave up on it, and, though Amis consistently disparaged its ‘experimental’ character and was glad it was never published, while at work on it, as his letters attest, he liked what he had written. I think it worth publishing, partly out of biographical interest, partly because it is often funny and perceptive, especially about small-town suburban manners and mores. The Huntington also possesses a handful of unpublished poems of power, one of which, ‘Things tell less and less,’ I brought to the attention of the executors and arranged to have published in the TLS in 2004, to widespread and approving notice. As it and several other unpublished works suggest, there is ample room for a new Collected Poems. Among the mysteries in the Huntington archive are several posed by Amis’s pocket diaries, some of which contain coded symbols, abbreviations and numerals. In the diary begun the day after his 50th birthday, on 17 April 1972, a time of deteriorating relations with Elizabeth Jane Howard, increased drinking, and a related loss of libido, each entry is followed by a number, never less than three, never more than eight. These numbers could signify drinks, presumably spirits, with wine and beer not counted, but they might also stand for pages written or marks out of 10 for the day, though an entry like: ‘F: Too hung to do anything exc abt 2 letters. 7,’ would seem to rule out all three possibilities, given the hangover. The entry contains one other mysterious feature: ‘F,’ which appears very infrequently in the diary. If it stands for what one thinks it does (as opposed to, say, ‘fibrillation’, never mentioned in the correspondence), what is it doing on a hangover day, unless it took place in the early hours of the morning, while drunk? I spent many an afternoon in California pondering such puzzles. Before the Huntington purchased Amis’s papers, he sold several important manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (which partly accounts for the relatively low price the Huntington paid for what remained). Among these manuscripts is a partial typescript of the first version of Lucky Jim, originally titled ‘Dixon and Christine’. The differences between ‘Dixon’ and Jim are striking, beginning with the fact that Jim, disconcertingly, is called ‘Julian’, quite the wrong name. The typescript contains numerous pencilled annotations, previously unidentified. But anyone who knows Philip Larkin’s hand, will recognise him as their author. Larkin’s crucial role in revising Lucky Jim has long been recognised, but its extent has been a matter of controversy. Larkin’s most important suggestion was that Amis ‘sod up the romantic business actively’, by which he meant make the novel more like a romance, with proper dragons and witches. The comic blcking figures – Professor Welch, the odious Bertrand, Jim’s affected girlfriend, Margaret, whose laugh is like ‘the tinkle of tiny silver bells’ – are sometimes sympathetically treated in ‘Dixon and Christine’; in the revised version, they are unsympathetic throughout, or almost throughout. What the typescript also makes clear is how Larkin improved the novel in smaller ways, with many warnings against artificial or overwritten dialogue, as in ‘terribly unnatural’ or ‘This speech might come from a stage play TOO BAD to be produced’ or ‘Horrible smell of arse’ (later abbreviated to ‘HS of A’) or ‘GRUESOME AROMA OF B’ (presumably ‘BUM’). Other suggestions concern pacing, as in ‘not going quickly enough’ or ‘too detailed for their purpose’. The best of these annotations reads: ‘This speech makes me twist about with boredom.’ When I returned to London from my year in California, Martin and his family were about to move to Uruguay. By the time he returned, several years later, the first draft of the biography was complete. Martin is not always the world’s most reliable correspondent; his collected letters will make a slim volume. Once I’d begun writing we were able to meet only a couple of times, when he returned to London to see his sons. He patiently answered my queries, offering corrections of fact and emphasis. His attitude to the biography, I now suspect, owed something to his father’s example. When Martin began his first novel, The Rachel Papers, Amis left him to it. Initially, Martin attributed this non-reaction to ‘sheer indolence’, but he soon came to see it ‘as a parental instinct, and a good one’. A similar instinct may have inspired Martin’s policy with me. Whatever its origin, I am grateful for the freedom he allowed me. The Life of Kingsley Amis’ (Jonathan Cape) is available for £26 (rrp £30) plus £1.25 p&p. Call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115

^{布朗肖（左）和列维纳斯（右）。}

^{《列维纳斯》托尔奈·阿兰著阿尔马当出版社2006年10月版定价：15.50欧元}

^{《布朗肖》阿尔蒂·库尔等著同谋出版社2006年10月版定价：22.00欧元}

　　德里达在给列维纳斯的悼词中曾这样写道：“对我们大多数人，特别是对我本人，这种绝对忠诚、堪称楷模的思想友谊，布朗肖与列维纳斯之间的友谊，乃是一份恩典，一件礼物；出于不止一种理由，它仍然值得我们这个时代祷告，它是一个幸运的事件，也是降临在那些能优先成为他们二位中任何一位的朋友的人的祝福。”今年是法国这两位思想上的同行者列维纳斯与布朗肖共同诞辰100周年，从年初伊始，对于他们两位分别的纪念活动就层出不穷，在巴黎尤奈斯库中心举行的一场为时4天（11月13—11月16日）的学术研讨会，更是将两位作家、思想者摆放在了一起怀念与膜拜。有一种说法，把上个世纪40至70年代的萨特比作法国知识界的白天，这位存在主义大师和战士所代表的显派们的光芒，遮掩了许多思想界的另类存在，如列维纳斯和布朗肖。他们在时间和空间上被人们不同程度地遗忘和忽视，相反，他们也因此具有了一种夜晚的气质，幽深、绵长，越来越多的后世者也开始燃着一些火把、点亮一盏灯笼，进入那些黑暗的宝藏中寻找和探究。

　　列维纳斯这个来自立陶宛的犹太流浪者，将胡塞尔与海德格尔的思想开创式地引介到法国，并在二者思想的基础上，展开了他的改造与批判，进而构建了一种“为他者的哲学”：以“他人”的存在及其对个人的绝对保障为基础，展开现象学的一系列还原活动。也就是从个人生存的“亲在”、“此在”及其对于有限的生存时间历程的“烦恼”、“忧虑”的体验中，转向由“他人”的视野所构成的无限广阔的无止境的超越世界。他使西方思想界冲破了自启蒙时代长久以来以个人和自我为中心的牢笼，而为我们论证了一个“他人”存在的绝对无限性的崭新价值观。一位当之无愧的为“他者”的哲学家，他不停地消解“自我”，而强调一种面对“他人”面孔时的责任感。

　　布朗肖则更像是一个自我引退的思想者，就像通常他著作勒口上的自我介绍：“莫里斯·布朗肖，小说家和批评家，生于1907年。他的一生完全奉献于文学以及属于文学的沉默。”要知道，这位几乎在我们视野里消失的大师，操办和主宰了法国20世纪知识界近乎所有的大事件：从新小说到先锋文学；从阿尔及利亚的“121人宣言”到巴黎“五月风暴”的作家行动委员会；从对萨德、洛特雷·阿蒙的重新发现到对荷尔德林、卡夫卡等人的崭新诠释；他既是萨特、巴塔耶的同辈人，又是福柯、巴特、德里达精神上的导师。而后半生逐渐消隐的他，拒绝一切采访和出头露面，就像戈达尔形容自己时所说的，成了“被遗忘者中最为著名的一个”。

　　除了同为思想界的隐者之外，其实有更多的理由将这两个人放在一起纪念。从早年他们共同在斯特拉斯堡的哲学学习，到纳粹占领时布朗肖对列维纳斯一家的帮助，再到战后他们对二战中犹太人那场浩劫的难以言说的言说，永恒的友谊贯穿了他们整整一生。布朗肖在他的著作《文学空间》（已由商务印书馆出版）中说：犹太人是这个世界上惟一不将自己的根基建立在土地上，而是建立在一本书———《圣经》———上的民族，这本书又名“写作”。而布朗肖与列维纳斯思想上的友情也正是源于这种犹太式基调，一种该隐与亚伯（流浪与被害）双重身份的重叠，也正因为如此，他们一同继承并根本地反驳了海德格尔的存在哲学。

　　今年10月刚刚出版的两本对列维纳斯与布朗肖的研究著作，也就显得格外恰逢其时。

　　前者《列维纳斯：他者的哲学，还是自我的哲学？》系统地介绍和探究了列维纳斯以伦理学为核心的哲学体系；后者《布朗肖：时间的证据》则是一本当前十几位法国知识界精英对布朗肖的研究论文集。这也成了这两位思想者由隐到显的一次有效的证明，是的，金子埋得再久，一旦出土，它照样会发光。

　　□发自巴黎

　　「榜评」

快乐读书快乐生活

　　与上周相比，本周总榜变化颇大，但未必有多少新意。唱主角的大多是生活类图书，比如《快乐生活（一点通）》这本“新家庭百事通”再度占据榜首。《无毒一身轻Ⅱ》和《人体使用手册》都不算新书了，其中的保健理论和建议，也并非毫无争议之处，但还是卖得很好，也可以看出都市人对健康的重视，对疾病的恐惧以及一向以来养生知识的缺乏。而伊能静和写《美容大王》的大S一样，爱美成癖、对保养的钻研到了某种极致，她们俩曾一起上过小S主持的“康熙来了”，谈起保养、购物、奢侈品，很有惺惺相惜的意思，那期节目真是“女人”得要命。伊能静主持的“美丽艺能界”虽然因为收视不佳，今年5月停播了，但其中不少秘笈至今仍被女人们奉为圭臬。以自己的经验，结合一年多以来主持节目时交流而来的心得，写这本《美丽教主之变脸天书》，难怪其中的介绍更细致也更得体，蛮有诚意的。倒是徐熙媛最近又推出一本《大S美丽随笔》，除了告诉吃燕麦＋牛奶＋水煮蛋的早餐来排毒、瑜伽对保持身材的好处外，基本上是写真和闲散的心情随笔，文笔极为普通（倒是同时有中文和法文，但这对读者应该没多少意义吧），突出的是“恋爱中的女人最美”，再也没有“授人以渔”的余暇了。

　　当然耀眼的新书还是有的，《长尾理论》显然是读者期待已久的，携“亚马逊畅销书榜经管类第一名”威势而来，一上市就跻身总榜。作者克里斯·安德森（ChrisAnderson）是美国《连线》（Wired）的总编辑，在他的领导之下，这本杂志从人（而非技术）的角度探讨技术，以及技术对政治、文化、社会和伦理道德带来的冲击，重新定义了数字文化，也因此在2005年获得“卓越杂志奖”金奖。“长尾理论”克里斯·安德森对互联网所缔造的美丽新世界的观察心得，如果要以一句话概括它的冲击性，那就是印在书封面的广告语“彻底颠覆80/20法则”。虽然“长尾”一词诞生不久，而且从研究案例上也是从数字媒体和音乐产业中获得实证，但它的前瞻性，对非互联网或娱乐媒体产业也同样充满启发。

　　此外，上海译文出版社趁《在路上》出版50年之机，重新引进、翻译了这本“垮掉的一代”的代表作。该书在国内较近的版本是2001年漓江出版社的“全译本”，译者文楚安，评价还不错。新译本除依据权威版本译出外，还增补了凯鲁亚克研究权威专家的导读，译者是国内著名翻译家、新华社高级编辑王永年。不过，王先生在接受采访时表示自己与凯鲁亚克，与这本年轻人的小说有代沟，受人之托勉力为之，“翻译得比较苦”。

 

　　「小说」

　　《诛仙》2005年1月开始推出简体字版，到现在将近两年了，总算出到了“7”，读者的耐心越来越好了。当然这也是没办法的事！网上开了头但结尾遥遥无期的“千年大坑”多了去，萧鼎已经算比较有“责任感”的了。当然啦，再怎么也比不上斯蒂芬·金的“黑暗塔”系列，历时30多年才完篇，据说曾有死囚发毒誓守密，恳求他透露结局……

　　如此看来，我们还是幸运的。

　　「非小说」

　　《一个人上东京》是高木直子系列绘本的第三本，身高150cm的女生怀着当插画家的梦想，来到东京，有小小的开心，和更多的沮丧与挫败感。这种心情本城读者想来很有共鸣！比较而言，更有热销潜力的应该是《赖声川的创意学》。尽管赖声川本人多年专注于剧场和电影，但他的见识、思考方式和诚意使得这本书成功“跨界”，在更多的领域造成话题。

　　「学术」

　　《哲学要义》是叶秀山先生给北大新生上课的讲义，虽然经过整理，但口语味道还是很浓，读起来十分亲切、流畅。巧的是榜单上还有两本类似风格的图书。《这个世界会好吗》是梁漱溟晚年口述，上榜已经很长时间了，而纪德的《关于陀思妥耶夫斯基的六次讲座》用巴黎式的思维思考俄罗斯式的问题，带有浓厚的法国阅读经验。

　　「经管」

　　「生活」

　　「儿童」

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今天的人不大知道何廉是谁，他于1895年出生在湖南邵阳农村，1919年赴美留学，获耶 鲁大学博士学位，1926年回国之后，曾在南开大学从事经济学研究和教学十年，进行了大量卓有成效的经济学研究和普及工作，成为一位享有声望的经济学家。他在《大公报》推出的统计副刊专栏，按时间排列所有中国重要的经济、金融统计数字，曾轰动一时。之后，《大公报》持续刊出他主编的《经济周刊》也在全国产生了很大影响。他还是《独立评论》的重要撰稿人。从1936年起，他应蒋介石入之邀，十年间先后担任行政院政务处长、经济部次长等要职，是蒋在经济事务方面的重要顾问，一度备受蒋的宠信，近距离地观察过这位主宰大陆命运二十多年的枭雄，一位经济学家的回忆为我们进一步认识蒋介石的真面目，了解国民党统治时代提供了许多第一手的珍贵史料。

西安事变前不久，何廉随蒋介石在洛阳住了一个多月，第一次“有机会经常看到委员长的一套生活方式以及他处理事务的方法。”使这位经济学家“弄明白了中国实权的情况”（《何廉回忆录》，中国文史出版社1988年版，114页，以下只标页码）这就是“政府的真正实权所在，始终是围绕着委员长转的。委员长不仅是行政院的头，军事委员会的头，党的头，如果化成实权来说，他是万物之首。”（115页）这位当时位居行政院政务处长的经济学家惊讶地发现——“几乎每份重要的报告，按理应直接送交南京行政院的，却首先来到了委员长的驻地办公室。”他的去向和个人的驻地办公室从来都是保密的。他的侍从室机构庞大，俨然就是政府中的政府，国家的真正中心，凌驾在整个国家体制之上。他走到哪里，哪里就是权力的中心，整个政府是跟着他的腿转动的。即使他休假期间，“翁文灏和我曾多次去他奉化的家，向他汇报有关行政院的事项。”（124页）

“我开始认识到，他认识人，也懂得用人，但是他不懂得制度和使用制度。我和他谈问题时，一谈到许多事情该制度化的时候，他的注意力就会向别处转移。我对他有这样的感觉，从根本上说，他不是个现代的人，基本上属于孔子传统思想影响下的人。他办起事来首先是靠人和个人接触以及关系等等，而不是靠制度。

办什么事，作什么变动，只要他认为怎么方便就怎么办。……他随身总带一支红铅笔和一叠纸，如果他认为该作出决定或给哪位来访者一笔钱，他会立即签发一项有关的手谕。这类手谕无数次都是用红铅笔写的，到处流传“（117—118页）

他不是皇帝，胜似皇帝，随心所欲，活脱脱一个 “朕即国家”的现代版，何廉说：“最活龙活现的一次，是1936年秋孔祥熙官邸一次十分非正式的会议上，孔接到委员长侍从打来的电话，说委员长要这么一笔款子。这仅仅是一次电话传呼，也没有手谕。孔打趣地对我们说：”看，委员长要款，我该咋办？‘孔让他的秘书通知上海中央银行用专机把款送交委员长。“（110—111页）另有一次，1937年春天，孔祥熙将以中国特使身份去参加英国女王的加冕典礼，在告别宴会上，”孔非常自私地要委员长给他颁发文职官员的最高勋章，这样他好戴着去伦敦。委员长对我说：“何先生，你就关照此事，给孔博士颁发勋章。’通常像这种颁发任何类别勋章的事，首先要在行政院会议上提出讨论并通过决议。所作决议还得送呈国民政府主席，由他来颁发勋章。现在这一切程序都不用了，只是委员长一道非正式的口谕，就得把勋章给孔祥熙送去。我通知了国民政府，第二天早晨勋章就由专机送交给孔。这真是滑天下之大稽，我觉得十分可笑！”（124页）

“他是一个信赖人而不重视制度的人，如果一个人和他很接近，那个人就可以受到他的庇护”（183—184页）1939年后期到1940年，何廉没有机会和蒋介石直接接触，他很快发现自己陷入批评、攻击之中，1942年2月，他主管的农本局多人被特工拘捕。直到张家璈给蒋写信，蒋大发雷霆，说并没有让他们逮捕那些人，只是指示“集中讯问”。事后放人时，戴笠还要求经济部“打收条领人”，戴只承认“他错误地理解和解释了委员长的命令”。事后何廉调任军事委员会参事室参事，他不到任，秘密警察就在他家门外站岗，监视他，他出门就跟着他，连日用必需品也削减了。总之是非逼他就范不可。那年，何廉想去香港，买飞机票要警方特别安全办公室批准，等了几乎两个月都没音讯，最后求助于蒋本人，几天就办成了。

显然在一个人的治下，喜怒无常，朝令夕改，只能是一个没有任何保障、不确定的社会，恐怖、灾难随时可能降临到每一个人身上。何廉不过是书生从政，他的遭遇不算什么，处在权力顶峰的蒋介石不也有过命在旦夕的西安之劫吗？连杀人不眨眼的魔王戴笠也不无抱怨，他曾对张家璈说，“为委员长工作非常难办。戴说，委员长给你指令，要你去调查某人或某事，但中途又打住或放慢了。”（220页）

1946年，何廉多年的心血编制的战后经济建设纲要被束之高阁，连一纸空文都算不上，“除了1000份已印发的和几份英文翻译本外，纲要从没有公布。”（252页）一个信奉自由主义、有理想的学者在这样的体制下注定了只能是“装饰品”，是可以呼之即来、挥之即去的道具。这位经济学家在经历宦海沉浮之后，终于下决心地离开蒋介石政府，结束十年官场生涯，回到独立的学术研究中，他在南京创办了著名的《世纪评论》周刊，在上海创办了中国经济研究所和《经济评论》。以他十年来对蒋介石以及这个政权的近距离观察，他说：

“我越来越清楚地体会到，委员长或许不是国家从事经济建设的理想的领导者。他主要是一个具有中世纪思想意识的人，他对经济建设的认识，和19世纪早期的维新派李鸿章、张之洞没有多大不同。对委员长来说，经济建设意味着经济的移植，看来他并不真正懂得为经济建设建立主要机构的重要性。

从委员长看来，人事关系的重要性超过机构设施，而委员长要求于部下对他的忠心和驯服超过对才干和正直的要求。要是一夜之间突然变心转意，就意味着机构和政策的变更的话，一个国家怎能平平稳稳、很有效率地从事经济建设？要是那些负责经济建设的人不是首先在公正有为的基础上遴选，一个国家怎能有效地进行经济建设？假使委员长的整个信任概念是以关系的亲疏为基础的话，我怎能为他从事经济建设工作？“（265—266页）

何况蒋介石“在政治上关心对付旁的政党，特别是共产党，超过他对经济建设的关心。……在他所定的大政方针之下，整个政府全力以赴处理政治问题，几乎将经济问题置诸度外。”（266页） 尽管自1930年代起，他大量起用翁文灏、王世杰、蒋廷黻、张家璈、吴鼎昌、何廉、叶公超等专家教授，也许他的初衷是良好的，给他们显赫的职位，早在西安事变发生后，何廉就看得很清楚：“翁文灏和我虽都在政府中位居高职，比起‘圈内集团’来，毕竟还是外人。我们并非政府是里层人物，也非党的成员，我们不过是政府的‘装饰品’！我们从未能搞清楚幕后究竟在搞些什么。”（121页）何廉不无痛苦地认识到蒋介石“或许看重吴鼎昌、蒋廷黻、张家璈，或许也有我自己的意见，但他从不真正信任我们。”（266页）所以这些受西方教育、学有专长的学者从来都不在蒋介石政权的“里层”。在这个浓厚人治色彩的政权“里层” 是孔祥熙、宋子文这样与他有裙带等关系的贪婪自私、腐败无耻的人物，蒋真正信任的是他们，所以孔掌握的财政部针水不进。蒋介石掌握着无限的权力，他通过亲戚、亲信控制权力，没有任何章法可言，他“常常绕过了机构，而去信任那些最亲近他、忠于他、服从他的人。他信任孔祥熙和宋子文，因为他们是姻兄姻弟，他信任孔祥熙胜过宋子文，因为孔更听他的话；他信任陈立夫因为陈的叔叔是他把兄弟；他信任俞飞鹏，因为是他的表弟兄；他信任张群，因为张群、陈其美、黄郛和他是把兄弟；他信任黄埔军校毕业生超过同样的团体，因为他是军校校长，而在中国师生关系几乎亲似父子。唯一可能例外是陈诚，他们之间非亲非故，但陈诚是他的同乡”（266页）他“老是准备让他随便哪个下属成群结党，只是要由他来当头头，而事实上，他是每个派系的最高领袖。……在心底里，委员长有一种操纵驾驭的嗜好，他要在矛盾中显示他的至高无上。他允许甚至鼓励搞派系活动，因为只要派系继续活动，唯有他才能使不同的派系捏合在一起。”（214页）

尽管如此，在这位沐浴了欧风美雨、受过严格学术训练、满脑子自由主义的学者眼中，蒋介石“是个可以共事的好人”，“他十分耿直，也非常坦率，他总设法使你明白，他在想些什么。他会给你答复：或者是，或者否，要不就等等，他不会使你灰心丧气的。”（117页）“他生活十分简朴。每天清晨起身很早，做一小段锻炼，就进行祈祷，……整个上午，他都用来批阅文件……”，他“吃得很少，吃得也很简朴。”（115页）他一贯称何廉为“何先生”。作为一位传统型的政治领袖，他或许不无魅力，但他中世纪的思维方式、行事作风，在一个急需向现代化转型的时代里注定将以失败告终，这是人治社会的必然，蒋介石的失败不仅是他个人的悲剧，也标志着他身体力行的这种千年相续的统治方式到20世纪已走到尽头，任何不可一世的独裁者试图依靠人而不是制度终将无法挽回地步入衰亡，蒋介石只是其中一个显著的例子罢了。

钱钟书，字默存，号槐聚，笔名中书君，1910年出生于江苏无锡。1933年，清华大学外文系毕业；1935年至1937年在英国牛津大学学习，获得文学士学位；1938年在法国巴黎大学进修并于本年因被母校清华大学聘为最年轻的教授之一回国。1941年出版散文集《写在人生边上》；1946年出版短篇小说集《人、兽、鬼》；1947年出版了长篇小说《围城》；1948年出版《谈艺录》。1979年出版了100多万字的《管锥编》极大地震动了学术界。1980年《围城》由人民文学出版社重印，并多次印刷，发行100多万册。另还出版有《七缀集》、《宋诗选注》等。

钱钟书一辈子钟情于书，据其夫人杨绛说，她在1973年为钱钟书整理读书笔记时，即有整整五大麻袋之多，堆在屋里高高的如一座小山，每一本笔记本上都密密麻麻地记满了中文、外文。他还精通六七种语言。

钱钟书在清华读书的时候跟曹禺和吴组缃是同班同学，他到清华后给自己立下的志愿是“横扫清华图书馆”，那时侯他不过才18岁，他终日博览中西新旧书籍，可谓一心只读圣贤书，是去图书馆借书最多的学生，并且他的考试成绩在班里总是第一。是全校公认的才子，在念大二时就由吴宓教授推荐他给本系学生带课。

钱钟书因为自己才高一世，所以颇自负自许，相当的“狂傲”，像极了古代的庄生。大学快毕业时，清华大学挽留他继续攻读西洋文学研究硕士学位，他曾说：“整个清华，没有一个教授有资格充当钱某人的导师！”。他架子相当大，从不愿拜访别人，更不拜访名人，只埋首脚踏实地做学问，并且在学问上对自己要求很高，也很严格。后来当他很有名气的时候，也总拒绝人们对他的采访。

钱钟书在西南联大外文系任教不到一年时间，便于1939年夏天辞职了，据说是不怎么得意，亦有说法是当时湖南宝庆县蓝田镇的国立师范学院请钱钟书去此校筹建外文系。

钱钟书一生对政治不感兴趣，可以这么说，他超越了那现实和时代，不想与之抗争，才守住了本性。他从1944年到1946年，用了两年时间，以每天写五百字的速度完成了长篇小说《围城》。《围城》虽然至1949年三月就已三次出版，也很畅销，但当时文艺界却对此书普遍评价不高。所以1980年以前，所有《中国现代文学史》和小说史的专著都对此书持基本上忽略的态度，有的甚至只字不提，许多青年人根本不知道有《围城》一书，连钱钟书的名字也未曾听说过。

1949年9月，钱钟书与杨绛应邀请重返清华大学任教。此前香港大学和牛津大学也邀请过钱钟书过去任教，都被他拒绝了。1953年，他又被调到中国社科院文学研究所任研究员，一直到退休都在那里工作。

奇怪的是从1949年至1957年，钱钟书没有发表任何文章、评论，也没有新的著作问世。是显示了他不可思议的聪明睿智，还是他遵从了默默者存的道理？也许是他从1950年起被中央邀请担任“《毛泽东选集》英译委员会”主任委员的原因？

1966年起的文革十年中，钱钟书又沉默了，还是没有发表任何文章、评论。只是他早已准备耐得半辈子寒窗寂寞，决定从创作走向研究，默默为世界文化奉献自己的智慧——偷空写《管锥编》。其间有近两年时间被下放到河南干校劳动，其艰苦程度可想而知，并因此大病一场，估计是没书看给憋的。

1975年基本写完《管锥编》。1979年，洋洋四大册，近百万字的《管锥编》由中华书局出版发行，成为当年学术界一件大事。《管锥编》是钱钟书气魄最宏伟阔大的著作，它打通一切文学体裁界限传统，对文化研究的贡献很大，尽管其侧重点仍在文艺学方面，却也几乎囊括了古今中外人文科学的所有门类。更为奇怪的是钱钟书完全采用文言文来写的《管锥编》，且处处见得生花妙笔和博大精深。如《管锥编》里面揭示了中外文学中共有的一种艺术方法和规律，即通感。就是人的视觉、触觉、嗅觉、味觉可以互通或交通，也叫感觉移借。应用通感的理论，在文学上许多看似不通的问题就迎刃而解了。钱钟书是第一个把“通感”现象引进我国文艺理论界的人，而且讲得相当精辟、生动，例证不穷。《管锥编》里面诸如此类的创见有好多，不再一一赘述。

钱钟书那照相机式的记忆力，学贯中西古今的博学，滔滔不绝的口才，浓郁的机趣与睿智，澹泊宁静毁誉不惊的人格，使他极富传奇色彩。他总是惜时如金，潜心读书研究，他甘于寂寞，不媚世媚俗，不求闻达，而又懂得生活之乐趣，如此真正大学者怎不让人肃然起敬？

钱钟书只是醉心在学问里遨游，面对周围环境，钱钟书根本不予理会，钱钟书就是钱钟书。他的人生实践在不经意间向世人阐述了知识就是力量，创新即是生命的铁律。

钱钟书极不爱应酬，好象也不关心国事，也缺少大多数知识分子为推进现实进步而常怀有的那种批判精神。也许是他的智慧和才气把一切都看透了，才会如此吧。每想至此，我总在心里笑着对自己说：“哈，钱钟书这家伙”。

在对世事常抱漠不关心的态度中，钱钟书以自己的努力和成就站立成文化界一位举世瞩目的人，成了一代大儒。这一点跟数学家陈景润很相似。脚踏实地，专注于自心，以自己的成就证明了自己的巨大存在，也许这即是人生之大聪明和大超然吧。

菲丽丝：我的爱！

来信收到，你资助我孙子的托儿所寄托费──三千婆罗洲币也收到。呵呵，你挺聪明，没换成卢布或美元邮寄。你知不知道，独立中文笔会会员、当代“冉阿让”──杨天水，其中一个原因，就是接受了境外几百美元的援助，而被关在牢房里。今后如资助，请仍邮寄婆罗洲币，并请注明该汇款用途，以免夜郎衙役鸡蛋挑骨头。

你这次资助，解了我燃眉之急！因为下个月又要缴三个月的、共计一千二百元的寄托费。听说有的孩子要缴一千八百元，也不知啥原因。如果真这样，他们每月要缴六百元，近于一个工人的月工资了。有的小孩还不争气，老是高烧感冒拉肚子。医生也不让打针吃药，动辄就叫他们住院吊盐水，一次就要几百元。而且出院，隔了几天，旧病复发又进院，医生眉开眼笑的，像碰到了财神爷。目睹此状，我急得对孙儿说：囡囡，你不生病，亲公天天给你讲故事、买棒糖，你千万不要生病啊。孩子懂事地回答：我不生病，我要吃棒糖，我要吃蛋挞。听说，四川有个误服农药的孩子，就是因为缺少八百元医疗费，没给洗胃而死在病床上。

下面谈谈我最近的生活状况。你知道，我有钱公园吃茶、舞厅跳舞、上街吃羊肉面，没钱就呆在家里孵豆芽，上上网、看看书、听听音乐、写写东西。除了上网有人骚扰、电话有人监控，基本没遇上大的麻烦。尽管线人有时探头探脑，想从我嘴巴中掏出什么东西，头脑里挖出什么思想，由于没什么秘密，没什么思想，电脑也经得起检查，因此应付起来游刃有余。

这次托友人福，免费去了趟安徽。第二站玩了元首的老家──绩溪龙川。龙川是块风水宝地，左右有山，一座叫龙须山、一座叫凤头山，多么好听吉祥的山名啊！生怕引起朝廷的妒忌，历代村民只好低调，将龙川称为坑口村。龙川溪穿村而过，可惜上游河床见底，满是石块，一副荒年大旱的模样。其实这儿像三峡那样筑个坝，留些溪水，完全可以改善景观，以便显出一副风调雨顺的样子。

龙川空气清新、街道清洁，民风也淳朴。一路游览，我们看到了过时的“毛主席万岁”的标语，笔迹淡淡的，若隐若现。在一户人家大门上，还看到了“一树红花开并蒂，两个新秀结同心”的打油诗，写得龙飞凤舞，充满时尚的激情。

走近街尾，胡氏宗祠出现眼前。雄伟壮观，人走进去，十分渺小。有生以来，我第一次看见这么大的祠堂。一看就晓得祖上花了大钱建造的，不像族人劈硬柴（AA制）。我真怀疑胡家老祖宗──胡宗宪，哪儿搞到一笔横财才如此大手大脚。

胡氏宗祠“整体建筑融砖、木、石三雕于一体”，木雕尤其精细。“浅浮、深浮、镂空，浮镂”，穷尽匠心。图形不仅养眼，内容也吉祥。正厅左面落地窗门下截，一幅荷池木雕引起我的注意。几片荷叶迎风翻摆，两只螃蟹在芙蓉底下游荡。荷蟹，不由让我联想起“和谐”。那一瞬间，我觉得元首的治国理念，或许更多是从传统文化中获得灵感，具体说，是从徽文化中获得灵感。我这种看法，在屯溪老街的书摊上得到了引证。摊上有一本书，上面的广告语是这么说的：“从徽文化中，完成社会和谐的建构。”元首的“八荣八耻”， 那时候也让我联想起乡村宗族祠堂里的族规。

元首的治国理念诞生于儒家文化，脱胎于胡氏宗祠。虽然称不上理想，但远远胜于空洞无物的“三个代表”。可惜夜郎朝廷失去包括工农大众的统治基础。说实话，剥夺了工农的岗位和田地，叫他们挣扎于生死的边缘，这些人怎么可能再心向朝廷呢？再者，元首的治国方略不是建筑在人民安居乐业的基础上，拆迁失业，朝不保夕，哪怕是完美的治国方略又有什么用呢？而且左右摇摆，一会儿以人为本、社会和谐，跟穷人吃饺子，一会儿又汕尾开枪、给军队地方突发事件参与权。要知道，地方诸侯尾大不掉，控制不住，很容易形成藩镇割据的局面，上海帮就是一个例子。另外，治国方略亦走不出金銮殿。因为贪官污吏多如牛毛。这些失去信仰、良知的官吏，唯利是图，阳奉阴违，根本不会服从元首的指挥、顾全朝廷未来的走向。考虑自身安全，也知道说了也白说，所以我不准备提供什么材料，也不详细诉说有个县府，一个案件就吓得惊弓之鸟半个月内暗地上缴廉政账户近二千万，有个涉案者还是县府维持治安的都头呢！

菲丽丝，说个笑话，出门那天清晨六点钟，我在小街小巷遇到四五个形迹可疑的女人，年纪都在三十上下。有的长辫，有的短发；有的染黄，有的本色；有的大眼，有的小眼；有的媚笑，有的谄笑；有的丰满、有的瘦削；有的皮鞋，有的布鞋。她们的衣服过时陈旧，面色亦憔悴无光，像纺织女工刚刚上了夜班。她们有的站在小弄的拐角处，有的站在电线杆下，有的坐在人家门口的石阶上。有的以一个巴掌托住自己的脸庞，有的朝我伸出三个指头。还有一个见我不理睬，索性追了上来，伸出V字形，喊老板、老板……

哎，菲丽丝，夜已深，不多说了。愿你有个好梦！何时梦中再见到你呢？

江苏／陆文2006、11、22

“一个女娃子，没钱，没势，爹妈都是平头老百姓，不就剩这点本钱。”这是秀秀出卖肉身的理由。

可以说《天浴》①是我看过的最绝望的中国电影！秀秀在摇晃的床上呻吟的时候，当事情结束之后秀秀问老金要水清洗自己的身子时，当秀秀最后要效仿别人自残以获得返城的批条的时候，我相信每位观众的心都在颤抖：天地不仁，视人为刍狗！

我听人讲过那段历史，也看过《中国知青梦》②那样的报告文学，我比较倾向于相信这是历史。不过我现在宁愿不把这看作对历史的控诉，因为那势必遭到一帮人的当头棒喝“拿出证据来”，还会遭到嘲笑“这个研究历史的把艺术虚构等同于历史”，我确实没有证据确切地证明这是历史事实，而且我也不愿趟这样的浑水，时间自然会证明这是事实还是虚构。但是更重要的理由是，如果仅仅把这看作历史，看作过去，那就降低了该片的深度，仅仅记录历史，控诉过去，控诉历史罪人从来不是最深刻的作品（不管是艺术还是学术）。为求生而卖身的事从来就有，为求生而卖掉自己唯一所有的人也永远都有。这是人类的宿命。我认为这是对人类普遍命运和绝望困境的控诉，这样的绝望从来就有，现在有，将来还有！

前两天在网上看到一个新闻，重庆某大学2002级大学女生文慧(化名)出身吉林农村，家中贫穷，为了支付念大学的费用，她多次出卖自己的身体。当记者问她为什么这样做的时候，她的回答是：“我真的需要那些钱，非常需要。你们要理解我，我没有好的家庭，我只有善良但却无用的父母，我除了读书没有任何技能，这是我惟一的出路……我的身体留着有什么用呢？如果我不能去读大学，我的身体还是只能留给一个庄稼汉。与其那样，还不如给他。”为了考研找工作，她又出卖自己的身体，她的理由是：“你不知道有多少人都在等一份工作，辛苦读完四年大学，最后发现原来一家小公司的小文秘都需要重点本科英语六级容貌俏丽身高165厘米以上，最后说薪水不过800元，还有几乎上百人排队等面试。这本来就是一个投机的社会，我总要活下去。”在采访的最后，记者问：“如果下一次有人能确实解决你的问题，而需要你付出身体，你会不会答应？”她的回答是：“也许会。得到一些东西，总要付出一些东西，而除了身体我什么都没有，我只能拿它去换。”③

除了身体，什么都没有的她们，为了生存，为了改变自己的命运，你说怎么办？读书？高昂的学费和生活费她们都支撑不起。种田？永无翻身之日。当贫穷世袭的时候，她们唯一的出路是自己的身体，而且还要加一个条件，那就是至少她的身体长得还不赖。而这个条件，也不是人人都具有的，也不是通过努力或者奋斗可以实现的，这真是彻底的天命，她们确实是没得选择。记得西方哪位哲人说过：人是被选择的，而非选择的。

在这样的背景下来考虑知识分子对民众的启蒙话语，很快就会发现启蒙话语的无根和谵妄。我们可以设想，启蒙思想家站在后文革的繁华城市的学术论坛上，慷慨激昂，理直气壮地质问秀秀：你为什么要出卖自己的身体呢？你难道不可以安安心心地在那个地方放牧吗？愤青们可能还会更会高亢地叫嚣：拿一把刀戳死那些王八蛋！

这样的质疑确实是只有一口虚气，与事实无关。在秀秀怀孕之后的剧情里，我更多地把老金看做一个启蒙者和革命者。他拉着秀秀（被启蒙者）去找场部的干部算帐，秀秀一直哀求着说别去了，可是老金一腔怒火，执意挟持着秀秀前往。结果秀秀不仅没有得到正义，反而再遭厄运。秀秀宁愿自残也不去抗争。最后是老金这个启蒙者和革命者未经秀秀的同意杀死了秀秀，为她保住了“贞洁”——这在启蒙者老金看来，是珍贵的，可是在被启蒙者秀秀看来，这是她的唯一交易资本。启蒙者/革命者引诱、煽动、挟持被启蒙者起来抗争，最后又是他们把被启蒙者推向了灭亡，勇敢如老金或者谭嗣同选择了殉葬，绝大部分像康有为、孙中山选择了躲进租界，此时，他们可没考虑到那些躲不进租界的被启蒙者了，这是最不负责的革命者/启蒙者。

    注：

①陈冲导演《天浴》

②邓贤《中国知青梦》，人民文学出版社2003

③漂亮女大学生的六年性交易实录

艾晓明 中山大学妇女性别研究中心

南都周刊：您听说了张钰事件吗？第一反应是什么？

艾晓明：首先我觉得媒体能够公开地来讨论这个问题，是个好事情，过去媒体并没有人来捅破这个问题。我看了一些接受采访的演员的材料，虽然一些明星说她们走向成功没有走这条路，但无论男女，他们是认可这种情况的存在的。所以，第一次由张钰的录像带事件把这个窗户纸捅破，让公众来讨论这个问题，我觉得是非常有意义的。

而且，在其他的一些场合，性与性侵害的问题常常没有当做权力和不平等的问题来讨论，而只是作为纯粹的性的问题在讨论或者甚至把它划入到不宜在公众领域讨论的范围。

因为这涉及到比较微妙的性剥削的形式，比如公开的卖淫嫖娼、性奴役或强迫性的强奸，公众都认为这是性剥削的形式，但当妇女为了在某一个行业里赢得某一个工作的机会，她要放弃自己的性自主来顺从这个行业里拥有权力或资源的人，这是一个比较微妙的而且公众很少去思考的性剥削的形式，借张钰的录像带事件引起公众来讨论这个事情，这本身是非常有意义的。

南都周刊：有人认为张钰值得尊重，勇气可嘉，有人认为这是她缺乏成为优秀演员的实力，所以走歪门邪道，您觉得怎么样？

艾晓明：从个人来讲，我们没有权利去评价个人的行为，每一个人都有权利运用自己认为合适的手段去维护自己的权益，因为“法律无明确禁止者，民皆可为之”，法律没有禁止说不应该出示和性有关的录像，你可能不会这么做，但是张钰这么做，那是她的自由。每个人都应该为自己的所作所为承担责任，但是我们没有权利评价他们。

南都周刊：但是目前引起注意的，首先就是张钰公布录像带这样一个行为，其次才是去思考背后的问题。就这种做法本身，存在很多的争议。

艾晓明：难道世界上有一种标准的方式吗？她就是采取了一种收集证据和公布证据的方式，她的证据是不是有效，是不是存在主观的因素，她其实也在公众的评价体系之内，她也要接受公众对证据的质疑。

南都周刊：假如说性交易、性贿赂成为了娱乐圈女演员发展的潜规则，您认为这是行业现象还是女性生存状态的问题？

艾晓明：性骚扰这类事情在职业场所是普遍存在的，其实性骚扰也是性剥削的一种形式，性骚扰就是因为某些人拥有权力，通过运用权力迫使下属或者相关的工作人员来顺从他的意志来获得性方面的好处，这就包括言语骚扰、身体骚扰，还不是指侵害这类事情，他没有实施强奸的行为，但是他已经把这个工作环境变成了一个不平等的环境。

在某些行业，性剥削可能存在的程度会比较严重，比如说这个行业是高盈利的、高收入的，比如说表演行业是和身体有关的，是有对妇女的一个凝视的文化传统的，那么这个行业的情况可能会比较严重。也和这个行当里面究竟是谁掌握权力有关，比如说演艺行业是男导演所主导的，他们决定了女演员的工作机会，那么这个行业的情况会比其他行业更为突出，集中。

南都周刊：女演员或者说女性，遭遇性骚扰，和女性以自己的身体进行性贿赂，这两者的区别是什么？

艾晓明：性贿赂有一个问题存在主动行贿的成分，但是仅仅去批评行贿的人，去反行贿是不够的，我们还应该追问，为什么要通过行贿？为什么不行贿就无法得到这样一个机会？或者说大量的人必须要通过行贿才能获得工作的机会，那就是说明存在这样一种不平等的性剥削、性压迫的关系。

南都周刊：女性的身体成为对象化的客体，成为了她们的一种资源，在两性关系中，一旦遭受背叛或者关系中断，她们都成为了弱者，从而寻求同情和帮助，要求补偿，这样的两性关系逻辑是基于什么样的心理机制和文化背景？

艾晓明：这确实就是两性关系还没有达到一个平等的程度的一种表现形式。从性别的角度讲，妇女还没有争取到和男性同等的地位和权利。但是在性的交往里，现在也没有说妇女就一定是吃亏的角色，木子美她没有这种感觉吧，大量的婚外情、一夜情的人没有这种感觉吧！现在媒体不都公开报道一夜情嘛，何以见得女人都一定认为自己吃亏呢？！这个逻辑现在已经没有那么强大的影响力了，很多的妇女都没有这种感觉了，都不会再认为性关系里，女的就一定吃亏了。

女性主义不会去判断个案是吃亏还是不吃亏，但是有一个普遍的原则，就是女性对自己的身体和行为是有自主权的，她愿意和一个男性结成这种性的关系，她应该对这个行为负有自主权，但是这一个权利不是绝对的，她还有其他的权利，不是这一个权利保证了，其他权利就得到保证，她还要争取其他的权利，比如就业的、政治的。

张念：这是对性政治宣战

张念 同济大学文化批评研究所

南都周刊：有人认为张钰录像带事件仅仅是一起炒作，而艾晓明老师则认为此事意义非同小可。请问你怎么看？

张念：是对性政治宣战，不仅仅是娱乐圈。

从表面看，这是一起“性交易”事件的一方因“悔约”（上床不等于上戏）而造成的，但这和一般性交易（买淫和卖淫）不同，这里的嫖资是男性导演的职业权力，交易双方的心理气势并不对等，有胁迫的意味，是性勒索与性讹诈。因为导演职业的特殊性而导致的性特权，包括行政权力而导致的性特权，是性政治中最典型的掠夺行为，这同时也伤害了无权无势的其他男女公民的权利，从这个意义上讲，是整体上的强权所默许的违背人们意愿的“强奸文化”，让各种各样的潜规则大行其道，这不仅仅是娱乐圈的特别状况。

这不是行业现象，而是整体的女性生存状况，那就是女人们拥有的社会及公共资源太有限，抗风险的能力很弱。

南都周刊：有人认为，张钰或者饶颖，都是因为目的未能达到，而展开了疯狂的对男人的报复行为。

张念：张和饶事件是两回事，前者牵涉到“潜规则”等社会问题，后者关乎人性，比如男人性与女人性更深层的内部秘密。这不是报复，仅仅是怨恨的极端表述。

南都周刊：女性遭遇性骚扰，和女性主动进行性贿赂，两者应该还是存在区别吧？

张念：看起来主动地，出让身体去获得现实利益的女人，依然是男权社会中的弱者，这是所有社会交换中，最不平等的交换，是所有社会不公导致的“纵身一跃”。

女人作为交换的礼物是男权文化的逻辑，作为某种生产方式被保留至今，男人必须为他们的性行为“买单”，是最可悲的权力。性行为本身成为产品，其开发、流通与分配的方式当然也由他们掌控。

洛洛：服从者的无耻和掌权者的羞耻

洛洛 编辑，新媒体女性网络召集人

张钰肯定是臭名昭著了，这是显而易见的事实；可是除了她，还有谁有资格臭名昭著呢？

和打假一样，买了假货自己贴上车费去退了，还要暗暗感激商家服务好的人，是成不了大气候的，更不要说那些自己默然认栽的了——只有那些明知是假，还要成千上万地买的打假专家，才是真正的狠角色。

张钰充当了这么个狠角色，这是勇气可嘉的地方；她未必能改写娱乐圈的历史，但她必然成为一个标志性的人物，不管她演技如何，长相如何，才华如何，出身如何，人品又如何，这些她的对手不断制造的浮沫般的细节，都不重要，最重要的是，她冲破了一切给女人设置的警戒线，拼出一身剐，周密筹划，手段下作老辣，做了个彻底的烂人。

有趣的是，至今，没有人怀疑“潜规则”的存在，最保守的意见无非认为这是“少数害群之马”的行为，这些措辞对于中国人不算陌生——基本上，说了等于白说的话，都是这个套路。除了对“少数害群之马”表示礼节性的不屑，不少业内业外人士的意见基本上可以这么总结：一、抖出来有什么用？愿赌服输吧！二、女演员虚荣，经不起诱惑啊——不演也饿不死啊！三、“真正成功的人”都是凭“真本事”的，“潜规则”只存在于不那么优秀的人中间，怨自己！ 事实上，谁是制定规则的人？一定是掌握资源分配的人，很不幸，跟所有行业一样，他们往往是男的。既然现实是，没有一个更加强大的仲裁者给约束他们的性活动，那么他们的规则就是行业的公理，无论是光明正大的，还是心照不宣的。接受资源分配的人除了服从和退出，没有选择——一部分人拥有幸运的豁免权，并不代表其他人受到的剥削是幻觉。

既然演员是一个合法的工作，那么演员争取角色，就和一个钟点工要求增加时薪，医生要求评高级职称一样，是非常正当的要求。即便是一个非常没有天赋的演员，争取一个不起眼的小角色，也是卑微而值得尊重的（不少今天的大腕都有这样的当年）权利——发展的权利。如果她必须为这个放弃身体的自主权，那就和钟点工为了加一元钱而接受性骚扰一样残酷——不管性观念是否开放，不情愿的性关系带来的痛苦都是一样的。

一个不够优秀的人也有权利向往成就，要求更加公平的游戏规则，何况在任何行业里，“不够优秀的人”永远是大多数，“不够优秀”没有责任成为烂规则的注脚。如果为了现实的原因，这些沉默的大多数，不得不按一个很烂的游戏规则行事，那么她也至少有权利要求按照烂的规则，给她相称的烂回报。因为迫不得已，她不必为这个烂规则被咎责；如果有人连这个烂规则都不遵守，她还能干什么呢？

张爱玲早有名言：“本来，一人女人上了男人的当，就该死；女人给当给男人上，那更是淫妇；如果一女人想给男人当上而失败了，反而上了人家的当，那是双料的淫恶，杀了她还污了刀。”这句话用在张钰引发的舆论上头，仍然可以当新闻综述来用；只是要加上一句：“如果一女人想给男人当上而失败了，反而上了人家的当，还满世界声光电化地作秀，活该坐电梯直接下十八层地狱。”回头看那已经是六十年前的老月亮了，中国女人在男女之事上头的发言权，还真没有什么起色。

张钰的高明之处，在于她克服了作为淫恶的妇女，对公众发言的羞耻和恐惧。要等待同情，等待别人赠送的公正，是没有指望了。唯有展示硬邦邦难以下咽的事实，证明自己的经验不是幻觉……说出来，是弱者唯一的权利。说出来，基本上很难挽回损失，未必能改写规则，但能让强者有所忌惮，让规则在执行面更加公平，让相同处境的人得到慰藉和支持，让后来的想说出来的人更有底气。

人一定要无耻和勇敢到一个地步，才能做到张钰做到的那一切。但规则服从者的无耻，是规则制定者真正的羞耻，可惜他们未必意识到。

吕频：感谢极端的牺牲者

吕频 女性主义者，自由职业

张钰所揭发的所谓“娱乐圈潜规则”到底是什么性质？导演要求演员以身体交换角色

戏份，和人事经理要求应聘者以身体交换就业机会是一样的，都严重违反职业道德。还不仅如此，此种性行为是违背妇女意志的，当然，从其强迫程度看够不上强奸，但却具有职场性骚扰的典型特征：以就业机会为砝码进行性胁迫，妇女如果不从就会受到职业伤害。很多其他国家对职场性骚扰有严厉的防治措施，据曾到中国做相关培训的美国加利福尼亚州人权律师帕特。苏女士说，在加州发生的一起诉讼中，向女演员提出性要求的男导演即被法庭判决为性骚扰。在中国，尽管认定和惩戒办法在法律上还比较含糊，但禁止性骚扰是有明文规定的。如果我们能认识到“潜规则”背后就业权利和违背妇女意志的实质，认识到所谓“潜规则”的违法性质，恐怕就不会再对所谓“潜规则”那么麻木不仁。

也许有人要问：如果上床是女演员自愿的，那就不是性骚扰了吧？没错，那就只能称为“性交易”，但这种交易的“自愿”，由于双方权力关系的严重不对等，一方掌握着另一方的生存就业乃至前途命运，不能不打上加重的引号。像卖淫一样，有权有势，予取予夺的男导演，与漂泊孤立，只有身体作为资本的女演员之间的性交易，其实就是前者对后者的剥削。

一个行业盛行这样的“潜规则”，乃至人人心知肚明的地步，这个行业的普遍腐败真是令人发指，那么多人对之见怪不怪，不以为意，则是这种腐败已经严重毒化社会道德的反映。张钰并不是一个人，在她背后有许多打落牙齿往肚里吞的同命者，她自己采取的方式也许是极端的，但在这种现状下，不采用这种极端的方式恐怕就不能做到揭穿真相，如果一个人的激烈极端能让更多人的生存状况多得到一点关注，我会宁愿赞美这种激烈极端，而不是一厢情愿地动机追究，由于她所付出的代价，我甚至会认为她是一个值得感谢的牺牲者。

有人指责张钰公布录像是侵犯了别人的隐私，其实当事人之一的公布并不符合侵犯隐私的法律定义。在性领域中，对女人的重要压迫是，第一，她们不该说，第二，说了就首先是她们自己的羞耻。但正如当年木子美说的：女人没有替男人保密的义务；如今敢于反抗秘密，拒绝把羞耻感内化的女人还是太少，也许这种“说出来”的冒犯对有些人来说构成冒犯，但真正冒犯了整个社会的，其实不是那被说出来的事实本身吗？

女人自古分两种，好女人和坏女人，因为做不成好女人，有些女人变坏了，于是就成了被社会放逐唾弃的丑角。如何看待这样的坏女人，某种意义上正是考验我们的道德能力之处，但那不该是耶稣宽恕抹大拉式的道德，不是带着等级观念的怜悯，而是该去辨认，在裸奔的坏女人背后，是什么黑影在驱赶？在这黑影还笼罩之时，我不在乎自己坚决支持张钰。

刚刚从媒体上闻知，全国人大常委、中国政法大学校长、法学家徐显明就人权问题提出了他的新见解，他将人权的发展分为四个阶段，前三个阶段分别是自由权本位的人权，生存权本位的人权和发展权本位的人权。在此基础上，徐显明提出了所谓的“第四代人权”，即“和谐权”，并试图“以和谐精神超越传统三代人权的对抗精神”。这一番高论，有着许多人权知识上的疾患，不得不给它瞧治一番。

从人权的历史来看，从来就不存在一个代际之说，人权不分代，也无从断代。我相信就是提出者自己都很难圆融地从时间上划出三个人权时代。从英国最早的“大宪章”到美国的“独立宣言”，从法国的“人权宣言”到联合国的“世界人权宣言”，它们对人权的主张，有着基本相同的诉求，从来没有以某一种权利为本位的价值偏重或偏废。1215年的六十三条“大宪章”，第一条就是强调教会根据宪章享有的自由和权利不受干扰和侵犯，所谓“下面附列之各项自由给予余等王国内一切自由人民”，这里的各项自由就包括作为生存权的财产权及其他。1776年的“独立宣言”这样表述自己的宗旨：“我们认为下述真理是不言而喻的，人人生而平等，造物主赋予他们若干不可让与的权利，其中包括生存权、自由权和追求幸福的权利”。这三种权利没有权重上的区别。不妨再看1789年法国“人权宣言”第二条：“任何政治结合的目的都在于保存人的自然的和不可动摇的权利。这些权利就是自由、财产、安全和反抗压迫。”待至1948年联合国通过的“世界人权宣言”，同样以并列的口吻声称：“人人有权享有生命、自由和人身安全”（第三条）。借以上的机会，我们等于重温了一次人权史，我们没有发现什么第一代的自由，第二代的生存，第三代的发展。尤其是“发展”，由于它的指向模糊，我们甚至没有在上述文本中发现这个词，它纯然是中国语境中根据自己需要出现的词汇。同样，“和谐”进入人权，也是人权本土化的试探。但，问题在于，如果人权三代说根本不成立，也就不会有所谓的“第四代人权”。

从人权的知识理路上看，它之所以不能分代际，是因为这样的划分意味着割裂。如果以生存权为本位，则意味着自由权的旁落。生存第一，自由让步，事实上，我们曾经正是这样以人权说事。但，我们知道，人的权利是复数不是单数，它是一个不断发展的有机整体，不可能一会儿以这个为“本”，一会儿又以那个为“位”。在英国大宪章中，“自由”就表示“自由产业”，即土地所有者有权拥有自己的土地以及自己的家乡法庭，你说这是自由权、还是生存权？许多权利原本就是互文的。因此，上述“代”以为先后的“自由权本位”和“生存权本位”在逻辑上站不住脚。殊不知，人权概念中，从来就没有那么多的本位，如果要有，也只有一个本位，即“人”。这个“人”，不是抽象的概念，而是具体的个人。如果人本位即“个人本位”，那么，自由、生存等是且仅是个人本位上的一系列的价值诉求。它们各自可以成为一种价值，但却无以成为本位。另外，人权的发展，也不是什么本位上的轮替，而是数量上的增容，比如，随着现代文明的发展，“隐私权”则日益成为人权家族中的后起之秀。

那么，和谐是否可以成为人权呢？可以看到，和谐在“和谐权”那里，指的人与人、人与国家、人与自然之间的关系状态。也就是说，“和谐”这个词只能用于人际之间，它表示的是人与对象的一种关系，不能也无以用于单纯的个人。但，我们知道，人权作为个人权利，它的各项诉求都是针对个人的，也必须针对个人。自由是个人的自由，生存也是个人的生存。如果把和谐作为个人的权利，试问，什么叫个人的和谐呢？针对个人而言，如果只是他自己的话，和谐这个词又有什么意义呢？可见，和谐可以作为一项社会目标，却无以成为个人权利。在权利的家族谱系中，永远也不会有“和谐权”这一说，因为它不通，至少它混淆了当年严复翻译《论自由》时所称谓的“群己之权界”。