首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished
admin
2015-10-21
82
问题
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlin’s letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page.
A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlin’s centenary year—he lived from 1909 to 1997—his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine.
Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlin’s professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public servants, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu.
Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis in 1956 he writes to the wife of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown "great moral splendour". The next letter, to Berlin’s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action "childish folly". His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Strawson, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial. Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents that his work is rot.
Mr. Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those Berlin wrote in 1946-1960. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection of old and new tributes, The Book of Isaiah, also edited by the tireless Mr. Hardy, partly answers both questions.
Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlin’s gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas.
Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others(negative liberty)is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential(positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong.
But perhaps Berlin’s strongest conviction was that the basic commitments—to friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achievement, nation and principle—clash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically attempt to subordinate some concerns to others.
The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in these letters. In personal form, that third conviction—that people are to be taken in full, not in formulae—runs throughout, and was surely one source of Berlin’s charm. More volumes of letters are to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument. He was an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays.
The last paragraph implies that Berlin’s letters______.
选项
A、present a different image of Berlin
B、reflect conflicts among Berlin’s three convictions
C、are not the best source to learn Berlin’s thought
D、reveal flaws in Berlin’s philosophical theory
答案
C
解析
推断题。该段最后一句开头的“but”表示语义的转折,并强调伯林的首要角色是思想家,要研究学习他的思想,最好的依据是他的论文,他的书信是无法替代这一作用的,故[C]为正确答案。文章第一段表明伯林的信中体现了他的恶念、智趣与人性洞察力,但并未强调信件揭示出伯林形象的另一面,故排除[A];文中也未提及伯林的三个核心信念之间的矛盾,或者他的哲学学说中存在什么缺陷,故排除[B]和[D]。
转载请注明原文地址:https://www.kaotiyun.com/show/NXKO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Thecause"ofthecrisisbetweenAmericaandIsraelisthat
随机试题
水冲脉见于
奥苏伯尔认为先行组织者可分为()。
右手定则中,大拇指所指的方向是()的方向。
关于乳腺脂肪瘤声像图特点,不包括
发现艾滋病时,城镇应当发出报告的时间是发现艾滋病时,农村应当发出报告的时间是
甲公司欠乙公司货款100万元、丙公司货款50万元。2009年9月,甲公司与丁公司达成意向,拟由丁公司兼并甲公司。乙公司原欠丁公司租金80万元。下列哪些表述是正确的?(2009年卷三72题)
化疗药物静脉注射时有溢出,下列处理哪项应禁忌?()
如图所示,在xOy平面内,y轴左侧存在竖直向上的匀强电场,场强大小为E=4×10-3V/m,y轴右侧存在垂直于xOy平面的磁场,磁场区域以MN为界分为Ⅰ、Ⅱ两部分,MN与x轴夹角θ=60°,相交于P点,OP=16cm。位于第二象限的粒子发射源S,沿x轴正向
个别语言学
A.旁边B.同事C.以为D.斤E.马上F.方便A:你觉得应该选择什么样的生活环境?B:还是大城市好啊!去哪里都很()。
最新回复
(
0
)