丹尼斯达顿解释达尔文主义的美的理论 中英文对照

丹尼斯达顿解释达尔文主义的美的理论

Delighted to be here and..uh, to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. 很高兴来到这里，与大家探讨我至为关心的一个主题，那就是“美”。

I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. 我研究艺术与审美哲学，事实上，这是我的工作。我想在理性，哲学，以及心理学层面上的理解，“美”的体验究竟是什么，那些感知是能被描述出来的，以及人们在尝试理解它的过程中犯了什么错误。

Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. I mean just think of the sheer variety----a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy", movies like "The Wizard of Oz", or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Dear Rosenkavalier", a stunning match winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh "Starry Night", a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy. 这是个很复杂的问题，部分原因是因为我们认为“美”的事物是如此的不同。想想一下这高度的多元性，婴儿的脸蛋，柏辽兹所作的“哈罗德在意大利”，像“绿野仙踪”这样的影片，或者契诃夫的作品，加利福尼亚中部的风景，北斋眼中的富士山，“玫瑰骑士”，世界杯足球赛中的一场漂亮的决胜赛，梵高的“星空”，一部简奥斯汀的小说，弗雷德阿斯泰尔在舞台上起舞。这一简单地列表中包含了人类自身，自然景观，艺术作品和专业活动。很难用一个解释就说清楚所有这些事物中所存在的“美”。

I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. And we get it, not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding. And you know who I mean----Charles Darwin. 然而，我能给大家体会一下我认为迄今为止我们所含有的最有力的关于“美”的理论。这一理论不是来自艺术哲学家，也不是来自后现代艺术理论家或是很有名的艺术评论家。不是，这一理论来自一位饲养藤壶、昆虫和鸽子的专家。你们知道我说的是谁------查尔斯达尔文。

Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question what is beauty? 当然，很多人认为他们已经知道了关于这个问题的正确答案，什么是美？

It's in the eye of the beholder. It's whatever moves you personally. Or, as some people----especially academic----prefer, beauty is in the culturally-conditioned eye of the beholder. People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. 美是观者的主观感受，它是那些让你感动的东西。或者说，如一些人------尤其是学院派的人------推崇的，美存在于处在文化环境中的观者的眼中。人们都会同意绘画、电影或音乐是美妙的。这是会因为他们的文化决定了统一的审美品味。对自然美景和对艺术作品的品味能轻而易举跨越不同文化。

Beethoven is adores in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. Or just think about American jazz or American movies----they go everywhere. There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values. How can we explain this universality? 贝多芬在日本受到推崇，秘鲁人喜爱日本木版画，印加雕刻则被英国博物馆视若珍宝，莎士比亚的作品被译成地球上各种主要语言。再想下美国爵士乐或美国电影------他们随处可见。这些艺术之间有许多不同，但也包含着普世的，跨越文化的审美愉悦和审美价值。我们如何解释这一普世性呢？

The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds. By the actins of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, for where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gather bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries. 最佳答案存在于对我们艺术和审美品味的达尔文主义进化过程的重新构建的尝试中。我们需要进行逆向组建我们当前的艺术品味和爱好并解释它们是如何被铭刻在我们思想中的。通过我们在史前，很可能是在我们完全进化成人类的“更新世”环境中，以及在我们在进化过程中所处的社会环境中的活动。这种逆向重建能从史前的人类记录中有所启发。我指的是化石、洞穴绘画等等。并且，应该考虑到生存到19世纪和20世纪的与世隔绝的狩猎族群的审美情趣。

Now, I, personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty. With its emotional intensity and pleasure belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. 我个人确信任何强烈而令人愉悦的“美”的体验都属于我们进化之后的人类心理的一部分。美的体验是整个达尔文主义适应过程中的一个成分。美是一种适应性效果，我们在艺术娱乐的创作与享受中将其延伸并强化。

As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. The first of these is natural selection----that's random mutation and selective retention----along with our basic anatomy and physiology----the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. 正如大家可能知道的，进化有两个主要的机制。第一个是自然选择------这是随机的基因突变和选择性保留------与我们基本解剖学和生理学结构一起------如胰腺、眼睛或指甲的进化。自然选择解释了许多本能性的恐惧和反感，比如腐肉的可怕气味，比如对蛇的惧怕或站在悬崖边上的恐惧。

Natural selection also explains pleasures----sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs. The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. It did not evolve for natural survival. In fact, it goes against natural survival. No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. It's quite a familiar story. It's women who actually push history forward. Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. He actually used that word. Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interesting or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. 自然选择也解释了愉悦------性愉悦，对糖、脂肪和蛋白质的喜爱，这反过来解释了许多广受欢迎的食物，从成熟的果实到巧克力糖和烤排骨。进化的另一大原则是性选择，它的运作则大相径庭，孔雀那华丽的尾巴就是最著名的例子。这不是为了自然生存而进化出来的。实际上，这与自然生存相违背。不，孔雀的尾巴是雌孔雀交配选择的结果。这是个大家耳熟能详的故事。实际上是女性推动了历时的前进。顺便说一句，达尔文本人也毫不怀疑孔雀的尾巴在雌孔雀眼中是美丽的。他事实上用过“美”这个词。现在，把这些牢记在心，我们可以确定美的体验是进化用来激发和维持兴趣、魅力甚至是痴迷的方式之一，是为了鼓励我们做出最有利于生存和繁衍的决策。

Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak. I mean, you can't expect to eat and adaptively beneficial landscape. It would hardly do to your baby or your lover. So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them. Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. 可以说，美是自然用来间接运作的方式，人们并不指望可以吃一个利于适应性的风景。也不会吃你的孩子或你的爱人。因此，进化的方式是让他们看起来赞，让他们散发出一种吸引力，让你仅仅是看着他们就觉得超爽的。想一下简单且重要的审美愉悦的来源，美丽风景的吸引力。

People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copes of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence and water directly in 全世界在完全不同的文化背景下的人们都倾向于某种特定的风景，这种风景恰巧与我们进化而来的更新纪大草原相似。今天这类风景在日历中、明信片中、高尔夫球场设计和公共公园中海油挂在起居室中的镶金画框中找到。从纽约到新西兰都能看到。这是一种有点像哈德逊河画派的风景图，描绘了开阔的原野上低低的草地点缀着些许树木，顺便说一下，通常这些树开叉离地面比较低，也就是说，如果有紧急情况，你可以爬到这些树上，风景中会在视野可见范围内能直接看到水流，或是远处的黛青色暗示着水的存在，指明有动物或鸟类盛

view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally----get this----a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. 名的迹象还有各种不同的绿色植物。最后------还有这个------一条小径，或是一条路，也许是河岸或是海岸，延伸向远方，几乎就是在邀请你沿着它走下去。

This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience. But , someone might argue, that's natural beauty. How about artistic beauty? Isn't that exhaustively cultural? 这种类型的风景大家一致公认是很漂亮的，甚至生活在没有这种风景的人们也是这样认为的。理想的热带稀疏大草原风景是最显著的例证之一，在世界各地的人都能找到有相似的视觉体验的美。但有人也许会争辩，那是自然美。艺术的美又如何呢？那难道不是纯粹的文化影响吗？

No, I don't think it is. And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are he stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative skills are actuality much older than that. Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifact are older than this. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. 不，我不这么认为。再次，我们回到史前，聊聊史前的一些事。普遍认为，最早的人类艺术品是极富技巧的洞穴画，我们都再到从拉斯科洞窟到萧伟洞窟。萧伟洞窟大约有3万2千年的历史，其中还有同一时期的一些小的、写实的妇女和动物的雕像。但和艺术和装饰技巧存在实际要更早些。漂亮的贝壳项链，看起来就像是艺术品和手工艺品，还有赭色的人体绘画，远在10万年前就存在了。但史前最酷人工制品比这些还要早。我印象中是被称为阿舍利手斧的手工制品。

The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. They go back about two and a half million years. These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, but often in, what are to our eyes, an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. These Acheulian hand axes----they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century----have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. 最古老的石质工具是在东非的奥杜威峡谷发现的石斧。它的历史主要追溯到两百五十万年前。这类粗糙的工具存在了数千个世纪，直到大约一百四十万年前，直立人开始打磨单个的薄石刀片，有时是椭圆形的，但通常，在我们的眼中，是醒目的对称的尖叶子形或泪滴形。这些阿舍利手斧------名称取自法国的圣啊舍瓦，这些手斧是19世纪在那儿发现的------出土了数千件，散布在亚洲、欧洲和非洲，几乎遍布每一处直立人或者匠人到过的地方。

Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made for butchering animals. And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today. So what were these ancient----I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar. What were these artifacts for? The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. 这些手斧众多的数量表明它们不是用于屠宰动物。更复杂的是当你考虑到，不像其他更新世的工具，在这些手斧精美脆弱的刀刃边缘找不到任何磨损的痕迹。而且它们中的一些，无论还用在屠宰什么动物上，都太大了点。它们的对称性，和引人注意的材料还含有，尤其是，它们那精细的做工对我们来说非常美丽，即使在今天也是如此。因此这些古老的------我是说，它们是古老的，异域的，但同时它们也是我们熟悉的这些人工制品的用途是什么？已有的最佳答案是它们就是已知最早的艺术品，从实用工具转变成迷人的审美对象，它们那优雅的形状和精湛的工艺让人凝望深思。

Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history----tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call fitness signals----that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities----intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased these status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. You know, it's an old line, but it has been shown to work---- "Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes." except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact. 手斧标志了人类历史上进化的而进步------从实用工具到审美对象就好像达尔文主义者所说的适应性信号，这就是说，它展示出了类似孔雀尾巴的用途，只是与毛发和羽毛不同，手斧是有意识的精巧制品。制作精良的手斧，表明了富有魅力的个人品质------智力，精细的动作控制，规划能力，责任心，有时还有能得到稀有材料的能力。经过千万代的传承，这样的技巧提供了制作者的地位并比那些能力差的人赢得了更多繁衍后代的优势。这是一句很古老的话了，但是现在仍然能起作用------让我们到洞里去，这样我就能给你看我的手斧了。当然，有趣的是，我们无法确认这样的观点是如何转播的，因为制作这些物品的直立人没有语言，这很难理解，但这也是难以置信的事实。

This object was made by a hominid ancestor----Homo erectus or Homo ergaster----between 50 and 100,000 years before language. Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens----as they were then 这一物品时在语言出现之前的5万年前至10万年前由原始人类祖先------直立人或匠人------制作出来的。延绵超过100万年手斧传统，是人类和原始人历史上最长时间的艺术传统。在手斧世代结束的时候，智人------最终以此来称呼他们------毫无疑问的找到了相互娱乐的新方

called, finally----were doubtless you know, finding new ways, to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling, jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. Yes, hairstyling----I insist on that. For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well. 法，谁知道呢，通过将笑话，讲故事、跳舞或美发。是的，美发------我坚持这点。对我们现代人来说，精湛的技术用于在小说和电影中创造想象中的世界，用音乐、绘画和舞蹈来表达强烈的情感。但尽管如此，这种古人的基本品质保留在我们的审美渴望中：我们在技巧性表现中发现的美。从拉斯科洞窟到罗浮宫再到卡耐基音乐厅，人类对艺术中的精湛技巧有种自发的永恒的欣赏。我们在绝世制作的事物中发现美。

So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it's deep in our minds. It's a gift, handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists. Thank you. 因此，下次你经过陈列着切成泪滴形的漂亮宝石的珠宝店橱窗时，不要太肯定，这只是你所接收到的文化影响了你，告诉你闪闪发光的珠宝师美丽的。你的祖先也很喜欢这形状，并在制作这一形状所需技能中发现了美，这甚至发生在他们能把他们的爱付诸文字之前。美是存在于观者的眼中么？不，它深深地在我们的思想中。它是一种天赋，来自于我们远祖的智慧和丰富的情感生活。我们对图像、对艺术中情感的表达、对音乐与夜空的美妙的强烈的反应将与我们同在，与我们的后代同在，只要人类还存在着。谢谢大家。