'Useless' Knowledge '无用的'知识
By Bertrand Russell
Francis Bacon, a man who rose to eminence by betraying his friends, asserted, no doubt as one of the ripe lessons of experience, that ‘knowledge is power’. But this is not true of all knowledge. Sir Thomas Browne wished to know what song the sirens sang, but if he had ascertained this it would not have enabled him to rise from being a magistrate to being High Sheriff of his county. The sort of knowledge that Bacon had in mind was that which we call scientific. In emphasising the importance of science, he was belatedly carrying on the tradition of the Arabs and the early Middle Ages, according to which knowledge consisted mainly as astrology, alchemy, and pharmacology, all of which were branches of science. A learned man was one who, having mastered these studies, had acquired magical powers. In the early eleventh century, Pope Silvester II, for no reason except that he read books, was universally believed to be a magician in league with the devil. Prospero, who in Shakespeare’s time was a mere phantasy, represented what had been for centuries the generally received conception of a learned man, so far at least as his powers of sorcery were concerned. Bacon believed—rightly, as we now know—that science could provide a more powerful magician’s wand than any that had been dreamed of by the necromancers of former ages.
英国一位靠出卖朋友而声名大噪的人——弗兰西斯·培根曾说：“知识就是力量。”这无疑是一句成熟的经验总结。托马斯·布朗爵士曾想弄清希腊神话中的海妖究竟唱什么歌，然而即使他确实清楚了，也不能帮他从一个地方长官提升为国家的高级行政长官。培根心目中的知识是指我们所说的科学知识。在强调科学的重要性时，他陈腐地承继阿拉伯和中世纪早期的传统，把知识看作主要由占星学、炼金术和药物学组成，这些都是科学的分支。一位精通这些学科的学者就是获得魔术般力量的人。11 世纪初，教皇西尔维斯特二世除了读些书外，并没有别的理由，就被普遍地看作是一个与魔鬼结盟的魔术师。普罗斯帕罗，在莎士比亚的时代只是一个虚构的人物，但几个世纪以来却代表着人们普遍接受的学者的概念，至今就其法力而言是人们所关注的。培根相信——正确地说，就如现在我们所知道的——科学能够提供比从前巫师任何幻梦还更有力的魔术师的魔杖。
The renaissance, which was at its height in England at the time of Bacon, involved a revolt against the utilitarian conception of knowledge. The Greeks had acquired a familiarity with Homer, as we do with music hall songs, because they enjoyed him, and without feeling that they were engaged in the pursuit of learning. But the men of the sixteenth century could not begin to understand him without first absorbing a very considerable amount of linguistic erudition. They admired the Greeks, and did not wish to be shut out from their pleasures; they therefore copied them, both in reading the classics and in other less avowable ways. Learning, in the renaissance, was part of the joie de vivre, just as much as drinking or love-making. And this was true not only of literature, but also of sterner studies. Everyone knows the story of Hobbes’s first contact with Euclid: opening the book, by chance, at the theorem of Pythagoras, he exclaimed, ‘By God, this is impossible’, and proceeded to read the proofs backwards until, reaching the axioms, he became convinced. No one can doubt that this was for him a voluptuous moment, unsullied by the thought of the utility of geometry in measuring fields.
培根在世时，英国的文艺复兴达到高峰，它包含一种对功利主义的知识概念的反抗。希腊人之熟悉荷马，有如我们熟悉音乐厅的歌曲，由于他们欣赏荷马，而不觉得是在忙于追求学问。但16世纪的人若不首先具备相当的语言学知识，就不能着手研究荷马。他们敬佩希腊人，并且又不愿意置身在他们的欢乐之外；因此在读那些古典著作时，他们总在仿效希腊人。在文艺复兴时，学习是生活乐趣的一部分，如同饮酒或性爱一佯。不仅对文学是这样，对那些较严肃的学科来说也是如此。人们都知道霍布斯首次接触欧几里德几何学的故事：一次他偶然翻开书，读到毕达哥拉斯定理，他大声叫道：“上帝，这是不可能的。”于是回头继续读它的证明，直至读到公理时，他才信服了。没有人会怀疑，对霍布斯来说，这一时刻如同耽迷酒色，然而想到几何学在测量土地中的效用，这种情绪被纯化了。
It is true that the renaissance found a practical use for the ancient languages in connection with theology. One of the earliest results of the new feeling for classical Latin was the discrediting of the forged decretals and the donation of Constantine. The inaccuracies which were discovered in the Vulgate and the Septuagint made Greek and Hebrew a necessary part of the controversial equipment of Protestant divines. The republican maxims of Greece and Rome were invoked to justify the resistance of Puritans to the Stuarts and of Jesuits to monarchs who had thrown off allegiance to the Pope. But all this was an effect, rather than a cause, of the revival of classical learning, which had been in full swing in Italy for nearly a century before Luther. The main motive of the renaissance was mental delight, the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers.
确实，文艺复兴发现了古典语言与神学相关的实际用途。新感受到的古典拉丁文的最初成果之一，就是不再相信编造的教皇教条和康士坦丁的捐赠。在拉丁文圣经和希腊译文圣经之间出现的偏差，使得希腊文和希伯来文成为新教神学家准备争论的一个必要组成部分。希腊与罗马的共和主义被用来证明清教徒与斯图亚特王朝、耶稣会会员与那些不再忠顺于教皇的君主之间的对抗是合理的。但所有这一切都是路德以前在意大利将近一个世纪自由发展的古典学术之复兴的结果，而不是其原由。文艺复兴的主要动机是精神上的欢愉，是复兴在艺术和思维中曾经出现过、但后来由于无知和迷信蒙住了我们的心灵而失落的那种丰富而自由的精神。