Introduction: “Germany” and German philosophy
导言：“德意志”与德国哲学
In 1763, one of the many contenders for the title “the first world war” – in this case, the “Seven Years War” – was concluded. Its worldwide effects were obvious – France, besides being saddled with enormous financial losses as a result of the war, was in effect driven out of North America and India by Britain, never to recover its territories there – but, curiously, the war had started and mostly been fought on “German” soil, and one of its major results was to transform (or perhaps just to confirm) the German Land of Prussia into a major European power. It is hard to say, though, what it meant for “Germany,” since, at that point, “Germany,” as so many historians have pointed out, did not exist except as a kind of shorthand for the German-speaking parts of the gradually expiring “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” Once a center of commerce and trade in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, “Germany,” in that shorthand sense, had by the eighteenth century become only a bit player on the European scene, long since having lost much of its economic vitality as trade shifted to the North Atlantic following the voyages of discovery and the intensive colonization efforts in what Europeans described as the “New World.” After suffering huge population losses in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), “Germany” found itself divided by the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 into a series of principalities – some relatively large, some as small as a village – that were held together only by the more-or-less fiction of belonging to and being protected by the laws and powers of the Holy Roman Empire (which as the old joke had it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, and which was for that matter neither a state, a confederation, or a treaty organization but a wholly sui generis political entity difficult to describe in any political terms familiar to us now). For a good bit of its early modern history, “Germany” did not even denote a cultural entity; if anything, its major feature was its intense religious division into Protestant and Catholic areas, with all the wars and rivalries that followed from that division. Neither Protestant nor Catholic “Germany” thought of themselves as sharing any kind of joint culture; at most they shared a language (of sorts) and a certain accidental geographical proximity.
一
1763年，作为“第一次世界战争”称谓竞争者之一的“七年战争”结束了。这场战争在世界范围内的影响是显而易见的——法国除了因战争而遭受巨大的财政损失之外，还被英国赶出了北美和印度，并且再也没能恢复其领土——但奇怪的是，这场战争开始于并主要是在“德意志”境内进行的，其中一个重要结果是，德意志的普鲁士国家转变为（或者可以说仅仅是被确认为）欧洲列强之一。不过，很难说这对于“德意志”来说意味着什么，因为正如许多历史学家已经指出的，在那时，“德国”尚不存在，所谓的“德意志”不过是逐渐衰落的“德意志民族神圣罗马帝国”中讲德语的那部分的简称。至18世纪，曾经在中世纪和文艺复兴时期作为商贸中心的“德意志”（简称意义上的），已经变成欧洲舞台上的一个小角色。随着发现欧洲人所称的“新大陆”的航海活动以及在这片土地上的积极殖民，贸易转移到北大西洋，“德意志”早已大大丧失其经济活力。在三十年（1618—1648年）战争中遭受了巨大的人口损失之后，按照1648年《威斯特伐利亚和约》的条款，“德意志”被分割为一系列的诸侯邦国，它们有的相对大些，有的则和村庄一样小。这些诸侯邦国只是因名义上属于并受神圣罗马帝国的权力与法律保护而聚合在一起，而后者不过是一个古老的笑话，它既不神圣，也不罗马，更非帝国，因此它不是一个国家、联盟或条约组织，而完全是一个我们今天的政治术语难以描述的、完全自成一类的政治实体。从其早期现代历史来看，“德意志”很大程度上甚至并不是指一个文化整体；恰恰相反，它的主要特征是，在宗教上分裂为新教地区与天主教地区，所有的战争和对抗都源自这一分2裂。无论是新教的“德意志”人还是天主教的“德意志”人，都不认为他们共享一种共同文化；他们至多共享了一种（各式各样的）语言，并且只是偶然地在地理上相邻。
“Germany” during that period must thus be put into quotation marks, since for all practical purposes there simply was no such thing as “Germany” at the time. “Germany” became Germany only in hindsight.
因此，在那一时期，“德意志”必然会被置于引号当中，因为那时实际上根本就不存在“德国”。“德意志”变成德国只是后来的事。
Yet, starting in 1781, “German” philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy and to change the shape of how not only Europeans but practically the whole world conceived of itself, of nature, of religion, of human history, of the nature of knowledge, of politics, and of the structure of the human mind in general. From its inception, it was controversial, always hard to understand, and almost always described as German – one thinks of William Hazlitt’s opening line in his 1816 review of a book by Friedrich Schlegel: “The book is German” – and it is clear that the word, “German,” sometimes was used to connote depth, sometimes to connote simply obscurity, and sometimes to accuse the author of attempting speciously to give “depth” to his works by burying it in obscurantist language. Yet the fact that there was no “Germany” at the time indicates how little can be explained by appealing to its being “German,” as if being “German” might independently explain the development of “German” philosophy during this period. If nothing else, what counted as “German” was itself up for grabs and was being developed and argued about by writers, politicians, publicists, and, of course, philosophers, during this period.
然而，自 1781年开始，德国哲学在一段时期内统治着欧洲哲学，它不仅改变了欧洲人甚至实际上也改变了整个世界关于自身、 自然、宗教 、人类历史、知识本质 、政治以及一般人类理智结构的理解。德国哲学从一开始就是备受争议的，它总是难以被理解，并且几乎总是被称为德意志的——比如1816年威廉•哈兹里特在评论弗里德里希•施莱格尔的著作时 ，一开篇就写道：“这本书是德意志的”——并且清楚的是， “德意志的”这个词，有时候用于意指深层含义，有时候仅用于意指表面含义，而有时候则用于指责作者试图通过将某种“深层含义”掩藏在反启蒙主义语言中，以华而不实的方式将这种含义赋予自己的作品⑴。不过 ，“德国”在当时并不存在的事实表明，几乎不可能诉诸它是“德意志的 ” （ itsbeing “German”）来做解释，似乎 “是德意志的 ” （ being “German”）这一点不能独立地解释这一时期德国哲学的发展。如果没有别的什么含义，那么在这一时期，被视作 “德意志的”东西就是那种人人随意可用的东西 ，是由作家、政治家、宣传员，当然还有哲学家所发展和争辩的东西。
Nonetheless, the questions those “German” philosophers asked themselves during this period remain our own questions. We have in the interim become perhaps a bit more sophisticated as to how we pose them, and we have in the interim learned a good bit about what kinds of iterations or what kinds of answers to their problems carry what types of extra problems with them. Their questions, though, remain our questions, and thus “German” philosophy remains an essential part of modern philosophy. What, then, was the relation of “German” philosophy to “Germany”?
但是，“德意志的”哲学家们在这一时期所提出的问题，依然是我们自己所必须面对的。在此期间，我们在如何讨论这些问题方面也许已经变得更有经验，已经更为清楚地知道对他们的问题的何种重复或回答又带来了新问题。尽管如此，他们的问题依然是我们的问题，因此，德国哲学依然是现代哲学的本质部分。那么，德国哲学与#德意志”的关系是什么?
It is tempting to think of “Germany” becoming Germany because of the explosion in philosophical, literary, and scientific work that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century in that part of the world, such that “Germany” became a culturally unified Germany (or came to acknowledge itself as a cultural unity) because of and through its literary and philosophical achievements. In 1810, Madame de Stael, in her book “On Germany,” coined the idea of Germany as a land of poets and philosophers, living out in thought what they could not achieve in political reality. Thus the picture of the “apolitical” German fleeing into the ethereal world of poetry and philosophy became a staple of foreign perceptions of Germany, so much so that since that time even many Germans themselves have adopted that account of their culture.
二
思考“德意志”变为德国的过程是吸引人的，因为18世纪末，这里的哲学、文学与科学出现了知识“大爆炸”，并且由于文学和哲学的发展，“德意志”成为文化上统一的德意志（或将自己视为一个文化统一体）。1810年，斯塔尔夫人（MadamedeStael)在其著作《论德意志》中认为，德意志是诗人与哲学家的国度，诗人与哲学家在思想中实现了他们在政治现实中所不能获得的东西。因此，“不关心政治的”德意志人的印象进人诗与哲学的玄虚世界当中，这一点变成德意志之外的人的主要观感，以至于从那时起，甚至许多德意志人自己也接受了这种关于他们的文化的看法。
That view is, however, seriously misleading, if not downright false. The Germans were by no means “apolitical” during this period, nor were they practically or politically apathetic. In fact, they were experiencing a wrenching transition into modern life, and it affected how they conceived of everything. To understand German philosophy, we must remember, as Hegel said, that the truth is the whole, that ideas and social structure do not neatly separate into different compartments, and that they both belong together, sometimes fitting one another comfortably, sometimes grating against each other and instigating change – and change was indeed in the air in “Germany” at the time. To understand German philosophy is to understand, at least partially, this “whole” and why the contingent forms it took ended up having a universal significance for us. To see this, it is useful to canvas, even if only briefly, some of the problems facing “Germany” during this period, and the obvious tensions they were engendering.
然而，这种观点，即便说不是一种明显的错误，那也是一种严重的误解。在这一时期，他们绝不是“不关心政治的”，他们在实践上或政治上也不是无动于衷的[2]。实际上，他们当时正经历着向现代生活的剧烈转变，而这影响了他们对所有事情的理解。为了理解德国哲学，我们必须谨记，如黑格尔所言，真理是整体，观念和社会结构不能被截然区分为两个不同的部分，并且它们是相互从属的，有时会相互适应，而有时则会相互对抗并引发某种改变——而且“改变”在当时的“德意志”的确是流行的。为了理解德国哲学，至少要部分地理解这一“整体”以及它偶然所具有的形式为何最终对于我们来说具有普遍意义。为了明白这一点，我们可以描绘——即便仅仅是简要地——这一时期“德意志”所面对的问题，以及它们所引起的明显张力。
At the middle of the eighteenth century, “Germany” was undergoing a sharp population increase, it was experiencing a changeover to commercialized agriculture, and its economy was beginning to feel the first faint tugs of the expansionist forces already at work in other parts of Europe. Its political and social reality was, however, something different and quite unstable at its core. The effects of the Thirty Years War had in some areas been devastating; for example, Württemberg (Hegel’s birthplace) had declined from a population of 445,000 in 1622 to only 97,000 in 1639. The effects on the economy of the region were even worse; already battered by the shift in trade to the North Atlantic, the German economy had simply withered under the effects of the war. The war had also shifted antagonisms away from purely Protestant/Catholic issues into more territorial concerns as various princes had allied against the emperor (thus throwing the efficacy and even the eventual existence of the Holy Roman Empire into question), with the result being a loss of authority for the Empire and an increase in the authority of local rulers.
18世纪中期，“德意志”正在经历着人口的快速增长和向商业化农业的转变，并且经济开始受到扩张主义力量的第一次微弱拖拽，而这种力量在欧洲其他地区也已经起作用了。然而，“德意志”的政治现实和社会现实，就其核心而言，是独特的并且是十分不稳定的。在部分地区，三十年战争的影响是毁灭性的；例如，符腾堡（黑格尔的出生地）的人口数，从1622年的445000锐减到1639年的97000ws对这一区域的经济的影响更是糟糕；由于贸易转移到北大西洋，德意志的经济已经遭受了打击，在战争的影响下甚至濒临崩溃。战争也使得对抗脱离了纯粹新教/天主教主题，转变为联合反对皇帝的各个邦国君主对于领土的关切（因此神圣罗马帝国的效力，甚至最终其是否存在都是成问题的了），由此，帝国丧失了权威，而各诸侯邦国的统治者们的权威则得以加强。
During that period, local princes came to require more money to maintain the kinds of courtly life for which the French had set the model (in addition to taking on the military expenses they believed themselves required to do); many German princes tried their best to emulate the royal court at Versailles, demanding the right to sponsor balls, build lavish palaces, maintain a set of courtiers, subsidize courtly arts, and so forth. Courtly life came with a price, and those princes were thus led to look for more efficient ways to govern their domains, raise taxes, and promote economic growth. This resulted in the growing demand (at least at first) for a relatively efficient bureaucracy trained in the latest management techniques to administer princely affairs effectively. To that end, the rulers looked to their universities – of which Germany had many because of the number of different princes who each wished to be sure that his university was turning out the right clerics in the right orthodoxy and the right administrators to manage his domain.
在那一时期，各邦国君主开始索取更多的金钱，来保持像法国人那样的宫廷生活（除了担负军事开支之外，他们相信自己需要这么做）；许多德意志邦国君主尽可能地效仿凡尔赛宫，举行舞会，建设奢靡的宫殿，供养大批朝臣，资助宫廷艺术，等等。宫廷生活是需要大量开支的，因此那些君主们就开始寻找更为高效的方式来控制他们的领地，征收税赋，并推动经济增长。这日益要求（至少在最初）一个相对高效的官僚机构，它能够以最新的管理技术来有效地管理邦国事务。最终，统治者们看到了大学一^德意志境内之所以有很多大学，是因为各个邦国君主都希望能够确定，他自己的大学培养出了持有正统观点的合格牧师和能够管理他的领地的合格管理者。
Those pressures, in turn, helped to pave the way for the gradual introduction of Enlightenment thought into Germany, as princes became more and more convinced by their officials that only with the most modern, up-to-date ideas about society and government was it possible for them to pursue their new ends of absolutist, courtly rule. However, the same pressures also helped both to underwrite and intensify the tendencies for these rulers to govern without any regard to a rule of law, and to become increasingly hostile to all those elements of tradition and inherited right that their enlightened advisors were telling them inhibited their raising the ever-larger amounts of money required to run their many mini-courts of their many mini-Versailles. They were not, however, particularly interested in fostering economic growth that might set up independent centers of authority, nor were their officials particularly interested in other groups acquiring more social status or powers than themselves. That set of circumstances severely restricted the possibilities for economic growth and for the creation of an independent, entrepreneurial middle class. At the same time, therefore, that the new Enlightenment ideas were blowing in from Britain and France, the population was on the rise (for example, by , Württemberg had risen back to a population of ,), and the economy, although steadily improving, was unable to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers. Thus, the economy simply could not offer sufficient employment opportunities to all the young men who were going to university or seminary to train in those Enlightenment ideas, with the hopes of finding a suitable career afterwards for themselves.
邦国君主们越来越相信他们的官员的如下说法，即只有凭借最现代的、日新月异的社会理念和政府理念，才能实现他们的专制统治的新目标，才能实现宫廷统治，此时，那些压力反过来就为逐渐将启蒙思想引人德意志开辟了道路。然而，同样是这些压力，它们也有助于保障与强化这些统治者无视法律来进行统治，并有助于他们逐渐敌视传统和继承下来的权利等所有要素，他们的启蒙了的顾问们告诉他们，这些要素妨碍了他们对财富的更大规模的索取，而这种索取是为了维护他们那为数众多的迷你凡尔赛宫。但是，他们对于推动经济增长（它有可能建立起独立的权威中心）并不怎么特别感兴趣，他们的官员对其他群体获得比自己更多的社会地位或权力也不怎么特别感兴趣。这种环境严重地限制了经济增长的可能性，以及出现独立的、创业型的中间阶层的可能性。因而，从英法传来新的启蒙理念、人口出现增长（例如，到1740年，符腾堡的人口数已经恢复到了472000)的同时，经济虽然稳步增长，但却不能应对急速扩张的人口[4]。因此，经济不能为所有那些打算进人大学或神学院的年轻人提供充分的就业机会，他们进人大学或神学院是想受到那些启蒙理念的训练，并希望将来能够找到一份合适的职业。
This was made all the worse by the fact that, after the Thirty Years War, employment in any of the learned professions had in effect become state employment, which meant that all such employment came to depend virtually completely on patronage from above. (There was only a handful of non-aristocratic young men who could count on a family fortune or an independent career to sustain them outside of state employment.) However, since the Enlightenment doctrines themselves that these young men were taught and trained to implement, inherently favored bringing unity, order, and rationalization into the administration of things, the bureaucracy staffed by them found itself more and more inherently in tension with the arbitrariness of princely power, which, of course, remained the sole source of the patronage that employed the bureaucrats in the first place. The administrators were, in effect, being trained to bite the hand that fed them, and, no surprise, they generally preferred the food offered to whatever pleasures biting and subsequent unemployment might bring them. That did not remove the tension, but it made the choice fairly clear.
让事情变得更糟的是，三十年战争之后，国家实际i掌控了所有需要学识的职位的聘用，这就意味着，所有这类职位将几乎完全依赖于上层的资助。（只有屈指可数的非贵族出身的年轻人能够依靠家族财富或独立职业而外在于国家聘用体制。）然而，启蒙运动使这些年轻人明白，他们之所以受教育、受训练，本质上是为了使对事物的管理变得统一、有序与合理，由此，他们所组成的官僚机构同君主权力的专断恣意之间的矛盾愈益尖锐，而后者当然一直是最初聘用这些官僚的唯一资助来源。实际上，管理者被训练成“恩将仇报”之人，而且并不奇怪的是，他们4般来说更愿意接受统治者的供养，而不喜欢“恩将仇报”以及随后而来的失业所可能带来的愉悦。这并没有消除矛盾，反倒使抉择变得越发清晰了。
All of this was taking place within the completely fragmented series of political and cultural units of “Germany” at the time. To go from one area of “Germany” to another was to travel in all senses to a foreign place; as one traveled, the laws changed, the dialect changed, the clothes changed, and the mores changed; the roads were terrible, and communication between the various areas was difficult (and consequently infrequent); and one usually required a passport to make the journey. A “liberty” was still a liberty within the context of the ancien régime, that is, not a general “right” but a “privilege” to do something really quite particular – such as the privilege to use iron nails, or to collect wood from a particular preserve – and depended on the locality in which it was exercised. To be outside of a particular locale was thus to be without “rights” perhaps at all. That sense of “particularism,” of belonging to a particular locale and being enclosed within it, clashed with the emerging Enlightenment sense of rationalization and “universalism” being taught as the only means to provide the “particularist” princes with the funds needed to continue their patronage of the learned professions.
所有这些发生在政治和文化上完全彼此独立的“德意志”诸邦之中。如果从“德意志”的一个地区到另一个地区旅行，那完全就是出国；在这场旅行中，法律变了、方言变了、服饰变了，如此等等，不胜枚举；道路糟糕，不同地区之间的交往困难（并因此很少来往）；通常，一个人要想旅行的话，那他必须申请通行证。“自由”（liberty)依然是一种旧制度(araderar^^me)语境中的自由，也就是说，它还不是一种普遍“权利”，而是做某种特别的事的"特权”——例如使用铁钉的特权或从特定保护区收集木头的特权，并且依赖于它所适用地区的区域性。因此，一旦脱离了特定区域，那么就完全不可能有什么“权利”了。“特殊主义”（即属于某一特定区域并封闭于其中）的观念同新兴的启蒙运动观念发生了碰撞，后者主张，只有合理化和“普遍主义”才能为“特殊主义者”即君6主提供继续赞助有学识职位所必需的资金。
This was coupled with an equally strong sense of fragility that was underwritten on all sides of the life surrounding Germans at the time. At this time, men typically married at the age of twenty-eight and women at twenty-five, but only about half the population ever reached that age at all, and only percent of the population was over sixty-five. Increasing poverty and the threat of real (and not just metaphorical) homelessness hung over a great many “Germans,” especially the poor. In this context, local communities and families offered the only real protection from the dangers of the surrounding world, and the price was a social conformity that by the end of the eighteenth century had become stifling. The only way out seemed to be to get out, and emigration to the “New World” and to other areas of Europe (particularly, Eastern Europe or Turkey) grew during that century. In addition to all those who left for the “New World,” many others migrated from one area of Germany or Europe to another, all during a time when being outside of one’s locality made one especially vulnerable to all the various kinds of dangers that followed on being disenfranchised.
这伴随着一种相当强烈的脆弱感，这种感觉表现在当时德意志人生活的各个方面。在这时，男子通常是在28岁结婚而女子则为25岁，但是，只有大约一半人口能够达到这个年龄，并且只有4%的人口能够超过65岁。不断增长的贫穷和真实的（不仅仅是比喻意义上的）无家可归的威胁笼罩着大部分“德意志人”，特别是穷人。在这一背景下，只有本地公社和家庭才能提供免受周边世界之威胁的保护，而代价则是社会从众性(•socialconformity),到了18世纪末，_这种从众性变得令人窒息。在那个世纪，唯一的出路似乎只能是走出去，移民到“新世界”去，到欧洲其他地区去（特别是东欧或土耳其）。除了那些前往“新世界”的人以外,还有许多人从德意志或欧洲的一个地区移居到另一地区，一旦人们走出故土并丧失公民权，他们特别容易受到各种危险的威胁。
The period of the middle to the end of the eighteenth century in “Germany” was thus beset with some very fundamental tensions, if not outright contradictions, within itself. On the one hand, it was a fragmented social landscape, full of dangers, in which mortality rates were high, and which demanded a sharply delineated sense of conformity, which for many remained the only soothing presence in an otherwise precarious life, but which for others had gradually become suffocating rather than reassuring. For the aspiring bureaucrats and their children, new winds were blowing in, but little seemed to be changing in front of them. Not unsurprisingly, the old mores were breaking down even at the moment when they still seemed so firmly cemented in place; for example, both in Europe during this period and in North America, illegitimate births sharply rose as young people, frustrated with having to postpone marriage, often forced the issue by premarital pregnancy (and, as always, women ended up bearing the costs of all those pregnancies that did not effectively lead to the desired marriage). In America, the prospect of seemingly limitless new land often gave young people in that largely agrarian society a way out; a pregnancy requiring a marriage often settled the issue for reluctant parents, and the new couple could set out on their own land to make their own future together. In Germany, however, this simply was not possible, a fact that only heightened the social tensions already at work. For many, it meant dependence on family for long periods of young adulthood; for others, it gave presumed fiancés the excuse they were seeking to sidestep the responsibilities expected of them.
三
因此，18世纪中期的德意志被一些特别根本性的内外矛盾困扰着。一方面，它的社会是四分五裂的，充满了危险，死亡率居高不下，它要求上文提及的那种从众性观念，这一观念对于很多人来说，相较于其他充满危险的生活，依然是唯一舒适的生存方式，但对于另一些人来说，这种观念日益变得令人窒息而不是令人安心。胸怀抱负的官僚及其子女能够感觉到新风徐来，但在他们面前似乎并未发生什么变化。并非意料之中的是,旧俗已经崩塌，即便它们看起来依然稳固，例如：无论是这一时期的欧洲还是北美，私生子迅速增多，年轻人（他们因延迟结婚而失意）经常要面对未婚先孕的问题（并且，就像以前一样，最终是女方承担怀孕的所有花费，而这并没有给她们带来她们所渴望的婚姻）。在美国，对看似无限的新土地的预期经常能够给身处农业社会的年轻人提供出路；需以婚姻7为保障的怀孕为心有不舍的父母解决了问题，新人们能够开始在自己的土地上携手创造他们自己的未来。然而，在德意志，这根本是不可能的，这只是加剧了已经在起作用的社会矛盾。对于很多人来说，这意味着青年时期长期依赖家庭；而对于另外一些人来说，这使得假定的未婚夫（妻）找到了借口，以此回避了希望他们承担的责任。
For the burgeoning class of administrators and those who hoped tojoin their ranks, “reading clubs” sprang up everywhere, even provokingsome conservative observers to bemoan what they saw as a new illness,the “reading addiction,” Lesesucht, to which certain types of people weresupposedly especially vulnerable (typically, servants lacking the properawe of their masters, women whose mores did not fit the morals of thetime, and, of course, impressionable young students). Novels especiallygave young people the means to imagine a life different from the onethey were leading or were seemingly destined to lead, and gave olderpeople a means to discuss in their lodges and reading societies materialthat attacked arbitrary princely authority and extolled the virtues of thelearned professions in general. Travel literature – with its capacity toexercise the imagination about different ways of life – became a cult ofits own. During that period, book publishing increased at a faster rate inthe German-speaking areas of Europe than anywhere else – an indicationnot only that literacy was on the rise, but also that people were seekingmore from their books. Book publishing had fallen drastically after thedevastations of the Thirty Years War; however, as Robert Darnton haspointed out, by , the Leipzig catalog of new books had reached itsprewar figure of about , titles, by (the year, for example, ofHegel’s and Hölderlin’s births) it had grown to 1,600 titles, and by 1800,5000titles.
对于迅速成长的管理阶层以及希望加人其中的人们来说，“阅读俱乐部”如雨后春笋般涌现出来，这甚至引得某些保守的观察家惋惜地说道，他们看到了一种新的疾病——“阅读癖”而某些人是特别容易受到“感染的”（典型的是，对主人缺少敬畏之心的仆人，与当时风俗格格不人的妇人，当然还包括易受影响的年轻学生）。特别是小说，它们使得年轻人能够想象一种新生活，它不同于他们正在过的或他们命中注定要过的那种生活，并且，小说使得年长之人能够聚在小屋和阅读社团中，讨论那些抨击专制君主之权威、颂扬有学识职位之美德的材料。旅行文学一它能够训练人们去想象不同的生活方式——变成了一种自我崇拜。在这一时期，欧洲德语区的书籍出版增长速度要快于其他地区——这不仅预示着阅读能力在增长，而且预示着人们正在从书中寻找更多的东西。三十年战争的破坏导致书籍出版大幅度下降；然而，如罗伯特•达恩顿所指出的，至1764年，莱比锡新书条目已达到战前水平，约1200条，至177〇年（在这一年，黑格尔和荷尔德林出生了）则增长到1600条，在1800年已经达到了5000条⑴。
The emerging culture of the reading clubs was not “court” culture,but it was also not “popular” culture. It was the culture of an emerginggroup that did not conceive of itself as bourgeois so much as it thought ofitself as cultivated, learned, and, most importantly, self-directing. Its idealwas crystallized in the German term Bildung, denoting a kind of educated, cultivated, cultured grasp of things; a man or woman of Bildungwas not merely learned, but was also a person of good taste, who had anoverall educated grasp of the world around him or her and was thus capable of a “self-direction” that was at odds with the prevailing pressuresfor conformity. To acquire Bildung was also to be more than educated;one might become merely “educated,” as it were, passively, by learningthings by rote or by acquiring the ability to mimic the accepted opinionsof the time. To be a person of Bildung, however, required that one makeoneself into a cultivated man or woman of good taste and intelligence.The man or woman of Bildung was the ideal member of a reading club,and together they came to conceive of themselves as forming a “public,”an Öffentlichkeit, a group of people collectively and freely arriving at judgments of goodness and badness about cultural, political, and social matters. In his prize-winning essay of , Moses Mendelssohn (a key figurein the German Enlightenment) even identified Enlightenment itself with Bildung.
“阅读俱乐部”这一新兴文化并不是“宫廷”文化，但它也不是“大众”文化。它是一个新兴群体的文化，这一群体并不将自己视为贪图享受的，而是认为自己是有教养的、受过教育的，并且最重要的，是自我指导的。它的理想凝结在这个德语词当中，这个词指的是以受过教育的、有教养的、有修养的方式掌握事物；一个拥有的男人或女人，不仅仅是有学识的，而且也是一个拥有良好品味的人，能够完全以受过教育的方式掌控其周边世界，并因此能够“指导自己”，而这与先前的从众性压力是格格不人的。获得SiWurag也不仅仅是受过教育；一个人如果仅仅是“受过教育的”，那么从消极的意义上可以说，他（或她）是通过死记硬背或通过获得模仿现成观点的能力来学习的。然而，成为一个拥S有BiWwng的人所要求的是，他（或她）使自己成为一个拥有良好品味和智识的人。这个拥有的男人或女人就是一个阅读俱乐部的理想成员，他们共同确信他们组成了一个“公共领域”即一群人共同地并且自由地就文化、政治和社会事务做出善恶判断。摩西•门德尔松（德国启蒙运动的关键人物）在其1784年的获奖征文中甚至将启蒙运动本身等同于Bildung。
In that context, the ideal of Bildung easily meshed with other strainsof emotionalist religion emerging in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.The Reformation had called for a questioning of ecclesiastical authority,but, by the time the dust had settled on the wars of religion and the ThirtyYears War, it had in effect ended up only substituting one doctrinaireauthority in favor of itself and several others. The resulting settlement inGermany after the wars, which allowed local princes to determine whatwould count as the established church in their domain, had then itselfparadoxically both further undermined the kind of claim to absolute authority that the church had previously assumed for itself, and written thatkind of authority even more firmly into the social fabric. The settlementthat made a particular orthodoxy mandatory for each locality therebyonly underlined the fragmentation of Christianity, making it abundantlyclear that “Christianity” did not necessarily speak any longer with onevoice. The obvious conclusion was that determining what Christianityreally “meant” required further reflection, and, in light of that, manyChristians took Augustine’s advice and turned inward to find the “true”voice of Christianity that had been overlaid, if not silenced, by the fragmentation of the church. Many Protestant thinkers advised people thatthey would better find God’s presence and his will by looking into theirhearts, not into their theology books. (There was a corresponding movement in Catholic areas as well.) In many areas of Protestant Germany, thistook the form of what came to be known as Pietism, which extolled groupreadings of the Bible, personal and group reflection on the deliverances ofone’s “heart” as a means of self-transformation, and a focus on reformingsociety now that the Reformation had been (partially) carried out withinthe church itself. Pietism also taught people to perform a kind of selfreflection that focused on keeping diaries, discussing one’s experiences offaith with others, holding oneself to a principle, and, in short, learning tosee whether one was directing one’s life in accordance with God’s wishes.
在此语境中，BiWmg的理想很容易与德意志及欧洲其他地区新兴的情感主义宗教（emotionalistreligion)结合起来。宗教改革提倡质疑教会权威，但是，当宗教战争和三十年战争尘埃落定时，宗教改革实际上最终只是为了支持它自己和其他一些东西而取代了一个教条主义权威。德意志的战后解决方案（它允许各地君主决定在其统治区内哪种宗教能够成为国教）产生了矛盾的效果：一方面，它进一步打破了教会声称具有的、先前自己假定的绝对权威；而另一方面则正式确认，这种权威更为稳固地进入社会结构当中。这种解决方案使得一种特殊的正统对于每种区域性来说都是强制性的，因而其不过是预示着基督教的分裂，而且变得更为清楚的是，“基督教”再也没有必要只用一个声音来播撒福音。显而易见的结论是，要决定基督教之真实“意谓”，那就需要进一步的反思，并且据此，许多基督徒接受了奥古斯丁的建议，转向内心去寻求那已被遮蔽的“真实的”基督教之音，它或是沉默无声，或是被教会弄得支离破碎。许多新教思想家建议人们，要想更好地发现上帝的在场及其意志，那就要去省察内心而不是阅读神学著作。（在天主教区域也发生了类似运动。）在德意志的许多新教地区，这采取了众所周知的虔信派的形式，它颂扬对《圣经》的群体式阅读，主张将个人与群体反思对“内心”的偏离作为自我改善的方式，并倡导关注社会改革，因为宗教改革在教会内部已经(部分地）展开了。虔信派也教导人们去自我反思，这种反思集中表现为坚持写日记，与他人讨论自己的经验，坚守原则，简言之，就是要学会看9一个人是否根据上帝的意愿来指导自己的生活。
In the previous century, Leibniz had argued that, because of God’s perfection, this had to be the “best of all possible worlds,” and the notion of perfection that was embedded in Leibniz’s doctrine had itself become a bit of orthodoxy in its development and codification in Germany by Christian Wolff. The “perfections” of the world and its corresponding “harmonies” even led to the coinage of a new word – “optimism” – and, in , the Berlin Academy of Sciences awarded a prize to an essay on the theme, “All is right.” The great Lisbon earthquake that occurred shortly thereafter spurred Voltaire into lampooning the whole matter in his novel, Candide, and it became more and more difficult after that point to maintain that everything in the world was in the order it was supposed to be.
17世纪时，莱布尼茨曾主张，由于上帝是完善的，这个世界必然是“所有可能世界中最好的”。内含在莱布尼茨学说当中的这种完善观念逐渐成为一种正统，而这要归功于克里斯蒂安.沃尔夫在德意志对这种观念的发展和整理。世界的“完善”及其相应的“和谐”甚至导致了新世界的创生——“乐观主义”，并且，在1775年，柏林科学院给关于此主题的一篇征文——《一切都是对的》——颁了奖。随后不久发生的里斯本大地震促使伏尔泰写就了讽刺整件事的小说《天真汉》，并且此后，如下观点越来越站不住脚：世界中的一切都处于其所应在的秩序当中。
There was, however, more to that line of thought than mere smugassertions that the world was as it should be. Seeking God’s perfectionin the world meant reflecting on God’s love for the world, which, in turn,gradually began to undermine the gloomy picture of human nature presented by some Christian thinkers (particularly, the Calvinists) in favorof a view that held that the world’s imperfections were capable of a sortof redemption in the here and now, not in some afterlife. It was, on thatline of emerging thought, therefore the duty of Christians to reform thatworld in light of God’s love, and in order to do that, Christians had toturn away from orthodoxy, even from overly intellectualistic theologicaltreatments of Christianity, and focus on the truth “within” their “hearts”in order to realize God’s kingdom on earth. The secular Enlightenmentemphases on sympathy and empathy thus fused well with the religioussense of enacting on our own God’s love for the world by Pietist reflection, and both fit, although uncomfortably, into the notion that oneshould be directing one’s life by becoming cultivated and by holding oneself to a moral principle. The educated young men and women of the“reading clubs” and the universities thus married the ideas of Bildung asself-direction and subjectivity as self-reflection into religious feeling as selfdirection. The mixture resulted in a slightly confused but still assertivemode of self-understanding that fit at best only precariously with the fragmented, authoritarian, conformist world in which they were seeminglydestined to live.
然而，这种思路并非仅仅自以为是地断言世界是它应当所是的样子。在世界当中寻找上帝的完善意味着反思上帝对世界的爱，这反过来逐渐开始打破某些基督教思想家（特别是加尔文教派）所呈现的人类本性的阴郁形象，并有利于如下观点，即世界的瑕疵可以当下补救，而不必等到死后。因而，根据新兴的思路，基督徒的义务是根据上帝的爱来改造世界，并且，为了做到这一点，基督徒必须脱离正统，甚至大大脱离基督教的唯智主义神学，而聚焦于他们自己“内心”当中的真理，为的是在地上实现上帝之国。世俗的启蒙运动强调同情和同感，因此很好地与虔信派教徒的宗教观念——依据我们的上帝对世界的爱来行动——融合在一起，二者（虽有冲突）都符合如下观念，即一个人应当通过变得有教养、通过坚守道德原则来指导自己的生活。因此，“阅读俱乐部”以及那些在大学中受过教育的青年男女，与将历Wimg视为自我指导、将主体性视为自我反思的观念相结合，产生出了作为自我指导的宗教情感。这种混合导致了一种稍显混乱但依然坚定的自我理解模式，这种模式至多是不牢靠地适应那个破碎的、专制的、从众者似乎命中注定地生活于其中的世界。
This was not simply a matter of rising expectations failing to be confirmed by social conditions, nor was it simply a matter of economic forces or class pressures compelling people to alter their ways to fit the new modes of production. Rather, young men and women in Germany in this period found themselves living in a practical, existential dilemma: many of them simply could no longer be the people that fit comfortably into that kind of social milieu, and thus for them the issue of what it meant for them to be any kind of person at all came more obviously to the fore. As the normative force of the old order slowly eroded away beneath them, those younger generations (roughly those coming of age in the s and those born in the early s) came to believe that they were leading unprecedented lives, and they went in search of a new set of meanings that would anchor their lives in that not yet so brave new world.
这里的问题不仅仅是上升的期望未能为社会条件所确认，也不仅仅是经济力量或阶层压力迫使人们去改变自己的方式以适应新的生产模式，毋宁说，这一时期德意志的青年男女发现自己身处一个实际的生存困境当中：他们中的许多人再也不能是那种能够舒适地适应社会环境的人，因此，对于他们来说，他们要成为何种人的问题日益清晰地摆在面前。随着古老秩序的规范性力量缓慢地消逝在他们背后，青年一代（特别是18世纪70年代成年以及此年代早期出生的人）开始相信，他们正经历着一种史无前例的生活，他们试图找寻一系列新的意义，这些意义将会把他们的生活锚定在那算不上美好的新世界当中。
For completely contingent reasons, the Germans of this period thus squarely faced what we can now call “modern” problems. The force of tradition, of scripture, even of nature and religion in general, had been shaken for them, and whatever orientation such things had offered them in the past seemed either non-existent or at least up for grabs. They were, of course, by no means willing simply to abandon appeals to scripture or tradition; instead, they found that holding on to those things required some other evidence than those things themselves, that the authority of tradition and established religion was no longer self-evident or self-certifying. This was not simply a matter of the world becoming more complex for new generations so that they were being called to be more discriminating than their parents; it was that their social world itself had changed, and that they had changed, such that appeals to matters that in the past had settled things for the ancestors – the very old “German” particularistic, “hometown” notion of “a place for everyone and everyone in their place” – were no longer viable. What had seemed fixed had come to seem either a matter of changeable convention or at best something that humans had “placed” in the world, not part of the eternal structure of things. What they were left with was their “own lives,” and what they found themselves “called” to do was lead their own lives. This, however, only raised the further issue for them: what kind of life counted as “one’s own”?
四
出于完全偶然的原因，这一时期的德意志人恰恰要面对我们现在所称的“现代”问题。对于他们来说，传统的力量、经文的力量，甚至一般的自然与宗教的力量都已被动摇了，这些东西在过去提供给他们的方向，无论是怎么样的，都似乎是子虚乌有的，或是有待争取的。当然，他们绝不希望简单地放弃诉诸经文或传统；相反，他们发现，坚持那些东西需要某些其他的证据，而不是那些东西本身；他们发现，传统的权威和现存的宗教不再是自明的或自证的。这里的问题不仅仅是，对于新生代来说世界变得日益复杂，以至于他们需要比他们的父母更加具有辨识力；问题是,他们的社会世界本身已经改变了，他们已经改变了，因此要想求助过去曾为他们的祖先解决过问题的事态——“人人各得其所，各安其位”这种相当古老的、“德意志的”特殊主义的“家乡”观念——再也行不通了。似乎已经固定的东西，看起来已开始变成可改变的习俗，或至多是某种人们“放置”在世界当中的东西，而不属于永恒的事物结构。留给他们的是他们“自己的生活”，他们发现自己“被要求”去做的事情就是过他们自己的生活。然而，这只是向他们提出了一个新问题：什么样的生活是“自己”的生活？
Trying to interpret their world, they found that the institutions and practices surrounding them gave them little help, since they could not “find” themselves or “see” themselves reflected in those practices. They became thereby metaphorically “homeless”; the consolations of locality, which had structured life for so many of their ancestors, were not immediately there for them. Yet they also did not find themselves without direction or guidance; they still lived in an orderly, determined society that had carved out specific roles for them to play. They thus took on a kind of duality in their own lives, an awareness (sometimes suffocating) of what they were supposed to do, a sense that their life’s path had already been laid out for them, and an equally compelling awareness that they were not “determined” by these pre-determined social paths, that it was “their own” lives they had to lead, all of which presented them with what can be properly called a pressing moral as well as a political question: how to live, how to keep faith with their families, their friends, their social context, sometimes even their religion, while maintaining this alienated, “dual” stance toward their own selves.
在试图解释他们的世界的过程中，他们发现，围绕着他们的制度与实践几乎不能给他们带来什么帮助，因为他们不能“发现”自己或“看到”自己反映在那些实践当中。因此他们开始变得“无家可归”；对于他们来说，本地性（locality)—它曾经建构了他们的祖先的生活——所带来的安慰不再是直接地在那里的。不过，在没有指导或引导的情况下，他们也没有发现自己；他们依然生活在古老的、被决定了的社会当中，这个社H会开拓出了特殊的角色让他们去扮演。因此，在他们的生活中，他们呈现出一种二元性：一方面，一种对他们所应做的事情的意识（有时是令人窒息的），一种认为他们的生活道路已经向他们展示出来的观念；另一方面，另一种同样引人注目的意识是，他们不是被预先确定的社会道路所“决定的”，他们必须过“他们自己的”生活。所有这些向他们提出了一个既是道德的又是政治的紧迫问题：在维持对自身的这种异化的、“二元的”立场的同时，如何生活，如何守信于他们的家人、朋友、社会环境，甚至有时还包括他们的宗教。
“Germany” thus found itself in a revolutionary situation, even though virtually nobody was calling for revolution. There was a palpable sense that things had to change, but nobody was sure what form the change should take or where the change should lead. Feeling that the past was no longer an independently adequate guide, they had to make up the answers to their unprecedented questions as they went along.
因此，“德意志”身处一种革命情势当中，虽然实际上没有人要求革命。有一种明显的感觉是，事情必须改变，但没有人能够确定，这种改变应当采取何种形式或这种改变应当在哪里首先发生。人们感觉到，过去已不足以作为独立的引导者，他们必须为前行过程中出现的史无前例的问题提供补充答案。
It is small wonder that Rousseau was so attractive for those generations. His notions resonated with everything they were experiencing: first, that we are “corrupted” by civilization (with its courtly culture and its fawning courtiers, each keeping his eye on what the others were doing to decide whom to imitate, each looking to the metaphorical social rule-book to guide his action); and, second, that we should instead seek a kind of independence from such social entanglements, be “natural,” find some kind of authenticity in our lives, be self-directing, and attend to our emotions as more “natural” guides to life. In Germany, the cult of feeling and sensibility in particular took root with a vehemence. The one avenue of expression for people with that kind of dual and divided consciousness of themselves and their social world – what the German idealists would later call a “splitting in two,” an Entzweiung – was the cultivation of an authentic sensibility, an attending to what was their “own” that was independent of the conformist, artificial world of the courts and the bureaucracy that either already surrounded them or inevitably awaited them. Their own “self-relation” – their sense of how their life was to go, their awareness of how they fit into the plan for them and the larger scheme of things – was seemingly given to them from the “outside,” by a social system that laid out their life-plan and gave them a highly prescribed set of roles to play. They were burdened with the crushing thought that they simply could not look forward to living their “own” lives in their allotted social realm, but only to taking over “inherited” lives of sorts; what was their own had to be “natural” and to be within the realm of the “feelings” they alone could cultivate and to which they could authentically respond.
并不奇怪的是，对那几代人来说，卢梭是相当具有吸引力的。他的观念与他们所经历的一切发生了共鸣：首先，我们是因文明而“堕落的”(因宫廷文化及谄媚的朝臣，每个人都是关注其他人在做什么来决定模仿谁，每个人都指望隐喻意义上的社会规则——书籍——来引导自己的行为）；其次，我们应当努力摆脱这种社会窠臼而成为“自然的”，应当在我们的生活当中去找寻真诚性从而成为自我指导的，应当留意我们的情绪，它是我们生活的更为“自然的”引导者。特别是在德意志，人们充满激情地崇拜情感和感性。由于对他们自己及其社会世界的那种二元的、分裂的意识----后来的德国观念论者将之称为二重化（£ratzweiiing)，人们表达这种崇拜的方式之一是培育一种真诚的感性，留意属于他们自己的东西，这独立于从众者、独立于宫廷和官僚的虚伪造作的世界，虽然这世界已经包围或不可避免地等待着这些人。他们自己的“自身关系”——他们对他们的生活要往哪里去的理解，他们对应当如何适应为他们制定的计划及更庞大的体制的意识——似乎是由社会系统从外部给予他们的，该系统安排了他们的生活计划并严格规定了他们所扮演的角色。他们因如下这种压迫性的思想而烦恼，即他们不仅不能在他们既定的社会领域中去期待过他们“自己的”生活，而且不能接管那些“继承下来的”生活；属于他们自己的东西必须是“自然的”，必须处于他们独自能够培育并且能够真诚回应的“情感”领域当中。
In that context, the cult of feeling and sensibility seemed to give them the power to carve out (or, seen from their own point of view, to “discover”) a space within their lives in which each took himself to have a direct relation to himself and others – each was related to self and other as they “really, independently were” and not merely as society or family had planned for them; each in this mode of emotional selfrelation likewise related to nature through a medium of something that was their “own” and not something that society could command from them or had imposed on them. To be “natural” and be in touch with their “sensibility” was thus to be independent of the social expectations from which they felt so alienated. This way of taking a stance toward oneself, others, and nature seemed (to many at least) to be a way of consoling or even reconciling themselves with what otherwise seemed to be an immutable order.
在这种情况下，对情感和感性的崇拜似乎给了他们在自己的生活中开拓（或从他们自己的视角来说是“发现”）空间的力量，在其中，每个人让自己同自己及他人直接发生关系——每个人都与自己和其他人有关，因为他们是“真实地、独立地存在着”，而不仅仅是因为社会或家庭为他们做了计划；在这种情感化的自身关系模式中，每个人同样也与自然发生关系，其媒介是某种属于他们“自己的”东西，而不是社会能够从他们那里调用或强加给他们的东西。因此，要成为“自然的”并与他们的“感性”’保持联系，那就要独立于他们感觉与之格格不入的社会期望。这种看待自己、他人与自然的方式，似乎（至少对于许多人来说）是操控甚或调解自己与看似不可改变的秩序之关系的方式。
Could that world be changed? The dominant philosophy of the time, Wolffianism as a codified and almost legalistically organized form of Leibnizian thought, drove the message home that the current order was not simply the way the ruling powers had decreed things, but was itself the way the world in-itself necessarily had to be. It also declared that the state was best conceived as a “machine” that ideally was to run on principles made efficient and transparent through the application of enlightened cameralistic doctrines as applied by well-trained administrators. “Enlightened” theology likewise told its readers to dispense with folksy superstition, to see everything from the point of view of the world viewed as impartial reason saw it had to be; enlightened theology thus came to see itself as being in the service of God by being in service of the rulers. In that early German mode of “Enlightenment,” the world as run by absolutist princes instructed and advised by “enlightened” theologians and administrators would be as close to a perfect world as sinful man might aspire to produce. Everything would indeed be in its place, exactly as it had to be.
世界会被改变吗？当时占统治地位的哲学即沃尔夫主义（它是莱布尼茨思想的体系化）传递出这样的信息：当前的秩序不仅是统治权命令事物的方式，而且它本身也是世界自在地必然不得不成为这个世界的方式。这一哲学还宣称，我们最好将国家视为一个在理想状态下按照原则运转的“机器”，它因运用启蒙了的财政学说而是高效透明的，这些学说是由受过良好训练的管理者来运用的。同样，“启蒙了的”神学告诉它的受众要摆脱低俗的迷信，要从被视为公正理性的世界的视角出发看待每j事物。因此，启蒙了的神学认为侍奉统治者就是侍奉上帝。在德意志早期的“启蒙运动”模式中，接受“启蒙了的”神学家和管理者的指导、建议的专制君主们所经营的世界，将会接近于一个完善的世界，即便是有罪的人也渴望产生出这样一个世界。每一事物都各安其位，并且恰恰是其必然所是。
That world was shaken by the great incendiary jolt that marked the publication of the twenty-three year old Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s epistolary novel in , The Passions of Young Werther (rendered misleadingly in English ever since as the “Sorrows” of Young Werther). It took Germany, indeed all of Europe, by storm, making its young author The “Leiden” of which the German title speaks are not merely “sorrows”; they are also the “sufferings” and the term for Christ’s passion. In the theological context that the title of the book evokes, Christ’s “passions” would rarely if ever be rendered as his “sorrows.” into an instant celebrity, perhaps even the first great literary celebrity (as a man whom all wanted to meet and to question about the relation between his experience and the events portrayed in the book). It is said to have inspired a rash of suicides in Europe for generations to come. The frame of the story is rather simple: a young man, Werther, falls in love with a young woman, Charlotte (Lotte) who is betrothed to another man, a friend of Werther’s; his love, although requited by Lotte, is doomed, and the unresponsiveness of the world (both social and natural) to the sufferings of his own and Lotte’s hearts eats away at him, such that he inexorably finds he has no other way out than to shoot himself with Lotte’s husband’s pistols; an “editor” gathers his letters and publishes them with a sparse commentary on them. (That the book quite obviously involved a mixture of autobiographical element, references to real people, and sheer invention helped to add to its appeal – people wanted to know how much of the story “really” happened.)
五
这个世界被一场具有煽动性的震动所撼动，其标志是23岁的约翰•沃尔夫冈•冯•歌德出版了书信体小说《少年维特之烦恼》①。它在德意M志乃至整个欧洲引发了一场风暴，它使得这位年轻作者一举成名，甚至可以说成了最伟大的文学大师（所有人都想见到他并询问他的经历与书中所描绘的事件的关系）。据说，它在欧洲引发T一代又一代的大批自杀事件。故事的框架是相当简单的：一个叫维特的年轻人爱上了一个叫夏洛特(绿蒂）的年轻女子，而她已与另一个男人订婚了，这个男人正是维特的朋友；他的爱（尽管绿蒂回报了他）是命中注定的，世界（包括社会世界和自然世界）对他自己的遭遇的无动于衷和绿蒂的心都困扰着他，以至于他发现，他只有用绿蒂丈夫的手枪自杀才能摆脱这些烦恼；一位“编者”收集了他的信并在出版时做了少量的评注。（这部书既有作者的亲身经历和真实的人，也有为增强吸引力而单纯虚构的情节——人们想知道的是，故事在多大程度上是“真实”发生过的。）
What genuinely electrified the audience at the time (and can still galvanize a young audience open-minded enough to appreciate it despite its now quaint feel) was the way it perfectly expressed the mood of the time while at the same time commenting on it, as it were, from within. Werther is presented as a person living out the cult of feeling and sensibility, experiencing the alienation from the social world around him, and drawing the conclusion that, without satisfaction for that sensibility, life was simply not worth living (or, rather, drawing the conclusion that either he or Lotte’s husband had to go). Werther, that is, actually was his (reading) audience, mirroring back to them what they themselves (however inchoately) were claiming to be. Like them, Werther was fully absorbed in the “convention” or the “fashion” of sensibility and feeling; unlike them (or, rather, unlike some of them), Werther was so fully absorbed in it that he could only draw the one logical conclusion from it: suicide in the face of its irrevocable failure.
真正触动当时读者的（尽管它现在让人觉得有些古怪，但其思想之开放依然能促使今天的年轻读者去欣赏它），是它完美表达当时气氛的方式及对这种气氛的评注，这种方式似乎是发自内心的。维特被表现为一个践行情感和感性崇拜的人，他经历着来自他周边的社会世界的异化，并最终发现，如果不能满足感性，那么生活就是不值得过的（或者毋宁说，他或绿蒂的丈夫，有一个必须离开也就是说，维特实际上就是他自己的读者，他反馈给读者们的，是他们自己（无论是多么不完备地）正在主张的东西。与他们一样的是，维特也完全沉浸于情感和感性的“风俗”或“风尚”当中；而与他们不一样的（或者毋宁说，与他们中的一部分不一样的）是，维特完全沉浸其中，以至于他只能从中得出唯一符合逻辑的结论：面对不可改变的失败，他只能自杀。
The audience (the readers) were equally absorbed in that “fashion”(otherwise the book could not have called out to them so much), but inreading the book (while being assisted ever so subtly by the alleged objectivity of the “editor”), they were at the same time becoming distancedfrom it, and thus, as they were reading it, coming to be not fully absorbedin it. Werther thus played the almost unprecedented role of actually inducing or at least bringing to a full awareness a duality of consciousness onthe part of its readership, an awareness that they were this character andyet, by virtue of reading about him, were also not this character. The cultof feeling and sensibility, which was supposed to free them or at least givethem a point of independence from the alienating social circumstancesin which they found themselves, was revealed to be just as alienating, asheavily laden with a dual consciousness, as was the state of affairs fromwhich it was supposed to liberate people. The cult of feeling itself putpeople in the position of believing that, although destined for the life ofbureaucratic numbness and conformity, each could find an “inner” pointof feeling and subjective sensibility that was independent of and whichfreed them from that numbing “external” reality even if they had to gothrough the motions of complying with its reality; Werther showed themthat the fashion for feeling (and its accompanying hypocrisy as peoplefeigned emotionalism to keep with the times) was itself self-destructive,and, in making that explicit for them, distanced them from it without atthe same time abolishing it in their experience. Werther was not a didacticnovel; it did not preach a moral at the end, nor did it outline what mightbe the proper way to live, or what the alternative to living a disjointed,entzweites life might be. It simply brought home to its audience who theywere and what that meant. (To the author’s horror, some of the audienceapparently drew exactly Werther’s conclusion and drowned themselves,jumped off bridges, or shot themselves, carrying copies of Werther withthem as they went.)
读者同样沉浸在那种“风尚”当中（否则这部书就不会那么吸引他们），但在读这部书时（“编者”所谓的客观性起到了相当巧妙的辅助作用），他们同时远离了它，因此，当他们读它时，并未完全沉浸其中。因此，《维特》所起到的几乎史无前例的作用，实际上是引入或至少让人们充分意识到，关于读者身份的意识是二元的，意识到，他们一方面是主角，而另一方面，通过阅读他的经历，他们又不是主角。由此揭示出的是，对情感和感性的崇拜（这本应解放他们，或至少给他们提供一个独立于他们所处的异化了的社会环境的支点）恰恰是异化的，它背负着一种二元意识，而这是它本应让人们摆脱的那种事态。对情感本身的崇拜使得人们相信，尽管他们注定要过官僚般麻木同质的生活，但每个人都能发现情感和主观感性的“内在”支点，它独立于那种麻木的“外在”现实，并使他们能够摆脱这种现实，即使他们不得不顺从于这种现实；《维特》展现给他们的是，情感风尚（及其相伴随的虚伪，即人们为了与时俱进而假装出情感主义）本身是自我毁灭性的，在向他们表明这一点的同时，它使人们远离了这种风尚，不过并没有在他们的经验中取消它。《维特》不是一部说教小说；它最终并未鼓吹某种道德，也没有勾画出什么才是正确的生活方式或什么能够取代一种分裂的生活。它只是使它的读者明了他们是谁，以及这意味着什么。（令作者感到恐惧的是，某些读者显然接受了维特的结论，因而以溺水、跳桥或吞枪的方式来自杀，而在他们赴死之时，都带着一本《维特》。）
It would be fatuous to claim that Werther fully caused or precipitated on its own a change of consciousness (or, to put it the terms of the idealists, a change in self-relation) among the reading public. It did, however, capture and solidify a sense, a mood, already at large and gave it a concrete shape. For its readers, however, it raised in a shocking and thoroughly gripping way the central issue of the time for them: what was it to live one’s “own” life? What was it to be a “modern” person, or, even more pointedly, a modern German?
我们不能说《维特》完全凭一己之力引起或促成了公众的意识的改变（或者用观念论者的术语来说是自身关系的改变）。然而，它的确已经详尽地体现并巩固了一种观念、一种气氛，并给予其具体形态。不过，对于它的读者来说，它以一种震撼人心、扣人心弦的方式提出了那个时代的核心问题：人们如何过“自己的”生活？什么样的人是“现代”人，或者更直截了当地说，什么样的人是现代德意志人？
The giddiness following Werther’s popularity, however, was only followed by a disappointing series of years. After the success of Werther, nothing so dramatic followed; Goethe (at least at first) did not follow his success up with an equally thrilling and gripping sequel, and, although he continued to write and enjoy literary celebrity, no other work moved in to take the place (or to develop the implications) of Werther. The great explosion that had been Werther seemed to be all there was to it; nothing else seemed to be emerging on the horizon that could claim the same kind of authority or revelation in German life. The dissatisfaction and existential sense of dislocation that Werther helped not only to bring to light but also to stir up did not disappear; but the crucial questions it raised remained unanswered, and nothing seemed to be on the horizon that would offer people the means to even begin constructing what an answer might look like.
然而，《维特》的流行所带来的眩晕只持续了数年就消失了。在《维特》成功之后，再也没有能如此吸引人的作品跟上；歌德（至少在最初时）没有在其成功之后拿出同样令人兴奋、扣人心弦的作品，尽管他继续写作并享有文学名家的美誉，但没有哪部作品能够取代《维特》（或发展《维特》的内涵）[6]。《维特》所带来的大爆炸似乎就仅止于此了；在德意志人的生活中，能够主张同样权威或启示的东西，似乎连影还没见75到。《维特》所阐明并激起的对错位的不满和生存论理解并未消失；但是，它提出的关键问题依然没有答案，似乎没有什么能够给人们提供手段去开始建构看起来像答案的东西。
A revolution was clearly brewing, but it was not, and certainly could not have seemed to be, a political revolution (at least at first). After all, the oppressiveness of life in “Germany” seemed to have no discriminable source against which people could focus a rebellion. In fragmented “Germany,” there was not a single court, a single church, nor even a single economy to which responsibility could be ascribed. There was no Bastille in which dissidents to “German” life were imprisoned. There simply was no “German” life – there was only Saxon life, Prussian life, Frankfurt life, Swabian life, and so forth. Werther, however, suggested that there was nonetheless a sense brewing in all of “Germany,” maybe even in all of Europe, that things, in the broadest sense of the term, had to change. The official Wolffian philosophy of the day, however, apparently proved that “things” were the way they had to be according to the nature of things-in-themselves. A split consciousness, a duality lived in one’s own life, seemed to be the necessary consequence, not of any contingent setup, but of the way things necessarily were in themselves.
革命显然已在酝酿之中，但它还不是，当然看起来也不可能是一场政治革命（至少最初是这样）。毕竟，“德意志”生活的压迫性似乎还不足以激起人们的反抗。在支离破碎的“德意志”，没有单一的朝廷、单一的教会，甚至也没有可以归属责任的单一经济。没有关押对“德意志人的”生活持异议者的“巴士底狱”。有的都是非“德意志人的”生活——只有撒克逊人的生活、普鲁士人的生活、法兰克福人的生活、斯瓦比亚人的生活，如此等等。然而，《维特》使人们认识到，尽管如此，一个观念正在全“德意志”，甚至可能在全欧洲酝酿，这就是事情（things,这里用的是其最宽泛的含义）必须改变。然而，当时官方的沃尔夫哲学所证明的是，“事情”必须以符合事情自在之本性的方式而存在。分裂的意识，即人们自己生活中的二元性，似乎是必然的结果，这种意识不是关于偶然调整的意识，而是关于事物自在地必然所是的方式的意识。
In 1781, things did change. In Königsberg, a far outpost of Prussia, outside even the domains of the Holy Roman Empire, a center of Scottish and English Enlightenment had established itself as an offshoot of the great merchant trade going on there. The British navy’s concerns about where it would procure the necessary timber with just the right balance of rigidity and flexibility for its masts had led to an extensive British engagement with the Baltic timber trade coming out of Königsberg. The large British settlement in Königsberg provided the impetus by which Scottish Enlightenment thought gradually mixed with German thought at a point just beyond the established edges of the old Holy Roman Empire. Out of that mixture came the next lightning bolt, which in one blow effectively demolished the entire grand metaphysical system supposedly holding the whole “German” scheme in place. Overthrowing the old metaphysics, it inserted a new idea into the vocabulary in terms of which modern Germans and Europeans spoke about their lives: selfdetermination. After Kant, nothing would be the same again.
1781年，事情的确改变了。在柯尼斯堡（普鲁士的发祥地，在神圣罗马帝国版图之外），苏格兰和英格兰启蒙运动的中心建立起来了，它是那里进行着的大三角贸易（thegreatmerchanttrade)的衍生物。不列颠海军所关心的是，它从哪里可以获得能在硬度和韧性之间保持良好平衡的木材用来制造桅杆，这使得不列颠与波罗的海沿岸之间建立起了广泛的木材贸易联系，而这场贸易正是从柯尼斯堡发端的。在柯尼斯堡，大量的不列颠移民推动了苏格兰启蒙运动思想逐渐同德意志思想相结合，而这恰恰是在古老的神圣罗马帝国确立的边界之外发生的。由这种结合开始，接下来的是雷霆闪电，它打击并有效地摧毁了整个华丽的形而上学体系，一般认为这种体系支持着整个“德意志的”体制。在推翻旧形而上学的过程中，它将一种新的理念嵌入词汇表中，现代德意志人和欧洲人根据这一理念来谈论他们的生活，这就是“自我决定”。康德之后，一切都不再一样了。
