职责、命运与君子之道

Duty, Destiny and The Way of the Good Man

有时候,把两件截然不同的事情联系起来会给我们很大启发。当然,在明明毫无关联的情况下提出关联总是很危险的,但同样明显的是,在某些时候,特别是在文学世界里,来自两个不同角度的洞见可以揭示同样的普遍真理,哪怕这些洞见有时来自截然不同的时代和文化。

Different cultures sometimes meet,or perhaps appear to meet,in ways that might seem surprising at first glance.Making a link between the English nineteenth century novelist Anthony Trollope(1815-1882)and the teachings of Confucius may appear to stretch the imagination,but they have much in common in their understanding of what it is to be a"gentleman"(English)or"Junzi君子"(Chinese),a person of ideal moral character.This paper argues that the figure of Plantagenet Palliser in Trollope’s"political"novels is just such a character who looks back to the ideal of Cicero in Latin antiquity-and perhaps even further back in history to the Confucius of the Analects.