《蜜蜂的寓言》:文学公共领域与现代性

The Fable of the Bees:Literary Public Sphere and Modernity

《蜜蜂的寓言》是18世纪英国颇具争议的作品。作者曼德维尔提出,美德的起源不是上帝,而是被基督教视为首恶的“骄傲”;同时,被认为诱发社会道德坍塌的“奢侈”其实是社会发展的动力。这一惊世骇俗的观点成为当时公众舆论的热点。基于“私人的恶德”与“公众的利益”这一核心思想,曼德维尔借助自己作品(语言交往行为的书面形式)中“骄傲”“奢侈”命题的论述,开创性地揭示了个人主体性与社会公共性在实践话语中的融合过程,其作品引发的公众舆论生成了18世纪文学公共领域实例,并在作品、阅读市场(读者)、社会(公众)三者之间的文本传播层面建构了启蒙理性,成就了现代性。

The Fable of the Bees is a controversial literary work in the Eighteenth-Century England.Bernard Mandeville the author pointed out that it was the pride regarded as the primary vice by Christians that became the origin of the virtue,while luxury considered to cripple social morality turned out to be consistently motivating social progress.His contentious opinion had formed the hot topic of the public opinion at that time.Mandeville aimed to construct a comprehensive social theory on the basis of his philosophical thinking in his work,whose purpose was to rectify the prejudices caused by the cognitive limitation of the traditional Christian thinking,and to enable people to recognize the agency and creativity of the human self-interest.There is an inherent continuity between Mandeville s opinion and those great thinkers of the Enlightenment,such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.Mandeville considered self-interest as the basis of his own theory.Within the Eighteenth-Century context,self-interest could be equal to the personal freedom sought after by those great thinkers,which was the confirmative attitude towards the individual subjectivity.Mandeville indicated that the acts of self-interest/private vices formed the public benefits,which made the social publicness to happen.On the basis of his key notion″Private Vices,Public Benefits″,Mandeville elaborated on two topics,namely″Pride″and″Luxury″,and creatively revealed the process of integrating individual subjectivity into social publicness in the practical discourse of his work.In The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere,Habermas expounded on the process of how public opinion managed to become a means of the bourgeoisie to construct the rational cognition,the political participation and social transformation amid the interaction between literary works,reading market and society in the Eighteenth Century.It is by virtue of public opinion that the rationality of the Enlightenment laid the foundation for the modern civilization,and constructed the modern society amid various opinions.Since public opinions were usually sparked by the inspiration or controversial literary works in this period,Habermas specified a term″literary public sphere″to describe this process.To some extent,the public opinion caused by Mandeville s work has presented a concrete case of the literary public sphere in the Eighteenth Century.This paper aims at reconstructing the process of the formation of literary public sphere through Mandeville s book.The paper expects to explicate that it is in the aspect of textual transmission,i.e.the interaction between literary work,reading market and society,that the rationality of the Enlightenment is constructed,in which modernity is formed as well.