丽藻彬彬:关于文学与历史哲学的思考

“The Artifice of Eternity”: Memory, History, and Literature

文学和历史都是记叙在个人或集体的记忆当中有意义、有价值的东西,因此作为写作形式,文学和历史在结构上有相似之处,要求摹述事件、刻画人物都栩栩如生、前后连贯、合情合理,具有真实感。历史叙述描绘生动,史书中记言合乎情理,目的都在于产生这种真实感。德国哲学家伽达默尔提出的“同时性”概念就可以作为一个理论框架,帮助我们理解通过文学和历史的叙述,我们对过去的体验何以有那种身临其境的直接性。然而历史与文学又有重要区别,史家在认识论和伦理的意义上,都与实在发生的实事相关连,应该“直笔”书写,而诗人和小说家则可以凭空虚构。中国传统有“史德”观念,史家应该秉笔直书,甚至不惜牺牲生命来保护历史记录的真实性。本文以中国古代文学和历史为例,讨论历史写作与历史理解的一些理论问题,力求使诗和历史可以相互发明,而非彼此对立、互不相干。本文最终将强调历史叙述求真的价值,强调其对社会人生的重要意义,以及对我们如何认识历史的重要意义。

Both history and literature commemorate what is meaningful and valuable in our personal or collective memories. As forms of writing, historical and literary narratives share certain structural similarities in recuperating the past with vivid descriptions, believable characterizations, and a coherent and convincing story line to achieve a sense of the real in representation. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic concept of “contemporaneity”(Gleichzeitigkeit) can offer a helpful theoretical framework for understanding the immediacy of our experience of the past in literary or historical representations. And yet, there is an important difference between literary and historical narratives in that the historian is epistemologically and morally bound to what actually happens, while the poet or the novelist is free to construct a fictional representation through imagination. In the Chinese tradition, there is the concept of “the historian’s virtue” and a historian is committed to the true record of history at any cost, even his life. By drawing on some exemplary works of ancient Chinese literature and historiography, this essay will discuss some of the theoretical issues related to the writing and the understanding of history, and try to lead to the mutual illumination of poetry and history rather than their opposition and mutual exclusion. It will conclude with the emphasis on the value of truth-claims in historiography that has important implications for human life and social reality as well as for our knowledge of history.