首先肯定这句话出自维特根斯坦的《文化与价值》。
原文如下:
”Wer zu viel wei, für den ist es schwer nicht zu lügen“
如果我们仅看英文的翻译:“He who knows too much finds it hard not to lie”和上述中文翻译的话这里的讨论没什么问题。这里目前的讨论很多都是围绕”撒谎“这个概念展开的。很可惜的是这两个翻译都有问题。引用维特根斯坦的另一句话 -- ”At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.“ 这里的很多很有道理的讨论都是基于不完整的翻译,所以。。。
英文的Lie和中文的撒谎都指有意的、故意的使用虚假言行。而德语的lügen则包括了无意的提供假的、错误的信息。这个区别就大了。。。所以无论是这句的英文翻译还是中文翻译都已经曲解了原意。撒谎可以避免,维特根斯坦已经给出了方案:Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. 但是无意中提供假的、错误的信息的话就。。。毕竟保持沉默也是提供信息的一种方式,so to speak.
一个人懂得太多就会发现,要不撒谎不容易,要不无意中提供错误信息很难、非常难或者根本做不到。
懂得多的人可能会知道语言本身就不是精准的,一个人永远无法用语言精准地表达自己,如维特根斯坦自己说的:My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression。既然无法准确表达自己,无意中提供错误信息就是不可避免的。
其实他类似的话说过很多:
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?
The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.
Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.
What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.
You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
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