2008年12月24日 星期三

李鑄晉 《鵲華秋色:趙孟頫的生平與畫藝》

鵲華秋色 李鑄晉台北:石頭出版股份有限公司,出版日期:2003/12/20


美術史家李鑄晉在《鵲華秋色:趙孟頫的生平與畫藝》一書中,探討了趙孟頫的家世、 師承、仕元的心境。趙孟頫後半生走上仕途,

《鹊华秋色图》是元初名画家赵孟俯的代表作之ㄧ。赵孟俯原是宋代王孙,然在宋亡之后,他于生活的现实和理想的空幻里,面临了“仕”与“隐”的矛盾挣扎。最 后他选择出仕元朝,但在心灵上却备受煎熬,于是写下了《罪出》之诗:“在山为远志,出山为小草。……昔为水上鸥,今如笼中鸟。……愁深无一语,回断南云 杳。恸哭悲风来,如何诉穹昊。”其心境之苦况完全披露无遗。然而他的书画艺术之创作,却又充满非凡的张力,让人无法忽略他的存在。 著名的旅美学者李铸晋教授,以如椽之笔,重新梳理赵孟俯的生平与画艺;以微观的史眼剖析赵孟俯的身世、心境和画作的内涵,也以宏观的视野立论时代背景的困 境与无奈,更为赵孟俯的画艺作继往开来的定位,可以说李铸晋教授为长久受非议的赵孟俯作了史无前例的翻案文章,使赵孟俯重新在艺术史上发光发亮。这是李铸 晋教授花费毕生精力的重要论文集,为艺术爱好者不能不看的经典之作

有關趙孟頫的研究論文集,共有10篇文章,包含趙孟頫的生平與繪畫研究.所有的文章都已發表過,但有一篇文章僅以英文出版.雖然是已經發表的的文章,但是有系統及主題式的整理


鹊华秋色(赵孟頫的生平与画艺)
点击看大图

赵孟頫被视为元代初年最伟大的书画家,他承前启后,开创一代画风,成为勾连中国艺术史的关 键人物。然而,由于他身为宋代王孙,却出仕元朝,这使他在遭受时人讥讽外,也备受后人非议,艺术成就未能得到足够的重视。著名旅美学者李铸晋教授,以如椽 之笔,重新梳理赵孟頫的生平与画艺,以微观的考察剖析赵孟頫的身世、心境和画作的内涵,也以宏观的视野立论时代背景的困境与无奈,更搜寻上下千年时空,远 接唐宋,下启元明清,为赵孟頫的画艺作继往开来的定位,使赵孟頫在艺术史上重新闪光。本书是李铸晋教授花费毕生精力的重要论文集,为艺术爱好者不能不看的 经典之作。
作者简介:
李 铸晋,原籍广东。南京金陵大学文学学士,1947年赴美,在爱荷华大学、普林斯顿大学取得硕士、博士。之后即于哈佛大学、普林斯顿大学、京都大学及欧、 美、日、台湾、香港各大博物馆从事中国艺术史的研究工作。1973年,他又遍访中国大陆如广东、杭州、上海、北京、洛阳和西安等各地的博物馆,并先后任教 于欧柏林学院、印第安那大学,爱荷华大学,香港中文大学,台湾大学,及匹兹堡大学,最后在堪萨斯大学任教二十余年,1990年退休,现为堪萨斯大学非讲座 名誉教授。著作有《千岩万壑》、《刘国松:一位现代中国艺术家的成长》、《现代中国绘画的趋向》,其中尤以1965年的《鹊华秋色——赵孟頫的一幅山水 画》为其代表作,本书即在此基础上扩充而成。

中國現代繪畫史—當代之部 李鑄晉石頭出版股份有限公司,出版日期:2003/11/01

中國現代繪畫史:民初之部(一九一二至一九四九) 李鑄晉 萬青力/著 ,石頭出版股份有限公司,出版日期:2001




图书目录:
赵孟頫研究的契机(作者序)
赵孟頫的生平
 赵孟頫的世系
 赵孟頫的师承
 赵孟頫一家的艺术与文学
 赵孟頫仕元的几种问题
赵孟頫的画艺
 赵孟頫红衣天竺僧图卷
 吴兴赵氏三世人马图卷
 赵孟頫鹊华秋色图卷
 赵孟頫二羊图卷
 赵氏一门三竹图卷





Frederick Mote, "Confucian Eremetism in the Yuan Period," in
The Confucian Persuasion, which deals with Cheng Ssu-hsiao

engaging in “Confucian” (as opposed to “Daoist”) eremetism: withdrawing due. to
the unsatisfactory nature of the contemporary social and political order ...

Eremitism


n.The state of a hermit; a living in seclusion from social life.

Eremetism was a monastic movement in vogue in the twelfth century. The demand for a new spirituality led many men to experiment with different kinds of eremitic living which was based on the lives of the Desert Fathers who had "invented" the idea.\18 In fact, a hermitage to which monks could retire for solitude is said to have existed in the environs of Vézelay.

2008年12月16日 星期二

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House

愛護建築師就是要給他多點建築來表現


Jorn Utzon

Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, died on November 29th, aged 90


Reuters

DETAILED architectural plans were slow to emerge from Jorn Utzon. He liked to gather insights, textures, effects of the light, before he drew anything. The concept, he used to say, embodied everything the realisation needed. The Lutheran church he designed in Bagsvaerd, in his native Denmark, began as a study of drifting clouds and sunlight on a day at the beach. An art museum in Silkebourg emerged from salt poured out of a shaker on a café table. And his entry for the most important competition of his life was a series of sketches of triangles and random parabolas, free shapes bounded by “curves in space geometrically undefined”. Along with the sketches came a cartoon self-portrait of a tall, thin, many-armed young man dipping a pen into his skull, which had sprung open like an inkpot.

His entry was thrown out at first, and not just for that. It broke several of the rules laid down for the competition to design a new opera house (in fact, two performance halls) on Bennelong Point, in Sydney. It was too big for the site; there was not enough seating; and, most notably, there was no estimate of cost. But Mr Utzon could not possibly cost it, because he had no idea whether it could ever be built. It was his dream-answer to the challenge of a “beautiful and demanding” site, one he couldn’t resist; but, like the church at Bagsveard, it was inspired largely by clouds, boats and light. Mr Utzon had never been to Sydney. Instead, as a practised sailor, he had studied the local naval charts. When one of the judges plucked his entry out of the pile of also-rans, he was as astonished, and unprepared, as everyone else.


The year was 1957. He was 38, and had little other work to his name except a workers’ estate, of yellow-brick houses grouped round courtyards, near Elsinore. What he wanted for Sydney was the effect he had noticed when tacking round the promontory at Elsinore, of the castle’s piled-up turrets against the piled-up clouds and his own billowing white sails; the liberation he had felt on the great platforms of the Mayan temples in Mexico, of being lifted above the dark jungle into another world of light; the height and presence of Gothic cathedrals, whose ogival shape was to show in the cross-sections of the Sydney roof-shells; and the curved, three-dimensional rib-work of boat-building, as he had watched his own father doing it at Aalborg. The load-bearing beams of the Opera House shells he called spidsgattere, in homage to the sharp-sterned boats his father made.

Most of all Mr Utzon wanted a contrast between the massive base of the concert halls, made of aggregated granite and without windows, and the glass walls and soaring shells above. Everything mechanical and functional was to be housed in the base, as in elemental rock. But the roofs were to be gleaming white, in deliberate contrast to the red-brown dark sprawl of Sydney, covered with ceramic tiles to catch and reflect the light, especially the fleeting colours of morning and evening. Outside, Mr Utzon wanted people to experience a feeling of uplift and detachment from the city; inside, he hoped they would be steeped in rich, restful colours, in preparation for the music or the drama to come.

Perfection and plywood

In fact, much of the drama came from himself. His aim was total control to achieve “perfection”, nothing less. But he was dealing with the government of New South Wales, which was impatient and sceptical and needed to watch costs; with engineers, under Ove Arup, who reasonably thought that they should be in charge of the structural stages; and with builders who wanted timely and finished designs. The spat that proved the last straw was over moulded plywood, which Mr Utzon wanted to use structurally as well as for panelling. In 1966 he was “forced out”, as he saw it, by the minister of public works, and left Australia. He never returned, not even for the opening in 1973; ten years late and, at more than A$100m, 1,400% over budget.

Sydney brought him fame, but few commissions. The Kuwaiti parliament building, also billowing and white, was his only other big international project. Though he was charming, elegant and an architect of genius, the difficulty of dealing with him and his dream-designs had got abroad. He won medals and the 2003 Pritzker prize, architecture’s Nobel; “but if you like an architect’s work”, he said once, “you give him something to build.”

Very late in life he was approached to become a consultant on the Opera House, and accepted. In truth, he had never stopped thinking about it. Mentally he was still patrolling the site, noting the course of storm-drains and the interplay of vaulting and walls. The multiple problems, as he had often said, were not his fault. They were created by the Sydney Opera House, which was there in his head, beautiful, demanding and continually evolving.

His greatest joy was to know that inside that building, up the steps from the main concourse, on the right, was a hall that in 2004 was named after him. It is a wide, low, bare space with huge easterly windows, floored in pale timber and with a ceiling of folded concrete beams that seem to hover lightly, bathed in reflections from the sea. The Utzon Room is exactly what he dreamed of; and it is also the only room yet built exactly to his plans.

2008年12月15日 星期一

民眾英雄 伊拉克記者 黃永田突擊扯掉 邱毅假髮

Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero

The Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at President Bush has stirred emotions across the Arab world.

一名伊拉克記者前天向美國總統布希丟皮鞋,抗議美國對伊拉克政策,遭伊拉克偵訊,但利比亞一個慈善團體認為這名記者做的對,還頒發他(勇氣獎)。

布什訪伊遇飛鞋伺候
上周日,一名伊拉克電視記者在巴格達參加美國總統布什和伊拉克總理馬利基(Nouri al-Maliki)召開的新聞發布會時將兩只10號的鞋扔向布什。


*****

國民黨立委邱毅昨到監院告發釋放陳水扁的法官周占春,卻遭挺扁民眾黃永田突擊扯掉假髮,露出毛髮極稀疏的禿頭,一臉錯愕的邱毅搶髮不成,迅速用手遮頭搭車離去,這一突發狀況,意外讓邱毅沒戴假髮的形象首次曝光。重戴上假髮回立院後,邱毅直呼:「好像是被 ...


2008年12月13日 星期六

John Maynard Keynes: 再利用

The Way We Live Now

The Remedist


Published: December 12, 2008

Among the most astonishing statements to be made by any policymaker in recent years was Alan Greenspan’s admission this autumn that the regime of deregulation he oversaw as chairman of the Federal Reserve was based on a “flaw”: he had overestimated the ability of a free market to self-correct and had missed the self-destructive power of deregulated mortgage lending. The “whole intellectual edifice,” he said, “collapsed in the summer of last year.”

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Gordon Anthony/Getty Images

John Maynard Keynes, 1923

“Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

Related

Times Topics: John Maynard Keynes

What was this “intellectual edifice”? As so often with policymakers, you need to tease out their beliefs from their policies. Greenspan must have believed something like the “efficient-market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets always price assets correctly. Given that markets are efficient, they would need only the lightest regulation. Government officials who control the money supply have only one task — to keep prices roughly stable.

I don’t suppose that Greenspan actually bought this story literally, since experience of repeated financial crises too obviously contradicted it. It was, after all, only a model. But he must have believed something sufficiently like it to have supported extensive financial deregulation and to have kept interest rates low in the period when the housing bubble was growing. This was the intellectual edifice, of both theory and policy, which has just been blown sky high. As George Soros rightly pointed out, “The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like OPEC raising the price of oil. . . . The crisis was generated by the financial system itself.”

This is where the great economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) comes in. Today, Keynes is justly enjoying a comeback. For the same “intellectual edifice” that Greenspan said has now collapsed was what supported the laissez-faire policies Keynes quarreled with in his times. Then, as now, economists believed that all uncertainty could be reduced to measurable risk. So asset prices always reflected fundamentals, and unregulated markets would in general be very stable.

By contrast, Keynes created an economics whose starting point was that not all future events could be reduced to measurable risk. There was a residue of genuine uncertainty, and this made disaster an ever-present possibility, not a once-in-a-lifetime “shock.” Investment was more an act of faith than a scientific calculation of probabilities. And in this fact lay the possibility of huge systemic mistakes.

The basic question Keynes asked was: How do rational people behave under conditions of uncertainty? The answer he gave was profound and extends far beyond economics. People fall back on “conventions,” which give them the assurance that they are doing the right thing. The chief of these are the assumptions that the future will be like the past (witness all the financial models that assumed housing prices wouldn’t fall) and that current prices correctly sum up “future prospects.” Above all, we run with the crowd. A master of aphorism, Keynes wrote that a “sound banker” is one who, “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way.” (Today, you might add a further convention — the belief that mathematics can conjure certainty out of uncertainty.)

But any view of the future based on what Keynes called “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to “sudden and violent changes” when the news changes. Investors do not process new information efficiently because they don’t know which information is relevant. Conventional behavior easily turns into herd behavior. Financial markets are punctuated by alternating currents of euphoria and panic.

Keynes’s prescriptions were guided by his conception of money, which plays a disturbing role in his economics. Most economists have seen money simply as a means of payment, an improvement on barter. Keynes emphasized its role as a “store of value.” Why, he asked, should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to “hold” money? The answer he gave was that “holding” money was a way of postponing transactions. The “desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. . . . The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium we require to make us part with money is a measure of the degree of our disquietude.” The same reliance on “conventional” thinking that leads investors to spend profligately at certain times leads them to be highly cautious at others. Even a relatively weak dollar may, at moments of high uncertainty, seem more “secure” than any other asset, as we are currently seeing.

It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.

This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics. His purpose, as he saw it, was not to destroy capitalism but to save it from itself. He thought that the work of rescue had to start with economic theory itself. Now that Greenspan’s intellectual edifice has collapsed, the moment has come to build a new structure on the foundations that Keynes laid.

Robert Skidelsky is the author most recently of “John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman.”

2008年12月12日 星期五

wooden golf tee inventor

Wikipedia article "George Franklin Grant"

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George Franklin Grant — the son of former slaves — was a professor of mechanical dentistry at Harvard University who became the first African-American to sit on Harvard's faculty. In the field of dentistry he was known for his invention of the oblate plate, a prosthetic device for people with cleft palate. His natural concern for sanitary conditions led him to another invention that was welcomed by a whole different community. At that time, golfers hit their ball from a mound of sand they fashioned by hand. This created two problems: it was unsanitary, and the different shape and height of the mounds could affect a golfer's game. On this date in 1899, Grant was granted a patent for the first wooden golf tee.

葉石濤

取材中時報


台灣文學大師葉石濤十一日因多重器官衰竭病逝高雄榮總,享壽八十四歲。葉老遺孀葉陳月得哀傷地說,丈夫住院前唯一牽掛,就是集結筆耕六十八年逾六百萬字的作品《葉石濤全集》(台灣文學館出版。  

葉石濤七十歲時曾在《展望台灣文學》序中寫道:「我現時已七十歲,垂垂老矣,但仍然在爬格子…可以說,我這一輩子,把所有生命都投注於台灣新文學的建設上,無怨無悔,披星戴月地走了過來。寫作生涯是孤寂而憂傷的,毫無樂趣可言。唯有在出書的當兒才微微感到一絲絲驕傲和喜悅。這就是上天給我的報酬吧!」

 葉石濤曾說:「作家是吃夢的,文學就是我的夢與食物。」從創作到評論,從外國文學譯介到為台灣文學定位,葉石濤以一生寫就一頁台灣現代文學發展史。

 他出身於台南望族世家,中學時開始創作。十八歲那年他在《文藝台灣》發表第一篇日文小說〈林君寄來的信〉,受主編西川滿的賞識而短暫擔任過助理編輯。

 台灣光復後,葉石濤改以漢文創作,發表過〈河畔的悲劇〉、〈來到臺灣的唐.芬〉、〈娼婦〉、〈莫里斯尼奧斯基的遭遇〉等作品,一九五三年在白色恐怖的風 聲鶴唳之下,他因與左派文人往來而被以「知匪不報」罪名入獄三年。出獄後葉石濤回到小學教書,擱筆沉潛,直到一九六五年才又重新提筆,並在此時遷居高雄左 營。

 他又陸續寫下《葫蘆巷春夢》、《羅桑榮和四個女人》、《羅桑榮和四個女人》、《鸚鵡與豎琴》、《葛瑪蘭的柑子》…等帶有黑色幽默與鄉土氣息的作品,八○年代後的寫作大膽碰觸白色恐怖經驗。

 葉石濤一九八七年完成第一部以台灣為主體意識建構的《台灣文學史綱》,爬梳十七世紀至廿世紀三百多年的台灣文學史。九○年代後,葉石濤寫下具有自傳性質 的《台灣男子簡阿淘:50年代白色恐怖》。近七十歲時開始研究原住民西拉雅題材,完成《西拉雅族的末裔》,及回憶府城童年的《府城瑣憶》等書。

 二○○四年,葉石濤以八十高齡再突破,出版情色題材的《蝴蝶巷春夢》,展現了驚人的創作活力。



「寫作,不是使命,而是上天對我的詛咒,不寫好痛苦」。他曾說若死了就將骨灰撒在鍾理和紀念館的台灣文學步道上。因為「生命從自然來,最終也該回歸自然」

2008年12月10日 星期三

Martti Ahtisaari

我在CNN看Ahtisaari 專訪的後十分鐘
似乎稍微了解他的神情

Finland's Ahtisaari receives Nobel Peace Prize

Finland's former president, Martti Ahtisaari, has received the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony at Oslo's city hall attended by Norway's King Harald and Queen Sonja. The award of the 10 million Swedish crowns prize worth roughly 950,000 euros to the veteran diplomat, was announced in October. 71-year-old Ahtisaari was awarded the prize for his three decades of work mediating conflicts from Namibia to Kosovo and Indonesia.

2008年12月9日 星期二

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (pronounced [ɪˈvɑn ˈɪlɪtʃ][1]) (Vienna, 4 September 1926Bremen, 2 December 2002) was an Austrian philosopher and social critic. He authored a series of critiques of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects of the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, and economic development.

List of works

Bibliography

  • Power in the Highest Degree : Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order by Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz, and Yale Magrass, Oxford University Press, 1990.
  • Silencing Ivan Illich : A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion. Gabbard, D. A. New York: Austin & Winfield, 1993, ISBN 1880921170

思想

思想家としてのイリイチは、学校交通医療といった社会的サービスの根幹に、道具的な権力、専門家権力を見て、過剰な効率性を追い求めるがあまり人間の自立、自律を喪失させる現代文明を批判。それらから離れて地に足を下ろした生き方を模索した。

[編集] 脱学校化

詳細は脱学校論を参照

学校教育においては、真に学びを取り戻すために、学校という制度の撤廃を提言。パウロ・フレイレの革命的教育学と並んで、地下運動から国際機関まで世界中を席捲した。イリイチの論は「脱学校論」として広く知られるようになり、当時以降のフリースクール運動の中で、指導的な理論のひとつになった。

[編集] バナキュラー

バナキュラーは、 そもそも、「家庭で最初に身につける言葉」などを意味する語であるが、イリイチは、この言葉が有給の家庭教師を雇わずとも身につけられることに焦点を当 て、バナキュラーを「一般の市場で売買されないもの」と拡大規定した。しかし、近代産業社会のサービスによって、このバナキュラーは交換可能なものとな り、結果として、人びとの生活からバナキュラリズムが失われていくさまをイリイチは指摘している。

[編集] シャドウ・ワーク

詳細はシャドウ・ワークを参照

イリイチは、バナキュラーの実態と変容を探るべく、家庭の主婦の家事労働などに目を向け、産業サービス社会において報酬を受けない再生産労働を「シャドウ・ワーク」(影法師の仕事―鶴見和子の訳)と命名した。イリイチの理論枠組みからすれば、学校のなかの生徒、病院における患者、交通機関における通勤・通学者もまた、シャドウ・ワークの担い手なのであるが、この概念化は、とりわけ女性の家庭内労働の新たな捉え方として注目されることになった。

[編集] ジェンダー

シャドウ・ワークの分析の後、イリイチは、産業化とバナキュラーの対立軸において、ユニセックス化とジェンダーの対立を設定。すなわち、産業社会においては、ジェンダーがセックスか ら離床し、バナキュラーな男女のジェンダーが失われることで、中性的な「経済セックス」化がなされていると批判した。バナキュラーなジェンダーが中性化さ れ、近代産業社会における経済分業を担う「経済セックス」者となることで、賃労働を担う男性とシャドウ・ワークを担う女性とに振り分けられているというの である。

イリイチの共感者たちによれば、イリイチの議論の意義は、産業経済社会における労働・分業や生産・消費のありようが、あたかも本来的なものであるか のように制度化、客観化されてしまって状況を明らかにし、既存の近代社会科学の枠組みから離れた新たな問題設定を行なおうとする点にあるが[5]、当時のフェミニストは、それを実態論的に捉え、男女差別の固定化を唱えるものだとして批判した。

[編集] 医原病

詳細は医原病を参照

また、イリイチは、医療制度は「専門家依存」をもたらすものであり、すなわち人間個々人の能力を奪い、不能化するものであると批判し、これを広義の医原病(社会的医原病、文化的医原病)であるとしている。

[編集] 著書

[編集] 単著

『オルターナティヴズ――制度変革の提唱』(新評論, 1985年)
『脱学校の社会』(東京創元社, 1977年)
『自由の奪回――現代社会における「のびやかさ」を求めて』(佑学社, 1979年)
『コンヴィヴィアリティのための道具』(日本エディタースクール出版部, 1989年)
  • 『政治的転換』(日本エディタースクール出版部, 1989年)
  • Energy and Equity (1974) ISBN 0061361535
『エネルギーと公正』(晶文社, 1979年)
『脱病院化社会――医療の限界』(晶文社, 1979年)
シャドウ・ワーク――生活のあり方を問う』(岩波書店, 1982年/新装版, 2005年/岩波現代文庫, 2005年)
『ジェンダー――女と男の世界』(岩波書店, 1984年)
  • 『人類の希望――イリイチ日本で語る』(新評論, 1984年)
  • H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985) ISBN 0-911005-06-4
『H2Oと水――「素材」を歴史的に読む』(新評論, 1986年)
『テクストのぶどう畑で』(法政大学出版局, 1995年)
  • Ivan Illich in Conversation interviews with David Cayley (1992)
『生きる意味――「システム」「責任」「生命」への批判』(藤原書店, 2005年)
※1970年代からインタビューを拒否してきたイリイチが珍しく応じた長時間インタビュー
  • 『生きる思想――反=教育/技術/生命』(藤原書店, 1999年)
  • Corruption of Christianity D. Cayley (ed.) (2000) ISBN 0-660-18099-5
  • The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (2005) ISBN 0-88784-714-5
『生きる希望――イバン・イリイチの遺言』(藤原書店, 2006年)

[編集] 共著

  • After deschooling, what? (1976)
『脱学校化の可能性――学校をなくせばどうなるか』(東京創元社, 1979年)
『専門家時代の幻想』(新評論, 1984年)
(B・サンダース)『ABC――民衆の知性のアルファベット化』(岩波書店, 1991年)


Ivan Illich

A polymath and polemicist, his greatest contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, rather than an ideologue

Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla
Monday December 9, 2002

Guardian

Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.

Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America). This position obscures the true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.

Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence University.

He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican's Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research centre which offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America.

The radicalism of CIDOC attracted many young North American priests, but it became a victim of its own success in a rightwing climate, and was wound up 10 years later by the consent of its members. (Illich said of its director, Valentina Borremans, that "she realised that the soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt it".) By this time Illich had also resigned active duty as a priest, thereby sidestepping a potentially bitter conflict with the conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed CIDOC.

Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions of the industrialised world. In seven concise, non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their original purpose. He observed the roots of this process in the institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church (he frequently cited the Latin maxim "corruptio optimi pessima", the corruption of the best is the worst).

His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the difference between feminine and masculine domains had been sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, capitalism creating and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male wage labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of his interests. There was the historicity of materials (H2O And The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said, an attempt to understand the transition from the book to the computer screen through the prism of the changes in 13th-century reading practice.

In essays, papers and through the work of his collaborators, he addressed themes as diverse as the history of the gaze, friendship, hospitality, bioethics, body history (particularly with his close collaborator, the sociologist Barbara Duden) and space.

Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.

His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised.

· Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4 1926; died December 2 2002

2008年12月7日 星期日

Robert Zajonc

Robert Zajonc, Who Looked at Mind’s Ties to Actions, Is Dead at 85


Published: December 6, 2008

Robert B. Zajonc, a distinguished psychologist who illuminated the mental processes that underpin social behavior and in so doing helped create the modern field of social psychology, died on Wednesday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 85.

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Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service

Robert B. Zajonc in 1996.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his son Michael said.

At his death, Professor Zajonc (pronounced ZYE-unts) was emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University, where he had taught since 1994. He previously had a long association with the University of Michigan.

Until the mid-20th century, social scientists seeking the impetus for human behavior tended to look reflexively to people’s environments. That, in an era when behavioral psychology reigned supreme, was precisely what they had been trained to do. Professor Zajonc, by contrast, also looked to the mind.

Published widely in professional journals and cited often in the news media, Professor Zajonc’s work ranged across the mental and social landscape. Among the subjects he investigated over five decades were the effect of birth order on intellectual performance; whether the mere presence of spectators can influence a performer for good or ill; and whether smiling can be a cause, as well as a consequence, of a good mood.

What united his diverse output was an abiding concern with the relationship between feeling and thought. Professor Zajonc repeatedly explored the place in the human mental makeup where emotion butts up against cognition, partly in an effort to determine which influences which more strongly. (On balance, he came down on the side of emotion.)

He was also consumed with the tacit, half-hidden patterns — of words, images, experiences and much else — that unconsciously inform the ways in which everyone navigates the social world.

Professor Zajonc was perhaps best known for discovering what he called the “mere exposure” effect. In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

In another study, which attracted much attention in the popular media, Professor Zajonc found that the size of a family, and the birth order of the children, have implications for the I.Q. of each child. He found that the I.Q. score of each successive child decreases a little, partly because only the eldest receives undivided parental attention.

The difference in I.Q. between the eldest child and the next sibling in line averaged just three points, Professor Zajonc found. But the larger implication of his study was that I.Q., long thought to be the product of heredity alone, was at least in part socially determined.

Robert Boleslaw Zajonc, an only child, was born in Lodz, Poland, on Nov. 23, 1923. In 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland and headed toward Lodz, he and his parents fled to Warsaw. There, the building in which they were staying was bombed, and Robert’s parents were killed. Robert woke up in a hospital, seriously injured.

He attended an underground university in Warsaw before being dispatched to a labor camp in Germany. He escaped and, recaptured, was sent to a political prison in France. Escaping again, he joined the French Resistance and studied at the University of Paris. Reaching England in 1944, he worked as a translator for American forces in the European campaign.

When the war ended, he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He later studied psychology at the University of Tübingen before immigrating to the United States in 1948.

Professor Zajonc earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1955. He remained on the faculty for the next four decades, directing the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the Institute for Social Research there.

Some of Professor Zajonc’s most influential work concerned “social facilitation” — the effect of the presence of others on a person’s performance of a specific task. Previous research on the subject appeared contradictory, suggesting that spectators helped performers in some cases but not in others. But in which cases?

What Professor Zajonc found was that when performers have mastered a skill at a high level, they are helped by the presence of an audience. (Think of professional musicians or athletes.) But he also found that when a performer has mastered a skill only imperfectly, the existence of onlookers is a hindrance. (Think of Sunday duffers in any arena.)

Elsewhere in his work, Professor Zajonc explored the nexus between psychology and physiology. In one widely reported study, he found that smiling or frowning can alter blood flow to the brain as facial muscles relax or contract. This in turn affects the parts of the brain that regulate feelings, helping induce happy or sad emotional states.

In recent years, Professor Zajonc also studied the psychology of racism, terrorism and genocide.

Professor Zajonc’s first marriage, to Donna Benson, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Hazel Rose Markus, a professor of social psychology at Stanford; their daughter, Krysia; three children from his first marriage, Peter, Michael and Joseph; and four grandchildren.

His books include “Social Psychology: An Experimental Approach” (Wadsworth, 1966) and “The Selected Works of R. B. Zajonc” (Wiley, 2004).

In a 2005 interview with The Observer, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, Professor Zajonc explained his reasons for choosing the career he did. They harked back to the work he did for the United Nations in Paris.

“I had contact with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” he said. “The Unesco motto is: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed,’ and having just been through a war, the motto was a sufficient incentive for me to get engaged in scientific initiatives that might make a contribution toward preventing future wars.”

He added, “I am still waiting for that contribution to be made by psychology.”

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