首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished
admin
2015-10-21
61
问题
When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlin’s letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page.
A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlin’s centenary year—he lived from 1909 to 1997—his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine.
Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlin’s professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public servants, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu.
Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis in 1956 he writes to the wife of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown "great moral splendour". The next letter, to Berlin’s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action "childish folly". His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Strawson, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial. Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents that his work is rot.
Mr. Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those Berlin wrote in 1946-1960. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection of old and new tributes, The Book of Isaiah, also edited by the tireless Mr. Hardy, partly answers both questions.
Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlin’s gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas.
Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others(negative liberty)is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential(positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong.
But perhaps Berlin’s strongest conviction was that the basic commitments—to friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achievement, nation and principle—clash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically attempt to subordinate some concerns to others.
The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in these letters. In personal form, that third conviction—that people are to be taken in full, not in formulae—runs throughout, and was surely one source of Berlin’s charm. More volumes of letters are to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument. He was an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays.
What does "this growing monument" in the last paragraph refer to?
选项
A、Published letters of Berlin.
B、Berlin’s philosophical thought.
C、Published essays of Berlin.
D、Berlin’s charm.
答案
A
解析
语义题。第二段表明,五年前出版了伯林信件的第一卷,近期又出版了厚厚的第二卷,最后一段表示更多的信件还将继续出版,因而出版的伯林信件将越来越多,所以作者将其比喻为越筑越高的纪念碑,因此选[A]。[B]、[C]和[D]均不符合此处文意,故排除。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/AXKO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
MoneyinAmericaMoneyisusedtobuygoodsorservicesand【1】______debts. 【1】_________InAmerica,moneysupplycon
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
ThetraditionaldividinglineinAmericabetween"east"and"west"is______.
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
Why,youmaywonder,shouldspidersbeourfriends?Becausetheyprotectsomanyinsects,andinsectsinclude【M1】_____
随机试题
A.炭疽芽孢杆菌B.解(溶)脲脲原体C.伯氏疏螺旋体D.柯萨奇B组病毒E.汉坦病毒引起人病毒性心肌炎的病原体是
患者,男性,47岁,主因“发热、腹痛、腹泻2天”以“细菌性痢疾”收入院。患者每日排便15次以上,为黏液脓血便。下列各项肛周皮肤护理措施中,不恰当的是
甲、乙、丙、丁四人合伙设立一粮油加工企业,甲出资1万元,乙负责购买机器,丙提供自家闲置的房屋作为厂房,丁因为懂加工技术,由其负责日常的经营和维修工作。在企业创建的第一年,企业效益很好,共赢利4万元,甲、乙、丙、丁四人各分得l万元。然而市场变化莫测,粮油加工
某工程项目业主与监理单位签订了施工阶段监理合同,与承包商签订了工程施工承包合同。由于承包商不具备防水施工资质,因此工程施工承包合同约定:地下防水工程可以分包。由于工期紧张,在设计单位仅交付地下室的施工图时,业主就要求承包商进场施工,同时对监理单位
下列需要办理结关手续的货物有()。
下列关于组合风险限额管理的说法,正确的有()。
请选择最适合的一项填入问号处,使之符合之前四个图形的变化规律。()
下列金融机构中,属于存款性金融机构的是()。
甲的父亲死后,其母乙将其家住宅独自占用。甲对此深为不满,拒绝向乙提供生活费。乙将甲告上法庭。法官审理后判决甲每月向乙提供生活费300元。对此事件,下列哪一种理解是正确的?()
______forthetimelyinvestmentfromthegeneralpublic,ourcompanywouldnotbesothrivingasitis.
最新回复
(
0
)