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
2017-04-20
45
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.
The author probably would NOT describe Berlin as a________.
选项
A、sarcastic man
B、modest man
C、arrogant man
D、sophisticated man
答案
C
解析
态度题。第四段用英国首相安东尼.艾登爵士的例子具体说明伯林在信中不乏对他人的辛辣讽刺。第五段首句指出伯林非但不为自己的成就感到自鸣得意,反而非常苛刻地评价自己,因此他是个极端谦虚的人。第四段表明伯林对同样的人在当面和背后会做出不同的评价。可见,他是个有城府的人,第十段也指出伯林认为人是复杂的,充满各种矛盾,不能简单地当作公式或原则,而他对这一信念身体力行。因此[A]、[B]和[D]三个形容词都比较符合伯林的个性特点。尽管伯林对他人尖刻嘲讽,但从第五段来看,他是个极端谦虚的人,并非狂妄自大,最后一段也表明他可能对自己的著述采取“self-mocking”(自嘲)的态度,因而[C]符合题意。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/NjzK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
AtHarvardCollegeinSeptember,acontroversyeruptedovertheadoptionofa"freshmanpledge,"whichforthefirsttimeasked
AtHarvardCollegeinSeptember,acontroversyeruptedovertheadoptionofa"freshmanpledge,"whichforthefirsttimeasked
SirHowardDavies,themanwiththejobofdecidingwhetherBritainneedsanewairport,mustbelookingwithsomealarmatthe
WhatisthecurrentsituationofjobmarketintheUS?
ThereasonswhywomenbossareunpopularincludeallofthefollowingEXCEPTthatpeoplethink______.
MilityHopson’sattitudetowardslendingmoneytofamilyis______.
Inthego-goyearsofthelate1990s,noeconomictheoristlookedbetterthanJosephSchumpeter,theAustrianchampionofcapita
Thereare______departmentsinAmericanGovernment.
PASSAGEFOURWhydoscientistsexaminethegenomesofastronauts?
PASSAGETHREEWhydoesachimpstepintostopafightbetweentwoothers?
随机试题
今天的我们几乎生活在一个高度格式化的时代,外出旅行要追逐各种攻略,购物消费要参考各种清单,本来非常个人化的生活、阅读方式也被各种标签所左右,“丰富”得千人一面,“个性”得人人相似,“鸡汤”得一望便知,也许这是我们所处时代的共有病症。在重复与转发里寻找自己,
肩周炎正确的治疗方法是
A.氢氯噻嗪B.尿激酶C.利多卡因D.美托洛尔E.洋地黄急性心肌梗死疼痛发作持续4小时,无其他相关病史,应选用
在使用戥秤时,下列哪项操作不正确( )。
下列股票估值方法不属于相对价值法的是()。[2015年9月证券真题]
简述教学的特点。
如果某人答应作为矛盾双方调解人,那么他就必须放弃事后袒护任何一方的权利,因为在调解之后再袒护一方等于说明先前的公正是伪装的。下列哪项是以上论述最想强调的?
【2009-52】简述20世纪二三十年代中国科学教育运动发展的主要表现。
数据管理技术的发展经历如下三个阶段:人工管理阶段、文件系统阶段和【】系统阶段。
传统中国装饰绳结,也就是我们所说的中国结(Chineseknot),是一种典型的中国本土艺术。这是一门独特的传统中国民间手工编织艺术,每个绳结只使用一根线,根据其形状和意思而命名。在中国,“结”意味着团结、友谊、和平、温暖和爱情等。中国结经常被用来表达良
最新回复
(
0
)