単語を多面的に理解する

 

Posted at 2017.01.28     Category : New York Review of Books

TOEIC学習で手こずるのは単語が動詞や名詞として柔軟に使われたり、文脈によって様々な意味を持つ多義語であったりするケースでしょう。外国語の場合は限られた文脈でしか触れないことが多いので偏った単語理解になりがちです。その点、新聞や雑誌がいいのは多くの分野のトピックに触れることができるからですね。

映画『沈黙』のレビューと同じ号にあったこともあり、イエズス会について書いてあった記事を読んでみました。そこで先ほど取り上げた単語retreatが登場していました。Orderが「修道会」を意味するように宗教のトピックはまた違った知識が求められそうです（汗）

Jesuits Admirable and Execrable
Garry Wills FEBRUARY 9, 2017 ISSUE

創始者Ignatius Loyolaによる「霊操」を説明しているところで、この記事では現在、会社や議会が実施するretreatの元になった実戦だとしています。

He did this through his Spiritual Exercises (exercitia means “workout”), a monthlong retreat made one-on-one with a personal trainer. The Exercises are now treated as a kind of spiritual boot camp to be experienced by incoming Jesuit seminarians in a group under one director （中略）

The exercises lie behind the modern practice of a “retreat” – withdrawal from one’s daily routine and patterns to consider their broader setting, possibilities, or shortcomings. Corporate and legislative bodies now encourage such retreats for secular purposes. Ignatius, of course, wanted to have a person reconsider his whole relationship with God.

宗教的な黙想の意味では英和辞典も載せています。

retreat
〘宗〙(修行を行う)静修(期間), 黙想会〘黙想のため修道院に入る〙

黙想を主催しているサイトを見ると確かに現代の研修的な側面がありそうです。「霊操」という日本語になっているのはSpiritual Exercises (ラテン語ではExercitia spiritualia)をそのまま訳したからでしょう。「霊操」って岩波文庫にも入っているんですね。

記事自体はすみませんが定期購読者専用になっています。イエズス会で傍流だが評価に値する人としてアメリカでベトナム反戦に積極的に関わったDaniel Berriganを評価に値しない人として第二次世界大戦時にローマ教皇とイタリアのムッソリーニの仲を取り持ったPietro Tacchi Venturiを中心に取り上げていましたがイエズス会の概要がわかるありがたいものでした。

Jesuits have never been shy about naming schools and other institutions after “Ours” (as they refer to each other)—Loyola, Xavier, Gonzaga, Canisius, Marquette. I went to Campion High School, where I was on the Bellarmine Debating Society, before entering St. Stanislaus Seminary—all three of them named for Jesuit saints. So one might have expected the first Jesuit pope to take his papal name from a Jesuit saint; there are, conveniently, two called Francis—Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Francis Borja (general of the order from 1565 to 1572). But Jorge Bergoglio took his name from Francis of Assisi, who was not a Jesuit, not a pope, and not even a priest. This is not surprising, since Bergoglio was not on good terms with his fellow Jesuits before his election to the papacy—which was probably why he was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, who despised Jesuits. John O’Malley, S.J., the great Renaissance historian, suspects that the pope thought he was not getting “a real Jesuit.”

Despite all this, some are trying to make the pope a “typical Jesuit,” though that is a mythical beast. There are Jesuits of all sorts, some to be revered, some reviled; some good, others bad. A good one died last year, the peace activist Daniel Berrigan, S.J.—though some thought that he, too, was not a real Jesuit. One of his superiors said he was “in the order, but not of it.” If I were looking for a bad Jesuit, I would name Pietro Tacchi Venturi, S.J., the secret intermediary between Pope Pius XI and Mussolini—a thorough anti-Semite, an authoritarian schemer, and a sexual adventurer. Fortunately, there are recent books that bring these two men into better focus—The Berrigan Letters(correspondence between the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan) and The Pope and Mussolini, by David I. Kertzer.1 Tacchi Venturi figures largely in Kertzer’s book, and is given solo treatment in a forthcoming book by Kevin Madigan of the Harvard Divinity School.

日本でもイエズス会といえば上智大学などの教育機関がまず頭に浮かびますが、それは欧米でも同じのようです。昨年話題になったニュースもイエズス会だったようです。

米名門ジョージタウン大が過去の人身売買を謝罪、「奴隷子孫優遇枠」設ける
2016年9月2日（金）18時55分

米首都ワシントンのジョージタウン大学は１日、１９世紀に大学の財政難を解消するために運営母体のカトリック・イエズス会が、所有していた黒人奴隷を売却するなどして奴隷制に関与していたことを認め、謝罪した。
　当時の奴隷２７２人の子孫に当たる学生に対して、入学しやすくする優遇措置を取ると発表。奴隷制の歴史を学ぶ機関も創設する。

宣教師＝植民主義の片棒を担いだというイメージもあり、このニュースなどはその見方を補強するものでしかありませんが、記事を読んでみるとそんなに単純なものではなく、Daniel Berriganのように反戦の立場をとる人もいたことがわかりました。

 

現在の一番人気の哲学者は？

 

Posted at 2016.05.08     Category : New York Review of Books

18世紀の哲学者ヒュームの伝記の書評が一般公開されています。冒頭興味深かったのは哲学者のなりそこないで、歴史家という同時代の評価だったそうで、保守的な場所では最近でも歴史家として区分されていたそうです。

Anthony Gottlieb MAY 26, 2016 ISSUE
Hume: An Intellectual Biography
by James A. Harris
Cambridge University Press, 621 pp., $55.00

David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty.

This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1815–1817. The best that could be said for Hume as a philosopher was that he provoked wiser thinkers to refute him in interesting ways. As a historian and essayist, though, Hume enjoyed almost immediate success. When James Boswell called him “the greatest Writer in Brittain”—this was in 1762, before Boswell transferred his allegiance to Dr. Johnson—he was thinking mainly of Hume’s History of England, which remained popular for much of the nineteenth century. “HUME (David), the Historian” is how the British Library rather conservatively still catalogued him in the 1980s.

現在人気があるのは現代は無神論者が増えていることが背景にあるのではと見ています。哲学者の評価は常に一定のわけではないのですね。

As James Harris drily notes in his fine new biography, Hume’s private letters show that “he was not very good at being serious about religion.” His lack of piety and the decorously veiled attacks on theism in his published writings may play some part in his current academic popularity. Most professional philosophers today are atheists—73 percent of them, according to the 2009 survey. Perhaps Hume’s cheerful wit and enjoyment of life also help to make him a model for today’s philosophers, who do not like to think of themselves as unduly serious when off-duty. When he lived in Paris in his early fifties, the famously equable and entertaining Hume was celebrated in the salons as le bon David. A plausible report in a London newspaper quoted him as declining his publisher’s requests for further volumes of his profitable History on the grounds that he was now “too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.”

書評といっても長いのでヒュームに関心がないと読みすすめるのはきついかもしれませんので無理に勧めることはしません。

カントのいっていた「独断のまどろみ」ってどう英語で表現するんだろうとふと疑問に思ったのですが、Wikipediaにのっていました。

(Wikipedia)
Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), credited Hume with awakening him from his "dogmatic slumber".[184]

英語訳の該当部分はこちらで紹介されていました。

“I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.”

ちょくちょく書いていますが、本を読める英語力がない人は書評から始めてもいいのではないでしょうか。New York Review of Bookは書評も長いのでNew York Timesあたりから始めるといいかもしれません。