nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
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作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
gobbling through old archives of this site for the past three weekends. can't say i learned anything new yet. but as i grow burdensome of always letting two halves of my brain arguing with each other, now this is the place to 'put down the flamethrower' and free myself of the guilt and pressure of conversing only to dead
great men. So i thank you all for making me feel resurrected to
this world of fire and flesh again.
What i want to talk about now is John Ruskin's classic 'Unto this Last'.
'Unto this Last', said Gandhi, 'captured me and made me transform my life'. For the young William Morris, 'The books of John Ruskin were ... a sort of revelation...' In his Introduction to 'The Bible of Amiens', Proust declared of Ruskin:'He will teach me, for is not he, too, in some degree the Truth?' 'He was one of those rare men,' wrote Tolstoy, 'who think with their hearts, and so he thought and said not only what he himself had seen and felt, but what everyone will think and say in the future.'
Ruskin's Unto this Last is first and foremost a cry of anger against injustice and inhumanity; the theories of the Political Economists had outraged his strongest moral convictions. But he was arguing against thinkers who claimed to have founded a science. To limit the book's message to questions of moral feeling would be to accept that he was what his critics called him, a sentimentalist who could not face reality. But the book is also a closely argued assault on the philosophical and scientific method the economists took for granted. Profoundly conservative, Ruskin was resisting the whole tendency of modern civilization on intelletcual as much as on moral grounds. He objected to a method, peculiar to modern times, which worked by specialization. He argued that this deformed reality by isolating the object of study and detaching moral from material considerations. Ruskin's argument may be connected with his objection to liberal democracy, which he thought of as the political expression of an outlook that see each man as the sum of his own interests, detached from a social context.
From his father he learned his political attitudes. His autobiography begins with the words 'I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school.' This Toryism, comparable to that of Swift and Johnson and Coleridge, is based on a belief in hierarchy, established order and obedience to inherited authority. He detested both liberty and equality, blaming them, more than privilege, for the injustices he condemned. Only those who held power by right, as he saw it, could be moved by a sense of duty to serve and protect the weak.
No political label quite fits Ruskin's politics. Though he detested the Liberals, he was far from being a supporter of the Conservatives. His 'Toryism' was such that it could, in his own lifetime, inspire the socialism of William Morris and the founders of the Labour Party; and when he called himself a 'conservative', he usually meant a preserver of the environment - what we should call a 'conservationist'. The truth is that, despite an exceptional consistency of view, throughout his life, on most matters of principle, his specific opinions changed and developed as he grew older. His attitudes to war and imperialism and the rights of women, for instance, oscillate wildly between reaction and radicalism; and he in effect concedes the ambiguity of his position when, in Fors Clavigera, he calls himself, with conscious irony, both a Communist and a Tory. This complexity is partly due to the fact that Ruskin was never a political animal. One of his biggest failings as a social critic is his undiscriminating contempt for all political movements. At the same time, much of his strength derives from his indifference to partisan attitudes, which gives him the clear-sightedness of the boy who could not see the Emperor's clothes.
This virtue is one of the qualities Ruskin shares with the only
contemporary writer to have influenced his social views. It is thanks to
Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) that the Romantic nostalgia he inherited fromhis father took on a radical tinge. Carlyle called Political Economy 'theDismal Science' and condemned it from a broadly Romantic viewpoint. But healso understood the industrial age and, in the 1830s and 40s, stood almostalone as the new philosophy's systematic opponent. Born in the same year asKeats, Carlyle was the only important English Romantic to survive into theVictorian era. Before the 1830s, when he began writing the apocalyptichistory and social criticism for which he is now remembered, Carlyle hadbeen mainly concerned with interpreting the literature and philosophy ofmodern Germany to the British public. Then, in early middle age, he turnedhis Germanic transcendentalism to practical use. He had early lost his
faith in Christianity but continued to believe in God. His philosophy
retains the doctrines of predestination and divine justice, which he had
learnt from his austerely Calvinist parents. He combines them with an
unusually severe version of Romantic pantheism: not the Wordsworthian
adoration of nature that Ruskin had imbibed, but belief in divinity as theindwelling principle of order in the universe. Man, in Carlyle's system,was a spiritual being who achieved his destined state of blessedness by
following the moral imperative at the heart of his nature. To do so meant
disregarding the prospect of material satisfaction. Thus, the idea of 'the
greatest happiness of the greatest number' as the end of all social
endeavour was morally abhorrent to Carlyle. Man's moral nature, as he saw
it, was expressed through work. To deny him work - as laissez-faire
governments, influenced by the economists, seemed to be doing - was notonly injustice. It was a crime against nature. Carlyle was probably the first thinker to insist that human beings have
a right to work. He also thought they had a right to be governed.
Laissez-faire, in his view, was the devil's philosophy. It was simply a way
of saying that those with authority to govern need not do so. The distress
of their subjects could simply be disregarded. But a nation's economy, as
Carlyle understood it, was as much a social organism as its institutions.If parliaments could be reformed, why not economies? To counter thelethargy of modern government, he argued for government by great men and
condemned the weakness of democracy. The hero as leader springs from
Carlyle's metaphysics; he is a man by his actions reveals his superiority
to all other men, embodies in effect the will of God.
Ruskin's beliefs differed from Carlyle's in detail and in tone. Both men
were authoritarian ( if compassionate) and both were driven by the
Protestant work ethic. But where Carlyle's obsession with men of power -
which led him to the belief that 'might is right' - anticipates fascism,
Ruskin believed in government by the wise. Carlyle was indiscriminate in
his praise of work. Ruskin, equally convinced of its importance, looks at
the quality of work and sees division of labour as a form of slavery. The
terms of the discussion in 'Unto this Last' are frequently Carlyle's, but
it is conducted at a level that is profounder and less portentous. Carlyle
had attacked the economists for the convert introduction - in an overtly
scientific arguement - of ideological values. But he had no head for the
detail of their argument. It is the detail that Ruskin sets himself to
demolish - the specifically economic issues. What moves us in 'Unto this
Last' is the way precise analysis unites with irony, passion and
imagination.
p158
Unto this Last is dealt with in detail in the general Introduction to this
selection. I therefore confine myself here to an analysis of Ruskin's
epigraphs. The first of these introduces the theme of the just wage, the
second that of the just price.
Christ's Parable of the Vineyard is the source of the book's title. As
the significance of the story is taken for granted by Ruskin, I quote it
here in full:
For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder,
which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.
And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent
them into his vineyard.
And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in
the marketplace,
And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is
right i will give you. And they went their way.
Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise.
And about the eleventh hour he went out, and fuond others satnding
idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?
They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go
ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.
So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward,
Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto
the first.
And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they
received every man a penny.
But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received
more; and they likewise received every man a penny.
And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the
house.
Saying, these last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them
equal unto us, which have borne the burden and the heat of the day.
But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong;
didst not thou agree with me for a penny?
Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as
unto thee.
(Matthew xx 1-14)
The spiritual meaning of this Ruskin takes for granted. What counts in Unto
this Last is the economic significance of Christ's teaching. Ruskin's
understanding of this is never directly stated, but a careful reading of
the book will suggest two emphases. First, that the economic relationship
between employer and employee should not be seen as a question of profit or
advantage, but of justice. Thus we may take it that the householder pays
all his workers the same, not in order to under-pay those who have borne
'the burden and the heat of the day', but because all men have equal needs.
So justice is to be seen in the recognition of need and reciprocal
responsibility. Secondly, the parable has bearing on what at the time
seemed Ruskin's most eccentric proposal, that there should be a fixed rate
of wages for any job of work, regardless of quality.
( You may continue your own reading of the above excerptions from the
introduction and commentary by Clive Wilmer in Penguin Classics 'Unto this
Last' at your own leisure pace if you buy the book. i'm sure you
appreciate my labor at transcribing it to you this far....)
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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CLASSIC series: John Ruskin's 'Unto this Last'
