Mortal subjects: passions of the soul in late twentieth-century French thought.

我的研究探索了二十世纪下半叶法国思想中关于人类主体与死亡关系的概念。几条相互交织的线索贯穿着这项研究，特别是身体与灵魂、爱与死、欲望与激情之间的关系。从希腊哲学家，特别是亚里士多德对激情的第一次讨论开始，激情就一直处于边缘地位。激情既表现在身体上，也表现在灵魂上(例如，悲伤中的哭泣和内心的痛苦，浪漫爱情中的性欲和情感渴望)，激情一直很难归类。如果不探索心灵和身体的关系，就不可能研究激情；而死亡的问题，人类的死亡，是这种关系被最强烈地探索的地方。死亡中的主人公会发生什么？人类的化身对临终前的受试者意味着什么？而对死亡的关注必然会将爱带入框架，因为爱、激情和死亡之间的关系是人类经验的内在联系。友谊和爱情总是被预期的损失所浸透。所有的经验都是基于它的终极转瞬性，换句话说，是基于它的死亡。另一个人的死亡是不可避免的，这使我们与他或她的关系变得辛酸和强烈。当然，古代和现代的哲学家以前曾多次研究过这些思想，我将利用它们为当代辩论提供见解，并衡量现代思想家依赖于他们的前辈和背离他们的方式。我的研究的一极将是对柏拉图的《座谈会》和亚里士多德的《德阿尼玛》等文本的探索，另一极将是试图考虑激进唯物主义的主张，例如它们在当代神经科学的进步中所表达的主张，以及英美心灵哲学和分析哲学传统的贡献。我知道，这是一个广阔的研究领域，但我的研究的主要目的之一恰恰是构建一种综合的方法，而不是宗派方法。那么最近的理论家和科学家是如何理解激情和死亡的呢？很容易看出，受当代神经科学启发的哲学可能会将爱情归因于大脑中化学变化的副产品，这些副产品是携带内啡肽、5-羟色胺、催产素和多巴胺的神经递质，人们观察到这些递质伴随着甚至可能导致通常被称为“坠入爱河”的经历。同样，如果将思想、精神和灵魂仅仅看作是大脑活动的结果，死亡可能看起来不成问题。激进的唯物主义肯定会让所有激情和死亡的经历变得平淡无奇。然而，即使是最明显的简约主义思想家，也经常表现出对爱情和死亡等基本经历更人道的理解的愿望。例如，在生物学家、神经学家、精神分析学家和哲学家最近的合作工作中，这一点很明显，他们的合资企业试图以不降低精神到对神经学的虚幻反映的方式来理解精神、情感和意识的本质。正是在这种广阔的背景下，我将对近代法国哲学中的死亡、主体性和激情进行研究。所研究的问题显然是专家和普通公众都感兴趣的。我相信，这个项目坚决的跨学科方法将对我们理解二十世纪下半叶的法国思想做出真正的贡献，因为它试图解决一些最根本和长期存在的哲学问题。

My research explores conceptions of the human subject in its relationship to death in French thought of the second half of the twentieth century. Several interweaving strands traverse the study, in particular the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From the first discussions of the passions by the Greek philosophers, in particular Aristotle, passion has held a borderline position. Manifested in both body and soul (weeping and anguish of heart in sadness, sexual desire and emotional yearning in romantic love, for example), passion has proved persistently difficult to categorize. It is not possible to work on passion without exploring the mind/body relationship; and the question of death, of human mortality, is the place where this relationship is most intensely explored. What happens to the subject in death? What does human embodiment mean for the subject at the point of death? And the focus on death necessarily brings love into the frame, for the relationship between love, passion and death is intrinsic to human experience. Friendship and love are always already permeated by anticipated loss. All experience is predicated on its ultimate transience, in other words on its death. It is the inevitable death of the other that gives our relationship with him or her its poignancy and intensity. Ancient and modern philosophers have, of course, examined these ideas many times before, and I shall draw on them for the insights they offer into contemporary debates and to gauge the ways in which modern thinkers are dependent on and depart from their precursors. At one pole of my study will be an exploration of texts such as Plato's Symposium and Aristotle's De Anima, at the other pole will be an attempt to take into account the claims of radical materialism as they are expressed for example in the advances of contemporary neuroscience, as well as the contributions of Anglo-American Philosophy of Mind and the Analytic philosophical tradition. This is, I am aware, a vast area of study, but one of the main aims of my research is precisely to construct a synthetic rather than a sectarian approach. How then are passion and death understood by recent theorists and scientists? It is easy to see how philosophies inspired by contemporary neuro-science may relegate love to being a mere by-product of chemical changes in the brain caused by neuro-transmitters carrying endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine which have been observed to accompany and perhaps even cause the experience commonly referred to as 'falling in love'. Similarly, death may seem unproblematic if mind, spirit and soul are envisaged as mere effects of activity in the brain. Radical materialism certainly risks de-dramatising all experiences of passion and mortality. Nevertheless, a desire for a more humane understanding of such fundamental experiences as love and death is often manifest in even the most apparently reductionist thinkers. This is evident, for example, in recent collaborative work between biologists, neuroscientists, psychoanalysts and philosophers whose joint ventures attempt to understand the nature of mind, emotion and consciousness in ways which do not reduce the spiritual to an illusory reflection of the neurological. It is against this broad background that my study of mortality, subjectivity and passion in recent French philosophy will be conducted. The issues examined are clearly of interest to specialists and general public alike. I believe that the resolutely interdisciplinary approach of this project will make a real contribution to our understanding of French thought of the second half of the twentieth century as it attempts to grapple with some of the most fundamental and perennial of philosophical questions.