The philosophy of porn - Prospect Magazine

Prospect Magazine · by John Maier · July 19, 2021

Sex and analytic philosophy are not promising bedfellows. But when it comes to feminist philosophy, it is no mere pun to say that sex is where the action is. The revival of this neglected feminist concern is principally owed to Amia Srinivasan, the 36-year-old star of Oxford philosophy and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College. Srinivasan began her career making influential contributions to formal epistemology and shot up the academic rungs; she has since found a public audience as a critic and essayist of remarkable precision and range. In her new essay collection, The Right to Sex, Srinivasan writes about consent, pornography and the ideological shaping of desire, attempting “to remake the political critique of sex for the 21st century.” Here, the political isn’t just personal; it’s intimate.

Readers may approach the book with misgivings. With what authority does academic philosophy address itself to the sexual imagination, fantasy and our intimate lives? There are other ways that philosophy can fail us besides being false; bad philosophy—like bad sex—can be formulaic and uninspired. When it comes to our ethical lives, philosophy wins authority not just by telling the truth about things, but by making sense of them. Philosophy, beyond being true, ought to ring true. Notoriously, when the heavy artillery of analytic philosophy—reduction, abstraction and theory-building—is turned on the landscape of moral and political life, the result is usually desolating.

“Sometimes,” Srinivasan writes, we just “don’t need another crank of the reason machine,” another spin of the “intellectual assembly line, endlessly performing the same task on different, fungible objects.” Philosophy, Srinivasan once admitted, is “a thing I love but whose instantiations often fill me with boredom and despair” (as good a characterisation of the subject as any).

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” Srinivasan starts, “but anyway, I’ll say it: philosophically-orientated theorists have been systematically failing to meet the moment very clearly since, I think, 2008 onwards… and, I think, for a lot longer than that.” Not only can philosophy sometimes alienate its readers, but in certain styles it fails to acknowledge where the theory of politics must yield to politics itself. All too often, Srinivasan explains, theorists have an “unjustified conviction… that what activists or political actors need are better philosophical tools and better philosophical concepts.”

“I think the problem,” she laughs, “is that often what they need is just more political power. So, if you really want to help the cause, you should probably just be joining your union and going on the picket line.”

“Porn has, in Srinivasan’s idiom, ‘world-making’ power”

The Chichele chair, named after a medieval archbishop of Canterbury who founded All Souls, will not be a seat of armchair philosophy, remote from worldly struggle, while Srinivasan is sitting on it. Her “world-directed” approach accounts for her apprehensive philosophical style, the sense she conveys—on the page and in person—of there being something at stake. As a young scholar, Srinivasan was turned off by the distasteful tendency in political philosophy to play intellectual games with matters of moral seriousness. Raised in Taiwan, New York and Singapore, she came to Oxford from Yale in 2007. Just when she might have gone back to the US, to law or graduate school, she won the coveted All Souls prize fellowship.

At Oxford, she “feared that being a philosopher and being a public thinker were simply two different things.” Even her previous byline at the London Review of Books wryly advertised her divided loyalty: “Amia Srinivasan teaches at Oxford but surfs in LA.” Now it simply refers to her Chichele appointment, doubtless itself a source of conflicted feeling to a philosopher who cares resolutely for radical politics and the possibility of “revolution.” (A wary ambivalence in the revered chair is not entirely new: GA Cohen, Srinivasan’s Marxist predecessor-but-one, once told the following joke: “Question: ‘How many fellows of All Souls does it take to change a light bulb?’ Answer: ‘Change?!?’”)

Talking to Srinivasan from her room in Oxford felt initially like being back in a philosophy tutorial: having my long-winded, ill-formulated questions charitably reconstructed and then answered with consideration and poise. In other ways it was not quite the same. For instance, though as an undergraduate it very often would have been true, it seldom seemed apropos to announce, an hour or so in, as I did to Srinivasan: “I’d like to talk about gay porn now, if that’s alright.”

One of the essays in Srinivasan’s book, “Talking to my Students about Porn,” refers back to the “Porn Wars” of the 1980s, when pornography was considered a robustly contestable political phenomenon. It has since become unfashionable to subject pornography, and the market of desire it serves, to ethical critique, largely because of the broader embrace of an ethic of “sex positivity”: we have learned to think “you do you” (or indeed anyone else) when it comes to people’s shocking sexual tastes or self-abasing kinks. We have become—for sound political reasons—nervous of diagnosing false consciousness; sexual desire is implicitly considered to be “pre-political,” assimilated to a private sphere immune from political critique.

Srinivasan’s work rehabilitates a more questioning attitude. To anti-porn feminists, porn was a metonym “for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men.” Its power, though, was more than totemic. As Catherine MacKinnon influentially argued, porn effectuates its message: it has, in Srinivasan’s idiom, “world-making” power. Porn is a machine for reproducing ideology; it eroticises women’s subordination and cultivates in men an ethic of entitlement and aggression. Porn tells lies about women, but it tells the truth about men.

When pornography existed on centrefolds, videotapes, and the backs of playing cards, campaigners might have succeeded in suppressing it. Now, it seems, nothing short of a technological armageddon could loosen porn’s grip on the collective imagination. With some irony, Srinivasan writes, “the warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realised: sex for my students is what porn says it is.”

So, as I was asking, what about gay porn? Whatever its negative qualities, these cannot straightforwardly consist in sexist conditioning or the objectification of women. As the philosopher Les Green has suggested, gay porn might even provide a positive service to gay men by objectifying them, giving them a robust sense of themselves as sex objects. This notwithstanding, perhaps the more disagreeable conventions of mainstream gay porn—of gay life, generally—involve a kind of imitation of the pernicious features of its heterosexual counterpart. Srinivasan agrees: “I think it’s undeniable that some of the problematic dynamics you find in mainstream gay male culture take their model from the heterosexual dynamic. That’s just obviously the case.”

But, Srinivasan argues, what mainstream porn of all varieties embodies is a vast, and perhaps irreversible, pedagogical failure. Its grip on the imagination is to be regretted, its disabling power owed as much to its cinematic qualities as anything else. The “logic of the screen” pacifies the viewer, compelling him to identify with his on-screen surrogate. “It etches deep grooves in the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli… if the viewer times things right—online, unlike in the cinema, one can always pause, fast-forward, rewind—it becomes his semen on her face and breasts.”

“Srinivasan asks whether we can subject our sexual desires to reflective criticism and some degree of wilful control”

Better sex education, Srinivasan argues, is now an impotent remedy. It fails to meet porn on its own terms, attempting to counter its immersive power with something cognitive and discursive: “porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” A remaining hope, Srinivasan concludes, is the onset of a kind of “negative education.” “What we need,” she explains, “isn’t a kind of positive hermeneutics to be inculcated in viewers of pornography, so that they can better interpret what is going on… what we need is the onslaught of images to just stop for a moment.”

I put it to Srinivasan that her critique shares some of its spirit with conservative objections to porn: the worry that porn’s logic of commodification corrupts the value of sex, manifest perhaps in the creeping feeling—all too easily evoked whenever one finds oneself choosing from a menu with pictures—that one is engaged in something debasing. “I totally agree,” Srinivasan says—“the conservative way of putting it is that we have this kind of sacred thing that’s being degraded by being placed on this screen. I more specifically want to say the thing we’re losing is a certain kind of creative capacity which then gets dulled by its over-reliance on the screen.”

Such arguments, she adds, are another reason to read conservative philosophers—“to understand that part of us, which is very much drawn to and recognises the truth in conservatism, because it’s a very false radical politics that thinks that progress does not come with loss.”

It is inherent to sexual life, with its vast comedy and small tragedies, that our desires can take us by surprise. But Srinivasan asks whether we can subject our sexual desires to reflective criticism and some degree of wilful control. Proposals along these lines are similiar to those of the “body positivity” movements, which invite us to find fat or disabled bodies attractive: to resist hegemonic standards of “fuckability.”

Srinivasan hopes that, with greater self-understanding, more enlightened desire might re-assert itself, “cut against what politics has chosen for us and choose for itself.” The task of sifting one’s authentic desires—those which are genuine or autonomous expressions of the sexual self—from those that are ideological deposits seems to me potentially paranoia-inducing. But that is only, Srinivasan replies, if one subscribes to the fantasy of the “pre-political desire” or “purely authentic self.” The point, she says ruefully, is not to ask whether we can sift the clean from the tainted—“the point is that everything is tainted.”

I wonder whether this project of radical sexual self-criticism recommends liberalism: an environment of free and self-examining enquiry; perhaps, in that rather quaint phrase of John Stuart Mill’s, “experiments in living.” I almost inquire whether Srinivasan considers herself a liberal, but—even following on from all the talk about sex and gay porn—it seems rather too personal a question. “There is,” though, she says, “a certain aspect to liberalism that is profoundly attractive, and shouldn’t only be owned by liberals, which is the fundamental respect for individual life, projects and forms of experimentation.”

In its totality, however, Srinivasan regards liberalism as tragic. In matters of sexuality, it purchases an equality in respect for taste at the price of deceiving us about the immutability of desires. Srinivasan thinks stories about fixed sexual preference, and the “born-this-way” narrative, are political, not metaphysical, claims. They have been very useful in seeing off prejudice. But it would be better if we could live without them, while retaining, indeed augmenting, the political equality they have secured. “I am not some kind of Whiggish person,” she says, “but I believe that the kind of defence of queer lifestyles in terms of involuntariness has got to be a fleeting historical moment that we get past, and it’s got to be high up on the agenda for a radical queer politics to get past it.”

But don’t the political forces at work on us, I put it to her, make us into creatures unfit for utopia? “That has to be right,” Srinivasan agrees: “I think it’s an extraordinary and striking fact that Moses doesn’t live to see the promised land, and he’s destined not to… as a metaphor, I think that’s right.” We are tied, by relations of nostalgia and rebellion, to the world we seek to liberate ourselves from. “But,” she adds, “I think that’s a hopeful thought too, because it means that I’m not going to have to be forced to live in a world in which I’m uncomfortable either. I’ll help to bring it into existence and then die.”

On Taste: How do we know whether art is any good?

 

On Taste

How do we know whether art is any good?

by Thomas Kaminski

For much of the 20th century The Man with the Golden Helmet was esteemed one of Rembrandt’s greatest paintings. The brilliant play of light on the gilded helmet, the subject’s shadowed face and pensive, down-turned eyes, and the secondary glint off the metal of the gorget seemed to most viewers a bravura display of the master’s technique. But by the 1960s some scholars had begun to question whether Rembrandt had in fact painted it; and two decades later, after extensive analysis, a scholarly consensus arose that it had probably been done by one of Rembrandt’s students.

What are we to make of this? Is the painting still a masterpiece? Did we set too high a value on it when we mistakenly thought it a Rembrandt? It is still the same picture: do we get less pleasure from it now that we strongly suspect it to be by a lesser hand? Why did we love it in the first place: because it was a brilliant artistic achievement, or because (as we thought at the time) it was by Rembrandt? These questions have no simple answers. They are all related to the intractable problem of taste.

Judgments and Standards

Taste is the faculty by which we make judgments about art. The term of course has broader social uses: a gift, a comment, any form of public display may, depending on the circumstances, be thought in either good or bad taste. Yet even in our social interactions, things are rarely straightforward. Who is to say that an act is in bad taste? One person might ignore certain social conventions, thinking them out-of-date, while another, more finicky sort might judge that behavior a violation of good manners.

Such conflicts are inevitable: the very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment. The idea derives from our physical sense of taste. It takes no great powers of observation to notice that different people prefer different foods. I like cilantro, you do not. As the Latin tag has it, de gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes.

And yet, however much we have a right to our own likes and dislikes, such judgments are often measured against a standard. For instance, the man who refuses to eat spinach or asparagus is unlikely to be considered a discerning judge of fine food. These two principles—the autonomy of the individual taste and the existence of some broader principle of excellence—are perpetually at odds. Each of us navigates between them, sometimes vindicating our own preferences, other times yielding to (and perhaps learning from) the taste of others.

Taste in the arts adds another level of complexity. Even when we are talking of the physical senses, we recognize that all people are not the same. Most of us know someone with a more delicate palate or a more sensitive nose than we have. Your eye doctor can even test your ability to see the full spectrum of colors. We find similar variety in people’s sensitivity to art. Some are more attuned to the play of words, others to the visual arts, still others to music. And within each category, the difference in responsiveness is enormous.

Alan Bennett makes this point in his play A Question of Attribution; his speaker is     Anthony Blunt, the art critic and Cambridge spy: “Kenneth Clark was saying the other day…that people who look at old masters fall into three groups: those who see what it is without being told; those who see it when you tell them; and those who can’t see it whatever you do.” This remark, cold and hard as it is, seems largely correct. Ask anyone who has taught literature or art history at the college level: the professor will recognize these three groups—the sensitive, the teachable, and the dull. It is not necessarily a matter of intellect. I once heard a brilliant economist talk about a novel: he noticed everything in it but the art. It is a matter of taste.

Before I go any further, let me add a few caveats. I intend to draw most examples from the visual arts. My arguments will apply just as well to literature and music, but the terrain is too vast to stick one’s nose into every hollow or fissure and hunt about for illustrative specimens. On top of that, having spent my academic career teaching literature, I hope to escape the dead hand of professionalism by working in the spirit of the amateur. Finally, I want to avoid—at least until the end—any contentious disputes between high and low taste, between Mozart and Mötley Crüe. For the purposes of this essay, there is such a thing as great art.

Back to Alan Bennet, and one qualification about Kenneth Clark’s typology. Those who see what is going on in an Old Master painting “without being told” can do so only because they already know something about the form. Art is never transparent. There are no wholly intuitive responses to it, not even to the Old Masters. We assume, perhaps rightly, that anyone can enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the scent of peonies: the pleasures of nature must certainly be available to all. But the response to art is different. Art is not a part of the natural world; it is a human contrivance, and to appreciate it we must undergo some form of acculturation. Before Western music conquered the world, the shamisen (a three-stringed traditional instrument) would have sounded as natural to Japanese ears as the guitar does to our own. But nature had nothing to do with it: we hear a culture’s vibrations in the strings of each instrument. No one, in fact, is born a connoisseur of Old Master paintings, just as no one is born a reader of Alexander Pope or a devotee of Mozart. Our responses to art involve both nature and nurture, an inherent sensitivity shaped by experience. Taste must always be trained.

Current Trends

The idea of training one’s taste may seem alien, even repugnant. Perhaps beauty should be recognizable in any circumstances. But one’s own experience will generally tell against this claim. Consider the Byzantine icon. Those of us who have trained our taste on the Western tradition of religious art from Giotto to Guido Reni are likely, upon first encountering an icon, to find it static, distant, artistically unsatisfying. In trying to make sense of it, we might see it as a “precursor” of Cimabue or Duccio. But how can that be relevant? The work was never intended to aim toward something grander. Created in a tradition, it had had its own purposes and expressed a particular artistic idiom. Such works seem alien to those never exposed to that tradition. Whatever made them precious eludes us.

And yet, strange or unfamiliar art will sometimes break through our prejudices, upsetting our expectations and becoming a part of our own personal aesthetic. Japanese prints, for instance, had a marked influence on 19th-century European art, as did African masks in the early 20th century. An openness to such experience may in fact be a sign of a particularly responsive taste. We may still know nothing of the work’s original social and cultural meaning, but that does not matter, for we have fit it into our own aesthetic world and conferred our own meaning upon it.

In the process of learning to see art, we also learn to tell good from bad—and the best from the good. But where did this scale of values come from? Didn’t we say at the start that we are each autonomous in matters of taste? How did it come about that we are now to judge by someone else’s lights?

More than two centuries ago David Hume took up this problem in “Of the Standard of Taste.” All responses to art, Hume’s essay argues, are fundamentally personal, but not all are equally valid. Some people are more sensitive to beauty than others. Some, better at recognizing what makes a work artful, possess sounder judgment. In Hume’s view, the man of taste possessed both sensibility and sense.

Because we have no simple means of identifying these paragons, however, they must reveal themselves by a sort of test: declare themselves “critics” and offer their judgments to the public. If they can bring others to see things as they do, they shape the current taste. In this way, by trial and error, a standard emerges. If Hume is correct about this process, as I think he is, any standard must be provisional, for it rests on nothing more solid than received opinion.

And received opinion certainly does change over time. The church of San Luigi dei Francesi stands just off a street that connects the Pantheon with Piazza Navona in Rome. If you enter the church today, you are likely to see a small crowd of people at the top of the left-hand aisle, waiting for someone to pop a euro into a metal box that will illuminate, for a minute or two, Caravaggio’s three great paintings of the life of Saint Matthew. With the striking effects of his lighting and his use of crude Italian peasants to represent the Apostles and the Holy Family, Caravaggio is today considered one of the great painters of the Western tradition. It was not always so. A century after his death, the most important guidebooks for English travelers to Rome—Edward Wright’s Observations Made in Travelling through France [and] Italy (1730) and Thomas Nugent’s The Grand Tour (1749)—made no mention of these paintings. Readers who carried either book to San Luigi would find their attention directed elsewhere, mainly to the Saint Cecelia chapel frescoed by Domenichino. As far as received opinion was concerned, Caravaggio wasn’t worth a look.

Even in his own day, Caravaggio had been controversial. One of the three paintings he originally completed for San Luigi—Saint Matthew and the Angel—was rejected by the priests who had commissioned it. In that work the saint sits cross-legged with a book on his knee as an angel directs his hand in writing the Gospel. But the saint’s naked legs and feet—with one brilliantly foreshortened foot seeming almost to protrude from the canvas—struck the patrons as below the dignity of an evangelist. Luckily for all concerned, a nobleman accepted this picture and paid Caravaggio to paint another, more decorous version of the same subject, which hangs above the chapel’s altar today. (The original version of the painting, sad to say, was destroyed in Berlin during the war.)

Despite such controversies, during the 17th century painters all over Europe followed Caravaggio’s example. But by the 18th, new ideas of propriety, even more strict than those of Caravaggio’s clerical patrons, had come to dominate contemporary taste. Raphael and Guido Reni now set the standard. The typical tourist at San Luigi was unlikely even to look into the dark chapel that housed Caravaggio’s works. It would not be until the first half of the 20th century that the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, playing the role of Hume’s taste-shaping critic, would resuscitate Caravaggio’s reputation. Times change, tastes change. That’s the way of the world.

Received Opinion

In fact, more often than not, our initial introduction to art is an unwitting exercise in absorbing received opinion. We are likely to know the names of important artists or hear the titles of famous paintings long before we have learned to look with any sensitivity at a work of art. Who hasn’t heard of the Mona Lisa? Who doesn’t know the names Michelangelo and Van Gogh? This naturally leads us to think in terms of hierarchies, even when we haven’t seen enough paintings to tell good from bad, let alone good from great.

It is only later that a family member or a teacher will help us look, perhaps pointing out some excellence in a favorite work or introducing us to an artist that we hadn’t known before, nudging us closer to a real aesthetic experience. It was Lincoln Kirstein’s remarkable good fortune to be guided, while still in his teens, through several art shows by John Maynard Keynes. When he balked at a Cézanne, Keynes told him, “Keep your eyes open, clean of received opinion and prejudice.” It was good advice, but not without its ironies: by admiring Cézanne in 1924, Keynes and his Bloomsbury friends showed their adventurous taste. A century later, Cézanne is the darling of received opinion.

Few are so fortunate as to have a mentor like Keynes; the rest of us must be content with absorbing the taste of the time. There is no shame in that, however much we might prize independent thought, for the untrained taste is inevitably naïve. Consider a young person interested in the arts who particularly values the expression of “authentic” feeling. How is he to know what authenticity looks like in a sophisticated piece of art?

In our untutored state we are all given to what I.A. Richards called “stock responses,” the tendency to mistake commonplace but comfortable notions for real insight. In the end, even the sensitive student of art requires some direction to avoid being taken in by the flabby, the meretricious, or the merely sentimental. And if this is true of the receptive viewer, one with some affinity for the arts, what will be its effect on those with only a passing interest? At best we can hope that those who are teachable will assimilate the taste of their teachers, which in most cases will track with received opinion.

And yet, since it is only received opinion and not the art itself that one must master, even the dull can learn what to say about art without ever having been truly touched by it. Almost anyone who has taken a course in art appreciation, however insensitive, should be able to tell you of Piero’s quiet dignity or Monet’s ability to capture light. One need not truly see the paintings in order to know what to say about them. In two of his Idler essays, Samuel Johnson, a contemporary of Hume’s, gives us a humorous portrait of the fictional Dick Minim, who makes a name for himself as a literary critic by listening to the wits in the coffee houses and repeating their observations to his acquaintances. Minim knows nothing of literature, but he has learned what to say in order to be taken for a man of taste.

The same applies equally to the visual arts. Quite a few people, I am sure, have praised a Picasso or a de Kooning without having derived much pleasure from viewing it. Knowing what one is supposed to say of such works, they dutifully follow the script. Such feigning is the arty version of hypocrisy for those who want to be seen as having sophisticated taste.

The Tyranny of Experts

We are now ready to answer the questions posed at the beginning about The Man with the Golden Helmet. Before the painting was reattributed to one of Rembrandt’s students, received opinion had pronounced it a masterpiece, and those who followed the dominant taste would have agreed. These same people would likely have found it less compelling after its demotion. Those who relied on their own taste would probably reserve judgment until they could see the work again. Had they too judged more by name than by eye, they might wonder. (It is a fault hard to avoid.) Was the splendor of the helmet artful or merely showy?

Such a question, in its new context, is very difficult to answer. What one had considered genius in the master’s hand might be excess in his student’s. How is one to judge? There is no rule. One can only look, feel, and think for oneself.

The world, though, will rarely give us that leisure. We are beset by a related problem—the tyranny of experts. Let us return to the example of Caravaggio in the 18th century. The authors of the guidebooks had already determined what was worth seeing. If a visitor to San Luigi had peered into the dark chapel by chance and been deeply moved by Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, what would his contemporaries have thought? Was he a man of independent judgment or of degenerate taste? For most, I suspect, it would have been the latter.

Perhaps the most instructive example is the early history of the Impressionists. They had rejected the dominant, Academic style of painting’s formal polish and idealized subjects, searching instead for an art of greater immediacy. But their revolutionary techniques—the new, brighter palette, the loose application of paint, working en plein air—were all dismissed, even ridiculed, by contemporary critics, who largely excluded Impressionist works from the Academic salons. For decades, a Bouguereau would command a far greater price than a Monet.

Over time, however, a small group of dealers and collectors began to champion Impressionist works, giving rise to a new, dissident taste in art. The older style, which lavished its perfected technique on stale sentiment or decorative eroticism, seemed allied to the conventions and platitudes of bourgeois society. The Impressionists, on the other hand, offered vitality and novelty, the verve of the city and a countryside unencumbered with sentimentality or moral lessons—in other words, the Modern. Establishment critics now found themselves challenged by radicals and upstarts, the original avant-garde. Taste in art had become a barometer of one’s social opinions.

With a great shift in taste under way, the Impressionists had two qualities working in their favor: the paintings themselves were visually appealing, and the new aesthetic was easy to assimilate. One did not have to be a profound theorist to accept that our visual world is constructed from small blotches of color. And, once again, the paintings themselves were so pretty!

Things became more difficult, however, with Post-Impressionism and Cubism, which put new demands on the viewer. One was now expected to accept the painter’s expressionist caprice as the true source of art. If you found the work itself odd or ugly—well, whose fault was that? And with the advent of abstraction, the critics came fully into their own. Many art lovers who enjoyed the detail of a Dutch genre scene or admired a portrait by Ingres were more puzzled than moved by Jackson Pollock’s drips or Franz Kline’s swaths of black. What were they to make of such things?

A Decadent Age

Most, of course, were too intimidated to speak up for fear they would be dismissed as philistines and declared incapable of appreciating “true” or “difficult” art. The late 20th century, when the art that most pleased the experts left the typical viewer cold, was the great age of the aesthetic hypocrite. One could only wonder what someone meant when he said that he “liked” a piece of modern art. Did he find the arrangement of colors in that work, however random or chaotic, beautiful in itself? Perhaps. Was that Cubist disassembly of a female torso psychologically compelling? Maybe the first time one saw that sort of thing. Or was our viewer merely watching out for his reputation, in effect saying to himself, “Everyone knows that Matisse is a great artist, and by nodding approval I show myself a man of taste”? Our motives, of course, are often unclear even to ourselves; and who is any one of us, after all, to dispute received opinion?

At the heart of the matter is the question of who determines what constitutes refined or sophisticated taste. For nearly a century we have ceded authority in such matters not to particularly sensitive viewers of art, Hume’s tastemakers, but to intellectuals. The latter judge as their theories or their politics require, with little concern for the actual experience of looking.

Ours, sad to say, is a decadent age, in which we have allowed the critics to argue us out of our senses. (Of all the arts, music has undoubtedly suffered the most from this deference to the intellect and denial of the sensual. Does anyone outside of music schools really enjoy the latest cacophony foisted upon restive but intimidated concertgoers as “modern” music?) And yet, once again, despite the failure of much modern art to convey anything either meaningful or pleasurable to most of us, there are still many who find abstract and conceptual art compelling and who derive real aesthetic pleasure from viewing it. So malleable is human consciousness in responding to the artifice of our fellow man, and such is the power of received opinion to shape those responses.

But the tyranny of critics is hardly the greatest obstacle to a rich experience of art today. For the past half-century, the very notion of a refined taste has come under attack as oppressive, just another means by which the privileged keep down the masses. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that a familiarity with the arts constituted a form of cultural capital that elites employed to exclude others from the inner circles of wealth and power. Historically, there was some truth to this, especially in Europe where the pretentions of social class rested largely on the distinction of one’s ancestors. In the descendants, these pretentions manifested themselves in an arrogant demeanor and an exquisite taste.

This way of thinking, though, never made much headway in America, where successful men often took pride in their humble origins. Some self-made men, it is true, married their daughters into the European aristocracy, but if we are to trust the imaginative insights of writers like Henry James, these young Americans were alternately attracted to and repelled by their new society’s high tone yet dubious morals. In any case, the American model has come to prevail against the European one. Today, wealth and power are far more closely tied to entrepreneurial success than to a love for Mozart or one’s family pride in owning a Rubens. If a refined taste still confers any social capital, it can do so only among the few nowadays who care about such things. When was the last time that a lack of taste prevented someone from becoming rich?

What We Make of It

After all these quibbles, hesitations, and uncertainties, what finally can we say about taste? It is simply the means by which we appreciate art, especially great art. Its importance rests on two assumptions. First, that art provides valuable experiences for human beings. And second, that some of those experiences are richer and more meaningful than others.

Take music. Its popular forms today, especially rock and rap, provide an incessant accompaniment to the lives of the young. The sound is rhythmic and sensual, its pleasures emotionally exuberant and rebellious, often Dionysiac. And those pleasures are real.

Nevertheless, some of us think them shallow, expending themselves in the endocrine system. Those who dissent from the popular taste will tell you that a Bach cantata, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner opera can not only stir our sensual nature but penetrate to the recesses of the human heart. Modern literary theorists and cultural critics sneer at such a claim, decrying it as a form of bourgeois sentimentality or just another attempt by the well-off to justify their “privilege.” Ultimately, the question is impervious to attempts at demonstration: either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.

Unfortunately, our contemporary Solons talk and write as if they have never had an aesthetic experience, which, if it is in fact the case, renders them unqualified to judge. No one doubts that Game of Thrones can entertain its audience, but it cannot move us as King Lear does. The one is an amusement, the other an exploration of human vanity, ignorance, cruelty, and desire.

History, of course, is littered with moral monsters who were themselves “men of taste.” One may indeed stand open-mouthed before a Velasquez, stay awake at the opera, and shudder at the murder of Desdemona without ever doing a kindness for one’s fellow man. But this reality merely reminds us of the crooked timber of which we are made.

To live a good life, taste is neither necessary nor sufficient. It can, though, enrich our experience and, perhaps, deepen our understanding of human life. What use we make of that enrichment and that deepening is up to us.

 

天老爷的“五官”长得是什么样？

辛德勇

2021-06-28 17:17 来源：澎湃新闻

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现代医学的科目，有个“五官科”，指的是眼、耳、口、鼻、喉这五种器官。这五种器官有个共同的地方，就是都长在头上。古人谈到人的身体，所说“五官”，一般与此稍有不同，喉咙因为藏得深，通常看不到（所以西洋人才会有“深喉”一说），所以不能算。翻检古书，可以看到，过去较早占据这个位置的，是“形态”这个词语，即古人是把耳、目、鼻、口、形态合称为“五官”（《荀子·天论》）。

现代商业社会，老板用人，都很讲究相貌（其实古代皇帝选官，同样也很看重这一点，獐头鼠目的要想做官本来是不大容易的，可官做久了，很容易肉往横了长，也就是活生生长出一股横眉竖眼的横劲儿来），对女员工尤甚，而招聘告示上写明的要求，往往就是“五官端正”这四个字。

日本大安株式会社影印明万历本《金瓶梅词话》

看过《金瓶梅》的，或许有人还会记得，当年西门大官人让吴神仙给春梅看相，兰陵笑笑生做有如下一番描述：

神仙睁眼儿见了春梅，年约不上二九，头戴银丝云髻儿，白线挑衫儿，桃红裙子，蓝纱比甲儿，缠手缚脚，出来道了万福。神仙观看良久，相道：“此位小姐五官端正，骨格清奇。发细眉浓，禀性要强。神急眼圆，为人急燥。山根不断，必得贵夫而生子。两额朝拱，位（主）早年必戴珠冠。行步若飞仙，声响神淸，必益夫而得禄三九，定然封赠。但吃了这左眼大，早年克父；右眼小，周岁克娘。左口角下只一点黑痣，主常沽啾唧之灾；右腮一点黑痣，一生受夫爱敬。”

天庭端正五官平　口苦涂朱行步轻

仓库丰盈财禄厚　一生常得贵人怜

神仙相毕，众妇女皆咬指以为神相。（《金瓶梅词话》第二十九回《吴神仙贵贱相人 潘金莲兰汤午战》）

吴神仙所谓“五官端正”的评语，落在实处，都在春梅的脸上。若是依据这一通文字，把“五官端正”理解为颜面姣好，应该不会有什么大错。

这春梅的颜面长得再好，再有福相，也不过是区区清河县里一个生药铺老板的通房丫头而已。出乎常人意料之外的是，在战国时人荀子的笔下，竟把这尘世凡人的“五官”同上天直接联系到了一起：

天行有常，不为尧存，不为桀亡，应之以治则吉，应之以乱则凶。强本而节用，则天不能贫；养备而动时，则天不能病；修道而不二，则天不能祸。本荒而用侈，则天不能使之富；养略而动罕，则天不能使之全；倍道而妄行，则天不能使之吉。故水旱未至而饥，寒暑未薄而疾，祅怪未至而凶。受时与治世同，而殃祸与治世异，不可以怨天，其道然也。故明于天人之分，则可谓至人矣。不为而成，不求而得，夫是之谓天职。如是者，虽深，其人不加虑焉；虽大，不加能焉；虽精，不加察焉：夫是之谓不与天争职。天有其时，地有其财，人有其治，夫是之谓能参。舍其所以参而愿其所参，则惑矣。列星随旋，日月递照，四时代御，阴阳大化，风雨博施，万物各得其和以生，各得其养以成，不见其事而见其功，夫是谓之神。皆知其所以成，莫知其无形，夫是之谓天。

天职既立，天功既成，形具而神生，好恶、喜怒、哀乐藏焉，夫是之谓天情。耳、目、鼻、口、形能（态），各有接而不相能也，夫是之谓天官。心居中虚以治五官，夫是之谓天君（《荀子·天论》）。

不惮其烦引述了这么长一段内容，是想让读者理解，荀子讲述的顺天应时的道理。这里所说“五官”，也就是耳、目、鼻、口、形能（态）五者，分明长在世人身上，却被荀子称之为“天官”，明里是要阐释天任其职、天成其功的语义，暗里则是在以上天“五官”来比附人身肉长的“五官”，而这当然要以苍天之上固有“五官”存在为前提。

那么，这个苍天之上的“五官”到底长得是什么样呢？不大了解中国古代天文历法知识的朋友，乍听这话，可能会觉得有些怪异：难道我们头顶上这片天空真的像俗话讲的那样是个青天大老爷？要不怎么会有脸有“五官”？

这事儿，本来很简单，翻看司马迁写的《史记》稍微看一看，就一目了然用不着再做什么解释——哪怕是看不懂这天老爷的“五官”指的到底是什么，也很容易知道他老人家确实“五官”俱全，一样都没有少，全全乎乎地都摆在天上呢。

不过这事儿要说复杂，也还真的不那么简单，需要慢慢从头道来。

稍习《史记》的朋友都知道，司马迁创制的这种纪传体正史，除了“本纪”和“列传”这两项主体内容亦即起最基本的构件之外，还列有“世家”、“表”和“书”这三种构件。其中的“书”，《汉书》以下的正史通常改而称作“志”，用以载述各项所谓“典章制度”，其中也包含天文内容在内。

《史记》这篇“书”，名为《天官书》。到班固撰著《汉书》的时候，把篇名改成了《天文志》（具体撰著《天文志》的，是班固的同乡马续）。《汉书》这样做的结果，不仅直接造成“天文”一语的普遍流行和“天官”之称隐没不显，而且还在书中湮灭了堂堂“天官”的面目。

这事儿，让我们先来看《汉书·天文志》。《汉书·天文志》一开头，就把全天恒星分归五大区域，举凡“经星常宿中外官凡百一十八名，积数七百八十三星”，一一加以叙述。这五大天区，分别名之曰中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫。“宫”字的本义，乃指房屋、处所，“五宫”意即五大空域。所以上述五宫之名，看起好像很合乎情理。

然而，《汉书·天文志》这些内容，原本是从《史记·天官书》里挪用过来的。核诸《史记》原本，可知实际情况并不那么简单。

百衲本《二十四史》影印所谓“景佑本”《汉书》

《汉书·天文志》在展开全篇的主体内容之前，先列有下面这样一段“小序”：

凡天文在图籍昭昭可知者，经星常宿中外官凡百一十八名，积数七百八十三星，皆有州国官宫物类之象。其伏见早晚，邪正存亡，虚实阔狭，及五星所行，合散犯守，陵历斗食，彗孛飞流，日月薄食，晕适背穴，抱珥虹蜺，迅雷风祅，怪云变气：此皆阴阳之精，其本在地，而上发于天者也。政失于此，则变见于彼，犹景之象形，乡之应声，是以明君睹之而寤，饬身正事，思其咎谢，则祸除而福至，自然之符也。

接下来，才从中宫开始，依次叙及东宫、南宫、西宫、北宫各个宫区之内的一组组恒星，这样的叙述似乎也很自然，但若是回归到《太史公书》的原本里去，其叙事的逻辑，就显得很不通顺了。

今本《史记》，虽然也是依次讲述上述中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫五大空域的一组组恒星，可是，书中并没有上列《汉书·天文志》“小序”的内容，《天官书》一开篇，即为“中宫”云云，这中、东、南、西、北诸宫的叙述，直接同篇名“天官”相衔接，即先以上苍之“官”为篇名却接之以天庭诸“宫”，所谓前后抵牾，首尾横决，怎么看，怎么也对不上茬口。

百衲本《二十四史》影印南宋建安黄善夫书坊刻三家注本《史记》

那么，《天官书》这个篇名会不会有什么讹误、也就是说它的本名会不会叫作《天宫书》呢？

试看《史记·太史公自序》，司马迁在讲述本篇撰著宗旨时，乃谓之曰：“星气之书，多杂禨祥，不经；推其文，考其验，不殊。比集论其行事，验于轨度以次，作《天官书》第五。”《汉书·司马迁传》对《史记》篇目的记述，同样如此。汉成帝时东平王刘宇曾上疏朝廷索求诸子及《太史公书》，大将军王凤谓“《太史公书》有战国从横权谲之谋，汉兴之初谋臣奇策，天官灾异，地形阸塞，皆不宜在诸侯王”（《汉书·宣元六王传》），其“天官灾异”一语中的“天官”，就应该是即《天官书》而言。当时《太史公书》尚秘藏禁中，王凤所言，依据的自是司马迁的原本。由此可见，《天官书》这一篇名，并没有什么讹误，这就是太史公本人写定的样子。

再来看唐人司马贞和张守节对《天官书》篇名的解释，还直接把这“天官”之语老天的“五官”联系到了一起。司马贞语曰：

案天文有五官。官者，星官也。星座有尊卑，若人之官曹列位，故曰天官（《史记·天官书》之《索隐》）。

这话是什么意思？所谓“天文”，直译其文便是上天的纹样，实际上是指日月星辰各等天体在苍空上的布列状况，因而“天文有五官”，也就是说星体的分布状况可以大别为“五官”。那么，“天官”的“官”、也就是“天文”之“五官”的“官”指的又是什么呢？司马贞解释说，就是“星官”，也就是“星座”。这下大家明白了吧？现代汉语里大家常听常讲的“星座”，就这么来的。“星座”通常是由一组相互毗邻的恒星构成的，它相当于官老爷屁股底下的座位，是随着官位的高低而有序列差异的。正因为如此，人们才会把星座称为“天官”。

道理，就这么简单。关键是“天文有五官”这句话，应当是承上启下的“破题”话，意即篇题下面讲述的具体内容，是分属于这天文“五官”之下，“天官”者，即此天文“五官”是也。清人张文虎即据此判断“小司马所见《史》本中、东、西、南、北并作‘官’字，尚未误也”，也就是说司马贞读到的《史记》，并没有像今本那样把天空分成中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫“五宫”，而是书作中、东、南、西、北“五官”（张文虎《校刊史记集解索隐正义札记》卷三）。

紧继司马贞之后，唐人张守节在《史记正义》中对《天官书》这一篇名疏解说：

张衡云：“文曜丽乎天，其动者有七：日、月、五星是也。日者，阳精之宗；月者，阴精之宗；五星，五行之精。众星列布，体生于地，精成于天，列居错峙，各有所属。在野象物，在朝象官，在人象事。其以神着有五列焉，是有三十五名：一居中央，谓之北斗；四布于方，各七，为二十八舍。日月运行，历示吉凶；五纬躔次，用告祸福。”（《史记·天官书》之《正义》）

上面引文末尾“五纬躔次，用告祸福”这两句话，是依据清乾隆年间刊印的武英殿本增补的，现在通行的中华书局点校本并没有这八个字（相应地，在“历示吉凶”句末附有一虚词“也”字）。

单纯从文献学本身来看，清武英殿本《史记》之所以要补入“五纬躔次，用告祸福”这两句话，是因为这段话出自《晋书·天文志》（案据《隋书·天文志》，知此语出自张衡的《灵宪》），而《晋书·天文志》尚另有“五纬躔次，用告祸福”那八个字。引述前人成说，不拘古今，本当但取所需，无须一一照录全文。显而易见，校勘殿本的史臣，以为不添补上这两句话则文义不足，不足以清楚说明张守节本来想要说明的问题。

另一方面，清廷史臣能这样做、会这样做，还有一个不言自明的版本目录学基础——这就是张守节的《史记正义》原书久已佚失不存，现在主要是依靠三家注本《史记》存其大致面目。当三家古注合附于《太史公书》之际，刊刻者对《史记正义》删削颇多，因而像“五纬躔次，用告祸福”这两句话，就完全有可能是在这个时候被误删掉的。因此，现在清臣把这两句话补上，可以说是合情合理的。

阅读《史记正义》这段内容，首先我们需要了解张守节《史记正义》同司马贞《史记索隐》之间的关系。张守节《史记正义》同刘宋裴骃的《史记集解》以及司马贞的《史记索隐》，合称“《史记》三家注”。简单地说，从刘宋裴骃的《史记集解》到唐人司马贞的《史记索隐》，再到张守节的《史记正义》，是一个逐层递进的关系，即《史记索隐》在注解《史记》正文的同时，还兼释《史记集解》的内容，或者说是在《史记集解》的基础上进一步有所阐发，而《史记正义》则在注解《史记》正文的同时，还兼释《史记集解》和《史记索隐》的内容，或者说是在《史记集解》和《史记索隐》两书的基础上更进一步有所阐发。

关于这一问题，前者，亦即《史记索隐》同《史记集解》的关系，读《太史公书》的人，大多只要稍加留意就很容易知晓；后者则隐微不显。尽管清乾隆时人邵晋涵在《南江书录》之“史记正义”条中已经清楚指明这一点，即谓张守节撰著《史记正义》，“能通裴骃之训辞，折司马贞之同异，题曰‘正义’，殆欲与《五经正义》并传矣”。

不过令人遗憾的是，邵晋涵的看法并未引起世人注意。如近人朱东润先生仍以为张守节在撰著《史记正义》时并未见及《史记索隐》，更不存在疏释《索隐》的问题（详朱氏《史记考索》之《张守节〈史记正义〉说例》）。直到近人程金造先生列举很有说服力的证据，翔实阐释，始论定《史记正义》的释义往往是针对《索隐》而发，即张氏乃同时疏释裴骃《集解》和司马贞《索隐》（说见程氏《史记正义与史记索隐关系证》一文，收入作者文集《史记管窥》）。另外，顾颉刚先生在阅读《史记》时，也主注意到张守节《正义》中专门疏释司马贞《索隐》的一些例证（说见《顾颉刚读书笔记》之《缓斋杂记》四）。

明白了《史记正义》同《史记索隐》之间这样的内在联系，再来审度上引《史记正义》的文义，也就很容易理解，张守节引述张衡所说“五星”、“五行”、“五列”以及所谓“在朝象官”云云，都是在直接疏释司马贞在《史记索隐》中提到的“五官”。

至于清廷官刻武英殿本补入“五纬躔次，用告祸福”这两句话的意义，读到司马迁在《史记·天官书》末尾写下的下面这段记述，才能清楚知晓：

余观史记，考行事，百年之中，五星无出而不反逆行，反逆行，尝盛大而变色；日月薄蚀，行南北有时：此其大度也。故紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危列宿部星，此天之五官坐位也，为经，不移徙，大小有差，阔狭有常；水、火、金、木、填星，此五星者，天之五佐，为纬，见伏有时，所过行赢缩有度。

我们看《史记正义》引述的张衡《灵宪》，开头谈到“文曜丽乎天，其动者有七：日、月、五星是也。日者，阳精之宗；月者，阴精之宗；五星，五行之精”，结尾处若如通行的三家注本《史记》，但云“日月运行，历示吉凶”即结束其语，那么，“五星，五行之精”这句话便失去照应，文义呈现明显的缺失，武英殿本的增补当然十分合理。不过参照《史记·天官书》上述记载，我们才能理解“五纬躔次，用告祸福”这两句话中的“五纬”、也就是水、火、金、木、土五大行星（案填星即土星）之所以被称作“五纬”，是因为它们乃是“天之五佐”，所谓“五纬”是与紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危这“五经”相对而言的。

请大家注意，这“五经”只是天庭“五官”的“坐位”（座位），还不是同水、火、金、木、土这“五佐”之星直接对应的“五官”真身，而这“五官”真身同司马贞在《史记索隐》中讲到的“天文”之“五官”当然应该是同一回事儿。

这种情况，向我们提示，张守节撰著《史记正义》时所依据的《太史公书》，应该同司马贞撰著《史记索隐》时依据的文本一样，都在《天官书》中把五大天区的名目书作中官、东官、南官、西官和北官，而不是今本《史记》的中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫。《史记正义》在注释“紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危列宿部星”一语时，谓乃“五官列宿部内之星也”，实际上已经清楚表明了这一点。

更进一步前后通观《史记·天官书》的记载，似乎不难看出，“紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危列宿部星，此天之五官坐位也”这段话，正应该是上承自中官、东官、南官、西官和北官这“五官”星区而来，清人钱大昕就是这样看待这一记载：

中宫天极星。此中宫天极星及东宫苍龙、南宫朱鸟、西宫咸池、北宫玄武五“宫”字皆当作“官”。案下文云“紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危，此天之五官坐位也”，可证史公本文皆作“官”矣。（钱大昕《廿二史考异》卷三）

印证钱大昕这一判断的，还有更为具体的版本依据，即《史记索隐》在《天官书》“中宫”语下引《春秋元命包》云“官之为言宣也，宣气立精为神垣”，钱大昕就此论述说：

古文取音义相协，展转互训，以“宣”训“官”，音相近也。流俗本亦讹作“宫”，由于不知古音。下文“紫宫”下乃引《元命包》“‘宫’之言‘中’也”，又可证小司马元本“中宫”作“中官”矣。（钱大昕《廿二史考异》卷三）

简单地说，只有《史记·天官书》原文是把星空分作中官、东官、南官、西官和北官这五大区域，司马贞才会做出“官之为言宣也”这样的训释，与这形成鲜明对比的是，小司马在训释“紫宫”之“宫”时却另行引述了《春秋元命包》“‘宫’之言‘中’也”的说法。两相对比，司马贞读到的《史记·天官书》，显然是记作中官、东官、南官、西官和北官，而不是现在我们看到的中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫。

其实如上所述，张守节读到的《太史公书》理应同样如此。《史记·司马相如传》载《大人赋》，有句云“使五帝先导兮，反太一而从陵阳”，《史记正义》引《天官书》云：“中官。天极星，其一明者，太一常居也。”除了“中官”书作“中宫”之外，这些话同今本《史记·天官书》开头的几句话一模一样。这是张守节用本仍存古本旧貌的确证。

按照上文所做论述，特别是清人钱大昕的考订结果，今人校勘《史记》，理所当然地应把中宫、东宫、南宫、西宫和北宫更正为中官、东官、南官、西官和北官。然而令人遗憾的是，现在被文史学界奉为权威版本的中华书局点校本，不仅未能更正这一严重的谬误，而且连在校勘记中做个说明也没有。旧点校本是这样，近年印行的新点校本依然如此。

那么，这是为什么呢？是点校者以为钱大昕不懂天文而未能采纳他的见解么？其实钱大昕乃是天下第一流的天文学史专家，这一考证，本来受到后世学者的高度认同。

譬如今中华书局点校本所依据的底本——同治金陵书局本，其校刊者张文虎，即谓“钱说至确”。只是碍于《史记》“正文习非成是，各本相同”，才“姑仍之”而已（张文虎《校刊史记集解索隐正义札记》卷三）。现在虽有个别研究古代天文历法的文史学者依然以“宫”为是，崇信今本《史记》的错误写法（如冯时《考古天文学》第六章第三节《古老的天官体系》），但比较权威的中国天文学史专家，如陈遵妫先生，他撰著的《中国天文学史》一书，虽然没有标明具体依据，但实际上是吸取钱大昕的意见，以“五官”分区来表述《史记·天官书》记述的星象（陈遵妫《中国天文学史》第三编第二章《〈天官书〉的五官》）。

在这种情况下，现在重新点校《史记》的学者，又有什么理由对钱大昕的观点完全置之不理呢？这是中国古代天文学史上的一个重大问题，绝非无足轻重的文字差异，因而点校者的处理方式按照正常的逻辑是怎么讲也说不过去的。对此，我唯一能够找到的理由，是操弄其事的人完全不懂古代天文历法的常识。因为完全读不懂，所以也根本不敢碰，一动也不敢动，甚至连引述钱大昕的说法出个校记也不敢。

不管现在通行的《史记》怎么处理《天官书》的文字，弄清所谓中、东、南、西、北“五宫”本来应该写作“五官”，天老爷的“五官”也就展现在了我们的面前——这就是《史记·天官书》分作中官、东官、南官、西官和北官这五个空域一一列举的那一组组恒星，也可以说是天老爷的“五官”就是由这一颗颗恒星连缀而成的一个个图形。

下面这五幅星图，是陈遵妫编绘的《史记·天官书》“五官”星图（见陈氏《中国天文学史》第三编第二章《〈天官书〉的五官》）。大家看一看，这也就是司马迁描摹的两千多年前天老爷的模样。

中官星图

东官星图

南官星图

西官星图

北官星图

我相信，看到这幅模样的天老爷，绝大多数读者对它的尊容，还是一片混沌，没有一个整体的印象，更看不到这诸多星象的内在联系。其实上述“五官”星区的划分，本身就是基于对漫天星象内在关系的认识，也体现了星空的整体结构。

在上古时期，人们在夜晚仰望星空时，最容易感知的，是漫天星斗随着地球自转而发生的移徙。当然，人们也很容易发现，这漫天星斗是环绕着一个中心点转动的——对于生活在北半球的中华先民来说，这一点，就是北极。

如果我们想象一下，把地球无限放大，就可以把天空想象为一个球体，这就是所谓“天球”。那么，北极可以说是“天轴”的北端，是一个点。在这个端点上，通常不会正赶上有一颗恒星。于是，人们便以北极点附近的一颗亮星作为北极的标志，这就是后世所谓“北极星”，古人通常是将其称作“北辰”。孔夫子说“为政以德，譬如北辰，居其所，而众星共（拱）之”（《论语·为政》）。众星拱辰这个例子，生动而又简明地说明了北极星的独特之处和它在世人心目中的特殊地位。可以说，它也是天顶的标志。

由于所谓“岁差”的原因，天球的北极大约将近26000年会环绕所谓“黄极”移行一周，所以从古到今，北极星也随之发生变化。需要说明的是，在《史记·天官书》中并没有清楚记载当时的北极星是指哪一颗星。

《天官书》记云：“中官。天极星。其一明者，太一常居也。”这里所说“太一”，指的应是天球北极点，而不是标志北极点的北极星。《开元占经》引《黄帝占》曰：“北极者，一名天极，一名北辰。”（唐瞿昙悉达《开元占经》卷六七《石氏中官》）如上所述，狭义地讲，北辰指的是北极星，同北极的概念是有所差异的，但浑而言之，也可以用“北辰”来表述北极的概念，故此说可谓大体不缪。从而可知，《天官书》所记“天极星”应该是位于北极区域的一个星座（或谓之曰星官），故太一亦即北极会“常居”于这个星座中那一颗最亮的恒星，也就是以此恒星作为北极的标志。

《史记索隐》引《春秋合诚图》曰：“北辰，其星五。”《晋书·天文志》和《隋书·天文志》也都记载说：“北极五星。”参据《开元占经》引《黄帝占》的说法，这个“北辰”或“北极”，指的应该就是《史记·天官书》所说的“天极星”。据此，北辰、北极或天极这个星座，应由五颗恒星组成，而其“第二星主日，帝王也”（《晋书·天文志》。《隋书·天文志》）。后世学者一般把这颗星称作“帝星”。参照《史记·天官书》“斗为帝车”（亦即帝星乘坐在北斗之中）的说法，可知这样的称谓是合情合理的，而这颗星之所以被称作“帝星”，是因为它就是司马迁写《史记》那个年代的北极星，是众星所拱的北辰。

北极与帝星

了解到这一点之后，大家再来翻看《史记·天官书》，就应该很容易理解，其“中官”这个涵盖很大区域的“天官”，体现的乃是以北极为核心的天顶区域，载述的是这个区域的星象。

天球有北极，有天顶，由天顶逐渐下降，降落到零纬度处，便是天球的赤道。在天赤道南北一定幅度范围内的天赤道带，中华先人们用星官、也就是星座把它划分为二十八个地段，这就是著名的二十八宿。设置二十八宿的目的，是要把它用作座标，来体现地球等行星以及其他星体的运行状况。当然古人不知道地球在绕着太阳转，反而以为太阳在围着大地兜圈子。用现代的科学术语讲，这叫太阳的“视运动”。

随着太阳在其视运动轨道上的位置变化，大地上也出现了春、夏、秋、冬四时的更替。春、夏、秋、冬四时的明显变化，让人们有理由把太阳视运动的轨迹切割为与这四时相对应的四个段落。这样，体现太阳视运动轨迹的二十八宿便被分成了七宿一组的四组。《史记·天官书》载述的东官、南官、西官和北官四大星区，反映的就是这四个太阳视运动运行区间的恒星，再按照赤道面上的东、南、西、北四方分别给这四个大区域星官命名，这就是东官、南官、西官和北官。这些恒星散布在这一区间赤道南北两侧的一定范围之内，北侧与北极天顶周边的“中官”之星相邻接，南侧则直至南天极周边那些隐而不见的星体为止，当然其核心地带就是二十八宿。

这样看来，司马迁在《史记·天官书》中对天之“五官”的描摹，眉目清晰，丝毫也不混乱。俗话说“内行看门道，外行看热闹”，会看不会看，看得懂还是看不懂，那都是你自己个儿的事儿，与太史公的天文造诣和文字能力无关。

不过司马迁写不错，并不等于他的书在流传过程中不会出现文字错谬。

我们看在把“五宫”订正为“五官”之后的东、南、西、北“四官”开头部分，其形式如下：

东官苍龙。房、心。心为明堂。……房为府，曰天驷。……

南官朱鸟。权、衡。衡，太微，三光之廷。……权，轩辕。轩辕，黄龙体。……

西官咸池，曰天五潢。五潢，五帝车舍。……

北官玄武。虚、危。危为盖屋，虚为哭泣之事。……

上列苍龙、朱鸟、玄武，是所谓四象中的三象，而苍龙或书作青龙，朱鸟或书作朱雀，玄武则是由黄鹿（或又神化成为瑞兽麒麟）蜕变而来，这些早已成为中国古代天文学史的基本常识，而西官与之匹配的词语，显然应该是四象中的另一象——白虎，这是理所当然的事情，本不必多加解说。

可是，不仅传世《史记》的所有版本都像上面这样缺失白虎未载，就连承用《史记·天官书》的《汉书·天文志》也同样如此。不过在另一方面，同样也很早就有人对这种不合理状况提出质疑。南宋时人吴仁杰在所著《两汉刊误补遗》一书中即针对《汉书·天文志》的状况指出：

《天文志》东宫苍龙、南宫朱鸟、西宫咸池、北宫玄武。仁杰按：苍龙总东方七宿言之，朱鸟、玄武亦各总其方七宿而言之，至咸池，则别一星名，自在二十八舍之外。《晋·天文志》所谓“天潢南三星曰咸池，鱼囿者”是已，此岂所以总西方七宿者哉！今以咸池与苍龙、朱鸟、玄武并称，又列参白虎于昴、毕之后，何其类例之驳也？（《两汉刊误补遗》卷五“咸池一”条）

其后清乾隆年间齐召南、梁玉绳等人更直接表明，若“以文势推之，应曰‘西宫（官）白虎咸池’，《史记》偶脱二字，《汉书》遂仍之尔”（清佚名《汉书疏证》卷八。钱大昕《潜研堂文集》卷三四《与梁耀北论史记书二》），即谓应在“西官”之下、“咸池”之上增补“白虎”二字。

这本来是一项很合理的意见，遗憾的是当时的史学考据第一高手钱大昕，却以为“参为白虎已见下文，此处不当更举。《史》《汉》未尝以四兽领四方诸宿，或先书，或后书，于例初无嫌也”（钱大昕《潜研堂文集》卷三四《与梁耀北论史记书二》）。案钱氏所云“四兽”即所谓“四象”。所谓智者千虑，必有一失，这话就像是针对钱大昕此语而发的一样。实际上司马迁在《史记·天官书》中述此上天之东、南、西、北“四官”，恰恰正是“以四兽领四方诸宿”，而我在这里讨论这一问题的意义也正在这里，并不仅仅是订补《史记·天官书》一处文字脱漏而已。

首先，前述《天官书》“东官苍龙”、“南官朱鸟”和“北官玄武”的写法，已经清楚表明太史公正是要“以四兽领四方诸宿”，而且挈领的范围还已溢出于“四方诸宿”的范围之外，兼及诸多与“四方诸宿”毗邻的恒星。今中华书局点校本在“东官苍龙”、“南官朱鸟”和“北官玄武”诸句之下都施以逗号，这很不合理。依据文义，其末都应句断，用以昭示其统领下文的“小篇题”性质，即可以分别将苍龙、朱鸟和玄武理解成为东官、南官和北官的星官名称。前面我所引述的司马迁写在《史记·天官书》末尾写的那段话，谈到“紫宫、房心、权衡、咸池、虚危列宿部星，此天之五官坐位也”，而坐在这五个“坐（座）位”之上的“五官”，就应该分别是天极、苍龙（青龙）、朱鸟（朱雀）、白虎和玄武，亦即中官天极、东官苍龙、南官朱鸟、西官白虎和北官玄武。

明白了这一点，也就很容易理解，作为西官“坐位”（座位）的咸池，是绝不可能同苍龙、朱鸟和玄武同等并列的，其上必定脱佚了“白虎”二字。我们看《天官书》中的“东官苍龙”、“南官朱鸟”和“北官玄武”都只孤零零地像一个小标题一样，与下文没有直接联系，可“西官咸池”的“咸池”却与下文之间衔接，这样的文字表述形式，也显示出它与苍龙、朱鸟、玄武诸语完全不同的性质。

要想深刻理解并准确把握苍龙（青龙）、朱鸟（朱雀）、白虎和玄武这四大星官名称的设定，需要清楚理解“四官”以至“五官”的天文意义。前面我已经谈到，东官、南官、西官和北官这四大星区，反映的是太阳视运动所行经四个区间的恒星，而苍龙（青龙）、朱鸟（朱雀）、白虎和玄武四象原初语义，应是用以形象地体现太阳视运动与之对应的四个阶段，即春、夏、秋、冬四时太阳视运动所经行的四个时段，这是四个动态的时间段落。苍龙（青龙）、朱鸟（朱雀）、白虎和玄武这四种活生生的动物形象，可以很好地体现时间的流动特性。在人们用以标记苍天上恒定的四大星区之后，这四兽的名称仍然形象地提示人们日月五星在天空中周而复始的运转。这样一动一静，两相映照，老天爷的面目就鲜活生动地呈现在大家的面前。特别是大家若是能够注意到在二十八宿背景下周而复始的太阳视运动同天顶上一动也不动北极星，其对比是更为强烈的，这样也就能够更为深切地理解古人以苍龙（青龙）、朱鸟（朱雀）、白虎和玄武四兽来命名东、南、西、北四大星官的意义。

至于钱大昕所说“参为白虎已见下文，此处不当更举”，还是没有能够很好地把握《史记·天官书》叙事的体例——即在四大星官每一星官的起首处，先标举以四兽亦即四象为名的星官名称，再逐一载述该星区内的各个恒星。我想大家来看一看《史记·天官书》的原文，应该很容易理解司马迁为什么在这里提到“参为白虎”之事：

参为白虎。三星直者，是为衡石。下有三星，兑，曰罚，为斩艾事。其外四星，左右肩股也。小三星隅置，曰觜觹，为虎首。

显而易见，“白虎”云云在这里只是用以说明表征参星的图形是一只白虎，并且参星这个星座中“衡石”之外的四颗星，是处于白虎的“左右肩股”位置之上；还有“觜觹，为虎首”，也就是二十八宿中的觜宿相当于白虎的头颅，因而非先说明“参为白虎”不可。如此而已，这同每一星官起首处叙述的星官名称，是全然不同的两回事儿，根本不存在复述其事的问题。

安徽含山凌家滩新石器时代遗址出土巨型玉猪

最后我想说明的是，《史记·天官书》中的“中官”，最初很可能也有个动物的名称——这就是黑豕（或称“玄豕”），也就是黑色的野猪。这是因为野猪是北极的象征，最近在河南郑州巩义双槐树仰韶时期聚落遗址发现的北斗七星遗迹，其斗魁正对着一个猪的骨骸。对照《史记·天官书》“斗为帝车”的说法，足以认定这个猪的骨骸体现的就是北极，当然也可以说是太一。从前附星图中可以看出，组成北辰、北极或天极这个星座的五颗恒星呈一“⦧”形，其状略如拱背而立的野猪。安徽含山凌家滩新石器时代遗址出土的具有重大象征意义的巨型玉猪，其造型便很接近这样的形态。野猪毛呈黑色，性夜行，这些都与暗夜密切相关。不过这是一个非常复杂的问题，还会牵涉到很多中国上古时期的天文历法观念，我将另行专门解说。