Books and Arts; Book Review;Meditations on love；Truly, madly, deeply；
文艺；书评；爱的沉思；爱得真挚，疯狂，深刻；
Plato described love as a serious mental disease. Aristotle saw it as a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Tina Turner dismissed the feeling as a second-hand emotion. The nature of love—how and when and why and with whom humans fall for each other—has preoccupied thinkers through the ages. Now a philosopher and a scientist have a go in two new and markedly different books.

柏拉图曾经将爱描述为严重的心理疾病。亚里士多德认为爱是一灵栖两躯。蒂娜·特纳并不认为这种感觉是种二手情感。爱的本质便是人们怎样，何时，为何，与谁共浴爱河，而这种本质已让思想家们研究了好几个世纪。如今，一位哲学家和一位科学家在其两本截然不同的新书中尝试着探求爱的本质。
In his latest work, “In Praise of Love”, Alain Badiou, a French philosopher, identifies three prevailing philosophical views of love. It can be an ecstatic encounter; an unsentimental contract; or an illusion, best treated with scepticism. He rejects all three. For Mr Badiou, love is the decision to live life through two perspectives, that of both the lover and the beloved. As such, it is more than the sum of its parts. Love “is a construction,” he writes, “a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.”
法国哲学家阿兰·巴迪欧在其新作《爱的礼赞》中指出，关于爱，有3种被普遍认同的哲学观点：爱是一种令人欣喜的邂逅；一种理性的维系；一种与怀疑主义共存的幻觉。不过，这三种观点都被巴迪欧否定了。对他而言，爱是决定在以后的生命中，同时拥有两个人的思想。因此，爱，不止于是部分的叠加而已。“爱是建造，”他写道，“爱不再是一个人的思想能够孕育出的生命，它需要两个人。”
Mr Badiou sees risk as central to love. A loving relationship demands multiple and shared perspectives, which always give rise to incongruences and tensions. He reserves special scorn for dabblers in internet dating, who evidently believe that the search for “a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, etc” will ultimately net “a risk-free option”. This is to neglect the very essence of love, according to Mr Badiou, which involves the presence of risk, the possibility of failure and the need for vulnerability.
巴迪欧认为爱的核心便是风险。一段恋爱关系讲求既多样又相同的思想，这便总会让两人感觉不合适，导致关系紧张。他一直都鄙视婚恋网上马虎配对的人。显然，这些人相信只需搜集未来另一半的“照片，喜好，生日，星座之类的”，终会成功地筛选出一个“零风险的选项”。他认为，这样做忽视了爱的本质——爱中存在着风险，有可能以分手告终，它也需要其中一方的示弱。
The book's chatty style (it is based on a conversation with Nicolas Truong, a French journalist) lends a deceptive simplicity to the ideas within. Get to work unpicking these concepts and it soon becomes plain that, like many French philosophers, Mr Badiou sacrifices clarity for linguistic zip and sparkle. Nonetheless, he leaves the reader with an incisive overview of philosophical thinking on love, from Plato to Kierkegaard to Lacan.
该书的闲谈式风格（它以作者与一位法国记者尼古拉斯·特罗翁的谈话为基础）会让人误以为：书中的思想都很简单。先得摒弃掉这些观点，之后，明显可以看到，巴迪欧与许多法国哲学家一样，追求的不是清晰明确，而是语言上的表现力与闪光点。不过，对于从柏拉图到克尔凯郭尔再到拉康关于爱的哲学思想，他的概述可谓鞭辟入里。
Robin Dunbar's book, “The Science of Love and Betrayal”, is—perhaps surprisingly—easier to get to grips with. Dr Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology with a study in this week's science section (see article), is best known for “Dunbar's number”, the limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. He laments that scientists have largely ignored the concept of love. In this book he bridges the gap between the biological explanations for humans' romantic behaviour and the psychological, historical, social and evolu- tionary contexts that help to shape it.
罗宾·邓巴的新书《爱与背叛的科学》更容易理解，或许这有点令人惊讶。邓巴博士是进化人类学的教授，本期科学专栏刊登了一篇他的研究。令他广为人知的是“邓巴数字”，即一个人最多可以拥有的稳定社交关系的人数。他感到惋惜的是，科学家几乎忽略了爱的概念。生物学上对人类浪漫行为做出了解释，这与有助于塑造这种行为的心理，历史，社会，及进化因素本毫无关联，但在该书中，他将两者联系了起来。
In particular, he is interested in why humans have developed such an affinity for “pairbonding”, despite the fact that strictly monogamous mating and rearing systems are not terribly advantageous in evolutionary terms. Monogamy is not unique to humans. What is unique, however, is the intensity with which the species falls in love. Nearly every human culture in history exhibits this complex sense of longing, Dr Dunbar observes.
邓巴博士尤为感兴趣的是，虽然就进化角度而言，严格的一夫一妻制及养育制并不占多大优势，但为何人类还如此热衷于“培养两个人的情侣关系”。一夫一妻制并不只是人类特有。不过，人类特有的是这个物种爱火燃烧的炽热。邓巴博士观察到，历史上，几乎人类的每种文化都表现出了这种复杂的渴望。
To understand this predisposition for monogamy, he takes readers through the myriad feelings of love, from the heady, breathless exhilaration of falling, to the stubborn persistence of familial affection, to the bitterness of betrayal. Throughout the book Dr Dunbar excels at taking obvious and familiar information—men prefer curvy women; women prefer men who dance well; older women rarely reveal their ages in lonely-hearts columns—and explaining the complex and often unexpected evolutionary science that lies behind it all.
为了理解一夫一妻制的偏向，邓巴博士带领读者体味了爱的各种感觉，从初坠爱河时忘乎所以，呼吸困难的兴奋，到义无反顾地维持家庭关系，再到遭到背叛时的心如刀割。纵观全书，邓巴的高超之处在于利用人们常见且熟悉的信息——男人偏好曲线玲珑的女人；女人喜欢舞技出众的男人；年龄稍大的女人很少在征友专栏揭露自己的年龄——同时解释了这些现象背后复杂且常出人意料的进化科学。
Love is a journey, a game, a many-splendoured thing. Though some give it a bad name (if Jon Bon Jovi is to be believed), the rest of us find the subject endlessly fascinating. The struggle to understand such a mystifying phenomenon invariably requires the help of philosophers and scientists, and others besides. Good news for Mr Badiou and Dr Dunbar.
爱是一次旅行，一场游戏，一件美妙的事。尽管有人给予爱很低的评价（如果人们愿意相信乔恩·邦·乔维的话），但是其余人都认为爱是一个永恒迷人的主题。当人们竭尽全力理解这迷一样的现象时，总是需要哲学家，科学家，及其他专家的帮助。这对巴迪欧和邓巴来说，是个好消息。