114 年 國立臺灣大學外文學系碩士班《專業英文（A）》

國立臺灣大學 114 學年度碩士班招生考試試題
科目: 專業英文 (A): 英文作文
題號: 11
節次: 3
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※ 注意: 請於試卷內之「非選擇題作答區」作答

In a famous passage from the introduction to The Use of Pleasure (volume 2 of The History of Sexuality), Michel Foucault gives an account of why he has pursued the scholarly research that is expressed in this book and its companion volume, The Care of the Self. For most of his career, Foucault's philosophical arguments had been grounded in analysis of European culture of the 18th and 19th centuries, but for these two volumes of The History of Sexuality he turned instead to ancient Greece and Rome. Although he would have studied Greek and Latin as a student, the ancient texts he turned to here demanded that he enter a whole new scholarly field.

You are now hoping to enter the field of English literary studies. For this exam, you should respond to Foucault's account below of the reasons for pursuing such research. After carefully reading the passage, write a coherent and argument-driven essay in which you analyze Foucault's claims and assess their limits and uses.

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple: I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The "essay" which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is what it was in times past, i.e., an "ascesis," askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought. The studies that follow, like the others I have done previously, are studies of "history" by reason of the domain they deal with and the references they appeal to; but they are not the work of a "historian." Which does not mean that they summarize or synthesize work done by others. Considered from the standpoint of their "pragmatics," they are the record of a long and tentative exercise that needed to be revised and corrected again and again. It was a philosophical exercise. The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.

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