Chinese Intellectual History. Notes on the state of the field, as well as some
proposals.
Rudolf G. Wagner
Heidelberg
Prof. Wang Ch’iu-kuei from the CCK Foundation has asked me to map out what I
personally would consider problems and fields of research in Chinese intellectual history
of particular relevancy and interest at this time that would merit a focused attention from
the Foundation. The best I can do in view of such a task is to offer some modest and very
personal suggestions and assessments which might serve as a starting point for the
discussion in Princeton in March 2003. I will try to be blunt in my statements. I am aware
that exceptions, and sometimes brilliant ones, can be pointed out to any of the broad
generalizations I will make. It would be my contention that these are what the word says,
exceptions. I am sure that I overlooked important areas simply because I am not familiar
enough with them.
A. Conditions for research in Chinese intellectual history have improved over the last
ten or twenty years.
1. Research conditions have dramatically improved with the availability of a new
set of dictionaries, including a few specialized dictionaries especially in the field
of Buddhist studies, but most of all with the availability of databases ranging
from full-text databases such as the Siku quanshu to highly analytical and
structured databases such as the Thesaurus linguae sericae, (TLS) that allow for
semantic and terminological studies, location of quotations, and can, in addition,
serve as extended dictionaries.
2. While lack of sources has not been a problem in Chinese intellectual history,
recent developments have made generally available new and exciting sources, to
wit: documents on bamboo and silk from the Warring States through the Han
that range from hitherto unknown scholarly writings to early versions of known
texts; sources on religious history and mentalité developments such as the
baojuan collections from Hexi and Tianjin; and, for the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, archival material by and on important intellectual figures as contained,
for example, in the Peking, Nanjing, and Shanghai archives, the Wenshi ziliao
series, and the publications from the CCP and KMT Party archives. These sources
allow researchers to get beyond the strongly state-controlled criteria of relevancy.
3. The number of researchers in the field of Chinese intellectual history has grown
substantially in the Chinese-speaking world, in Japan, and in western countries,
with most focused on developments since 1840. The number of published
research works and of Ph.D. dissertations in this field has gone up. Financing
has been sustained, considerably aided in this by Chinese Studies-focused
foundations from Taiwan such as the CCK.
4. International cooperation and exchange, especially between Chinese Chinese
Studies on the one hand and Western and Japanese Chinese Studies on the other,
has greatly increased. This was mostly due to the emergence of a group of
younger scholars of promise in the PRC after the Cultural Revolution, and an
increase in the leeway allotted to work in Chinese intellectual history due to
policy changes in the 1980s in both the PRC and Taiwan.
It looks as though things were quite fine. I personally see, however, rather substantial
problems.
B. Structural Problems besetting the study of Chinese intellectual history.
The study of Chinese intellectual history suffers, comparatively speaking, from
amateurism.
- Even for the most important texts there are practically no critical scholarly
editions and reliable translations. Not to mention translations reflecting historical
changes in their reading.
- There is not even the beginning of an etymological dictionary that would be based
on Chinese words not on characters; and neither do we have historical studies of
the development even of the core terms used in most sources of Chinese
intellectual history. A look at works such as Brunner, Conze, Koselleck,
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe : historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen
Sprache in Deutschland, the plethora of well-research tools such as RGG, or
even such a modest volume as Williams’ Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and
society, all of which can farm the results of an endless amount of previous
detailed research work on each concept and its environment, shows how far
Chinese Studies still have to go to get to a solid footing.
- The analysis of the grammar and rhetoric of classical Chinese and of the historical
changes has by far not reached the point where the knowledge of the available
scholarship in this field would secure a definitive and uncontroversial reading of a
passage as it would in the case of Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin. Analytical and
descriptive tools that would fit the particular and historically specific
communication structures prevailing among the different segments of the premodern Chinese intellectual elite have not now been developed.
- Chinese Studies continues to be under the influence of modern Chinese scholarly
traditions with their preference for broad overviews rather than detailed research
on a narrowly defined topic, and of a Western hierarchy of relevancy for which it
is o.k. to publish a Ph.D. on the function of quotations from Livy in
Macchiavelli’s Il Principe but a Ph.D. on, say, the concept of 例 in Du Yu’s 春秋
經傳集解 would rather seem to be too narrow in focus for a Western perception
that will only take in the ‘essence’ of other cultures.
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The pressure from intellectual fashions has become especially marked in Chinese
Studies in the US. Given the importance and impact of US Chinese Studies, they
have spread over the entire field including Taiwan and the PRC. These fashions
have their origin in theoretical explorations of fields with an enormously rich
swath of primary research done over many generations. To a degree it might be
possible here to write conceptual studies that are based not on sources but on this
secondary research. No such rich ground work is available in Chinese Studies.
The effect is that broad and often ill-defined and/or little-understood imported
theoretical notions are imposed upon a small body of randomly selected and littleunderstood Chinese material. Sometimes, elements from Chinese studies have
been used in the original development of these theoretical explorations such as the
reference to Jacques Gernet’s statement in his study on the Jesuits that certain
thoughts simply cannot be expressed in Chinese in Derrida’s Grammatologie.
Hardly any sinologist would, I presume, go along with Gernet on this point which
seems rather taken from Lee Whorf than derived from an analysis his own sources,
but it enters theory as a confirmation of the universal validity of Derrida’s
proposition. Needless to say, it has always been eminently useful to read the work
of top scholars in better developed fields in order to broaden the options of
thinking and researching available for one’s own research. With the importance
attached by many search committees to a candidate’s familiarity with ‘theory’, the
importance given to such basic skills as broad familiarity with, and precise
historical and contextualized understanding of Chinese-language sources
decreases.
The discovery, by historians following the tracks of scholars such as Hayden
White, of the narratological element in what previously was treated as factual
historical source material (such as the Shiji or the Zuozhuan) has theoretically
heightened the need for the capacity to precisely analyze the different rhetorical,
narrative, polemical etc. dimensions of this material. In marked contrast, I find
rough and unfalsifiable summarizing of presumably factual source content on the
rise, and the volume of true ‘translations’ that bring the intended meaning to the
receiver decreasing. This is not to mention the shocking volume of simple and
often utterly deforming translation mistakes that are being treated as marginal
flaws which might be mentioned in private conversation but will not even be
alluded to in a book review. The slovenly attitude with regard to a precise
understanding of the source material is aided by what I will, just for the fun of
provocation, call a latent racism. It basically assumes that the fogginess of a
Chinese argument as it appears in many a translation is due to the fogginess of the
argument itself, not to that of the translator’s understanding. Implied in this
assumption is the old saw of the Chinese being unable to think straight, which
means that there is no wonder if their translated arguments sound as they do.
The lack of acceptance of China scholarship in intellectual history among the
broader community of intellectual historians certainly has to do with their
continuing Western-centered perspective. The endless battles to get students of
Chinese philosophy accepted as bona fide members in the American
Philosophical Association are just one example. At the same time, however, few
are the sinological works that one would in good faith recommend to someone
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working in some field of European intellectual history. At the same time,
translations of non-European philosophical writings enjoy broad acceptance
among the broader Western public. It has turned to works such as the Upanishads
or the Laozi for philosophical and moral guidance rather than to Aristotle or Kant.
The academic professionals see these popular preferences with disdain, and find
their suspicion confirmed that these are just foggy phrases of wisdom that make
housewives feel good. If items from Chinese intellectual history make it into the
mainstream it is often as but a curious item of bizarre otherness such as Borges’
Chinese encyclopedia.
Studies in Chinese intellectual history have often tended to take a broad approach,
weaving together intellectual, religious, social, historical, literary, and political
strands. While this was, it seems to me, a strategy born out of a weakness – lack
of specific scholarship to interact with, and an essentialist approach – under the
Chinese conditions it showed its worth. The actual segmentation among the
literate elite in pre-modern China as much as in modern China into relatively
stable inward-oriented professional fields has not been strongly developed. Nearly
every historical actor was simultaneously present in different areas such as
government political debate, literary pursuits, philosophical disputes, and
scholarly work, with friends ranging from Buddhist monks to wealthy bookworms
hidden among their treasures. As a consequence, it was a reasonable strategy to
weave together these strands, as they had interacted in the lives of these people.
This might have, for a while, seemed unprofessional to scholars working in
historically grown fields with a high division of labor as they have become
petrified in the modern disciplines with their high walls. Without any merit or
visible contribution on the side of the sinologists, the tide has turned, and many
intellectual historians are now pursuing research that goes into a similar direction
with art historians talking social history, texts, and politics, social historians
talking philosophy, and political historians economy, magic, and gender. In short,
Chinese intellectual history is back in the mainstream without having moved an
inch. Still, it is good to be here.
C. Research Areas (that might be) of Importance and Promise
Generally, Chinese intellectual history is mostly in need of basic research.
1. Grammatical and rhetorical patterns and their changes over time: tools for
decoding classical Chinese argumentative texts. (Examples: the function of
statement status markers such as 夫 and 凡; of parallelism; of implied quotations;
of the implied countertext; of standard building blocks and argumentative
sequences)
2. Critical edition and translation of text from China’s intellectual heritage,
including historical readings extrapolated from commentaries. Selection
independent of traditional assumptions whether these are ‘mainstream’ or not.
3. The newly discovered bamboo and silk texts. (The strongly phonetic writing of
the Chu bamboo slips has driven home the fundamental difference between word
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and character in Chinese. The texts have not undergone a canonical selection
process and thus allow a glimpse at a pre-canonical corpus of intellectual writings
with strongly individual selections. The basic and largely imported assumption
dominating much classical sinological scholarship during the 20th century has
been ‘doubting the antiquity’ [of texts]. The new finds force a fundamental
rethinking of the particular patterns characterizing the structure of Chinese
tradition and transmission.)
Studies in the historical semantics of Chinese philosophical terms: Focus
Neoconfucianism. (Neoconfucianism studies suffer from the lack of solid studies
on the development of core notions that do not let themselves be guided by the
self-stylization of Neoconfucian thinkers. Given the eventual importance of this
line of thought as well as the number of scholars working in this field, there might
be a realistic hope for a dramatic improvement.)
The Chinese order of things: Its development in the interaction with dispensations
from other languages and cultures. (The Great Wall presumably shielding China
from intellectual developments elsewhere is as much a myth as its real-life
counterpart. Given the dramatic changes occurring in the Chinese conceptual
order under the impact of the new foreign terminology in Chinese garb, mostly
coming from Japan, the look goes back to the Mahayana Buddhist, Lamaist,
Moslem, Christian impact. Recently, claims have even been made that during the
Zhanguo and Han periods similar processes occurred (Mair on Laozi and India,
Unschuld on Huangdi neijing and Hippocrates).
State, institutions, and media in Chinese intellectual communication. (The
discussion on the structure of the Chinese public sphere has ended after a few
statements of belief and principle. Given the recent slate of studies on Ming and
Qing printing, academies, and the new newspaper media, a critical mass should be
there for a concerted effort that could overcome the limitations of Habermas’
seminal work while making the best of his contribution.)
The logic of a decentered intellectual realm: Chinese-foreign interaction since the
middle of the 19th century. (Intellectual exchanges and interactions within and
across linguistic borders are a normal affair. The mostly receiving position of
China in this realm during the last 150 years has led to a type of dependent and
marginalized development where the main engine is the random influx of foreign
intellectual products and their random acceptance within China. Traditional
notions of ‘influence’ and the like are unable to describe the logic of this process
which continues to dominate even the reception of Marxism in China from the
Soviet Union.)