Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898-1937

6. Grasping for Permanence in Historical Change

6 Grasping for Permanence in Historical Change T he historical approach taken by many Chinese scholars toward Chinese history paved the way for a new relationship with the past. But the emphasis on change in historicism clashed with a desire for a historical continuity, as the more the difference between the individual phases of an entity’s history is emphasized, the less plausible it will be to go on considering it one and the same thing through all the phases of its development. . . . [T]he suggestion of diachronicity that is implied by the definition of historicism . . . will have the effect of ungluing the successive phases a historical entity passes through in its history; this will result in synchronicity.1 Textual exegesis, widely practiced along with historicism, while avoiding a completely Western approach because of its claim of equivalence with a scientific approach, accentuated the particular characteristics of historical events and eras. A greater historical continuity called for a more transcendental framework that allowed both change and continuity. Moreover, neither a historical nor an objective treatment of history could assign value and meaning to anything in history beyond what was transient and specific. As Confucian values were being discredited, more scholars searched for alternative, perennial values in Chinese history. The result, just as in the case of German historicism, was a tendency toward developing a transcendental historical idea or framework that was embodied in all phases of history despite changes. German historicism saw the birth of the historical idea by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Ranke, the characteristics of which included an embodiment of what was unique to both a historical entity and a historical period, giving coherence to them not to be reduced entirely to the kind of knowledge expressed by social-scientific laws and only to 119 be defined on the basis of unbiased historical research.2 Ranke followed Herder’s belief that in a higher reality made possible by God behind the outward appearance of the historical events, persons and institutions studied, there was always a totality, an integrated, spiritual reality and the task of a historical understanding would begin with total immersion in the subject matter and be completed by spiritual apperception.3 Many Chinese scholars were directly or indirectly influenced by German historicism. Chen Yinque and Fu Sinian studied in Germany, Liu Shipei was influenced by the German philosophy of history via Japan, and Tang Yongtong read Herder, Ranke, and Windelband while a student at Harvard. But a wider audience, which had not been exposed to German philosophy, also fell under its influence. Unlike the German historical idea, however, the transcendental historical framework developed by Chinese scholars was trans-cultural, and it was not antagonistic to science, as the German historical idea was. This transcendental framework enabled Chinese scholars to continue in their combination of textual exegesis and historicism, which linked their work to greater, more universal meanings aligned with Western values and justified an avoidance of a linear, progressive framework. Such a framework was sometimes used by Hu Shi, who became famous for applying Western individualism and humanism as the criteria for evaluating Chinese philosophers in “An Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy,” one of the first courses Hu offered at Peking University in 1917.4 After Hu’s book based on the lectures of this course was published, Liang Qichao in two lectures at the university attacked Hu for neglecting the religious and ethical aspects of Chinese thinkers like Confucius and Zhuang Zi.5 Although Liang’s call for a balance between the Western scientific approach and metaphysics resembled the cognitive framework suggested by Cai Yuanpei, it was these textual exegetics’ connection between this transcendental framework and textual exegesis that gave uniqueness to their scholarship. In addition to learning from German historicism, this group also drew on French and American transcendental cultural theories. Members of this group, such as Liu Shipei and Huang Jie, borrowed from the nineteenth-century French orientalist Albert Etienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (d. 1894). Terrien de Lacouperie, as discussed below, offered a racial theory of China that proved useful in reconstructing Chinese history and historical values.6 Others were also heavily influenced by the culturalistic view of history of Irving Babbitt, a professor of French literature at Harvard University, who presented himself as the valiant Horatius defending cultural values in a commercialized turn-of-the-century America. 120 PEKING UNIVERSITY Chinese Intellectual History, Textual Exegesis, and...