-
15. Acknowledgments and Advertisements: A 1994 Self-Appraisal
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter XV h Acknowledgments and Advertisements: A 1994 Self-Appraisal Richard Kluckhohn died some years ago. He was an anthropologist, a very dynamic and distinctive person. It’s a different world without him. He was a close friend of mine since the 1940s, when we both were in the fourth grade at Shady Hill, a well-known “progressive” school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was from Dick that I, absolutely incredulous, first learned about the mechanics of sexual congress, which he patiently explained to me one day after school as we walked home along the banks of the Charles River. Thus occurred one of the intellectual breakthroughs of my youth. As Dick’s friend, I had the privilege of knowing his parents, the famous social scientists Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn. In those days, along with my curiosity about the facts of life, I deeply admired the Stalin regime—two viewpoints that may or may not have shared some “inner logic.” Mr. Kluckhohn, then head of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, seemed amused by my fervent outbursts defending Stalin, but Mrs. Kluckhohn was not. I put her down as a hopeless anti-Communist somewhere in the vicinity of F. A. Hayek, Arthur Koestler, or Hannah Arendt, but Mr. Kluckhohn, I was sure, secretly agreed with me. In the early 1950s, I followed in Dick’s footsteps and went to the University of Chicago. There I was greatly impressed by Edgar Snow’s enthusiastic account of Mao’s revolution in Red Star Over China. It upset me when Burton Fine, a brilliant violinist absolutely ignorant about China, dared to suggest that Edgar Snow had misjudged the Chinese situation. Why not spend my life, I thought, studying China in order to set straight presumptuous persons like Burt Fine? Why not indeed! When I got back to Cambridge during 760 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel a vacation break, I asked Mr. Kluckhohn whether the study of Chinese thought was a promising field. He said he thought so. He was right. This field is like climbing an endless mountain trail that leads from one vista and challenge to the next. But my desire to climb it also had a great deal to do with my father, the philosopher Arnold Metzger, and my mother, Ilse Metzger. I was never able to travel down the avenue of humanistic learning made accessible to them by their German education, but they gave me a glimpse of it, and today, many years after my conversations with them, I am beginning again to ponder the questions they raised for me. In 1959, when I turned twenty-six, about seven years after my talk with Mr. Kluckhohn, I was admitted to Harvard’s Ph.D. Program in History and Far Eastern Languages. This was a very thrilling event for me. To understand how I felt, one would have to read Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run. But Harvard was a learning experience, not just a psychological one. Some thirty years later, I am still endlessly grateful to my main teachers there, Robert N. Bellah, John K. Fairbank, Kwang-Ching Liu, and L. S. Yang, as well as to Benjamin I. Schwartz and other superb professors and graduate students there, whose intellectual help is largely responsible for any success I’ve had as a student of Chinese history. It was also at Harvard that my friendships were forged with Chang Hao and Ramon H. Myers. If there are any insights in my writings, many have grown out of their discussions with me. It is hard to say whether their intellectual help or their friendship has meant more to me. It is impossible, however, for me here to name all the scholars whom I encountered over the years, and whose personalities and insights enriched my life. I do not know how it compares, say, to the worlds of physics or music, but throughout the world the study of Chinese civilization surely attracts a large number of gifted and appealing individuals, even if the platitudemongers and opportunists are forever with us. As the years went by, after reading innumerable articles and books and flogging my mind with the difficulties of the Chinese language, I found out that Burt Fine had been right, while he went on to occupy the first chair of the viola section in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. [44.222.146.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:43 GMT) 15. A 1994 Self-Appraisal 761 By this time, it had...