Value Demands and Value Fulfillment: An Approach to the Study of the Ch'ing Emperor-Official Relationship

27 VALUE DEMANDS AND VALUE FULFILLMENT: AN APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF THE CHTNG EMPEROR -OFFICIAL RELATIONSHIP By Silas Hsiu-Liang Wu The value of these three papers, in my opinion, lies in two areas: on the one hand, in their respective insights into the ideological role played by the value factor in an examination of the interpersonal relations between the Ch'ing emperors and their officials; and on the other hand in their significance in the continual process of refining the western historiography of China. The former is substantive; the latter methodological (even philosophical). Let us examine the latter aspect first. I. METHODOLOGY Thirty-eight years ago, Harold D. Lasswell applied Freudian concepts and findings to the study of political personalities and published his pioneer work entitled Psychpathology and Politics (Chicago, 193 0). In his presidential address to the 1957 Annual Meeting of the Americal Historical Association, William Langer urged the "deepening of our historical understanding through exploitation of the concepts and findings of modern psychology, " and considered such an effort to be the historian's "next assignment. " Two years later (I960), Arthur F. Wright wrote a biographical essay on the famous Chinese emperor Sui Yang -ti in which he combined analytical narrative techniques with a limited application of psychopathological concepts (i.e., Freud's Oedipus Complex). In 1962, Wright wrote another essay entitled "Values, Roles, and Personalities " in which he interpreted the biographical studies of a dozen important Confucian figures that comprise the volume bearing the title Confucian Personalities (Stanford, 1962). In a Ch'ing panel of the AAS meeting held in 1966, Harold Kahn, who claimed in 1965 to have added a "third dimension" to the study of the emperorship centered upon the Mid-Ch'ing monarch Ch'ien-lung, examined one of the cardinal values, filiality, and its relationship with the political behavior of his hero the Ch'ien-lung Emperor. Mr. Spence, in the same panel, tried to add a fourth dimension of time to historiography of the Chinese emperorship when he discussed the behavior patterns of his protagonist, K'ang-hsi, the grandfather of Ch'ienlung . Now, in today's presentation, Mr. Spence has brought Chinese historiography to a new frontier beyond dimensions, namely, to the world of the unconscious which transcends both time and space. 28 This brief review of Western historiography on China seems to qualify the present panel for a historic position in the continual effort of historians in deepening our understanding of Chinese history. However, the question of integrating the "behavioral approach" into Chinese historiography is necessarily a controversial one. A thorough evaluation of the pros and cons on this issue will involve lengthy philosophical and methodological problems as well as a logical corollary: evaluating the availability and usefulness of Chinese source materials. Time will not permit me to go into the last aspect in detail (I have made some preliminary study on this problem and I hope a fuller treatment will be presented in some future time). Therefore I will make some preliminary remarks focussing on the first two problems. First, historians seem to have no serious problem in justifying the attempt to apply psychological findings to the study of historical personalities . To begin with, both the dead and the living share one constant -- 'human nature. " "All fairly normal men, " as J. Bryce argues, "have like passions and desires. They are stirred by like motives, they think upon similar lines ..." Theoretically, therefore, any findings derived from research on living personalities should help us to understand the behavior and discover the hidden motives of the dead provided we can acquire comparable and relevant data suitable for our analysis. Here lies the very problem of how to apply behavioral approach to our discipline; and some of the problems encountered and discussed among the social scientists when they discussed the same problem of how to apply psychoanalytical findings to their disciplines are equally applicable to our case. Let us quote Ernest Van Den Haag, who is an important social philosopher and a practicing psychoanalysist: Psychoanalytical theory which guides interpretations [of human behavior] becomes less objective the less it is applied to live patients. The less the object of study is able to...