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May 2007 Abstracts
Nietzsche’s Relation to Historical Methods and Nineteenth-Century German Historiography
THOMAS H. BROBJER
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 155-179
Nietzsche is generally regarded as a severe critic of historical method and scholarship; this view has influenced much of contemporary discussions about the role and nature of historical scholarship. In this article I argue that this view is seriously mistaken (to a large degree because of the somewhat misleading nature of Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben). I do so by examining what he actually says about understanding history and historical method, as well as his relation to the founders of modern German historiography (Wolf, Niebuhr, Ranke, and Mommsen). I show, contrary to most expectations, that Nietzsche knew these historians well and that he fundamentally affirmed their view of historical method. What he primarily objected to among his contemporaries was that historical scholarship was often regarded as a goal in itself, rather than as a means, and consequently that history was placed above philosophy. In fact, a historical approach was essential for Nietzsche’s whole understanding of philosophy, and his own philosophical project.
CHUN-CHIEH HUANG, The Defining Character of Chinese Historical Thinking
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 180-188
Imbued with profound historical consciousness, the Chinese people are Homo historiens in every sense of the term. To be human in China, to a very large extent, is to be historical, which means to live up to the paradigmatic past. Therefore, historical thinking in traditional China is moral thinking. The Chinese historico-moral thinking centers around the notion of Dao, a notion that connotes both Heavenly principle and human norm.
In view of its practical orientation, Chinese historical thinking is, on the one hand, concrete thinking and, on the other, analogical thinking. Thinking concretely and analogically, the Chinese people are able to communicate with the past and to extrapolate meanings from history. In this way, historical experience in China becomes a library in which modern readers may engage in creative dialogues with the past.
JÖRN RÜSEN, Crossing Cultural Borders: How to Understand Historical Thinking in China and the West
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 189-193
Topical intercultural discourse on historical thinking is deeply determined by fundamental distinctions, mainly between the “East” and the “West.” The epistemological preconditions of this discourse are normally not reflected or even criticized. This article follows Chun-Chieh Huang’s attempt to give Chinese historical thinking a new voice in this intercultural discourse. It agrees with Huang’s strategy of focusing the description of the peculiarity of Chinese historical thinking on fundamental criteria of historical sense-generation. Huang argues for a strict difference between the Chinese way of sense-generation in history and the Western one. Against this distinction I argue that both traditions of historical thinking follow the same logic, namely that of the exemplary mode, which is known in the Western tradition by Cicero’s slogan “Historia vitae magistra.” Instead of claiming this mode as typical of Chinese historical thinking, I propose to clarify the difference between China and the West by looking for a modification of the same logic. Finally the question arises as to what the paradigmatic shift of historical thinking from the exemplary to the genetic mode means for the Chinese tradition Huang has presented. This shift cannot be understood as only a Western one, since it is a mode of pursuing modernity in history by a fundamental temporalization in the interpretation of the human world.
F.-H. MUTSCHLER, Sima Qian and His Western Colleagues: On Possible Categories of Description
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 194-200
This article comments on some of Professor Huang’s theses by looking at ancient historiography. It deals with the significance of history in its respective cultural contexts; the kind of orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide; and the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation. Distinguishing between ancient Greece and Rome, it shows that Huang’s explicit and implicit East–West oppositions are more valid with respect to ancient Greece than to ancient Rome. On important points, the situation of Rome is surprisingly close to that of China. Thus not only in China but also in Rome, tradition and history are highly important as a life-orienting force (as opposed to the importance of speculative thought in Greece); and not only in China but also in Rome the orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide is to a great extent moral (as opposed to orientation through intellectual insight that, for a historian such as Thucydides, is placed in the foreground). As to the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation, the paper takes up Professor Rüsen’s category of “exemplary meaning-generation,” but suggests a distinction between example in the sense of “case/instance” and example in the sense of “model/paragon.” Though the two corresponding modes of exemplary meaning-generation are mostly entwined, it appears that in Chinese and Roman historical works (in accordance with their stress on moral effect) there is a tendency toward meaning-generation by example in the sense of “model/paragon,” whereas in Greek historiography (in accordance with its stress on intellectual insight) the tendency is toward meaning-generation by example in the sense of “case/instance.”
Q. EDWARD WANG, Is There a Chinese Mode of Historical Thinking? A Cross-Cultural Analysis
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 201-209
Taking Chun-chieh Huang’s ruminations on the defining character of Chinese historical thinking as a starting point, this essay discusses the ways in which historical cultures and traditions are compared and contrasted and explores some new ways of thinking. It argues that cultural comparisons often constitute two-way traffic (one begins to examine itself after encountering the other) and that attempts to characterize one historical culture, such as that of China, are often made relationally and temporally. When the Chinese tradition of historiography is perceived and presented in the West, it has been regarded more or less as a counterexample against which the “unique” traits of Western historical thinking are thrown into relief. Given the hegemonic influence of Western scholarship in modern times, latter-day Chinese historians also valorize the East–West dichotomy. A closer look at this dichotomy, or the characterization of both cultures, reveals that it is not only relative but also relational and temporal. When the modern Chinese appeared impressed by the rigor of Rankean critical historiography, for example, they were essentially attempting to rediscover their own cultural past, for example, the eighteenth-century tradition of evidential learning, in adapting to the changing world. Our task today, the essay contends, is to historicize the specific context within which cultural comparisons are made and to go beyond readily accepted characterizations in order to reassess certain elements in a given culture, to apply historical wisdom, and to cope with the challenges we now face.
RANJAN GHOSH, India, itihasa, and Inter-historiographical Discourse
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 210-217
An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one-upmanship, we encounter a presumptuousness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one’s own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one’s own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, neuter the possibilities of knowledge-sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the Chinese know as history. Accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense-generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse.
MASAYUKI SATO, The Archetype of History in the Confucian Ecumene
History and Theory 46 (May 2007), 218-232
Cultures are constituted by binary oppositions: the absolute and the relative; the perfect and the imperfect; the stable and the unstable. Many of the world’s cultures have looked to revealed religion to discover the absolute: that which transcends the human, the intellect, and space and time. By positing a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, they conceive of an eternal and absolute that continues to exist in an immutable state.
In such cultures new perspectives for reinterpreting the past are continually propounded. This allows history to be rewritten and re-rewritten. History simply becomes a method for becoming conscious of the past.
By contrast, many East Asian cultures have not developed such a concept of revealed religion. For them, history itself constitutes an absolute, something on which one can rely. History in East Asia is endowed with a normative function, a source of authority that does not permit easy rewriting.
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