【多元觀點】Qian Mu: Overview and Personal Reflections
【多元觀點】
Qian Mu: Overview and Personal Reflections
Kirill O. Thompson
Associate Dean, Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at National Taiwan University. Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University.
Overview
Qian Mu (錢穆，1895-1991) was a master of the Chinese humanities and an embodiment of traditional Chinese culture. Although coming of age at a time when Chinese scholars were eagerly absorbing western ideas and approaches, Qian steadfastly practiced traditional style learning. He saw in China’s 5,000 year cultural and intellectual legacy rich resources for building nation, society, and people, and devoted his life to studying and expounding on this legacy, almost in spite of the incursions of 20th century modernity. This distinguished Qian from the prominent New Confucians of his generation who tried to work out syntheses of Western and Chinese thought that might lay the ground for not only settling China’s political and social problems but charting a course for modernization. At the same time, they, like Qian, sought to avoid wholesale westernization while appropriating digestible elements of Western thought.
Qian’s influence in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong remains deep and far-reaching. He wrote and edited numerous books covering nearly every period of Chinese thought, and taught generations of students from the 1920s into the 1980s. Although he bore features of the eccentric autodidact, Qian rose to prominence by virtue of his sharp mind, prodigious memory, academic productivity, and devotion to his ideals. Notably, he developed a notion of national learning and wrote history books in that spirit, which highlighted Confucianism in the study of traditional Chinese humanities. In a sense, the many institutes for national learning that have been set up on university campuses throughout China in recent years are a legacy of Qian’s vision of national learning.
Qian was born in 1895 in Qifang Qiao (七房橋，Seven Mansions Village), Wuxi (無錫)County, Jiangsu province, and died in 1991 in Taipei. He, like the other New Confucians, witnessed a century of upheaval and change in China’s national life. Through it all, he remained enamored with the exquisite beauty and subtle delights of traditional Chinese culture. He kept his faith that this precious culture itself contained the resources necessary for revitalizing China and her people, that there was no need to draw wholesale on Western models. He remained confident that, by cultivating a sympathetic appreciation of traditional history, thought, literature, and art, the Chinese could still realize themselves in rich and meaningful ways. Despite the inroads of Social Darwinism and Scientism (Kwok 1965) in various forms among the intelligentsia of his generation, together with the rise of modern politics and economics, Qian still saw the possibility of maintaining the humane traditional culture in the Chinese home, community, and school.
Qian Mu recommended seven books as testaments of the tradition that people who identify themselves with Chinese culture should read. They include four ancient texts: Confucius’ Analects (《論語》), Mencius (《孟子》), Laozi (《老子》), and Zhuangzi (《莊子》). They also include three medieval texts: The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch(《六祖壇經》), Zhu Xi’s(朱熹) anthology, Reflections on Things at Hand (《近思錄》), and Wang Yangming’s(王陽明) Instructions for Practical Living(《傳習錄》). This choice of titles offers food for thought. Wang Yangming’s stock had risen for Qian’s generation of intelligentsia since Wang’s teachings, such as the unity of knowledge and action and extension of the inborn knowledge of the good, had played a role in Meiji era Japan’s generally successful national development and modernization with traditional characteristics.
Again, during an age when most distinguished scholars sought to apply standard Western modes of analysis to ancient Chinese philosophy texts, Qian insisted on the priority of carefully reading the original texts and commentaries with unblinkered eyes according to method that had been gleaned over centuries. Through his own careful reading of ancient texts, he stressed the insight that, rather than offering real definitions of concepts, essences, Chinese thinkers usually assumed a working understanding of the terms and gave practical accounts of the terms according to the needs of the audience at hand. For example, Confucius offered a variety of terse, practical accounts of his “cardinal” virtue Ren (humaneness, humanity) to different followers—which modern interpreters attempt to artificially unify into a “general theory” of Ren. Wang Yangming, too, could offer a “four sentence teaching” on mind and moral value to one disciple, but then countenance its flat out denial by a more advanced disciple – on the understanding that different formulations were required for students with different needs and levels of attainment. What worked at a lower level could be false at a higher level. [1] Moreover, Qian showed that Chinese thought did not proceed along the linear deductive lines required by Western-trained interpreters. Thus, unlike most Western trained interpreters, Qian argued that Zhu Xi’s notion of “li”(理) was not identifiable as a platonic Form, Aristotelian substance, or even a generic Western principle. Using Zhu Xi’s own words, Qian showed that li represents the inner patterning, which relates and structures all cycles, formations, and phenomena, that li make up the warp and woof of the world. As Zhu Xi said, the li are like the textures of grains in wood, lines in jade, and veins in leaves. Zhu’s conception of li thus presents an order that is, aesthetic and organic, not linear and logical. Qian’s rectification of 20th century accounts of li as a sort of principle was a contribution to the understanding of Chinese philosophy and testament to his unvarnished method of meticulous reading of the original ancient texts.
By the same token, Qian sought to show that the ancient Chinese schools of thought did not present an antagonistic Hegelian dialectic of conflicting “theses” and “antitheses.” Rather, he insisted, they absorbed and adapted each other’s views, usually in view of practical applicability instead of simply offering denials and refutations. He illustrated this sort of pattern in his account of the intellectual development from Confucianism to Mohism, Sophism, and Daoism. In this spirit, he took pains to show that the Neo-Confucian term qi (氣,cosmic vapor) had been adopted from classical Daoism and that Zhu Xi’s integrated notion of li and qi, or better li-qi, had been inspired in part by the holistic Huayan Buddhist (華嚴宗) theory of li (理，reality) and shi (事，phenomena).
Qian insisted that Chinese thought also differs from “logocentric” Western philosophy and modes of analysis by virtue of its inherently historical, contextual, practical character. Fortunately, 20th century Western philosophy began to awaken to its own historicity, contextuality, and diversity. Hopefully, this will conduce to the development of increasingly nuanced modes of interpretation and comparative study. In this regard, Qian was prescient and insightful, although he did not venture to prescribe a strict interpretive approach other than sensitive, meticulous inquiry.
Qian Mu’s Major Writings
Qian wrote several influential books on Chinese intellectual history. In each book, he sought to rectify the misconceptions of his contemporaries by marshalling textual evidence. His first scholarly book, Chronological Studies of the Pre-Qin Philosophers (《先秦諸子繫年》, Xian-Qin zhuzi jinian), appeared in the late 1920s and brought him instant recognition and acceptance by the academic community. In response to the errors and misconceptions in other popular studies of the pre-Qin thinkers of the day, with this book Qian tried to establish the relative timeframes of these thinkers and their ideas in order to present the actual stages of intellectual development in ancient China.
History of Chinese Thought of the Last Three Hundred Years (《中國近三百年學術史》,Zhongguo jin-sanbai nian xueshushi, 1977) is arguably Qian’s most renowned scholarly book. Chinese scholars of the early 20th century generally spoke in support of the “textual research” of the Qing and against the speculative approach of the Song, yet none of them had presented an accurate overview of Qing scholarship. Accordingly, in this book Qian sought to trace the Song roots of Qing learning, and then to describe each of the Qing schools and major figures in detail. This book was a contribution to the field and remains a sourcebook in Qing studies.
In Assessment of the Han Old and New Text Controversy (《兩漢經學今古文平議》,Liang-Han jingxue jinguwen pingyi, 1958), Qian attempted to uncover and examine the original disputes and evidence involved in the Han controversy over the old and new version of the classics, which had been obscured in the course of the factionalized Qing reenactment of the controversy. The book has four sections: a chronicle of the lives of the Han scholars Liu Xiang and Liu Xin (father and son), an examination of the Han methods of textual exegesis, a consideration of Confucius’ authorship of the Annals of the Spring and Autumn Period, and an inquiry into the authenticity of the Rites of Zhou. In his time, Qian’s analyses of the issues generally laid to rest disputes that had preoccupied Chinese scholars for two centuries.
In Anthology and Critical Study of Qing Literati (《清儒學案》,Qingru xue’an), Qian focused on the Qing Neo-Confucians who had continued Song style learning and focused on the notions of mind-heart, human nature, appropriateness, and pattern (xin心, xing性, yi義, li理). Qian was intrigued that, whereas the Song Neo-Confucians had inherited these notions from known passages in the Book of Change, with “Appendixes,” and the Four Books (《四書》, Analects《論語》, Mencius 《孟子》, Great Learning 《大學》, and Doctrine of the Mean《中庸》), the Qing Neo-Confucians drew on a wider variety of sources, often difficult to trace. Contrary to the prevailing view, Qian emphasized that these discourses on quintessential Neo-Confucian notions expressed the spirit of Qing scholarship in a way that mere textual exegesis never could. This book inaugurated a new wave of interest in Neo-Confucianism from the Song to the Qing that persists to the present.
Qian’s crowning achievement, in my estimation, was his 5-volume New Anthology and Critical Study of Zhu Xi (《朱子新學案》, Zhuxi xin-xue’an, 1971). Again, in this work, Qian set out to rectify errors in the interpretation of Zhu Xi’s thought perpetrated in Qing and 20th century scholarship, as well as to present Zhu Xi not as a narrow-minded Neo-Confucian moralist but as a “Renaissance Man,” a scholar of breadth and depth who made significant contributions in many of the traditional Chinese humanities. In countering interpreters who, armed with Western methods, had portrayed Zhu as an inveterate dualist, Qian marshaled evidence showing the organic holism and natural integrity of Zhu Xi’s system and fundamental notions. Also, in countering idealist critics of Zhu’s objective notion of “investigating things,” Qian presented evidence showing its practical efficacy. To subjectivist believers in moral intuitionism who regarded “investigating things” as taking responsive moral action, Qian defended Zhu’s view that life in society is so complex that, even though we are endowed with moral intuition, we still need to inquire into the objective nexus of human affairs to ensure that our intuitions are directed to the facts. Even if we have the right impulses, we still need to have the facts right if we are to express our right impluses appropriately and “hit the mark” in our conduct. Qian further showed that Zhu effectively applied his notion of “investigating things” in observing natural phenomena as well as in textual research, and attributed several scientific discoveries to him.
Additionally, in tracing Zhu’s intellectual development in detail, Qian showed that Zhu had created a genuine Neo-Confucian synthesis, not just an eclectic arrangement of ideas. Qian also demonstrated that Zhu’s historical, literary, and textual research was sophisticated, and not hobbled by his commitment to Neo-Confucianism. Thus, in a time when major scholars were showing a bias toward Zhu’s more narrowly focused intellectual rivals, Lu Jiuyuan(陸九淵) and Wang Shouren(王守仁), Qian forcefully reestablished Zhu Xi’s intellectual preeminence and inaugurated a renaissance of Zhu Xi studies that continues to the present.
Qian also wrote several influential histories of Chinese thought, including History of Chinese Thought (《中國思想史》, Zhongguo sixiangshi, 1952), Introduction to Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism (《宋明理學概述》,Song-Ming lixue kaishu, 1953), and Essays in the History of Chinese Thought (Zhongguo xueshu sixiang luncong, 8 vols., 1977-1980). These works are distinguished by Qian’s interest in tracing the deep historical roots of ideas, showing the interconnections among the schools of thought, and bringing historical and cultural backgrounds to bear. Qian always infused his discussions with a wealth of knowledge and probing personal insights.
Personal Reflections
In my own study of Zhu Xi’s writings and ideas, particularly 35+ years ago, I appreciated Qian Mu’s studies because he attempted both to let Zhu Xi’s texts speak for themselves, with Qian’s own comments interspersed. And, he generally gave full quotes in order to include Zhu Xi’s qualifications and hints of context, and to situate the quoted passages in the context of Zhu’s intellectual development. Moreover, he defended the unity and holism of Zhu’s thought against the other interpreters’ charges of dualism, by presenting Zhu’s notions like li and qi, xing(性) and qing(情), even ti(體) and yong(用), as “two aspects of one thing,” or better, “two facets of continuous phenomena.” This set of readings complied with Qian’s emphasis that li for Zhu Xi is/are always borne in qi-- while qi always bodies forth li in the formation of phenomena.[2] Although I did not fully realize it at the time, this sort of approach to Zhu Xi’s thought made me receptive to Joseph Needham’s (1955) and A.C. Graham’s (1986) readings of li as (organic) pattern/patterning rather than as (rational) principle, and primed me to see the promise in the Ames-Hall notions of aesthetic order (vs. logical order) and ars contextualis (1987) for interpreting Confucianism in general and Zhu Xi in particular.[3] This sort of approach allowed me to register and appreciate the coherence and power of Zhu Xi’s thought which I later found to be united and vivified under the notion of complemenarity, and to explore his ideas and their implications in new and vital ways (Thompson 2015).
The Power of Sensitive Reading
Qian Mu’s stress on sensitive reading with an eye to textual and dialogical context and how the ideas play out in the stream of life resonated in my mind with the later Wittgenstein’s approach to reading and dialogical approach to presenting his own reflections and insights. Wittgenstein would read novels and stories out loud in an effort to identify with the characters in feeling and emotion as well as thought. He learned to read the literature of his favorite writers in the original language to have the full experience. He learned Russian to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, Danish to read Kierkegaard, and Norwegian to read Ibsen. Wittgenstein adopted a dialogical approach in expressing his later thought, by which he sought not only to bring language back to its home ground of living contexts but, ipso facto, to show how expressions and meanings that are understood in life can be made strange and false when ironed out as analytical propositions in logocentric treatises. In my view, Qian took a similar oral approach to the Chinese classics he pondered, and paid close attention to the dialogical dynamics of, say, Confucius’ discussions and Zhu Xi’s dialogues, which brought out nuances and reflections which generally would not arise in monolog-styled treatises, as such. Generations of classical scholars read the classics aloud as the “normal way,” regarding silent reading as somehow devoid of life and spirit. I recall hearing that, among 20th century scholars, Okada Takehiko was known for reciting the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean before rising and retiring, respectively, on a daily basis. At the time, I couldn’t grasp the point of these daily rituals but gradually they made sense to me as something especially important in an age when human communications are increasingly mediated and silent.
Let me close with parallel considerations of sensitive reading. In a recent study, Magdalena Ostas compares Wittgenstein’s dialogical approach which is a hallmark of Philosophical Investigations (1958) with Wordsworth’s theory that, in order to come alive, poetry should reflect the common emotions, feelings, and language of humanity in “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1798). Ostas quotes a touching dialogical poem by Wordsworth, “We are Seven,” which to her resonates with Wittgenstein’s approach, and to me resonates with Confucius’ and, by extension, Zhu Xi’s sentiments about human connectedness, vertical as well as horizontal, that underlies the sensitive conduct of human relationships, including the ancestral rites in particular. According to Ostas, “We Are Seven” “centers on a discrepancy between a young cottage girl and her adult interlocutor about what is to count in this world as a sibling, and thus as a person, or a significant being. Their dialogue… begins (Ostas 2011):
“Sisters and brothers, little maid
“How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they, I pray you tell?”
She answered, “Seven are we,
“And two of us at Conway dwell,
“And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
“My sister and my brother,
“And in the church-yard cottage, I
“Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
“And two are gone to sea,
“Yet you are seven; I pray you tell
“Sweet Maid, how this may be?”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
“Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little maid,
“Your limbs they are alive;
“If two are in the church-yard laid,
“Then ye are only five.”
(13-35)
As Ostas points out, “The young girl insists that, despite the death of two of her siblings,… they still are seven in all, while her interlocutor asks,.. how many they be and reasonably insists that they are only five… the exchange takes place around the central question of who will count at all as a brother or sister—that is, who can at all “be.”[4] …. The poem is entirely efficacious in making its “are” (we are seven) surprising and new….”
The adult in the poem holds the “realistic” view that the dead are dead and gone, whether to Heaven or not. But, the young girl is not deluded in that sense. As Ostas notes, she “does know death,… as she…volunteers a factual narrative: her sister Jane “in bed … moaning lay” (l. 50), and her brother John “was forced to go” (l. 59), as well. Yet she insists that they are seven in all” (Ostas 2011).
Interestingly, the adult thinks that “he has something to teach her... the rational education he attempts to give her surfaces in the final stanza: “But they are dead; those two are dead!” (l. 65)(Ostas 2011).
“What, then, one might ask, doesn’t the young girl get What is it that the adult wants her to understand that she refuses to register or accept? That death is death? [Certainly,] the disagreement between the cottage girl and the adult speaker has to do at once with questions about ontology (what counts as a person), ethics (the significance of one being for another), morality (how we do or we should think about death), and language (when we can say or do say that a person is). To divorce these concerns or questions from each other in their interweave in this poem, I think, is to reduce the… “enormity” … of what this adult interlocutor might have to teach this particular child, …about… the significance of people in our world if he wanted to set her [use of the word] “are” straight…. [Italics added.]
“One might say that what the speaker objects to is the girl’s insistent refrain (“we are seven”), in other words, how she answers him and comes to talk about the living and the dead in our world. He objects to her basic re-description of a state of affairs, to the liberty she takes with the most ordinary of words, and what that license bespeaks about her understanding. She lives alone with her mother, and her dead siblings, lying just twelve steps from their door, are very much alive for her. Yet we don’t say they are after they have died; she does. We might say just that, that they are still alive for us, or we might confess that when tallying we are still inclined to count them too. But to insist that they “are” is perhaps to break a foundational rule of the game—or to be a poet. What the young girl’s insistent “are” registers, then, is her ability to make language stretch and reach to the limits of meaning, her ability to see something surprising and new in what we ordinarily say…. Rather, it is essential to understanding the spirit of the poem to say that the two actually don’t share a world, and that we as readers are essentially drawn to the possibilities her world offers more than we are to his” [Italics added] (Ostas 2011).
To me, the poem “We Are Seven” casts light on the mentality and sentiments that underlie Confucius’ discussions and sensitive conduct of the ancestral rites, and his assertion that he practices ancestral rites as if his parents and ancestors are actually present (declarative) (Analects 3.12).[5] The poem reminds us, to my way of thinking, that Confucius’ “as if” approach was not a sort of pretense or playacting “as if they were present” (subjunctive), but rather animated by the sincere feeling that they are present. Zhu Xi took this attitude seriously enough to argue that the impulse to act as if the ancestors really are present has a biological basis in that their blood is coursing through our veins. One’s feelings of reverence, thus, not only support one’s inner senses of sincerity and gravitas but somehow reverberate with some real presence of one’s ancestors.[6] I contend that one would need to undertake the sort of careful, sensitive reading advocated by Qian Mu, and as practiced by Wittgenstein and Ostas, to evoke and begin to appreciate the sorts of mentality and sentiments involved in Confucius conduct of the ancestral rites.[7]
I am reminded of Zhuangzi(莊子)’s story of “fish happiness” (Watson 1968, ch. 17). While strolling across a bridge, Zhuangzi and Huizi (惠子) see fish capering in the river Hao (濠) below. Resonating with the scene, Zhuangzi comments, “This is fish happiness,” to which Huizi-- ever the detached objective observer and logic chopper-- responds, “You are not a fish. How do you know they are happy?” to which Zhuangzi handily replies, “You are not me. How do you know that I do not know they are happy? Your very question intimates that you know I know it. I know it standing here by the water.”[8] Dialogically, Huizi reflects his own lack of attunement with the situation. He lacks resonance and his discourse is hobbled because of his philosophical commitments. Zhuangzi’s awareness of the fish happiness results from his openness and resonance, his rapport, with the lively capering of the fish (which would have been equally evident to Huizi if he hadn’t been so willfully detached). Hence, Zhuangzi can reply that he knows it --- because he is standing right there (resonating with the fish). He doesn’t need to have direct access to the fishes’ emotions or other corroborating testimony, as it were. The Chinese text bears a clue to this resonance: The same term, you (roam, ramble), is used to express Zhuangzi’s and Huizi’s lively jaunt in the country and the fish’s lively swimming (Thompson 2016).
Returning to Qian Mu, all of these examples underscore, to me at least, the value and importance of his method of sensitive, careful reading and reflection on the classics. One strives to understand not only what is being said but to think about the context and dialogical implications of what is being said, without reducing it to, say, explicit formal propositions and/or artificially mapping it into a logical system dragged in some other place. Certainly, Qian Mu approached—and resonated with-- the Chinese philosophical texts with this sort of sensitivity. There is still much to learn from him and his example.
Notes
[1]Chinese Buddhism, too, sometimes operated on this principle.
[2] See David Wade, Li; Dynamic Form in Nature (2003).
[3] Ames and Hall were working out their new approach to Confucianism and Chinese philosophy just when I was working on my dissertation on Zhu Xi.
[4] Ostas finds Wordsworth making a similar point in a later poem, “one of Wordsworth’s most haunting mediations on death, “A slumber did my spirit seal.” There, the enigmatic “she” of the poem while living to the speaker “seem’d a thing” (l. 3)—that is, precisely not a living being rushing, like the rest, toward death, but something nearly inanimate; when alive, she “could not feel / The touch of earthly years” (ll. 3-4). It is only when she dies and explicitly has “no motion” or “force” (l. 5) and cannot hear or see that her body begins to circulate and she comes into to a sort of “life”: she is “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees!” (ll. 7-8). Thus the question of “being” in the world—counting—comes to Wordsworth in “A slumber did my spirit seal” not as an abstract question about the mind or the body but specifically as an internal interrogation of what it means to conceive of a person as a “thing”—she seemed a “thing”: first an immortal thing, then a thing in the ground” (Ostas 2011).
[5] “When Confucius offered sacrifices to his ancestors, he felt as if his ancestors were actually present. When he offered sacrifices to other spiritual beings, he felt as if there were actually present. He said, “If I do not participate in the sacrifice, it is as if I did not participate at all” (Chan 1963. 25). Some of Confucius’ followers began to treat the as if in the subjunctive sense without a sincere since the ancestral spirits were present, which Mozi picked up on in his critique of Confucius’ followers’ observances of the rites. (Mozi did not criticize Confucius himself.)
[6] Ostas concludes: “Wordsworth, [like Wittgenstein], finds a deep link between the word and its localized unfolding, or the form of life, form of feeling, and form of moral relation that it is able to register and record. Words for both the poet and the philosopher are essentially saturated with the lives into which they are woven. They are revelatory of what we speakers, again, find interesting, significant, moving, important, unimportant, or utterly mundane. Insofar as they register these things, they offer a kind of record of what Wittgenstein called our natural history and Wordsworth the necessities of our nature, and insofar as philosophy too takes a consequential interest in that record, it is intimately bound to the poetic impulse. To reconstruct and reassemble that record in language in a way that renders it at once undamaged yet marvelous and surprising is one of Wordsworth’s aspirations in?Lyrical Ballads” (Ibid.)
[7] I experienced a similar sense of connectedness and presence over the past year. One spring day last year (2015), an image on television made me recall and start to seek a college classmate in Chicago who I hadn’t seen in four decades. Although I didn’t recall her family name, a series of coincidences, such as finding some old letters in our family homestead late that summer, encouraged me to continue the search. Frustratingly, the letters did not contain her family name, perhaps as an indication of first name intimacy back then. Finally, I located her image and her full name online in an old college yearbook this past winter. On that basis, I eventually was able to identify her married name and place of business – still in the Chicago area. I asked another female classmate in that area to call her place of business to test the advisability of making contact. The other classmate reported back that the classmate had passed away two years earlier! At the same time, the improbable series of coincidences that had allowed me to track down her name and place of business at all, and then to learn her fate, gave me the uncanny feeling that she had in some real sense—especially through the unexpected discover of her old letters-- wanted me to know what had become of her-- that she was all right. I had never before --or after-- had that sort of uncanny feeling. (The letters displayed a wit, a humor, a human element that could never be expressed through the Net, for whatever reason.) There was something good and rewarding about this total experience, which perhaps resembles the sense of human connectedness that Confucius and Zhu Xi intimated. For another example, for years after my youngest brother died I had always “counted him” whenever I was asked how many siblings I had. Later, it felt embarrassing to need to explain that he had passed away when asked “what he was doing,” so I gradually quit counting him orally—though I still counted and continue to count him as my sibling in my heart.
[8] Zhuangzi knows his friend Huizi well and quickly entraps and tangles him in the constrains of his own implicit criteria or truth conditions in asking “How do you know?”
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