Sinology 1964/ 汉学1964

Joseph R. Levenson, “The Humanistic Disciplines: Will Sinology Do?” Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4 (Aug., 1964), 507-512.

[Page 512]

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Conclusion

The sum of the matter is this: the world is a world, not the sum of –ological areas. Sinology as a conception will not do, not because China ought to be bleached out of its individual significance, but because, as an individual, China belongs now in a universal world of discourse. The sinologist is entitled to be very reserved about easy universal analogies, but he should entertain comparisons, if only to give his particular field a universal context. Only then, when the creative life of China is studied in something more than the Sinological spirit, will Chinese civilization seem not just historically significant. A purely “Sinological” form of admiration of Chinese culture may amount to denigration. significant but historically

For when “Sinology” came to be the sum of Western interest in Chinese civilization, then its historical significance was “mere.” From Western sources, on the other hand, Chinese were indulging an interest in all the other-ologies, the sciences (in the broadest sense) that have no historical boundaries. The vital quest was for knowledge in the abstract, not knowledge of Western thought. In a world where a “Congress of Orientalists” would regularly convene, the idea of a “Congress of Occidentalists” had the force of whimsical paradox.

It was whimsy, but not a joke. It was no joke, first, because China indeed had once been able to conceive the idea of “barbarian experts,” much as the modern West conceives of its “China experts”; that was a time when China could still be thought of, at least at home, as the kind of world to which Europeans like the philosophes applied, not in the “Sinological” spirit, but in search of answers to universal questions. And it was not a joke, too, because it was anything but funny. Lu Hsün, for one (and he spoke for more than one) would not see himself as a happy antique. He could not bear to see China as a vast museum. History had to be made there again, and the museum consigned to the dead, as a place of liberation for the living, not a “Sinological” mausoleum for the modern dead-alive.