The Study of Chinese Civilization

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5129490
AutoresArthur F Wright (autor de correspondencia)
Año1960
Volumen21
Número2
Páginas233
Fecha de publicación1960-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2708197
OpenAlexW2329718004
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14

When Westerners in the late XVIIIth and early XIXth centuries first turned to the serious study of Chinese civilization, they were influenced by a well-developed image of the object of their study. The Jesuits had, for their own reasons, given European man a peculiarly colored picture of that distant land, and the men of the Enlightenment had, in turn, put that picture to their own uses.' Objects from the hands of Chinese artists and artisans had been brought to Europe and proved to have an immediate appeal to the taste of the European upper classes. Western scholars were persuaded that they were contemplating the oldest continuous socio-political order on earth with a record of that continuity so vast, detailed, and complex as to reduce any researcher to despair. They drew from the writings of the Jesuits and the Enlightenment the impression that Chinese civilization had an order, a stability, a symmetry, a rationality in strong contrast to the divided, uneasy, strife-ridden world of the West. This complex of impressions, together with the aesthetic appeal of Chinese objects of art, set the tone of the early European study of China. If it is true, as Max Scheler suggested, that the aficionado is the forerunner of the researcher, it would be correct to say that the sinophile is the forerunner, if not the father of the sinologue. As Europeans,2 influenced by this sort of sinophilia, began their arduous progress toward some understanding of this remote cultural entity, they were guided in their choice of subject and in their methods and interpretations by the traditions of Chinese scholarship. After all, who could speak with more authority than those Chinese scholars who, as officials, had built and maintained that vast socio-political edifice and who, as writers, had celebrated its values, recorded its history, and organized its literary heritage? Thus the Europeans, in their early studies, were in a sense the captives of the tradition they studied and of the self-image of Chinese civilization which the perpetuators of that tradition had developed over the millenia. From another vantage point, Japanese scholars continued, as they had for some thirteen centuries, to contemplate with awe the great * This essay was first presented on the kind invitation of Professor Milton Singer and the late Robert Redfield to the Seminar on the Comparative Study of Civilizations held at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the Spring months of 1958. 1 Cf. Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (Paris, 1932)

Ancient history · Archaeology · Civilization · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Philosophy