While writing this preface, I would like to discuss a question: What is the significance of the study of the history of academic history? Personally, I think that the study of academic history has many meanings, one of which is what I want to talk about in this preface, on the one hand, to help us understand the mechanism of historical writing, and on the other hand, to help us understand why people at a certain period of history decided to turn on or off, value or despise a certain kind of intellectual history. Why is it turned on or off in such a way, and what is the point of turning it on or off?
Is the writing of history natural (given), and is the historian omniscient? Is it possible for history to write everything? Is it natural that all the correct and good history will be written? I will begin with two perspectives from Kenneth Burke and Walter Benjamin.
Although history writing will try to write everything as much as possible, what is written is always only a part. Historians always want to cover everything, but in reality any history can only be partial. As Burke (not for historians) says, every statement also obscures something else, so why do people choose this part and ignore or obscure the others? Writing history is like cutting cheese, and there are infinite ways to cut it, but why do people choose this way over the other? Therefore, how to choose and how to write are important issues that need to be dealt with in the history of academic history.
In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin borrowed the painter Klee's The New Angel to illustrate his view of history: The face of the angel looks into the past, and the body advances into the future. He also uses this as a trait of historical writing and historical interpretation. That is to say, on the one hand, the historian has a new concern with the progress of the times (his body advances into the future); On the other hand, his face looks to the past, so as his body moves forward, the history he chooses to write is different. There are many examples of the body moving forward to the future and looking at the past, for example, the modern historian Zhu Xizu studied the change of the subject from 1933 to 1934, from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to the pseudo-Qi, that is, because he saw the North China puppet ** at that time, which is very similar to the history of the puppet Qi after the fall of Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty.
After briefly introducing these two points of view, I would like to emphasize that I personally believe that history certainly has relatively stable themes and contents, and I never believe that all historical writing is subjective and all historical facts are relative. However, we cannot but admit that the scope of historians' attention and candlelight has changed with the times. There is always a great dialectic and tension between the stable part and the changing part of the historical writing.
If historical writing is not spontaneous, and historians are not omniscient, any expression can only be partial. The question of history writing is a myriad of issues, or to borrow a modern phrase, there is a mechanism for the operation of history writing. In 1983, the French historian Fran Ois Hartog proposed the concept of the mechanism of historicity, and then wrote "regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time" based on this concept. From this book, it seems that his main concern is not the writing mechanism of historians, but the question of historicity. He precisely distinguishes the three concepts of time: past, present, and future, and has a variety of proportions and relationships between these three in a particular group of people. For example, when talking about Hercules Achilles, Hartog says that he wakes up every day on the same day (there is no past and no future). For example, when Captain Cook met a native Hawaiian, he found that their views of time were almost completely different. It is mentioned in the book that although some hatred occurred generations ago, Maori may still say to their enemies, "I just ate your father's flesh and even claim that the future exists in the past." In the book, Hartog also discusses how contemporary memories and commemorations have taken the lead and almost replaced the status of history.
In order to make the following discussion more vivid, I would like to borrow Hartog's concept and slightly modify it, namely the mechanism of historical writing, and explain that historiography is to some extent a study of the mechanism of historical writing. This type of mechanism encompasses a wide range of parts, including the past, present, and future, to which Hartog paid special attention to the aforementioned part, as well as the part of historical writing. For example, how do you form a variety of historical writings? There are a wide range of questions about why and how to write. This also includes, of course, the ignorance of history -- why people dare not, or are unwilling to talk more about history, or are unwilling or unwilling to talk more about a certain aspect of history.
In every era, people's access to historical knowledge is uneven, and there are at least two clues: one is that people who choose to delve into the history known by certain source materials themselves; The other is the historical writing of historians of each era, especially the historical knowledge taught in various textbooks. The influence of the latter is greater and more extensive. Therefore, if a certain generation does not write certain things in its history writing (especially textbooks), or enlarges and deepens certain things, then there will be huge differences in the perception of history by people in different eras. What to write and what not to write, why to write, and why not to write is part of the problem of academic history Historiography is part of the problem of historical research, just like turning the door handle without turning one doorknob and turning another doorknob, the world is seen in a huge difference. That's why I mentioned earlier: Academic History One of the many tasks of historiography is to study and understand why certain doorknobs are turned on or off in various eras, why this doorknob is turned open and not that doorknob, and the intellectual worlds they entail, whether large or small.
Take, for example, what people know about ancient history. The controversy between the late Qing Dynasty and the modern and ancient texts is an important academic issue, but its importance does not stop there, they encompass different intellectual worlds or life worlds, and those who are obedient to modern writers or ancient writers have different views on many issues. Taking the vision of ancient history as an example, Xia Zengyou, who admired the modern classics at that time, believed that there were many myths in ancient historiography, and the primeval to three dynasties in his "Ancient Chinese History" were the era of doubt. Liu Shipei, who admired the ancient scriptures, believed that these were historical facts, so he made a detailed description in his "Textbook of Chinese History". In addition, those who believe in ancient scriptures often regard ancient figures such as Zhou Gong and Confucius as ordinary figures, while those who believe in modern scriptures have a different view. Therefore, academic history and historiography are actually related to the way people want to see the world.
Here, I would like to follow the issue of the controversy between modern and ancient texts, and further cite the antiquity trend of modern China as an example. There is a lot of research on the antiquity movement in modern China, and I personally discussed it in "The Rise of the Ancient History Criticism Movement". The antiquity movement is an extremely important historiographical issue in modern China, but it also involves a question of the intellectual world and even the living world, that is, it actually determines how people understand ancient history.
At the height of antiquity, there was a popular opinion in the academic community that the Shang Dynasty might still be the Stone Age. Hu Shi quoted the Swedish scholar John Gunnar Andersson in his book on the Emperor and Jiuding in the first volume of the Ancient History: "Andersen suspects that the Shang Dynasty is still the late Stone Age (Neolithic Age), and I think his assumption is quite close. Gu Jiegang also said: I think the hypothesis that the Zhou Dynasty entered the Bronze Age is quite valid. Not only did the part before the Shang Dynasty in the "Records of the Historians" not dare to be regarded as a history of letters, but the people who wrote textbooks at that time did not dare to write the history of letters before the Shang Dynasty, and even the "History of China" by Miyazaki Ichijo in Japan was the same.
However, the idea of doubting antiquity was challenged by academic activities such as the excavation of Yin Ruins, and many people turned to believe that the records in the "Records of the Yin Dynasty" were credible. Zhu Jianxin recorded the change of atmosphere in "The Study of Gold and Stone" in this way: Recently, some scholars who have studied ancient Chinese social history have said that Yin was at the end of the Stone Age, and that the recent excavations of Yin in Anyang, Henan Province have been excavated, which is also false. This can also be seen when we reread Xu Xusheng's The Age of Legends in Ancient Chinese History, especially in Narrative and Chapter 1 on the Belief in the Ancients. He said: If we look at the words and artifacts produced by Yin Xu, we can see that the culture of that day was quite high, and it was quite far from the dawn of culture. If it is all pitch black in front of us, why is there a sudden leap forward in culture at this time? He also said: When we see the bronze ware in the late Shang Dynasty with extremely fine smelting chains and rich patterns, we feel that the use of bronze tools at that time has been quite long. However, hundreds of years ago, in the Yaoshun era, and even more than a thousand years ago, in the era of the Yellow Emperor Chiyou, all bronze tools were used, which is not impossible. Therefore, he further advocated that since the road of doubting the ancients cannot be followed, we should change to the road of believing in the ancients, which also prompted Xu Xusheng to seriously analyze the ancient legends. After Hu Shi saw the exquisite bronzes unearthed in Yinxu, his views on ancient history also changed drastically. It is believed that the ancient history is long and to a high degree, and there is a strong suspicion of the radical theory of coming from the West. Su Bingqi mentioned in an article that after the excavation of Yinxu, some people dared to put the Shang Dynasty at the beginning of ancient history, and he may be referring to Zhang Yinlin's "Outline of Ancient Chinese History". Hu Shijie once reminded people that Zhang Yinlin's book was written in the Shang Dynasty because a large number of things had been unearthed in Yinxu at that time.
Therefore, this academic history of believing and doubting and turning from doubt to belief is in fact a question that decides to close or open a large area of the ancient historical world, and it is a question that determines the historical consciousness of people in the entire era. Just as the anti-Song culture represented by Hui Dong and others in the Qing Dynasty research and criticism, the impact was too great, and Fang Dongshu said that the influence was so far that it almost made people feel that the Song Dynasty should not exist - there is a Song Dynasty that cannot be a dynasty (Fang Dongshu, "Han Xue Shang Dui"). In other words, all the political, cultural, and ideological achievements of the Song Dynasty were not taken seriously, or even regarded as negative and harmful, which cut off the interest or understanding of the dynasty and its vast related fields by many people at the time, and even made the Song Dynasty seem as if it should not have existed.
Therefore, the history of academic history is not only the study of which Confucian scholar, which book, or which academic school, but also the understanding of why and why certain portals were opened and closed in each era. To study them, in fact, is also to study the huge knowledge worlds they contain, as well as the significant impact of the switching and differences between them on the knowledge world and real life of people in each era.