Warring States Project | Current Research

The American study of ancient China is only a part, and not a very fully acknowledged part, of the American study of the past. That larger historical enterprise itself faced new perils after the war. It was assaulted by ideologies such as poetmodernism. These denied that history as such was possible: we cannot know the past, our ideas of the past are mere reflections of our preferences and preconceptions; we cannot know another person; we cannot know ourselves (here the psychoanalysts would happily agree). Much of the impetus behind these denials came from French thought (Foucault, Derrida, the Belgian De Man, and so on, with a local echo in Stanley Fish). The trouble with French thought is that the French, having lost three world wars in a row, will seize on anything that frees them from that uncomplimentary record. The outcome was a crisis in the study of history, with the study of nonwestern antiquity as merely a minor casualty in that larger war of theory.

In the attention of the present, the past was replaced by the immediate future. Advocacy took center stage. The attraction of advocacy, besides the undoubted problems on which it often focuses, is that it is easy. It requires no weird foreign languages, no training in the subtleties of textual criticism, no acquaintance with a sometimes large body of ancient tradition - until very recently, the mere bulk of Chinese written texts, including thousands of years of commentaries on the texts, was the largest in the world. Advocacy requires only that you know what you think, and are prepared to argue for it in the forum of the present. Not only in the streets, but in the universities, this trend became dominant. It left little room for the past.

Scholarship in the antiquities is not entirely dead, either in America or Europe. For the last fifty years, there has been, in Biblical studies, an encouraging rediscovery of some of the classical modes of approach to an ancient text: recognizing interpolations, determining directionality between related texts - in short, readmitting the idea of text growth and tradition growth; resuming the effort to understand antiquity on antiquity's own terms. The Project's own efforts in Sinology (and Biblical studies, and even Homeric studies, in the thought that no antiquity can be fully understood in isolation) are not for the Project itself to judge. They are noted here as one fragmentary survival of what, at its best, was never a very firmly grounded enterprise: American Sinology.