Sinological Profiles
Homer H Dubs
28 Mar 1892 (Deerfield Illinois) - 16 Aug 1969 (Oxford)

Homer H Dubs

Dubs was not quite a China baby, having been born in Deerfield Illinois, but his missionary parents took him as a child to Hunan, where he grew up. He returned to the US in 1902, and after a freshman year at Oberlin (1910-1911) shifted to Yale, where he graduated in 1914 with a major in philosophy, and where he had the unusual distinction of being elected to both the humanistic (Phi Beta Kappa) and scientific (Sigma Xi) honor societies. He earned a Masters in philosophy at Columbia (1916) and a Bachelor of Divinity at the associated Union Theological Seminary (1917, magna cum laude), before returning to China as a missionary in his own right. His first assignment was to the Language School in Nanking. Like Kennedy, at some point he left the mission field, and shifted instead to scholarship.

Returning to the US, he received a PhD from Chicago in 1925 with a dissertation on Sywndz. News that Dubs was working on Sywndz had prompted Duyvendak to abandon a similar project, on which he had already published preliminary studies, and switch instead to Lord Shang. Dubs' work was published in two volumes, first an overview (Hsüntze, the Moulder of Ancient Confucianism) in 1927, which received a long review by Duyvendak in T'oung Pao, and then a partial translation (The Works of Hsüntze), in 1928, which again received a Duyvendak review, listing no less than 40 pages of mistranslations. In Dubs' work, some Sywndz chapters (3, 12-14, and 24-end) are omitted, others (11, 16) are represented by excerpts. The included chapters 1-2 are by far the most appealing part of the Sywndz canon; unfortunately, they were an effort of image modification undertaken by the posthumous school of Sywndz at Lan-ling. The reaction of some readers to the list of omitted chapters will be to turn at once to Sywndz 3 ("Nothing Indecorous"), to see what forbidden and therefore desirable things it might contain. It turns out to be a late but genuine summary of the advantages of Sywndz's preferred highly ritualistic mode of life. One might call it Sywndz's own attempt at image modification. It is rather suave; only at the very end does it revert to Sywndz's more characteristic mode by criticizing two almost fictional figures who recur in many Sywndz chapters; in Sywndz's view, they achieved a reputation for virtue by pretending to be purer than the pure. Dubs has trouble with Sywndz in his more usual hateful mode, and from the Sywndz 6 list of Twelve Wrong Philosophers, he refuses to include the last and worst of he Bad Philosophers: Mencius and Dz-sz. This was unwise: no opponent of Mencius is more outspoken on the record than Sywndz, who devotes a whole chapter (23) to contesting the Mencian view of human nature. In any case, such as it was (and who can object to a biographer taking a positive view of his subject?), Dubs' thesis did lead to less uncertain employment. He had been teaching at the University of Minnesota (1925-1927), and now went on to a longer stint,1927-1934, at Marshall College (since 1961, Marshall University) in Huntington, West Virginia.

Dubs himself took a large view of the methods of humanistic scholarship. Compared with the sciences, where solid and durable results seem to be obtained, how certain are the humanists of their conclusions? In 1930 appeared Rational Induction: An Analysis of the Method of Science and Philosophy. Among other things, it sought certainty in a redefinition of the syllogism, as containing five rather than three elements. The work was received with respect by some, and with thinly veiled contempt by others. It seems to this reviewer that "certainty" is elusive, in astrophysics as well as in ancient texts; the question is whether we can arrive at an inference that is good enough to be going ahead with, leaving it for future results to require abandonment or modification of that working idea. The key word is "working;" the search for the past is by definition continually open to new evidence, or to a more adequate account of the old evidence. "Good enough" must suffice us, against the jeers of the simpleminded, who reject all thought as subjective and thus invalid, and then retire to their little oases of theological certainty.

In all this one senses a never resolved uncertainty between the higher realm (alchemy, astronomy theology proper) and the lower, the merely historical.

In the early Thirties, international Sinology was putting itself on a rational basis, with the American Council of Learned Societies taking a large part on its side of the Atlantic. With several Chinese collaborators, Dubs was put in charge of a Han Shu translation project (1934-1937). Results began to appear soon after the grant period. The first two of five planned volumes appeared in 1938 and 1944, and in 1947, in recognition, Dubs was awarded the Julien Prize, Sinology's highest honor. A third volume appeared after a long interval, in 1955. A further two, essentially complete, never saw print. In the years after the grant period, Dubs was moving around academically: Duke (Divinity School) 1937-1943, Columbia (part-time) 1944-1945, Hartford Seminary 1945-1947. Then came another recognition from Europe. In 1947, at Duyvendak's suggestion, Dubs was offered Legge's old position at Oxford; Legge himself having been the first recipient of the Julien Prize. From this position Dubs retired in 1959, and died ten years later, in considerable pain from a final illness.

His work during these last twenty years can only be called negligible. His inaugural lecture at Oxford, on 7 Feb 1948, was published om 1949 as "China, the Land of Humanistic Scholarship." His only other book from the Oxford period was a study of A Roman City in Ancient China, which appeared in 1959, the year of his retirement. Framing gestures of welcome and farewell. In between, he made small contributions to the various Sinological and theological journals, including a series in Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie in years 1955-1960. In academic 1962-1932, Dubs lectured at the University of Hawaii and in Australia. What seems to have been Dubs' last paper was one published in JAOS in 1964, on the Great FIre in Lu. The author remarks that he had .

In writing a symphony or in running a life, the great thing is to know when you are finished, lest the dotage come to represent the doings, in the eyes of later ages.

At Dubs' death, the still unfinished two volumes of the Han Shu translation were shipped back to the US by David Hawkes, his successor at Oxford and himself a recipient of the Julien Prize (1963), in the hope that they might after all be published. They went to the University of Washington, where Wittfogel's Chinese History Project had moved in the meantime. There, they came under the care of Jack Dull, and after Dull's death in 1995, were relocated to the University of Oregon. The work of final editing was at last done by William Crowell and Jeff Howard, who had been Jack' students at Washington. These and the other three volumes are now available online at the Oregon library's online service, Oregon Digital. There has been closure.

E Bruce Brooks

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