Session 149: Encompassing Comparisons and Parallel Discourses: New Approaches to Comparative Intellectual History

Organizer and Chair: Ari Daniel Levine, University of Georgia

Discussant: Pamela Crossley, Dartmouth College

This panel seeks to develop new theories and methodologies for comparative intellectual history by exploring parallel discourses in Chinese and European thought. Each presenter will compare two bodies of texts—one Chinese, one European—that explicate similar ways of thinking, knowing, speaking, or feeling. By working at the level of discourses and vocabularies, each paper examines how language placed limits upon what was conceivable, and how these intellectual systems were predicated upon unspoken assumptions. By using native terminologies as the basis of their comparisons, the panelists seek to avoid culture-bound explanations and "East"/"West" dichotomies.

This panel offers four methodological approaches to comparative intellectual history. In a close reading of classical texts, Mark Edward Lewis compares and contrasts early Chinese and ancient Greek attitudes towards emotional experiences by analyzing vocabularies that describe the nature, substance, sources, and locations of emotional phenomena. Comparing literary taxonomies of rhetoric and their relation to political authority, David Schaberg’s paper analyzes changing conceptions of persuasion and eloquence in two imperial settings: the courts of Qin-Han China and the Roman principate. Ari Levine’s paper examines notions of faction (pengdang) and "party" in eleventh-century China and eighteenth-century Britain, focusing on vocabularies of authority and legitimacy that underlay political theory and rhetoric in periods of factional conflict. Examining scientific texts written by Jesuit missionaries and Chinese scholars in the seventeenth century, Benjamin Elman compares Chinese notions of gewu zhizhi ("investigating things and extending knowledge") with European conceptions of scientia and uncovers the unspoken assumptions behind these intellectual structures.

Describing Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece

Mark Edward Lewis, Stanford University

In recent decades emotions have become a leading theme for comparative cultural analysis through linguistic semantics. Most studies compare terms for emotions in different cultures. They generally seek (1) to contrast cultures through demonstrating the presence or absence of near equivalents ("people X have no word for ‘shame’"), and distinguishing their connotations and uses; or (2) to discover "universal emotion concepts" underlying the surface diversity of natural languages. One of the few studies to apply such methods to China is Paolo Santangelo’s Sentimental Education in Chinese History.

This paper will, in contrast, focus not on early Chinese and Greek names of emotions, but the associated verbs and relational terms that characterized emotions in general, and the related practices which provided vocabulary pertaining to emotions. Through the study of verbs I will deduce the nature and substance of emotions, e.g., actively mobilized or passively endured; fluid, wind, or energy; striking a blow or permeating, etc. Through relational terms I will suggest something of the perceived location and sources of emotions, e.g., internal or external, if the latter, then how they enter the body, where in the body, etc. Related practices that provided vocabulary in both cultures include demonology, medicine, and dream analysis. This study will attempt to establish the place of emotions as a general phenomenon in both cultures, to show how their ideas were alike, and indicate how they differed.

Speech Genres and the Rise of Literary Taxonomy

David Schaberg, UCLA

Comparative investigations in literature often take the form of juxtapositions of taxonomies: "Did the Chinese have epic?" asks about a particular genre and, implicitly, about a whole system of genres. Such taxonomies take shape where political stability permits the specialized labor of archivists, bibliographers, and anthologists. According to Bakhtin and others, however, literary genres themselves originate outside of writing, in oral utterances having specific use values in given social and historical settings. These settings and ways of speaking do not disappear with the rise of writing and taxonomy, nor do they lose their importance in the daily conduct of social business. One must imagine, then, literary genres embedded in and imperfectly distinguished from a more diffuse and changeable tissue of speech genres, the living talk of every sort that makes a work and its author usable.

A case in point is speech in imperial courts. In eras of growing controls on critical and deliberative speech, as during the rise of the Qin and Han imperia and the coming of the Roman principate, new technical theorizations of persuasion went hand in hand with authoritarian condemnations of eloquence. Works of the free-speaking past were preserved and imitated, but in contexts that stressed their literariness, their identification with genre and their insulation from any real business of imperial policy. Investigation of generic taxonomies and extra-taxonomic factors in two distinct imperial settings thus illuminates both the fate of persuasive speech and the origins of the category of the "literary" itself.

Public Good and Partisan Gain: Political Languages of Faction in Northern Song China and Hanoverian Britain

Ari Daniel Levine, University of Georgia

In eleventh-century China and eighteenth-century Britain, political and ideological conflicts divided the socio-political elite of both empires into rival factions: reformists (xindang) and anti-reformists (jiudang), Tories and Whigs. At the courts of the Song and Hanoverian dynasties, a series of partisan ministerial regimes contended for power and patronage. While unfolding within different cultural and institutional contexts, these factional conflicts offer fruitful comparisons for historians of political theory, ideology, and discourse.

By interrogating the terms of these parallel vocabularies of faction and party, this paper will compare Chinese and British conceptions of political authority and legitimacy, exploring the intellectual assumptions and linguistic limits that constrained the political imagination. Political theorists and rhetoricians worked within classical and historical frames of reference that constrained the limits of interpretation. In late Northern Song China (1068–1126), the authors of "Essays on Faction" (Pengdang lun) generally described "factions" (pengdang) as the exclusive province of "petty men" (xiaoren), illegitimate ministers who pursued "selfish" (si) interests while forsaking the "public good" (gong). From Bolingbroke to Hume, eighteenth-century British authors of "Dissertations on Parties" similarly imagined loyalty to "party" as undermining the "public good" and "national interest."

Both Chinese and English political vocabularies proved insufficiently elastic to conceive of factions as anything but malign and illegitimate associations that subverted state authority and monarchical prerogatives. Since factions were imagined to be antithetical to the public good, political figures refrained from publicly admitting that they had formed factions, using the terms "faction" and "party" to accuse their adversaries of political illegitimacy.

Tradutore, traditore: Christianity, Science, and Translation in Seventeenth-Century China

Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University

When Europeans reached China during the age of exploration, the highest learning (scientia) of their men of culture did not connote natural science. For Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), natural philosophy, not natural science, was a field of higher learning. Science was a medieval French term, which was synonymous with accurate and systematized knowledge. When Latinized the word became scientia and represented among scholastics and early modern elites the specialized branches of Aristotelian moral and natural philosophy. Included in the Scholastic regime for learning were the seven sciences of medieval learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Comparable to the classical ideal of the six arts in ancient China (rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics), these seven liberal arts served in Roman education as preparation for more specialized training in philosophy, medicine, or law.

Like contemporary Europeans and Islamic scholars, late imperial Chinese also prioritized mathematical studies for their pre-modern exact sciences, which informed Chinese astronomy, geography, cartography, and alchemy in different ways. Literati also applied the naturalistic concepts of yin and yang and the five evolutive phases (wuxing) to elucidate the spontaneous (ziran) changes in the stuff of the world (qi). Rational and abstract explanations of natural things and phenomena characterized the pre-modern sciences worldwide, particularly Chinese elite traditions of natural studies. I spotlight the early modern scientific texts translated jointly by Christian missionaries and Chinese literati. These science translations were not simply innocent byproducts of the missionary enterprise, however. The science texts the missionaries successfully translated into classical Chinese were encoded with Christian messages and religiously-induced silences. Hence, I do not focus on translation as a futile exercise in philosophical incommensurability. Instead, I demonstrate the willful infiltration of Christian beliefs in the scientific textbooks translated into Chinese.

My analysis of scientific translations by missionaries and their converts will reveal the unspoken predispositions that Catholics and Chinese all encoded. This lack of transparency has been underestimated in previously accounts of translation in China and Japan as high-minded efforts at achieving verisimilitude. Jesuit translators did not just fail to achieve a seamless word-by-word correspondence from Latin or English to Chinese. Nor were they idealistic failures who tried unsuccessfully to capture the spirit of the source through more adventuresome literary tactics.

The Jesuits in China rejected the European original when the native source betrayed their religious sensibilities. The result was not a failure to communicate. Competent in vernacular Chinese, the Jesuits communicated well enough to their Chinese partners who produced the classical translations. Rather, the enterprise of translation became a mindful, Christian effort not to translate Copernican heliocentricity in the original to the target audience. We see in this act of dissembling a sense of religious commitment that we should not underestimate. Jesuit dissembling tells us that we must further problematize the act of translation ideologically and recognize that the Chinese were not privy to the untranslated passages. What they did not know mattered.