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Sinology/Chinese intellectual history twitter, tell me if the book I am looking for exists, and if it doesn't, the closest thing to it.
Scholars of Western thought see years 1870-1950 as sort of a watershed in Western intellectual and cultural history. These are the years when
Scholars of Western thought see years 1870-1950 as sort of a watershed in Western intellectual and cultural history. These are the years when
advances in science start to erode the traditional metaphysical commitments underlying Western philosophy and ideology (Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Einstein), events of WWI and then the rise of totalitarianism both further discredit reigning ideologies and ideals, but also destroy
the social basis of the Western order (extinguishing European aristocracy and old states, ending imperialism, etc.). In high intellectual terms, these events create the sort of modernism we associate with T.S. Eliot's WASTELAND, and set the stage for absurdist post modernism that
we associate with WAITING FOR GODOT or CATCH-22. You are familiar with this intellectual world, as you still live in it and so have an intuitive grasp of what it means to live in an age when all frames are broken, ideologies dead, and meanings questioned.
Well something similar has happened in Chinese history--not once, but *twice.* Everybody is familiar with the second time this happened, when the Qing empire collapses, China falls apart, and the belief in Neoconfucian ideals and order evaporates. In literature no one embodies
this better than Lu Xun's short stories "KONG YIJI" and "DIARY OF A MADMAN." There are lots and lots of books on this second collapse.
There is a lot less written on the first. I peg it as happening at the tale end of the Tang Dynasty, from about 820s-890s.
There is a lot less written on the first. I peg it as happening at the tale end of the Tang Dynasty, from about 820s-890s.
There are a few things that happen in this time. First the An-Lushan rebellion knocks the Tang down at their height--in many ways, Chinese civilization at its height. In THE DESTRUCTION OF THE MEDIEVAL CHINESE ARISTOCRACY Tackett shows how even more devastating catastrophes
would follow at century's end, outright destroying almost the entire Chinese elite--elite families and lifeways that had preceded the Tang's existence in some cases by centuries, and had withstood institutional changes through those centuries. Buddhism seems to go through a
similar material crisis as state funding is stripped from them and as the great monasteries are sacked in civil war and invasion. So the Chinese aristocracy that has been ruling since the late Han is gone. State religion wilts. The glory Tang at its height is revealed a delusion.
And a lot of this is permanent. After being the center of Chinese civilization for 2000 years, Chang'an is never the center for a major dynasty ever again. The new dynasties intellectual, economic, and social center is to the south.
These dynasties are not built around aristocratic great clans, but on the meritocratic products of the civil examination system, which only becomes the society dominating institution we are familiar with in the Song. A far more commercial, and less martial, elite emerges.
Recognizing all of this, Japanese historians sometimes date the beginning of "modern" Chinese history to the Song dynasty. But what interests me here is the *intellectual* component to all of this. I have not read a great deal about it, but what I have read...
Well, here is how Michael Fuller describes the poetry of the late Tang in AN INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE POETRY:
This is not dissimilar to what happened to Europeans and Chinese in the early 20th century.
Neither modern Westerners nor Chinese have really found a solution to this set of interlocking problems (material collapse of an old social order coupled with intellectual collapse of the ideals and metaphysical underpinnings of the cultural order)... yet.
But the Chinese of 1000 years ago did. Today we call it Neoconfucianism; it provided the intellectual architecture for the new Chinese social order, an order that would last through the end of the Qing, and was exported to Vietnam and Korea almost wholesale. It was the orthodoxy
of the exam system, it met the challenges posed by subversive intellectual currents (e.g. Buddhism), provided an integrated set of ideas for grounding human relationships to each other, to the universe, and to the political order.
A lot has been written about Neoconfucianism and its answers to all these questions. But what I am interested in, I suppose, is this interregnum. This time when medieval Chinese poets were writing, to put it too simply, there own version of THE WASTE LAND and KONG YIJI--and the
century long story of how they build up a new ideological structure to fill the void left by the intellectual, cultural, and social collapse of the 800s.
I doubt anyone has framed things exactly like this before, but if I am interested in exploring this issue, what are the best books to read on cultural life in the 800 and 900s?
I also suppose people only care about the vote totals tonight so I might have to re-ask all of this in three weeks or what have you
