Once upon a time, the experience of studying under Shi Shi's door gave me the first time to have a more in-depth academic experience of the interaction between people and me, inside and outside, and the spiritual impact brought about by the bad news made these experiences come to mind again. If the theme is still "internalization", I hope to use this to remember my teacher.
--Zhang Taisu, Professor, Yale University School of Law
Remembering Teacher Shi Jingqian
—
Zhang Taisu Wen
This article was first published in Yali Readings (ID: yalipub)
Jonathan D. Spence (11 August 1936 – 25 December 2021), also known as Jonathan Spencer, was born in Surrey, South West London, England, and graduated from cambridge university in the United Kingdom and Yale University in the United States with a doctorate. He is a well-known expert and sinologist of contemporary Chinese history in the United States, who is known for his research on the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He was taught at the University of Winchester and the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965 and is currently a professor at Yale University, director of the Department of History, and Center for East Asian Studies. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Chinese, Hong Kong. He was the president of the American Historical Society from 2004 to 2005 and enjoys a high reputation in the Western sinology community.
When I received the news of the death of Professor Jonathan Spence on the afternoon of December 26, I was putting together this year's Yali book list and a routine annual review. In the original idea, this year's theme was "internalization", focusing on the restlessness, backward-looking, and even inward volume of political and intellectual circles in various countries in the second year of the epidemic. One of the complaints often heard in Europe and the United States in the past two years is "the pandemic has narrowed our horizons" ("The epidemic has narrowed our horizons"). At both the individual and group levels, the pandemic is driving a shift toward internalization: it reduces interaction between people and countries, compresses the space for individual activities and communication, and dramatically increases the unpredictability of the future. As a result, people's vision of life is forced to shift from the outside to the inside, and their insecurity and risk aversion are also increasing day by day. Such an environment not only exacerbates the internal political contradictions of various countries, but also further intensifies the geopolitical contradictions: all major countries have internal worries, and the escalation of internal worries seems to push them into a tougher external posture, trying to integrate internal affairs with external pressure. The dangers of such an approach are self-evident.
The death of the old professor not only disrupted my original thinking, but also added some new dimensions to them. Once upon a time, the experience of studying under Shi Shi's door gave me the first time to have a more in-depth academic experience of the interaction between people and me, inside and outside, and the spiritual impact brought about by the bad news made these experiences come to mind again. If the theme is still "internalization", I hope to use this to remember my teacher.
Professor Shi Jingqian is at Yale Law School, from left, Ge Weibao and Kissinger.
I met Shi Jingqian in the fall of 2002. He was working on a book, "Return to Dragon Mountain," and needed to hire a research assistant to sort out and translate some of Mr. Zhang's poems. As a sophomore international student with a background in ancient literature and struggling to survive on a scholarship, I submitted my application without hesitation. So the job became one of the main lines of my life for the next few years: sorting out a batch of documents every two weeks, holding a lunch meeting with Shi Shi at his favorite Naples Pizzeria or Timothy Dwight's residential college cafeteria, drinking a Coke, asking for a salary from the history department, and repeating it. Naturally, I took his famous lecture course on "Modern Chinese History", and then asked him to serve as a supervisory professor for his graduation thesis in my senior year, and gave him a course assistant for two years during my law school. In 2008, with his official retirement, I entered Professor Peter Perdue to study for a doctorate in history, thus ending a six-year study and work trip to history. After that, the old professor was not in good health, and except for the occasional gathering at his home, he was indeed rarely seen on campus. Although the bad news of his death came unexpectedly, his students and colleagues were not unprepared over the years.
Naples Pizza
In my personal experience, Shi Jingqian's appeal lies less in his specific views or academic insights, but more in the "field" he has created: an elegant, serene, but yet profound field of knowledge and behavior, opening up a state of mind that is both detached and touching. When attending his classes or reading his works, he often feels that the flow of time slows down and the noise of the outside world fades, so his thinking is plunged into the historical scene he describes in a particularly clear state, with the joys and sorrows of Zhang Dai, Yongzheng, Kangxi, Xu Zhimo, Matteo Ricci, and Wang. This sense of space-time displacement was a new learning experience for me at that time, and I have rarely experienced it in other places so far, no matter how profound the thinking of other scholars, how smooth the theory, and how meticulous the examination is. Unlike the set of doctrines left by most scholars to future generations, Shi Jingqian left behind more of a "sense of history": feelings, emotions, intentions, and phenomena. Through this "sense of history", it seems that we can cross the threshold of subjective thinking and more intuitively touch the historical situation itself.
Similar feelings exist in every conversation with the old professor: no matter what the content of the conversation is, whether it is history or the things around him, literature or opinions, he can always listen, understand, and analyze at a leisurely and gentle rhythm. After a few rounds of discussion, the historical materials that were originally limited to paper often become vivid and vivid, and the characters in them seem to be in front of us, as if breathing the same air as us. At that time, 300 or 400 undergraduate students at Yale took the course "Modern Chinese History" every year, not so much how enthusiastic they were for Chinese history itself, but rather that most of them were attracted by Shi Jingqian's own field, hoping to get out of front of his eyes under his guidance, immerse themselves in the historical world in an all-round way, and "talk to the ancients" in an all-round way. Such an experience may be similar to reading a novel, but the lecturer's respect and kindness for historical materials are always emphasized: this is still a history class. Even twenty years ago, when yale history masters gathered, this immersive experience is still the only one.
Book Shadow: Some of Shi Jingqian's works
Shi Jingqian's contemporaries often attribute his success to his particularly moving, "angelic" (Levinson) writing. However, I thought that Wen Yu was born from the heart, and Shi Shi's real superiority was probably his ability to "cultivate the heart" and empathize. The so-called "cultivation of the mind" is not the self-cultivation of the Taoist class, but while sincerely understanding others, it can still maintain the subjectivity of the self, and then open up the two and give historical figures some vitality that cannot be presented by pure literature combing. It is a kind of work that finds the intersection between the subjective and the objective, both cultivating the other mind and the original mind. Only on top of this cognitive balance can there be the possibility of rationally incorporating empathy into academic research and expression.
In fact, the vast majority of scholars (including me) do not have a good grasp of the balance between the person and the self, between the subject and the guest, so they cannot take empathy as the primary research method. We can only make up for the lack of empathy through other means, either with theoretical frameworks, or empirical routines, or with literature. Shi Jingqian is one of the very few lucky people with the talent of "cultivating the heart" and empathy, who can really enter history under the interaction of historical analysis and situation imagination, Shi Shiran walks back, and then he can take students and readers to find the past. In terms of "looking at history from the inside", I can't think of anyone who has done a better job than him. When others were confused that "at that time, they only remembered the depths of the mountains, and Qingxi went to the Cloud Forest several times", he was already able to keep Taoyuan in his heart and even bring it out.
At the level of academic inheritance, such a talent has a two-sided nature: on the one hand, strong empathy ability helps to teach according to aptitude, but on the other hand, empathy itself is extremely difficult to be taught and inherited. On the one hand, Shi Jingqian is undoubtedly an extremely successful doctoral supervisor, and has cultivated a series of top scholars such as Peng Mulan and Ke Jiaoyan in the past few decades. On the other hand, a closer look at the research styles of these scholars reveals that almost none of them have taken the same method and route as Shi Jingqian himself, and they are also very different from each other, and there is almost no school of commonality. Of course, this is not because Shi Jingqian himself "does not want to pass on", but probably because his academic talent "cannot be passed on". "The Words of the Master and the Heavenly Dao are unattainable and unheard." In the past twenty years, although I have often longed for Shi Jingqian's academic realm, I have not regarded it as a very suitable development direction for myself.
Yale University Library/Campus
Today's increasingly "internalized" political environment has given me a deeper understanding of the importance of empathy: even if it can't be done quite, we still need to try. Most of the internal and external troubles of the major powers stem from the extreme differentiation of world views, from the incomprehension of others, and even from the "unwillingness to understand." In the case of the United States, for example, the domestic political contradictions in the United States have their own economic basis, but pure economic contradictions are not enough to explain the increasing political polarization today, and the subjective initiative of ideology and political culture must be recognized on the economic basis. Similarly, the conflict between China and the United States has its own material basis, but pure material interests are not enough to explain the communication dilemma between the two countries, and the subjective initiative of ideological and worldview differences must be recognized on the material basis. With the advent of the pandemic, people have been confined to smaller living spaces, and already fragile communication channels between people have become increasingly blocked.
Completely eliminating the communication dilemma between different countries may be an impossible task, or even a worthwhile task: after all, the self-perception of human society is still based on various internal and external differences, and once they are lost, their fundamental cohesion may be lost. Even so, under the general trend of overall "internalization", it seems that more empathy efforts are not a bad thing, at least it can help this crisis-ridden world to breathe a little relief, and find more room for people to understand and communicate with each other. When Vogel died a year ago, there were many people in Both China and the United States lamenting that Fu's mode of thinking of understanding China with goodwill is rare in the Western world. After Shi Jingqian's death, this feeling may deepen again, but on the other hand, its existence itself just shows that no matter when and where, people will always have some fundamental needs for mutual understanding of goodwill. Rational empathy may be difficult, but how cruel would a world be without it?
Taking a step back, even if the slightest empathy that each of us can do is not substantially beneficial to the macro situation, it can still help us to let go of some undeserved obsessions in this situation full of anxiety and infighting, look away, and live a little more gracefully. Shi Jingqian is perhaps the most unhurried and elegant scholar I have ever met: his empathy has greatly expanded his horizons, so his spiritual life is rarely confined to the present, and he can always wander to a certain extent on the other side of history. Many years later, if I talk to my juniors about my division commanders, I may not analyze with them how Shi Jingqian interpreted the mentality of the scholars in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, but I will carefully describe his calmness and elegance, and hope that they can learn something from it. In my memory palace, he still wanders around the Yale campus on an autumn afternoon, or pours a cup of coffee in the corner of a pizzeria, chatting with a historical figure through a few rolls of corner materials dug out of nowhere, hundreds of years apart.
With this article, I would like to commemorate my teacher.
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