The historical significance of biography 丨 Phoenix Book Review

British history professor John Tosh said in his book The Mission of Historiography: "History has given us two forms of power. On the one hand, history can be used to strengthen a sense of group identity (to the state or to the community) by firmly 'binding' people to the same narrative of the past; on the other hand, it empowers people by enriching the intellectual resources of those citizens who have done something. As a way of historical narration, biography has taken the realization of these two missions of history as its ultimate goal from the beginning of its birth, and constructed the intellectual history of "accomplished citizens" in the sense of group identity. Carlisle's statement that "history is a biography of a great man" has been criticized by intellectuals since mass society because it infinitely magnifies the significance of the great man in history and ignores the existence of ordinary people, but it captures the original core of the biographical style and illustrates the inseparable relationship between biography and historical narrative. Good biography is the same as a good historical narrative, or rather, biography is a genre that opens history from a personal perspective, and the historical significance of biography needs to be rethought—such a statement brings some positive affirmation to the biography that has been rejected by historiography since modern times because of its imaginary artistic construction. The biography "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers: Modern Chinese Enlightenment Yan Fu", written by historian Mr. Huang Kewu to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Yan Fu's death, opens up the history of the development of modern Chinese thought and culture through Yan Fu's personal history, and gives Yan Fu, the ideological enlightener, historical significance in the sense of identity of the ideological and cultural development process of an era, and also gives historical significance to the biographical style.

Personal history is part of history

Huang Kewu, the author of "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers", is a doctor of history at Stanford University and is now a distinguished researcher at the Institute of Modern History of the "Academia Sinica" in Taiwan, and has published and published more than 20 (pieces) of research on Yan Fu since the publication of "The So of Freedom: Yan Fu's Understanding and Criticism of John Mill's Free Thought" in 1998, and is a senior Yan Fu expert. The phrase "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers" comes from the 2017 Yan Fu documentary "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers - Yan Fu in the Great Changes of the Millennium", which was quoted by the author as "to highlight his (Yan Fu's) originality and importance in enlightenment" and "the four words of the title best show the historical role of Yan Fu" - the pioneer of enlightenment in modern China.

As a biography of an Enlightenment thinker, "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers" focuses on Yan Fu's ideological connotations, and the whole book uses two-thirds of the content to "show his political, economic, and social ideological characteristics and his impact on the times through the analysis of Yan's translated works." Yan Fu was the earliest and most influential enlightener, thinker and educator in modern China who introduced Western learning to enlighten the public and save the survival of the people, and the Western studies he introduced and his reflections on Chinese and Western cultures became an important source of modern Chinese thought.

Compared with Yan Fu's life experience, readers are more familiar with his translation of Huxley's "Heavenly Evolution" Darwin's theory of evolution of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest". The translation and publication of "The Theory of Heavenly Speech" in 1898 set off a reading fever, of course, more importantly, the storm of ideological enlightenment brought about by the reading fever. Cai Yuanpei said: "Words such as 'competition for things', 'struggle for survival', 'survival of the fittest' and other words have become the mantra of everyone. In His Forty Self-Descriptions, Hu Shi recalled the popularity of the Heavenly Speech when he was studying at the Chengzhen Academy in Shanghai: "The ideas spread by Yan Fu were like wildfire, burning the hearts and blood of many teenagers. In 1905, when Hu Shi was 14 years old, he was influenced by the "Theory of Heavenly Speech" and gave himself the word "suitable", from which Hu Shizhi's name was derived. Lu Xun recorded his excitement when he read "The Theory of Heavenly Speech" in 1898 at the Jiangnan Water Teacher's School: "The trend of reading new books became popular, and I also knew that there was a book in China called "Heavenly Speech"... oh! It turned out that there was a Huxley sitting in the study in the world thinking so much, and thinking so freshly? Cao Juren said: "In the past 20 years, I have read more than 500 kinds of memoirs, and they are rarely unaffected by Huxley's "Heavenly Speech". Although Yan Fu is older than the new figures in the ideological and cultural circles during the new cultural movement such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi, from the perspective of the large historical period, they still belong to their contemporaries, and they are also new intellectuals who grew up after receiving new education in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty. However, Yan Fu was the first to promote the core values of democracy and science from the perspective of the comparison of Chinese and Western cultures, laying the tone for the development of modern Chinese thought since the "May Fourth". The "May Fourth" period combined democracy, science and anti-tradition as a blueprint for building a new China, which was translated by Yan Fu as the beginning, and lu Xun, Hu Shi and other contributors to the "New Youth" magazine inherited and carried forward.

Biographies of thinkers are not easy to write because "thinkers spend most of their time sitting and thinking", but Hannah Arendt, combined with her experience in writing more than 10 biographies of thinkers, believes that it is possible to "explain something fascinating" about the thinker "with psychological and biographical factors", that is, starting from the environment in which he grew up and the personal field such as the family, because the reproduction of private life that is generally prejudiced and diluted actually makes the public figure more realistic. As a biography of a thinker, in addition to focusing on the ideological connotation of Yan Fu becoming the "first person to open his eyes to the world" in modern China, "Pen Awakening Mountains and Rivers" tells about Yan Fu's private life in one-third of the way: he lost his father at an early age, his family fell into an economic crisis, he could not continue to receive traditional education in private schools, and he had no choice but to choose the Fuzhou Mawei Ship Administration School, which "in addition to providing clothing, food, and housing, but also issued four or two silver allowances every month". The school is mainly Western studies, mainly taught in English, but also emphasizes that in secondary schools, students must learn ancient Chinese at a fixed time, and Yan Fu's later concept of connecting Chinese and Western was originally rooted in this. In 1877, he went to England to study, dedicated to absorbing Western knowledge, after returning to China in 1879, he studied under Wu Rulun, learned the ancient language of Tongcheng, and then participated in the township examination four times, although they all ended in the first place, but strengthened the quality of ancient literature, and then systematically read classic works on Western politics, economy, law, sociology, and education during the Restoration Movement, laying the foundation for Chinese and Western learning. Yan Fu's "troubled" life of "not being safe and smooth" ultimately led to the life of a controversial Enlightenment thinker who studied both Chinese and Western.

As a historian, when presenting the development of Yan Fu's thought, in addition to telling the background factors of the times and the large and small, public and private of individual families, the author pays attention to the interaction between individuals and collectives in creating an era of the atmosphere, and places more ink on the history of exchanges between Yan Fu and contemporary "citizens with achievements" such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian and other figures of the Reform School at that time, which focuses on the ideological intersection to the difference between The people and Liang Qichao, who is also the ideological leader of the times. Details such as questioning and alienation have a sense of detail in the big history. Reading biographies is also reading history. These exchanges are not only between individuals, but also reflect the relationship between the reformers in Tianjin and Shanghai on the eve of the Penghu ReformAtion, presenting from one side a picture of modern intellectual history constructed by multiple details.

Historical significance

Liang Qichao, a first-class historian in modern Chinese history, said in the Supplement to the Chinese Historical Research Law: "The purpose of history is to give new meaning or new value to the true facts of the past, so as to provide resources for the activities of modern people." He also explains the so-called "new value": "There are two kinds of value, there is a temporary value, which is obsolete and the price decreases; there is a permanent value, and the longer the time, the more the value increases." Also as a historian, Huang Kewu in this book sorted out and evaluated the value of Yanfu Enlightenment Thought in the history of Chinese thought and culture, affirmed its "temporary value", and fully affirmed its "permanent value" from the perspective of long-term development of history: "In the process of China's ideological and cultural transformation in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, Yanfu Thought played an important role. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Yan Fu was a pioneer of enlightenment in introducing Western studies, and on the one hand, his works opened the May Fourth New Culture Movement, which gave birth to the spirit of criticizing tradition, pursuing democracy, and science, on the other hand, he also began to reflect on this enlightenment discourse (centered on Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun and other authors of "New Youth"), exploring the limitations or deficiencies of concepts such as science, democracy, patriotism, and anti-tradition. ”

Yan Fu's views on "the similarities and differences between secondary schools and Western studies and their mutual relations" fully reflect the unique significance of his ideas. Yan Fu opposed the "theory of the origin of Western studies" and the "theory of the use of Chinese bodies in the West" at the end of the 19th century and the "theory of total Westernization" in the early 20th century. Mr. Huang Kewu corrected the prejudices of some scholars after the New Culture Movement who criticized Yan Fu's early tendency toward Western studies and his return to conservatism in his later years. What is more worth affirming is that the author believes that the theories introduced by Yan Fu revolve around liberalism, capitalism, social evolution theory and logic, which are a set of national concepts with an integrated point of view, with new historical heights.

Time has passed through a hundred years, the development, achievements and limitations of that era, history has given the answer, and the "permanent value" of Yanfu thought needs to be re-evaluated and understood. As Mr. Zheng Zheng, president of the Fujian Yanfu Academic Research Association, said: "When we re-study economics for the development of a modern socialist economy, Yan Fu, who has always been considered 'out of place', many of his theories are so suitable for today's time a hundred years later, which cannot but arouse people's amazement and high attention." ”

This biography has a small regret that the citations are not annotated throughout the book, and it lacks the rigorous sense of reference that historical works should have. Of course, this regret is intentional by the author, who said in the "Preface": "I hope to introduce Yan Fu's life to the general reader with concise words." Therefore, efforts were made to simplify the drafting, to use as few citations as possible, and not to annotate them as in formal scholarly works. ”

What time has not told, history will always tell. This is also the long-term view of the almanac scholar Braudel, who studied long-term historical phenomena in order to fundamentally grasp history. When we read Yan Fu's biography today, we not only want to know what kind of life he lived, but also hope to understand and grasp the history of the ever-changing era in which their generation lived and its current significance a hundred years later from the perspective of his personal history, which is the historical significance of the biography.