This article is transferred from: Sunshine Tianming Ya Reading Academy
Xia Zhongyi is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Chen Yinke: "What I have learned in my life is for burying bones"
Chen Yinke's life experience was very prominent. His grandfather, Chen Baozhen, was the governor of Hunan in the late Qing Dynasty, and he was also an important town in modern history. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao once gathered under their command. His biological father, Chen San, was originally the leader of the late Qing literary circle. Chen has been a pure scholar all his life, that is, a person who has been purely academicized. In his 1929 seven-sentence sentence: "Reading is not willing to be busy with others"? This "person" can be interpreted as a businessman or as an officialdom authority.
Chen was an academician of the Academia Sinica before 1949, and Lao Jiang sometimes wanted to give the academicians a little face and invite them to dinner. Of course, Lao Chiang's face is very large, so whether the academicians go or not? This has become an intriguing "Hamlet" proposition.
Chen didn't give face, but he was full of reluctance. He once wrote a poem: "Look at the flowers and sorrow near the highest building." "Flower" is a metaphor for the leader of state power. The leader is high in the political upper echelons, so it is called the "highest building". Chen had never been optimistic about Chiang politically, but Chiang hosted a banquet for academicians in a high-rise building, so the closer he approached the building, the more entangled and sad he became.
Then you can understand why Chen politely rejected Chiang's plan to "rush the shipment" at the end of 1948. Several times the plane stopped at the airport to wait, Chen just didn't board, and then he finally boarded the plane because he was sure that it was Hu Shi who went south with the plane, and he thought that although Hu was the president of the Academia Sinica, he still had the true character of a scholar, so he might as well go with him for the time being. When the plane landed in Nanjing, the two parted ways, Hu went to the presidential palace to meet with Chiang, Chen turned around and arrived in Shanghai, and a few days later went south to Yangcheng to become a professor at Lingnan University. It is of great significance that he chose a space that is neither Taipei nor Beijing, but which is at an equidistant distance from both the KMT and the CCP.
He died in 1969 at the age of eighty. He was born in 1890, thirteen years younger than Wang Guowei.
Such a hurried history of Chen's life can be seen with the following characteristics:
First, before 1929, he was already a pure scholar, and he was already emphasizing the study of scholars, and his mind had to be free from the shackles of political utilitarianism, so he still wanted to live like this after 1949. Before 1949, it was no problem for him to live like this, because the political leaders at that time could respect academics and Huairou scholars, so he lived a chic and arrogant life, and Tsinghua Garden was a beautiful space for him to realize his dream of being a scholar. But after 1949, he still insisted on living like this, which will be very difficult. So he lived as a tragic remnant.
Second, where is the boundary between a scholar and a pure scholar? It depends on whether you really regard academic choice as the first meaning of the pattern of life in your life, which is called the "academic standard." Life is like a big chessboard, and if you choose academia as a chess piece, where is the position, whether it is a rook, a horse, a cannon, or a general, or a handsome? Therefore, whether from the perspective of academic achievements or personality, Chen is indeed a monument to Chinese humanities scholarship in the 20th century, first of all, a monument to personality.
Feng Youlan: "Rhetoric Establishes Hypocrisy"
In fact, Feng did use the Zhdanov model to rewrite his Republican version of history. The first volume of the revised New History of Chinese Philosophy was published in 1962, Mao Zedong received him in 1964, and in 1965 he shook hands with Feng cordially and took a group photo. According to the inertia of Zhdanov's thinking, the history of philosophy must be set up as the history of the struggle between materialism and idealism. Feng's path is also to apply this model to the thinkers of the pre-Qin period, and put hats on them: Xunzi is basically materialistic, Mencius is idealistic, Confucius has materialism and idealism, etc. This is obviously not "rhetoric establishes sincerity", but "rhetoric establishes hypocrisy". When it comes to pre-Qin Confucianism in China, whether it is Confucius, Mencius, or Xunzi, their ideological focus is, strictly speaking, not so much on epistemology as on ethics. Feng used materialism and idealism to put the hat on the head of the pre-Qin Confucianism, which was really Zhang Guan Li Dai.
But Feng did just that, because he wanted to follow the path of "those who go along with it". This "zhi" is synonymous with the "zhi" of Chen's "those who go against it die", and both refer to the current situation. The difference is that "those who go along with it prosper, which means that what the times shout for, Feng will peddle what he wants, and he wants to maximize the benefits and is the safest"; "those who go against it die" means that no matter what the situation is, as long as it does not fit "independence" and "freedom", Chen is a maverick and only talks about dignity and does not care about safety.
This is the second way of life that Feng has chosen, which is very different from Chen Yinke's.
Qian Zhongshu: "Don't do anything if you dare to go against the customs"
The third way of life that Qian Zhongshu chose after 1949 was proposed as the "eight-character policy": "If you don't go well, you won't prosper, and if you don't go against it, you won't die." "It's interesting. In short, money is the pursuit of a sense of dignity, or the maintenance of security without losing dignity. Therefore, Qian will not be so tragic as Chen to become a martyr in the end, nor will he endure humiliation and surrender his personal dignity like Feng, and finally go to hell. Qian is between the black and white of Chen and Feng's opposing personalities, and has walked out of a gray life of wisdom.
Intuitively, they speculated that there must be a huge amount of matter in the universe that cannot be described by the knowledge and mathematical models of modern physics. Only 5% of the matter in the universe can be explained by digital models and modern physics. There are also 95% of you who can't deny its existence but can't see it. It's like a breeze blowing in your face and you feel cool, but you can't tell how the wind came to you. You feel it, but you can't describe it. Substances that cannot be described by modern physics knowledge and numerical models are named "dark matter". The same is true of Qian's thoughts, he has thoughts, but they are very dark, so dark that many people can't see them, so they are called "dark thoughts". Of course, this is a metaphor. Because if you really put a lot of effort into reading between the lines, you can still understand.
What are the "dark thoughts" in Qian's "Selected Notes on Song Poems"? The main point of his "dark thoughts" lies in the monopoly of Chinese academic thinking by using the three obscure forms of "micro-judgment", "implicit reasoning", and "side interpretation" to say goodbye to the Soviet model (whose philosophical symbol is reflection theory).
The Soviet model's intellectual monopoly or "methodological colonization" of Chinese scholarship from 1949 to 1978 was absurd to the point that a scholar who did not interpret beauty and literature with reflection theory was inevitably eliminated. In 1956, when he was only 19 years old, he wrote an essay "On Beauty", which did not use reflection theory to demonstrate the objectivity of beauty (he used poetic language to describe aesthetic experience, and did not distinguish between "beauty" and "beauty"), and as a result, he was branded as a rightist in 1957. This proves that at that time, whether to submit to the Soviet model's methodological monopoly on Chinese scholarship was no longer a question of thinking, but of politics.
However, when Qian wrote "Selected Notes on Song Poems" in 1955-1957, he did not respect the reflection theory as a methodology, but it did not affect the publication of this book in 1958. A "micro-judgment" is not an evasion or suspension of a judgment, but rather an ambiguous "yes" or "no" to the conclusion, even though the wording itself is already silently presenting a "yes" or "no". Everything is in silence. Qian just uses the "micro-judgment" formula, presupposes four logical steps to say goodbye to the reflection theory, and many people still can't see it after saying goodbye to the reflection theory.
Step 1, Qian does not deny that Song poetry does have many works that write the history of the Song Dynasty. For example, there are two kinds: one is to write about the suffering of the people, and the other is to write about the border war, which caused the imperial court to collect taxes too much, which made the grassroots even worse and miserable. It seems to be very face-saving for the reflection theory. Because a cursory look at Song poetry is a visual representation of the social reality of the Song Dynasty, which is very in line with the way of reflection theory.
Step 2, Qian said again, really well-written Song poems are not "rhyming documents". That is to say, whether a poem is well written or not has nothing to do with whether the historical elements contained in the poem can be corresponded to in the court documents. If we think that a poem is well done, the root is "faith and signing", that is, the historical elements contained in it can be found in the court documents, then how should we understand the sculpture work? The sculptor's body art shape attracts attention because the body is either soft or fit, and the body is as fit as David and as soft as Venus. If you insist on looking at the work from the perspective of "reflection", it will be troublesome, because reflection must talk about seeing the essence through the phenomenon. Why can a limb be so soft or toned? It is physiologically supported by bones.
Therefore, compared to the phenomenon of limbs, bones are the essence, but people cannot see bones by daily vision, and can only be peeped through X-rays. Therefore, if we insist that poetry is only good if it reflects the essence of reality, it is no less absurd than looking at ancient Greek sculpture on X-rays. The essence of Qian's remarks is to question the lack of legitimacy in using reflection theory to guide literary research at the methodological level.
On the third step, Qian said that Fan Chengda wrote a poem called "State Bridge", and those who are familiar with the architectural history of the Song Dynasty know that Fan Shishi's "State Bridge" is purely virtual, but this poem expresses the anxiety of the people in the occupied area who are eager for the imperial court to recover the rivers and mountains. Obviously, this "state bridge" brewed by patriotic passion did not detract from the excellence of the poem because it was unrealistic. Therefore, whether a poem is well written or not has nothing to do with whether it reflects reality, but only whether it can appeal to emotions and images artistically. In fact, this is a complete debunking of the reason for the theory of reflection as the authoritative methodology of literary studies.
Step 4, Qian joked, don't you emphasize that Song poems should reflect reality? However, there were many realities in the Song Dynasty, but Song poems did not reflect them at all, such as "Water Margin". Song Shi left no trace of the famous Liangshan One Hundred and Eight Heroes who were later written in Zhanghui novels. There are also Song poems Compared with Song Ci, Song Ci pays more attention to the subtle feelings of scholars and doctors. In this respect, why is Song poetry far inferior to Song poetry? Therefore, it is theoretically coarse to simply use the theory of reflection to forcibly define the absolute dependence of literature on reality. Money will not be said at this point. Reflection theory, as the authority of literary research methodology, has been deconstructed.
However, Qian's 18,000-word preface to "Selected Notes on Song Poems" solemnly uses the word "reflection" nine times from beginning to end, but in fact he is deconstructing the methodological authority of reflection theory, which is inevitably strange. If you understand it more deeply, you will find that Qian wrote this preface almost to play an ancient color trick, wearing a red robe, and the robe is embroidered with the key word "reflection", but the result from under the robe is not a reflection theory, but a "form-based" theory that is similar to his 1948 "Tan Yilu". That is to say, Qian is not willing to follow the path of how Song poetry reflects the reality of the Song Dynasty, and he prefers to follow the path of Song poetry that has become the artistic evolution of Song poetry (different from Tang poetry).
Now I can make a summary: that is, Qian Zhongshu is definitely not Chen Yinke, and Chen does not consider safety for the sake of dignity. In the same way, the money is not Feng Youlan, Feng can even throw away his dignity in order to be an imperial master (safety or profit maximization). Qian is not afraid of "the death of those who go against it" like Chen, nor does he dream of "prosperity of those who go along with it" like Feng, Qian is trying a third way of living?
In short, money is pursuing the dignity of a sense of security, or money can take dignity as the bottom line when taking into account a sense of security.