Methodology Construction of Euro-American Sinology and Parallel Study of Comparative Literature

Liu Yunhua*

Abstract: During the 1950s and 60s, the concept of parallel study of comparative literature was initiated by US scholars, yet they ignored the construction of methodology. As a methodological paradigm to compare and study cultural relations between heterogeneous literary works without factual links, parallel study has always been under criticism. This paper, however, holds that whether it is on the history of modern cross-cultural literary exchanges, or it is on the sprouting practices of Eastern-Western literary comparison, parallel study has wielded an ineradicable and unavoidable influence. This paper,after a brief review of and reflection upon the methodology of parallel study,enumerates several Euro-American sinologists, and classifies their parallel study methodologies into three categories after in-depth exploration and discussion. It then points out that parallel study is by no means a field that overlooks methodology, but rather, its methodology is complicated and boasts diverse possibilities; the study of the methodology of parallel study is also of great theoretical importance to the advancement of disciplinary construction of comparative literature and the Eastern-Western literary comparison.

Keywords: Euro-American Sinology; parallel study; methodology

1. The birth of parallel study and the problems with its methodology

The concept “parallel study” was proposed by US scholars in the 1950s and 60s, and immediately triggered a long-standing debate between US and French scholars on what comparative literature is and how to make a comparative study of literature. For that very part of history, which is quite well known, repetition here seems unnecessary. US academics like René Wellek and Henry H. H. Remak listed “literariness” or “aesthetic value” as the central focus and primary task of comparative literature, and in this manner tried to change the too mechanical and rigid theories upheld by earlier French scholars in aspects such as disciplinary orientation, division of literature territory and methodology construction. That indeed made some sense, yet it has also to be noted that these US scholars, while dedicating themselves to the theoretical “synthesis,” generally ignored the methodology construction, and even denied the existence of distinctive approaches to comparative literature. Among these US scholars, only Owen Aldridge seemed to somehow notice what parallel study should be based on: comparability. He posed that the parallels made through the lens of aesthetics tend to emphasize “resemblances or affinities.” Such “analogy without contact” might lead more attention to the “major works” (note: this term is used to contrast with the “minor works” which the French scholars valued in their literary comparison) and how they are artistically created.Yet he added that methodology is not a problem worth too much attention, and compared with the content, the method is merely a minor aspect①Aldridge,p. 5. However, the “historical comparative poetics” advocated during the end of the 19th century and the mid-20th century by some Russian academics such as Alexander Veselovsk and V.M. Zhirmunsky, seemed more enlightening for the methodology construction of parallel study, for it advocated exploring the “typological commonness,” and the deeper reasons for and the rules of the commonness②Wu, pp. 27–38; Liu, pp. 250–268..

Modern Chinese scholars exhibit two major inclinations in their “parallel study” of Chinese and foreign literature as well as in the methodology construction of parallel study: first, “compare” or “illustrate” by seeking commonness and interconnection. For example, Qian Zhongshu, in his Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (guan zhui bian), attempted to “interconnect” those literary or poetic phenomena without factual links, either by sorting out the truths behind tiny details, or by pursuing a certain worth beyond through his Eastern-Western literary comparison, or by seeking the common literary and poetic cores that are universally implied. All the while he used a method of “comparison” to break down those “perplexing barriers” existing between the Chinese and western literary and poetic cores.③Qian, p. 496The second inclination of modern Chinese scholars is to seek differences and heterogeneity through “comparisons.” Examples of this inclination are even more abundant. In the twilight of the Qing Dynasty, especially after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)and the Gengzi Incident (the Boxer Rebellion) in 1900, several Chinese scholars armed with a global view and a profound understanding of Western culture, became fans of the difference-based “comparison.” First Guo Songtao, Yan Fu, then Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, then Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi and Lun Xun, just to name a few. Generally speaking, there was one common assumption in their Chinese-Western comparative discourses: “Western culture” is superior to its Eastern counterpart.④There are also some exceptions. Some conservatives (who knew little about Western culture) were rigid in mind and blindly xenophobic. Some powerful officials,such as Xu Tong, Chong Qi and Yun Yuding, boasted about how Chinese culture was superior to Western culture. This assumption was heartily embraced by some Chinese scholars then, including Liang Qichao, who had undertaken a tour of Europe in 1919, and those representatives of “cultural conservatism,” like Liang Shuming, Zhang Junmai and Du Yaquan. That was why, at the beginning of the 20th century, Tang Yongtong lamented: It was all very well for “the reformists to learn from the West.” The “conservatives,” however, also “fell prey to the alien culture.” Though the two bore enmity against each other, they were “unanimous in worshiping Europe and US as an idol” (Tang, p. 21; also see Luo, 2001, pp. 28-100). Yet the author believes that, compared with the radical theories pursuing indiscriminate Westernization, those conservative cultural views indicated evident progress in the understanding about the connotation and methods of and attitude to the relationship between the Chinese and Western cultures. Since the 1920s, one marked response Chinese literati had made to World War I and Liang Qichao’s Impressions of a Voyage to Europe was the rising of the “Eastern Cultural School” (forming the majority of the later “cultural conservatives”), which was marked by a “consciousness” of Eastern culture. This school was generally made up of erudite scholars that knew both Eastern and Western cultures well.While able to distinguish between the sharp differences, they never blindly opposed or degraded Western culture. Thus they either proposed mutual compatibility and complementarity between Western and Eastern cultures, or advocated multi-dimensional co-existence of the two. Their attitude towards the relationships between the two, compared with the “indiscriminate Westernization” activists (such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi), or the “stubborn conservatives” (represented by Gu Hongming), appeared more tolerant, rational and objective, revealing a kind of “wisdom in adjusting and mediating.”

There is also an inclination in between that strives for a harmonious co-existence of similarities and differences, which is represented by academics like Ye Weilian, the author of Comparative Poetics:A Discussion of Theoretic Frameworks. While insisting on pursuing common aesthetic rules and grounds through comparison, Ye made it clear that Chinese and Western literature/culture must always “identify their similarities and differences” through “mutual reflection, comparison, analogy and understanding.” As the saying goes, “Differences might indicate commonness, just as the void might breed forms of life,” “similarities”and “differences,” “this” and “that” are contrary yet auxiliary to each other. “That” is an “inseparable”partner of “this”①Ye, p. 15, 24.. However, Ye’s study and methodology are rarely seen in practice, and do not belong to the mainstream parallel study of Chinese-Western comparative literature.

This paper holds that, “parallel study,” whether it aims to “seek commonness” or to “identify differences,”is to a large degree viewed by scholars in and out of China as something intimidating or insignificant. The general opinion among academics is that its “credibility” is dubious. As early as 1932, Chen Yinque, a master of traditional Chinese culture, proposed that the “comparison between Chinese and foreign literature” must be limited to those topics such as “how poets like Bai Juyi influenced Chinese and Japanese literature, or how Buddhist stories influenced Indian or Chinese literature and how these literatures evolved in history,”for only these topics “fell in with the core of comparative study.” Moreover, they touched on the “concepts of historical evolution and systematic differences / similarities.” Conversely, these propositions such as “Homer is comparable to Qu Yuan, Confucius is comparable to Goethe and ancient culture to modern culture,” or even “anything from Chinese culture can bear some analogy to something from another culture,” often came from unconvincing analogy and absurd reasoning, and could not withstand scrutiny. What’s worse, in that case, “Chinese culture might totally surrender to its foreign counterpart, or have its own pedigrees disrupted”and “there is no possibility for study”②Chen, pp. 251–252. In other words, Chen believed that parallel study was not by any means “credible.” Some scholars of modern times point out that “parallel study” is prone to fall into the trap of “polarized thinking,” arbitrary generalization, oversimplification and thus disregard for the diversity inside one culture, thereby causing misjudgment about values and “false interpretation of cultural peculiarities”③Meng, pp. 143–156. In some sense those views voice the basic concerns the academic circle generally has for parallel study. A veteran scholar in comparative literature, whom the author respects a great deal, once even asserted during a private meeting with the author that “parallel study is a false proposition and pseudostudy” (To respect privacy, the name of the scholar is kept anonymous here).

History is complicated. As early as the late Ming Dynasty, when Western culture began to enter China,“parallel study” between Chinese and Western culture had already sprouted. By the late Qing Dynasty and the early years of the period of the Republic of China, China had modeled the framework for its great“self-reconstruction” almost completely on the Western paradigm. “Parallel study” had made ineradicable contributions to China’s transformation from “an old self” to “a new self” then, but surely it was a rough and abstract kind of parallel study.Tang Yongtong, as early as the 1920s, had criticized Liang Qichao’s Impressions of a Voyage to Europe and Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies as “superficial tunnel vision.” He argued that these studies “abused analogies to seek commonness, yet while identifying differences tended to overidolize a certain culture and excessively degrade another,” and embodied the “decline”of the academics and the culture①Tang, pp. 20–23.. His criticism, however, did not respect the fact, for these studies in fact implied several new attempts at methodology construction, which, unfortunately, were ignored. For example,Liang Shuming once noted that the parallel study between Chinese, Western and Indian culture must be based upon the “cause-and-effect relationships” existing among the three civilizations, and must not be limited to a mere listing for comparison②Liang, p. 25. Liang was among those who for the first time realized that parallel study and influence study are in fact inseparable from and interdependent of each other. This, the author believes, is of great theoretical significance.

Generally speaking, however, the “superficial tunnel vision,” Tang Yongtong alarmed one hundred years ago, is still commonly seen in the field of Chinese-Western cultural comparison. The fact that scholars are lacking in understanding about language and in knowledge is one reason. The other reason is the deficient methodology of parallel study. Specifically, besides the aforementioned “polarized thinking” problem, the cross-border comparison between Chinese and Western literary theories is also plagued by the inundation of too abstract comparisons that might lead to dubious conclusions, as well as the disregard for tracing the origins of terms and concepts, thereby ending up in a muddle of cognitive uncertainty. Surely, to rectify the“superficial tunnel vision,” one must find a suitable remedy. Language and knowledge accumulation really matters but needs take a long time. Compared with them, methodology construction could in reality bring more immediate improvement to the parallel study. On this point, the Euro-American sinologists have served as very good examples.

2. Methodology construction of Euro-American sinology and parallel study of comparative literature

Comparative methodology of Euro-American sinology in nature mainly belongs to “parallel study.”A rational, objective and dialectical attempt to elucidate, criticize and summarize according to these representative methods will not only advance methodology construction during China-West cultural dialogues, but also will provide inspiration for the innovation and improvement of the disciplinary theories of comparative literature.

This paper will tentatively explore some Euro-American sinological works which focus on Chinese classics and have constructed some unique parallel study methods. Generally, these works can be divided into three categories. First, comparative study, represented by the “Trilogy of The Comparison between Chinese and Western Thoughts,” authored by David L. Hall and Roger Ames, F. Jullien’s Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics and Found the Morality:Mencius’ Dialogues with the Enlightenment Philosophers, as well as Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons, co-authored by Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant. Second, interpretation and study of Chinese classics/thoughts/culture in the framework of Western propositions, paradigms and ideological patterns, which is represented by Jacques Gernet, Benjamin Schwartz, Benjamin Elman, Chad Hansen, and James Liu. John K. Fairbank, Joseph R. Levenson and Paul A. Cohen also made contributions to this category by their “shock and reaction” theory, “the traditional and the modern” theory and “Chinacentralism” theory, which they used to study and interpret the fission and evolution of Chinese culture during the late Qing Dynasty. Third, systematic interpretation of Chinese classics/thoughts/culture through a certain consciousness of problematics, which is represented by sinologists such as Richard Wilhelm, Marcel Granet,Joseph Needham, Angus Graham and Roger Ames, who focused on “correlative thinking” when they tried to define the essence of Chinese thoughts in a series of discussions. There are also William T. De Bary and Thomas A. Metzger, who studied Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism through the lens of the “consciousness of predicament.” Given the limitations of space and time, this paper could not give an all-round detailed presentation here. Rather, this paper will, based on the individual contributions of some sinologists, briefly analyze their parallel study methods as they fall into the three categories mentioned above.

The author believes that the three types of sinology mentioned above have led to three approaches for parallel study: a method that takes on the path of polarity comparison, a method that centers on a certain proposition, paradigm or framework of interpretation, and a method that proceeds from problematics. Surely there are overlapping areas among the three (some sinologists might adopt all three methods simultaneously),yet each sinologist also has his/her own inclination. This paper will mainly revolve around the three approaches and analyze individual cases which adopt them.

2.1 The method of polarity comparison: represented by David L. Hall, Roger Ames and F. Jullien

The premise of the method of polarity comparison is that Chinese culture and Western culture are completely different, namely, they vary sharply in their views about the origin of the universe, the relationship between heaven and man, core values, the thinking mode, and the explanation for change and development.A most common practice of this method in Chinese-Western cultural comparison is to select a character, a concept or a proposition from the cultural or literary classic works of both sides, and then compare them.Yet due to the disregard for the influence that environment, times, languages, nationalities and authors themselves exert on the research objects, the conclusions always end up too abstract and lacking in objectivity and credibility. Some sinologists, however, seemed to find a more objective approach, for they abandoned the direct analogy or comparison between propositions, concepts or characters selected from the culture as a whole. Instead, they incorporated the concepts/propositions in question into a context, paid attention to the point/side or major/minor relationship between certain concepts/propositions and other relevant concepts. In that manner they not only performed “contextualization,” but also touched on methods of phylogenetics and genealogy that pursue cause-and-effect relationships. David L. Hall, Roger Ames and F. Jullien are exemplars of this method.

First, David L. Hall and Roger Ames①Liu, 2013, pp. 146–156. The works on the study of Chinese philosophy and culture they have co-authored since the 1980s, especially the “Trilogy of The Comparison between Chinese and Western Thoughts,”②The trilogy includes Thinking through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (1995) and Thinking through Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (1998). All three books have been published by the State Univ. of New York Press.have caused an uproar among international academics. Those works use substantial comparative cultural methods. According to David L. Hall and Roger Ames, research into Chinese culture shall draw on the “arscontextualis (skills of contextualization),” yet “polarity comparison” never ceases as the research into Chinese and Western culture continues.

Their major opinion includes: first, the Chinese explanation of the origin of the universe is completely different from that of the West, hence there are two different modes of ideological/cultural construction and different connotations/characteristics for it. On the whole, Chinese culture is “nontranscendental.” It uses“correlative thinking” when handling the intertwining relationships between heaven, man and the world,and achieves an “aesthetic order (world).” Chinese culture belongs to the “First Problematic Thinking.” If it is mechanically “defined” by the Western transcendental binary opposition and “cause-and-effect logic,” i.e.the “Second Problematic Thinking,” then not only misunderstanding but also “rubbish” and “barriers” might be created, which will block the path to a better understanding of Chinese culture. So, what is the right path towards Chinese culture? David L. Hall and Roger Ames held that the key was “contextualization.” What is contextualization then? Placing the research objects (“elements of culture” or “important propositions” in the two scholars’ eyes①David L. Hall and Roger Ames named these key elements or propositions “cultural determinants.” They were formulated during the axial period of Chinese and Western culture (in the West, before St. Augustine; in China, pre-Qin period and the Han Dynasty), and were always “present” in the advancement of Chinese and Western culture and exerted their due influence (Hall & Ames, 1995, xvi-xvii).) in a “focus/field” context and emphasizing the nonessentialized interaction between the two. This is an understanding about “aesthetics,” “narration” and “sympathy.” Western culture is well known for its tradition of using “contextualization” to explain the generation of meaning, yet David L. Hall and Roger Ames argued that contextualization accompanies the cause-and-effect logic and reasoning of essentialism all the time. In response to the phenomenon that some sinologists widely apply this logic to their interpretation of Chinese culture, David L. Hall and Roger Ames firmly oppose the “logicalization” or “essentialization” of problems concerning Chinese culture.

The second viewpoint David L. Hall and Roger Ames stressed is that, while classifying Chinese culture and Western culture into two different frameworks, namely the “First Problematic Thinking” and the “Second Problematic Thinking,” it is also necessary to highlight their respective “counter-discourses.” “Counterdiscourses” are minor discourses that are different from or even contrary to the mainstream discourses.The appearance of “counter-discourses” indicates that the development of a certain culture is by no means linear. Rather, it boasts considerable diversity and a resilience that necessarily follows. The ups and downs, or even the disappearance and survival of “counter-discourses” (for example, the School of Names of Chinese philosophy never took center stage in Chinese history, and tragedies are rarely seen in Chinese literature)are helpful in revealing the quality and characteristics of the mainstream discourses and are thus worth deep exploration. The “counter-discourses” in Chinese culture, such as the views of the School of Names of Chinese philosophy during the pre-Qin period, Zhuangzi’s skepticism, and Hetuvidya of Buddhism during the Sui and Tang Dynasties, all attached great importance to the logical elucidation of conceptions, Nāma and nimitta. The “counter-discourses” in Western culture, such as the proposition that “ever-present change is the fundamental essence of the universe,” which was upheld by Greek philosopher Heraclitus (approximately 540–480 BC),and the “continuity of matter②It means all the substances, from very tiny bits to the universe, are a mixture of a certain number of ingredients (or “seeds”). The nature and form of the ingredients predominating in number will decide the nature and form of a substance (the ingredients themselves never change or move)” proposed by Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), as well as the “nomos” that was formed in the wake of sages’ attention to the art of debate, were more often than not against essentialism,or preferred poetic-style speeches that were highly marked with metaphors, allegories and paradoxes. They wielded a big influence on the West. Nonetheless, as “philosophy” won in its battle against “poetry,” which was waged by Plato in an elaborately-designed drama, as “theory” (the most essential part of it is physics and “metaphysics constituting the main body of “philosophy”) still topped the values within the structure of knowledge established by Aristotle, they were finally marginalized as “counter-discourses” in ancient Western intellectual history.

David L. Hall and Roger Ames also noticed the dynamic evolution of problems themselves. Specifically speaking, the connotation and representation of any concept or proposition, as an outcome of coordination among relevant elements under certain circumstances, will naturally change if the circumstances change.Therefore, historicism is necessary when the elements and dimensions of problems are reviewed; moreover,“discourses” and “counter-discourses” might reverse roles under certain circumstances. David L. Hall and Roger Ames’ understanding and interpretation of Chinese culture prove enlightening even for Chinese scholars, thus they not only are viewed as leaders of North American sinology, but also have won the heart-felt respect of Chinese scholars. Their success is to a large extent attributed to the effective methods they adopted.

Next comes F. Jullien①Liu, 2014, pp. 40–53. It has to be recognized that Jullien is an ambitious scholar with his own set of methods. He insisted that there was something wrong with the foundation of the building of Western culture,and new strengthening work was needed. Or in his own words, Western thoughts needed to be “re-catégoriser(re-categorized).” However, the “re-categorization” project could not be completed by the West itself, for“interpreting the West’s culture in the Western environment,” though seeming to “gain a direct access,” is in fact “murmuring to itself,” and is almost unlikely to usher in refreshing changes and progress. Therefore,this “re-categorization” project that goes “backward” must make “detours” around “another culture” and be implemented under the gaze of “another culture.” That means Western thinkers must “leave their homeland”again and to “penser autrement (think elsewhere).” The “self” and the “other” based on Hegel’s “all-inclusive”absolute reason are merely an imaginary version of the West-centralism and essentialism. This “other,” as the opposite side of the “self,” is in fact the other “self,” rather than a real “other.” Jullien held that for the West,this very “other” “lying elsewhere” could be none other than “China.” “China,” as the “l’impensé (a state of mind simply cannot arise within its own pattern)” of the West, had a connotation that went far beyond what the West could imagine. It could overthrow the Western “word/object” relationship most effectively, thereby toppling the foundation of Western thoughts and the universally-cherished vision in the West.Jullien also considered Chinese and Western culture to be completely different from each other. According to him, the“differences” between the two were where “comparison” or even a “comparative system” should start, while at the same time they also served as a reminder of the traps that interpretative methods, such as interlingual translation, might fall into; “differences” are impossible to be erased, nor should they be: it is “differences”that ensure the “distance” and “validity” of the “vis-à-vis (face-to-face)” meeting of the two cultures, and the“translation” that seems reliable might in fact murder “differences” when dissolving the “distance”②Jullien & Marchaise, pp. 129–135, 168–206. Jullien’s works, though basing the parallel study between Chinese and Western culture upon their “differences,” rarely made absurd, vague conclusions. Instead, they were full of in-depth individual insights that highlighted the peculiarities of the two cultures. In that sense, Jullien’s parallel study methods are definitely worth deeper exploration.

2.2 Methods that center on a certain proposition or interpretative framework: represented by John K. Fairbank, Joseph R. Levenson and Jacques Gernet

The method refers to the parallel study between Chinese and Western thoughts that is conducted based on a certain paradigm, proposition or interpretative framework. Unlike the one above, this method, in appearance,undertakes direct interpretation of Chinese culture, yet meanwhile it also retains Chinese-Western cultural comparisons, visible or not, here and there. Studies launched by John K. Fairbank, Joseph R. Levenson and Jacques Gernet are good examples of this methodology.

Around World War II, when American sinology sprouted, developed and evolved, methodology was always a key problem. It can be said that each change and progress of American sinology around this period was mainly marked by a renovation of methodology. This characteristic was in line with John K. Fairbank’s proposal that “each kind of social science” should be used as an “area-study approach” for studying Chinese history①Fairbank, 1983, xiv.(In contrast, the traditional sinology which limits itself to historical and linguistic documents is rigid in methodology).

John K. Fairbank is undoubtedly one of the sinologists that have been most respected by modern Chinese scholars. The “shock-reaction” model he used in interpreting transformations of modern Chinese history,and his insightful view of “tributary system/treaty system” “ubiquitous sovereignty” and “China and other countries being concentric circles,” was highly influential in the West and drew wide attention from Chinese scholars. However, his contribution to the parallel study between Chinese and Western culture, especially to the understanding of the concrete differences between the two, has rarely been summarized by scholars. The truth is that all John K. Fairbank’s studies of Chinese history and culture were conducted in the big framework of Chinese-Western cultural comparison. The “modernization” standards he used to evaluate the progressions of Chinese and Western history and culture were heavily tainted with West-centralism, yet a lot of his views were, and are still enlightening today. The majority of his views go:②The following five viewpoints can be found in John K. Fairbank’s China: Tradition and Transformation (Revised Edition). (Trans. Zhang Pei et al. Beijing: World Knowledge Press, 2002), The Great Chinese Revolution, 1900-1985 (Trans. Liu Zunqi, Beijing: World Knowledge Press, 2000) and The United States and China(4th edition, enlarged) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983). The details will not be enumerated here.

First, though in earlier history China was an “Eastern-style” society, Fairbank did not regard its development as unchanging, iron-like, or “super-stable.” Instead, he viewed its development as an everprogressing process. When speaking of Chinese monarchy, for example, he stressed the supremacy of the monarchical power, and noticed that ever since the Han and Tang Dynasties, the monarchical power did not reach below counties, and local affairs were in fact entrusted to the gentry. There is another example: when talking about the legitimacy of private enterprises, on the one hand, he did not agree with some other Western scholars viewing the East as “despotism” (they insisted that China had never established the legitimacy of private enterprises), and on the other hand, he acknowledged that Chinese capitalism was all the time plagued by underdevelopment, and merchants ranked very low on the social ladder. Quite the contrary, in the West, ever since ancient Greece, city-states or cities had been controlled by the propertied class (mainly merchants), who manipulated the government and went out of their way to prevent any sign of an independent bureaucracy.

Second, in China, family, rather than the individual, was the unit of society. In China, the family was a miniature of the country. The head (father) of the family was the supreme dictator. He was allowed by the law to sell his children and even execute a defiant son. Along with that came filial duty and compliance, which were considered to be the major part of moral practice and virtue. In accordance with its Yin-Yang cosmology,China established a hierarchy within the family and within society, in which each member was appointed to a certain position and committed to certain moral responsibilities so as to make sure that their work was interactive and well coordinated.

Third, Chinese politics was fundamentally based on Confucian principles. Fairbank held that without a deep understanding of the Confucian thoughts and traditions, no one could understand Mao Zedong or Jiang Jieshi. Confucius’ voice could even be heard in the “Marx-Mao Zedong duet played in Beijing” nowadays①Fairbank,1983, pp. 53–55.In terms of the law, Fairbank thought that Chinese legal conceptions were based on the rule of heaven (the order of nature). Only people who could restrain their behavior during moral cultivation and practices were following this rule of heaven. Any breach of the rule of heaven would be a moral, but not a legal problem.Chinese people did not view the laws as something external and absolute. Nor did they admit the “higher laws” are bestowed upon them by a divine god (such as the god-given “Ten Commandments” in Christianity and other commandments from Jehovah or Jesus). This peculiarity of Chinese law, on the one hand, prevented binary opposition (opposition always incurs difficult choices and tensions) between the divine and the vulgar,between god and man, yet on the other hand, it made the law less independent and less dignified. In the old China, the law, the binding power for contracts and private enterprises had never achieved a “holy trinity,”therefore the old China could never be called a “modern” country.

Fourth, China’s nationalism was closely linked with its culture. Hence, the conquest by an alien ethnicity was acceptable for the nationalists of China—if only the alien ethnicity accepted the Confucian morality. This could explain Chinese tradition of “synarchy”②Fairbank, 2002, p. 449.. In the West, however, things were different. Nationalism was tangled up with politics, thus even countries (such as Germany and France) sharing the same cultural basis(Christianity) could constantly wage wars against each other.

Fifth, there were marked differences between China and the West in their understanding of the man-nature relationship: in the West, nature or the other creatures served as either the men’s background or opponents(to be conquered by men at last); in China (as well as other Eastern countries), however, man was viewed as a mere part of nature that depended on nature. Man and nature were not opponents. Such a contrast was also shown in culture: in Western religions, man and God were the same in nature and form, thus Christian paintings always focused on people; Western portraits often placed people in the foreground and scenery in the background (for example, the ancient Italian paintings were finished by drawing a figure first, and then adding some scenery to decorate), while ancient Chinese landscape paintings tended to portray figure as a tiny and even insignificant stroke beside a forbidding cliff.

Joseph R. Levenson, Fairbank’s student, contributed new content to Fairbank’s interpretative framework. In his famous book Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China, Levenson added the dimension of “emotion”to the conflicts between (Chinese) history and (Western) values, thereby causing complex tensions and even“fission” between the two. His most well-known proposition, inspired by Liang Qichao’s experiences, which went “seeing the value of other countries, a person with a rational mind might avert from the culture of his motherland; yet influenced by history, he is always connected to his motherland by an emotional bound”①1986, p. 4.,proved highly influential among posterity. In his three-volume Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, Levenson expanded his proposition and used it to interpret all the paradoxes encountered by China in modern times: the East and the West, the history and the value, the traditional and the modern, the conservative and the radical,and the nation and the world. His binary thinking in interpretation reminded scholars after him that, between the late Qing Dynasty and the early years of the period of the Republic of China (or the “era of transformation”),a number of pioneers of the New Culture Movement had in fact wavered between “two contradictory inclinations”②Zhang, pp. 134–152, pp. 200–226., or even among “multiple contradictory inclinations”③Luo, 2002, pp. 24–28. Moreover, Levenson’s binary thinking,which exuded a vehement sense of crisis, and his profound, persevering ideological exploration, as well as his contradictory yet peculiarly charming expressions, intrigued a large number of luminaries in the West④Gao, 2010, pp. 82–87; 1990, pp. 39–46..Evidently, however, this “excessive” obsession might easily backfire: Paul A. Cohen, another student of John K. Fairbank, openly challenged his teacher and Levenson in his book Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. His move was triggered by the new spirit of the time then (such as the doubting voices against Western ethnocentrism and imperialist hegemony during the Vietnam War and inside the Euro-American academia itself). In addition, the dilemmas caused by Fairbank and Levenson’s disregard for the internal elements of China and their functions (which the “internal approach” emphasized⑤Lin Tongqi summed up Cohen’s “internal approach” in four connotations: paying attention to the internal elements of Chinese society, viewing the source of and impetus for modern “changes” of China from inside, taking on an “insider” perspective, and adopting the “method of empathy” (Lin, pp. 60-70)..)in their interpretation were also part of the reason. Academic works remarking on Cohen’s new approach and influence abound in China, yet given the limitation of space here, no more details will be given.⑥What’s worth mentioning is that John K. Fairbank in his latter works evidently assimilated Cohen’s thoughts, and sincerely reflected upon the practices of “using Western theories to interpret the Chinese culture” conducted by him and the mainstream American academia (Hou, pp. 108-119).

At the beginning of the 1980s, Jacques Gernet, in honor of the 400thanniversary of Matteo Ricci arrival in China, wrote the book China and the Christian Impact (first published in 1982). Fairbank’s influence was evident in this book, yet Jacques Gernet further expounded on the concrete embodiments of the “shock and reaction” theory from the perspective of the relationship among language, culture, thinking and reality. He used the linguistic propositions of Emile Benveniste, a famous French linguist, as methodological support to process the relationship among language, thinking and reality. According to Emile Benveniste, language“establishes and organizes the content and means of our imagination.” In the Indo-European language system,there is an “all-inclusive” word -- être (be), which has an “essential meaning” in Indo-European thought and philosophy: “The West has been seeking ‘être’ all through its history by exploring superficial phenomenon.”In contrast, the Chinese language does not have “those characteristics that belong to the category of grammar,”as a result, the word “être” can never find an equivalent in Chinese, whereby it becomes “not convenient” for Chinese to express nouns such as “existence” and “substance.” In Chinese and its like, the border between the “truth” (Being/God/Soul/Reason/Logos) and its “embodiment” (beings/body/flesh/perception) is largely blurred. In addition, unlike Western languages, Chinese is not able to directly show through linguistic forms the differences of abstract/concrete, feminine/masculine or other differences in elements like the tense and the person. In a word, Chinese is a language unfavorable for logical thinking. Understanding the differences between Chinese and Western languages, Jacques Gernet pointed out that the Chinese people in the Ming and Qing Dynasties in fact did not, and could not, truly understand the meaning of “God,” “Heaven,” “immortality of the soul” in Christianity and the “revelation of truth” concerning them, for after all, the Chinese language felt awkward as a means to express Western “truth”①Gernet, 1991, pp. 345–357..

Jacques Gernet’s another book L’intelligence de la Chine: Le Social et Le Mental (The Intelligence of China:The Social and the Mental) analyzed China by comparing the marked differences between China and the West,for example, Chinese people did not pay attention to the division between public and private space, preferred reconciliation to fighting, emphasized mutual complementarity of contrary sides rather than confrontation,liked texts better than voices, and tended to think instinctively rather than logically②Gernet, 2004, pp. 3–9,131–151,188–193.. Responses to his study of Chinese thoughts and culture possibly varied, yet his keen insight has undoubtedly been widely recognized.This indicates that the approach to comparing Chinese and Western culture through the lens of the relationship between language, culture, thinking and reality is feasible and worth recommendation.

2.3 Methods that proceed from problematics: represented by Thomas A. Metzger and William T.De Bary

The “consciousness of predicament” of Thomas A. Metzger and William T. De Bary is used here as an example, because the “predicament of Confucianism” and the question how China could “get out of the predicament” had haunted them for a lifetime. As is known, Confucianism sank into a deep predicament as China went through dramatic changes. Joseph R. Levenson insisted that without its political patron,Confucianism was doomed to “end up in museums,” where it would be removed from the vividness of daily moral life, be preserved as “an antique,” or become a “wandering ghost” never seeing the way out③Levenson, 2000, pp. 273, 337-343.

Many scholars have concerns about the predicament of Confucianism in modern times, yet few behave like Metzger, who set the “consciousness of predicament” as a perspective to study Confucianism.According to Metzger, “The best way to know a group of people is to figure out what is bothering them.”For Confucianism at different stages of the late Chinese empire, “a deep-rooted, psychological sense of predicament, discontent and disharmony of existence” was of “primary importance.” It far outpaced“instrumental anxieties” concerning wealth and power④Metzger, pp. 13–16. “Consciousness of problematics” is a synonym for“consciousness of predicaments.” Only when one’s body or mind suffers frustration, depression and anxiety can “problems” be realized. However, Metzger’s “consciousness of problematics” mainly targeted those influential figures in Euro-American sinology, such as John K. Fairbank, Joseph R. Levenson and Max Weber. In short, he opposed Fairbank and Levenson’s approach to study China by placing the traditional and the modern in binary opposition, for in that manner the two would reject, exclude and antagonize each other,thereby incurring a mechanical, one-sided “partial understanding” of the relationship between Chinese people and their traditional culture. In that case, research would not be revealing but obscuring the nature of the problem①Metzger, pp. 9, 16–17.. Max Weber, however, insisted that compared with the intense tensions and confrontations Puritans felt between the world and themselves, Confucianism treated the world with “naivety.” It made efforts to reduce the tensions between man and the “world” to an absolute minimum in Confucian China, there was never a strained relationship between people and the “world,” for there was never a God that transcended the vulgar world, expostulated on morality or made moral prophecies. Nor was there a “spiritual” substitute(the prophet) who sought to enlighten people and kept the solemn vows (made to God). Confucianism,lacking a Christian-like sense of fighting against the “evil” inside oneself and in the world, naturally failed to provide ideological support for revolutions②Weber, pp. 227–229.. It is clear that Metzger’s consciousness of the “predicament” for Confucianism mainly resulted from his negation of Weber’s negation. In this manner he also brought Fairbank and Levenson’s “traditional and modern” comparison pattern into a more complicated elucidation platform where the relationships between the public and the private, between the interior and the exterior, between the explicit and the implicit, between the rule of heaven and the desires of man, and between the ideal and the real,had triggered conflicts, anxiety and even fear among the Confucian scholars. Metzger held that “Confucianism will be meaningless, if it ignores the universal background of moral decay that includes the internal destructive power coming from one’s selfishness”③38.. In fact, the contradictions between the ideal and the real, the conflicts between individual desire and universal morality had all the while accompanied Confucianism since its birth. Those conflicts and the “consciousness of predicament” they aroused also inspired the “metaphysical superstructure”④There is no precise Chinese word for “metaphysical superstructure” (Metzger, p. 53). Though Metzger claimed that he valued this structure very much, it never became De Bary’s focus (Metzger, pp. 54-55).proposed by Neo-Confucianism as it developed from the Song Dynasty to modern times.The ideal of Confucianism followers originated from their understanding of the pure will of the universe (the mandate of heaven, the natural order of heaven and the principle of heaven) and the construction of morality.They attempted to use morality as a tool to rule, to transform the “world” and the “heart” of men, and finally to achieve individual and communal success by respecting the rules of the universe. Yet the whole process was also accompanied by the tensions and anxiety within “man himself” and between the “self” and the morally decaying “world,” and by the Confucian practitioners’ spontaneous “caution about and fear of misconduct”and their “relentless” effort to “tear themselves apart” (to negate and struggle against the “evil” coming from selfish desires and the vulgar world)⑤Metzger, pp. 47–154. It was the very “consciousness of predicament” of Confucianism,Metzger held, that gave rise to the “tensions” within the minds of Confucianism followers, including Neo-Confucianism followers, thereby forming the strong internal power that made revolutions possible.

William T. De Bary continued with the topic of “consciousness of predicament.” In his book The Trouble with Confucianism (first published in 1991), he conducted further research into the historical predicament of modern Confucianism -- surely he always acknowledged that Confucianism was living in a “predicament.”He searched wide-ranging Chinese and Western documents and summed up the reasons for the “predicament”from four aspects -- “heaven, the emperor, the virtuous men and the ordinary people.” According to De Bary, the virtuous men in the Confucian tradition were similar to the prophets in the Old Testament, for as individuals they could gain direct access to the “morality,” the supreme value; they could also admonish the rulers for or warn the rulers against going against the will of heaven and thus incurring disasters; their holy sense of mission and power originated from their role as an intermediary between man and God. This “herolike” or “prophet-like” role was in fact not a whim of Confucianism, but rather, it was typical of the Confucian tradition.①De Bary valued this idea and repeated it several times in the book (De Bary, 1996, pp. 93–98; 2009b, pp. 7–14; 1981, pp. 9–13).Yet the differences between the virtuous men in Confucianism and the Western prophets are evident. In Confucianism, “heaven” was never a man-like god that directly intervened in history, or “spoke”to everybody, “made covenants” and pledged to keep his promises, as is portrayed in Christianity. Thus, none of the virtuous men or the ordinary people (the entire nation) would have a sense of direct responsibility and mission for “heaven.” At last, the Confucian virtuous men, neither effectively entrusted by ordinary people,nor gaining religious support from “heaven,” were doomed to struggle between the ordinary people and the imperial autocracy. In that sense, the political and moral responsibility Confucianism placed on the shoulder of the virtuous men -- “making sagacious kings and cultivating moral people,” seemed unbearable. That was the biggest predicament that the Confucian virtuous men encountered in history②De Bary, 2009a, pp. 14–27..

In terms of Chinese-Western cultural comparison, De Bary, based on the definition of “liberty” given by US scholar Charles Frankel and in Webster’s New International Dictionary, proposed that “liberty” refers to a“humanitarian value” shared by China and the West, and set “liberty” as a basic standard for his comparative study. According to De Bary, measured by the standard of “liberty,” Confucius was not only a “conservative,”but also a “liberal,” as he used the ideals and exemplars of the past to criticize the institutional systems of his time. He was definitely what Gilbert Murray named “a role model in the practice of embracing two different thoughts.” The scholars of Neo-Confucianism, on the contrary, did well in “toleration” and advocated “natural state, self-reliance, and self-responsibility.” They were closer to Western “individualism” and “liberalism”③De Bary, 2009b, pp. 55–83, 95–122.Those views, however, said little about the fact that Chinese culture and Western culture varied sharply in terms of “liberty” and “personality.” That was possibly because the very place where De Bary gave his speech was the supreme headquarters of Neo-Confucianism: TCA College. In the book The Trouble with Confucianism, however, conflicts and differences were consciously highlighted, for example, De Bary defined a Confucian individual as a “moral personality,” rather than an “independent individual” in the West. He held that the Confucian society, unlike the law-based “civil society” in the West, was made of “ritual communities;”Confucianism pursued an integration of rituals, morality and practice, rather than the reification (the public interest) of the public value (the common good). He was essentially saying that Confucianism could not escape its fate of “predicament.” This bondage, however, in its turn enhanced “Chinese people’s determination to get out of the predicament and their will to survive,” which showed that it was not necessarily negative④De Bary, 2009a, pp. 103. In the works of sinologists like Metzger and De Bary, the traces of Christianity and Judaism were easily found when the authors were interpreting Chinese culture. The “counter-measures” they prescribed for the “predicament”of China were also influenced by the elements of deep-rooted Jewish and Christian culture.

3. Conclusion

According to Gernet, Europeans could hardly equal the Chinese and Japanese when it comes to the study of Chinese or Eastern culture, but their study has its own value. So, what is the value? First, European sinology is of a “comparative nature.” Comparison improves the understanding of differences and the deeper exploration into how those differences are developed. Second, comparison also convinces people that, at some point, those paths that follow certain directions will prove better (The study of cultural differences must not deny the factual superiority of a certain culture)①Gernet, 2004, p. 3.

Gernet makes a point. Euro-American sinology is helpful for methodology construction, namely that it provides luminous ideas for how to conduct cross-cultural comparisons between Chinese and Western culture/literature. Theoretically, the gap between cultures is impossible to be “bridged,” and the complete“dissolution of boundaries between cultures” is an “insurmountable task.” However, one thing is certain: the theoretical deduction based on an abstract premise and a priori logic could by no means negate the value of real or practical actions. Take the aforementioned “self” reconstruction of China in modern times for example,the Chinese-Western “parallel study,” despite a large number of misunderstandings, did prove helpful.Another example is Zeno’s famous “Dichotomy Paradox:” according to the theoretically irrefutable premises presupposed by Zeno (for example, the distance from A to B is infinitely dividable and people cannot pass an infinite number of dots within a finite amount of time), motion is impossible; yet the truth is that one can easily walk from A to B②In the mainstream Western realm of thought, the world of logic of Transcendentalism and the world of actions of Empiricism have always been placed in binary opposition. Their contradiction was not fundamentally addressed until phenomenologists (including Martin Heidegger) introduced the new “Existentialism”(View on Truth). Their approach was in fact like the traditional Chinese method which integrated the internal and the external, and harmonized the abstract and the concrete. But surely there were evident differences, for example, Heidegger also stressed how the “external” and “concrete” could negate and obscure the“internal” and the “abstract,” while Chinese scholars inclined more to the more “explicit,” positive result.. Therefore, the value of practices in the imperfect empirical world must not be negated by a supposition inferred from a perfect priori condition.

To sum up, the sinologists mentioned above have made important contributions to the methodology construction of the parallel study of comparative literature. Their contributions could be summarized as follows:

First, parallel study is never a field that ignored methods. In the 1950s and 60s, scholars like René Wellek and Henry H. H. Remak made light of the methodology construction of parallel study and denied the existence of unique methods in comparative literature. Their opinion still predominates in the mainstream realm of comparative literature at home and abroad. Yet the sinologists mentioned above, by means of their studies,reveal that the methodology of parallel study is a field full of complexity with a diversity of possibilities, and its validity directly influences the understanding and interpretation of a research object.

Second, specifically speaking, parallel study must not just select a proposition, concept or character from the culture as a whole, and then make direct and abstract analogies or comparisons. Instead, it must incorporate the concept or proposition into a context or a framework and pay attention to the point/side or major/minor relationships between certain concept/proposition and other relevant concepts/propositions. This approach is not only about “contextualization,” but also belongs to “phylogenetics and genealogy.”

Third, parallel study must avoid leveraging a certain abstract theoretical model to form peremptory judgments about Chinese and Western culture. Instead, the internal circumstances of a culture must be fully considered during the parallel study, and the comparative study of a problem must be based on a perusal of the original text as well as “corroboration of original evidence”①Yan, pp. 18–31, for example, the simultaneous consideration of “discourses/counterdiscourses” in the previous text effectively overcomes the negative results of “polarized thinking.”

Last but foremost, the “influence study” and the “parallel study” must never be placed in simple opposition (as the academics of comparative literature always do). Instead, it must be realized that the two are in fact mutually dependent and complementary. the author believes that “parallel study” especially needs“influence study” which emphasizes cause-and-effect links to enhance its foundation (this point will be expounded in another paper).

Surely it also must be noted that the cross-cultural parallel studies conducted by sinologists are closely linked to “pre-understanding” elements such as their own cultural identity and national stance. Though sometimes hidden, this could play a crucial part. Take Max Weber, Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph R. Levenson and Thomas A. Metzger -- all four are sinologists with the strongest sense of problematics -- for example.They are all Jews and Jewish culture is ingrained in their understanding of Chinese thoughts (they are always possessed by an “empathetic” cognition, which induces them to project their thoughts and feelings about their own national culture and time in their studies of Chinese culture). Determining the mechanism of how this influence works will be a great challenge to relevant study. Moreover, sinologists conduct comparative study mainly in order to enlighten Western readers, and even to solve problems in the West (never those in China).In that manner, on the one hand, the understanding of Chinese classics will be attained in the entanglement of two or even multiple cultural contexts, and on the other hand, modern Euro-American sinologists will share a certain realm of western knowledge and issues. Discussions and diverse opinions will arise in the field,forming their own curve of development and map of connections. To sort out those connections, one must be a very good searcher and reader of multilingual documents written in major European languages such as French, German and English. This will be an even bigger, deeper and harder challenge.