This collection of essays on how Chinese and Western intellectuals conceive and structure time is a welcome contribution to the much-understudied field of traditional Chinese historiography. The book consists of three parts—time in ancient China, in traditional China, and in modern China—and assumes that Chinese historians apprehend time as “concrete” rather than “abstract,” as the West imagines it.
The contributors employ several binaries to juxtapose Chinese and Western views of time with respect to historical narrative: historical/suprahistorical, immanent/transcendent, and concrete/universal. They challenge the view that Chinese historical time is cyclical and Western historical time is linear, arguing that “each cycle offers new content, which cannot be seen as a mere repetition of the past or going by circles” (pp. 91–92). Jörn Rüsen's essay asserts that most historiographical comparisons have been West-centric, which leads to a “distortion of perspectives” (p. 3). To remedy this, Rüsen assumes a “universal typology,” asserting that there are “fundamental and universal elements of man's relationship to the past” (p. 4). Unfortunately, he neglects to address (or admit) the present intellectual discomfort with old assumptions that all humanity, regardless of cultural context, share the same basic responses to the world and time.
Rüsen views the experience and interpretation of time as an “artificial distinction” (p. 5). His sketch of how historians invest temporal change (experience) with meaning and his “typologies of time” help anchor the following chapters to common bases of inquiry. Huang Chun-chieh lays out more specific differences between Western and Chinese notions of time: West = causal, Chinese equals hortatory. Chinese historiography presents the ideal that present generations “live up to the paradigmatic past today” (p. 19); time in China is “humanly lived time” rather than “clock time.”
The Chinese historian seeks to exhibit “timeless” time, or “Supertime,” seen in the actions of the sages who discerned the trend (shi) of events and provided examples of how to behave. Based on Nietzsche's Übermensch, Huang coins the term “Supertime” to describe the timeless state of harmony between humanity and nature (p. 33). It is a “concrete” analogue of the West's “abstract” notion of time, which is teleological. Chen Chi-yun's chapter complements Huang's essay, centering on the notion of cyclical Chinese time. Whereas Western sinology has interpreted China's dynastic histories as evidence of a cyclical conception of time, Chen notes that the very preservation of historical records assumes that nothing lasts forever. As Chen demonstrates, passages from the Yijing and other early works accept a linear and empiricist view of history; like the West, Chinese were conscious of the transcendent (dao), but chose to concentrate on the immanent (de).
Liu Shu-hsien, in a discussion of the Yijing, and John Henderson, in an account of Chinese astronomy, consider Chinese notions of time from a developmental perspective. Drawing heavily from later Yijing commentaries, Liu suggests that Chinese historiography includes both ideas of the eternal, as in the West, and its own preference for being grounded in the present (p. 86). Henderson, however, offers more a technical description of scientific advancement than a discussion of the philosophical conundrums associated with historiographical time. He speaks first on the “order of time” and then about the history of calendrics and astronomical understanding, providing a trenchant consideration of Zhang Xuecheng's belief that calendrical reforms coincided with intellectual reforms regarding ritual and morality.
Chan Wing-cheuk and Q. Edward Wang's chapters are the most focused essays. Chan turns to the Yijing to explore how numerical possibilities were employed in early China to symbolize change. He asserts a Chinese notion of time that is both monist and dualist. Wang Fuzhi, he notes, combines these two; the “supra-historical” Way (dao) must have a complementary “historical” human world. Humans are forced to “live in a manner of daily innovation” (p. 126).
Wang deftly connects the coincidences between Zhang Xuecheng and Heidegger's respective views of the past in light of the present. Like Heidegger, Zhang held that nothing is immutable; everything must be studied in its historical context. Wang neglects to note, however, Western historical-critical methods that employ textual exegesis with the same context-conscious approach that Zhang advocated.
Ricardo Mak considers Yan Fu's eventual departure from Herbert Spencer's West-centric, teleological view of history to a more Daoist acceptance of an unknown, directionless historical progress. Wang Ming-ke's discussion of Qiang history as a minority group strains to fit into the volume's larger themes. Wang divides Qiang historiography into five historical narratives representing accounts by both Qiang and Han historians, arguing that early narratives function as a collective memory. His most successful argument is that historians who identify themselves with a specific cultural group create a “linear history about the ‘others,’ and also a history of ‘us’” (p. 198).
Overall, the dichotomies that appear here are overly confident, seen in the assertion that Chinese thinkers preferred “concrete” rather than “abstract” ideas. One is mindful of Pythagoras's use of numbers to describe transcendent principles, or Socrates’ dialogue with Meno, which rests on geometry (concrete) to discuss the origin of virtue (abstract). The use of readymade distinctions often obscures the more nuanced philosophical products of China and the West. In the end, however, this volume is refreshingly philosophical. For anyone interested in China's intellectual and historiographical heritage, this will be an important and often-revisited addition to the bookshelf.
