“FUTURE PAST”: TIME AND TELEOLOGY IN (ANCIENT) HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian's account of the past is strongly shaped by the future of the events narrated. The telos, that is, the vantage point from which the past is envisaged, influences the selection of the material as well as its arrangement. Although the telos is past for historians and readers, it is future for historical agents. The term “future past,” coined by Reinhart Koselleck to highlight the fact that the future was seen differently before the Sattelzeit, also lends itself to capturing this asymmetry and elucidating its ramifications for the writing of history. The first part of the essay elaborates on the notion of “future past”: besides considering its significance and pitfalls, I offset it against the perspectivity of historical knowledge and the concept of narrative “closure” (I). Then the works of two ancient historians, Polybius and Sallust, serve as test cases that illustrate the intricacies of “future past.” Neither has received much credit for intellectual sophistication in scholarship, and yet the different narrative strategies Polybius and Sallust deploy reveal profound reflections on the temporal dynamics of writing history (II). Although the issue of “future past” is particularly pertinent to the strongly narrative historiography of antiquity, the controversy about the end of the Roman Republic demonstrates that it also applies to the works of modern historians (III). Finally, I will argue that “future past” alerts us to an aspect of how we relate to the past that is in danger of being obliterated in the current debate on “presence” and history. The past is present in customs, relics, and rituals, but the historiographical construction of the past is predicated on a complex hermeneutical operation that involves the choice of a telos. The concept of “future past” also differs from post‐structuralist theories through its emphasis on time. Retrospect calms the flow of time, but is unable to arrest it fully, as the openness of the past survives in the form of “future past” (IV).     

经济行为与环境变化:清前期台湾野生鹿消失探析

鹿曾经是台湾数量最庞大的野生动物群之一。明末以来,随着台湾贸易交流的活跃,鹿成为大宗出口商品,土著居民由原先捕鹿作为民生用品逐渐发展至为市场服务;清前期大陆移民入台的农业垦殖又破坏了鹿原有的生态环境。人类经济行为引发的环境变化,最终导致了野生鹿在台湾渐趋消失。     

An inquiry into the causes for the multiple goals of the United States Antitrust Law from a historical perspective

It is not the case as Robert Bork claims that the U. S. antitrust law had only one goal—maximization of consumer welfare of efficiency—at the very beginning and should have been kept that way for its later development. Partly because of the fighting among different interest groups as well as spokesmen of different regions at the 51st Congress, the Sherman Antitrust Act came out as a legislation with multiple goals, which were also taking shape under the influence of the Republican idea of balance of power, the liberal belief in property rights, the freedom of contract of classic economics, and the price theory of neoclassic economics. In more than a hundred years after that, the U.S. antitrust law has shifted the center of its goals as a result of the change of regulatory regimes with different emphases such as market function, economic stabilization, social concern, and economic efficiency during different periods. From a historical perspective, it is beyond dispute that the U.S. antitrust law has had multiple goals instead of only one. __________ Translated from: Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 (Journal of Historical Science), No.6, 2004     

日本侵略华中地区的经济根源

华中地区是中国最富庶的地区。占领富庶的华中攫取以战养战的战略物资,控制中国经济枢纽,摧毁国民政府赖以生存的经济基础,排斥其他国家在华中的资本势力,便成为日本侵略华中的经济根源。日本侵略华中之初,在速战速决战略指导思想下,对华中地区大肆掠夺的同时进行疯狂地破坏和摧残;战争持久化以后,日本加紧对华中沦陷区的经济统制,试图把华中经络成为他们以战养战的经济基地。     

NEITHER/NOR

An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French intellectual life resulted in a series of negative positions that rendered the human void of any conceptual content and thereby unsuitable as a basis for future political action or philosophical investigation. In addition to basing his analysis on two rigorously sketched concepts of his own design, “antifoundational realism” and “negative anthropology,” Geroulanos deploys a striking use of conceptual irony to show how the critical efforts of his protagonists often led to theoretical cul‐de‐sacs and a heightened measure of existential despondency. The treatment of the emergence of antihumanism as a local phenomenon among a segment of French intellectuals nevertheless encounters problems when it abandons the terrain of historical argument for an engagement with broader metaphysical concerns. By participating in the discourse of its subjects, An Atheism that is Not Humanist finds its way into cul‐de‐sacs of its own, in which, for example, the ostensibly political bearing of efforts to transcend mere politics for broader considerations of the “theo‐political crisis of modernity” remains unclear. Finally, by accepting the terms of the phenomenological diagnosis of metaphysical crisis in the interwar years, the book compromises certain of its genealogical aspirations, especially with regard to the legacy of Third Republic idealism and the specific qualities of post‐phenomenological structuralism.     

Reading back from Experimental Painting

ABSTRACT

My book, Experimental Painting (1970), was the product of a decade of coming to terms with the history of modern art and with contemporary manifestations of the avantgarde. While at Cambridge from 1960 to 1967, I published art criticism, initially in locally published magazines, and then went on to review art exhibitions both nationally and internationally. This led to being co-editor of Form, which produced further opportunities. The term ‘experimental’ that I adopted in 1970 was intended to suggest the paradigm of scientific discovery which suited some, if not all, of the artists I studied. This article considers concepts directly imported from contemporary scientific enquiry that seemed relevant to me at the time, notably those from experimental psychology, psychoanalysis and structural linguistics. I relate them to the character of intellectual life at Cambridge in a period which saw much debate about the relationship between Sciences and Humanities as ‘Two Cultures’.     

论明代士人的"异业治生"

士作为知识与智能的承载者,其治生类型大致可概括为本业治生与异业治生两种。明代士人的异业治生,主要包括耕读传家、医卜杂艺、工贾自食三种方式。由于本业治生途径的狭窄、收益低下与不稳定,中国传统社会的士人形成了"重异轻本"的治生理念。这一理念随着明代社会的变迁与商品经济的发展渐趋深化,并呈现出由重"耕"向重"贾"的演变趋势。这种演变一定程度上提升了士人的生存能力,促动了其社会人格的相对独立。但与此同时,也加深了士人对异业治生的依赖程度,导致其经济人格的渐趋软弱与社会人格独立的相对有限,并成为影响近世中国知识分子群体生存与发展的一个内在因素。     

Saussure and his intellectual environment

SUMMARY

The present study paints the intellectual environment in which Ferdinand de Saussure developed his ideas about language and linguistics during the fin de siècle. It sketches his dissatisfaction with that environment to the extent that it touched on linguistics, and shows the new course he was trying to steer on the basis of ideas that seemed to open new and exciting perspectives, even though they were still vaguely defined. As Saussure himself was extremely reticent about his sources and intellectual pedigree, his stance in the lively European cultural context in which he lived can only be established through textual critique and conjecture. On this basis, it is concluded that Saussure, though relatively uninformed about its historical roots, essentially aimed at integrating the rationalist tradition current in the sciences in his day into a new, ‘scientific’ general theory of language. In this, he was heavily indebted to a few predecessors, such as the French philosopher-psychologist Victor Egger, and particularly to the French psychologist, historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who was a major cultural influence in nineteenth-century France, though now largely forgotten. The present study thus supports Hans Aarsleff's analysis, where, for the first time, Taine's influence is emphasised, and rejects John Joseph's contention that Taine had no influence and that, instead, Saussure was influenced mainly by the romanticist Adolphe Pictet. Saussure abhorred Pictet's method of etymologising, which predated the Young Grammarian school, central to Saussure's linguistic education. The issue has implications for the positioning of Saussure in the history of linguistics. Is he part of the non-analytical, romanticist and experience-based European strand of thought that is found in art and postmodernist philosophy and is sometimes called structuralism, or is he a representative of the short-lived European branch of specifically linguistic structuralism, which was rationalist in outlook, more science-oriented and more formalist, but lost out to American structuralism? The latter seems to be the case, though phenomenology, postmodernism and art have lately claimed Saussure as an icon.