Lectures (3c)—Scholarship

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

[a] Contemplation RF

Beloit College Mortar Board

26 October 2011

Part Three of Five

So there I was, my junior year in college, reading a translation of a(n) historical masterwork named 資治通鑑 (The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling). I was seeing the characters and events in the famous novel I had read months earlier in an entirely new light. The experience transformed me...but was it scholarship? Mmm.....not really. It was an English translation (not an insurmountable issue), and I was reading it as background for understanding the novel. I am not discounting it, but let's err for now on the side of saying that I was filling in the gaps of my basic knowledge, and not really creating new knowledge.

But then something happened, even before I learned to read Chinese with any level of facility. I started to think about what I was doing "in a different key" as it were. Although I did not have the anecdote I am about to relate in my intellectual quiver at the time, I have come to see its use in charting the path that every serious student takes from study to scholarship. Although I cannot track down the book in which I first read it (a management book on the shelves of the Evanston, Illinois Barnes & Noble bookstore in 1990), it goes something like this.

       Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the most innovative educational thinkers 
       in the twentieth century. He and his students spent a great deal of time trying to 
       explicate the kinds of intellectual changes taking place in children. Take a 
       reasonably intelligent fourth grader and ask her to memorize the fifty states and 
       their capitals cities (this example can easily enough be adjusted to provincial 
       capitals, départements, and  other administrative districts). In the United States, 
       it is common enough to come across families quizzing bright young students 
       with such questions as "What is the capital of Tennessee?" or "Bismarck is the 
       capital of which state?" The eager young learner shouts back the proper answers
       (Nashville and North Dakota) and soaks in the lingering glow of successful rote 
       learning. Now, says Piaget, let us change the question slightly. It will make all the
       difference in the world. What if there were only ten states? What might they be, 
       and what might be their capitals?

[b] Stumped RF

The fourth-grader is stumped. While perfectly adept at memorized mirroring of the world into which she has been thrown, she struggles mightily with worlds that she is  asked to imagine—possible worlds, imagined contingencies. The fourth-grader is not yet capable of this kind of thought, but it will come soon enough with continued learning and cognitive development.

Well, learning and scholarship are a little bit like this. I always tell my history students this anecdote, and say that (unless they had particularly fine high school teachers) they are now ready to learn about the past in new and deeper ways. What I mean to imply is that they are starting down the path to scholarship. They are not there yet, but this is the start. When you can start to imagine, say, Germany as three different Länder, and not the sixteen "out there" in "reality," you will start to change your questioning from lines originating from "to the east of Bavaria lies Baden-Wurttemberg" toward something closer to "what is the relationship between the states we today call 'Bavaria,' and 'Baden-Wurttemberg,' (not to mention 'Hesse' and 'Thuringia')?" And even that kind of thinking will quickly give way to the realization that the thinker is still inextricably mired in a Bavaria-centered world-view. Nonetheless, the barricades of assumed "reality" have been breached, and the world is ripe for scholarship.

This drama happens every day, all over the world, for little proto-scholars.

That's where I found myself in relation to my Chinese novel and historical text. No longer was I reading to learn more about the fall of the Han (which, let me emphasize, is not unscholarly, of course, but does echo rather too closely what we are taught to do from childhood on). Now, however, I was reading the same translated text, but with questions far fewer people had ever asked before. I was in a newer territory. I was not exactly a lone explorer, but the travelers on this path were far fewer than those on the well-trodden roads of "established knowledge."

I felt a little bit like a pioneer, but I wasn't alone. Nothing is ever completely unstudied. Yes, I know all of the objections that could be raised (I hear you cry "but...mais...しかし...aber...可是..."). Forget it; I'm not going to budge. I want my polemic here. Nothing is ever completely unstudied. All I have to do is think back to the discussion of a panel I was on to review scholarly applications a while back. One eminent scholar explained to the rest of us that she had one rule with regard to applications for research funding. If an applicant strongly implied that his approach or topic was unique...forget it. Done. Over. She—one of the finest scholars I have met—wanted to see the applicant place his work in the context of intellectual discovery across the world and through time. She had no patience at all for people who thought they were alone in the wilderness of discovery.*

[c] Off-beaten/Oft-beaten RF

***  ***

There I was, asking the kinds of questions that were somewhat newer, fresher, in the world of Chinese studies. Who was the author of this book—the Comprehensive Mirror—and why was his narrative so different from the novel that got me started down this long and winding interpretive road?

His name was Sima Guang (1019-1086). He was an eleventh-century (Northern Song dynasty) Neo-Confucian scholar who was involved in all sorts of political battles during the 1040s, 1050s, 1060s, 1070s, and 1080s. If that seems too "distant" for you, imagine the same kind of official in your country with five decades of continuous political experience (in the United States, his name would be Leon Panetta, if only Panetta had written a 10,000 page historical work on top of his government service). Sima Guang wrote one of the greatest historiographical texts ever to be "published," and he was both admired and hated by his contemporaries (often at the same time).

O.k., now I was engaged. I was was on the verge of "scholarship."

Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

 
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And then it came together. I was never the same...and yet strangely unchanged...all at the same time. I came to be just like every other one of the millions of scholars all over the globe and throughout human history—from cave painters to "rocket scientists." And you.

*I have changed the circumstances and details of this anecdote somewhat, so as not to give away any private information about the particular discussions of this particular committee.