丽藻彬彬: 关于文学与历史哲学的思考

Both history and literature commemorate what is meaningful and valuable in our personal or collective memories. As forms of writing, historical and literary narratives share certain structural similarities in recuperating the past with vivid descriptions, believable characterizations, and a coherent and convincing story line to achieve a sense of the real in representation. Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic concept of “contemporaneity” (Gleichzeitigkeit) can offer a helpful theoretical framework for understanding the immediacy of our experience of the past in literary or historical representations. And yet, there is an important difference between literary and historical narratives in that the historian is epistemologically and morally bound to what actually happens, while the poet or the novelist is free to construct a fictional representation through imagination. In the Chinese tradition, there is the concept of “the historian's virtue” and a historian is committed to the true record of history at any cost, even his life. By drawing on some exemplary works of ancient Chinese literature and historiography, this essay will discuss some of the theoretical issues related to the writing and the understanding of history, and try to lead to the mutual illumination of poetry and history rather than their opposition and mutual exclusion. It will conclude with the emphasis on the value of truth-claims in historiography that has important implications for human life and social reality as well as for our knowledge of history.