Yesterday my two Honours Project students gave their lecture-recitals: one (trained by my great friend and colleague Elsa Lee) played Brahms’ Op. 117, drawing on Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy to interpret the inwardness and melancholy of this set—referred to by Brahms himself as “lullabies of my sorrow.” The other performed Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, focusing on narratives and the concept of the Doppelgänger through Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius, and how Romanticism can be viewed as an extended age of sensibility rather than a clean break from the eighteenth century, something that was also discussed in my last MA class on Tuesday.
Earlier in the month I was in Beijing, as well as Chongqing and Chengdu in Sichuan, for the education exhibition fairs and visits to schools like Chong Nankai High School School and Chengdu No.7 High School. The former was founded by someone whom I respect a lot: Zhang Boling, a towering figure in Chinese education who established Nankai University. His work as a Protestant functioned as a “middle way” during a turbulent period in Chinese history: he reconciled patriotism with non-partisanship, connecting traditional Chinese values with Western science to strengthen Chinese cultural identity; he also did not treat the East and West, or the religious and the secular, as dichotomies. His principled flexibility extended to the political life: although he joined the Kuomintang in 1941 and served as the President of the Examination Yuan, he chose not to flee to Taiwan in 1949, staying in his homeland under the protection of his former student, Zhou Enlai (Zhou was a graduate of Nankai Middle School and a student at Nankai University).
The trip got me rethinking about the concept of Chineseness, as even Beijing and Sichuan can seem to represent two very different cultures of Chinese identity. As Rey Chow argued in 1998, Chineseness can be a loaded signifier. Rather than dismissing the term, she suggests unpacking it not by writing it out of existence but assessing its modes of historical signification. Projects of this sort help dismantle artificial dichotomies; and I am reminded of how related theoretical problems were noted, historically, in the work of Nietzsche and Kant. In their writings, “China” becomes precisely a sort of totalizing signifier for their own intellectual conflicts. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche derided Kant as the “Chinaman of Königsberg” and in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), he grouped the Chinese with Kantian moralists and Christians as a singular symbol of lackluster mediocrity: “Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will continue to decline, getting thinner, more better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian… what is nihilism today if it is not that?” Similar pejorative terms can be found in The Anti-Christ (1895).
Ironically, Kant had earlier in his aesthetic judgment categorized Chinese philosophy and paintings as “ridiculous grotesqueries,” although he also acknowledged versions of “venerable grotesqueries.” Thus it is almost like Nietzsche was applying Kant’s own logic of exclusion to frame Kantian philosophy as a failure of European vigor. They both used a culture they did not understand fully for a Westernized rhetorical poetic justice.
I have been reading Linda Alcoff’s Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (1996) as well: a synthesis of Gadamer and Foucault is, for me, as good as it gets. Alcoff rightly describes Gadamer as a “conservative Christian” but notes immense value in his critique of Cartesian epistemology. She commends Gadamer’s rejection of “ahistoricality,” of the assumption that individual identity is constructed ex nihilo. Instead, Gadamer posits that identity is a historical continuation entwined with what we prioritize, what we ignore, and the language we use.
For Alcoff, Gadamer’s “situated knowledge” and Foucault’s “discursive power” converge to show our understanding is framed by history, tradition, and prejudice, yet also constructed through institutional power. Their ideas together reveal how authority is not always repressive and that the total elimination of power is a utopian fantasy. She writes:
All authorities are not authoritarian. As Gadamer counsels, we must critique Enlightenment assumptions that the deference for tradition and authority is in every case unjustified and always sustains tyranny… If every authority is seen as authoritarian, the result is a tyranny of structurelessness in which strong personalities hold sway and dominant ideas are left unaccountable.… As Foucault well knew, it is uselessly utopian to pursue the complete elimination of all structures of power/knowledge. For both epistemic and political reasons, what is needed is a decentered form of structuring, which can destabilize authorities so that they cannot become authoritarian.
How does this decentered approach to authority apply to music? I wonder. Perhaps no single entity—composer, score, or performer—holds absolute power. Authority becomes a shifting and negotiated balance that changes depending on time and perspective. In discussing Brahms’ Op. 117, my student highlighted its inward melancholy and “hidden,” or even “protected,” melodies. In this instance, the music’s authority lies in what is expressively kept private or left unsaid; it acts not as an authoritarian dictation and more a hermeneutic question.