Rebirth of the Classical Scholarship: A Political Imagination, or a Historical Critique?

Abstract

Classics has a long tradition whether in China or in the West. This article tries to analyze its history, its nature, and the ideological struggle within classics from the following three aspects: (1) classics is not necessarily conservative, and in essence it is the project of modernity; (2) the tradition of classics is permeated by a cultural imagination of the past, presuming some particular political lifestyle of the ancients with a kind of metaphysical and transcendental correctness; (3) German classics is a distinctive dual combination of historicism and romanticism, which produces profound influence on the humanities and academics in modern China. In the end, this article tries to argue that classics is a historical science and its methodology should be of historical critique.