"Antiquity" and Its Rhetorical Power : The Revisionary Invention of a New Model of Literary Learning in Han Time

This article examines the formation of a new intellectual model from the last half-century BCE to the first century CE (late Western Han to early Eastern Han) in early imperial China. The emergence of this model was presented as an integration of a constellation of new scholarly values and the rhetorical power of the past in the name of gu 古 (“antiquity”). The last half-century of the Western Han witnessed an overall cultural nostalgia in coordination with a growing enthusiasm in studying ancient textual legacy through individual intellectual labor. Under this circumstance, an array of Han scholarly voices—from Yang Xiong and Liu Xin to Ban Gu and Wang Chong—projected an ideal image of literary learning in the aura of antiquity. In terms of gu zhe zhi xue 古者之學 (“learning as a matter in antiquity”) and gu zhi xuezhe 古之學者 (“man-of-learning in antiquity”), Yang Xiong and Liu Xin presented the revisionary invention of a new intellectual model, which they characterized as a manner of self-oriented accumulation of intellectual labor toward the cultivation of individual erudition. Depicted as broadly engaged with texts and knowledge including and beyond the official canon, this model entailed a motif of ideological criticism against the Han official academic system, as well as its institutional regulation of knowledge production and its imposition of personal affiliation. Rhetorically, these Han discourses present a revisionary approach of meaning-production, appropriating a series of old ideas and utterances—such as “broadly learned about wen” 博學於文 and “a man-of-learning in antiquity [did it] for the sake of himself” 古之學者爲己—by transforming them into practical values applicable to new intellectual contexts.