History and Epics in China and in the West

Abstract

My study cannot give more than some comments on a very extensive theme that requires a number of studies which have not even been precisely formulatied, as yet. I should like to show that the specific thought pattern, the specific perception of reality, intrinsic to a specific cultural category — that which is the predominant one in the given cultural complex — influences all other categories and determines their nature. I want to illustrate my thesis on the relationship between literature and history. With some exaggeration I would formulate my thesis as follows: as literature is, so is history; the same perception of reality is in the background of both and determines their form. I will limit myself to this theme and I will not deal with the causes determining the differences of pattern in various fields of a certain culture; I will not attempt to solve the philosophical and socialogical problems, neither will I seek for further connections in the total cultural complex, with which I illustrate my thesis, that is the chinese cultural complex, although I fully realize its extreme importance for our problem.

Read at the meeting of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic studies, Tokyo 1961. Printed in Diogenes No. 42, 1963, pp. 22–43.