Conferenza su “La storia della mentalita’ in Cina”, tenuta dal Prof. Paolo Santangelo

L’IIC Shanghai è lieto di annunciare la Conferenza su “La storia della mentalita’ in Cina”, tenuta in lingua inglese dal Prof. Paolo Santangelo dell’Universita’  di Roma “La Sapienza.

La Conferenza si terra’ martedi’ 26 gennaio presso l’Universita’ dello Zhejiang in Hangzhou alla presenza del Prof. Zhang Gangfeng, e sara’ replicata giovedi’ 28 gennaio a Shanghai presso l’Accademia Sinica di Scienze Sociali.

Le Conferenze saranno presentate dall’Addetto Culturale IIC Shanghai, Prof. Giorgio Casacchia.

Data, Orario e Luogo:

26 gennaio 2010, ore 14.00

Meeting Hall, 2F., Xixi Campus, Humanistic Faculty, Zhejiang Univeristy, Hangzhou.

28 gennaio 2010, ore 14.00:

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai.

Ingresso Libero.


TESTO DELLA CONFERENZA, tenuta a Hangzhou, Universita’ del Zhejiang, Facolta’ di Studi Umanistici, il 26 gennaio 2010

A History of mentality?

•Historical works have different approaches and aims, and may focus on events, society, ideas, economy, etc. Among the aims of the historian extremely interesting is the reconstruction of the representation of reality, especially inner reality in a certain period and society. This is what roughly refers to mentality.

•For mental structure I intend the complex system of various cognitive and practical aspects of the ‘world of mind and body’ in a certain civilisation. They are reflected in the common manner people classify and judge, inside and beyond the rational and conscious theories: the perception of the self, the sense of responsibility, health and illness concepts, belief systems, and the ladder of values, especially the imagery and representation of the inner reality, states of mind and sensations, which regulate the immediate perceptions of social subjects, and result from their unconscious incorporation of unknown determinations (Le Goff 1974).
•Thus, histories of "tears", or of “smells”, of “mourning” and “fear” have been already elaborated for European history and thought.

•Barthes Roland, Fragments d’un discours amoreux (Frammenti di un discorso amoroso, Torino, Einaudi, 1979), Paris, Seuil, 1977, pp. 159-61

•But although history of mentality is already an accepted sub-discipline, especially after the studies done in the ambit of Les Annales for European Medieval and modern history,  for China however we need to re-examine sources, and to prepare materials and tools which have not been done in this direction.

Lucien Febvre focuses on ‘sensitivity’ or  ‘mental’ ‘tools',  ‘habits’ and ‘needs’,  and in his  Problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle: Religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel,1942), he makes an inventory of the conceptual categories which are the different supports for thinking: language, with its lexicon and syntactic particularities, the tools and the languages available in the operations of knowledge, and finally the value attributed to each sense.

•Robert Mandrou (Mandrou R.,  Introduction à la France moderne. Essay de psychologie historique, Paris: Albin Michel, 1961), moves further, and  combines the study of the mental tools with that of sensations, and passions which make up the mentality.

•Le Goff (La nouvelle histoire, Paris 1979) defines the history of mentalities by stressing the elements of routine, unconscious that regulate the immediate perceptions of social subjects, the collective and common manner of classifying and judging. Also focusing on the ‘currents of the deep’ which govern the ‘collective unconscious’ of the members of a society, without their awareness,

•Philippe Ariès’ contribution aims at the analysis of ‘common feelings’ or ‘general feelings’ as the unconscious expression of collective sensitivity  (Ariès, Philippe, Essay sur l’histoire de la mort en occident du moyen age à nos jours,  Paris: Seuil, 1975).

•Alphonse Dupront’s concept of  historical  psychology –  ‘the history of values, mentalities, forms, symbolics, myths’ – emphasizes the connections between intellectual history and ‘mentality’ (Dupront Alphonse, “L’histoire après Freud”, Revue de l’Enseignement supérieur, 44-45, 1969, pp. 27-63).

•In the analysis of a certain period and a certain civilization, we notice that there are some common elements that are accepted and understood by the members of a society, notwithstanding the different social positions and ideas. One of these elements is the emotional dimension. Emotion  is a “lived experience” 生命體驗, a personal, subjective, unique and the unrepeatable experience (Erlebnis),   Emotion is, however, also a kind of  “language”,  a language that transmits a series of affective codes 情感代碼, allowing for interaction with the external world, and at the same time a re-negotiation of reciprocal positions in interpersonal relations. As a language, its external manifestation and traces can be the object of analysis and evaluation, and can offer elements a basis for the understanding of the deep structures of a culture. It is “constructed”社會結構 on the symbolic rational and ethical elements, which are supplied by their cultural environment, and it is manifested through a language - a relatively coherent organization of concepts at the cognitive level  .

•Thus, an interdisciplinary approach and its comparative implications thus are the main features of this work, whose objects are mental states and emotions, collective imagery and their representations. The object of this research is not the emotion itself, but the representation of specific emotions and states of mind, myths and symbols, observed through the medium of the ways of communications and the external descriptions which are available. Representations of states of mind offer hidden information on the concept of self, the ladder of values, the deep structures of mentality and imagery of a certain society. This means that by studying emotions and symbols, we study a society, and the inner structures of its cultural products.

Sources

•Any source are useful for this enquiry, both well known and new sources, but the method is different from other historical inquiry. Instead of evaluating sources’ reliability, aims and veraciousness, or their authorship, we focus on their circulation and significance in the period, and we should find all elements useful to know about the representation of emotions and inner reality, and the symbolic repertoire. In the analysis of the sources, we consider all elements and information that can be used to reconstruct the mentality and imagination of the time.

•Owing to this specific research, most of the selected sources are literary, as they are the richest sources for the representation of reality and imagery : one of the transmission channels is artistic intuition in the form of the author’s creation and its re-creation by people who enjoy it. Ordinary historical documentation, whose contents and aims are consciously written, throws relatively little light on psychological aspects; therefore it is necessary to search behind these sources in order to grasp the apparent ‘silence of what we call the collective mentality’.

•In fact, this approach offers new interpretative patterns in re-reading documents that have already been studied, and also allows the use of materials that have until now been regarded as territory of other disciplines - symbols and myths, iconography, songs, tales -  to be considered as historical sources.

•This field of observation covers feeling and reacting, attitudes, desires and abhorrence, moral, religious and aesthetic sensitivity, and the world of the imagery: these elements form the mental sphere of a certain culture in a certain period, derive from the collective mentality but at the same time flow into it, modifying it. They are based on everyday habits, on individual behaviour and emotional attitude; this field concerns dreams and nightmares, illusions and fears, ways of perceiving oneself and the external reality. They are - as Huizinga observes - "the illusion in which the contemporaries lived is in itself a truth"

Ideological background

• “The mind of the universe corresponds to its creative and productive activity. At the time of birth, man and the other beings receive the mind of the universe as their own mind”. 天地以生物為心者也。 而人物之生又各得夫天地之心以為心者也 (Renshuo仁說 “Treatise on the virtue of humaneness”, Zhuzi wenji 朱子文集, 13:466, Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類, 95:2424; cf. also Chan Wing-tsit, “Chu Hsi on Tian” 1989, pp. 184-96).

We should consider the ideological and intellectual resources, and other historical elements of that society, but finally we have to utilize sources in a different direction from usual historical research.