Word: levenson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...third volume resolves the lines of tension between ideas and individuals, individuals and institutions, with an exploration of how a culture lays its ghosts to rest--how the past beomes history. Levenson wrote, after the fact...
...Levenson sought, in his study of China, "ties that bind a world." And so in Confucian China he treated not the problem of Confucian China's decline into irrelevance, into history, but an understanding that would reinforce Levenson's understanding of comparable problems in other traditions. For some, this resulted in a distressing call for historical relativism, for the basic comparison that juxtaposes the historian's own time with every other. Only with confidence in himself, Levenson held, could a historian make sense of the past--the historian had to "take one's own day seriously, retaining the moral need...
...some of his readers, what appeared to Levenson to be a universal problem of the individual's relation to his past, became instead merely Levenson's problem as a Jew in America, cut off from his own culture and roots. In discussing one Chinese attempt to reconcile present with past, Angus McDonald complained that "the synthesis that the Chinese had found in the thought of Mao... was beyond him [Levenson] as a Jew in exile." The limits of the Jewish experience (limiting the comparisons that Levenson could make from within his own culture), McDonald held, prevented Levenson from responding...
...this view ignores the subtleties of Levenson's relativism. Other histories were not important because their historical experiences had one to one correspondences with one's own experience. The crucial question was not, "How is this the same as what he knows or is?" but, as Levenson wrote in the third volume of the trilogy, "Why should a generation comparable enough to his own to be judged in his vocabulary not be analogous to his own?... Why should earlier men, who deserve to be taken as seriously as he himself, diverge so far from his standards...
...Levenson's own experience as a Jew was crucial to his life and work. In the introduction of what was to have been his retirement book on Judaism, Levenson proudly reaffirmed his commitment to a Judaism with links to the past that McDonald believed cut him off from the present. To be a Jew in America was for Levenson a choice of standards from which to view not only his own time and culture but any other--"To choose well in life is nothing less than to choose life itself...