Using contemporary Western philosophic ideas, this essay examines Hsün Tzu's view of the mind as both a director of action and a spectator of action. In analyzing the mind as director, Hsün Tzu argues against Mencius's idea that the mind simply extends one's natural tendencies. Hsün Tzu's presentation of the mind as spectator— an idea developed chiefly in his discussion of obsession—accepts Chuang Tzu's stress on the importance of detachment, but argues that such detachment need not necessitate withdrawal from normal action. Hsün Tzu's two views of the mind can be reconciled by examining the mind's relationship to desires and to moral judgments. That examination also leads to the conclusion that Hsün Tzu thinks moral judgments have only a conventional and not a universal basis.

Introducing these three critical essays on Edward Said's Orientalism† raises perplexing questions of scholarly and professional definition. In the case of the recent JAS symposium on Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament, the organizer of the group effort came to the Journal with a proposal which the editor ultimately encouraged, accepted, and brought to publication; this time the editor initiated the Said symposium himself, persuaded his colleagues to participate, and then subjected them to varying degrees of editorial suggestion before sending the whole package off to the printer. It might well be suggested that editors should stick to processing and avoid initiating; that there is a built-in conflict of interest, a potential for abuse of editorial discretion, if the editor not only decides what ought to be accepted for publication but also dabbles in what ought to be written about in the first place. As is obvious from this symposium's appearance in the Journal, I would hold that occasionally crossing the line from processing to initiating—in the case of a work like Said's, for example, which does not fall within the ordinary domain of the Journal's primary readership—can be constructive.

Devotees of operatic silliness will recall how Anna Russell, in her music hall routine explaining the convoluted plot of Wagner's Ring, prepares her audience for the reappearance of that disgusting dwarf Allllberic (“ten hours after the damned opera begins”), and leans forward conspiratorially to deliver her long-awaited line: “I'm not making this UP, you know!” And anyone who supposes that Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is simply fabricating something in his book Orientalism; is taking oblique potshots at the academic establishment out of misdirected political dissatisfaction with the situation in the eastern Mediterranean; is presuming to speak of what he does not know professionally; is fulminating about a nastiness peculiar to Islamic studies; is attributing to innocent scholars the unlikely or unintended motive to control the object of their scholarship; or, finally, is saying nothing of relevance to practitioners of other disciplines or students of other areas—anyone who harbors such suspicions may wish to consider the manner and substance of the following two passages, chosen from among documents that I happen to have seen in the past several weeks:

In Japan we have no Nineveh or Babylon to disentomb, no Jerusalem to uncover of its superincumbent debris, in order to identify its ancient topography, no Ilium that was, to bring to light, after the oblivion of the ages, nor ancient ruins of any kind whatever to interest the antiquary.

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in these colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

In his autobiography Loren Eiseley wrote: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant's commands, something not to be questioned.” We who are non-Japanese students of Japan form a culture of our own, and Edward Said's Orientalism helps us to see, perhaps for the first time, the “drill sergeant's commands” to which we respons.

Before Liberation, the history of the revolution of 1911 fell within the domain of Kuomintang party history. Although numerous publications appeared, some of which possessed historical value, generally speaking an orthodox point of view occupied the dominant position. Many published works were filled with prejudice and distortion and should not be regarded as genuine historical research.

Since the new China was established, research on the revolution of 1911 has gradually become a branch of modern Chinese history, which takes historical materialism as its leading principle.