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A Dedication to Classics Scholarship 39

The accumulation of all sorts of unreasonable factors, such religious conflicts,
economic failures, and political depravity, made life unbearable for the common
people and eventually led to the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789). It is
understood that the French Revolution developed over three stages. By the time it
reached its climax—when the Jacobins seized power under Robespierre (1758–
1794), a bloody policy of terror was adopted to deter foreign troops from inter-
vening. The word “terror” began therefrom.
Max Weber saw modernization as a process of rationalization. Then, why did
the advent of post-modernism appear? Michel Foucault gave an answer, saying
that modern rationalism will annihilate man. The nature of rationalism in modern
capitalism is thus revealed by post-modernism.
The timeline of events unfurled thus: the eternal logical rationality was
sought in ancient Greece; Christianity turned from mythology to rationality,
which was not, however, genuinely rational, and came under fire during the
critique of reason; and finally, Enlightenment thinkers put tradition and ratio-
nality into opposition. Throughout this series of development, the most impor-
tant issue remained: how to evaluate tradition and whether it is the opponent of
reason?

3.2 How Should We Conceive “Tradition”?

What does “tradition” mean? The English word “tradition” carries different
meanings from their Chinese counterpart, not only in their forms as countable or
uncountable nouns, plural or singular, but also in their semantic content.
In its singular form as an uncountable noun, “tradition” denotes an abstract
concept, meaning the process of transmitting, or the “flow” of what is transmitted
from past to present. In English dictionaries, it is usually defined as “handing
something down from generation to generation,” or “the passing down of
something.”
In its plural form, the countable noun “tradition” denotes concrete and spe-
cific items, used to refer to customs, habits, beliefs, institutions, and the thoughts
of a social community. In this sense, the word “tradition” refers to things that are
handed down and is equivalent to its Chinese counterpart.
No culture in the world could exist without traditions. Specific customs,
faiths, institutions, utensils, or articles of clothing and such like, all possess a
certain stability that is identifiable in their qualitative properties. Meanwhile
they vary quantitatively from their previous stages of development. For
example, the computer has evolved from a giant apparatus of tubes and wires to
a desktop, and then a laptop, but its essential function remains stable,