expanded the calendrical framework, escalating the eons of cosmic time within
which their founders are situated. It is almost a rule of thumb that the more
ancient a text claims to be, the more recently it falls in the sequence of
composition. This “archaizing strategy” is itself a form of innovation; rather
than claiming creativity moving forward in time, one projects the edge of
creativity backwards.
There was plenty of room for creativity within the textual commentary
mode. Rival camps could choose their favorite text on which to expound. We
see this in full force in the high period of Tokugawa Japan, when rival schools
attached their views to old texts which served as vehicles, while denouncing
the views of their rivals as later accretions. The Ancient Learning school of
Yamaga Soko, Ito Jinsai, and Ogyu Sorai dismissed the previously dominant
Neo-Confucian school as merely the learning of the Sung dynasty, while using
its newfound independence for drastic conceptual innovations. The still more
archaizing National Learning school of Kamo Mabuchi and Motoori Nori-
naga, turning to the Japanese poetic-religious classics, exemplifies another path
along which textual commentary acquires its own mode of innovation. There
is a cumulative development of the techniques of scholarship, the sharpening
of the critical tools, and the accumulation of knowledge about historical
sequences. The claims of Neo-Confucians to propound eternal verities were
punctured by rival scholars who could marshal a better historical apparatus.
The claim to uncover a “true” tradition is an innovative move against prevail-
ing conventions. The battle among Japanese scholars over the distant past
moved to a higher level of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, creating a
sophisticated neoconservative epistemology about the limits of rationality in
order to argue about the nature of historicity and the accessibility of tradition.
Again the dynamic is not confined to Asian textual scholars; a similar sequence
is traced out in biblical scholarship in the German universities after 1820, from
the figurative interpretations by liberal “higher criticism” to Barthian neo-or-
thodoxy.
The textual commentary mode contains several possibilities for innovation,
including the use of commentaries as publication vehicles for new ideas, the
development of historical scholarship and reflexivity about one’s historical
situatedness, and eventually about the abstract conception of historicity itself.
The emergence of self-conscious historical standards marks a level of sophis-
tication above the blind adulation of texts for their claimed antiquity. But
sharpening technical standards of historical scholarship does not necessarily
bring an upward move in the overall sequence of philosophical abstraction and
reflexivity. The “Old Text school” arose in the Han dynasty as a movement of
librarians and textual scholars attacking the pseudo-ancient texts of the Han
Confucians, and branding them as a phony “New Text school.” Modern
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^795