Product Description
The world’s preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures.
A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.
This short book, with its many charming and fascinating illustrations from ancient China, will interest many. Needham gives the history of gunpowder and firearms and comparative macrobiotics.
What really interested me, however, is the concluding essay, in which Needham speculates why science never developed in China. And it is a mystery, one that many scholars have pondered. China’s civilization had thousands of years of stable government. And it has a tradition that venerated scholars. China also had a history of many interesting inventions and engineers. Certainly, all the factors seemed lined up to aid in the blossoming of scince.
Yet science, not just mere technology, real science, with its organized effort to explain and understand nature, with its interest in abstract subjects and its testing of theories, only developed in the west. Why?
Needham suggests it was the way the Chinese viewed time. Across the entire of the western ancient world, as well as India and China, time was viewed as a great wheel, with one golden age with great technologies succeeded by a fallen era, when idea would be lost. Then the golden age would reappear, with all the same technologies.
What the west had was Christianity, which posited a time which was not a wheel, but which progressed. Christ, after all, came in historical time.
Alfred North Whitehead placed the reason the west developed science on Christian theology. This is what he stated: “There seems but one source…It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God…Every detail was supervised and ordered; the search in to nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality”.
From the very start, as shown in such Christian theologians as Tertullian and Augustine, Christians argued that there was a truth. Truth was God. And the truth could be discovered by rationality.
Rating: 5 / 5
I shall summarise the interesting chapter 5, which considers some aspects of the question why “Chinese civilisation did not spontaneously develop modern natural science as Western Europe did, though China had been much more advanced in the fifteen pre-Renaissance centuries” (p. 131), though sadly without offering a positive answer. (The other chapters are disappointing. So for example chapter 4 promises to relate the “rationale of acupuncture,” but it restricts itself to the rather pedestrian points that Western science does not unequivocally discredit acupuncture and that the Chinese anticipated Harvey’s theory of the circulation of blood. Neither of these things constitute a “rationale of acupuncture,” obviously.)
A possible hypothesis as to what restrained the Chinese is that they lacked a zeal for progress owing to their “veritable deification” (p. 109) of men of the past and “liturgical veneration” (p. 111) for the past. However, this hypothesis is soon turned on its head, “for you can find textual evidence in every period showing that in spite of their veneration for the sages, Chinese scholars and scientific men believed that there had been progress beyond the knowledge of their distant ancestors” (p. 116). In fact, much of the veneration was directed precisely at “ordinary men and women who conferred benefits upon posterity” (p. 111). The Chinese also had a clear “conception of the three major technological stages of man’s culture, the ages of stone bronze, and iron” (p. 112). Furthermore, “each new emperor wanted to have a new [astronomical calendar], necessarily better and more accurate than any of those that had gone before. No mathematician or astronomer in any Chinese century would have dreamed of denying the continual progress and improvement in the sciences they professed. … The same may also be said of the pharmaceutical naturalists, whose descriptions of the kingdoms of Nature grew and grew.” (p. 116).
A related hypothesis “set up by many philosophers and writers” (p. 122) is that Christianity was particularly conducive to modern science owing to its linear, realist conception of time which is said to be essential for science not only in suggesting that progress is possible but also as a conceptual foundation for aspects of scientific theories themselves, such as the notion of causality. This hypothesis, however, is also readily refuted, as the Chinese conception of time was always predominantly linear (p. 128; argued from circumstantial evidence), proving that whatever the difference between Europe and China may have been “it had nothing to do with China’s attitude towards time” (p. 131).
Another possible explanation is that capitalism is conducive to science “since the social situation in the era of the rise of capitalism greatly favoured … the higher artisanate, where cooperation sprang quite naturally from working conditions” (p. 117). “‘Thus science’, says Zilsel, ‘… came to be regarded as the product of a cooperation for nonpersonal ends, a cooperation in which all scientists of the past, the present, and the future have a part.’ Today, he went on, this idea or ideal seems almost self-evident, yet no Brahamic, Buddhist, Muslim, or Latin scholastic, no Confucian scholar or Renaissance humanist, no philosopher or rhetor of classical antiquity ever achieved it. Zilsel would have done much better not to include the reference to the Confucian scholars until Europe knew a little more about them, for in fact it would seem that the idea of cumulative, disinterested, cooperative enterprise in amassing scientific information was much more customary in mediaeval China than anywhere in the pre-Renaissance West.” (p. 118).
Lastly, one must consider the hypothesis that the Chinese lacked Baconian empiricism, this so-called cornerstone of the so-called scientific method. Again, not so. One finds a number of such sayings as “those who can manage the dykes and the rivers … did not learn their business from Yu the Great, they learned it from the waters” (p. 119). We also have the following remarkable and unequivocal tribute to empiricism. “Liu Cho appealed to the throne in +604 for the authorisation of new research on solar shadow measurements, proposing a geodetic survey of a meridian arc. What he said was: ‘Thus, the heavens and the earth will not be able to conceal their form, and the celestial bodies will be obliged to yield up to us their measurements. We shall excel the glorious sages of old, and resolve our remaining doubts about the universe. …’” (p. 120). This ambitious and costly undertaking was indeed carried out (though not until the next century). But it did not spark a scientific revolution, proving that there is much more to science than Baconian empiricism.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book consisted of speeches made by Prof. Joseph Needham, the contents of which were available for free. In that sense the book is over-priced.
Rating: 2 / 5