N. Sivin
(Published in Sivin, Science in Ancient China, (Aldershot, Hants: Variorum, 1995), chapter VII)
This essay makes the case for two conclusions. First, why the scientific revolution did not take place in China is not a question that historical research can answer. It commends attention to the fallacies that lead people to ask it. Second, a scientific revolution, by the criteria that historians of science use, did take place in China in the eighteenth century. It did not, however, have the social consequences that we assume a scientific revolution will have. It suggests that those assumptions are mistaken.
Anyone who has looked into the history of science, technology, and medicine in the last generation or so has been aware that all the great civilizations of the ancient world had their own sophisticated traditions. The Chinese traditions, because they are recorded so fully, and because they were more independent of European influence than the Islamic and Indian ones, are particularly fascinating if we want to compare how understanding of Nature varies in different cultural circumstances. What the Chinese knew and did was explained by Chinese and Japanese historians beginning in the 1920's. My English colleague Joseph Needham began calling their work to the attention of educated people in the West, and encouraging them to add to it, in the 1950's. By now it is one of the most flourishing fields in the history of science, with perhaps a thousand specialists in China, Japan, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
When people become aware of what we have turned up, they usually begin wondering why the transition to modern science first happened where it did. In 1969 Joseph Needham gave the "Scientific Revolution problem" its classic formulation: "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?" "Why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilization . . . ?" He adds a second question that makes the larger problem more interesting: "why, between the first century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs."
In that millennium and a half, European civilization was first experiencing a slow general collapse and then even more slowly recovering from it. It is obvious that we ought to be looking at the Western end of Eurasia, not the Far Eastern end, to account for European inferiority in technology over a span of 1400 years. But there are still other doubts to be expressed in connection with this second question, with its claim of Chinese superiority over many centuries. The natural knowledge that was being applied to human needs was not what we usually call Chinese science.
Early technology did not succeed or fail according to how well it applied the insights of early science. Science was done on the whole by members of the minority of educated people in China, and passed down in books. Technology was a matter of craft and manufacturing skills privately transmitted by artisans to their children and apprentices. Most such artisans could not read the scientists' books. They had to depend on their own practical and esthetic knowledge. What that knowledge was like we can only reconstruct from the artifacts they left and from the scattered written testimony of literate people. Literacy spread considerably outside the elite over the last several centuries, but this did not lead to the substantial use of books to teach craft skills.
It also seems to me that comparing all of the scientific and engineering activity of one civilization with all that of another in a single generalization conceals more than it reveals, since it is only in modern times that these various kinds of work became closely connected. It is true that between the end of the Roman period and 1400 or so, a Chinese visiting Europe would have found it in many respects technologically backward. On the other hand, there was probably not a great deal to choose between Chinese and European medical practice before about 1850 (knowledge of anatomy and physiology had hardly any therapeutic applications earlier). Mathematical astronomy in China by its last high point about 1300 never quite reached the general level of predictive accuracy that Ptolemy had mastered eleven hundred years earlier.
I con't need to dwell on comparisons of this kind. They tell us nothing at all about what we can expect to learn from one culture or the other. After all, no one is proposing that we give up the study of the European tradition of alchemy just because the Chinese alchemical literature is richer in chemical knowledge. What matters is that we are now able to begin comparing several strong traditions of science and technology based on the ideas and social arrangements of different civilizations. All of them have to be studied if we want to understand the general relations through history and across the globe between science and culture, science and society, science and individual consciousness. Without that comparative understanding we will remain trapped in our own parochial viewpoints. Historians have more urgent work to do than trying to prove that every other culture was inferior to the one they specialize in.
As an example of how studying the Chinese experience can suggest clues about the character of early science in general, let me dwell briefly on the case of Shen Kua (1031 - 1095), one of the most versatile figures in the history of Chinese science and engineering. Just to give a few examples, he is famous for the first discussion of magnetic declination and of printing with movable type, the only application of permutations in traditional Chinese mathematics, a proposal for daily records of the lunar and planetary positions, the first suggestion in East Asia of a purely solar calendar, an explanation of the process of land formation by both deposition of silt and erosion, and an important book on the theory and practice of medicine. In addition to his technical activities, his writing has to be consulted by every student of early Chinese archeology, music, art and literary criticism, economic theory, and diplomacy. He made his early reputation as a land reclamation expert. He was deeply involved as a high official in the 1060's in the most important political reform movement for some centuries.
Shen's combination of unlimited curiosity and involvement in the affairs of his time had a special interest for my own education. For some time, through a series of studies roaming through different historic periods and technical disciplines, I have been trying to piece together bits of answers to a large question that I find boundlessly interesting. How did Chinese scientists in traditional times explain to themselves what they were doing? In other words, what was their understanding of nature and of their relation to it as conscious individuals living in a society? How did the insights of the various sciences hang together to form this understanding? I had gradually formed a general idea of the sciences as defined in early China, but I couldn't see how their insights were combined to form that general understanding. It occurred to me that I might do well to study how the sciences fit together in the mind of a person who was involved in all of them. The obvious person to study was Shen Kua.
The pattern that emerged wasn't unexpected, but I had to take stock of it for the first time. One aspect was that there does not seem to have been a systematic connection between all the sciences in the minds of the people who did them. They were not integrated under the dominion of philosophy, as schools and universities integrated them in Europe and Islam. They had sciences but no science, no single conception or word for the overarching sum of all of them.
In Shen Kua's memoirs there is a classification called "regularities underlying the phenomena ." Under this heading he like many others grouped together physical and numerological aspects of astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and divination, which refract the pattern of physical reality in their various ways. A section called "technical skills " puts together medicine, engineering, and mathematics (including astronomical mathematics), because they share purely instrumental value. There they fit alongside architecture and games. His chapter on "strange occurrences " sets out his thoughts on the origin of plant fossils, the first recorded description of a tornado in East Asia, an account of his experiment on the formation of rainbows, and similar gems, all sitting alongside unlikely hearsay and ephemeral curiosities.
You can see that what makes us think of Shen Kua as a scientist was widely scattered through his own scheme of human knowledge. That scheme cohered not on the level of science, but on a much more general level. In his writing, there are no clear boundaries between material that fits the modern conception of science and material that doesn't. That modern conception does not help us to understand what Shen Kua was getting at.
Shen Kua, in the second half of the eleventh century, made his turn on the stage of history at a time when a great upsurge in social mobility was broadening the group that ruled China. Many of these new men were interested in all sorts of practical affairs that well-born people in earlier times would have considered beneath them. Civil servants were expected to be competent and versatile, and might work their way to the hightest posts of the empire as financial specialists. At that time merit ratings of officials were being based on the bottom line--quantitative measures of efficiency in collecting taxes, reclaiming land, and so on, instead of entirely on virtue, breeding, and orthodoxy, as had been the case earlier. At leisure too, this large group that Shen Kua belonged to was free to indulge curiosity--in an amateur way, of course--about anything in the universe, including technical matters that earlier were fit only for clerks or artisans. Only after Shen's lifetime did this evolving amateur ideal settle on philosophy, the arts, and literature as the appropriate realms to be universal within, once again leaving the study of the earth and sky largely to the mere technicians. In the eleventh century Shen was only one of a number of polymaths whose scientific and technological interests, however amateur, all emerged in connection with their varied official responsibilities. The intellectual consistency of Shen's style in scientific thought seems to reflect only the consistency of his public career, in which that style was formed. What connected his research interests, in other words, were the remarkably diverse responsibilities and commitments of his civil service appointments.
The astronomer in the court computing calendars to be issued in the emperor's name, the doctor curing sick people in whatever part of society he was born into, the alchemist pursuing archaic secrets in mountain haunts of legendary teachers, had no reason to relate their arts to each other. Philosophers were in no position to define a common discipline for all of them, as Aristotle and his successors had done in Europe, and so philosophers had practically no influence on the development of these special pursuits.
If anyone was going to seek out the common ground of the sciences in China, it was people like Shen Kua, who were mastering them all. But Shen put his own understanding together in ways that did not directly link the fields of Chinese science, and in ways that intimately associate what today would be considered scientific with what would be called grossly superstitious. That distinction simply gets in the way of understanding the way Shen Kua's thought was connected. Surely it is necessary to understand thought before one begins to label it.
I would have to say that I failed to find the internal unity of Chinese science that I was looking for in the mind of Shen Kua. By way of compensation, I did learn the importance of an issue that I hadn't paid enough attention to before, that is, the relations of the sciences to other kinds of knowledge.
* * *
Now back to the Scientific Revolution problem. It is striking that this question--Why didn't the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?--happens to be one of the few questions that people often ask in public places about why something didn't happen history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today's newspaper. It belongs to an infinite set of questions that historians don't organize research programs around because they have no direct answers. They translate into questions about the rest of the world. The one that concerns us, for instance, translates into "in what circumstances did the Scientific Revolution take place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe?"
Why do people keep asking why the Scientific Revolution did not take place in China when they know enough not to waste time explaining why their names did not appear on page 3 of today's newspaper? Because the question encourages exploration of a fascinating topic and provides some order for thinking about it. It is, in other words, heuristic. Heuristic questions are useful at the beginning of an inquiry. As we comprehend enough to deal with complicated patterns, heuristic questions tend to grow murky, and finally to lose their interest compared with the emerging clarity of what did happen.
So much for heuristic questions in general. Why do we tend to take this one more seriously than the general run? Somehow the Scientific Revolution problem holds a special urgency.
That urgency is there, I suggest, because this problem implies a challenge to certain Western assumptions, assumptions that ordinarily we do not question. Above all we usually assume that the Scientific Revolution is what everybody ought to have had. But it is not at all clear that that is what everybody wanted before it became, in recent times, an urgent matter of survival amidst violent change--change resulting from, among other things, the Scientific Revolution that did take place. In fact we have made very little progress so far in understanding how Europeans originally came to want it in one country after another, since the attention of historians has been concentrated on how it took place.
There is usually the further assumption that civilizations which had the potential for a scientific revolution ought to have had the kind that took place in the West, that led to the sorts of institutional and social changes that appeared in the West.
These assumptions are usually linked to a belief--or a faith, if you prefer--that European civilization was somehow in touch with reality in a way no other civilization could be, and that its great share of the world's wealth and power comes from some intrinsic fitness to inherit the earth that was there all along. Historical study does not suggest that Europe by 1600 had a concentration of intelligence, imagination, talent, or virtue that no other civlization could match. It does suggest that the privileged position of the West comes instead from a head start in the technological exploitation of nature and the political exploitation of societies not technologically equipped to defend themselves.
Finally there is another assumption that, since modern science has so quickly and thoroughly become international, it transcends European historical and philosophic biases, and is as universal, objective, and value-free as the Nature that it seeks to understand and manipulate.
What seems to be common sense in that last assumption (or in the self-conception that all the assumptions I have mentioned are part of) does not stand up to thoughtful examination. Modern science is still too marked by the special circumstances of its development in Europe to be considered universal.
Chinese science got along without dichotomies between mind and body, objective and subjective, even wave and particle. In the West the first two were entrenched in scientific thought by the time of Plato. Galileo, Descartes, and others carried them into modern times to mark off the realm of physical science from the province of the soul, which was decidedly off limits to secular innovators like themselves. These distinctions let early modern scientists claim authority over the physical world on the ground that purely natural knowledge could not conflict with and therefore could not threaten the authority of established religion.
Science and religion have long since learned to coexist, but we are still living with these sharp distinctions between mind and body and so on. If they are European peculiarities, and perpetual sources of trouble at that, why hasn't modern science managed to rid itself of them? It is evidently not a simple matter to root them out. Until we do, there is something to be said for frankly admitting a certain parochialism in the foundations of science. The mathematical equations may be universal, but the allocation of human effort among the possibilities of natural knowledge is not.
Science and technology have spread throughout the world, but that has not made them universal, in the sense of transcending European patterns of thought. In one society after another the encounter between old and new ideas has been abortive, resolved by social change and political legislation. Traditional ideas are simply excluded (on the grounds that they are primitive, superstitious, regressive, fit only for the lower classes, etc.) from the educational systems created to teach a new technical and managerial elite the values of technology alongside its theory and practice.
Modern technology is clearly more powerful than that of traditional societies; but to a larger extent than we generally realize, its strength emerges in application to needs and expectations that do not exist until it generates them. True universality would require modern technology to coexist with and serve cultural diversity rather than standardizing it out of existence.
I am arguing that the notion of a value-free modern science unmarked by its social and historical origins is wishful thinking. But so is the idea that modern science is in every essential respect European.
Growing awareness of the high level of science and technology in ancient China has led to cascades and avalanches of hypotheses from one scholar or another about factors that inhibited the evolution of modern science in China, or characteristics unique to the West that made possible or furthered a major scientific revolution. One thing these hypotheses have in common is a tendency to turn the history of world science into a saga of Europe's success and everyone else's failure, or at best inherently flawed partial success, until the advent of redemption through modernization. Modernization means, of course, learning to do things our way, even though we don't seem to be doing so splendidly ourselves lately.
But modern science was not simply the result of one good idea cascading over another through the centuries in the European atmosphere. It was the product of a passage of ideas and tools between civilizations that has been practically uninterrupted since the New Stone Age. Many of the shaping influences of the European tradition, we now know, came from outside the margins of Europe. The leap across the barrier to the world we inhabit was also more than intellectual. No one who is only an intellectual historian or only a social historian can hope to do it justice.
To begin at the intellectual end, the Scientific Revolution was a transformation of our knowledge of the external world. It changed the questions we asked, the means we used to explore them, and the character of the answers. It established for the first time the dominion of number and measure over every physical phenomenon.
Ernst Gellner pointed out not long ago a particular way in which the European Scientific Revolution is more than a leap to a new form of knowing. It is natural to assume that in science the crucial test has always been "is it true?" But earlier that was only one of several equally important questions: Is it beautiful? Is it conventional? Is it morally improving? Does it lead to perception of the Good? Does it conform to certain esthetic patterns that all truth must, as astronomers up to Kepler believed that celestial orbits must be compounded of perfect circular motions? In science the test of truth has displaced most of these and redefined the others. This demand for truth above all was an appeal to fact--fact that was in principle public, verifiable, morally neutral, that did not change with the social circumstances of the observer, that was immune from interference by magician, or god, or human need. But the new science did more than appeal to facts. It created facts of that kind for the first time, knowledge that had no value except truth value. That is an awesomely original creation. It took place in Europe between the time of Copernicus and Laplace and has spread across the world since. The same leap was not taken in seventeenth-century China. People there considered the idea of objective knowledge without wisdom, without moral or esthetic significance, grotesque.
The Scientific Revolution also meant a continuing redefinition of the connections of natural philosophy (i.e., science) to other kinds of knowledge. It meant a redefinition of man's orientation toward the past and the future. It meant a redefinition of what authority should determine what uses may be made of knowledge. It meant a redefinition of what knowledge of nature is socially desirable, and what socially undesirable. It meant a redefinition of how knowledge ought to be related to human individuality and to the active relations of man and nature.
Galileo and his friends and successors could not have got round the authority of the Church on the strength of ideas alone. That message was conveyed to Galileo by the Congregation of the Index in 1616, and then with drastic finality when he was condemned in 1633. But he and his fellow spirits had begun constructing a new intellectual community outside the old establishment. A hundred years earlier there had been no organized alternative to the Church and its scholastic educational system; then even Galileo himself might have died an archbishop. But in the Counter-Reformation the Church, threatened by Protestantism, became defensive and obsessed with thought control. It naturally became less attractive to the most talented and ambitious (and of course there was less room for those who were attracted). A variety of new careers was emerging. Among them the profession of scientist was being invented. This profession could not provide structures that paid for specialist careers until about 1800, but from the start it assumed for its amateurs, devotees, and enthusiasts, independent authority to formulate the laws of nature. Scientists took that authority away, in fact, from the Scholastics, for whom science could never be more than a collaborator of faith. Secular learning remade the universities and displaced other ancient institutions while over several centuries of evolution and revolution it formed a technical establishment.
This outline of the Scientific Revolution's many dimensions is meant to suggest how much we are likely to miss if we care only about social factors, or only about intellectual factors, as we survey the situation in China. Until recently, for instance, people concerned with that topic, including myself, have overlooked a significant piece of the Chinese picture, which I will now consider.
By conventional intellectual criteria, China had its own scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. This is a point of no small interest if we are meditating about why China couldn't have had one.
Western mathematics and mathematical astronomy were introduced to China beginning around 1630--in a form that before long would be obsolete in those parts of Europe where readers were permitted access to current knowledge. Several Chinese scholars quickly responded and began reshaping the way astronomy was done in China. They radically and permanently reoriented the sense of how one goes about comprehending the celestial motions. They changed the sense of which concepts, tools, and methods are centrally important, so that geometry and trigonometry largely replaced traditional numerical or algebraic procedures. Such issues as the absolute sense of rotation of a planet and its relative distance from the earth became important for the first time. Chinese astronomers came to believe for the first time that mathematical models can explain the phenomena as well as predict them. These changes amount to a conceptual revolution in astronomy.
That revolution did not generate the same pitch of tension as the one going on in Europe at the same time. It did not burst forth in as fundamental a reorientation of thought about Nature. It did not cast doubt on all the traditional ideas of what constitutes an astronomical problem. It did not narrow people's views of what meaning astronomical prediction can have for the ultimate understanding of Nature and of man's relation to it.
The most striking long-range outcome of the encounter with European science, in fact, was a revival of traditional Chinese astronomy, a rediscovery of forgotten methods, that were studied once again in combination with the new ideas and that supported what might be called a new classicism. Rather than replacing traditional values, the new values implicit in the foreign astronomical writings were used to perpetuate traditional values.
Why didn't this conceptual revolution have the social consequences that historians of Western science have encouraged us to expect? The old and new astronomy were not in antagonistic competition, once the Chinese acknowledged that the European techniques yielded much more reliable predictions. By the mid-seventeenth century European civilization had had no appreciable political or social impact, and astronomy was making its way on its own merits.
One is tempted to see the process by which Western astronomy became rooted later in China as the last major face-to-face encounter of non-Western and European science in world history. By the eighteenth century modern science was crossing national boundaries on the coattails of Empire, and competition between sciences, literatures, religions, etc., on the basis of their particular merits had become a thing of the past. Even in the mid-seventeenth century, despite the high drama of eclipse prediction contests in the late Ming court, the fact remains that the triumph of European computational techniques came about not through a consensus of great minds but by an imperial decision to hand over operational control of the Astronomical Bureau to Jesuit missionaries.
The foreign techniques, powerful though they were, offered Chinese students no alternative route to security and fame, and the civil service examination system left no room for one. The only astronomers who could respond to the Jesuits' writings were members of the old intellectual elite. They were bound to evaluate innovations in the light of established ideals that they felt an individual responsibility to strengthen and pass on to the next generation.
Revolutions in science as well as in politics take place at the margins of society, but the people who made the one in seventeenth-century China were firmly attached to the dominant values of their culture. At the time there could be no students of astronomy motivated to cast off traditional values. There were no groups of intellectuals alienated enough to follow ideas where they led even if the society around them fell apart.
The most influential first-generation champions of Western astronomy were men of the lower Yangtze region who lived through the Manchu invasion of the 1640's. They adopted the traditional role of the loyalist who would not serve a new dynasty, particularly what they saw as a non-Chinese dynasty. Having refused to strive for conventional careers in a society that in their view had fallen apart, they were motivated to spend their lives studying and teaching the new mathematics and astronomy while they used them to master the neglected techniques of their own tradition. They rejected the Ch'ing present not for a modernist future but to keep alive the lost cause of the Ming for one more generation. Wang Hsi-shan even avoided using the Ch'ing dating system. Despite his superb critical acumen he was the opposite of Descartes, for whom every ancient institution had to justify itself by the new criterion of clear and distinct ideas or be considered a dead relic.
If then we seek in China those for whom science was not a means to conservative ends, those for whom a proven fact outweighed values that had evolved for thousands of years, we do not find them until the late nineteenth century. Then it was people with little or no stake in the old society who became the first modern scientists. By that time foreigners exempt from Chinese law and backed by gunboats could do what they wanted in China. They constructed new institutions and new career lines let them attract and educate talented young people who had no other prospects. We can no longer talk about the encounter of the old and new astronomy. Social and political change had left nothing for the old to do. It became rare as time passed for modern scientists to be aware that their country had had its own scientific tradition. Only in the last generation has that awareness became general.
* * *
My frustrations in trying to make sense of science in China arise partly because of the many levels of human activity that have to be encompassed over such a great sweep of time and human experience. They arise partly because the European Scientific Revolution seems to call for an understanding in greater breadth and depth than its historians have insisted upon. Once we keep in mind the many dimensions of scientific change and their complex relations, it becomes less surprising that the Scientific Revolution took place only when and where it did. The process increasingly comes to resemble any historic evolution, which is always the sum of human decisions and acts, some arbitrary, some wrongheaded--in other words muddling through. We do not need to appeal to fate, determinism, teleology, cultural superiority, an inexorably unfolding inner logic, or the hidden operation of some World Spirit.
Looking at these two scientific revolutions--the one we think we know so well in Europe, and the one that wasn't what we expect it to be in the seventeenth-century China--suggests that we have a great deal to learn about the specific circumstances of each, seen in all its dimensions, before we are ready to tell the world why it couldn't have happened in other times or places.
I believe that the breakthroughs coming up in the study of Chinese science will be of another kind altogether. They will have to do with understanding in depth and in an integral way the circumstances of people who did science and technology: how their technical ideas related to the rest of their thought; what the scientific communities were--that is, who formed a consensus that certain phenomena were problematic, and that certain kinds of answers were legitimate; how those communities were related to the rest of society; how they were supported; how the responsibility of men of knowledge to their colleagues in science was reconciled with their responsibility to society; what larger ends the sciences served, that kept their laws conformable to the laws of Chinese painting and to the basic principles of moral conduct.
These are issues about which we understand very little with respect to China or to Europe. It will take much further study and reflection on both sides before the comparative history of science is ready to take off. My prognostication is that by that time we will no longer be asking why the transition to modern science did not first take place in China.
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