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"Ask Again" Needham's Question"
Wen | Pushi
One night in February 1938, british biochemist Joseph Needham was lying on a bed in the research room with his Chinese lover, Lu Guizhen, in his K-I room at Case College in central Cambridge, smoking a cigarette. He asked Lu Guizhen, "Can you write me the Chinese of the cigarette?" After Lu Guizhen wrote it down, he wrote the two Chinese characters of "cigarette" in his diary, a total of 22 paintings, meaning "fragrant smoke".
Needham realized that the structure of Chinese was more interesting than in English. It was the first time he had written a foreign script from a distant region, and as he wrote these two Chinese characters, he entered a completely unfamiliar world, where everything was arranged and combined in different ways.
Needham
It was a moment of epiphany. According to simon Winchester, the British writer who wrote about it, that moment "belongs to linguistics rather than eroticism." Needham immediately asked Lu Guizhen to be his Chinese enlightenment teacher, and decided to learn Chinese characters from scratch, just like a Cambridge university student who received a generalist education, and widely extended his exploration tentacles outside of his major.
As he learned more about several of his Chinese students, especially Lu Guizhen, Needham found that "our mastery of science and insight into knowledge are exactly the same." This led him to a spiritual question: Why does science only originate in the West? It is also said that it was three Chinese students who asked him why "modern science only originated in Europe" that made him think about a question he had never thought about before. This question later became a motivation for his monumental work, Science and Civilization in China (also translated as The History of Science and Technology in China).
Lu Guizhen (first from right) in England in 1937
The proposal of "Needham's Question" has triggered a protracted debate in post-reform China, which has been debated for a long time. One formulation of the question is: Why did Chinese civilization, which was more effective before the 15th century in acquiring natural knowledge and applying it to the practical needs of man, did not produce modern science in the 15th century? The second half of the question is chronologically parallel to the question "Why modern science originated only in Europe"
It has attracted a great deal of enthusiasm for discussion and research, and has also produced many hypotheses and theories that attempt to explain from the institutional, economic, social, cultural psychological, mindset, and spiritual dimensions. Whatever the degree of persuasiveness of these explanations, in our comparison with Europe, we see the peculiarities of our own culture and the collective subconscious more clearly than ever before.
Around 2000, Wu Guosheng, a scholar of Western philosophy, found that more and more people came to discuss space, time, universe, and nature with him when dealing with some colleagues in the history of science.
Previously, when he was writing The Concept of Time, he had a chance encounter with Needham's question. He read that Needham believed that ancient Chinese "science" had nothing to do with the concept of time. It made him feel compelled to answer a seemingly self-evident question: What is science? Or rather, what is the criterion for "science for science"? A new perspective emerges: after going back to the Western context and understanding the connotations, boundaries, and uniqueness of science within the framework of the Greek tradition of reason and modern mathematical experiments, can we look back at the "science" of ancient China more clearly? It turns out that the word "science" means "knowledge" in Latin.
If Francis Bacon's famous phrase "knowledge is power" expresses the pragmatic idea of "knowledge is useful" in Chinese context, in the corresponding Latin context it should be understood as science itself as a material and political force transforming the world. For the ancient Greeks, the pure pursuit of this knowledge was the training and realization of free humanity, and they regarded "freedom" as the fundamental symbol of human beings. The Greeks' understanding of "freedom" in terms of "knowledge" may be a little foreign to us. Ancient Chinese natural knowledge is completely different from Western science, more based on the I Ching and the Yin and Yang Five Elements Bagua, and has different understandings and pursuits of ideal personality.
The question that arises is: Why did modern science emerge only in Western Europe? Around 1780, there were some first signs of the "old" world jumping into the "new" world in Britain. In the less than 100 years since, the face of Europe and the United States has changed almost completely. How exactly did the so-called "modern" process develop? How to produce a "new" world from an "old" world? Why did this turning point occur in European civilization and not in China, India or the Islamic world?
Needham was in Cambridge in March 1965
Indeed, before this turning point, Europe had been culturally and spiritually ready to brew for almost three centuries. Some young Chinese scholars have traced back to the history of the European Middle Ages and the true origins of Christianity. Zhang Putian, a professor of the history of science at Tsinghua University, has single-handedly translated more than 50 books on the history of Western science, an unfamiliar field full of new knowledge. The work he did was more to explain the recent history of Western Europe clearly, to tell people what conditions were needed to produce modern science in the West.
Understanding this period of European history is actually one of the answers to the "Needham Question". Zhang Putian said, "We are easy to see the similarities between the East and the West, and we don't pay much attention to the differences between them. Seeing the difference requires deeper, philosophical reflection and exploration. To study the history of Chinese science, we should look at it more in the spirit of seeking differences while reserving similarities with the West, rather than in the spirit of seeking common ground while reserving differences."
After recognizing Western science, we also have a clearer understanding of ourselves. It is "Needham's question" that places the history of science in China and the West in such a relationship of mutual reference and mirror. As Wu Guosheng said, "Ancient China did not produce science in the modern sense of the West, not an accidental mistake, but the fate of existence." However, in the process of our continuous understanding of the West and ourselves, we are aware of the subjectivity of our own culture and expand the boundaries of the kingdom of knowledge.
Needham was with Chinese scholars and painters
On the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Needham's birth, we recall his question of the century. Over time, the "Needham Question" and his research to answer this question were questioned and criticized by the Western scientific paradigm from within himself, which was its destiny. To the Dutch historian of science H. Floris Cohen, Needham's writings are like a jigsaw puzzle littered with fragments, "almost certainly they can be roughly put together into a spectacular image, but this picture exists only in the mind of the fragment maker."
Needham's tome is more like a book on technology than a book about the scientific revolution; he makes no distinction between science and technology, and often thinks that technology is only applied science, and that science and technology, pure science and applied science, cannot be separated. In fact, if he removed the technological inventions of the inventions that spread from China to the world, there would be very little left.
Needham, Li Dafei (first from right) and Lu Guizhen talk
In the view of some Western historians of science, the dismal factual description should be that the development of Western science in general did not benefit from China's contribution, and only the Islamic world and Western Europe, two closely related scientific systems, had fruitful interactions; the concept systems related to race were practically incomprehensible to each other, and their natural philosophy was unjust. As a result, technological elements could be widely disseminated in the ancient world, while scientific elements were often not.
Beyond this academic and historian understanding, I prefer to understand in a warm way the course of this issue and its fate today and in the future. It is out of love for China that Needham has the greatest confidence in China's future. The greatest strength of the large set of books he wrote was that it recorded many of the promises of ancient Chinese history to the future.
"The myriad of sporadic, fragmented technological inventions, while not naturally belonging to the kind of culture and mindset that can produce modern science, remains a roadmap for Chinese to follow for the future." When Joseph Needham examined the ancient Chinese astrological charts in the Dunhuang Grottoes and realized that their patterns were huge, historically long, and widespread, he understood that the ancient Chinese people had been fascinated by the stars in the sky since ancient times and their thinking patterns were "as magnificent as the ocean", and they had also thought about their relationship with nature in the way that an individual faced the entire universe.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the first locomotive assembled Chinese
In his article "From the Needham Question to the Future", Miao Qian wrote that although Europe in the 17th century produced brilliant Newtonian mechanics, it was also caught in a huge conflict between the "spiritual theory" that believed that spirit was the origin of the world and the mechanistic theory planned by Newtonian mechanics; Chinese culture, because of its emphasis on the unity of spirit and matter, had never been so indigently divided.
In the era in which Newton lived, he still had a very strong belief in "existence". But in the field of quantum mechanics in the 20th century, the boundary between "existence" and "void" is no longer obvious, and the observer himself is involved—physicists have found that there is no clear line between the observer and the objective world, between the observer and the observed object, and the observer himself becomes part of the experiment.
As part of nature, our observations, and even our consciousness, have an impact on the natural world. In the 1970s, a group of physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, gathered to discuss fundamental problems in physics, hoping to find some philosophical methods and trustworthy thought paths that could be relied upon to explain some of the fundamental problems in quantum mechanics, known as the "Fundamental Physics Group." Some of the group members later abandoned scientific research projects and devoted their lives to the nature of concepts such as consciousness and measurement. One of its members, Fritschev Capra, wrote a popular science book, The Tao of Physics. To solve some of the difficult problems in modern physics, he said, it is likely that people will need to look to Eastern cultures for answers.
In April 1962, students at the Royal Military Institute of Technology made observations in class with the help of weather balloons
The fundamental difference between Eastern philosophy and Western philosophical systems is that Eastern philosophy relies on intuition beyond language and logic to understand the nature of things, which is characteristic of mysticism and is precisely the characteristic of modern physics. The wave-particle duality described in quantum mechanics—that matter can be waves or particles, depending on the way people observe them—is an inherent contradiction that goes beyond logic, and Eastern philosophy is accustomed to using paradoxical discourses to express sensations beyond language and the truth it understands.
Needham was a pioneer in the history of cross-cultural science. It was his question that aroused Chinese concern for the differences between China and the West, so that a generation of Chinese and Western scholars, especially Chinese scholars, threw themselves into it, and made a lot of comparisons between Chinese and Western cultures from the perspective of the history of science, so that finally people realized that ancient Chinese natural knowledge and Western science were not fair, and the Western scientific classification system and chronicle framework could not accommodate and bloom ancient Chinese natural knowledge as a whole, they were heterogeneous and differently constructed. This is the picture of the historical path that the puzzle unfolds in the 21st century more than half a century after Needham asked his question.
Needham in the lab
Rather than gradually recognizing that "Needham's Question" is a pseudo-question, it leads us to cognitive breakthrough and transcend itself, and finally recognizes both the uniqueness of Chinese culture and the unique human cultural phenomenon that originated in Europe, rooted in the pursuit and cultivation of free human nature.
And all of this stems from Needham's love for China, from his desire to understand China and to place the then marginalized, destroyed and suffering Eastern civilization on an equal footing with European civilization. It seems to me that it is this motivation that drives the question, giving it its own structure and destiny, thus making the solution to it a historical journey that opens up cognition and brings us closer to truths that come with time.
In 1948, In a writing project for Cambridge University Press, Needham said he would write a book to answer his questions. In the end, the quest and answer to this question expanded to become a huge plan of seven volumes. The English name of this large set of books is Science and Civilisation in China, which is currently translated in China as The History of Science and Technology in China. Perhaps in the future, we can translate it into "Chinese Science and Civilization" according to the original meaning of English. I suppose this is also Needham's wish to write this big book. As Zhang Putian said: "The history of science is by no means a footnote to science, and people with a heart will find out the mysteries of history and read the true meaning of thought from these works."
Cover animation design: Huang Gang
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Highlights from this issue
Ask "Needham's Question" (Puss)
"Needham's Question": Birth and Destiny (Pushi)
The Historical Path of a Puzzle (Pushe)
After Needham, what kind of comparative history of science do we need? (Chen Lu)
A list of books on the history of science (Xue Wei)
From "Needham's Question" to the Future Question (Miao Qian)
Needham Institute: Cross-Cultural Inheritance (Zhao Jingyi)
Current Events: Will "Trumpism" Retire After the U.S. Election? (Liu Yi)
Survey: How to become the "ideal zoo"? (Wang Shan)
Interview: Bai Qianshen: China and the World in the Art of Calligraphy (Li Jing)
Market Analysis: Why Regulate Online Small Loans? (Xie Jiu)
Culture: A Long Discussion: The Right to Rebuild the Wooden Pagoda of Ying County (Zhang Xingyun)
Interview: We look for others, others may also be looking for us (Sun Ruoxi)
TV: Mature Divorce (Kasson)
TV: Middle-aged Anxiety at Vanity Fair (Zhang Yuehan)
Play: Journey to the World with Shakespeare (Anne)
Image: Where do you think you came from? (Zhang Yuling)
Design: Growing up with artificial intelligence (Zhong heyan)
Fashion: Retro Game Trend (Yang Tan)
Xing Haiyang: Snack food is not "leisure"
Yue Yuan: Coexistence with the new crown virus
Bu Jian: Engagement and negotiation
Zhang Bin: The old case is slightly lan
Song Xiaojun: She was the first senior US defense officer to "stare" at China
In the 1950s, the famous British scholar Joseph Needham proposed a topic that aroused worldwide discussion: China made important contributions to the development of human science and technology in ancient times, why did the modern scientific and industrial revolution not take place in China? In the opinion of economist Lin Yifu, "The scientific revolution must first have people who are curious and very perceptive about natural phenomena, this trait is innate to people, in addition, it also needs the ability to be verified through the construction of mathematical models and the experimentation of laboratory systems. ”
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