Abstract
Joseph Needham was the greatest and most influential twentieth-century student of premodern Chinese science. In his multivolume Science and Civilisation in China (Needham, J. & others. (1954–2004). Science and civilisation in China (Vols. 1–7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), he exhaustively documented the interplay of science, technology, philosophy, metaphysics, and Chinese culture. He posed the famous Needham Question: Why did Chinese science always remain empirical and restricted to theories of primitive or medieval type? What were the inhibiting factors which prevented the rise of modern science in Asia? He held that Chinese natural philosophy lacked entirely a tradition of formulating theories verifiable by experiment. There was no attempt to formulate ‘mature hypotheses couched in mathematical terms and experimentally verifiable’. China certainly had technology and had it in abundance, but the enormous array of Chinese discoveries and inventions were disconnected, seldom refined, and little connected to the development of science. Crucially, there was no independent ‘research’ culture or infrastructure to coordinate, disseminate, and exploit the technology. The widespread view that common sense plus experience plus technology give rise to science cannot be sustained. Needham documented at great length the internal philosophical, intellectual, and cultural factors inhibiting the appearance and growth of Western-style science in China. Needham maintains that the Chinese simply could never embrace, even provisionally for the sake of doing science, the mechanical worldview that underwrote Europe’s Scientific Revolution. But with the passage of half-a-century, philosophical criticism of the Needham project has emerged. Feng shui existed and expanded in what was, for centuries, a non-science environment, and so it was the default worldview of China and Southeast Asia.
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Simon Winchester provides a list of 300 such ‘firsts’ documented by Needham (Winchester 2008, pp. 267–277).
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In 2016 Fang Lizhi, the dissident Chinese astrophysicist, lamented this characteristic of Chinese culture: ‘We move only from “Confucius says …” to “Chairman Mao teaches us …”’ (Fang 2016, p. 15).
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The example is elaborated in Grove (1989, p. 37).
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China’s formal embrace of Confucianism began with the Han emperor Wu Di’s decree of 134 bc making it the official ideology of the Han dynasty. It remained the state ideology (religion, worldview) till the 1911 Revolution. Neo-Confucianism arose in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and became central to Chinese and much of East Asian culture and philosophy through the following eight centuries, during which time it absorbed elements of Buddhism and Daoism (Angle and Tiwald 2017; Berthrong 1998).
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Bodde’s account of Chinese language is detailed in Huff (1993, pp. 290–96).
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Stephen Angle and Justin Tiwald have published a comprehensive book on neo-Confucian philosophy (Angle and Tiwald 2017), and John Makeham has edited a large anthology on the same subject (Makeham 2010). It is noteworthy that ‘experiment’ does not occur in the index of either book. Given that experiment is the defining feature of post-Galilean modern terrestrial science, it says something about the neo-Confucian tradition that it ignores experiment.
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Needham’s own eclectic mix of socialism, Christianity, and process philosophy can be read in his Science, Religion and Reality (Needham 1925) and Order and Life: The Terry Lectures (Needham 1936/1968). For a sophisticated endorsement of Whitehead’s process metaphysics by a leading quantum physicist and philosopher, see Abner Shimony (1965).
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Qian was born in 1936, and in 1959 he completed a Soviet-type education in theoretical physics at Peking University then taught physics at Zhejiang University, having as hundreds of thousands of other interlectuals did a 10-year interlude of ‘bourgeois correction’ during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 1980 he went to the History Department at University of Michigan, completed a PhD, and depressed by Chinese realities and convinced that an open society would never eventuate, stayed in the USA.
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Matthews, M.R. (2019). Joseph Needham on Feng Shui and Traditional Chinese Science. In: Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience. Science: Philosophy, History and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18822-1_10
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