Science In China, 1600-1900: Essays By Benjamin A Elman

Essays by Benjamin A Elman

Yi Kai Ho

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9789814651127
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Distinguished historian Benjamin A Elman's collective volume on the history of science in imperial China, brings together over 30 years of historical literature on the subject. With updates to the literature and new material including transcripts of podcasts and translated interview articles, Science in China takes the reader on a journey starting in the early 17th century with the missionary efforts of the Jesuits in China, and ending with the Protestant missions in the 19th century. These two milestone encounters brought Western sciences to local Chinese scholars with great success in shaping modern Chinese science. Elman studies the interaction between Western and Chinese sciences through philological research and evidence, and treats the two encounters not as separate events but as a continuum of creative exchange of scientific knowledge and discourse.

Contents:

• Introduction — From Value to Fact: The Emergence of Phonology as a Precise Discipline in Late Imperial China
• Native Traditions of Natural Studies during the Ming–Qing Transition, 1600–1800
• Some Comparative Issues — Ming–Qing Border Defense and Jesuit Learning in Late Imperial China
• The Jesuit Role as "Technical Experts" in "High Qing"
• Western Learning and Evidential Research in the 18th Century
• The China Prize Essay Contest and the Late Qing Promotion of Modern Science
• The Great Reversal: The "Rise of Japan" and the "Fall of China" after 1895
• Rethinking the 20th-Century Denigration of Traditional Chinese Science and Medicine in the 21st Century

Readership: Undergraduates and researchers in history of science, Chinese history, history of Chinese science, philology, and history of East Asia and East Asian science.
Key Features:

• Comprehensive volume on all writings of renown East Asian historian Benjamin A Elman on the history of science in imperial China
• New material and previously published works updated with contemporary research findings

Chapter 1

Introduction — From Value to Fact: The Emergence of Phonology as a Precise Discipline in Late Imperial China

In his pioneering article “The Abortiveness of Empiricism in Early Ch’ing Thought”, which he included in his magnum opus on modern Chinese intellectual history, Joseph Levenson contended that the philological turn among Chinese literati scholars in the 17^th and 18^th century could not have developed a “scientific temper” on its own without the decisive intrusion of Western industrialism in the 19^th century. Because the empirical attitudes of early and mid-Qing dynasty classicists were not scientific in and of themselves, their critique of idealism resembled Abelard’s nominalism more than Francis Bacon’s inductive and empirical science, according to Levenson. The late imperial textual focus celebrated the Chinese classics as repositories of knowledge and thus represented a dead-end from the standpoint of development of science.¹

Levenson’s influential conclusions were drawn, however, after he had refracted Qing philological scholarship through a “Western” prism that was calibrated according to an idealized development of modern science in Europe. He argued that the use of “scientific” to describe Qing philology was simply a metaphor drawn from the natural sciences. Europeans, he claimed, had proceeded from natural science to thinking scientifically about philological problems. Consequently, we cannot turn this natural development in Europe inside out and expect that the Chinese would have proceeded from sound philology to think philologically about natural science.

The “traditions of scholarship in an age of science” are not as clear cut as Levenson presented them, however. The polemical history of Western humanism favored by Bacon (1561–1626) and Descartes (1596–1650), which Levenson uncritically accepted, has over-determined the allegedly antagonistic relations between Renaissance philology and early modern science. Levenson, unfortunately, never realized that men like Kepler (1571–1630), as well as Newton (1642–1727), were both humanists and scientists. They frequently interpreted references to natural phenomena in classical texts and used astronomy to date events in ancient history. Accordingly, humanist scholarship and science were a single pursuit, not the polar opposites that Levenson presented.²

The emergence of phonology as a key discipline during the Qing dynasty was closely tied to the triumph of precise empirical techniques of philological analysis championed by participants in the evidential research movement over Song–Ming, 1200–1600, moral philosophy. In phonology, such applications stressed the reconstruction of archaic finals through an examination of ancient rhyme schemes. In the late 18^th century, significant steps were taken to investigate archaic initials as well. Such pioneering studies established the foundations of modern Chinese linguistics and at the same time provided Western linguists with much of the necessary data and tools needed to refine earlier reconstructions of ancient Chinese phonology.

During the Song and Ming dynasties, the scholarly goal of literati was the cultivation of moral perfection. Their ideal was a life of intense and unremitting effort, a life they felt would successfully emulate the ancient sages. After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, however, this ideal was taken less and less literally. The Qing dynasty heirs of these fervent groups of Song-Ming literati were members of a secular academic community, which encouraged original and critical scholarship. For the Song– Ming scholars, the classical canon had been the repository of moral truth that transcended time and place. The reaction of Qing textual scholars against the unquestioned authority of the classics was most evident in their precise studies in linguistics, astronomy, mathematics, geography, and epigraphy. Scholars of the 17^th and 18^th century applied these fields of research to verify or controvert important elements of the classical legacy. They were dissatisfied with the unverifiable moral ideals that pervaded the Song–Ming vision of antiquity.

Relying on systematic gathering of materials that they would then critically scrutinize and in certain cases even quantify, Qing scholars combined evidential research methods with data collection and organization. The modern scholar Liang Qichao

(1873–1929), for example, has estimated that Qian Daxin

(1728–1804) recorded over one hundred items in his notation book before he attempted to shed new light on the phenomenon of labiodentals recorded in ancient Chinese texts. Qian presented his data within a systematic discussion of ancient pronunciation. Moreover, during the Qing period, there was noticeable progress in kaozheng

fields of inquiry. Such progress was possible because evidential scholars, unlike their Song and Ming precursors, stressed research topics that lent themselves to cumulative results. Accompanying this sense of the continuity of academic progress was a quest for originality.

As in the West, the history of linguistics in China presents an interesting analogy to the evolution of empirical methods of verification in the natural sciences. The development of language study and the emergence of historical and comparative linguistics are not uniquely Western achievements. Qing evidential scholars in particular established the foundations of modern Chinese linguistic science. The papers in this volume confirm the limitations in such one-sided accounts of Qing philology and Renaissance humanism. Levenson not only isolated philology from natural studies, which is untenable for both late imperial China and early modern Europe, but he also underestimated how Qing classicists, like their Renaissance counterparts, had integrated mathematics and astronomy in their efforts to reconstruct antiquity and restore its traditions of natural studies.³

Narrative accounts of the history of science worldwide from 1500 to 1800, such as that of Joseph Levenson, have been portrayed mainly through European frames of reference, even when comparative themes are stressed. Hence, even though the emergence of “modern science” in industrializing portions of Western Europe is uncontested, the contested nature of the interaction since 1550 between late imperial Chinese and early modern Europeans over the meaning and significance of natural studies remains a little-known story. Eurocentric portraits of the rise of modern science, while not monolithic or one-dimensional, usually represent variations of a single-minded historical teleology of Western European scientific “success”, and, by comparison, non-Western “failure”.⁴

Comparisons of early modern Europe and late imperial China suggest a number of ways that the comparative history of science can lead us away from such teleologies. First and foremost, historicizing the Western scientific revolution makes it possible to compare the ongoing role played by classical languages (Latin in Europe, ancient Chinese in China, and Sanskrit in India) as cultural mediums during the transition from natural philosophy to early modern science. Secondly, differential studies that wield appropriate concepts and categories for comparing precise historical situations are mandatory. In particular, the case studies provided in the papers below successfully integrate scientific contents and historical contexts as the key to moving from the local to the global and back again. A global account that is misinformed about local or regional realities will miss the mark.⁵

To paraphrase the views of Peter Winch, we must first acknowledge that as yet we do not have appropriate categories of learning that resemble the pre-modern Chinese frames for what we call “natural studies” or “ natural history”, according to which Chinese literati evaluated Jesuit scientia during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Moreover, as Donald Lach has pointed out, an analytical ordering of early modern European scholarship, such as the Jesuit scientia or Schweigger’s crystal electrical theory of matter, within the framework of modern learning is equally problematic and anachronistic.⁶

To understand pre-modern Chinese frames of knowledge for the natural world, as for early modern Europe, we should first extend our own contemporary understanding and make room for them not as a “comedy of errors” but as a plausible set of ideas and beliefs. Placing natural studies in imperial China and pre-modern Europe within their own internal and external contexts allows us to reconstruct their historical communities of interpretation and how those communities — through interaction — constructed science on their own terms. By better understanding early modern European and Chinese interest in nature, technology, and medicine, we are more perceptive about ourselves and the cultural, economic, political, and social values that undergird our contemporary versions of modern science.

For over a century, Europeans have heralded the success of Western science and assumed the failure of science elsewhere. Such views until recently preempted positive narratives about early modern Chinese, Islamic, and Sanskrit exact studies. The rehabilitation of the exact sciences in the pre-modern non-Western world is a long-term precondition for balancing the historiographical playing field. In the decades since Needham, we have increasingly acknowledged that our focus on the “failure” of Chinese science to develop into modern science is heuristically interesting but historiographically misguided. We are now forced to reassess how the history of science globally should be rewritten.⁷

The emergence of phonology as a key discipline during the Qing dynasty was closely tied to the triumph of precise empirical techniques of philological analysis championed by participants in the evidential research movement over Song–Ming moral discourses.

_____________________________

¹ Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, 1–14.

² See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800.

³ Benjamin A. Elman, “From Value to Fact: The Emergence of Phonology as a Precise Discipline in Late Imperial China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 102, 3 (July–October 1982): 493–500.

⁴ Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China.

⁵ See Michel Paty, “Comparative History of Modern Science and the Context of Dependency”, Science, Technology, & Society 4.2 (1999): 178, 184, 196.

⁶ Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Bryon Wilson, ed., Rationality, 93–102, and Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe. Volume II. A Century of Wonder, Book 3: The Scholarly Disciplines, 395.

⁷ Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India successfully recaptures the traditions of Sanskrit exact learning that generations of British imperialism disavowed. See also Christopher Minkowski, “Competing Cosmologies in Early Modern Indian Astronomy,” in Charles Burnett, Jan Hogendijk and Kim Plofker, eds., Ketuprakasa: studies in the history of the exact sciences in honor of David Pingree, 349–385.

Chapter 2

Native Traditions of Natural Studies during the Ming–Qing Transitio...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Editor’s Note
• Author’s Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction — From Value to Fact: The Emergence of Phonology as a Precise Discipline in Late Imperial China
• Chapter 2: Native Traditions of Natural Studies during the Ming–Qing Transition, 1600–1800
• Chapter 3: Some Comparative Issues — Ming–Qing Border Defense and Jesuit Learning in Late Imperial China
• Chapter 4: The Jesuit Role as “Technical Experts”in “High Qing”
• Chapter 5: Western Learning and Evidential Research in the 18th Century
• Chapter 6: The China Prize Essay Contest and the Late Qing Promotion of Modern Science
• Chapter 7: The Great Reversal: The “Rise of Japan”and the “Fall of China” after 1895
• Chapter 8: Rethinking the 20th-Century Denigration of Traditional Chinese Science and Medicine in the 21st Century
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index