Chinese organic materialism and modern science studies: Rethinking Joseph Needham’s legacy

Abstract

Historian of science Joseph Needham argued in various papers and books that the philosophy of organic materialism that informed classical Chinese science not only nurtured Chinese discoveries in areas such as magnetic studies, but also obstructed the emergence of early modern mechanical science in China. Nevertheless, the emergence of field conceptions in late modern science led him to see that Chinese organic materialism could combine with mechanical conceptions to enrich late modern science. Although much attention has been paid to Needham’s historical and sociological views of Chinese science, there has been hardly any systematic focus on understanding his conception of the philosophy of Chinese science. This article explains why Chinese organic materialism not only nurtured Chinese science in the past, and hindered the emergence of modern science in China, but can also be part of a synthesis of late modern science transcending early Western science.

1. Joseph Needham and Chinese organic materialism

In his preface to the second part of the last and seventh volume of the series Science and Civilisation in China, in which Joseph Needham was involved in laying out his general conclusions and reflections after five decades of monumental work, the eminent historian of Chinese science, Mark Elvin (2004), bemoans the neglect of Needham in the mainstream history of science:

What is hard to come to terms with, almost half a century after the appearance of the first volume in 1954, is the limited assimilation of Needham’s work into the bloodstream of the history of science in general; that is, outside the half-occluded universe of East Asian specialists and a handful of experts sensitive to the decisive contributions of comparisons. For these to be useful, there has to be enough in common between two domains to make comparisons and contrasts relevant, and enough different to make such juxtapositions reveal critically distinctive aspects of one or the other. (p. xxv)

Over the more than two decades since Elvin wrote, the situation has changed considerably. The global turn in history, and particularly the history of science and technology, has increased the relevance of Needham’s achievements for mainstream history. The study of the role of the Eurasian circulation of ideas, religions, goods and people in shaping the rise of modern science and modernity in Europe is now a vibrant cultural enterprise, and no one can deny that Needham played a crucial role in this turn, beginning more than six decades ago. Much of this new work is the outcome of attempts to construct a global historical sociology of modern science and society by reorienting from Eurocentric to Eurasian perspectives (Bala, 2006; Cohen, 2011; Hobson, 2004; Huff, 2010; Joseph, 2011; Mei and Rehren, 2009; O’Brien, 2013).

Nevertheless, even Elvin forgets to mention that Needham did not only have a great deal to say about historical and sociocultural factors that could illuminate his grand question about why modern science emerged in Europe rather than in China, but also wrote much about the intellectual and philosophical belief systems relevant to answering that question. In particular, Needham saw Chinese science as inspired by a vision of nature – what he termed ‘organic materialism’ – that was sharply different from the mechanical vision of early modern science. Although he saw many of the achievements of Chinese science as playing themselves out within the framework of organic materialism, Needham also claimed that Chinese natural philosophy constituted an insuperable obstacle to the rise of modern science in China.

Paradoxically, Needham also saw early modern science as subsequently broadening its perspective to include field ideas, and with late modern science to integrate such ideas with mechanical atomic notions. It led him to argue that the Chinese organic world conception was becoming a part of late modern science, so that organic materialism and the mechanical philosophy could be seen as complementing and completing each other.

Needham’s views raise three profound concerns for contemporary history and philosophy of science that have yet to be adequately addressed:

• First, how did the philosophical orientation of organic materialism influence the many discoveries of Chinese science and technology that had made seminal contributions to modern science and technology? Did it hinder, be indifferent to or facilitate those discoveries in ancient China?

• Second, why did organic materialist philosophy turn out to be an obstacle to the emergence of modern science in China? Was the obstacle merely linked with sociocultural factors and beliefs that came to be integrally associated with organic materialism, or did this philosophy positively inhibit the turn to modern mechanical science?

• Third, do developments in late modern science make the organic materialist world view relevant once again in a new synthesis of Chinese organic philosophy with the mechanical world view? How can such a synthesis even be possible if the organic world view had hindered the emergence of modern science in the first place?

This article attempts to address these questions and consider their implications for the relevance of classical Chinese natural philosophy to contemporary philosophy of science.

2. Organic materialism as facilitating classical Chinese science

Needham considered that the natural philosophy of organic materialism promoted the growth of Chinese discoveries during the period of its dominance, especially in the development of the seismograph, knowledge of magnetism and the understanding of tidal phenomena. He wrote,

[I]t can be shown in great detail that the philosophia perennis of China was an organic materialism. This can be illustrated from the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers of every epoch. The mechanical view of the world simply did not develop in Chinese thought, and the organicist view in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers. Nevertheless, this did not prevent the appearance of great scientific inventions such as the seismograph, to which we have already referred. In some respects this philosophy of Nature may even have helped. It was not so strange or surprising that the lodestone should point to the pole if one was already convinced that there was an organic pattern in the cosmos. If, as is truly the case, the Chinese were worrying about the magnetic declination before Europeans even knew of the polarity, that was perhaps because they were untroubled by the idea that for action to occur it was necessary for one discrete object to have an impact upon another; in other words, they were inclined a priori to field theories, and this predilection may well also account for the fact that they arrived so early at a correct conception of the cause of sea tides. (Needham, 1969: 20–21)

What is clear, however, is that even if Needham appealed to field conceptions of Chinese organic materialism to explain discoveries in seismographics, magnetism and tidal phenomena, he did not show us that there is any connection between this organic philosophy and the many remarkable mechanical discoveries made in China that he so amply documented. Indeed, this dissociation is reinforced by historian of science Shigeru Nakayama, who considers that organic materialism could not have served to promote modern science. He argues that, while Western thinkers see discrete phenomena as linked by cause and effect relations grasped in terms of impacts in a well-defined framework of abstract space and time, the Chinese comprehended them in terms of resonances involving action at a distance. He considers it doubtful that such a concept of ‘organism’ in Chinese thought could ever have led to modern science. Moreover, the organic conceptions of nature that Needham saw as uniquely Chinese can, according to Nakayama, also be found in other premodern cultures (Nakayama and Sivin, 1973: 39).

To explain the anomaly of Chinese mechanical accomplishments and the apparently impoverished Chinese philosophy of nature, sinologist AC Graham maintains that theoretical and practical concerns were not brought to bear on each other in China as they were in Europe. That separation between the two precluded the integration of Chinese technological discoveries within a broader theoretical vision. Graham considers that our tendency to associate science and technology together hinders us in recognizing this today. He attributes this to our propensity to see an intimate connection between science and technology, so that the two are perceived as evolving and developing together, as the correlative mode of thinking of early magical modes of thinking and practice, as well as that of medieval protoscientific thought, became displaced by causal thinking. This leads us to suppose that the great advances made in technological discoveries in China imply that it was on the verge of modern science. It also prompts us to ask why China failed to achieve modern science, or otherwise raises suspicions about Chinese priority in technological achievements (Graham, 1989: 315).

Graham rejects both alternatives. He thinks we cannot repudiate Chinese priority in technological discoveries merely on the grounds that they did not produce modern science, but he also maintains that the Chinese cannot be taken to have been on the verge of modern science simply because of their technological achievements. He explains that it was possible for the Chinese to be scientifically regressive even though they were technologically progressive because they deployed causal thinking as rigorously as in the West when it came to practical, useful concerns that improved material welfare. But this does not imply that there would be a natural progressive development of rationality that would lead to the notion of controlled experiments to make discoveries about mathematical laws of nature to explain phenomena. Causal thinking and the rationality it promoted could not lead the Chinese to the conceptions of experiment and mathematical laws so closely associated with Western science. This leads Graham to conclude that the Chinese engaged in two different kinds of thinking when it came to practical matters and theoretical or philosophical discourse. In the former case, where the pursuit of utility was the dominant interest, they adopted causal thinking, but in the latter case, where intellectual concerns were primary, they adopted a correlative cosmology and thinking (Graham, 1989: 317).

But such an account fails to provide an acceptable answer to the question he addresses. On the one hand, he asserts but does not explain why the Chinese adopted a causal approach in their practical pursuits. On the other hand, Graham does not explain why the Chinese causal approach to practical matters, which allowed them to design, construct and implement a surprisingly huge number of sophisticated technologies over long historical periods, was not hampered by their correlative intellectual orientation.

However, in contrast to Graham, historian Floris Cohen gives a positive role to the philosophy of organic materialism in classical China in promoting Chinese discoveries. But, unlike ancient Greek philosophy, it could not pave the way to modern science. He explains this by noting that there were two different pathways of going beyond primitive thought – one taken by the ancient Greeks and the other by the Chinese. At the time those choices were made, neither path would have appeared clearly superior, and both were options well worth pursuing. The natural philosophy adopted by the Chinese was initially superior in making possible technological discoveries. The water clock developed by Su Sung in medieval China was superior to its mechanical counterpart in Europe at the time. Indeed, in many respects, one would have judged the natural philosophy of the Chinese superior to that of the Europeans before the scientific revolution. Nevertheless, there was a crucial difference: the Greek tradition had greater long-term possibilities than Chinese organic materialism. The latter ran into what Cohen terms ‘a magnificent dead end’, whereas the Greek legacy opened the way to modern science after it was restored and forged into a new synthesis. He concludes that ‘China had no Scientific Revolution because such an outcome was not contained in the developmental possibilities of an organic approach to nature in the “correlative” mode of the Chinese’ (Cohen, 1994: 475).

Cohen wrongly assumes that only the Greek and not the Chinese legacy possessed developmental possibilities that could lead to modern science. That would appear to be the case only if modern science were solely rooted in the Greek precedent. Following Needham, we now recognize that modern science also had crucial contributions from Chinese science. This suggests that elements of modern science came from both the Chinese and the Greek traditions even though neither had the resources to develop into modern science by itself. That required contributions from both traditions.

Despite their different conceptions of organic materialism in promoting Chinese technological achievements – Graham thinks it was an obstacle circumvented by Chinese causal thinking in practical matters, and Cohen considers it to have facilitated Chinese achievements for some time until it reached its ‘magnificent dead end’ – neither explains how it nurtured Chinese technological and scientific achievements.

I suggest that correlative cosmology played a positive role in Chinese technological discoveries. This becomes evident when we compare the notions of cause in Aristotelian philosophy, which inspired European science in the premodern era, and the Chinese correlative conception of causes. I propose that the Aristotelian tradition inhibits and organic materialism nurtures a technological experimental approach that promotes innovation in mechanical engineering.

This can be appreciated when we consider Aristotle’s causal analysis of phenomena. Aristotle sees all natural phenomena as shaped by four different types of causes, which he terms efficient, final, material and formal. He also takes those four causes to be ultimately grounded upon his fundamental concepts of matter and form used to analyse all processes of change. In his study, The Classical Mind: A History of Western Philosophy, WT Jones deploys the example of an acorn growing into an oak tree to elucidate how Aristotle would provide his causal analysis of the process. For an oak tree that grew from a planted acorn, Aristotle would see the efficient cause as the person who planted the acorn; the final cause would be the purpose for which the tree is being grown; the material cause would be the soil, water and sunlight needed to nurture its growth; and the formal cause is the form of the tree that exists potentially in the acorn.

Jones emphasizes that the Aristotelian view requires us to see the acorn as carrying the potential to be an oak tree and the tree as the actualization of that potential. The oak is the realization of the potential in the acorn, and the environment in which it grows merely provides the medium that nurtures that process. For Aristotle, the grown oak tree is the outcome of something essential contained in the acorn, although in a way not yet actualized (Jones, 1969: 223–225).

This Aristotelian conception of causality contrasts sharply with the Chinese correlative conception. For the latter, the oak became what it is not only by virtue what is innate in the acorn, but also by virtue of the environment in which the tree grew. It is the relations with other things in its environment that makes the oak what it is. The acorn is only one factor among many others that have to be included. The Chinese view explains the oak tree correlatively in terms of the environmental context in which it matured, but Aristotelians account for it by appeal to essential properties within the acorn. Although they are both giving causal explanations of the oak tree, their accounts of its causes are quite different. Aristotle refers to necessary causes within the acorn but treats the environment as only a facilitating factor, whereas the Chinese emphasize correlated causes in the context outside and treat the acorn as a facilitating factor (Benesch, 1993; Lloyd, 2004; Lloyd and Sivin, 2003; Shankman and Durrant, 2002).

The correlative causal approach associated with organic materialism is much more likely to nurture mechanical innovation and creativity than the Aristotelian causal essentialist approach. It encouraged the Chinese to take the path of understanding something by examining how it harmonizes and integrates with other parts of the system in which it is embedded. This is because its behaviour is explained in terms of how it fits into the larger system to produce harmony in the whole. This does not invoke some essence of a thing, or essential causes within it, but how it correlates with other things. Even if we acknowledge that there were many microcosm–macrocosm analogies in Greek thought, they were framed within the Aristotelian concept of causal essentialism rather than a relational view of causes, which dominated Chinese thought.

Needham saw this holistic orientation in the neo-Confucian philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who viewed nature as regulated by li, which is translatable as ‘principles of organization’. Needham (1956) argued that li is close, but not identical, to natural law in the modern sense (p. 484) because it includes a notion in which parts of a system are treated as fitting into the whole, showing neo-Confucianism to be ‘a scheme of thought striving to be a philosophy of organism’ (pp. 558, 567). This conception of law as li accords with Chinese organic materialist philosophy of nature, in which the regularities of nature are seen as arising from the relationships between things in nature (Needham, 1956: 518–583).

Such an understanding of a thing, not in terms of an essence within it but in terms of its relations to other things, would encourage a tinkering orientation to a system as a whole, to see how changes occur in the behaviour of one part when we alter other parts within the system. This is the trial-and-error process that we find in the scientific experimental method, which involves altering the context of an object in order to discover how its behaviour is thereby affected. It would be far more difficult to adopt such a tinkering experimental approach if we assumed that the behaviour of a thing is influenced by virtue of an essence within it.

Chinese organic materialism did not only inspire technological discoveries. It came to shape Chinese astronomical ideas that Needham considered to have influenced modern astronomy in 17th-century Europe. Many ideas associated with the heliocentric revolution in astronomical theory had been anticipated by the Chinese centuries earlier. In order to appreciate this, we have to recognize that an important astronomical model accepted by the Chinese at the time of the scientific revolution was the Xuan Ye, or infinite empty space, theory (Bala, 2006: 131–144). Although there was also concern about the movements of the Sun and the Moon and predictions of their eclipses, the theory centred on the study of the stars. According to the theory, all heavenly bodies were generated by the condensation of an ethereal substance, qi, which floated in an infinite empty space. The heavenly bodies themselves rotated around their orbits in an anticlockwise direction around the Pole Star, driven by the floating, rushing qi. Needham maintained that this theory had currency among Chinese astronomers at the time Jesuits arrived in China.

Jesuit astronomer and missionary Matteo Ricci referred to this theory in 1595 in a letter to his colleagues in Europe, in which he contrasted the European and Chinese astronomical traditions. He particularly drew attention to some of the ‘absurdities’, as he saw them, that Chinese astronomers believed. He noted that the Chinese believed in only one sky, unlike European astronomers, who knew that there were 10 skies because the planets were bound to separate crystalline spheres. Moreover, the Chinese thought that the stars moved in an empty void, unlike Europeans, who considered a void to be impossible, and stars to be attached to a crystalline firmament. ¹

What is remarkable is that the Chinese ideas seen as absurd by Ricci became part of the radical revisions of thought following the scientific revolution. Working with Chinese astronomers in their Astronomical Bureau, Ricci must have also learned how his Chinese counterparts made meticulous records of the passages of comets, the sudden manifestations of supernovae or exploding stars, and the advent of sunspots. Even when European astronomers of the time noticed those anomalous events, the events were dismissed as illusions or earthly exhalations out of regard for the Aristotelian view of an unchanging and immutable heaven beyond the lunar sphere. It is surely striking that Ricci – who was well trained and educated in the European astronomical tradition at the time and inducted into the highest Chinese astronomical circles for that reason – should list as absurdities Chinese beliefs that soon became part of modern astronomy (Ronan, 1981 (1978): 213). Indeed, this gives grounds for suspecting that Chinese ideas of a changing heaven of exploding stars, comets and sunspots, and the infinity of space, influenced European astronomy at the time of the scientific revolution. ²

Moreover, one can further suspect that Chinese organic materialism influenced the discoveries in Chinese astronomy that later became a part of modern astronomy. If heavenly phenomena correlate with events on Earth in the Chinese organic view, then there is every reason to suspect that changes on Earth would correspond with those in the heavens, an example being the tides, and this would make Chinese astronomers receptive to recognizing comets, sunspots and meteors as well as supernovae in the heavens as portending changes on Earth.

Thus, we cannot explain the scientific revolution in Europe by ignoring the impact of Chinese technologies and astronomy, both of which were shaped by Chinese organic materialist philosophy. We have to conclude that Chinese organic materialism contributed to the scientific revolution through the discoveries it facilitated even if it could not have led to modern science on its own.

3. Organic materialism as obstructing the emergence of modern science

Needham was also concerned with explaining how modern science differed from medieval science, including Chinese science, when he wrote,

[I]t is essential to define the differences between ancient and medieval science on the one hand, and modern science on the other. I make an important distinction between the two. When we say that modern science developed only in Western Europe at the time of Galileo in the late Renaissance, we mean surely that there and then alone there developed the fundamental bases of the structure of the natural sciences as we have them today, namely the application of mathematical hypothesis to Nature, the full understanding and use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrisation of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality . . . Until it had been universalised by its fusion with mathematics, natural science could not be the common property of all mankind. The sciences of the medieval world were tied closely to the ethnic environments in which they had arisen. (Needham, 1969: 14–15)

That passage is interesting from a philosophical point of view. It suggests that Needham believed that there is a crucial difference between the classical organic materialist natural philosophy of premodern China and the mechanical philosophy of modern science. It also invokes the question of why organic materialism, which nurtured science in its early stages within China, did not have the potential to make the passage to modern science directly. In particular, it raises the issue of why the modern experimental method Needham refers to, which was systematically formulated by Francis Bacon, and the application of mathematical hypotheses did not arise in China. To address this, we have to look more closely at Bacon’s influence on modern science.

Many great scientists acknowledged Bacon as the founder of the scientific method, even though he was neither a great scientist nor a great mathematician. The Royal Society of London saw in him its founding inspiration, and Isaac Newton claimed inspiration from the Baconian method. Even in Enlightenment France, the philosophes treated him as the pioneer of the inductive–experimental method. The celebrated scientist John Herschel, in his study A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy in 1851, gave him the highest accolade. Herschel wrote that, although the fallacies of Aristotelian philosophy came to be overthrown by appeal to the facts of nature by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, it was Bacon who showed the flaws in Aristotelian philosophical methodology by appealing to broad and general principles and rectifying its drawbacks by proposing a better approach to understanding nature. For that reason, Herschel (1851) considered that Bacon would be acknowledged in future ages as a great reformer of philosophy, despite making little contribution to the discovery of what he called ‘physical truths’ (pp. 113–114).

To get a better appreciation of Bacon’s (1994) influence, let us begin with his famous dictum: ‘We can only command Nature by obeying her’ (p. 43). It seems paradoxical when we take it at face value. It appears to suggest the impossible: that we should command and obey nature at one and the same time. But what Bacon was doing was referring to two different contexts in the way we relate to nature. His method of controlled experiment helps us to understand what they are. To practise his method requires us to adopt techniques to compel nature to reveal those laws that regulate natural phenomena. That cannot be achieved by merely observing phenomena as they occur in their natural contexts – it requires us to create new contexts, forged by our own artifice, that are not found in nature:

A natural history compiled for its own sake is quite unlike one collected in an organized way with the aim of informing the intellect and building a philosophy. And these two [kinds of] histories, different as they are in other matters, differ especially in this, that the former contains only the variety of natural species and no experiments of the mechanical arts. And just as in ordinary life the true personality of a person and his hidden thoughts and motives show themselves more clearly when he is under stress than at other times, so things in Nature that are hidden reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they follow their own course. There will therefore be grounds for optimism regarding natural philosophy when, and only when, natural history (which is its basis and foundation) shall have been better organized; but until that is done, hardly any. (Bacon, 1994: 107–108)

Thus, Bacon’s experimental method recommends that we study how things behave not in their natural contexts, but in the context of controlled situations that we artificially engineer. He argued that the study of plants and animals – what he called natural history – must adopt the same experimental method that had shown itself to be remarkably successful in the mechanical arts. In effect, his method promotes an approach to studying nature in which contexts devised by the experimenter displace natural contexts.

What was new and significant about Bacon’s experimental method was that it leads us to identify the universal laws that constrain nature in all the sundry and diverse conditions that scientists can imaginatively devise. It permits us to discover nature’s laws by adamantly violating the natural contexts wherein those laws normally operate. Bacon maintained that we can discover those laws only by the vexations of art – that is, by creating new experimental contexts that do not exist in nature to wrest those secrets from nature.

Bacon’s apparently paradoxical dictum that nature must be obeyed to be commanded now becomes much clearer. He was proposing that we can only have greater control of nature by conforming to the laws of nature, which we cannot violate. Moreover, although we cannot alter those laws, we can use our knowledge of them to have greater command over natural contexts. Those contexts can be freely altered by us, as we do in the experimental method, so as to bring nature into our service. In short, what can be made subject to our command are the contexts in which natural laws operate; what we must submit to are the natural laws in themselves.

But it is precisely the violation of natural contexts that Chinese organic materialism precludes. It promotes a science that seeks to operate within natural contexts even if they are tinkered with in order to make improvements in the functioning of nature. The debate between Taoist and Confucian thinkers in early China was not about whether one can violate natural contexts but the extent to which one should allow natural processes to develop spontaneously or cultivate them. Indeed, this original debate concerning our relations with nature became transformed, with the consolidation of the cultivation of nature under the agricultural order, into one centred not on whether nature should be cultivated, but on whether human nature should be cultivated or allowed to develop spontaneously. Both the Taoist and Confucian perspectives were inspired by an organic materialist vision of the universe that would have precluded the Baconian method of violating natural contexts to discover natural laws (Bala, 2017: 183–200). For this reason, Chinese organic materialism would have proved an obstacle to the emergence of modern science in China.

There has recently emerged a new approach to understanding the scientific revolution as more than a transformation in astronomical theory and technology. It is emphasized that the expansion of knowledge included many disciplines, from medicine and biology to geography and chemistry. Those changes involved not just technological or theoretical transformations but also a radical shift in the way we approach the production of natural knowledge. A strong case along such lines has been made recently by historian Floris Cohen (2011) in his study How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th century Breakthrough. Cohen accounts for the rise of modern science through the emergence and fusion of three distinct approaches to natural phenomena that he labels ‘modes of nature-knowledge’: mathematical realism, kinetic corpuscularianism, and fact-finding experimentalism. Cohen claims that the first two of the three modes – mathematical realism and kinetic corpuscularianism – are transformations of two different traditions that originated in ancient Greek science. Kinetic corpuscularianism emerged through a radical transformation of the ancient atomism of Epicurus that was popularized in Athens. Cohen sees mathematical realism as a transformation of the abstract mathematical orientation to disciplines such as optics, astronomy, statics and hydrostatics mainly associated with Greek science in Alexandria. He takes the third tradition of fact-finding experimentalism to have grown out of another transformation of a distinctive orientation to nature emphasizing both accurate description and practical orientation that emerged sui generis in late Renaissance Europe (Cohen, 2015: 102–144). ³

Cohen traces this third mode of nature-knowledge to an origin in the practical crafts evident in artist–artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci. He maintains that it was this mode of nature-knowledge that Francis Bacon transformed into fact-finding experimentalism. This is questionable. The mechanical discoveries that impressed Bacon did not draw their inspiration simply from Leonardo. They were Chinese discoveries, the origins of which were unknown to Bacon. In a famous and oft-quoted passage, Bacon wrote,

It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries. (As cited in Needham, 1954: 19)

Hence, in trying to explain the rise of fact-finding experimentalism in Europe with Bacon, we cannot simply take into account Leonardo da Vinci and ignore the crucial impact of Chinese technologies on medieval Europe.

But it is precisely the violation of natural contexts recommended by Bacon to discover the laws of nature that is precluded by Chinese organic materialism. That philosophy recommends the method of observing nature in its natural contexts, even if it allows tinkering with those contexts to discover the changes and improvements that such tinkering makes possible. It was this approach that led to the gradual improvements in technology that Chinese science made possible, the impacts of which so impressed Bacon. It was also organic materialism that led the Chinese to envision a changing universe in an infinite empty space – an idea that influenced the rise of modern astronomy in Europe, although it also precluded the mechanical conception of a clockwork universe so crucial to the Newtonian system. This explains why Needham rightly saw organic materialism as both nurturing ideas and technologies that contributed to modern science and at the same time also precluding the mechanical worldview and experimental method.

Given the impact of Chinese technologies on Bacon, despite his ignorance of their origins, it is highly likely that his radical experimental method involves a systematization of the tinkering experimental method that nurtured those Chinese mechanical discoveries subsequently transmitted to Europe. The major innovation Bacon instituted was to take the tinkering orientation further by producing novel contexts not found in nature to enable the discernment of the laws of nature that controlled all experimental contexts. Thus, it was the stimulus of Chinese technology, and its tinkering experimentalism to make mechanical innovations, which guided Bacon to his ‘discovery of how to discover’.

By contrast, the tinkering experimental method of Chinese science went beyond the passive method of observation of the ancient Greeks, although it fell short of Bacon’s method of active experimentation. Greek science worked within the context of nature as it is; Chinese science was prepared to cultivate nature by tinkering with it while respecting its overall context, but Baconian science demanded that we violate natural contexts to determine the laws that regulate nature in all contexts. And the main factor that inhibited Chinese science from moving beyond its tinkering experimental method to Baconian active experimentalism was the organic materialist philosophy that inspired it.

4. Organic materialism as completing modern science

In an early paper on mathematics and science that compared Chinese and Western approaches to knowledge, Needham noted that ‘Chinese mathematical and theoretical backwardness was clothed in an organic philosophy of nature closely resembling that which modern science has been forced to adopt after three centuries of mechanical materialism’ (as cited in Courtney and Lee, 1997: 108). This leads Nakayama to conclude that Needham was inclined to see late modern science as a synthesis of the Chinese tradition of organism and early modern Western mechanism. This makes modern science, he thought, neither Eastern nor Western. Indeed, Needham held that early mechanistic science, which originated in Europe, could not be deemed modern science, but only matured into the latter after drawing on contributions from Chinese science (Nakayama and Sivin, 1973: 39–40).

Needham’s views on the relationship of Chinese philosophy to science exhibit a paradoxical stand that has not gone unnoticed. He seems to have assumed that Chinese philosophy was congenial to the growth of premodern Chinese science, hostile to the emergence of early modern science, but hospitable once again to late modern statistical science. Strangely, even Needham himself recognized the irony of his position when he wrote,

The problem is whether recognition of such statistical regularities and their mathematical expression could have been reached by any other road than that which science actually travelled in the West. Was the state of mind in which an egg-laying cock could be prosecuted at law necessary in a culture which should later have the property of producing a Kepler? (Needham, 1956: 582)

He went on to add, ‘Who shall say that the Newtonian phase was not an essential one?’(Needham, 1956: 582). He repeated this claim by stating,

An unexpected vista thus opens before our eyes – the possibility that while the philosophy of the fortuitous concourses of atoms, stemming from the society of European mercantile city-states, was essential for the construction of modern science in the 19th century form; the philosophy of organism, essential for the construction of modern science in its present and coming form, stemmed from the bureaucratic society of ancient and medieval China . . . All that our conclusion need be is that Chinese bureaucratism and the organicism which sprang from it may turn out to have been as necessary an element in the formation of the perfected worldview of science, as Greek mercantilism and the atomism to which it gave birth. (Needham, 1956: 339)

He reiterated this point in a number of places in the same text by not only stressing Chinese philosophical ideas as valuable for the future of science, but also that science could not ‘perfect itself’ without such ideas (Needham, 1956: 288, 340).

We have already seen Needham’s claims disputed by historian of science Shigeru Nakayama. His view is endorsed by Qian Wenyuan in a chapter titled ‘Scientific philosophies: China’s past – the world’s future?’ in his book The Great Inertia. Qian notes, tongue in cheek, that Needham treated ancient Chinese philosophy as increasing in value over time, like antiques. In the past, the Chinese did not know how to develop it, so it hindered the growth of science. But now, so Needham argued, it will be resurrected to complete the science that emerged in Europe in the early modern era. To Qian, such a development would be a great irony of history (Qian, 1985: 133).

Indian sociologist of science Jatinder Bajaj would agree with him. He notes quizzically that Needham requires us to suppose that, although the Chinese had a natural philosophy and social views that were remarkably modern, they arrived at them too early to be able to make significant discoveries, as happened in the West. This was because those discoveries could only be made by following the historical sequence in which they emerged in the West. He finds such a view highly questionable (Bajaj, 1988: 59–60).

Paradoxically, Needham also thought that science today has reached a position in which we need to integrate the Chinese organic materialist vision (and its field orientation) with the mechanical and atomic views of early modern science. He argued that, since the time of Dalton, Huxley and the mechanical materialists, science has increasingly been obliged to integrate field conceptions of nature that were more consonant with the Chinese organic materialist worldview. He envisaged a situation in which the two come to complement each other. He noted that

[Science] has been obliged to become still more ‘modern’, to assimilate field physics . . . Deepening knowledge of biological phenomena, too, has necessitated a reformulation of scientific concepts in which the philosophy of organism has had a vital part to play. (Needham, 1956: 339)

But Needham thought that Chinese science on its own could have developed into modern science with inputs from the Greek tradition. In his ‘Poverties and triumphs’ chapter in The Grand Titration, Needham (1969) wrote,

I would be prepared to say that if parallel social and economic changes had been possible in Chinese society then some form of modern science would have arisen there. If so, it would have been, I think organic rather than mechanical from the first, and it might well have gone a long way before receiving the great stimulus which a knowledge of Greek science and mathematics would no doubt have provided, and turning into something like the science which we know today. (pp. 40–41)

Needham’s views on such philosophical matters may be dismissed as aggrandizing claims for Chinese natural philosophy if not for the fact that Niels Bohr (1958), a leading pioneer of quantum theory who developed the complementarity of the field and atomic viewpoints (wave–particle duality), also emphasized a similar connection to Chinese philosophy:

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory . . . [we must turn] to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tse have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. (pp. 19–20)

Indeed, so impressed was Bohr by this Chinese connection that when he was awarded the Order of the Elephant, one of Denmark’s highest honours, he chose for his coat of arms the Chinese yin–yang symbol (Figure 1). The connections between field and atomic ideas noted by Needham and Bohr raise a new philosophical question. What makes the philosophy of Chinese organic materialism so congenial to the worldview of the quantum theory?

Figure 1.

Niels Bohr’s coat of arms.

Needham answered that question, as we have seen, by arguing that the modern science of statistical regularities, presumably linked to quantum theory, although he is not explicit about that, takes us beyond the mechanical vision of 17th century science and moves us closer to the correlative cosmology that characterized Chinese thought for millennia. Moreover, Needham also argued that, among Chinese philosophical traditions, it is the Taoists who most consistently emphasize the notion of nature as a correlatively conditioned self-regulating system of growing processes. He described the Taoist conception of nature as follows:

For the Taoists the Tao or Way was not the right way of life within human society, but the way in which the universe worked; in other words, the Order of Nature . . . which brought all things into existence and governs their every action, not so much by force as by a kind of natural curvature in space and time, that reminds us of the logos of Heracleitus of Ephesus, controlling the orderly process of change. (Needham, 1956: 36–37)

Thus, Needham saw the Taoists as concerned with the way of nature that lies outside the way of life in human society and views things in nature as growing and developing in correlative dependence upon other things without human intervention. This organic correlative vision of nature is central to the Taoist conception of how we should study and relate to nature. This is most clearly expounded by Laozi in his seminal text Dao De Jing. ⁴ It led him to recommend that we can only learn about nature by entering and communing with it, but without intervening in its processes. It is important to note that his desire for communion is not merely an expression of a secular wish to leave civilization – it is also connected with an urge to identify with nature so closely and intimately that it is often seen as a sort of nature mysticism.

Taoist mysticism, however, contrasts sharply with Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic mystical traditions because it stresses communion with nature rather than withdrawal from nature. Its naturalistic orientation led historian of Chinese philosophy Feng Youlan to describe it as ‘the only system of mysticism the world has ever seen which was not profoundly anti-scientific’ (as cited in Needham, 1956: 33). Such an approach would make observation highly sensitive to the natural contexts in which phenomena arise and develop. It is quite contrary to the Baconian experimental method of studying nature by violating its contexts.

The importance of making scientific method sensitive to contextual knowledge was also stressed by philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. He argued that Enlightenment science in general repressed contextual knowledge and described the change he wished to promote to transcend the limits of the modernist vision initiated by Bacon and Descartes. He thought that those 17th century philosophers set out to frame their queries to arrive at answers that were universal and independent of context. By contrast, he saw his task as the opposite one of reversing those decontextualizing approaches by recontextualizing the questions that were their primary concerns (Toulmin, 1992: 21).

Toulmin contended that contextual knowledge was held in high regard in the premodern age by European and many other cultures inspired by their different organic worldviews, but enlightenment science marginalized such knowledge in favour of the acontextual knowledge of universal laws that early modern thinkers valued. He added that the new science of chaos and complexity has once again revealed the significance of contextual knowledge for the advancement of science. He concluded that quantum theory, gestalt psychology and ecology have begun to shift science away from the acontextual emphasis of early modern mechanical science. This makes the Chinese organic materialist emphasis on the importance of contextual knowledge obtained by working within the context of nature, rather than aggressively experimenting outside it, transcend the limitations of Bacon’s experimental method.

5. Rethinking Needham’s legacy

In the past, comparative studies of Chinese science have largely focused on why the organic materialist framework obstructed the emergence of modern science in China. Little attention has been paid to two positive contributions of organic materialism to modern science. First, it promoted the growth of scientific and technological developments in China that paved the way for early modern science to emerge in Europe. Second, its perspective can be incorporated to enrich the philosophical understanding of late modern science following the integration of field conceptions with atomic ideas in quantum theory. Needham himself emphasized these two positive contributions of organic materialism, although those who followed him have largely paid attention only to his concerns about how it obstructed the emergence of modern science.

There is a tendency to see Greek science as closer to modern science than its Chinese counterpart. This is a historical mistake, since both the Greek and the Chinese traditions made important contributions to modern science. Modern science broke away from Greek and Chinese science, although we can trace ontological and methodological continuities from both the earlier traditions into modern science. Such a view is more faithful to Needham’s legacy and, as Elvin notes, would rectify its neglect by mainstream historians and philosophers of science.

What comes out clearly is the coherence of Needham’s views on the role that Chinese organic materialism played in nurturing Chinese contextual science, in obstructing the Chinese from moving towards the acontextual tradition of early modern science, and once again meshing in well with late modern science. But Needham did not give a coherent philosophical explanation for his claims concerning the relations between Chinese organic materialist science and modern science. The explanations offered in this paper for the ambivalent relationship between Chinese organic materialism and modern science make his views quite relevant to contemporary science studies.