China Science Why the Scientific

China Science

Why the Scientific Revolution Couldn't Take Place in China

Ethno- or cultural-centricity can take many forms, and it is not simply in the realms studied by the "soft sciences" -- sociology, psychology, and other investigations of human action, motivation, and community -- that problems and biases from such thinking emerge. The very development of science itself is subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of cultural values, beliefs, and perspectives, and "rational thought" is not necessarily one and the same thing on two sides of the globe. This is one of the most salient points made by Nathan Sivin in his essay, "Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China -- Or Did It?," in which the author presents an argument that addresses the common criticism of modern China. Sivin makes clear that a scientific revolution on Western terms is culturally precluded in China, and that such an event was both perhaps unnecessary and fundamentally unsupported by Chinese beliefs and understandings of the physical -- and the "non-physical" -- worlds.

Even this distinction between the physical and the non-physical, or the scientific and the spiritual/religious, is a distinctly Western trait. Such binary oppositions are one of the foundational features of Western thought yet are completely antithetical to Chinese perspectives, as Sivin himself points out: "Chinese science got along without dichotomies between mind and body, objective and subjective, even wave and particle."

The Scientific Revolution in the West was defined by a split of rational thought from religious dogma, and this not simply impractical but entirely untenable in the constraints of Chinese thought and culture.

Extreme rationalists might already feel their hackles rising at this point: the need for a break between science/rationality and religion/spiritualism is because such a break is so difficult. Allowing non-empirical "facts" or beliefs to affect conclusions and perceptions leads to bad science and incorrect or inaccurate knowledge, according to the scientific view (or the Western ideal of the scientific view). Again, however, this is a Western belief that is so engrained as to be almost impossible to escape, as such binary oppositions have been a part of Western thought since the time of Plato.

Once these beliefs are so firmly entrenched in modes of thought, it becomes all but impossible to express a thought without giving into this bias -- Western languages, including English, have developed along the lines of Western thought, and thus it becomes impossible to discuss the concept of objectivity without delineating it from subjectivity, while such a distinction is (or at least was, according to Sivin) itself completely impossible in Chinese thought.

This is related to the concepts put forward by Jacques Derrida, who asserted that it is impossible to build any system of thought or any "structure" without their first being a pre-existing system or "structure" upon which to build.

Fundamental and inherently subjective (and thus at least partially false) systems of though cannot be avoided, and in Western thought this basic system consists of these ultimately false binary oppositions. This makes an understanding of a science that could incorporate objective and subjective elements a logical contradiction to Western minds.

Sivin concedes that Chinese science is not exactly the same as Western science (though this is arguably not really true in the present era), but he doesn't really put this in terms of a concession. Advances in Chinese astronomy and mathematics were made at approximately the same time they were being made in Europe, he contends, but due to a long and unbroken working understanding of how the observable world and universe worked -- even if it was more flawed than Ptolemy had achieved -- these advances did not cause or warrant the type of Scientific Revolution experienced in the West.

Other scholars of Chinese scientific history agree with this basic assessment, noting that the "germs of modern science can also be found in ancient Chinese philosophy," and as this philosophy -- which was not divorceable from science -- was known, studied, and examined throughout China's development (unlike the disruptions in knowledge that occurred in Europe) it makes sense that even major advances were not as fundamentally revolutionary in the culture.