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The Abortiveness of Empiricism in Early Ch'ing Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Joseph R. Levenson
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

In Sung and Ming intellectual life, idealist philosophies came to the fore. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a number of Chinese thinkers, that predominance of idealism seemed a disaster, and they formally disavowed it. Is there an indication, perhaps, in the early existence of this group of materialists, that the seemingly stable, traditionalistic Chinese society had the capacity to develop under its own power, without a catalytic intrusion of Western industrialism, into a society with a scientific temper?

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Articles
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1954

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References

1 cf. Huang Siu-chi, Lu Hsiang-shan, a Twelfth Century Chinese Idealist Philosopher, New Haven, 1944 for a comparative discussion of these schools and for bibliographical references in Chinese and in translation.

2 T'an P'i-mu , Ch'ing-tai ssu-hsiang shih-kang (Historical outline of Ch'ing thought), Shanghai, 1940, 10–11.

3 Hou Wai-lu , Chin-tai Chung-kuo ssu-hsiang hsüeh-shuo shih . (Intellectual history of modern China), Shanghai, 1947, 5.

4 T'an, op. cit., 53.

5 Ibid., 33.

6 Yen Yuan , “Ts'un hsüeh pien” , in Chi-fu ts'ung-shu 1879, ts'e 275, 1.12.

7 Tai Chen , “Meng-tzu tzu-i su-cheng” , in An-hui ts'ung-shu , 6th series, Shanghai, 1936, ts'e 10, 1.11.

8 Hou, op. cit., 8.

9 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, “Chung-kuo chin san-pai nien hsüeh-shu shih” . (History of Chinese scholarship in the last three hundred years), Yin-ping-shih ho-chi , Shanghai, 1936, chuan-chi 17.6.

10 Ch'ien Mu , Chung-kuo chin san-pai nien hsüeh-shu shih (History of Chinese scholarship in the last three hundred years), Chungking, 1945, 20.

11 Ku Yen-wu , Jih-chih lu , Shanghai, 1933, I, 18. 108, 114.

12 Ibid., 121.

13 T'an, op. cit., 1.

14 Ibid., 2.

15 Ku, op. cit., I, author's preface, 1.

16 T'an, op. cit., 1.

17 Rosenzweig, Franz, from “The New Thinking,” in Glatzer, Nahum (tr.), Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, Philadelphia. 1953. 192Google Scholar.

18 Aaron, R. I., The Theory of Universals, Oxford, 1952, 25. For an interesting reference to this relation between generalization and particular instance, made by the musicologist, Donald Tovey, in terms of the musical ‘form’ and the musical ‘work,’ see Copland, Aaron, Music and Imagination, Cambridge, 1952, 63Google Scholar.

19 Lehrs, Ernst, Man or Matter, London, 1951.

20 cf. Sarton, George, Introduction to the History of Science, Washington, 1931, II, 194Google Scholar; Crombie, A. C, Augustine to Galileo, London, 1952, 11Google Scholar; Sandor, Paul, Histoire de la dialectique, Paris, 1947, 65Google Scholar.

21 cf. Nef, John U., “The Genesis of Industrialism and of Modern Science, 1560–1640,” in Downs, Norton, ed., Essays in Honor of Conyers Read, Chicago, 1953, 217Google Scholar; Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modem World, New York, 1937, 62Google Scholar.

22 Collingwood, R. C, An Autobiography, Harmondsworth, 1944, 22Google Scholar.

23 For Bacon, see Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background, London, 1950, 25Google Scholar; for Ku, see Hou, op. cit., 181, 186.

24 The example of Bacon has been introduced into the discussion not because his standing as a philosopher of science is secure, but because he gave the critique of idealism a turn toward science. He is, therefore, a fit subject for comparison with the Chinese thinkers who, like him, rejected the idealism of intellectual predecessors, but who failed to proceed in his direction. Scientific thinking has, of course, left Bacon far behind. It has been pointed out that he was notoriously wide of the mark in his illustrations of scientific method in the Novum Organum [Henderson, Lawrence J., The Order of Nature, Cambridge, 1917, 27Google Scholar], and Einstein implicitly criticizes the extremes of Baconian induction when he speaks of a ‘philosophical prejudice’—the faith that facts by themselves can and should yield scientific knowledge without free conceptual construction [Einstein, Albert, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Arthur, Schilpp Paul (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Evanston, 1949, 49Google Scholar]. But we may cite Whitehead's moderate estimate of Bacon to confirm the latter in his place as an immediately post-idealist spokesman for science, as distinct from the Ch'ing empiricists: “The explicit realisation of the antithesis between the deductive rationalism of the scholastics and the inductive observational methods of the moderns must chiefly be ascribed to Bacon…. Induction has proved to be a somewhat more complex process than Bacon anticipated…. But when you have made all the requisite deductions, Bacon remains as one of the great builders who constructed the mind of the modern world.” [Whitehead, op. cit.,. 62–63].

25 As for its specifically social characteristics, Chinese society was one in which the key to power was the combined possession of land and office in a tax-collecting, centralized state. It was a society in which the landed bureaucracy, by a combination of threat and lure, could always make abortive the revolutionary impulse in proto-capitalist elements, a society always open to rebellion or invasion but never to revolution. Intellectually, such a society was admirably served by Confucianism's traditionalism, its anti-legalist moral bias, its theory of free social mobility, and the premium it set on the mastery of a literary inheritance. Under these circumstances, science was neither socially encouraged to develop beside Confucianism (because Confucianism was both necessary and sufficient as knowledge for power) nor intellectually encouraged to develop within Confucianism (because Confucianism warred with it at almost every point).

26 Wiley, Margaret L., The Subtle Knot, Creative Skepticism in Seventeenth Century England, Cambridge, 1952, 18Google Scholar.

27 For examples, see note 7, above; “Meng-tzu tzu-i su-cheng,” Preface, lb; “Tung-yüan wen-chi” in An-hui ts'ung-shu, 6th series, ts'e 35, 8.13.

28 Tai, “Tung-yüan wen-chi” ts'e 35, 9.9.

29 Yen, loc. cit., 4.8b.

30 Ibid., 1.11b.

31 T'an op. cit., 55.

32 It is sometimes suggested that Ch'ing philological scholarship (.e.g., the efforts of Ku Yen-wu et al. to ascertain the ancient pronunciations of Chinese characters) is evidence of an indigenous Chinese commitment to scientific method. Nevertheless, however favorably Ch'ing philology may compare with the eighteenth and nineteenth-century ‘scientific philology’ of Sir William Jones, Max Müller, and other Westerners, it can hardly be seen as subversive of Confucian anti-scientism. The adjective scientific, used in connection with such studies as philology, is essentially metaphorical, and the metaphor is drawn from natural science; natural science is the point of reference which gives meaning to the adjective when it is applied in other fields. One might proceed, as European scholars did, from contemplating natural science to thinking ‘scientifically’ about philological problems, but we have no grounds for turning the metaphor inside-out, and expecting that the Chinese would have necessarily proceeded from sound philology to the point of thinking ‘philologically’ about the basic fields of natural science. If the most successful intellectual explorations of the early Ch'ing period—so successful that they have earned our modern accolade, ‘scientific’—-were, indeed, in the field of philology, which is so near to Confucian concern with texts and history, this very fact shows how far was early Ch'ing thought from any deep concern with the riddle of nature.

33 e.g., Liang, “Tai Tung-yüan sheng-jih ni-pai nien shi-nien hui yüan-ch'i (The origins of the conference to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Tai Tung-yüan), Yin-ping-shih ho-chi, wen-chi 14:40.38 et seq., where Tai's affinity with modern science is proclaimed. Liang also related the Yen-Li school to the pragmatism of James and Dewey, which was associated with the use of scientific method; see Liang, “Yen-Li hsüeh-p'ai yü hsien-tai chiao-yü ssu-hu” ü (The Yen-Li school and the contemporary educational thought-tide), Ibid., 41.3. Hsü Shih-ch'ang (1858–1939) made a more extreme statement of the eternal and universal significance of the Yen-Li teachings; see Freeman, Mansfield, “Yen Hsi Chai, a Seventeenth Century Philosopher,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, LVII, 1926, 70.

Hsiao I-shan , Ch'ing-tai t'ung-shih (General history of the Ch'ing period), Shanghai, 1927, I, 763 and 797, finds a spirit very similar to that of modern science in Ch'ing scholarship, especially in Ku Yen-wu and the Han Learning. Hou Wai-lu, op. cit., I, 165, similarly finds a strong tendency toward modern science in Ku and the Yen-Li school.