Neo-Confucianism_ Scientism and Natural Philosophy in Twentieth-Century China
We now turn to consider Popper’s ‘World One’—the ‘world of physical objects or of physical states’ that played such an important role in the emergence of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century in the thought of Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton. For the philosopher Mary Midgley, ‘the natural sciences are wholly dedicated to talking about objects. That is their job.’1 Scientific theories (located in World Three) represent human attempts to explain what is observed in the external world of objects (located in World One).
For many, the quest for objectivity of judgement, avoiding subjectivity and bias, is one of the most distinctive and important features of today’s natural sciences.2 Science is universally applicable, irrespective of its geographical or sociological location of its practitioners, or their religious or political beliefs. This quest for an objectivity which transcended partisan commitments is deeply rooted in the history of early modern natural philosophy. This was especially the case in seventeenth-century England, when natural philosophy was seen as a discipline capable of bridging the religious and political divides of that period that had been exacerbated by the Civil War.3
The concept of ‘objectivity’ was considered to be an epistemic virtue in the late seventeenth century, in that it pointed to the possibility of a universal, incorrigible knowledge, which was not contaminated or tainted by partisan concerns or cultural precommitments.4 Francis Bacon’s notion of scientific self-distancing, enacted through the neutral instrumentality of experimentation, was mirrored in an increasing emphasis on intellectual accountability.5
Bacon saw experimentation as a means of ensuring objectivity of judgement, countering the potential for self-deception in all human understanding which he expressed in his ‘Doctrine of Idols’. Any such distortions in human judgement could be corrected by the unquestionable neutrality of the experimental instrument.
Yet others questioned this judgement, pointing out the inevitable subjectivity of judgement that accompanied the interpretation of instrumental observation. The British natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish rejected ‘the validity of the subject-object boundary’, while highlighting the significance of the restricted knowledge of nature that was possible for humanity on account of the location of the human observer within—not above—nature.
Cavendish’s assertion that nature cannot be wholly known arises not merely out of a confrontation with the enormity of nature’s infinite, but also out of a belief that man is inextricably a part of the nature he seeks to know: there simply exists no outside vantage point from which to view and thereby to control some object called nature.6
For Cavendish, the Baconian claim to ‘objectivity’ could not be detached from the human tendency to create, and not merely communicate, knowledge.7 It is an important point, even though it ran counter to the dominant trends in the natural philosophy of the age.
Virtuosi, according to this consensus, were those whose ideas were informed by neutral and detached observation, experiment, and critical reflection on the natural order on the one hand, and who expressed their evidence-based opinions in an undogmatic, cautious, and gracious manner on the other, aware of their own corrigibility and fallibility.8 Boyle and Newton, for example, both stressed the provisional nature of experimental findings, and believed that the only way to discover what kind of world God had created was to investigate that world empirically, using neutral tools of investigation that ensured objectivity of judgement.9
In modern natural sciences, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity primarily concerns the extent to which the various implicit and explicit biases of the knower can be neutralized or eliminated from the process of knowledge production. This point is widely accepted, even though it clearly needs nuancing. Nicholas Rescher, for example, argues that the essence of an objective judgement is that it possesses ‘a cogency compelling for everyone alike (or at least all normal and sensible people), independently of idiosyncratic tendencies and inclinations’.10 This, he suggests, means trying to identify and eliminate ‘biases, idiosyncrasies, predilections, personal allegiances, and the like’11 from our attempts to understand the world and ourselves.
There is, however, an obvious problem with this approach, in that it appears to treat pre-understandings simply as ‘bias’. To observe the world is not simply to record what is there; it is to impose or employ some implicit descriptive framework in interpreting what is observed. Observation is an interpretative process, laden with implicit theoretical precommitments.12 Scientific progress does not take place by eliminating the biasing effect of such pre-understandings, but by revising and refining what come to be recognized as inadequate pre-understandings, and replacing them with more developed understandings that are better placed to accommodate those data and experiences. Daniel Dennett develops this point further, noting that natural scientists might incorporate unacknowledged and unverified philosophical ideas in their theories. ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.’13
Yet some would argue that science is objective in a second sense, holding that the natural sciences engage only with the objects of the physical world, with the intention of achieving a rational understanding of the world. This approach, which became particularly important in the later nineteenth century, regards any form of emotional, affective, or aesthetic engagement with nature as inappropriate. The natural sciences report on nature, avoiding any affective response to nature, or any sense that the observer is participating in what is observed. Engagement with the objective world is thus held to lead to impersonal quantified accounts of nature, deliberately setting to one side any subjective engagement with the natural world—such as an experience of wonder at its beauty.14
Yet this emphasis upon objectivity simply reified subjectivity as the ‘other’, in that objectivity cannot be articulated without an opposing subjectivity.15 This artificial and unsustainable separation of the objective and subjective is out of place within a natural philosophy. The two may certainly be distinguished, as in Popper’s useful framework of the ‘three worlds’; yet this distinction is intended to allow each of them to be considered in greater individual depth, to explore the way in which they can relate to each other, and to appreciate the outcomes of this process of correlation, especially in the multifaceted human engagement with the natural world.
The natural sciences aim to make rational sense of our world, placing particular emphasis on its intelligibility.16 Especially in popular scientific writing, the scientific enterprise is articulated primarily in ways that privilege the domains of the rational or cognitive, and play down the emotional, imaginative, or affective domains.17 It is certainly true that human beings seem to have an innate desire and capacity to make sense of our world, perhaps arising from some deeper evolutionary instinct.18 Yet this ‘understanding’ cannot be framed simply in terms of logical analysis and quantification. As the history of science makes clear, this ‘logic of scientific discovery’ often involves an appeal to the imagination in generating hypotheses, and an appeal to the human sense of beauty in evaluating the scientific theories that result.19 The journey of scientific discovery does not end in a cold rationalism; indeed, this journey might not even begin with a desire to make sense of things. As many, including the poet Hermann Hesse, have pointed out, an experience of wonder is often both the emotional trigger and imaginative gateway to a pilgrimage of intellectual discovery.20
For Thomas Nagel, ‘there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint.’21 Nagel clearly thinks of a spectrum of possibilities existing between the objective and subjective, and is particularly critical of those who consider it possible for an observer to adopt a purely detached objective account of every aspect of existence. ‘We may think of reality as a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach gradually from the contingencies of the self.’22 Nagel’s point is not that there is a distinct ‘subjective’ metaphysical realm, but that the single reality of our world requires engagement and apprehension from both objective and subjective perspectives or points of view, while noting the difficulties for an external observer in understanding another’s ‘point of view’.
Nagel thus argues that there are limits to a purely objective account of the world which render it incomplete as a basis for humane life and thought. In his influential essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Nagel maps out some significant lines of concern about such an excessive objectivity, even if he does not quite manage to articulate a clear alternative.23 For Nagel, the nature of human consciousness is such that a subjective perspective on the world is proper and inevitable. The physical sciences take the form of ‘a domain of objective facts…that can be observed and understood from many points of view’. Yet a subjective perspective expresses what it feels like to be a given subject. And for that subject, this constitutes the ‘subjective facts’ that not only ‘embody a particular point of view’, but which are ‘accessible only from one point of view’.24 Nagel illustrates this point by considering how someone might enter into another person’s point of view: ‘The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him. This does not prevent us each from believing that the other’s experience has such a subjective character.’25
Nagel’s analysis is important to the natural philosophical project developed in this volume for two reasons. First, he highlights the importance of our subjective perceptions of the world for us. How the world appears to me is not the same as how it appears to you. Second, it highlights a difficulty noted earlier in exploring the specific accounts of natural philosophy offered by Kepler, Boyle, and others—namely, that these tend to take the form of personal syntheses or viewpoints whose internal rationalities are not entirely accessible to us today, in that they are individual constructions which were clearly considered plausible and reasonable to those who constructed them, as well as others who engaged them. There is clearly a cultural element to these ways of thinking, which is not self-evident or intrinsically plausible to those in a different cultural context.
Nagel’s analysis confirms both that an objective scientific knowledge of our physical world is important, and that there is more that needs to be said about that world, not least its impact on human subjective experiential worlds, and its role in catalysing and informing a quest for meaning in life, and the pursuit of the good life. Natural philosophy sought to capture this wider vision of scientific knowledge, and use it to develop practices and values which enabled meaningful inhabitation of the natural world.
Yet this broader vision of the human engagement with the natural order faced a significant challenge in the twentieth century, through the intellectual movement now known as ‘scientism’. In the next section, we shall explore this development, and how it relates to the retrieval of a natural philosophy.
Most philosophers take the view that each academic discipline has the ability to illuminate part of a larger picture, and thus exists in a collaborative relationship with other forms of knowledge. This view has, however, met with resistance from a group of writers who want to grant epistemic privilege to the natural sciences. While such views are found mainly among scientific popularizers, often accompanied by unsubstantiated rhetoric about the ‘death of philosophy’, they can also be found in more sophisticated forms which merit serious attention. For example, Edward O. Wilson acknowledges that many now regard the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities as separated ‘by an epistemological discontinuity, in particular by possession of different categories of truth, autonomous ways of knowing, and languages largely untranslatable into those of the natural sciences’.26 Yet for Wilson, the unifying agenda of the Enlightenment holds that everything is ‘ultimately reducible…to the laws of physics’.27
The term ‘scientism’ is now widely used to refer to reductive views such as that of Wilson,28 which allocate the fundamental right to discursive justification exclusively to the natural sciences. The Italian philosopher Evandro Agassi suggests that the defining feature of scientism lies in its endemic reductionism, which insists that ‘the whole is identical with a horizon which is actually partial, no matter how spacious it might seem.’29 Scientism is sometimes described using unhelpful value-laden judgements in referring to the extent to which the natural sciences can inform or determine philosophical, ethical, or religious issues. For example, Susan Haack frames scientism in terms of an ‘exaggerated kind of deference to science’, or an ‘excessive readiness’ to accept a scientific pronouncement as authoritative.30
But who decides whether such attitudes are ‘exaggerated’ or ‘excessive’? There is no extra-disciplinary ‘view from nowhere’—comparable perhaps to Henry Sidgwick’s ‘point of view of the universe’31—that allows us to determine objectively the extent to which the natural sciences ought to be involved in the deliberations and decisions of other disciplines—or, indeed, the extent to which other disciplines, particularly history and philosophy, ought to be involved in scientific reflection.
The philosopher Alex Rosenberg offers a definition of scientism, which is a helpful starting point for reflection on interdisciplinary knowledge production. For Rosenberg, scientism
is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is complete in its fundamentals; and that when “complete,” what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today.32
If Rosenberg’s view is accepted, it follows that the category of natural philosophy becomes redundant, in that the natural sciences are able to answer any valid philosophical questions relating to the natural world, and the place of humanity within it.33
Three significant criticisms can be made of scientism, when it is framed in this way. First, its legitimacy rests on what appear to be circular forms of argument. If the natural sciences are proposed as the only reliable source and criterion of knowledge, how can this claim be shown to be ‘knowledge’, rather than merely an ‘opinion’, other than by an appeal to the natural sciences themselves? The validity of an epistemic rule R is thus confirmed by the application of that same epistemic rule R. This charge of circularity could be avoided by justifying the reliability of science by an appeal beyond the sciences, drawing on the support of other disciplines in order to make a cumulative case for this belief. Yet in making such an appeal, the reliability of non-scientific disciplines and authorities is implicitly being conceded.
So how might the methods of the natural sciences be used to prove that those methods are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything? Mikael Stenmark points out that it is very difficult to devise a credible scientific experiment which would show that science determines the limits of reality, or demonstrates that other methods of investigating of the world are inadequate or invalid.34 In any case, there appears to be a category error here, in that what are being assessed are actually second-order philosophical claims about science, which cannot be verified experimentally. This suggests that the confirmation or refutation of such an approach to science would therefore have to be conducted on a philosophical, rather than a scientific, basis.35
Second, scientism, as defined by Rosenberg, fails to give due weight to the provisional nature of science. Rosenberg suggests that when it is ‘complete, what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today’. I am not aware of any compelling empirical evidence for this bold assertion. One obvious problem is the phenomenon of radical theory change in scientific history. The scientific consensus over time has shifted dramatically and often unpredictably.36 The scientific enterprise is not yet terminated or completed, and its present findings are incomplete, and in some cases possibly erroneous.37 In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University in 1879, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell warned against any complacency on this matter.
This characteristic of modern experiments – that they consist principally of measurements – is so prominent, that the opinion seems to have got abroad, that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals.38
Today’s theories might turn out to be transient staging-posts, rather than final resting places; they might be better than those they had displaced, but they are not right for that reason. The ‘received wisdom’ of the natural sciences is not static or fixed, but is rather subject to constant review, so that ‘the price of scientific progress is the obsolescence of scientific knowledge.’39 It is important to recall that the scientific consensus of the first decade of the twentieth century was that the universe was more or less the same today as it always had been; yet this once fashionable and seemingly reliable view had been eclipsed by the seemingly unstoppable rise of the theory of cosmic origins generally known as the ‘Big Bang’.40
James Ladyman, in defending a more cautious concept of ‘scientism’, points out that ‘fallibilism is integral to the scientistic spirit, and it is entirely in accord with it to say that science is the worst source of knowledge about the world apart from all the rest. The history of science teaches us that even cherished laws may be subject to revision.’41 As Arthur Koestler remarked, during his exploration of changing scientific ideas about the universe: ‘The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.’42 The history of science may thus help us reflect on what its potential futures might be.43
A third concern arises from the influential ‘critical realist’ analysis of Roy Bhaskar. For Bhaskar, ontology determines epistemology; it is the nature of an object that determines both what can be known about it, and how it is to be known. Bhaskar’s critical realism offers a helpful way of critiquing scientism as the improper imposition of a research method appropriate for one level of reality onto every aspect of the natural and social world.44 For Bhaskar, ‘the nature of the object’ determines ‘the form of its possible science’. Scientism, Bhaskar notes, denies that there are ‘any significant differences in the methods appropriate to studying social and natural objects’.45
If Bhaskar is right, scientism—whether intentionally or not—reduces reality to what can be known through the application of one specific research method. Epistemology is thus allowed to determine ontology, in that the use of one specific research method determines what is ‘seen’—and hence judged to be real. Scientism is, on this approach, blind to the existence of levels of reality that cannot be engaged by the methods of the natural sciences—methods, it must be added, which were actually developed with other research tasks in mind. Examples of such levels which are inaccessible using these scientific methods include questions of existential meaning and moral value.46
These three points, when taken together, point to the continuing importance of the disciplines of the history and philosophy of science in helping us to understand both the nature and limits of scientific knowledge, and the manner in which a revived natural philosophy might offer a fuller and more satisfying account of the place of the natural sciences in the human quest for wisdom. To live meaningfully in this world, human beings need more than a purely scientific analysis of our universe is able to provide. As Eleonore Stump caustically (yet perceptively) remarked, there is no good reason to suppose that ‘left-brain skills alone will reveal to us all that is philosophically interesting about the world’.47
Although the capacity of the natural sciences to provide authoritative and comprehensive answer to all of life’s questions has been discussed extensively in western academia, it is too easy to overlook developments in twentieth-century China, which have important consequences for any informed reflection about the scope and future of natural philosophy. Several forms of natural philosophy can be discerned within China’s rich cultural history, with roots that can be traced back to the classical period. Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism all developed forms of natural philosophy, often focusing on the issue of achieving ‘harmony’ between heaven and earth.48 Yet these did not lead to the emergence of the natural sciences in their western form,49 characterized by the use of the experimental method, and a Baconian agenda of transforming nature through an enhanced understanding of its functionalities.
In 1919, however, things changed. Following the collapse of the of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the end of the First World War in 1918, Chinese nationalists called for a rejection of traditional values—which were widely associated with Confucianism—and the adoption of the western ideals of ‘Mr. Science’.50 The ‘May Fourth Movement’ increasingly saw western science as a means of modernizing China, and enabling it to achieve its potential, particularly in the face of western cultural and political encroachment.51 Traditional Confucian values came to be seen as reactionary, inhibiting the social change and technological advances that were essential if China was to become a modern nation state. Modernization of China came to become associated with an idealist belief in ‘the power of science to modify society by using the methods, values, and ideas underlying science’.52 Gradually science came to be seen not simply as an instrument or a technique for achieving cultural and social change, but as an ideology—a way of determining values and meaning.53
The form of scientism that emerged in China in the early decades of the twentieth century had two main elements: a ‘conception of science as an all-inclusive system of nature which not only informs us of objective reality concerning the physical universe but prescribes an outlook on human life and society as well’; and the core conviction that science represented a ‘mode of thinking, a methodology which promised to be the only valid way of understanding life and the world’.54 A good example of this approach in the 1920s is found in the works of the geologist Ding Wenjiang, who advocated a scientific rationalism which restricted itself to categorization of observations of the physical world. ‘The scientific method is nothing but the division into classes of facts in the world and the search for their order.’55
In a lecture given at Qinghua University on 14 February 1923, Zhang Junmai argued that this growing trend towards scientism was destructive of some traditional cultural values, and drew on the writings of European philosophers such as Henri Bergson (1859–1941) who had established themselves as critics of scientism and positivism in opposing the overextension of science.56 Zhang Junmai’s criticism focused on the impoverishment of the subjective, which was the inevitable outcome of science’s attempt to objectify reality, and reduce this to a unified worldview. Yet these points were not made in dialogue with traditional Chinese intellectual traditions, but rather their European counterparts.
In the late 1950s, however, a traditional alternative began to emerge. ‘Neo-Confucianism’ presented itself as maintaining continuity with older and distinctively Chinese understandings of the natural world, and offering answers to important questions that could not be answered on the basis of science alone.57 The potential tensions between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’—two categories that do not easily fit into traditional Chinese taxonomies of knowledge—were of no small importance in the genesis of Neo-Confucianism.58 In the past, Chinese intellectuals had located the intelligibility of the world in the metaphysical worldview offered by traditional Chinese religion and philosophy. While recognizing that the natural sciences offered a new way of making the external world intelligible, there were increasing concerns that this form of scientism proved incapable of engaging deeper questions of value and meaning.
Neo-Confucian intellectuals did not deny the usefulness of scientific discourse as such, but rather pointed out the need to complement its ‘objective logical causal mode of thinking with an approach which promised to yield a subjective, direct, and empathic comprehension of the world’.59 This development, particularly when seen against the widespread revival of Confucianism in contemporary China,60 points to the kind of synergy between science and other forms of human knowledge that is characteristic of western natural philosophy, and the need to offer an account of the world which was attentive to both its objective and subjective dimensions.
Although the natural sciences can indeed be considered to be universal in terms of their methods of investigation and criteria of theory choice, there is a growing recognition that science is culturally embedded, interacting with other cultural stakeholders. The emergence of ‘natural philosophy’ in the West, especially during the early modern period, points to the intersections and interactions of what might now be called ‘science’ with wider social, political, and philosophical issues. The rise of Neo-Confucianism can be seen as enabling Chinese scientists to retain their cultural identity, offering a framework which both encourages the development of the sciences and recognizes the need to engage deeper questions of meaning and value that are not themselves adequately or reliably engaged by the scientific method.61
This naturally leads us to move on to consider Popper’s ‘World Two’ in the next chapter, and reflect on its importance for a retrieved natural philosophy.