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JOSEPH NEEDHAM AND THE HISTORY OF CHINESE SCIENCE
Joseph Needham, biochemist and historian, is ninety-two and has not yet completed the most remarkable academic career in twentieth-century England. His memorial will be Science and Civilization in China, which ranks with Toynbee’s A Study of History, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex among the monuments of liberal scholarship. Like all such monuments, Needham’s major work drives a small number of ideas about thought, politics, knowledge, and religion through an extraordinary range of material. The questions that arise are about the continuity between the vatic quality with which Needham has surrounded his interest in China since the 1940s and the vatic quality of his interest in biochemistry, science, religion, and politics before that. By the time he began a four-year stint as Scientific Counsellor to the British Embassy in Chungking in 1942, Needham had published a large scientific work and what were to be the last of his research articles. Thereafter, he abandoned science and research articles. Almost all his future writing was to be an application to science, religion, and society in China of a doctrine which had originally been applied to science, religion, and society in England. Volume I of Science and Civilization in China, which appeared in 1954, described China’s economic geography and political history, and the contacts which China had had with India, Islam, and Western Europe, up to the fifteenth century. It also announced the structure at which Needham was to aim from Volume II onward in describing relations between Chinese achievements in the sciences and the religious, philosophical, and sociological framework of Chinese thought and life. This announcement has been followed more or less as planned, though some of the volumes have mushroomed and others have been restructured in the process of composition. Since the concluding volume—The Social Background—has not been published and perhaps is yet to be written, any account of Needham’s explanatory concepts must to some extent be provisional. It is unlikely, however, that The Social Background will alter the explanatory picture of which Needham has already made many statements, not only in Science and Civilization in China but also in The Grand Titration, Within the Four Seas, and Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West. What Needham brought to China was his already stated beliefs that Europeans in general, and scientists and Christians in particular, were suffused with spiritual pride, that European religion was objectionably supernatural, and that scientific wisdom was not necessarily superior to religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom. In explaining the disagreeable fact that science had not developed as rapidly in China as it had in Europe from the sixteenth century onward, he was led on to the more congenial question, why it had developed so successfully in China before the sixteenth century. One thing that was not apparent in Needham’s public persona in the early 1940s was any special sympathy for Chinese Communism as distinct from a sympathy for Communism generally. Whatever his role as a Cambridge Communist in the 1930s, his wartime mission to China was a mission of liaison with the Chiang Kai-shek regime. It was not until Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949 that Needham made definitive judgments against Chiang Kai-shek’s perversion of the 1911 Revolution, the subjection of his “Christian democracy” to the “landowner-banker-comprador group,” and the failure of his “new fascism” to deserve support against the Maoist revolution. These condemnations then merged into the condemnations Needham was to utter over the following forty years—of the American refusal to recognize Communist China, of American bombing of North-Korean industrial plants during the Korean war, and of American saturation-bombing of South Vietnam during the Vietnam war. For Needham, all were examples of the “dominance-psychology” of the West and its aggression toward the natural development of Chinese culture. These arguments assumed that in China economic development was a foreign importation, that Communism was by no means as antipathetic to the modern Chinese as it was to English and American conservatives, and that the Chinese people, in “winning the civil war” and willing the attainment of socialism “at the earliest possible time,” had been extending the “cohesiveness,” anti-individualism, and feeling for “mutual aid” characteristic of “bureaucratic feudalism” and the historic Chinese mind. Needham spelled out the reasons for thinking of Chinese Communism as the heir to Chinese history. He argued that peasant-China and, to some extent, classical China agreed with Marx that practice and theory—or manual and intellectual labor—should be united, and that Communism was likely to adapt its theories to the “concrete conditions of Chinese society,” the absence of a “military” or “expansive” ethos, and the Confucian concern for the “juristic security of the individual.” At the same time he spelled out the reasons for admiring the Communist regime—that the rural communes of the late 1950s were trying to recapture that “social solidarity” which had been a “motivating force” in Chinese society for two millennia; that the Cultural Revolution was a natural reaction against the “capitalist tendencies” of the early 1960s, which had needed an “altruistic social morality” to resist them; and that, in the age of artificial intelligence, biological engineering, and atomic physics, Europeans and Americans had something to learn from the “saints and sages” of China. Even the Chinese interest in acquiring atomic weapons did not dent the belief Needham expressed to the Student Revolutionaries of the 1960s that “Scientism” was a “Euro-American disease” which China had never experienced, that Mao Tse-tung was a “social and ethical philosopher” rather than a “military man,” and that it might well be China’s world-role to “restore humanistic values based on all the forms of human experience.” Needham’s mother was the author of the famous song Nellie Dean; his father was a distinguished doctor and an Anglo-Catholic of Quaker sympathies. Needham himself attended the Oundle School during the headmastership of F. W. Sanderson, who was a friend and admirer of H. G. Wells, and was a medical undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1924, and, apart from ten years as Master, has been a Fellow ever since. As to the provenance of his thought and the early direction of his mind, Needham has specified many influences, among whom Gowland Hopkins was pre-eminent in biochemistry, Collingwood, Inge, Noel, Bishop Barnes, F. C. Burkitt, E. G. Browne, and Otto were pre-eminent in religion, and James Ward, Whitehead, Blake, Lotze, Mach, Havelock Ellis, Bernal, D. H. Lawrence, Carpenter, H. G. Wells, and Shaw were pre-eminent intellectually. Needham’s mixture, however, has always been his own, and has been displayed in three stages— through the two hundred or so technical papers and four large volumes which he published about biochemistry between 1925 and 1942, through the sketch he gave of the nature of religious and scientific enquiry up to 1931, and through the insertion he effected in the 1930s of an ethical, political, and sociological doctrine which had not really been present previously. Chemical Embryology, Biochemistry and Morphogenesis, and the biochemical papers were based ultimately on research done by Needham himself or by other biochemists in the two or three decades before he went to China in 1942. It was only in informal essays and books that he contextualized biochemistry, confined it to its proper sphere, and insisted that it should be conducted, indeed was being conducted, by almost all existing research workers, according to methods that were mathematical and mechanistic. These adjectives were negative and critical. They reminded “philosophically-minded biologists,” like J. B. S. Haldane, that the invention of neo-vitalism in order to explain “those aspects of animal life most difficult to deal with psychochemically” had ignored the “vast army of physiologists, zoologists, embryologists and biochemists who … had been … ‘getting on with the job’” in laboratories and professional journals, and had been right not only to ignore “teleology,” “entelechies,” and “hormic” urges but also to treat Man as a machine which had to be dealt with “under … the headings of number, measure, weight, intensity or capacity.” Needham’s ultimate conclusion in the 1920s was a criticism of the “over-specialization” of “philosophically naïve scientists.” His immediate conclusions were more constricting—that scientific activity was an “abstraction” (i.e., the result of the decision to consider experience mathematically and mechanistically), that the knowledge acquired by research since the seventeenth century had been acquired therefore by “legitimate methodological distortion,” and that laboratory research, though applicable to “any phenomenon whatever,” did not correspond to “external nature,” was neither art, religion, history, philosophy “nor an instrument of merely practical activity,” but was a Kantian subjectivation or Vaihangerian fiction—a “special … department of the human spirit” which need not in the short run be affected, as Butterfield and Oakeshott [1] were saying about history at the same time in The Whig Interpretation of History and Experience and Its Modes, by anything the philosopher might say to “explain it or to explain it away.” These conclusions—the outcome of continuous research and reflection on research in a highly successful enterprise, the Cambridge Biochemistry Laboratory—included an emphasis on both the disjunction and the compatibility between scientific activity and philosophical, religious, and aesthetic activity. They led on to the belief that the task of the future, having protected the abstraction suitable to laboratory research, was to build on already existing demolitions of Huxley’s, Tyndall’s, and Spencer’s naturalistic materialism, not by concocting “immiscible” mixtures like “Scientific Deism” or “the Religion of Science” but by protecting religion, art, and philosophy against science. Needham was an Anglo-Catholic and spent a number of years testing his vocation to be a priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in Cambridge. It is important, however, that he was a liturgical Anglo-Catholic, and that his Anglo-Catholicism did not exclude skepticism about the “direct telephonic communication with Omniscience” that he found in the “mental prisons … inhabited by the theologian and the mystic.” Needham agreed that philosophy and theology could have indirect effects on scientific assumptions. But he aimed in the first place to effect a defensive separation, denying scientific authority to “theologians … mystics and … idealist philosophers,” while affirming the existence of a vast field of thought and practice in which scientific abstraction was inoperative and Man could legitimately be understood as “Organism,” “Personality,” or “Child of God and … Inheritor of the City of Heaven.” Needham seemed sometimes to affirm that religion, art, and philosophy were merely different from science and not “higher.” At other times he adopted the view that for “theologic religion” nothing which was important “could be proved by science.” He added, moreover, that the retreat from philosophical naturalism had been matched by a retreat from objectivity in religion, as interest in mysticism had revived, the individual had replaced the Church as the focus of attention, and psychology and pragmatism had created a “more subjective standpoint” than had been possible in the nineteenth century. And since not only science but also religion had been both “subjectivated” and given an infusion of “humility” in the previous thirty years, each had become more compatible with the other in their search for that “unmoveable … reality … which … lay … behind the changing show of facts.” These propositions, elaborated with help from Wittgenstein, Holbein, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, issued in the assertions that methodological materialism presented no obstacle to prayer and worship, and that the great philosophers had not been philosophical materialists. Above all, they issued in the assertion that religious experience, though as natural to man as singing or walking, was no more “in touch with the real” than scientific experience was, that “glib” claims to familiarity with God should be avoided, and that Christianity should no more be thought of as “the final religion” than “Einsteinian physics” or “Joycean prose” should be thought of as the “final physics” or the “final prose.” For most of the 1920s Needham’s interests did not extend to ethics, politics, or sociology. He had been a volunteer-strikebreaker during the General Strike of 1926 but seems previously not to have taken very much interest in politics. Between 1929, when he joined the Labour Party, and Hitler’s arrival in office in 1933, he acquired an ethical, political, and sociological dimension in which “individualism” became a dirty word and Hogben, Haldane, Bernal, Waddington, and Levy—socialist or Marxist scientists who were enemies of Christianity—became allies. In the 1930s, Needham wrote to some extent as a Christian, to some extent as advocate of the combination of “intellectual” and “manual” capability characteristic of the scientific research worker. He also wrote positively as advocate of the philosophical account of science which he found in Whitehead and others, of the dialectical materialism which he found in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and of the English identification between science, puritanism, and social equality which he found in Winstanley and the Diggers and Levellers of the seventeenth century. These positions were interconnected in two major ways—insofar as he wished religion to turn into “social emotion,” and insofar as he looked forward to the successive layers displayed in physical, mental, and social evolution achieving an even higher level in the new types of citizen-society of the future, where the “bacterial … protozoic … coloemic … endocrinic … osmo-regulatory … vertebral … conscious and toolmaking” levels of evolutionary integration would be completed by the “socialization of the means of production” in a “cooperative commonwealth” and “world society” from which the aggressiveness, female slavery and “warped … mental states” which were obstructing Engels’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, would have been abolished. Needham anticipated Orwellian or Huxleyite hiccups, wrote feelingly about the hostility to science displayed by Karl Barth and D. H. Lawrence, and envisaged the prospect of a “scientifically stabilized stagnant class-stratified totalitarian social organism” enslaving “whole peoples … for generations … and destroying culture and learning” in the process. It was, he believed, only “ultimate” victory which was “inevitable”; but inevitable it was, whatever setbacks were being suffered in Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, and whatever damage might be done to the “great democracy” of the Soviet Union, since the “higher levels” of organization to which both science and Marxism looked forward would undoubtedly be achieved as private ownership and the profit-motive became obsolete. In the 1920s Needham had been concerned primarily to protect religion against syncretism and Victorian naturalism. By 1931 he was saying that the religious period of European history was over, that religion was in for a “bad time during the next four or five centuries,” and that the establishment of the scientist on the “semi-oracular tripod” once occupied by the priest had become irreversible. On the other hand, he was saying that, though religion would “never die,” it should be edged out of its other-worldly ghetto, should make a “flesh-and-blood” contribution to the material millennium that science had made possible, and should make it its business to resist the “tyranny” of the “scientific experience” which science was imposing on the other forms of experience. By the time he and John Lewis edited Christianity and the Social Revolution in 1935, pluralist libertarianism had been joined by a very explicit Marxism. Between 1935 and 1943 Needham defined the role of “the traditional religion of the European West” in the “coming world order.” He rejected “retrograde asceticism,” the mystical neo-Platonism to which Inge’s Plotinus had to some extent persuaded him, and the anachronistic doctrines of “verbal inspiration, eternal damnation and the magical efficacy of prayer.” He recognized that the “allegorical constructiveness” of historic theology had blunted the directness of Christ’s commands, and that feudal lords and capitalist employers had used Christ as a “social opiate” for “proletarian misery.” He also emphasized the importance which the Incarnation had given to Time and the certainty with which Isaiah on the one hand and Marx on the other [2] had agreed that God’s Kingdom could be “realised … on earth.” To realize God’s Kingdom on earth was said to be “sacramental,” and science, Marx, and the early Christians to have been so much on one side in the pursuit of sacramentality, and Fascism to be so much on the other side, that Marxism was the “only possible moral theology” for the twentieth century. Marxism alone was capable of doing Christianity’s work, it alone was “spreading comradeship, dignity, culture and happiness … to all working people,” it alone could complete the transition that Christ had implied from the religion of fear as established by priests, through the religion of holiness as established by prophets, to the religion of love as the work of the Holy Spirit of a righteous order. Christianity was as compatible with materialism as psychology had suggested, as “the Blessed Sacrament of the Mass” had made clear, and as Teilhard de Chardin was later to be praised for pointing out. In identifying itself with a “scientific ethic” it would be “taking the ‘love of our neighbour’ seriously,” setting women on an equality with men, and helping to abolish “privilege, bourgeois liberty … exploitation … private property … national wars, colonial exploitation and … the unequal distribution of goods, education and leisure” throughout the world. Needham idealized his idols—Marxism’s “regard for honesty … charity … truth … loyalty and art,” the “sighs of … oppressed creatures” that he found in the folk songs, outlaws, and Morris-dancers whom puritans and businessmen had hated, and the use which the working classes would make of the leisure of which the ruling classes wished to go on depriving them. He praised the national cultural autonomy of Stalin’s Soviet Union and distinguished not only between the “permanence” of dictatorship in Fascist states and the “transience” of dictatorship in Communist states but also between Fascist and Communist leadership as being respectively “leadership from above” and “leadership from within.” We need not be too critical. Needham was no sillier than Auden, Laski, John Strachey, Anthony Blunt, E. M. Forster, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs. But his identification of Marxism with religion does raise a question. If one asks how Needham conceived the future of religion in the 1930s, the answer is that, while more than happy for the “wonderful poetry of the liturgy” to survive the “world view” out of which it had been written, he doubted whether it would survive. Furthermore, he did not believe that existing churchgoers would be likely to welcome either the “new forms of social emotion” or the “clergy and people of the New Dispensation.” What he wanted was recognition that Christianity, so far from being a “divine revelation,” was “the human spirit … reacting to the facts of human destiny,” that it would be succeeded in time by “another form of numinous feeling” and a “new development of social emotions,” and that, indeed, as he stated in 1941, when “justice, love and comradeship” had been fully incorporated into social life, “society” would have been “sanctified,” and religion “would pass … without loss … into social emotion as such.” In envisaging the death throes of existing religion, Needham denied that the new religion would be initiated in the “armchairs of literary critics,” the “lecture rooms of academic philosophers,” or “the speculations of scientific workers interested in religion from the outside.” Even when half-suggesting that it might be initiated in the cinema and theater, or through the factory-system of post-capitalist cooperating producers, he made it clear that it would be indistinguishable from the social emotions that it would sustain. Increasingly, moreover, he pointed to similarities between his own conception of religion and the conception of religion that he described in the articles and books he was beginning to write about China. Needham had used historical examples in the 1920s and had specified the seventeenth century as of central importance for the history of the modern world. But it was not until he took Marxism on board (after 1929) that he acquired the historical framework out of which he was eventually to think about China from 1942 onward. In the 1930s and early 1940s Needham discussed two sets of historical events—the Levellers of the English Civil War as representatives of “the working masses” who had been unable to “push on” toward a “classless … or … socialist … state” because of the “inescapability” of “class distinctions” at that time, and the Renaissance, Reformation, and rise of modern science as “corresponding” to the transition from the “feudal economic system” to the “capitalist economic system.” Needham did not suggest that modern science was inseparable from capitalism and economic individualism; on the contrary he believed that it needed to be rescued from them. His argument, nevertheless, was that they had risen together, that the former could only be explained in relation to the latter, and that the apparently autonomous intellectual or religious developments which had occurred between Comenius’s “Christian universalism” and Christian Socialism were post facto reflections of the “universal process” involved in the rise of “bourgeois capitalist nationalism and imperialism” out of the “obscurantist mediaevalism” which had preceded it. Needham’s first historical writing—the long historical disquisition in Volume I of Chemical Embryology in 1931—had not been sociologically oriented and had made little attempt at general explanation. Nor, though he had cooperated with Butterfield, Postan, and others in setting up the History of Science as a serious subject in Cambridge in the 1930s, did he give any full-scale account of the rise of science in Europe. All he had done by 1942 was to explain it in passing and to add that there was a problem about modern science’s failure to emerge in China. In the 1930s Needham had been interested in China and had referred approvingly to the influence which Taoism and Confucianism had had on Leibniz, the philosophes and the French Revolution. The arrival in his Laboratory in the course of the 1930s of Lu-Gwei Djen and other Chinese research students then encouraged him to add Chinese to the languages that he had already, and gave him the idea of writing an historical account of classical Chinese science. By 1942 all of his interests were engaged, and he began, a decade before Volume I of Science and Civilization in China was published, to give accounts of its significance. In considering China’s failure to develop the mathematically-based science which Europe developed after the sixteenth century, Needham began from a negative principle —that, since the reason could not be found in Europe’s inherent superiority or China’s inherent inferiority, it must be found in historical factors like the absence of city-states, the transition which China had made to an examination-based non-hereditary bureaucratic mandarinate in the third century B.C., and the intellectual superiority and ethical will with which the Confucian mandarinate had obstructed both capitalism and the seizure of the state by the merchant class subsequently. These were represented as truths of high importance about Confucianism, about the Chinese mentality, and about modern science. It was pointed out that among Chinese religions only Buddhism was other-worldly and that Confucianism and Taoism were really “philosophies.” It was the emphasis of the latter two on this world to the exclusion of the next that was of explanatory significance, negatively because it excluded the conception of a Creator who had made the laws of nature, positively because mathematical science in sixteenth-century Europe had developed in the shadow of this conception. In Taoism, and in Lao Tzu’s and Chauan Tzu’s revolts against the “ethical rationalism” of Confucius, Needham saw similarities to Lucretius. He interpreted the Taoist insistence on “observing nature without preconceptions” and the Taoist belief in the “permeative” character of the “Order of Nature” as an intelligible parallel to Epicurean ataraxia, as a rejection of Confucianism’s distaste for manual labor, and as a hermit-renunciation based on the belief that human society would never be restored until the Order of Nature was understood. In Taoism’s replacement of “masculine” authoritarianism by a certain “feminine receptiveness,” moreover, he recognized anticipations of the modern Western scientist’s “intellectual humility … in face of Nature.” To Taoism Needham has been invariably friendly, even when its social ideal has been said to be based on pre-feudal tribalism and its intellectual connections to be with magic, alchemy, and the search for the elixir of life. The points he has emphasized is that science often arises out of magic, that Taoism is the “only systematic mysticism” which has not been anti-scientific, and that, by criticizing Confucian rationalism, it has proved that science and rationalism do not always go together. In spite of Taoism having been “at the bottom of most of the ancient and medieval sciences” which the Chinese had made their own, it was still, nevertheless, the case that it was Confucianism which raised the historical problem. Needham is not in Chinese terms a Confucian. On the contrary, he is an “honorary Taoist,” criticizing Confucianism for degenerating into “conventionality,” and emphasizing the antinomianism which he identifies as Taoism’s leading characteristic. But whereas, as he understands it, Buddhism, in spite of popular success and a revolutionary role, had always been foreign to the Chinese mind, bureaucracy and Confucianism had been the overwhelming facts in Chinese life and government for two millenia. Confucianism was not, of course, a scientific philosophy. It discouraged “interest in the world outside human society” and was concerned exclusively with the ethical judgments appropriate to man’s nature. It was a “paternalist” sociological philosophy—the “most social-minded humanistic doctrine that any part of the world had ever known.” It conceptualized ethical and sociological justice within a “feudal” (or “bureaucratic-feudal”) framework and was the instrument of a “scholar-gentry” which wished to open education to the talents. It had a “superiority-complex” which protected sedentary administrators from “artisans who did things with their hands” and responded to geographical and climatic challenges with that combination of graft, control, and cooperation which had been needed for hydraulic feudalism and the Asiatic mode of production. Throughout his discussion of Confucianism, Needham has extolled its “civil” ethos (as against the aristocratic militarism of medieval Christianity), its Pelagian sinlessness (as against European Augustinianism), and its avoidance, by and large (in spite of the self-inflicted incineration of “a few Buddhist monks”), of witchcraft-mania and the Inquisitorial desire to “persecute” for the sake of opinion. Confucianism, in other words, was neither an idealism nor a metaphysic, had no conception of a “creator God” or a “theological philosophy,” and, though liturgical, was religion only in so far as it invoked a sense of the numinous, an “asceticism” which tended sometimes toward “prudery,” and a universe which, in the absence of a Creator-God, was itself “moral.” In considering Confucian philosophy, Needham admired the “wonderful” synthesis which the neo-Confucians had effected between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the theory of integrative levels which had produced a harmoniously “organic” and “non-mechanical” evolutionary materialism in anticipation of both Darwin and Marx, and the “intrinsic logic” which had transcended the contradictions endemic in the “European” soul between “theological spiritualism and mechanical materialism” on the one hand, and between papal authority and imperial authority on the other. Confucianism, of course, reflected the sociological situation in which slavery did not exist, the widespread availability of the crossbow had put a brake on Imperial authoritarianism, and the mandarinate’s primary function had been to persuade the people to pay their taxes. In spite of a Marxist emphasis on material factors, however, the intellectual argument was put as strongly as the sociological, the place of science in Confucian, Taoist, Legalist, Mohist, Logical, and Naturalist thought was discussed at length, and feudal and post-feudal Confucianism and the fascism of the Legalists appeared as enemies of science, while anti-feudal Taoism, the “chivalrous military pacifism” of the Mohists, and the “organic naturalism” of the Yin-Yang Chia, appeared as its friends and proponents. In the battle between Confucianism and Taoism, Needham made it obvious which side he was on. Confucius had combined a revolutionary belief that education and the bureaucracy should be open to the talents with a doctrine of “this-worldly socialmindedness” which, so far as social justice could be conceived of within a feudal framework, had included a concern for social justice. But basically Confucianism had been “rationalistic” and anti-supernatural, had taught an ethical doctrine which assumed that Man was more interesting than Nature and had established Pelagianism as the orthodoxy where the Augustinianism of the Hsun Ching was the heresy. Confucianism, indeed, though ambivalent toward science, had been so far from being “theological” that “even when established as a cult, it had had no theologians to resent, as Christian theologians were to resent, the “scientific view of the world,” and was able, therefore, rather to “turn away … from … the investigation of Nature” than positively to attack it, as Christian theology was to attack it in the West. In explaining Chinese science, Needham took his stand on the primordial Taoism which had existed before its “agnostic Naturalism” had been turned into theist, supernatural ecclesiasticism. Taoism had retained the ideal of a cooperative village-collectivism which had predated private property and the “proto-feudalism” of the Bronze Age. Where Confucianism and Legalism had been “masculine, managing, hard, dominating, aggressive, rational and donative,” it had been feminine, tolerant, yielding, permissive, withdrawing, and “receptive,” had asserted that a Confucian order could not be introduced into human society without a profounder knowledge of Nature than Confucians were willing to pursue, and, in laying the foundations for Chinese chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and pharmaceutics, had amalgamated not only science, magic, alchemy, and nature-mysticism but also the search for personal immortality through gymnastic, helio-therapeutic, respiratory, sexual, and dietary techniques, as well as through shamanism, which “the masses” had for many generations preferred to the “state religion encouraged by the Confucians.” The Tao of Taoism, therefore, as opposed to the Confucian Tao, was “the way in which the universe worked.” It was mystically and psychologically preferable to Confucianism, was outside the “charmed circle” of “feudal aristocratic philosophy” and “bureaucratic literary culture,” and took an antinomian and revolutionary view of the distortions and prejudices of Confucian social philosophy. Even more to the point, its interest in science involved it in “manual work and technology” and enabled it to “bridge the gap,” which the Confucian literati could not begin to bridge, between the scholar and the artisan. In specifying the content of Taoist philosophy, Needham emphasized the “eternity and uncreatedness” of the Tao, the impartiality and universal applicability of scientific method, and the need to detach judgments of truth from ethical judgments. “Cognoscere causas” was the Taoist motto, and Taoism’s aim to prevent action “contrary to nature” through that “peace of mind which came from … formulating a theory or hypothesis … of the terrifying manifestations of the natural world” by which “the frail structure of human society” was surrounded. Taoism thus had a positive as well as a negative aspect. It not only rejected “forcing,” it also asserted the importance of “letting things work out their destinies in accordance with their intrinsic principles.” This was the root of both Taoist ataraxia and Taoist empiricism, and it issued in the claim that disregard of “causes and intrinsic principles in Nature would lead to failure.” Needham emphasized Taoism’s belief in “mutual service,” the contrast between Confucian “stability” and its own embryonic evolutionism, and its association with all the revolutions which had endeavored to “overthrow the established order for more than a thousand years.” Taoism was “of the extreme left,” was the philosophy of those who had failed in society, and maintained the memory of the “legendary rebels” who had resisted the “antisocial” practice of “accumulating wealth for private ends.” Most important of all, Taoism by origin was an organic philosophy which had the supreme merit of treating women as equal to men, of encompasssing the incompatibility between science and democracy, and of avoiding Europe’s “schizophrenia” between “hedonistic materialism on the one hand and … theological spiritualism on the other.” Throughout his Chinese writings, Needham has been as determined as Toynbee to belittle Western mentalities and to supply Chinese homilies about their improvement. He has taken it for granted that China had had to reject “dogmatic … ecclesiastical and … transcendental” Christianity when presented with it in the eighth, thirteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries and that Europeans, though stuck with Christianity, would have to give up the idea of the “visible … church” extending itself “to all mankind,” since the “invisible” Church, including Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, and many other manifestations of the Holy Spirit, probably “covered … the earth … already” even though Christians did not realize it. Needham has wished it to be known that he is neither a Comtean, a Theosophist, nor an admirer of “synthetic brews of human experience,” and that he has not been advocating “a world union of faiths” or “the reunion of the churches.” He also wishes it to be known that no one can be a “full person” without a religion, and that everyone should adopt the religious “matrix.” Needham claimed that he would have “liked” to join C. S. Lewis in making “the Christian ethic” the “guiding beacon for humanity.” But he did no such thing, not only because of the difficulty involved in disentangling Christianity’s “eternal gospel” from the “fears … and prejudices” of ages “more ignorant and powerless than our own” but also because it was with the unforced humanism embodied in all the Chinese religions, and especially in Taoism, that the Christians of the West, instead of “exalting themselves as sole possessors of all truth,” should “sit down in the lowest room” and make an effort at “greater mutual understanding.” Liberal scholarship needs ideas. But they do not have to be very sensible ideas, so long as they are applied relentlessly and fluently, and it is impossible to withhold admiration for the relentlessness and fluency with which Needham has spread an English doctrine upon the world. It is equally impossible to avoid amazement at the assumption that his very English, and rather simple, mixture of Marxism, sociology, and Anglo-Catholicism can really provide a subtle structure for so long and complicated a subject as the history of Chinese science. |
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