Last Friday (March 30), I was invited to Shanghai Natural History Museum to take part in a “reading session,” where I introduced my own Outdated Wisdom. Although it was an internal event, there were quite a few listeners—more than 50 friends from museums and publishing houses took part.
The title I set for my talk was “Outdated Wisdom and Its Contemporary Significance.” I heard that Liu Su was going as well, so I especially strengthened the Darwinian evolutionary logic in it, and won myself a remark: “Thought-provoking; I hadn’t expected it could be used that way.” I was pretty satisfied with that~
This talk was rather unusual for me, because I seem never to have expressed so strongly a certain “naturalistic” stance before—and this strong naturalism was in turn meant to defend a kind of “relativism.”
History = the Past vs. Science = the Eternal
First, let us discuss the concept of “history.”
The word “history” now has three layers of meaning: first, it refers to “things that happened in the past”; second, it refers to the documents that record those things; third, it refers to a research activity centered on empirical investigation and record-keeping.
From the perspective of etymological evolution, the most common first meaning is precisely the one that formed latest. Originally, the word history referred to a kind of inquiry, one that leaned more toward empirical knowledge and was distinguished from the philosophical tradition of contemplative reflection.
I have discussed the concept of history many times, especially its meaning in the phrase natural history. I will be brief here: what I want to point out is that it is not that there first existed a whole set of “things in the past,” and then historians went to study them; rather, it is the opposite. After historians record all kinds of “things,” they are thereby condemned to become “the past.” Things seen on paper are already no longer before our eyes. Text or other recording media give human experience and cognition temporality; records make things become “the past.”
But “science” from the very beginning has tried to become an exception—that is to say, it seems to seek something that can be recorded, yet does not become “the past.” For the ancient Greeks, this something was “nature/physis (nature).” For the Greeks, the real world was full of change: appearances were inconstant and shifting, but their “nature” was constant. The basic aim of Greek philosophy, and indeed of Western philosophy as a whole, was to seek the eternal within a changing world. They believed in the existence of eternal things, and moreover believed that such things were, to a greater or lesser degree, sayable.
By contrast, ancient China lacked this notion of a “recordable eternity.” As the saying goes, “The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way” (道可道，非常道); truth is either changing or cannot be grasped through fixed discourse. Thus throughout ancient Chinese scholarship, the two domains of science and history were never separated.
Science Also Has a History
But “the past” and “the eternal” were never truly drawn apart. In fact, people discovered that those things once recorded as “eternal” truths also ended up, one after another, becoming “the past”—and this process is what we call the “history of science.”
It gradually became more and more clearly recognized that science also has a history. During the Renaissance, scholars first noticed the “degradation” of textual knowledge. They discovered the splendid classical era and believed that the knowledge already attained by the ancients had regressed over the long Middle Ages because of transmission errors and loss; so Renaissance thinkers tried to restore the “texts of the past.” But a little later, during the Scientific Revolution, people began to believe that scholarship would continuously renew and advance, that the knowledge possessed by the great ancients was also mistaken, and that modern people needed to adopt new methods to seek the truth. This tireless quest produced enormous benefits, and humanity entered an age of knowledge explosion. Yet it was precisely the ever-changing condition of science that further emphasized its historicity—old conclusions were constantly overturned, and old knowledge constantly updated.
People discovered that recorded “science” likewise becomes “outdated.” So where, after all, are we to find something eternal? People tried to seek something eternally correct at the level of methodology, but with little effect; the claims of skeptics grew ever stronger. By the time of contemporary philosophy of science, holism and paradigm theory fundamentally denied the existence of any such “eternal records,” because any proposition in itself is really just a pile of symbols, and its meaning can only be understood within scientific activity as a whole. And science as a whole can never be fixed and unchanging.
Of course, we can believe that although science is constantly renewing and changing, it is always developing toward some eternal and unchanging purpose. The problem is: what exactly is this eternal and unchanging purpose? Can it be written down in black and white? If it can, who has the right to control that record? If it cannot, then this “eternal” thing seems not much different from God, nothing more than a faith that comforts the human heart.
But does this mean nihilism is bound to win? If we are compelled to seriously acknowledge the fact that “science also has a history,” does that mean we can then arbitrarily and capriciously decide what counts as science?
A Naturalistic View of Science
Here, I insist on a naturalistic view of science. Naturalism, first of all, stands opposed to mysticism—that is to say, it does not appeal to some absolutely transcendent thing to prop itself up. Faith is not a bad thing; I can believe in the eternal thing I have identified, and you can believe in the eternal thing you have identified. But if we are arguing about certain issues in public space, then we should not rely on things that are only my private beliefs and lack any public basis.
In short, “there is no eternal being backing science.” We must acknowledge that science has its history, and that its evolutionary process is not built upon an already fixed eternal foundation, nor does it have some already clear and unchanging goal to guide its direction.
Second, this “natural” is the “natural” of natural selection. Darwinian evolution, or evolutionism, is less a concrete conclusion of biology than, first of all, a “way of thinking,” a perspective from which to view problems. It can also be used to understand the competition and succession among different types of human activity such as religion, culture, political regimes, and so on—and in this respect, science is no exception.
When Darwinism speaks of “natural selection,” it does not mean that there is some eternal being called “nature,” replacing the earlier eternal being called “God,” to carry out selection over all things. “Nature” does not possess any purpose or will whatsoever. Nor does the so-called “survival of the fittest” mean that there exists some eternal and unchanging standard by which to measure who is superior and who is inferior.
The crux of evolutionism lies in explaining the origin and evolution of things after eliminating any role for an “eternal being.” “Nature” is not an absolutely unchanging eternal being, but rather the constantly changing “environment” relative to the one who adapts to it.
“Survival of the fittest” does not mean adapting to God’s absolute plan, or to some eternal and unchanging rule; it means adapting to the environment. The so-called “environment” may be broad or narrow, ranging from the entire biosphere to a local habitat or niche. Within environments of different scales, “competition” takes place at different levels. Species compete with one another, and traits compete with one another. The same is true of science: from the whole of human society to specific classes, regions, and academic circles, competition unfolds at different levels. Competition between disciplines and paradigms on the large scale, and competition between individual hypotheses and data on the small scale, can all be understood within their corresponding environments.
“Those adapted to the environment survive” is not itself a concrete conclusion, but rather a way of thinking or a research angle. Following this angle, we will attend to the various interactional relationships between a specific object of study (such as a species or a scientific theory) and its corresponding environment, investigate how the environment shapes and constrains these things, and ask what distinguishing features this thing has, compared with other competitors, in accommodating or breaking through the constraints of the environment. These are the “conclusions.” The perspective opposite to this way of thinking is one that enters through the “eternal being” side; this perspective attempts to find an absolute point of reference or coordinate system that transcends history and is detached from context, and then to discuss specific things against that eternal background.
Relativism
So this naturalistic view of science is first and foremost about breaking absolutism, replacing “an absolute eternal base point” with “a relative temporal environment,” and discussing the relationship between things and their relative environments rather than the distance between things and an absolute purpose.
Seen in this light, what is generally called “relativism” is really just an extension of naturalism. Kuhn emphasized the role of “social psychology” in the history of science, and the sociology of scientific knowledge emphasized the role of social relations and power structures. Saying that these “external” things affect the development of scientific knowledge itself sounds, on the face of it, like a kind of heresy; in fact, it is a more thorough naturalistic attitude. Whether social psychology or power structure, both are part of the historical environment of specific science. Examining the interactive relationship between specific science and its specific environment is precisely the direction indicated to us by an evolutionist view of science.
The “environment” is not fixed and unchanging; the environment shapes species, and species in turn constantly transform the environment. There is no absolute boundary between species and environment. The species itself also constitutes part of the environment: wolves and grass are part of the rabbit’s environment, and rabbits likewise belong to the wolf’s environment. Science is the product of its age, and at the same time the face of the age is also shaped by science.
We can study and discuss questions such as: “For a certain kind of science, which environment is more suitable for its survival?” Or, “For a certain environment, which kind of science is the ‘fittest’?” But we cannot step outside relativity to discuss “which environment is absolutely the best” or “which science is absolutely superior.”
There is no absolute truth, but neither is there absolute falsehood. A certain “eliminated” science may have its advantages in another environment; science that is now in full bloom may also become out of step in a new environment.
But this is by no means nihilism. It does not mean that whatever I say can count as “science.” Rather, it means that when I want to determine that certain things “are science” or are “more scientific,” I must specify the corresponding environment. “Environment” cannot be conjured up out of thin air; it is the real result of evolutionary history. Or, to put it differently, if you define what is “most scientific” within a purely imagined environment, the scope of its applicability is limited only to the world you have imagined.
Scientism and Species Extinction
This evolutionist view of science not only helps us understand the origins and development of the sciences that currently occupy the mainstream, it also suggests what attitude we should take toward those “outdated” sciences.
We have said that organisms and environments shape each other, and that spirit and epoch bring each other to fruition. Some sciences are “eliminated” merely because they are “outdated,” not because they are absolutely wrong. Things that have been eliminated do not necessarily have all their possibilities exhausted. Many species do not suddenly go extinct overnight; they merely gradually lose the mainstream’s territory, yet may continue to propagate in smaller and more specialized niches. As the times change, old species may generate new possibilities for survival through hybridization, migration, interbreeding, and specialization.
For example, wild rice, blue corn, purple sweet potatoes, and the like would all be on the verge of elimination in an environment where grain yield is the supreme criterion; higher-yield crops are more fit. But when grain is abundant and people’s dietary needs become increasingly diversified, these non-mainstream crops very likely gain new life.
The same applies to “outdated science”: the only thing to do is to let nature take its course. First of all, we must acknowledge that they really are “out of step with the times,” and we should not let any past science stand on equal footing with the current cutting edge. But neither is there any need to exterminate them all; once old knowledge yields the mainstream, we should not deny it a place even in the most marginal corners.
The problem with “scientism” does not lie in regarding currently mainstream scientific knowledge as the “fittest”; rather, it lies in consciously or unconsciously pushing outdated or marginal knowledge toward rapid extinction.
In evolution, the rise and fall of species succession is only natural, but species extinction at the cost of flattening ecological diversity is terrible.
History of Science and Environmental Protection
The discipline of “history of science” is precisely an “environmental protection” discipline that shoulders its mission in the context of a “multi-diversity mass extinction.” Modern history of science does not merely seek to preserve outdated science in the form of “specimens”; it also seeks to preserve for them a certain “nature reserve,” allowing outdated science still to unfold as living wisdom.
The so-called “anti-Whig” stance in the history of science simply means that we should, as far as possible, restore outdated science to an environment close to that of its own time (when it was once at its height), rather than placing all of it under the single environment of today for evaluation.
The point of a reserve is to draw boundaries: on the one hand, it keeps outdated science from confronting cutting-edge science head-on; on the other hand, it also guards against the overhunting of the outdated by cutting-edge technology. But these boundaries are not airtight. Through derivation and hybridization, we try to stimulate the possibilities in outdated science that have not yet been fully unfolded, and at the same time enable us to have more confidence in dealing with the next environmental upheaval.
Historically, there have been many scientific “genes” that were once eliminated but then reactivated in the next era. For example, heliocentrism and atomism were out of place in ancient Greece, but were brought forward again in modern times. Element theory, the wave theory of light, the relativity of space, and so on—all have risen and fallen several times in history. We can of course also hope that certain ancient forms of wisdom can still inspire future scientific work.
Of course, even if they do not contribute so directly, at the very least, properly cultivating some “reserves” can provide grounds for curious exploration and camping holidays, can’t it? When we return from the intimate yet strange “old environment” to the monotonous and familiar modern world, we can also more lucidly notice those things in the modern world that make us cherish, depend on, resent, or remain wary of them. In daily life we take them for granted, but after briefly leaving them and then looking back, we very likely spark our attention and reflection.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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