Just after finishing a paper arguing that “natural history” should be translated as 自然史, today happened to be the day when Professor Liu came to speak on natural history and its methods of historiography, so I might as well continue and write a couple more thoughts.
Like historiographical programs such as Whig history, intellectual history, and social history, “natural history,” as a program of historiography, is a pun. On the one hand, “scientific natural history” can be read as some kind of “scientific chronicle” or “scientific record.” The feature of natural history lies in its emphasis on classificatory description, but not on temporal narration, especially not on constructing causal chains in linear time. Traditional history of science has always emphasized explaining scientific development, aiming to account for the staged evolution of progress and succession. “Natural history,” however, can break through this constraint: although it likewise records the many different forms science has taken and the scientific achievements of history, it does not require us to reconstruct a causally ordered chain arranged linearly according to time. Even if one wants to narrate the origins and development of some particular scientific form, and to examine its relations with other scientific forms and cultural elements, one still need not embed these relations in a one-way temporal sequence. Of course, any division of scientific forms or scientific fields is always based on the stance of the contemporary historian; a purely objective “natural” state does not exist in the first place. But all the same, the standpoint of “natural history” can, to the greatest extent possible, dissolve Whig history and restore the “natural” face of scientific activity.
At the same time, “the natural history of science” will pay greater attention to the various changes in the relation between human beings and nature (or the natural world), rather than taking only the growth of abstract knowledge or the expansion of conquering power as the thread of the narrative. Correspondingly, it will of course also pay greater attention to the study of “natural history” as a disciplinary tradition within history itself. For example, if we reexamine the Scientific Revolution through the lens of natural history, we will arrive at a new assessment of the Renaissance. The old Whig view highly praised the Renaissance, seeing it as the period when humanity emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages and moved toward reason and light. But newer intellectual history research has found that the Renaissance was not as brilliant and great as it was once imagined to be; in fact, many of the intellectual preconditions for modern science had already been laid in the late Middle Ages, and many features of Renaissance humanism seem instead to have run counter to the development of natural philosophy. Seen this way, the birth of modern science seems to have depended mainly on the nourishment of late medieval scholastic philosophy, and the role of the Renaissance becomes secondary. Yet if we reexamine the Renaissance once more from the perspective of natural history, we may discover something new—that is, the revival of the tradition of “natural history” (accompanied by the rise of naturalism and the rise of history). The significance of printing will then truly receive the attention it deserves, because it was precisely the possibilities brought by printing that made encyclopedias and “illustrated compendia” popular, greatly stimulated interest in historiography and natural history, and led to a transformation in the view of nature. The changes in the view of nature brought about by the revival and development of “natural history,” and the new relation between human beings and nature thereby formed, are not necessarily less important than the transformation in the view of nature brought about by astronomy and physics—from a “closed world” to an “infinite universe.” It is just that we have paid very little attention to them in the past.
November 12, 2010
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- Gǔ Chù2010-11-12 04:36:08
Following the thread of “natural history” is more likely to allow us to uncover the relationship between humanism and naturalism in the Renaissance. When we used to talk about natural history, we often understood it as the people who loved plants and animals, were interested in nature, and therefore conducted natural history research. But in fact, some of the earlier natural historians of the Renaissance were not very interested in examining nature itself; until Linnaeus and Buffon, important natural historians often were people who did not like going into the field at all. In fact, early natural historians were probably more interested in texts. What they mainly did was compile historical materials and turn them into encyclopedias through textual compilation. So Conrad Gessner was also a bibliographer, Dalechamps was also a classical philologist, and Jan Jonston was also a historian. We may perhaps boldly conjecture: the revival of natural history was not brought about first by “discovering nature,” or by first becoming interested in nature and then beginning to study nature. Rather, it was precisely first the interest in “history,” in historical texts, and the spirit of the Renaissance’s longing to return to antiquity, together with a new relation to texts and chronicles (the rise of printing), that produced a new demand for knowledge. In contrast to the Middle Ages, which required people to imagine and debate but did not require results, people in the Renaissance period needed a kind of typographic knowledge. Knowledge no longer meant the erudition and wit displayed in oral exchange, or the transmission from master to disciple in the academy; rather, it had to take textual and tabular form and be placed on the shelf, something widely reproduced through printing. The mere fact that illustrations could be reproduced accurately made it possible for precision in faithfully depicting natural objects to become a requirement. The changing status of books brought about a new conception of knowledge, and this conception would naturally come to demand a “natural history,” only later developing into an interest in nature itself. Thus, although the age of great geographical discoveries also belonged to that era, the earlier works of natural history did not originate in travelers’ accounts, but were more often embodied in the compilation of historical materials by textual scholars.
- 十七2010-11-15 23:12:42 匿名 10.8.0.4
I would like to know why knowledge changed from “virtue” into “power.” Is it possible to reveal the root of this transformation from the perspective of media?
- Gǔ Chù2010-11-15 23:54:29
This is a very good question; my reply would be rather long, so I might as well write a new post.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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