I previously wrote “Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Thoughts on Liu Huajie’s Lecture,” where I briefly raised this idea. I noted that although what I call natural history as a historiographical program differs from Liu Huajie’s “historiographical program of natural history” only in translation (I argue that Natural History should be translated as “自然史” rather than the more usual “博物学”), my conception of this way of writing history is quite different from Liu’s. Recently I chatted again with my student Wang Liang about related topics, and then I saw a conversation record between Liu and Jiang Xiaoyuan, Liu Bing, and the others about “the good should be attributed to natural history.” That made me want to write something more about it.
Teacher Liu said:
I have long been considering another supplementary path: the historiographical program of natural history, or what might be called the natural history approach to the historiography of science. … Why think of natural history? There are many reasons; I discuss some of them in my article in the Journal of Peking University, “The Mathematization of Nature, the Crisis of Science, and Natural History.” Here I would like to begin with a small matter: the words naturalist and scientist. The former has existed at least since the seventeenth century, whereas the latter did not appear until the nineteenth century. In terms of the human business of dealing with nature and understanding the world, the occupation of naturalist had long existed, whereas scientist was a rather late profession. Natural history is by no means a field monopolized by the West. You may be able to say that nowhere lacks scientists, but it is hard to say that nowhere lacks naturalists.
I have heard Teacher Liu’s piece on “science crisis and natural history,” or rather his lecture in which he dragged in Husserl to promote natural history. As he himself also said, invoking Husserl’s theory of the crisis of science was “putting on a tiger’s skin to wave the big flag.” Did Husserl really mean that? I’m afraid clearly not. This way of handling intellectual resources is no accident; it also reflects a feature of Liu’s— and at times Wu’s— promotion of natural history: taking all kinds of demons and spirits and putting them to work for me, gathering together whatever is advantageous to the promotion of natural history. Thus the book edited by Jiang Xiaoyuan straightforwardly and candidly took the title “The Good Should Be Attributed to Natural History.”
This phrase should come from the famous saying of Teacher Tian Song: “The good should be attributed to science, the bad to the devil.” That line was meant to satirize the modern scientism that assigns all utterly excellent qualities to science, while excluding the parts it dislikes from science—attributing them, for example, to personal psychology, the seductions of religion, the shackles of tradition, and so on. Through this kind of beautification, the scientific history that gets told becomes a heroic history in which light keeps defeating darkness. This kind of “Whig history” not only produces arbitrariness and haste in historiography, but also fosters a superstition about “science,” as though science were supremely good, perfect, and omnipotent. It is as if science has always been able—and will always be able—to defeat any enemy and solve every problem.
And Liu and the others’ “the good should be attributed to natural history,” in a certain sense, merely replaces science with natural history, still superstitiously believing in its power in a one-sided way. Although Liu and others do not deny verbally that natural history is imperfect—for instance, Liu may cite examples of how naturalists in the colonial era cruelly destroyed local ecologies—such reflection at this level is not considered profound. Traditional Whig history of science likewise allows us to cite many examples of scientists’ bad conduct, yet “science” is rarely taken as a whole to be held to account and critically examined. In my view, Liu and the others likewise lack reflection on “natural history” itself; they are merely talking about natural history as having this or that feature, and these features are also idealized rather than historically investigated.
The passage quoted above is worth careful reflection and examination. Liu says that the word naturalist existed in the seventeenth century, whereas scientist did not appear until the nineteenth century. He then concludes that the occupation of naturalist had long existed, while scientist was a rather late profession. But we quickly discover that, comparing the seventeenth century with the nineteenth, this “rather” is really not all that much at all—so why, before that for so many centuries, was there no word encompassing “naturalists”? One should know that the word scientist has a predecessor, namely “philosopher” or “natural philosopher,” and that predecessor goes much further back. So where is the predecessor of naturalist (I tend to translate it as natural scholar, naturalist, or natural philosopher)? Moreover, specific types of scientists, such as chemists, astronomers, mathematicians, and so on, had already existed long before; but under naturalist, what do we find? The etymologies of zoologist and botanist are actually even later than naturalist! (According to etymonline)
Although the word scientist, and even the word science itself, are relatively recent, when we trace history backward there is nevertheless a fairly clear line of development. Later science did indeed inherit and bring together earlier disciplinary traditions such as mathematics and astronomy, so we can tell a relatively complete story of the causes and effects of an entire “history of Western science.” But so-called “natural history” not only lacks the concept itself, its lines of disciplinary inheritance are also very unclear; how, then, could one possibly tell a complete “history of natural science” at all?
If there is no place that lacks naturalists, and if the occupation of natural history has existed long ago, then why has no clear concept or line of inheritance formed over thousands of years? The answer can only be that the idea that “natural history” is everywhere is fundamentally nothing but a wishful illusion, a Whiggish contrivance—much like classifying Mozi as a scientist. We can indeed seem to find many “naturalists” in antiquity, but how reasonable this treatment really is remains highly questionable.
Who exactly counts as a naturalist? Which works count as works of natural history? These are the first questions that any so-called “historiographical program of natural history” must face.
The reason one fantasizes that “natural history exists in antiquity and modern times, in China and abroad; you can find naturalists everywhere” is probably based on a basic confusion: namely, that natural knowledge is important and indispensable, so natural history must also be indispensable. But let us think about it: is “language” important or not? Yet “linguistics” is a modern concept. Do people everywhere have to do arithmetic? But “mathematics” in the Western sense does not exist everywhere.
People anywhere, so long as they live, must know something about concrete things; they must know their names and properties. We now call these natural-historical kinds of knowledge, and that is not wrong. But this does not mean that natural history and “natural-historical knowledge” are equally everywhere. It is like how we now regard how to do arithmetic or how to calculate area as mathematical knowledge, and we believe every people has similar knowledge—but to say that mathematics is everywhere is another matter. Even if we broaden the concept of mathematics and say that every people has its own mathematics, we must still bear in mind its plurality: this mathematics is not that mathematics. For example, China does not have an academic tradition or category of knowledge corresponding to Western mathematics. Even if we can extract from Chinese traditions of arithmetic and numerological technique some achievements corresponding to Western mathematics, Western mathematics and Chinese arithmetic or numerology are two very different things. This is also one reason I insist that “Natural History” should be translated as “自然史”: to remind us that ancient China simply did not have anything corresponding to “natural history.”
If one is to undertake the so-called historiographical program of natural history, one must first carefully reflect on what exactly “natural history” is. This involves the question of what counts as “knowledge” in the first place, and how one is to count as a “discipline.”
The term “natural history” is comparatively clear and straightforward—it is a historical study of natural things. First, it is research directed at natural things; although it also extends to the classification and description of human-made objects, its basic object is the natural world. Second, it is historical study, that is, empirical, descriptive, concrete research, rather than philosophical, transcendental, speculative, abstract research.
Thus, the possibility of natural history as a discipline first depends on the concept of “nature,” which involves the opening up of the realm of immanence—namely, concern for and interest in the “nature” of things—and then also involves the division between nature and the humanities, with the “natural world” becoming a distinct field of study. Second, it involves the establishment of “historical study.” According to Plato’s conception of knowledge alone, historical knowledge simply does not qualify as knowledge—such empirical, concrete, mundane, and often temporal description and record in the eyes of Platonism probably does not amount to “knowledge” at all, and historians and poets are one kind of person. Thus, within the Western tradition, “natural history” is rooted both in that philosophical tradition—which opened up the domain of immanence and stimulated people’s interest in seeking knowledge of “the things themselves”—and in a certain orientation that has gone its own way, separate from the path of “philosophy.”
In ancient China, first of all, there was never truly formed a concept of “nature” standing opposed to human beings; therefore the “natural world” never constituted an independent object of research. Of course, people did study scenery, flowers and birds, grasses and trees, and so on, but their interest was in no sense an inquiry into the nature of things; it was always out of concern for the human world, and often related to concerns with land, literature and art, and medicine.
Another kind of research interest was not at all in those things themselves, but in research motivated by an interest in textual knowledge. In this respect, ancient China and the ancient West were similar. Many achievements classified as “natural history” were in fact produced not at all from any intimate affection for the natural world, but entirely in the study, amidst piles of old papers, books, and records. This was the case in the ancient Chinese tradition of erudition on names and objects (er ya mingwu), and to a large extent also the tradition of materia medica; it was likewise the case for the natural historians of the early Renaissance in the West, from Pliny the Elder to Gesner. Those were典型的 historians, not “naturalists” who loved nature. Their interest lay in collation, annotation, and compilation of texts. Today we sometimes explain their historical work instrumentally, namely, as a way of understanding natural knowledge: rather than laboriously going out into the field to collect specimens, it was better first to draw on the achievements of predecessors. But this way of thinking already presupposes, as a matter of course, that their ultimate interest lay in the natural world, and that natural knowledge was superior to textual knowledge. In fact, for the ancients—whether in ancient China or in the medieval West—the status of “classical” texts was probably even higher than that of empirical research. For example, rather than saying that erudition on names and objects used texts to understand nature, it would be more accurate to say that it used some empirical research to annotate and supplement texts. In the West, until Galileo, people still had to invoke the metaphor of “the two great books” to defend as hard as they could the idea that direct research on natural things could obtain at least a status equal to textual research. Thus we can understand that it was only when the epistemological status of such direct observation and description of natural things finally surpassed that of textual study of the classics that the concept of “naturalist” could come into being; before that, the people who did what was called natural-historical work were mostly historians.
In my view, it is indeed highly meaningful to reorder the history of science according to a program of “natural history.” This perspective may reveal many important questions: for example, the concept of nature, the concept of knowledge, the migration of intellectual interests, the relationship between philosophy and history, the waxing and waning of contemplative life and active life, the relationship between textual study and empirical study, the significance of printing, the place of the Renaissance, and so on—far beyond merely the significance of anti-Whiggism and ecological concern. As for the historiographical program of natural history as expressed by Teacher Liu, aside from writing more about achievements in natural history and less about mathematical and physical sciences, I do not see what sort of novelty that kind of history of science would really offer.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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