The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came Into Being

[荷]H·弗洛里斯·科恩：《The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came into Being》，translated by Zhang Butian, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2012

This is a slim booklet written for ordinary readers, and may be regarded as a popularized version of the author’s other weighty scholarly work, *How Modern Science Was Born: Four Civilizations, One Breakthrough in the Seventeenth Century*.

The Needham Question has long been a topic of particular concern to Chinese historians of science and even to the general public. The Hong Kong scholar Chen Fangzheng recently published *Inheritance and Rebellion: Why Did Modern Science Appear in the West?* Teacher Zhou Cheng translated a book also called *Why Did Modern Science Emerge in the West*—in fact, the original title of Toby Huff’s book is simply “The Rise of Modern Science,” and the Chinese title was obviously chosen to suit our interests. If the aim is to attract readers, then if this book translated by senior brother Butian were renamed *Why Did Modern Science Emerge in the West*, that would in fact be a bit more apt. Although the author’s discussion of China in this book is still somewhat thin, one can see that throughout the book he is trying to answer this question: why Europe? What exactly happened in Europe in the seventeenth century?

After reading the whole book, I felt somewhat disappointed, perhaps because I had initially expected too much, but by the end many doubts still seemed unresolved. Of course, as a popular booklet, the author could hardly explain every issue in full; otherwise he would not have needed to write the later magnum opus. Thus, the significance of this book lies not in how many problems it actually solves, but in the new lines of thought and new way of narrating history that it offers.

The title of this book may cause misunderstanding. We may think that “the re-creation of the world” is the author’s answer to the question of how modern science came into being, but in fact the author does not, in the main text, go into depth about what “the re-creation of the world” means; he merely presents this new world as a consequence of modern science, rather than as its cause. At the outset, the author depicts the world in which modern people find themselves: a world full of noise and stripped of mystery. He asks: where did this new world, so different from the ancient one, come from? “Who is hiding behind that? Who caused the fundamental change in the ancient model?” (p. 2) The author answers: “This transformation was brought about by Hertz and Marconi, but not by them alone” (p. 3, p. 9). Tracing “backward” from Hertz to Maxwell, then to Faraday, Newton, and all the way to Galileo, the author points out that all of this must be traced back to “around 1600, when the world was re-created.” (p. 4, p. 10)

Up to this point, the author has not offered any particularly novel insight; he is only restating a fact that has long been well known: the “Scientific Revolution” led to an entirely new worldview—this is what traditional textbooks also say. The title of this book might as well be *How the Modern Science That Re-Created the World Came into Being*; in this book, “the re-creation of the world” is merely a lead-in rather than a conclusion.

So what is the book’s conclusion? Simply put, one might sum it up as “three modes of natural knowledge, three transformations, and three syntheses.” The author narrates the origins of modern science as the following process: the mode of knowledge marked by Athens, namely “natural philosophy”; the mode of knowledge marked by Alexandria, namely “abstract-mathematical” knowledge; and the utility-oriented mode of knowledge born in Western Europe each underwent an “upgrade” of their own (independently, and without prior coordination) around the seventeenth century, then combined in pairs, finally achieving synthesis in Newton.

First of all, it is worth noting the author’s clear distinction between Athens and Alexandria. The scientific tradition of the Alexandrian Museum is generally classified under “Hellenistic science,” described as the Greek tradition plus some Eastern practical spirit, and on the whole as a continuation of the Greek scientific tradition. But in Koen’s view, these were two different traditions that did not communicate at the time, and there was “a marked lack of interaction” between these two modes of knowledge (p. 17, p. 27). The scholarly tradition originating in Greece sought to know the “essence” of nature; it attempted to give the world a holistic, qualitative explanation starting from some first principle. But the “Alexandrians” were not interested in this principle and unity: “‘Alexandrians’ do not explain; they describe and prove. They do not, by indirection, use words to make qualitative statements, but employ mathematical units that can be calculated—numbers and shapes.” (p. 16, p. 25)

However, the author emphasizes the difference between Athens and Alexandria too strongly, to the point of thinking that “there was almost no dialogue possible between the two” (p. 18, p. 28), which seems debatable as well. In fact, Athens and Alexandria were nothing more than scholarly centers of two different periods; the cultural sphere to which the whole scholarly tradition belonged was basically overlapping. Beyond Athens and Alexandria, it also included the entire Greek cultural region of the Italian peninsula and Asia Minor. Euclid was born in Athens, Archimedes on Sicily. Athens and Alexandria were merely gathering places for scholars, not the origins of scholarship, and there was fundamentally no problem of “their places of birth being geographically far apart” (p. 18, p. 28) as the author says. Athenians and Alexandrians were both “Greeks,” and this cultural identity was by no means wholly broken. If that is so, then if we still insist that Athens and Alexandria were utterly different, we must also explain how this “Greek Scientific Revolution” came into being.

The author sidesteps the relationship between Pythagoras and Plato’s Academy, which barred entry to anyone who did not know geometry, classifying Plato’s Academy under “Athens” while placing Pythagoras under “Alexandria.” But the author does also note the change from Pythagoras to Euclid: “Euclid studied the corresponding proportions more precisely. At this point, he no longer considered how the world as a whole was constructed—celestial bodies and harmonies were more the toys of philosophers…” (p. 13, p. 21) In fact, on the one hand Pythagoras was a pioneer of the mathematical tradition, but on the other hand he was also a thoroughly “natural philosopher”; “all is number,” like “all is water,” is a typical “mode of knowledge” of natural philosophy that offers a qualitative explanation of the universe as a whole. Usually we also regard Pythagoreanism and Platonism as deeply connected. Yet what developed from the Pythagorean tradition was another kind of “abstract-mathematical” mode of knowledge, one that could not be communicated with natural philosophy. How did that happen?

In my view, the key does not lie in “abstract” or “mathematical” as such. Pythagorean natural philosophy was also abstract and mathematical, and the concentric-sphere model of the cosmos and the regular cube composed of the five elements in the Platonic school were likewise abstract and mathematical. But unlike the mathematics of Archimedes and Ptolemy, the “mathematics” of the natural philosophers still aimed at providing qualitative explanations, whereas in the latter case mathematics became a practical tool for making precise predictions. In other words, the traditional account—that “Hellenistic science = Greek tradition + Eastern pragmatism”—still has its merits. Of course, I cannot deny that “Alexandria” really was a new paradigm quite different from “Athens,” but we must note that “Alexandria” was indeed born from the soil of “Athens,” a product of a not-yet-fully-radical Scientific Revolution; the tradition of natural philosophy was not entirely “revolutionized away,” and in the later Arab world and the Middle Ages, a certain tension always remained between these two traditions.

As for the third mode of knowledge, different from these two ancient paradigms, there are even more problems. The author thinks this mode of knowledge “seems to have developed out of thin air during the European Renaissance” (p. 71, p. 93). This mode of natural knowledge held that “truth cannot be derived from intellect, but must be sought in precise observation, with the aim of achieving certain practical goals.” (p. 67, p. 88) As typical examples of this mode of knowledge, the author cites the Renaissance pursuit of “precise description” and the tradition of alchemy. But there are two problems here. First, did these trends really appear out of nowhere? Second, can these trends be lumped together under the category of “utility-oriented”?

For example, the author mentions Paracelsus’s alchemical pursuits, but alchemy clearly already existed in the Islamic world. So what, then, was the difference between Paracelsus’s “natural inquiry for practical purposes” and that of his Islamic predecessors? The author’s answer is: “Compared with Islamic civilization, Paracelsus and his followers embedded all of this more deeply into a magically described world” (p. 71, p. 93). For Paracelsus, “the universe is still a chemical laboratory… all matter is composed of three basic principles…” (p. 71, p. 93). We can see that, compared with the Arabs, Paracelsus’s greatest difference does not lie in any “utility orientation,” but rather in the fact that his research was embedded within a complete “natural philosophy.” But in the author’s account, the combination of what he calls the third mode of knowledge with “Athens” occurs in a later era—so how could it already have happened at the origin of the third mode?

In my view, the difference between Arab alchemy and European Renaissance alchemy lies precisely in the fact that the former pursued “utility” more strongly: they studied alchemy in order to make gold. But among Europeans, for instance in the work of van Helmont, who styled himself a “fire-arts philosopher,” the goal of alchemy was no longer merely practical; it was also a philosophical quest to reveal the mysteries of the universe.

On the other hand, there are similar problems with the trend toward “precise description.” Did ancient people have no pursuit of precise description? From Aristotle’s *History of Animals* to Pliny’s *Natural History*, the tradition of natural inquiry centered on “precise description” was hardly unprecedented. Pliny’s records of things are also full of descriptions of various practical properties. The author cites several “herbals” (p. 69, p. 90) in an attempt to show the “practical purpose” of these descriptive efforts, but he does not mention many other kinds of textual work. For example, Gesner’s compilation of natural histories of plants and animals arose from his interests in philology and bibliography; Pierre Belon’s investigations of plants and animals in the Middle East, published in a book in 1553, were originally intended to meet the needs of correcting Aristotle’s texts. What was different from ancient natural historians (or naturalists) was precisely that Renaissance natural history increasingly became oriented toward the organization of textual knowledge itself rather than practical use. In terms of descriptive method, scholars also increasingly focused on the natural, objective properties of things rather than their human, utilitarian attributes.

The author believes that these three mutually independent modes of knowledge each underwent an “upgrade” in the early modern period: the Alexandrian mathematical model became more tightly linked to reality through the mathematization of nature and turned into “Alexandria-plus”; the Athens model added the idea of laws of motion on top of Greek atomism, forming a new explanatory mechanism; and the utility-oriented mode shifted from passive observation to a mode of spontaneous “discovery-experimental” research.

In the author’s view, the “upgrade” of “Alexandria” was the most revolutionary (p. 206, p. 253), but this still merits further discussion. If the key issue is to endow mathematical models with realist status, then that had already appeared in Pythagoras and Plato, only to be abandoned by the Alexandrians. So why not say, at this point, that Alexandria was returning to Athens, rather than insist that Alexandria independently and spontaneously carried out an upgrade?

It is less accurate to say that nature became “mathematized” than to say that both “nature” and “mathematics” changed. Galileo’s mathematics differs from Pythagoras’s mathematics: the latter is qualitative and demonstrative, while the former is quantitative and calculative. One might say that modern people endowed the instrumental mathematics used by the Alexandrians with a primordial status that only the Athenians would have granted, while what was broken down at the same time were the boundaries between the world of ideas and the real world, and between natural phenomena and forced phenomena. To understand these changes, one cannot detach them from the tradition of natural philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. The two contributors to “Alexandria-plus” singled out by the author—Kepler and Galileo—were, respectively, a fanatical believer in Platonism and someone who directly opposed Aristotle. It is hard to imagine discussing this Alexandrian upgrade in isolation from the “Athens” tradition. The author cites many characteristics of European society—such as greed, curiosity, and the technical environment—to explain why these “three almost simultaneous transformations” erupted “almost simultaneously” (p. 107, p. 135), but throughout he seems to avoid the intrinsic connection between Athens and Alexandria, and thus has to treat their simultaneous upgrade as a matter of chance.

Finally, the author tells the story of how the three forms were combined: first the upgraded Athens and upgraded Alexandria were brought together in Huygens; then Boyle, Hooke, and the young Newton combined Athens-plus with the experimental mode; and finally all the threads were synthesized in the mature Newton.

At one point the author mentions that “modern science ultimately emerged only from one of these forms of natural knowledge” (p. 31, p. 44), but now it seems that modern science was actually the hybrid offspring of three modes of natural knowledge. The author merely describes how these combinations came about, but does not explain how such combinations were possible in the first place. This synthesis seems to be the result of a highly accidental conjuncture, perhaps thanks to the spirit of compromise brought by the Treaty of Westphalia (p. 173, p. 213). Such an explanation is hard to accept, and I cannot help suspecting that this treaty, which ended the Eighty Years’ War and formally recognized Dutch independence, may have been overvalued by this Dutch scholar. There is no denying that the Netherlands and its free publishing environment made an indelible contribution to the flourishing of modern science, but to say that Dutch independence saved the whole modern scientific tradition from premature death is probably going too far. As for the intrinsic connection among these three modes of knowledge, the author only casually says that there are “some themes within them that can more or less occasionally cross over” (p. 172, p. 212), which is of course also unsatisfactory to me. In fact, from the author’s narrative we can also see that “Athens” is the core of the two syntheses: first Athens is combined in turn with the other two forms, whereas the mathematical mode and the utility-oriented mode, which in theory seem more closely related to each other, do not in history undergo any significant combination. This seems strange.

As for the question of why science did not arise in China, first of all, the author does not think this is a pseudo-question. Of course China was unlikely to develop Western-style science, but why China’s own “modes of natural knowledge” failed to develop and grow independently remains a problem in need of explanation.

The author’s explanation is that China lacked “cultural transplantation,” whereas Western science, from Greece to Arabia to Western Europe, “underwent multiple transplants, while China did not undergo even one.” (p. 33, p. 46) The author mentions that the Alexandrian school and Mozi alike possessed developmental potential unseen by their contemporaries and stood on the margins at the time, “but Alexandria had two chances for revival, while Mozi had none.” (p. 34, p. 47)

This explanation seems novel on the surface, but in fact it is still quite classic. It simply says that China’s historical development was relatively closed, while the West’s environment was relatively open. But precisely because the author’s idea of “three modes of natural knowledge, three transformations, and three syntheses” has been introduced, this explanatory template needs to be reconsidered. If Athens and Alexandria are also two completely different scientific paradigms, then could it be said that ancient China had only one “mode of natural knowledge”? When the author compares Greek and Chinese natural knowledge, he offers a broad model: “On the whole, Greek natural knowledge was mainly intellectualist, while Chinese natural knowledge was mainly empiricist.” (p. 31, p. 44) This is yet another familiar old formulation. Yet if the Western tradition can still be subdivided into three lineages, including the utility-oriented strand of empiricism, then what about the Chinese tradition internally? Did everything really become monolithic after the exclusive elevation of Confucianism? The Wei-Jin natural history tradition, Wei-Jin xuanxue, the introduction of Buddhism, Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism, the encyclopedic vogue of the late Ming and early Qing… Chinese scholarly modes were in fact undergoing transformation all along. It is only from a Western standpoint that the differences seem not very large. But if we instead take the whole West as a broad whole, while carefully distinguishing within the Chinese tradition, how many modes of natural knowledge and how many transformations and syntheses can we identify?

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.