Titrating Civilization: Science and Society in East and West
This book review was written last November. It was commissioned, but after I submitted it there was no response. I only asked about it recently and learned that it had not been used, so I’m posting it here first and then I’ll look for somewhere else to submit it~
Before Brother Bo Tianshi translated The Grand Titration, I had long heard of this book and read some introductions to it, but I never quite understood what the titration business was all about. Only after reading it myself did I begin to make some sense of it, and I feel it is worth explaining clearly. The original title when I submitted it was “Needham’s Answer to the ‘Needham Question’,” but now I think that title is too plain, so I changed it when posting it on the blog.
1. The Needham Question: a pseudo-question?
Science and Civilisation in China, edited under Needham’s direction (the Chinese translation is titled A History of Science and Technology in China), has already appeared in 27 volumes across 7 volumes, from the first volume published in 1954 to the second part of volume seven in 2004. It is the point of departure for Western scholars seeking to understand the history of Chinese science, and even historians of Chinese science in China have been deeply influenced by it. Needham’s grand enterprise left the field of history of science not only the excavation and organization of vast amounts of historical material, but also his distinctive understanding of ancient Chinese science from a comparative-civilizational perspective. Whether one affirms or denies it, all the various studies of the history of Chinese science after Needham are, in a certain sense, responses to Needham.
The famous “Needham Question” has had an influence that extends far beyond the field of historiography, and countless debates have revolved around it.
In the preface to the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, Needham raised a set of questions, and in his later work these questions kept reappearing in different forms.
To sum up, the “Needham Question” has two parts: first, why was China’s scientific and technological civilization, taken as a whole, so far ahead of the West before the fifteenth century? And then, if that is so, why did modern science arise precisely in Europe, enabling Europe to overtake China so rapidly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward?
One common response to the Needham Question is: it is a pseudo-question. Many commentators have tried to dissolve the Needham Question by showing that its premises do not hold.
For example, some people deny that China was ahead in science and technology before the fifteenth century. They distinguish science from technology and argue that China was only ever ahead in technology, while in theoretical science it had always lagged behind. Others simply deny the comparability of Chinese and Western science, claiming that the two were never developing along the same lines in the first place, so that the Needham Question is like saying: the willow tree grew faster at first, so why was it the peach tree’s fruit that ripened first in the end?
One of Needham’s successors, Sivin, also tried to dissolve the Needham Question. He said, for example, that Needham was more or less asking, “Why didn’t my name appear in today’s newspaper?” Sivin thought that the rise of modern science is like a person’s name appearing in the newspaper: it is a rare event. We can investigate why a person did make it into the paper, but we cannot answer why a person did not.
These views all make a certain amount of sense, but if we think that this alone is enough to simply dismiss the significance of the Needham Question, that would be too arrogant. In fact, the very discussions that try to dissolve the question also reflect the positive influence of the Needham Question. Whether in trying to respond to it or trying to dissolve it, the Needham Question has encouraged scholars to keep paying attention to the differences and affinities between Chinese and Western cultures, and to the complex relationship between the development of science and technology and cultural and social environments.
It must be noted that what we call the Needham Question has played, from the very beginning, the role of a “point of entry” or a “problem-generating point.” Needham was not, after finishing a whole round of research into the history of Chinese science and technology, suddenly struck by confusion and difficulty and then threw the paradoxical Needham Question out to the scholarly world. On the contrary, the Needham Question was precisely the point of entry that spurred Needham himself into deeper research on the history of Chinese science and technology; Needham’s own grand body of work can all be seen as his answer to this question.
Of course we may bypass Needham’s work and respond to the Needham Question from different angles, but we must never be so self-satisfied as to think that we have somehow easily solved the great problem that tormented Needham—that would be a laughingstock.
In many articles and lectures, Needham himself discussed the Needham Question in greater depth from various angles. However we may want to crack the Needham Question, why not first read his own answer carefully?
Needham’s strategy for solving the problem was “titration.” As he said: “Only by carefully analyzing Eastern and Western culture, and carrying out a genuine titration of it, can this question finally be answered.” (p. 1) His answers to the Needham Question are collected in this volume, The Grand Titration. The essays in this book overlap in many places, but each has its own emphasis. All of them discuss the Needham Question, with clear arguments and abundant material. Although some of the views and materials may seem outdated today, that is precisely because we are standing on Needham’s shoulders.
2. “Titration”: a method for comparing civilizations
The real major premise of the Needham Question may perhaps be a hypothesis or belief of this sort: civilizations can be compared with one another.
As noted above, comparing a willow tree and a peach tree in terms of fruit yield is completely out of place. Yet that only means the mode of comparison is wrong; it does not mean that willows and peach trees cannot be compared at all. For example, one might compare them in terms of timber, shade, or even aesthetic value. The same is true of Chinese civilization and Western civilization, Chinese science and Western science. Of course they are not entirely the same, but neither are they entirely incomparable. Rather than dogmatically denying the comparability of Chinese and Western science, it would be better to explore in what sense, by what standards, and by what methods a more appropriate comparison between China and the West can be made.
Needham’s The Grand Titration expresses precisely such an analytic method for comparing civilizations. The Chinese translation renders it as Titrating Civilization, which more accurately conveys Needham’s original intention of using the “titration” method to analyze “civilization.”
“Titration” is a commonly used quantitative analytical method in chemistry. In brief, one takes a solution whose composition and concentration are already known and adds it drop by drop to another solution whose properties are to be tested, until neutralization occurs (at which point a characteristic phenomenon such as a color change will take place). Then, based on the amount of the known solution that was added, one can calculate the content of a corresponding component in the solution under test.
Needham’s original field was biochemistry, so he was clearly very familiar with titration in chemistry. But what does titration mean in the history of science and technology? What exactly is being titrated against what? Needham’s explanation is not especially clear, but we can roughly guess his line of thought.
In the “titration of civilization,” what is being tested is not a solution but “civilization”; Chinese civilization and Western civilization are like two solvents. Clearly, China and the West appear very different on the whole; each contains different components, and even if they share some components, those components occupy very different proportions in the two solutions. So it is not very meaningful to compare Chinese civilization as a whole with Western civilization as a whole. But that does not mean the two are wholly unrelated. Needham believed that civilizations can be titrated against one another, and that from this one can determine the differences in the “components” of each civilization.
Obviously, “titrating” civilizations does not mean simply throwing two solutions (civilizations) together all at once. Rather, one first extracts some “reagents” whose composition and properties are relatively well defined, and then drips these known reagents into different civilizations, observing the different reactions caused by the same reagent, and thereby inferring the differences in composition among the different civilizations.
The “titration reagents” chosen by Needham were the various achievements in the history of science and technology (they can also include various elements in thought and society). Needham said: “In studying the history of the discoveries and inventions of China and other cultures, my collaborators and I have always tried to establish dates… so that the great civilizations can thus be ‘titrated’ against one another… We also need to analyze the various social and intellectual components of the great civilizations, in order to understand why one combination was far ahead in the Middle Ages, while another combination later overtook it and produced modern science.” (p. 2)
3. The history of science from the perspective of civilizational history
Many studies of the history of science in China often aim to enhance national confidence, and happily dwell on conclusions like “China achieved X hundreds of years earlier than the West.” Although many such conclusions owe much to Needham and his team’s excavations, Needham’s concern with establishing chronological priority clearly went far beyond the nationalist horizon. For Needham, determining the dates of inventions and discoveries mattered because it allowed one to locate a given achievement in the social and cultural history of its time more precisely, and only then could one further examine the interactive responses between that technology and its cultural environment.
For Needham, each “civilization” can be seen as a pool of mixed components with a complex composition. We cannot instantly see all the components in the solution and their proportions; we can only use the method of “titration,” inferring the corresponding components in the solution from the reactions stirred up as each “reagent” is gradually introduced into it. For example, component A may have a stronger affinity for reagent A, whereas component B will inhibit A. Thus, if adding A to one solution produces a vigorous reaction, while A’s effect in another solution is extremely slow, then there is reason to infer that the former solution contains more of component A, while the latter is dominated more by component B.
For example, Needham mentions (p. 80) that the introduction of the horse collar had many effects on European social development, promoting feudalism and ultimately leading to capitalism, but that the horse collar did not produce a similar effect in China. Needham speculates that this was on the one hand because China’s cultural environment leaned toward bureaucratism rather than a city-state tradition; on the other hand, in many regions of China water buffalo were used in agriculture, and transport relied more heavily on canals, so the effect of putting a horse in a collar in China was far weaker than the reaction it triggered in the West.
Each specific technological achievement (reagent) can suggest only a very limited range of inferences, but once one combines them with a comprehensive and meticulous examination of the history of science and technology, one can obtain a much clearer understanding of the distinctive features of different civilizations.
Through a comprehensive and meticulous investigation of the history of science and technology, Needham arrived at many views. He believed that the influence of different social environments was most important; China’s distinctive bureaucracy and the “Asiatic mode of production” were important factors in enabling China to remain ahead before the fifteenth century, but they also suppressed the emergence of modern science, whereas the city-state system and democratic traditions helped foster the rise of capitalism and modern science in the West.
In Needham’s view, the solution of civilization is constantly changing: what acts as a force promoting technology in one era may become a force suppressing it in another. As a leftist scholar sympathetic to Marxism, Needham believed that “capitalism,” like Eastern bureaucratism, must also have its role in promoting technological civilization understood historically. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social environment of capitalism was indeed most congenial to modern science, but by the twentieth century perhaps socialism would exert a more positive force.
Needham’s specific views and materials may well be open to much debate, but the perspective on the history of science and technology, or civilizational history, that he opened up remains profoundly inspiring. In Needham’s perspective, the significance of research into the history of science goes far beyond simply listing a chronology of technological achievements and then bathing in feelings of pride or inferiority depending on whether one was ahead or behind. For Needham, listing achievements is only the starting point of the whole study, merely the stage of preparing the “reagents” before “titration.” Although Needham’s work of distillation and organization at this stage is also astonishing, if we stop only at these “reagents,” mistaking them for Needham’s final achievement and then inheriting or criticizing them while forgetting the “titration of civilization,” then that would surely be buying the casket and returning the pearl.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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