The recent atmosphere has me a little like a startled bird, so I’m continuing to use encrypted mode. This article really isn’t worth encrypting; in a couple of days I may quietly decrypt it.
A teacher has recently been disciplined over remarks about the Four Great Inventions, and that is truly shocking. I don’t want to reopen here the warning against a culture of informing on others; I only want to talk about the academic question.
What makes this incident even more frightening than before is that the remarks that led to the punishment were not a political issue, but an academic one. Even the official media could not stomach that, and called for the controversy over the “Four Great Inventions” to return to the academic sphere.
What is academic, anyway? It comes down to reasoning and evidence. An academic question is not simply a matter of choosing sides. Academic research also has positions, but it is not simply a matter of supporting or not supporting some slogan; rather, it is reflected in the choice of evidence and the mode of argument. If there is neither evidence nor argument, and all that is said is a lonely slogan, then it means nothing at all.
Political slogans, in fact, also depend on context. For example, when we say “communism is good,” is that right or not? But if someone insists that communism should be realized immediately today, private ownership abolished, property eliminated, money abolished, and even the state and the party dissolved (according to Marx’s ideal, once communism is realized, the state as an apparatus of violence would no longer be needed), then is he right or not? If you want to say his idea is wrong, then does that mean “communism is bad”?
Any sentence, any concept, does not have only one absolutely fixed meaning, only one black-or-white conclusion. Communism is good as an ideal, but bad as a practical policy; “one country, two systems” is good when applied to Hong Kong, but if you try to do “one country, two systems” in Haidian District, that may well not be good. The academic attitude, or rather the attitude of reasoning, first of all requires that one not judge simplistically, emotionally, or in slogan form.
Whether the “Four Great Inventions” count as innovation is a similar question. The key is: what does “innovation” mean in the discussion at hand? That teacher devoted an entire course to discussing the meaning of innovation, and then, on the basis of the context already established, judged that the Four Great Inventions were not innovation. His view is of course open to question and criticism, but the dispute must also be raised within the relevant context, rather than simply being labeled on the basis of a few isolated words.
Even many online arguments no longer care about the concept of “innovation” at all; instead, they turn the question into whether the Four Great Inventions are good or bad.
In fact, in some accounts of the history of science with a strong nationalist flavor, I have never seen the Four Great Inventions described as “innovation.” People usually say that the Four Great Inventions are great, important, a huge contribution to the peoples of the world, and so on.
Is the Great Wall of ten thousand li great or not? Impressive or not? But is it innovation? Was Emperor Wu of Han defeating the Xiongnu great or not? Impressive or not? But is that innovation? Does it follow that anything good is innovation, and anything that is not innovation is not a good thing?
The word “innovation” has long been abused to the point of exhaustion. Of course we can also understand it in the broadest sense—for example, “creating something new” counts as innovation. But if so, what is so remarkable about saying that the Four Great Inventions are innovation? If I dig a hole in front of my own door, that also counts as innovation. Before I dug it, there was no hole here; this hole is a brand-new hole unprecedented in history. I have contributed a brand-new hole to the peoples of the world—does that count as innovation?
Those who fundamentally do not probe the meaning of concepts, who irrationally turn theoretical claims into slogans and flatten them, are the ones truly and irretrievably devaluing themselves. They reduce China to nothing more than a few contentless labels—We are the greatest! We are the most glorious! We are the most formidable! Beyond that, where exactly does our distinctiveness lie? They become evasive and vague.
“Innovation” is in fact a technical term, and in academia it has its own distinct position, with many ways of defining it. Some mainstream definitions actually treat “innovation” as an economic concept, meaning some systemic integration running from science and technology to industry and commerce; it is not simply “digging a hole that has never existed before” that counts as innovation, but only something that must produce economic benefit.
Of course, even from an economic standpoint, are the Four Great Inventions actually innovation? That is also open to discussion. For example, I feel papermaking may perhaps have a little claim to it, and in the history of printing there may also have been similar innovative activities (though the decisive figure was not Bi Sheng). But these are more specific disputes, whereas most of the people joining the argument have not even taken the trouble to think a bit about the academic meaning of the concept of “innovation.”
A dozen years ago, I often saw veteran figures in the field of philosophy of science and technology such as Jin Wulun discussing the implications of “innovation,” but now we seem to emphasize innovation more and more, while becoming more and more unfamiliar with conceptual analysis.
In the two lectures I recently gave, I listed a series of the most famous “inventors” in Western history, including: Gutenberg (the printing press), Watt (the steam engine), Fulton (the steamboat), Stephenson (the train), Morse (the telegraph), Whitney (interchangeable parts), Daguerre (photography), Edison (the electric light), Marconi (radio), Bell (the telephone), Nobel (dynamite), the Wright brothers (the airplane), Ford (the automobile / assembly line).
What do these renowned figures have in common? They were not the first to create the thing in parentheses, and at the same time they were the ones who most successfully commercialized the thing in parentheses.
But these people are not famous in vain. Their fame does not arise from misunderstanding; rather, according to the Western understanding of invention and innovation, they really are key figures in the history of technology.
Of course, we can reject Western concepts, create a Chinese-characterized model of innovation, and reevaluate historical figures from our own perspective. But the problem is that we first need some recognition of the mainstream common sense of the modern world before we can talk about surpassing it. It is not like being a frog in a well, who has never even heard of the outside world’s views and is discussing issues that are completely detached. Compare the Wikipedia entry for innovation with domestic discussions of innovation, and one will feel very deeply this disconnect in popular knowledge.
I have recently come to a view: namely, that ancient China not only lacked “science,” but even lacked so-called “technology.” Of course, I am not relying on the everyday understanding of “technology” as various practical tools and production techniques; in that sense, no civilization lacks technology, and from the moment human beings parted company with apes, humans and technology have mutually constituted one another. But if we take the modern Western concept of “techn-ology,” ancient China did in fact lack a kind of technology as “logos.” This lack in ancient China is shared with its lack of “science.”
I won’t go deeper into the specific discussion for now. But a new metaphor I used in a recent lecture is worth recording again:
When one asks questions like “Did ancient China have science?” one is, given that the source of the concept of “science” lies in the West, actually asking: can we find in ancient China some portion of what Westerners define as “science”? For example, Western science has astronomical observation, and the Shang dynasty in China already had it; Western science has the camera obscura, and the Mohist Canon already had it; Western science has the Pythagorean theorem, and the Chinese already had that long ago…
Similarly, we can phrase the question differently, for example: “Did the West in antiquity have Confucianism?” Then we can use the Chinese tradition to define the contents of Confucianism. For example, Confucianism emphasizes filial piety toward one’s parents, and the Western Bible also has that in the Ten Commandments; Confucianism says “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire,” and the West has similar formulations; Confucianism has the teaching of investigating things to extend knowledge, and of course the West also has that; within the Confucian tradition there is the teaching of resonance between Heaven and humanity, and the West also has the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm; within Confucianism there is a branch of the School of Mind, and the West also has branches of idealism, and so on…
In that way, can we also say that ancient Western civilization had Confucianism? And can we even say that in many specific contents, Westerners were earlier than Chinese people?
If one really wanted to say that, it would not be impossible to make the case. But we would feel that something is not quite right. In what sense, exactly, can ancient Western civilization be said to have Confucianism, and in what sense can it not be said to have Confucianism? Very simply: if we treat “Confucianism” as an integrated, continuous “tradition,” then horizontally speaking, the various specific ideas of Confucianism possess a certain overall unity; and vertically speaking, Confucianism develops with a continuous logic from the pre-Qin period through the Song and Ming. It is in this sense that we call it Confucianism. But if we break apart the wholeness of Confucianism and treat it as a collection of isolated specific contents, then of course we can also find counterparts to some of those items in other civilizations.
The same is true of “science” and “technology.” If we compare them with “Confucianism,” the issue is similar. If we break them apart and look at individual scientific achievements and technological products, naturally we can find counterparts in other civilizations. But if we consider more their unity and continuity, then the problem is different.
The key is: why exactly are we asking this question? Is it to search for or confirm the cross-civilizational universality of ethics or science? Is it to look for some tendency toward convergence in historical development? Or is it to compare differences between civilizations? Or simply to seek a sense of ethnic superiority?
If we do not clarify why we are asking, and do not understand the context of the discussion, but only desperately insist on things like “ancient China had science,” just as on “ancient Western civilization had Confucianism,” then in fact it is something completely incomprehensible.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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