Response to Kent Deng

摘要

As Deng rightly points out, investigating why China had never invented a steam engine is itself counterfactual, and, to me, doomed to be beyond the explanatory power of any explanation from technology. On the methodological level, few would dispute that 'it is conceptually helpful and methodologically justifiable to compare different growth trajectories ... by using one species (or its evolution) as a benchmark'. However, it should also be noted that a value-freed Darwinist approach does not necessarily free one from the so-called 'trap of centrism'. This is particularly so as moral and ethical issues and value judgements had long been indivisible parts of premodern Chinese scientific thought. One cannot understand the intimate interactions of cultural values and scientific activities without setting oneself within the specific intellectual and cultural context of pre-Jesuit China. Differing from the European tradition, concepts of morality and ethics in traditional China had integrated tightly with a value-freed or -neutralized natural world. Under the principle of the unity of nature and humanity, Chinese scholars (especially after the Song period) associated the Confucian concept of benevolence (or ren t) with the Daoist metaphysical concept of Dao and universe. Such a theorization attached the nature of human reason to the phenomena and laws of the natural world, and injected at the same time moral and ethical qualities or elements into the natural order. For instance, the Song scholar Wen Tian-Xiang( 1238-82) wrote 'There is the qi of righteousness among the Heaven and the Earth; such qi transmutes itself into abstract forms and flows among all matters of being.' In other words, Chinese intellectuals up to the late Ming period were operating in a context of 'nature' that differed substantially from that of the Europeans. Only the literati saw the wholeness of nature, ethics and humanity not as a burden of knowledge but an inborn and requisite integrity. Science and technology was incomplete by itself in pre-Jesuit China. It was never an end of its own, but, as Deng also recognizes, a means to the maintenance of the moral-ethically defined social order.