Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-European Cross-Cultural Perspective ed. by Hans Ulrich Vogel, Günter Dux (review)

This book resulted from a conference held in Germany in 2000 on the concept of “nature” in China and Europe before the eighteenth century. Edited by Günter Dux, a specialist of sociology and social philosophy, and by Hans Ulrich Vogel, a historian of Chinese sciences and techniques, the book includes fifteen contributions introduced by two preliminary articles by Mark Elvin, who in the last twenty years has contributed to opening up the field of Chinese environmental history. His first contribution is the overview for the book, which sets out the issues raised and sheds light on the different theories legitimating this type of project: cross-cultural in character, with well-known complexity. A theoretical framework grounded in recent biological, climatological, and psychological discoveries, as well as Dux’s “historical-genetic theory of culture,” thus underlies the contributions, all of which aim to evaluate the varying degrees of convergence and divergence between these two cultures in history.

While cross-cultural in its approach, the book does lean toward China, which Elvin justifies by the scarcity of scholarly studies on this subject from that country, and at least three misunderstandings that the contributors of this book want to clear up. The first, refuted by Christoph Harbsmeier, is the idea that in China there was no concept equivalent to “nature” as understood in Europe (220). The second, highlighted by Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, is that any concept of nature thought to have existed in China is viewed as unchanging and timeless, while the historical relativism of the same concept in the West is taken for granted (526). From this, a third and more general misunderstanding arose: the assumption “that, in pre-imperial and most of the imperial period, educated Chinese and educated Western Europeans inhabited totally, or almost totally, distinct mental universes as regards the styles of thinking about the natural world that were seen as acceptable” (5). Notably, Heiner Roetz’s analysis destroys the image of an empathetic and holistic Chinese approach to nature completely different from that of the West (199), which, had it (ever) existed, would have been a definite obstacle to development of the modern forms of subjugation of nature in China. To clear up these misunderstandings, which are rooted in various Western comparatist discourses on China since the nineteenth century, the book privileges contributions on China.

While the book is not divided thematically, one can identify three subissues. A first set of contributions starts with ancient Greece and China and focuses on what led people to come to think about the natural world, and the cosmology this thinking produced. Contributions by Dux, Julián Pacho, and Ulrich Wenzel focus on ancient Greek thinking on the natural world, retracing the ontology of the Greek world image and analyzing the concept of causality in Aristotle and Aristotelian tradition. John Henderson mirrors this in his analysis of the birth of Chinese cosmological thinking, stressing how for Chinese the key to understanding order in the universe was correlative thinking, drawing systematic correspondences among various orders, such as the human body, the body politic, and the heavenly bodies. How this early cosmology, putting the yin, yang, and five phases at the origin of any transformation in the world, pervaded the ancient Chinese world of scholars is addressed by Karine Chemla, who focuses on how numbers and mathematical reality were approached in ancient China. She shows that mathematicians looked at mathematical reality from the point of view of transformations, comparable to that adopted by some thinkers of the same time to reflect on reality in general, namely, with the two opposed but complementary principles, yin and yang, accounting for transformations in the world.

Roetz, bringing together the different contemporary philosophical viewpoints on nature in ancient China in his contribution, sheds light on the other pieces of Chinese thought of the Axial Age. While giving insight into how Daoists and Confucianists viewed nature in opposition to...