Teilhard and the Future of Humanity

Chapter 9: The Role of Science in Contemporary China and according to Teilhard

c h a p t e r 9 The Role of Science in Contemporary China and according to Teilhard Thierry Meynard, S.J. For the past century, knowledge has been classified for the most part along Western lines in China. Thus, notions of science (kexue), philosophy (zhengzhi), and religion (zongjiao), were neologisms introduced in China at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The introduction of these concepts (and here we especially concern ourselves with those of science and philosophy) oriented modern Chinese thought toward new debates that the Chinese had never experienced in the past. As modern Chinese thought derived its epistemology from the West, it should, by the same means, take in the different fields of inquiry underlying Western thought. Thus, the nineteenth -century European quarrel between scientific positivism and metaphysical philosophy would be reenacted in twentiethcentury China in very similar terms. Experts in Chinese studies will support the idea that Western scientific thought entered China through Jesuit missionary activities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably in mathematics, astronomy, geography, medicine, and botany. 135 136 Thierry Meynard However, most of the Jesuits’ knowledge was largely confined inside the walls of the imperial palace or the Astronomical Bureau in Beijing, and the Jesuits did not find Chinese institutions that would ensure the spread of this knowledge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many research institutions were created on the model of those in the West, and in which Western institutions played an important role. When Teilhard de Chardin came to China, he first worked with the museum of natural history, founded by the Jesuit Emile Licent in Tianjin. Later on he worked as advisor to the Geological Survey of China founded in 1916. While the Survey was directed by the Chinese, many research programs were in fact directed by Western scientists, such as Amadeus W. Grabau, an American, and J. G. Anderson, a Swede. With the discovery of the Zhoukoudian site and its famous ‘‘Peking Man,’’ the Survey collaborated with the Anatomy Department of the American Hospital School in Beijing, also called Peking Union Medical College. Davidson Black, an American, directed this unit, which benefited from the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Teilhard worked within this research unit in the 1920s and ’30s. Modern science in China provoked a great fascination among many Chinese, especially for those who were now being trained by Western scientists in the new institutions mentioned above. However, it was traumatizing for many others, because this science seemed to make traditional Chinese thinking useless or even harmful. The schism created in the modern age in the West between science and metaphysics became more radicalized in twentieth-century China, because the debate was so central to Chinese cultural identity. This schism was clearly manifested during the dialectic over science and metaphysics which would stir up the Chinese intellectual world in the years 1923–24 and would determine to the present day the overarching direction of Chinese contemporary thought toward a type of scientism. The dialectic between science and metaphysics would explode during Teilhard ’s first stay in China. Within a period of a few months, some 137 The Role of Science in Contemporary China fifty articles would express the view of the greatest Chinese thinkers who would be divided amongst themselves between the metaphysical and scientific camps. 1. The Mutual Prejudices of the Metaphysicians and the Scientists Zhang Junmai (1886–1969) began the debate in a conference in February 1923 at the University of Tsinghua. Zhang, like his contemporary neo-Confucians, sought scientific development because he recognized that knowledge for its own sake had not been sufficiently appreciated in China, and that it was important then to develop an epistemological spirit. He therefore did not oppose science, but he fiercely opposed scientism, which assumes that science is the only truth: ‘‘As developed as science can be, it cannot resolve the questions on the meaning of life because this is not within its power.’’1 Zhang therefore came to describe the relationship between science and the meaning of human life through five major dichotomies: objectivity-subjectivity, logic-intuition, analysis-synthesis, causality-free will, and uniformity-diversity. For Zhang, the cosmos is made up not only of the world of natural phenomena, but also of the world of metaphysical truth and morality. Scientific knowledge does not allow one to know...