Medicine, Philosophy and Religion

·期刊原文
Book Review

Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections

By Mary Tiles

Philosophy East and West
v. 50 n.2 (April 2000)

pp.308-309
　

Copyright 2000 by University of Hawai'i Press

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P.308

Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections. By Nathan Sivin. Aldershot, England: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing, 1995. Pp. xvii + 278.

Reviewed by Mary Tiles University of Hawaii

Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections reprints three of Nathan Sivin's previously published essays, which appeared between 1978 and 1990. In addition it contains a revised version of one essay and a bibliography along with four new essays. The new essays are "Comparing Greek and Chinese Philosophy and Science" (chapter 1), "Emotional Counter-therapy" (chapter 2), "The Myth of the Naturalists" (chapter 4), and "Taoism and Science" (chapter 7).

Sivin describes the motivation underlying these studies as an intense curiosity about how people in a civilization very different from that of Europe have gone about understanding nature and defining their relation to it. He further comments that studying other cultures historically is at least as serviceable a way as philosophic speculation to learn about ways of thinking that never evolved in Western traditions. Nevertheless, Sivin claims at the beginning of chapter 1, although historians have already spent three hundred years comparing European and other scientific traditions, we have learned embarrassingly little from these three centuries of comparative studies. How are these historical studies to be made more fruitful? Sivin suggests that disappointment will continue to outbalance hope as long as we insist on comparing things out of context one at a time. He tries to steer clear of what he calls two major fads in the history of science: the context-free study of ideas and the sociological approach, which attends to social context while ignoring what scientists thought and did. He has no use for the idea that science is separable from its context, but instead studies ideas, their use, and the social processes that created and elaborated them as a single phenomenon.

This stance leads Sivin to challenge assumptions underlying much of the work of earlier historians of Chinese science, including, of course, that of Joseph Needham. This is the thrust of many of the essays included in this volume. Although Sivin acknowledges the enormous value of Needham's work, he nonetheless takes issue with some of the generalizations to which it has led, and which are frequently re-

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peated without critical examination. Thus chapters 6 and 7, which occupy close to half the volume, challenge the claim that Taoism was either responsible for, or furthered the development of the sciences in China.

There are here basically two foci of criticism. The first, and the main burden of chapter 6, concerns the definition of Taoism. The second is that none of the various defensible definitions can support the claim that it was Taoism, as opposed to Confucianism, that was responsible for the development of science and technology in China. Sivin draws attention to the many things that Taoism can mean. He argues that the distinction between Tao chia (Taoist school) and Tao Chiao (Taoist sect) is a creation of modern historians that is of little use in textual studies. He does not like the term Tao chia because it suggests that there is some identifiable group of Taoist philosophers, whereas he claims that those who gave high priority to the study of the Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu as texts were a handful of authors scattered through history. The point of not taking ideas out of context then comes into play, for Sivin refuses to make the crippling assumption that these texts had a fixed intellectual content independent of time and place. This presents a powerful challenge to the assumption that any textual canon can, on its own, be a sign of any significant degree of ideological uniformity across a historically and/or geographically dispersed readership. Sivin's complaint is that he cannot find any social group that could be called Taoist and whose members would be those recognized as contributing to the development of science and technology in China.

In chapter 7 he argues that from the Han on, although one can identify certain ideas as Taoist to the extent that they echo those of the Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, embodying such ideas in some subclass of society called the Taoists is more likely than not to be a vacuous exercise. He further provides evidence that the goal of the cluster of Taoist religious traditions was communal or personal salvation, not the pursuit of scientific knowledge. This case is further pursued in chapter 8, where it is argued that it is a mistake to study the history of Chinese alchemy as a study of the history of chemistry in China. We have to stop assuming that the ends of alchemy were chemical. Chemical knowledge was only a means used in striving toward more spiritual goals. Alchemy thus has to be studied from a religious as well as a scientific perspective.

Sivin brings in a wealth of material to substantiate his points. This makes the volume a valuable reference resource for those working on aspects of the history of the Chinese sciences. On the other hand, it is not, at least to this reader, wholly clear where all of this leaves us. The hatchet job has been done: we are firmly warned not to make facile generalizations and shown why we should not do so. But once this by no means insignificant bit of tangled underbrush has been cleared, we still don't seem to be able to see the wood for the trees. Maybe that is simply a sign that there is a lot more work yet to be done in this area in which few have the necessary combination of skills to enter with anything like the degree of confidence or competence that Sivin displays.