Cool Footnote #4: Guide for the Perplexed

In the course of researching my last post, while searching for background on the agricultural historian Hu Daojing, the author of “Explaining the Chinese Peasantry’s Understanding of Soybean Root Nodules,” I found an article including him in a group of Chinese scientists who were important influences on Joseph Needham, the primary author and chief conspirator behind the encyclopedically massive Science and Civilization of China.

I happen to own 15 volumes of Needham’s masterwork, an inheritance from my uncle, whose interest in Chinese history played a convoluted role in my own intellectual journey to China. (For more information on that topic, including my relationship with fire, an investigation of the concept of huohou, and an introduction to my favorite Sichuanese writer, Li Jieren, please read my (somewhat self-indulgent post) Proper Fire Management.)

Joseph Needham first became interested in the history of science and technology and China when he spent a solid chunk of World War II helping Chinese scientists gain access to resources for scientific research under the auspices of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office. At the time, Japanese invaders controlled large parts of China, and Needham’s headquarters were in Sichuan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government had retreated to. In his early 40s, Needham’s efforts to distribute supplies, as he later wrote, “entailed journeys within China of approximately 8,000 kilometers, mostly by motor-truck, but also by aeroplane, river-steamer, junk, sampan, skin-raft, horseback, jeep, bus and bicycle.”

The article referencing Hu Daojing informed me that in 1943, Needham gave a lecture in Chongqing, Sichuan titled “Science and agriculture in China and the West” in which he introduced to the world the conundrum later described as “the Needham puzzle.” Why, he asked, had a civilization that was at the forefront of scientific and technological progress for millennia fallen behind Europe in the early modern era?

I found a copy of that speech in a book called Science Outpost, a collection of official reports, letters, and other miscellanea (including poetry!) authored by Needham while stationed in China from 1942-1946.

On the first page, in his introduction, Needham reaches back to medieval Europe to explain why he regarded it as his life work to increase global scientific communication.

Thus in the twelfth century Maimonides of Cordova, at the court of the Sultan in Cairo, correlating the opinions of Neo-Platonists and Aristotelians, of Jewish and Arabian scholars, produced his famous Guide for the Perplexed, and by summarizing the work of predecessors and contemporaries affected all medieval philosophy.

I love this call-out to Maimonides, because I am often perplexed and I am always looking for a guide. (It was only by a great act of willpower that I refrained from getting a copy of Guide for the Perplexed from the library yesterday, because, I’m afraid, my rabbit holes already runneth over.) And I continue to be inspired by Needham, who finished his 1943 lecture with a manifesto that is sadly unfulfilled:

The position today is, of course, that modern science is absolutely international. There is no question of differences between Chinese and western scientists. I greatly dislike the expression “foreign” or “western” science. Science is your inheritance as much as mine. Zhuangzi and Anaxagoras; Zhu Xi and Leonardo; what difference makes it? There is no such thing as “foreign” science or “Chinese science. There is only one international human science – it is our common possession. In the future there is only one possible way in which mankind can advance, through co-operation and solidarity. The unity of science already foreshadows that political unity which will one day embrace the whole of mankind. The Chinese people and the people of the West are brothers in that common task

Hu Daojing and Joseph Needham

.