Book Fair: FOJ on Winchester (on Needham)

My friend FOJ ventures into a too-little remembered episode of modern Chinese history and comes back with a contribution to the Underbelly summer Book Fair. FOJ's recommendtion is The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester. The "man" of the title is Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilization in China, itself one of the masterworks history-writing in the 20th Century. Here's FOJ on Winchester on Needham:

This book which is categorized as a biography is actually four books in one and perhaps that is both its strength and its weakness. It is a biography of Joseph Needham, a fascinating guy who lived an unconventional life and lived it very well. Theme 1 is that life.

Theme 2 is a look at China from 1940 until the 1970's. Because the hero is a friend of Chou En Lai the insights are fascinating. Much of what we learn emerges through a series of journeys into parts of China that are not occupied by the Japanese to look at science departments in Chinese universities in areas that were more free of Japanese influences .

Theme 3 is the life of a politically progressive Oxford prof who believed in what Mao and Chou were doing and may have been blinded to certain excesses and the effect that has on him. (For example he was banned from lecturing in the U.S. as a result of his participation on a panel that accused the U.S. of bad acts during the Korean War.)

Theme 4 is perhaps the most exciting and dominant one. Needham spent his life investigating the extraordinary inventions, innovations and discoveries made by the Chinese from about 1000 BC to about 1500 A.D. and translating them to the Western World and making sure we could not ignore them. This helps the reader understand Chinese civilization through the ages. This should be a reminder to us that to disrespect Chinese civilization is a big mistake in many ways.The author lists some of these inventions, discoveries and innovations in an appendix and it is staggering to read them.

Theme 5 is related to theme 1 and is the love life of a person whose love and fascination with China began with his love and fascination for Lu Gwei-djen a young beautiful brilliant Chinese student and who continued that relationship both personally (along with others) and professionally for many many years along with his marriage which predated this meeting by a few years. The threesome seems to have worked out well professionally and personally and when Needham’s wife died after 50 plus years of marriage he married his Chinese Sweetheart and when she died he proposed unsuccessfully to others.

The book is relatively short at 265 pages and perhaps that is the reason that none of these themes (except perhaps theme 5) is so fully developed as the reader might like. Still, this is a wonderful story well told and its lessons both about Chinese civilization and about how much there is undiscovered that we need to know are important stories.

Afterthought: Sounds like five, not four, good buddy, but hey, who's counting? As always, for your convenience, there is a collection of all the Book Fair posts here.

Reviving Joseph Needham

I see that Cambridge University Press will bring out a new edition of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China—the one-volume version, I take it, rather than the massive multi-volume affair, which seems to appear incrementally and perhaps without end (link).

Well, bully for them: well deserved and if anything, long overdue. I can’t think of anyone who has fallen so completely out of the canon as Needham, once thought perhaps the greatest historian of the 20^th Century. I assume part of the problem is the sheer daunting massiveness of his output (I won’t pretend to have read it all, not by a long shot). And it’s science, not a favorite among readers of history; and history, not a favorite among readers of science. And there’s a dicey premise—Needham”s “grand question”—why did “the West,” after such a slow and pitiful beginning, overtake China in scientific knowledge? Needham isn’t the least afraid to wade in with suggestions, hypotheses, conjectures, in a world where even to raise the issue might be regarded as of questionable taste.

Shorter Joseph Needham: it’s the matter of “lawfulness.” “The West” operates on the idea that there are underlying “laws” that can be discerned and made intelligible. Early China had a bad experience with “lawfulness;” ever since has shied away from too much reliance on general principles of this sort: if you pay too much attention to “laws,” you’re not paying enough attention to particulars—and besides, if you are paying too much attention to laws, you are not paying enough attention to good men, whose words and judgment are more important than law.

Both Chinese and western thought unite ethical and cosmic order—track human experiences as natural events, either in the world or in the body. But:

But it seems that the Western conception was deeply different from the Chinese. The former saw justice and law at all levels, closely associated with personalized beings, enacting laws or administering them. The latter saw only that righteousness embodied in good custom represented the harmony necessary for the existence and function of the social organism. It recognized also a harmony in the function of the heavens, and, if pressed, would have admitted one in the functions of the individual body also, but these harmonies were spontaneous, not free. Discord in one was echoed by disharmony in the others.

—Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China 528 (1956)