The Martian probe Tianwen sends us videos of Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars, the CNOOC has just completed the construction of the country’s largest oil production platform in the South China Sea and Yuan Longping, the inventor of hybrid rice, died this week at the age of 91.
These three remarkable achievements of Chinese techno-science, still unimaginable twenty years ago, provide an opportunity to better understand the question of technology in China.
“Three remarkable achievements of Chinese techno-science, still unimaginable twenty years ago, provide an opportunity to better understand the question of technology in China”
Yuk Hui is making his contribution today. Juror of the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, he studied computer science in Hong Kong and philosophy at Goldmsmiths College in London, and published in English ‘The Question Concerning Technonolgy in China – An Essay in Cosmotechnics’, the French translation of which comes from come out under the title ‘The Problem of Technology in China’.
The compass, the paper, the gunpowder traditionally pass for the great Chinese inventions. The compass, the stern rudder, paper money, the kite, the abacus, the wheelbarrow and the parasol are commonly added to it.
In view of the importance of these inventions and the social and economic impact of the technological breakthroughs it has demonstrated in its history, China could have become modern long before Europe. It was not the case.
The second power in the world has achieved the feat of becoming a very great technological power without ever having thought of technique. For want of bringing together the intellectual conditions which, in Europe, made the scientific and technological revolution possible, China has modernized without modernity.
“So what did she lack for her to invent the science and technology that made Europe modern? A founding mythological story, the separation of the two orders of nature and culture, the invention of geometry, the Cartesian cogito and the obsession with causality, undoubtedly also a more complex geography ”
What did it lack for it to invent the science and technology which made the modernity of Europe? A founding mythological story, the separation of the two orders of nature and culture, the invention of geometry, the Cartesian cogito and the obsession with causality, undoubtedly also a more complex geography: these are some of the avenues of Yuk Hui’s investigation.
A culture without cuts
Let’s start with the mythological tale. Aeschylus credits Prometheus with the invention of “all the technai possessed by mortals, starting with arithmetic and writing, memory of everything, labor which gives birth to the arts”.
Chinese tradition names Shennong the god who brings agriculture, fire, medicinal plants. But unlike the tragic heroism of Prometheus who steals fire from the gods to give it to men, if Shennong invents the plow, the hoe, the kitchen and the zither, it is not against the gods, to dispossess them or to rebalance a balance of forces more favorable to men, it is so that the ten thousand beings prosper and live in good harmony with the sky and the earth. In the absence of mimetic rivalry between gods and men, the latter do not feel obliged to cultivate their singularity by developing their critical, scientific and technological rationality.
“In the absence of mimetic rivalry between gods and men, the latter do not feel obliged to cultivate their singularity by developing their critical, scientific and technological rationality”
The second track is philosophical. In ‘Chinese Science and the West’, J. Needham noted: “Chinese philosophy is organic materialism. Chinese thought has never developed a mechanistic view of the world because it is the organicist perspective according to which each phenomenon is linked to all the others according to a hierarchical order that has prevailed among Chinese thinkers ”. And in a dialogue with the sinologist Gernet, the Hellenist Vernant recalled that Chinese culture, unlike Greek, is a culture without a break between reigns, orders and categories: no break between gods and men, eternal and mortal, the visible and the invisible, the permanent and the changing, the pure and the mixed, the uncertain and the certain. Nothing of this Western anxiety of the separated man who must repair his condition, transform nature, grow and invent himself through work, science and technology.
Correlations more than causalities
The third track is methodological. Einstein noted that if Western science had been able to develop, it was thanks to the two basic realizations that were the invention of the logico-formal system by the Euclidean geometry of the Greek philosophers, and the discovery, during the Renaissance, that it it is possible to find causal relationships by systematic experiment. However, China did not think of geometry which objective space and spatialize time, and where Western science since Descartes analyzes, divides, separates, measures, Chinese thought organizes correspondences and resonances, thinking more about relationships than substances, tracking correlation more than causation.
A geography without rivalry
The fourth track could well be geographic. This is the fruitful hypothesis of Jared Diamond in ‘Inequality among societies’ which explains that the vast Chinese plain and its two great river valleys were conducive to the concentration of power in the form of a centralized state, rendering by there impossible internal competition between the different regions of the empire.
“The vast Chinese plain and its two great river valleys were conducive to the concentration of power in the form of a centralized state, thereby making internal competition between the different regions of the empire impossible”
The technique is not universal, its emergence always depends on a culture, a cosmology, a morality. What Yuk Hui calls cosmotechnics. Chinese cosmotechnics have made the emergence of Western-style modernity impossible. This is how China modernized without modernity. And by mimetic rivalry with the West.
In the face of predatory capitalism
Since the humiliation of Western colonization after the Opium Wars of 1840 and 1860, which it has often attributed to European technological superiority, Chinese power has sought to catch up with its technological backwardness to return to the world race. This is today done. Is this frenetically constructed technological power still reconcilable with the fundamentals of Chinese culture? Will it be able to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene without aligning itself with the model of predatory capitalism which has become, in Yuk Hui’s words, “the contemporary cosmostechnic which dominates the planet”?
“Is this frenetically constructed technological power still reconcilable with the fundamentals of Chinese culture?”
The future of China largely depends on the answer to the first question, the future of the world on the answer to the second.
‘The Great Learning’, a Confucian classic, recommends the following guiding principles which honor man: scrutinizing the nature of things, developing knowledge, perfecting will, regulating movements of the heart, perfecting oneself , to govern the States well, to enjoy peace throughout the empire.
May the new Chinese technological reason be faithful to this program.
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