Many historians of science have noticed parallels between two ancient cultures which were apparently completely unknown to each other. These cultures were those of Greece and China, and the parallels involved the ways their philosophers were thinking about the natural world. (The writings of H. Floris Cohen are the main sources here; further sources are listed below.)
According to H. Floris Cohen, in both of these civilizations:
Pattern and order in the world were sought for and given expression in ways that, while not as a rule excluding the divine, did entail attribution of the generality of natural phenomena to agents or forces operating without immediate divine intervention. ‘Naturalist’ has become the standard label for such conceptions.1
Greece
As they considered the complexity of the natural world, the earliest Greek philosophers searched for the “one in the many”. Thales proposed that all things were (or came from) water; Anaximenes claimed air was the source of everything, and Anaximander talked about an unspecified boundless stuff. However the most influential Greek theory came from Empedocles in the fifth century BC; Empedocles articulated a theory of not one but four “roots" (air, water, earth, and fire) and two active principles (love and strife). Empedocles’ four roots influenced much of subsequent Greek thought, especially in cosmology and medicine.
Plato started calling these roots “elements,” and Aristotle incorporated them into his Physics as consisting of prime matter under the influence of the properties of hot/cold and wet/dry:
Earth is cold and dry.
Water is cold and wet.
Air is hot and wet.
Fire is hot and dry.
These can be visualized in the following diagram.
Several Hippocratic treatises identified four vital bodily fluids or “humors”; imbalances in these humors were the causes of disease. Later Galen integrated this idea into his own system of human physiology, and Galen’s system remained influential until the emergence of germ theory in the nineteenth century. The four humors were regarded as corresponding to the four elements (although neither Galen nor the Hippocratic writings made this explicit):
Blood — corresponding to Air
Yellow Bile — corresponding to Fire
Black Bile — corresponding to Earth
Phlegm — corresponding to Water
In the Aristotelian cosmos each of the four elements has its own natural place (determined by its weight), to which it naturally moves unless it is prevented by an external factor or “unnatural motion.” Aristotle knew that the earth is essentially spherical, so he argued that the element’s natural places form a set of nested spheres, with earth at the center, encircled by water, air, and fire, in that order. So earth naturally falls down; water flows down until it is stopped by earth, air rises, and fire rises even higher.
Aristotle also added a fifth element — later called aether — which was the substance of celestial objects such as the sun, moon, stars, and planets, which move in perfect circles (or combinations thereof). As part of the Aristotelian cosmos all of these elements continued to be influential in the west for the following two millennia.
China
In the fifth and sixth centuries BC, (around the same time as in Greece) various Chinese philosophers started exploring naturalistic ideas about the constitution of the world. Compared to the Greeks’ focus on causation, the Chinese thought more in terms of connection or correlation:
For the ancient Chinese, things were connected rather than caused… The universe is a vast organism, with now one component, now another, taking the lead at any one time, with all the parts co-operating in a mutual service… In such a system as this, causality is not like a chain of events… [rather] succession was subordinated to… interdependence.2
Four key concepts emerged, each involving this correlative way of thinking:
Tao (the Way)
Chi (matter/energy)
Wu-hsing (the five phases)
Yin/Yang
The tao was used in a broader sense than in the Taoist religion. Its general meaning was, according to Cohen, “the Way that accords with the individual and with his society, in harmony also with the fabric of nature.”3
Originally chi referred to a variety of intangible phenomena such as air, breath, smoke, fog, and clouds. Later, in the context of medicine, chi came to mean physical vitality and the natural forces which influence health. It is often translated as matter/energy.
When dividing a phenomenon into two parts or aspects, the terms of yin/yang were often used as the framework: “In principle, every spatial configuration and every process that takes place in real time are open to a yin-yang interpretation, whether it involves action and reaction, male and female, or growth and withering.”4
For more complex divisions, there were the wu-hsing, or five phases: Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, Earth. These referred to not simply physical elements or “roots” like those of Empedocles, but also included abstract processes which regulate the course of things. For example, earth referred to vegetative processes, and metal referred to things which could be turned into something else by melting or evaporation.
These five phases have two different orders (or cycles): The production cycle and the conquest cycle.
In the production cycle, one process flows from another: Wood — Fire — Earth — Metal — Water.
Wood when burned creates fire, which in turn creates ash (a form of earth). Metal is formed in the earth, from which it is extracted. When cool, metal leads to condensation, creating water, which in turn, nourishes wood, closing the cycle.
In the conquest cycle, one process dominates another: Wood — Earth — Water — Fire — Metal.
Wood stabilizes earth (as in preventing soil erosion). Earth contains water (as with dams). Water dampens fire. Fire shapes metal. Metal chops wood, closing the cycle.
Mohism
During China’s Warring States period (c. 475 BC - 221 BC), a thinker named Mozi originated a philosophic school known as Mohism which propagated ideas on politics, ethics, natural philosophy, and logic. Mozi’s writings were unusual in that they did not have any references to yin/yang, the five phases, or chi. Mohist natural philosophy resembled Greek thinking more closely than did any other Chinese ideas. It focused on developing concepts in a more rigorous fashion, seeking necessary causal connections, and examining objects such as mirrors, balances, ladders, and masonry.
After the Qin unification of China in 221 BC, the numerous competing philosophic systems were merged into the Han synthesis, with the bulk of Mohism being discarded and ignored. Unfortunately Mohism did not have any further influence on Chinese culture.
Chinese versus Greek Nature-Knowledge
In his magnum opus How Modern Science Came Into The World, H. Floris Cohen asks:
Why in the end was modern science grafted upon the body of knowledge to come out of the Greek, and not the Chinese, quest for nature-knowledge? Might not the outcome, but for some quirk of history, just as well have been otherwise?5
According to Cohen, a major part of the answer lies in the opportunities for cross-fertilization between cultures. Cohen uses the term “cultural transplantation” to refer to a process undergone multiple times in western history. After the conquests of Alexander, Greek ideas were transplanted to Alexandria. Centuries later, these ideas were transplanted into the Islamic world, and centuries later into Europe. Every transplantation led to an influx of new ideas and new approaches.
Due primarily to the vicissitudes of military-political history, such stimulating and transformative experiences were to keep happening to the Greek corpus of nature-knowledge but never to its Chinese counterpart.6
In spite of multiple barbarian invasions, China was able to keep its cultural integrity intact and largely untouched by outside influences. As an unintended consequence, Chinese thought missed out on the opportunities for re-invigoration and competition faced by ideas in the West.
But perhaps even more important than this is China’s worldview of organic materialism and its focus on “harmony.” Cohen points out an important philosophic issue:
Behind the Chinese striving for harmony lay an acceptance of the world as it is given to us, in marked contrast to how European civilization aimed in action and in thought to intervene in the world and manipulate it for human ends.7
One figure notably absent from Cohen’s explanation is Aristotle, whose philosophy provided a powerful framework for future science, with its logic and its accounts of knowledge as rooted in empirical observation and organized in terms of a hierarchy of abstractions. In the western tradition, even when thinkers such as Francis Bacon claimed to reject Aristotle, they were usually relying on Aristotle in regard to fundamentals.
As we have seen, Mohist thought about nature was unique in ancient China, especially with its interest in logic and its focus on finding necessary causal connections among physical phenomena. If Mohism had not been ignored and suppressed — if it had been allowed to grow and evolve — perhaps a “Chinese Aristotle" might have eventually emerged.
I welcome your thoughts in the comments.
References for Further Reading:
The classic on the history of science and technology in China is Joseph Needham’s multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press, 1954-). A condensed version prepared under the supervision of Needham is Colin A. Ronin’s The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, (Cambridge University Press, 1978-).
H. Floris Cohen, The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History ((Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came Into The World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)
Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
G. E. R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Clarendon Press, 2006)
G. E. R. Lloyd, Principles And Practices in Ancient Greek And Chinese Science (Variorum Collected Studies Series) (Ashgate/Variorum, 2019)
Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Savin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (London: Yale University Press, 2002)
H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came Into The World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 3
Quoted in H. Floris Cohen, The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) p. 31-2, from C.A. Ronin, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, Vol I. (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 165
Modern Science, p. 35
Rise p. 33
Modern Science, p. 44
Modern Science, p. 46
Modern Science, p. 138