Scholar Wu Guosheng: Science Has Never Truly Entered the Movement to Renew Our National Spirit (Part 1)

A long interview, but worth your time. When we talk about science and technology, do we dwell too much on what "technology" can be used for, and miss what "science" does to the spirit?

Wu Guosheng is a professor in the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University and chair of its Department of the History of Science. He works mainly on the history and philosophy of science. He has taught a popular general-education course, A General History of Science (《科学通史》), at both Peking University and Tsinghua, and written the bestsellers The Journey of Science (《科学的历程》) and What Is Science? (《什么是科学》); his other books include The Greek Concept of Space (《希腊空间概念》) and Lectures on the Philosophy of Technology (《技术哲学讲演录》).

Han Qide, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, once said of What Is Science?: "This book thinks through and explains the nature and origins of science both from within the Western context and from the reality of how Chinese people actually understand science. It has insights of its own, and it is profound yet plainly put, easy to take in. Of the works on the philosophy of science I have seen, it is a very good one, and the best suited to Chinese readers today."

Jiang Xiaoyuan, a chair professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said The Journey of Science "really has been influential all along. On the one hand it is well regarded in academic circles; on the other, it has had a good effect on a number of young people, working as a kind of doorway in."

Wu Guosheng was born in September 1964 in Guangji, Hubei. At 15 he entered Peking University to study geophysics, then moved to the philosophy department for his master's. In 1997 he became the youngest research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; a year later he took his PhD in philosophy there under the philosopher Ye Xiushan. From 1999 to 2016 he was a professor in Peking University's philosophy department, until he moved to Tsinghua the year before last, where he went on to head the newly founded Department of the History of Science.

For more than 20 years, one of Wu Guosheng's projects has been to clear away Chinese misunderstandings of science so that people can see what science actually is. As he sees it, many Chinese people today hold three big misconceptions. First, they do not separate "science" (ke) from "technology" (ji): in Chinese, talk of kexue ("science") slides easily into keji ("science and technology"), and when people say keji they mean technology. Second, they paint science in far too utilitarian a color — science shows up as a tool, not as an end. Third, they lean too hard on the literal sense of the word, "dividing into disciplines" (fenke).

Science, he argues, is an import from the West, and to understand it you have to go back into the Western context. In Western history science has taken two successive forms: first Greek science, then modern science. Greek science was non-utilitarian, intrinsic, certain knowledge, born of the Greek pursuit of a free human nature; its typical products were deductive mathematics, formal logic, and systematic philosophy. Modern science inherited the Greek ideal of certainty but added claims of subjectivity and power, and so became the force that dominates today — plainly useful, governing how human society develops, deciding humanity's future. Its main form is mathematical experimental science.

The Journey of Science came out in a fourth edition this past August, 23 years after the first. Wu recalls that the 1995 edition sold 20,000 copies, a decent showing at the time. "This book is mainly a witness to what happened to popular-science publishing in China over the past 20 years, how it slowly warmed up again from a low point."

Apart from a few revisions, the fourth edition's biggest change from the previous three is the pictures, many of them from Wu Guosheng's "science travels" of the past decade. Our interview began with those travels. Set beside science museums abroad, Wu thinks, China's have one glaring problem: no historical collections.

"China's so-called science and technology museums — they're called Science and Technology Museums, but what they actually correspond to abroad is the Science Center; they follow the science-center model. That model has no collections, only interactive exhibits. I have long argued that China should build its own national science museum. The Chinese people have spent more than 100 years learning Western science, and something has to bear witness to that," Wu told QDaily.

In January 2018, Wu Guosheng and his companions set out on a 13-day "pilgrimage to Greek science." Following science as their thread, they went to many places in Greece: the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, Aristotle's hometown of Stagira, Pythagoras's home island of Samos, the National Archaeological Museum of Greece.

At the National Archaeological Museum he saw the Antikythera mechanism and could hardly contain himself, examining every gear and ring, unable to take his hands off it. "The Antikythera mechanism is the first mechanical computer we know of in human history, believed to date from the first or second century BC. Nothing like it appeared again until around AD 1400. That is to say, in the history of European mechanical technology there is a gap of roughly 1,500 years, and it stands there alone, a solitary peak," Wu said.

Beyond Greece, the past decade has taken Wu Guosheng to Woolsthorpe, Newton's home village; to Downe, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species; to Einstein's former house in Princeton; to the late-18th-century Watt steam engine on display at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney; and elsewhere.

Wherever he goes, the first thing he looks for is whatever has to do with science. During a week in Paris he never set foot in the Louvre; everything he went to see involved scientists — Descartes, Pasteur, Marie Curie, Buffon, Lamarck.

These visits, Wu Guosheng says, have deepened the "excitement and longing" he brings to his research, and made his own life more complete.

Q = QDaily

Wu = Wu Guosheng

To meet the crisis of modernity created by modern mathematical experimental science, we have to return to Greece and draw on the natural-history tradition

Q: Modern mathematical experimental science has achieved enormous things, but you point out that this purely conquering, power-driven science has already shown its limits plainly, and has set off a series of crises of modernity. To get past those limits and crises there are two routes: return to the ideal scientific spirit of ancient Greece, or return to the spirit of natural history. You discuss both at length in your book, but the discussion is scattered, so could you sum it up simply — what limits exactly has modern mathematical experimental science revealed, and what crises has it brought? And why does returning to the ancient Greek ideal of science, and to the spirit of natural history, matter so much right now?

Wu: I always feel that Chinese people either misunderstand science or underrate it.

Of the Greek origins of science we are wholly ignorant, wholly blind. We do not know that science began as the result of cherishing, defending and carrying forward a free spirit, because Chinese culture talks about usefulness and looks at results. That is one misunderstanding.

The second is underrating what modern science latently contains. We see only that modern science is useful; we don't see that this usefulness is rooted in a very deep system inside Western culture. To use the Chinese pair ti (substance) and yong (function): modern science is a kind of substance, not a function. If you look only at its function, you are underrating it. What substance is modern science built on? On a system whose core is Christian culture. It takes the realization of human free will as a basic goal of modernity. The basic goal of modernity is the free play of the human will — which is what Nietzsche called the will to power. And what does the will to power produce? It turns the world into a picture, treats the world as our object, something to be defeated, conquered, controlled, operated on, and it asserts its own will by making the world into an object. This is the deeply rooted substance of modernity, and it is what makes modern science deal with nature the way it does.

Many Chinese people don't really grasp this; they see only that modern science is very useful. Why is it so useful? Why has it been pushed this far? How far is that? It is control of the world with no blind spots, an airtight net, domination by precise calculation. So it is no longer a simple question of function. In the Chinese ti-yong scheme, function serves to accomplish substance, and function can even be a matter of chance — I can use a thing this way or that way. But that isn't so here. Modern science does not permit this use or that use; there is only one use, and that is to use nature up, use it into the ground. So the consequences of such a science are inevitable: pollution, ecological imbalance, resources running out, imbalance among human beings. These problems arise on their own. Put simply: strain between people and nature, and strain between people and people. That strain has become a consequence of modernity that is hard to avoid.

Westerners were the first to see this consequence, so they have ways of controlling and rescuing the situation. Chinese people say "a thing at its extreme turns back," and "where there is danger there is opportunity." The West has similar thinking: Hölderlin said that where the danger is, the saving power grows too. So the West saw the seriousness of the problem first, and has been developing ways to get past these dangers. Where does China's problem lie? First, people are not aware of the danger. That may have to do with the stage of development — you have only just begun to develop, so you can't see the danger. Someone who hasn't yet eaten his fill doesn't appreciate the harm in being fat. But some problems come on fast. Over the past 20 years Chinese people have put on weight quickly, and the consequences here are worse than in the West. America has plenty of very fat people, but the rates of high blood pressure, high blood lipids and stroke are not that high, because it happened gradually, and along the way they gradually settled on medical systems, health-care systems and habits of hygiene that kept the problem from getting that bad.

China is different. China shot up. When things shoot up, the consequences stand out. So on one side, pollution has produced huge numbers of liver-cancer cases; liver cancer is rife in many rural areas. On the other side, there are a great many strokes, because in the past people rarely got this disease, or rarely knew where it came from. Now, with better living conditions — having just gotten enough to eat, people eat with a vengeance — a lot of problems follow. And they don't come slowly at all. This is not some distant future; it is already the present. So you can't say we aren't fully modernized yet, let's not worry about these problems. In fact you have to worry about them more urgently than the West does. In pollution, ecological damage, and the unhealthiness of social life and of people's bodies, China is the worst case.

We run fast, and in terms of cultural ecology we have no natural predators. Other people have natural predators, so their ecology stays roughly in balance. I often say that Western science keeps growing stronger, yet Western religion has not weakened in the least, and there is still art, philosophy, democratic institutions, all of them holding science in check. Science there is powerful on one side, and on the other it cannot break through those restraints. Here it is different: no natural predators, no way to check it. So you get what is called scientism, a cultural condition in which science cannot be reflected upon.

What Is Science? is in fact aimed squarely at China, at the state of Chinese academic and intellectual life. So the two routes out of the crisis you just mentioned also come loaded with the Chinese context, because in the West this has long gone without saying. The so-called postmodern voices, with Nietzsche as their representative, appeared in the 19th century — some even argue that Marx's basic line of thinking is postmodern too — and so plenty of people in the 20th century talked about going back to Greece. Virtue ethics, for instance, arose to get around the shortcomings of utilitarianism and of Kantian categorical-imperative ethics, and it wanted to return to Greece. There is much of this in science as well: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Einstein all gradually turned their scientific aims back toward Greece.

What does going back to Greece mean? Science came out of Greece in the first place. You try a certain path, and then you find you have exhausted its possibilities and can go no further — that in the end its bad consequences have outweighed the intentions you had when you set out. What is the only thing left to do? Go back to your original condition. So Westerners began long ago to rescue their crisis of modernity by returning to Greece. This is not a new route; we Chinese simply haven't noticed it.

But my way of putting this has a target. When Chinese people talk about science, they should think about this route. If you are thinking about culture, of course, you don't necessarily have to go back to Greece, because Chinese culture did not come from Greece and is not a scientific culture. A full revival of Chinese culture, an escape from its crisis, may have to go back to the pre-Qin era, reviving a culture gone stale by returning to the pre-Qin. Returning to Greece is a shared identification within Western culture, and the road Western modern science must take to get out of its difficulty. Westerners realized that long ago.

On natural history (bowuxue), I do have some claim to originality, and because it is original, people don't necessarily accept it. In the West, nobody lectures on natural history as such. The reason nobody does is that it never died out among ordinary people; the tradition there runs deep. You see it in many places. First, in popular leisure: to fight the ailments of the city and the ills of modern civilization, you go back to nature, back to the countryside. The West has always done this — the Romantic movement, the life-reform movement. It already had an institutionalized way back to nature: all the natural-history societies you find in developed countries, the Linnean Society, the Audubon bird societies, the Leopold societies. Through democratic self-organization, it has reached down to the level of the community.

In China this tradition was cut off. Ancient China certainly had landscape poetry, a tradition of closeness to nature. But that tradition was taken to have nothing to do with science. It never occurred to Chinese people that it could be used to hold science in check. This point, too, is aimed at the Chinese context. In the West it isn't a problem — that way of thinking was always there. Natural history declined as an academic school, but the movement did not decline.

The 19th century was a double turning point for natural history. On one side, the academic school gradually faded: universities no longer had departments of natural history, replacing them with departments of botany, zoology, mineralogy, geology and so on. It was split into disciplines, and natural history, the umbrella over all of them, was thrown away. So by the 20th century you could hardly find a naturalist; a few individuals such as Harvard's Edward O. Wilson or Ernst Mayr count. But among ordinary people the movement had already grown strong in the 19th century, with civic organizations everywhere. That is why environmental movements arise so readily in a country like the United States. America's environmental movement has never stopped — from the 19th-century national-park movement, begun under President Theodore Roosevelt, on through the 20th century, with Leopold's land ethic and his natural-history classic A Sand County Almanac (1949), to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the 1960s. It has never stopped. It lives among ordinary people, not in the academy. In China, ordinary people lack it, and it has not joined up with the mainstream science movement. So when I raise this, my motive is to enrich the soil of Chinese science culture. Science has depth; it is a system of ecological connections.

Returning to Greece, drawing on natural history — both are addressed to Chinese discourse. In an international setting, neither is new.

For Chinese people today, what science means is still mainly enlightenment

Q: Against that background, what do you think science means for Chinese people today? What does it stand for?

Wu: For Chinese people today, what science means is still mainly enlightenment. It marks one of the main forces carrying China from a traditional society to a modern one, and that cannot be denied. All the various strands of thinking that run against it are therefore in trouble, because science has become the representative of the contemporary mainstream, the spokesman for the modern worldview, the maker of the modern model of social development, a principal driver of where humanity is headed. That cannot be denied.

But not denying it does not mean only one kind of science can stand for it. Those of us who work on the history of science, on the cultural history of science, who chase down the cultural origins of science, come to see that science is not merely a means to some end, as Chinese culture takes it to be; it is itself a powerful culture. And since it is a culture, it cannot have only one branch; it comes as a whole cluster. That cluster is what we have to fill in.

So I want to speak to China's present situation. First, we need to fill in its origins. Where did it come from? That we do not know. Many Chinese people think that as long as you want to eat, you have to do science. That is entirely wrong. It sells science short. It holds that people have to survive, that surviving requires science, that science is something every people has. Not so. Wanting to eat does not require doing science. Doing science requires a particular cultural identity, and that is the Greek spirit. This is what I have stressed for many years. You have to get hold of it at the source. Without it you will not do science right, or long, or lastingly; you cannot really follow or catch up with the rhythm and pace of modern society.

Second, science has many branches; it is a very rich ecosystem, so we need to add the natural-history branch. That branch has another advantage: it can be joined to the best of ancient Chinese culture. If you look only at the mathematical branch, ancient China has little to show. The more you work on it, the more pitiable ancient China looks. Have today's science and engineering students read the history of ancient Chinese technology and the result is that everyone comes away thinking the ancients were hopeless. Look at ancient China through the lens of mathematics and experiment and it appears crude, rudimentary, imprecise, loose in its logic, all at the level of common sense. But put on the natural-history lens and you may find ancient China full of suggestions — what it says about heaven, earth, people, farming and medicine can help correct certain excesses of modernization. Insisting instead on how many "firsts" the ancients scored — the earliest discovery of magnetic declination, say — what good is that? I don't see what it suggests for the present. You are only keeping up a bit of vanity; there is nothing instructive in it.

Q: Next year is the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, and one of its most important slogans was "science" — "Mr. Science," as it was called then. Looking back over the fate of science in China across those 100 years, what strikes you most? Is there anything today worth treasuring, or worth rethinking?

Wu: I think that since May Fourth, science has still been something in the nature of a tool. From May Fourth on, and even earlier, when Chinese people admired Western science they mostly understood it from within their own culture, not from the spiritual essence of science. That is, the reason Chinese people valued science was mostly to save the country, strengthen the army, change a backward condition — to use it as a tool. I take this to be Confucian thinking as well. China's modern scientists were all Confucians; it was Confucian devotion to family and nation that drove modern China's scientific progress. So I say Confucianism is not necessarily anti-science. Confucians may not understand science, but their devotion to family and nation could push generation after generation of Confucian-minded intellectuals into scientific research. That is my main impression.

That generation of scientists usually carried this devotion: I will give my life to the country. The founders of the atomic and hydrogen bomb programs all thought this way. Their motive for doing science was not curiosity, not the urge to pursue truth, not an unstoppable wonder at the mysteries of the universe, but the misfortune of family and country and the need to use science and technology to rescue a dangerous situation. That was the main motive, and it did accomplish certain things. Never mind those men; take Yang Zhenning's generation. The thing Yang has been proudest of all his life is that winning the Nobel Prize changed the Chinese sense of being inferior to others. He said that was his greatest achievement — not that he had discovered something about the material world and been overjoyed by it. Wang Ganchang, Qian Sanqiang, Qian Xuesen: all followed the same line. For the scientists of the whole 20th century, this was the main problem.

The motive is a good one, but it is not enough. Doing it this way keeps science permanently in the condition of a tool, without changing the traditional attitude toward science, and that makes it hard to turn science directly into cultural soil. So I think the Chinese people of the future, and future thinking about science, science policy and policy toward scientists, should all understand science from the angle of raising free citizens. Studying science lets you understand more of what democracy is, what equality is, what truth is, what freedom is. Understanding science from that angle is what would properly bring science into a nation's movement of renewal and rebirth. Science today is not thought to have any part in renewing the national spirit. Renewing the national spirit is still left to the Confucians, pondering "Zhou is an old state, but its mandate is new," trying to do the job with benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness. I don't oppose them, but you have to let science in. The people with real insight understand this — Professor Zhang Xianglong, for example. Zhang Xianglong is a Confucian, but he holds that any movement of thought or of social reform today that leaves out science and technology is nonsense, is muddled. Because what is the great trend of this society? You haven't seen it clearly.

So when we reflect on May Fourth, this is the main problem. Science has not truly entered the movement to renew our national soul, our national spirit.

Q: You mentioned freedom, which reminds me that you once said that for Westerners, to become human is to become free. In the Greek age, to grasp the logic of the Ideas was to realize freedom; today, to realize one's own will is to realize freedom. I'm curious: for you personally, what is freedom? What counts as having realized it?

Wu: Over more than a thousand years the two freedoms, the Christian and the Greek, did a great deal of merging. I personally believe that true freedom should be freedom in the sense of reason.

Freedom in the sense of asserting the will probably belongs mostly to ethics and morality. In that domain, all obedience to external rules presupposes that you are able to obey, able to choose; that is what makes you a person with moral and ethical capacity. Freedom lives in that domain. But the real substance of freedom lies in the inward understanding with which you meet the world and meet life. So I still lean toward the Greek kind of freedom; that freedom is more basic. Freedom of the will is derivative, a side branch. The root of freedom is still the Greek thing, the pure self, a hard, inward logic. That is freedom in the true sense.

And that is what our own culture badly lacks. The lack comes from what Chinese culture calls the organic worldview. The organic worldview dissolves every individual; there is no question of the individual at all. Chinese culture is extremely short on individual consciousness. So in a modern society led by science, having no individual and speaking only of the organism, the whole, is a very large problem. And once you lack this, even freedom of the will has nothing to rest on. So in my view the Greek kind of freedom is probably the more basic one.

Humans and technology are in fact evolving together

Q: In recent years it feels as though more and more people are pushing a kind of "AI threat" argument. They believe the current development of artificial intelligence will affect privacy, the job market, weapons of mass destruction, and might even destroy humanity. What do you make of such claims?

Wu: My view differs from Professor Jiang Xiaoyuan's. He does a lot of arguing for this; he says AI will be the main calamity of humanity's future.

I think, first, that AI does not appear all at once; it can't leap out in a single day. AI is a human technology, made by human beings, and in the course of making it we deal with all sorts of bugs. When you innovate in technology there is much in it that works against you, and when you optimize it you have to take those things into account. Take the car. Does the car have downsides? It does. It goes too fast, so it is hard to control and easy to crash; the number of people killed in car accidents each year is no smaller than in a war. But you are used to it, and you don't stop riding in cars because riding in cars can end in a crash. When humanity made the car, it did not make the car alone. Cars did not become that fast in a day, and cars come with speed limits, with laws against speeding on the highway, with criminal liability for drunk driving, and so on.

So the car has become part of culture; it is a culture, not simply a technology. As a technology, the car's threat to human beings is obvious. It kills people, wiping out a whole carload at once — how frightening is that? Human reflexes are weak, and yet the car is that fast: 100 kilometers an hour in only 8 seconds, or 5 seconds, or 4. People simply cannot keep up. These are all problems. Yet people feel there is nothing much wrong. Why nothing much wrong? Because car culture has been developing for more than 100 years, with a great many supporting things around it.

By the same logic, AI will not have its technology finished in a single day, and an AI culture will form as well. That culture will contain plenty of constraints. It will tell you that a car is not only an engine — it also has brakes. Brakes have gone through many generations, and now braking is easy. As AI develops, all sorts of faults nobody expected will show up, and new technologies will appear at once to cover them, to hold them in check. So I don't think anything drastic will come of AI. I don't see it as different in kind from anything else.

Take automata: automata have always been with us — air conditioners, refrigerators. Some will say AI learns by itself; a car also has a certain intelligence, since intelligence is, in the end, what people put into it. You give it as much as you decide to give. AI has the same issue. Of course it has to learn, and things like that may come. But AI is a machine, a product of human technology; it is always a human product and always subject to people. Sure, it will have problems. If they are big, humanity will put more effort into patching that part; if they are small, we gradually ignore them, and it doesn't matter. I think AI will go the same way. What you are imagining now hasn't happened yet, and learning is gradual. On this point I am not worried.

Google's or Baidu's search systems used to do nothing but big data; now they can classify and have some intelligence, but they still can't get there in a single step. So I think technology, like an organism, goes through evolution. It is a process in which humans and technology evolve together. And since it is evolution, nothing catastrophic will happen. What does evolution mean? Whatever goes too far gets weeded out. Whatever doesn't go too far stays. A species that flaunts itself is generally weeded out. What does flaunting mean? One, you eat too much and finish off everyone else's food; then you have nothing left to eat. Two, you taste especially good, and others eat you. So I also believe that something like AI, if it really had that many downsides, would have been killed off long ago.

Q: I think this touches on our basic attitude toward technology. Traditionally people are either optimists or pessimists about it. But your position seems to be a third path: technology is a transcendence of the human, a self-transcendence of our physical bodies. Could you say more?

Wu: Technological optimism says people can overpower technology. Technological pessimism says technology will overpower people. Both rest on the same premise, that technology and human beings are two separate skins — once the thing is made, either people are ruled by it or they control it. Neither is right. What my third path means is that people and technology are not two skins; they are one thing.

Technology looks as though it sits outside us, making an inside-outside relation. In fact it is a mirror relation. From the moment humans began knapping stone tools — the stone tool seems to be outside us? No. Every act of knapping a stone tool massages the folds of your cortex. That is, when human beings make external things, they are shaping their own interior at the same time.

Humans and technology are in fact evolving together. They are one. The technology you have is the human nature you have; the human nature you have is the technology you have.

The co-evolution of humans and technology is uneven. Sometimes the unevenness shows up as technology running ahead, doing things that catch people off guard and leave them awkward, at a loss. A car, one careless moment, and — whoosh — off it goes. You meant to hit the brake and hit the accelerator. But you can't say the car is out of control; losing control is the exception, and the fact that it can happen shows the unevenness. So sometimes technology walks in front of people. Sometimes it walks behind and holds them back: someone who likes or is used to an older technology will resist a new one.

Technology running ahead or lagging behind is part of what co-evolution means. Just as, to evolve, you first need new species — and where do new species come from? From mutation. Mutation is a kind of running ahead. Lagging is the present environment selecting which genes and species get to live. So this is a pair of contradictions, and that's fine. This contradiction is one of the basic ways our world works. The third path is not some other path; it is simply the question of humans and technology evolving together.

In terms of the philosophy of technology, this means you cannot treat technology as the human being's Other. If you insist on doing so, then all you can say is that the human being exists in the manner of an Other to begin with. Where do humans differ from animals? An animal is forever just itself, while a human is forever human existence plus something; a human has to have a bit extra. That extra bit, you could say, is technology. Without technology it won't work — you're not human.

Professor Deng Xiaomang has a formulation I like. He says the human being is not the animal that makes tools, nor the animal that uses tools; the human being is the animal that carries tools. Carrying usually means holding them in your hand, or wearing them on your body; even stark naked, you are still carrying technology. You are always with technology, never apart from it. What you part from is only particular, concrete technologies, and that parting is what we call unevenness — which of course soon turns into a new way of evolving together.

The problem with Chinese medicine is not only a scientific one; it involves culture, politics and national feeling

Q: You have said that ancient Chinese medicine and pharmacology also belong to the natural-history tradition — that the pharmacological part is mainly the bencao (materia medica) tradition within earth-science natural history, while the medical part can be classed as natural history of the human body. That is the historical view. I'm curious about the practical one: what is your attitude toward traditional Chinese medicine?

Wu: Chinese medicine is a troublesome subject. It is no longer only a scholarly question; it has turned into a question of national feeling (laughs), which makes it hard to talk about. Frankly, I don't believe in Chinese medicine myself. If I'm ill I certainly won't see a Chinese-medicine doctor. There is exactly one Chinese medicine I believe in — berberine (laughs).

Objectively, medicine is complicated, and it cares about results. Whatever your principles are, just cure me. So the problem of Chinese medicine is not purely a scientific problem. Modern Western medicine rests on mathematical experimental science, which insists on universality, repeatability and operability. Chinese medicine falls short on all three. It has no universality — it stresses climate, working in spring and not in winter; it varies with the person, curing men but not women, the old but not the young. Those who get better think it worked, of course. But can anyone tell whether the illness cleared up on its own or was cured by the treatment? Nobody can say. Second, Chinese medicine has never done the double-blind trials, the controls, the screening out of psychological factors that modern science demands. So it does not really fall inside the domain of science.

And fundamentally, medicine involves how a person understands disease. What counts as an illness? Understanding of disease depends on culture. Science, in principle, does not: you can't say gravity suits landlords but not poor peasants, suits the English but not the Chinese. Medicine can have that dependency — think of shanghuo ("internal heat"), or zuoyuezi (postpartum confinement), complaints bound up with Chinese culture. There's nothing you can say about them.

Some complaints depend on culture in another way, and there is a lot of research on this. Where women's rights were weak, some doctors held that many of women's illnesses were not illnesses at all. After feminism arrived, many things once regarded as non-illnesses became illnesses — postpartum depression, for instance, or premenstrual depression. In the past these were not illnesses; now, with feminist ideas, they count as illnesses. And what does counting as an illness mean? It means you get publicly funded treatment and legal leave. If it is not an illness, there is no legal leave and it cannot be brought into the medical-insurance system. That drags in politics as well.

So the problem of medicine is not purely a scientific one. That has to be said.

Chinese medicine depends heavily on culture. Judged entirely through the eyes of modern medicine, Chinese medicine is at about the same level as traditional Western medicine. Westerners today would never set modern medicine against traditional Western medicine; they say the old stuff is outdated, there is nothing to discuss. Certainly there are individuals who on occasion still believe in it, but it is not the mainstream. Chinese medicine deserves the same treatment: it too should be seen as the traditional medicine that existed before modern medicine appeared, and it cannot be measured against modern medicine. That is like pitting spears and broadswords against the atomic bomb. What would be the point? This is exactly the mistake we Chinese make, forever comparing Chinese medicine with modern medicine when the two cannot be compared. Westerners don't compare; why must you? It has to do with our cultural position: you are a backward nation, a latecomer nation, and the feeling may be hard to get past. Add in the fact that medicine is a field that cares about results and personal experience, and mixing the two together makes everything especially muddled.

So a view of medicine cannot be a purely scientific view. My talk of natural history is itself neutral; it cannot become the mainstream. What I mean is that if we also regard Chinese medicine as natural history of a sort, that likewise means it cannot become the mainstream — it is not science in the mathematical sense and does not meet the demands of mainstream science. Modern medicine does. In what sense, then, does Chinese medicine count as medicine? In the natural-history sense. That is all I mean.

Q: Your books all revolve around three words: "nature," "science" and "technology." Would you be willing to try summing up the relationship among the three in a sentence or a paragraph?

Wu: Science originates in the invention of nature. China has no concept of "nature"; nature is a Greek invention. Heidegger said modern technology is the completed form of metaphysics. You could also say modern technology is a kind of final form of science.

Those two sentences sum up my two ideas. First, science originated in Greece, in the pursuit of freedom. Second, where does the danger of modern technology lie? Modern technology has exhausted the possibilities modern science created. For that danger I have a phrase: the discovery of nature and the death of nature. Nature has now lost its autonomy. In Greece nature was an autonomous domain, but modern science, resting on the Christian idea of creation, produced an odd combination. On one hand nature is autonomous, indifferent to human will, with objective laws of its own; on the other hand everything in it is assembled by people through experiment. What we now call laws of nature ought to be called laws of the unnatural.

The topic of nature can string together both the origin of science and the danger of contemporary technology.

The late Heidegger took this very seriously; he was writing on Physics. He said the word "nature" in Western culture plays a hidden role. Hidden in what way? Hidden in the sense that people can no longer make it out, that the role has gone blurry. When we speak of nature now we have made it a specialty, a marginal topic. Philosophy today generally talks about justice, beauty and the like; nature comes up rarely. When it does, people think of what scientists deal with — and the scientists don't say much about it either. Heidegger saw this very precisely and very deeply: he said nature is always playing a hidden regulating role. Physics, he said, is the study of nature (physis). Philosophy is metaphysics. And what is metaphysics? It is what comes after physics. So across 2,000 years of Western thought, philosophy has followed nature's hints, wittingly or not. Wherever nature points, philosophy goes. Put plainly, the history of metaphysics, of philosophy, is a history of following nature. So he held that nature's being forgotten and pushed to the margins does not mean it has stopped acting on reality; perhaps the more it acts, the more hidden it is. What truly acts is often what is most hidden.

(Note: the English word "physics" comes from the ancient Greek "φύσις" (physis), whose original meaning is "nature." Metaphysics is rendered in Chinese as xingshangxue; it studies being and the essence of things, a branch of philosophical inquiry regarded as "first philosophy" and "the fundamental question of philosophy.")

Cover image: the Acropolis of Athens, photo by Wu Guosheng; banner image: Wu Guosheng, from Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan.