Scholar Wu Guosheng: The Values of the 1980s Left a Deep Mark on Us (Part 2) | Interviews

"The values of the 1980s left a deep mark on us. Of course you make adjustments, but the overall direction hasn't changed — you still feel that China's future and the fate of the Chinese nation have to move in that direction (toward liberalization and democratization). However you put it, nothing about this has changed."

In the summer of 1983, 19-year-old Wu Guosheng sat in on a lecture about modern cosmology in Classroom 201 of Peking University's No. 1 Teaching Building. It was a hot day, but the room was packed — everyone wanted to see the speaker in the flesh.

That year Wu had been admitted as a graduate student in Peking University's Department of Philosophy. He had read the speaker's essays and "was deeply won over by the philosophical insight and wisdom in them," and later "recommended his books to classmates and spread his ideas among them."

Besides science, Wu went to many lectures on literature and philosophy at Peking University in those years — the writer Xiao Jun, the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, the Rockefeller University logician Wang Hao, and others. He read widely on those subjects too.

Chasing lectures, burying himself in books, joining every kind of social activity — this wasn't just Wu's own enthusiasm at the time. It was a trait he shared with many students around him.

In a sense it reflected the ideological and intellectual climate of the whole era. For China, the 1980s were a period of enlightenment. The Cultural Revolution had just ended; life was monotonous and goods were scarce, but people looked ahead with confidence and hope. "Every student was a questioning youth, brimming with the scent of youth and a hunger for ideas" (in Li Zehou's words). Those were the years when China's far-reaching "culture fever" and "intellectual enlightenment movement" took hold, with the reexamination of tradition and the awakening of the individual as their two great themes.

The young Wu Guosheng was a fair specimen of the college students of that moment. Shaped by the intellectual enlightenment of the 1980s, they revered their spiritual mentors, believed in universal values — science, democracy, freedom, human rights — and carried a strong sense of social responsibility and an idealistic streak.

Like many young people in the 1980s, Wu began as a literary youth who loved fiction. But physics was his best subject on the college entrance exam, so for his undergraduate degree he chose space physics at Peking University. He gradually came to see that space physics "is very close to applied technologies like radio and radar," which "didn't fit my taste for pure, abstract things."

Around the same time, a fellow townsman of his was studying in the Department of Philosophy. Under that influence, Wu began reading philosophy, sitting in on philosophy classes and lectures, and taking part in all sorts of social activities, "to understand the ideological and intellectual climate of China at the time." So when it came to graduate school, the Department of Philosophy was the natural choice.

Even after switching to the humanities, Wu kept his interest in science. He read the Einstein Anthology (《爱因斯坦文集》) and came to know its translators and the people around them — Xu Liangying, Zhao Zhongli, Fan Dainian — who influenced him a great deal.

In the late 1980s, Wu took on the job of translating the British philosopher Robin Collingwood's The Idea of Nature. "That translation had a huge influence on me. It laid the intellectual groundwork for my later academic path. Through translating The Idea of Nature, I found that the history of scientific thought held a whole gold mine nobody had dug into. By the early 1990s, inspired by Collingwood, I began my own research in the history of scientific thought." He went on to publish many books, among them The Error of Ontologizing Nature (《自然本体化之误》, 1993), The Development of the Greek Concept of Space (《希腊空间概念的发展》, 1994), The Course of Science (《科学的历程》, 1995), The Idea of Time (《时间的观念》, 1996) and Contemplating Nature (《追思自然》, 1998).

In 1995 he began a PhD in Western philosophy under the eminent philosopher Ye Xiushan, writing his dissertation on Heidegger's philosophy of technology. As he saw it, understanding Western science fully meant going back to the intellectual background of Western philosophy that science grew out of. This period, you could say, marked his move from history into thought — from the history of scientific thought to the phenomenological philosophy of science and technology.

In turn, that phenomenological work shaped his history of science, turning it into "from thought into history." When he first wrote The Course of Science, he held a science-centered view of history and paid attention mainly to scientists. Later he came to see that "technology is the ocean, science is an island" — "science is what floats on the surface; the real cold current underwater is technology." That is why, in writing his forthcoming A General History of Science (《科学通史》), he plans to give technology a great deal of room.

Soon after finishing his doctorate in 1998, out of a love for teaching, Wu gave up his post at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and joined the Peking University faculty in 1999. He stayed 17 years. In 2016 he left for a professorship at Tsinghua University's School of Humanities. The following year Tsinghua's Department of the History of Science was formally established, with Wu as its chair.

Talking to QDaily, he laid out three plans. First, because "China's traditional history of science is too old-fashioned and too narrow," he wants to build up the Department of the History of Science, bring about a "changing of the guard," and "lift the whole look of this discipline in China." Second, he wants to write a purely philosophical book called What Is Technology (《什么是技术》). His earlier What Is Science (《什么是科学》) was half history and half philosophy; The Course of Science was pure history. Third, because Chinese readers hold so many misconceptions about Copernicus and Galileo, he may write their biographies.

More than 30 years on, Wu, now 54, looked back on what had shaped him and told us with feeling: "The values of the 1980s left a deep mark on us. Of course you make adjustments, but the overall direction hasn't changed — you still feel that China's future and the fate of the Chinese nation have to move in that direction (toward liberalization and democratization). However you put it, nothing about this has changed."

Q = QDaily

Wu = Wu Guosheng

From Science to Philosophy

Q: Your undergraduate major was space physics, and you came to philosophy later. On why you switched, you said in an earlier interview: "I had a fellow townsman studying in the Department of Philosophy. Under his influence I often read philosophical works and attended philosophy classes and lectures. When it came time to choose a field for graduate school, philosophy was the natural choice." Could you say more concretely which philosophical works you read then? Which classes and lectures in the Department of Philosophy did you go to? What effect did those books, classes and lectures have on you later?

Wu: Before college I was really a humanities type — I liked the humanities better. It's just that in our school days the saying went, "master math, physics and chemistry and you can go anywhere without fear." A promising young man was supposed to study math, physics and chemistry. In fact I had a strong artistic and literary streak, and I loved to write. After starting college I even tried fiction — I began writing novels in my freshman year. So back then I read mostly literature, and I knew the literary world of the 1980s very well.

We read a lot of literature then. Bai Hua's Unrequited Love (《苦恋》), for instance, which came under attack and was later made into the film The Sun and the Man; Ye Wenfu's poem General, You Mustn't Do This (《将军，你不能这样做》); Xiong Zhaozheng's Raise Your Forest of Hands and Stop It! (《请举起森林一般的手，制止！》) — works tied to the political movements of the time. Then there were the more exploratory ones. "Scar literature" goes without saying; there was also An Open Love Letter (《公开的情书》), written by Jin Guantao and others, When the Sunset Fades (《晚霞消失的时候》), Dai Houying's Stones of the Wall (《人啊，人！》) and Zhang Xianliang's Mimosa (《绿化树》). I knew all of these inside out back then — I'd read every one. Reading literature was a very important step for me at that stage. I even saw Xiao Jun in person, when he came to lecture at Peking University.

Philosophy I taught myself. Philosophy then didn't amount to much beyond Marxist philosophy. I read a lot of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, things written by Soviet authors — very heavy going. Hegel's The Shorter Logic (《小逻辑》) too. And there were lectures by various philosophers: when Harvard's Hilary Putnam visited China, I went to hear him. I also met the logician Wang Hao when he came.

Q: So all these people came to China back then.

Wu: They all came in the 1980s. Reform and opening had just begun, things were lively, and none of us had seen anything like it. Of course, coming from science myself, the scientist I admired most, the one with real philosophical feeling, was Einstein. I read his books too.

So at that time, what I read most was literature; then so-called Marxist philosophy — philosophy simply meant Marxist philosophy then; and after that philosophy of science, which is why I never left science behind. Some people in my field had studied science or engineering originally, but once they switched they had nothing more to do with either — they went into pure philosophy. I kept my interest in science. Because I read the Einstein Anthology (《爱因斯坦文集》) then, I got to know its translators and the people around them — Xu Liangying, Zhao Zhongli, Fan Dainian.

So I really represent one branch of Chinese philosophy of science and technology, the one I call the right wing. They all came out of the sciences, but they leaned firmly toward democratization, they had a free and skeptical spirit, and they doubted and criticized the dogmatic, orthodox strand of Marxist philosophy. I was close to them.

The fiction writing stopped after that. Once you enter philosophy of science, it's an enormous field with a great many books to get through. A huge pile in the history of science, a huge pile in the philosophy of science, plus the scientists' own writings — it adds up, and there's no room left for much else. But I was lucky in one way: unlike my peers in the philosophy and history of science and technology, I always kept a link to pure philosophy. I later did my PhD under Ye Xiushan, and people feel I have more of a philosophical flavor than most. That's part of my academic background too.

Q: On the shift from science to philosophy, besides the reason you just gave, you've mentioned a more philosophical one — a fork in the road. You call that fork the "world-picture paradox." You once gave a long lecture on it, but it may be hard for many people to follow. Could you explain simply why the "world-picture paradox" was your fork in the road?

Wu: Put simply, it comes down to this: what is the relationship between science and philosophy? That was a question a lot of people cared about in the 1980s, and some people probably still do. You can come at that relationship from many angles. The angle I took then was this: philosophy at the time saw itself as the study of general laws — worldview, methodology, outlook on life. But science also claimed to study general laws. In what sense, then, were the two different?

Thinking that question through was the hinge on which I entered philosophy. Before I thought about it, I hadn't really got through philosophy's gate — I was probably just discussing general questions about science. Only once you work that question out do you find there is a philosophical dimension, a philosophical way of putting questions, that isn't science's way.

The main resource that let me make the crossing was Kant. Kant's philosophy is enormously important. Back then Li Zehou was almost alone in taking Kant seriously. Kant revealed the fundamental divide between science and philosophy. In the Kantian sense, science is what's called intellect-based thinking, or finite thinking. It has a framework, a priori categories, and it tacitly grants a great deal. Note that word "tacitly" — tacitly means taking many things for granted, unquestioned. Science doesn't interrogate every question; philosophy has to interrogate exactly what has been taken for granted.

Space and time, for instance — a very typical case. Today, when we say "the world," we mean something inside space and time. Why do time and space matter so much? That has to do with science after Newton. Newtonian science, modern science generally, created a way of understanding the world as a picture, and that picturing shows up as its casting in space and time. What is the world? The world is all the events that exist within space and time. That is not how the ancients saw it at all. The ancients didn't think space and time were so important. Of Aristotle's ten categories, space and time were only two, and not the most important ones. In ancient Greece time simply wasn't important.

That's the crucial point: you find that the things scientific thinking overlooks are exactly where philosophy starts — not that philosophy's concerns are the same as science's concerns. When I was a graduate student I still had the other mindset, that whatever philosophers cared about, scientists already cared about, so you needn't bother. Well, if none of us cares about anything, don't we have nothing to do? Ah, but you do have something to do. What is it? Not the things scientists care about — how big is the universe, is it finite or infinite? Those aren't your questions. What are your questions? Questions about those a priori categories.

So my later work on the history of scientific thought is connected to this. I found that looking at the question historically makes it clearer. In ancient Greece, for instance, space and time weren't basic categories. The way you studied the world wasn't to fit the world into a framework of space and time first — that's the modern approach. Why do we do it that way now? Because motion got reduced to motion as displacement. When the Greeks talked about motion, they thought your face changing counted as motion. A bird growing into a full-grown bird was motion too. Modern people think motion just means a change of position in space, so space became a basic category. What's the harm in that? You've thinned out motion — you've simplified away the richness of the world. But science happens to be especially effective once things are simplified that way, which is how it got to where it is.

The Values of the 1980s Left a Deep Mark on Us

Q: What influence do you feel Professor Huang Yaoshu and Professor Ye Xiushan had on you? Could you say more?

Wu: Professor Huang didn't influence me much. We enrolled in 1983, and right after we started he spent a year in the United States. After we graduated in 1986, he emigrated there. So we didn't spend much time together; our contact was brief. Professor Huang also worked on the philosophy of mathematics, and I never ended up in the philosophy of mathematics — my master's thesis was on cosmology — so the fields didn't line up either.

Professor Ye's influence was greater. That's because I was later assigned to the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he was a colleague. First colleagues; then I began taking in his teaching, found it excellent, and eventually became his student. It went on quite a while — a decade or so — with us together constantly, me reading his books and listening to him. Reading his books was mainly study, learning more; listening to him talk often brought a flash of insight, so his influence on me went deeper. That covers German classical philosophy, Greek philosophy and modern phenomenology — and my present focus on phenomenology in particular comes basically from him.

Q: Professor Ye is remarkable — he worked on both ancient Greek philosophy and modern philosophy.

Wu: Right, he joined the two. That was a great spur to us: even if we couldn't reach that height ourselves, our hearts aspired to it.

Q: Which books left the deepest impression on you in your student days?

Wu: In my sophomore and junior years, two of them: A Biography of Einstein (《爱因斯坦传》) and Fu Lei's Family Letters (《傅雷家书》). Fu Lei's Family Letters opened up a whole world. To hear a man steeped in both Chinese and Western learning talk about family feeling and household matters — the way he did it was fresh and strange. I even mailed the book to my father and asked him to read it. He read it and said it wasn't very interesting. My father has since died. Recently my mother asked me to buy her the same book; she wants to read it. I told her that back in college I'd bought it specially for Dad and he wouldn't even look at it. She said, your father just wasn't up to it, his sensibility was too coarse (laughs).

A Biography of Einstein (《爱因斯坦传》) was written by a Chinese author named Qin Guangen, who trained in physics and later went abroad. The book is very well done — in the 1980s, with not a trace of Cultural Revolution rhetoric in it. I later recommended that China Youth Publishing House reprint it.

Q: I've long been curious about one thing regarding Einstein. We all know he was a great scientist, but he loved Mozart, and once said that if he weren't a scientist he'd want to be an artist. How do you see the connection?

Wu: German culture is a trinity of music, philosophy and science. It has a tradition behind it. Germany was a latecomer among nations; early on it was held together not by political borders but by culture. The so-called three great masters of classical music — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — were all Germans. So was the German-language literature of that era: Goethe, Heine and the rest. Much of the science of the late 19th century, electromagnetism and mathematics, was done by Germans too.

Germany was once broken into many separate states, not one political community. It came into being and took shape as a cultural community instead. Early on that community grew out of music, and its themes were the same as those of German classical philosophy. The four great figures — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — worked on many of the same themes as German classical music, the unity of opposites among them. The unity of opposites is in fact a basic theme of German classical music. Two themes, an exposition, a development, a recapitulation. Every sonata follows that pattern: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is the basic law of dialectics, and dialectics is the achievement of German classical philosophy. Sonatas are all thesis-antithesis-synthesis: a first theme, slow; a second theme, fast; then the two begin to merge. Listen to a sonata and then read German classical philosophy — they match perfectly. The cultural spirit is one and the same.

Science was similar. German classical science was influenced at first by Schelling and Goethe, and it too pursued natural history and the synthesis of opposites. In the 19th century, after Hegel, German science began to rise and rebel against all that, taking a new path: toward Newton and against Goethe. That's one side of it. But the rational thinking inside German classical music and classical philosophy — the Kantian part — remained a very strong force.

German culture is fascinating; its inner cultural spirit is consistent. So Einstein had no use for Hegel or Schelling. He liked the line that runs through Kant and Mozart. Einstein read Kant at 16 — quite something. When Germans do philosophy, someone like Husserl goes at it the way a scientist would, meticulously. Germans are given to writing at enormous length; they'll dash off four or five hundred thousand characters without blinking.

Q: I get the sense that the spirit and ideas of the 1980s enlightenment shaped you deeply, but China has changed a great deal since. How do you see that value system now? Do you still hold to it? What do you feel about it?

Wu: The values of the 1980s left a deep mark on us. Of course you make adjustments, but the overall direction hasn't changed — you still feel that China's future and the fate of the Chinese nation have to move in that direction.

Q: Toward liberalization and democratization.

Wu: Certainly. However you put it, nothing about this has changed.

Of course, something like a distinctly Chinese path still has its pull on people like us. Confucian thought is carved into our inner selves, generation after generation. Even if you've never studied Confucius or Mencius, the social structure and the surroundings work on you. I was influenced by my father, and I consider my father a Confucian. That devotion to family and nation, that habit of making the individual yield to the collective on every big question — these are all Confucian ways of doing things, so people like us are easily bewitched. If you haven't been through a real theoretical reckoning, it's very easy to be taken in by Confucian sentiment.

I get taken in often. But once you clear things up through theory, you find it's really just fog — nothing has been thought through, it's only a feeling. Being born Chinese, of course we want Chinese people and Chinese culture to be number one in the world — but that's just a feeling. Will it work? How would it work? You have to spell that out. Confucian culture works largely by playing on our feelings; its reasoning is never carried all the way through, so at times we find ourselves badly torn.

Of course, I've grown closer and closer to science, which Confucianism never had. So I'm ever more aware that this can't be dodged or ignored — in fact it's impossible to ignore. I hope to use that as an opening: can Confucian feeling be folded in and fused with science? That's something I want to work on.

Q: Young people today may still feel the pull of Confucianism. How do you see that?

Wu: The problem right now is that we have to act in the field of education first. One, you need a spirit of rigorous logic and reasoning. Two, you need pluralistic tolerance. With those two things, the rest is manageable.

Logical reasoning is the scientific spirit; pluralistic tolerance is the modern spirit. In a sense, tolerance is a Christian spirit. You can say Christianity wasn't tolerant historically. Fine — it is tolerant now. Christianity's tolerance is written into its doctrine, which holds that human beings are finite. Because you are not God, whatever any person says can always be wrong. That matters. Christianity has been the greatest force against cults precisely because it has never held that any living person can grasp absolute truth. That's an important source of its pluralistic tolerance. As long as you accept that every living person can be wrong, things become manageable. Don't all cults revolve around worshipping some living person? Whether in the name of a nation or of some group, worshipping a particular person means believing he is never wrong and must be obeyed. Christianity is firmly against exactly that — against the worship of the living.

The two spirits of Western culture, logical reasoning and pluralistic tolerance, are really the spirits of the two Hellenic-Hebraic civilizations (Greek and Hebrew). And about those two, I've become more and more convinced that, set against the rest of human history, they really are more advanced. Why? Because they are the foundation of the modern spirit. This inevitably touches on some basic conceptual questions, and it takes a philosopher to lay them out. I hope to work it out systematically one day, in a way that makes you say, oh, so that's how it works.

Practically no one can resist Confucian thought. We were hot-blooded young men too, and patriotic feeling makes you impulsive. But now I see that a culture built on blood ties belongs to a low rung of human civilization. Once blood ties come into it, fairness and justice become very hard to uphold; there's no absolute standard. Of course, living inside a blood-tie culture is quite comfortable — the warmth, the harmony, grandchildren around your knee, both parents still alive. Confucian culture really is full of feeling. But look: as long as technology stays undeveloped and the range of human life stays small, that kind of culture works fine.

Q: But modern society is a highly mobile one.

Wu: Right, that's the problem. Once a society of migration appears, Confucianism isn't enough, and it often gets in the way.

The History of Science Has Many Ways to Take Part in Shaping Today's Science and Technology Policy

Q: The scholarly method of the history of science demands wariness of Whig history and "presentism" — historians of science shouldn't judge or study the history of science by present-day values. So should historians of science take part in public policy debates? What form should that take? Are there examples? Which public policies on science are open to argument?

Wu: First, being anti-Whig is relative, not absolute, because all history is contemporary history. In that sense you can't avoid your present-day standpoint and intentions. What is sound in anti-Whig history is that you should be conscious of your own standpoint. Knowing you have one is enough. You can't possibly hold no standpoint; having none is itself a standpoint. Being conscious of it rules out extreme Whig history.

So all contemporary history-writing is, to some degree, facing up to some real problem. What I'm telling you today is that I wrote What Is Science (《什么是科学》) for Chinese readers. The Course of Science (《科学的历程》) has a background too. What background? Being conscious of it, simply. It's when people believe they're offering objective, indisputable, one-and-only history that things go badly wrong. If you really recognize that what you're doing is conditioned, it isn't Whig history anymore, and the harm disappears.

Take the claim that modern Chinese history is a history of imperialist invasion of China. You can write it that way. But if you know that this way of thinking comes out of a fairly widespread sense of inferiority among Chinese people, and that this is why it gets written that way — haven't you already deconstructed it? So being anti-Whig doesn't mean you have no stake in the present. On the contrary, you do. Being clearly conscious of that stake is the fundamental way to defuse the harm of Whig history.

In that sense the historiography of science is necessary, and it is in fact a way of thinking about present-day policy. When we talk about going back to Greece, we're facing up to how excessively utilitarian Chinese thinking about science is. The chronic neglect of basic disciplines, and badly designed policies toward scientists, are very real problems. So although we appear to be talking about Greece, freedom and reason, what we have our eye on is present-day science and technology policy — we just don't always name it, or name it in every sentence.

The history of science has all sorts of ways to take part in shaping today's science and technology policy and policy toward scientists. My What Is Science is really a lecture I've been giving for years, a decade or two, and it carries very concrete present-day concerns. I'm not the only one saying this now; more and more scientists back from abroad are raising the issue. The goal of science isn't practical benefit, it's satisfying curiosity. The younger generation dares to say so out loud; the older generation finds that far too extravagant. With the country not yet rich and strong, doing science to satisfy your own curiosity looks much too selfish. But it's different now — young returnees can say openly and without apology, I do science because it's fun. In the past you didn't dare say that; it was embarrassing. Qian Xuesen's generation might have done science for fun, but they couldn't say it. Now it can be said.

Q: Seen that way, there has been progress.

Wu: There has. Part of it is simply the stage we're at. The other part, conversely, is that the advocacy of people like us is having an effect.

Q: Speaking of "progress" — there's a saying that from the May Fourth era to today, evolutionary thinking is the idea that has sunk in most deeply. Everyone assumes new is good. But a lot of people are now reflecting on the problems buried in that. How do you see it?

Wu: Reflecting on the idea of progress mainly means reflecting on its singularity. In everyday language, progress — advance, a step forward — is of course a usable idea; it means things got better. Whether that "better" runs along a single line is the crux of the idea of progress. As long as you don't cling to one track, and you accept that the world holds different models of progress — cyclical, linear, spiral — there's no problem. So using the word "progress" and holding a worldview with only one form of progress are not the same thing. You can't refuse to speak of things getting better; the point is to refuse a single, singular model of development.

What the May Fourth era argued about was this: is the Western model the only one? Can Chinese people come up with a model of their own? Can Confucianism produce democratic politics? Can it produce constitutional government? Can it protect the people's freedom? Can it actually deliver?

The mechanism of Darwin's theory of evolution is natural selection. Natural selection has no goal; it isn't the ever-improving direction we tend to imagine. But 18th- and 19th-century Europeans understood evolutionary theory simply as evolution, so what was accepted at the time wasn't the natural-selection part, it was the account of evolution itself. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection wasn't really accepted until the 20th century.

So the history of science has a famous phrase, "the eclipse of Darwinism." In Darwin's lifetime his theory of natural selection was never accepted. His peers — Huxley, for instance — defended him, but what they defended wasn't natural selection, it was evolution itself. That things must change became the consensus of the day. How they changed — on that there was no consensus. That's part of the historical background to the word being translated into Chinese as jinhua, a word that means "evolving toward progress."

So "survival of the fittest," in Darwin's own sense of evolution, carries no ranking of higher and lower; being well adapted doesn't mean being more advanced. But the idea of evolution that came out of the Enlightenment had progressivism built into it. Darwin himself held no progressivist views, yet most evolutionists were progressivists. So progress and evolution don't mean the same thing.

[Note: Professor Wu Guosheng says that "evolution" is now translated into Chinese as jinhua, which means "evolving toward progress," but a more accurate rendering would be yanhua, meaning simply "change over time," since "evolution" carries no sense of "progressive" and yanhua is the more neutral term. For the convenience of general readers, however, Wu uses jinhua throughout this interview.]

A Philosophy of History Built on Evolutionism Cannot Point the Way for Humanity

Q: Over the years, which books have influenced your thinking most?

Wu: Sapiens (《人类简史》). On the question of human origins I've always been a skeptic about evolutionary theory, but once that book came out I found myself at a loss for how to refute it, which is why it hit me so hard. I've been looking for a way to refute it ever since — that's why I still can't write the first chapter of my A General History of Science. I haven't found a good argument against him.

Evolutionists have a large problem. Because evolution has no goal and no sense of better or worse, it contains a built-in paradox. If evolution doesn't care about good or bad, what is there to worry about? To worry means the bad might drive out the good — that's what worrying is. And if you're worried, you've already smuggled in a judgment of good and bad, better and worse. So the biggest paradox in the Sapiens author's argument is that he holds an evolutionist view of history on one hand and worries about humanity's future on the other.

I do worry, and my worrying assumes there is good and bad, so I can't use evolutionist thinking to do human history. I think you have to admit that human beings have something essential at their core, and evolutionary theory can't supply it. Evolutionary theory says everything is contingent. The appearance of nature, of civilization — pure contingency, with nothing good or bad about it.

Which is to say, a philosophy of history or of the humanities built on evolutionism can't point the way for humanity, can't take humanity's pulse. Whatever happens doesn't matter; it is what it is, and if we go extinct, so be it. To a scholar steeped in evolutionary thinking, the extinction of the human species is no great matter.

Evolutionary theory is a kind of dissolving. It holds that there is no mystery in human beings, that they're simply the product of natural selection. Why did humans walk out of Africa? Who knows? At some point someone happened to stand upright, and that was that. Selection favored the one who stood up. It treats human evolution and human nature as holding no secret at all. That, of course, we can't agree with. How could human beings have no mystery in them?

Q: Isn't that a bit anthropocentric?

Wu: It is. But you can't avoid anthropocentrism, just as you can't avoid Whig history.

One human capacity is the ability to adopt a non-human point of view; that's a distinctly human trait. But whoever adopts that non-human view is also able to adopt the human one, and at bottom, deeply rooted as it is, it remains a human point of view. This is Heidegger's thought: without Dasein, can Being show itself? You can certainly write from the perspective of Being, but without the perspective of Dasein, can Being appear at all? And Dasein is the human being.

So in correcting for anthropocentrism you can't overdo it. The key is to feel out that other perspective; being self-aware is enough. As long as you're self-aware, dogmatism and doctrinairism won't take hold, and you won't fall into philosophical faults that needn't be there. Of course, self-awareness is itself hard. You may think you're self-aware when you aren't. Heidegger kept reflecting that he still wasn't self-aware enough. That's entirely possible.

Q: You said there is good and bad. What's the standard for good and bad?

Wu: In the biological sense, the survival of the species is one standard. Second, when you judge the level of a civilization, there are higher and lower degrees of refinement. Professor Chen Jiaying says, for instance, that measured against the way the Greeks lived, modern people are cripples. The Greeks were willing to go to enormous trouble just to get something clear — how refined is that. They'd happily discuss a thing for more than half a month, travel hundreds or thousands of miles to visit Socrates, only to work out what beauty is. And after a meal they'd lie around talking all day, and go back to it the next day, still trying to work out what beauty is. Set our lives beside that and we come off badly.

The trouble now is that modern people can no longer set any standard at all. The only standard left is that the species survives, and that bar is far too low. Cockroaches have been around more than 300 million years, older than anyone, and there are plenty of species of them. Does that make them a success? This also touches on comparing Chinese civilization with Greek civilization: Greek civilization looks, from where we stand, to be on its last legs, while there are an awful lot of Chinese people. Which is to say, it now falls to scholars in the humanities to find a way to set the standard.

Q: Is there a scientist you'd like to write a biography of?

Wu: Copernicus and Galileo. My reason is that Chinese readers misunderstand them. There aren't many misconceptions about Einstein, so there's no need, and there are already plenty of good biographies. Copernicus and Galileo attract a lot of misconceptions, and there are no good biographies of them.

Q: What kinds of misconceptions, for instance?

Wu: For instance, we don't really know what Copernicus did for a living. We know he was an astronomer and assume he spent his life on a government stipend, watching the sky. In fact Copernicus spent his life as a priest, working in a church. Today he's a towering figure; in his lifetime he wasn't. He had no idea he was a big deal and neither did the people around him, so after he died no one knew where he was buried. In 2005, during renovations at Frombork Cathedral in Poland, a skeleton was dug up beside a pillar, and on inspection the man looked like Copernicus. After research — X-rays, DNA and so on — it was confirmed to be him, and he was reburied.

Copernicus was a nobody in his own lifetime. I've studied him and I'm very fond of him. I've been to the places where he was born, studied, worked and died in old age; I've visited them all. He was born in Toruń, Poland, a lovely little town on the Vistula; he studied at the University of Kraków and the University of Bologna, and went abroad to study at Padua. When he finished he came back to serve as private physician to his uncle, who was a formidable figure in his own right. Then, until his old age, he spent some 40 years at a place called Frombork Cathedral. No Chinese person had ever been there — it's a small town on the Baltic coast. When I went, the locals were astonished, because Chinese tourists get as far as the big city of Gdańsk (Danzig) at most. One day I might write a book called In the Footsteps of the Masters (《沿着大师的足迹》).

We don't understand Galileo well either. It's easy to imagine that a scientist must have had some research institution paying him, but there were no research institutions then. We assume it was impressive that Galileo and Newton became professors in their twenties; that's a misreading. Back then the science professors at a university were the cheapest kind, worth very little. That's why Galileo did everything he could to become a court mathematician, and Newton wanted to run the Mint — to hold office. Even the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, which looks so grand to us today, Newton didn't much care for at the time, because there was no money in it. Newton also traded stocks and lost over £4,000, a huge loss — though he grew quite rich later in life. He never had a family either.

There's another figure, Leonardo da Vinci. Chinese readers understand him entirely one-sidedly, as a painter. And what does "painter" mean here? It's easy to picture him as a professor at some art academy, painting all his life. It was nothing like that. There were no art academies then, and art wasn't even a profession. What did he do all his life? Where did he get his meals? Most of us have no idea.

How a person made a living — that's the first thing to establish when you research a life.

Cover image: Wu Guosheng, courtesy of Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan; banner image: Einstein, courtesy of Wikipedia.