/lit/ - Literature

>A radical separation was made, as Needham suggested, by the theologian Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). Suarez proposed a separation between the world of morality and the world of the non-human: law can only be applied to the former, since things lacking reason are capable neither of law nor Obedience. This concept of the law of nature with a direct relation to the law-giver is present not only in the juridical domain, but also in natural science, for example in Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton. Needham proceeds to the claim that the law of nature in the sense of ius gentium or natural science in Europe is not present in China, precisely because (1) there was a distaste for abstract codified laws owing to historical experience, (2) li proved to be more suitable than any other forms of bureaucratism, and (3) more importantly, the Supreme Being, although it existed for a short period in China, was depersonalised, and hence a celestial supreme creator who gives laws to both nature and the non-natural never really existed. Therefore,

>"[t]he harmonious co-operation of all beings arose not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic and organic pattern and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures."

>This lack of a mechanical causal view meant that the notion of a system well-ordered according to laws did not arise; and hence China lacked any programme that sought effectively to understand beings and to manipulate them according to mechanical causalities. This mechanical paradigm could be said to be a necessary preliminary stage for the assimilation of the organic— that is, the imitation or simulation of organic operations, as for example in the technological lineage from simple automata to synthetic biology or complex systems. Needham thus poses the following analogy:

>[W]ith their appreciation of relativism and the subtlety and immensity of the universe, they were groping after an Einsteinian world-picture without having laid the foundations for a Newtonian one. By that path science could not develop.

>There is room for doubt as to Needham’s term ‘organic materialism’, since it is debatable whether what he is addressing here is a materialism at all. It is perhaps more correct to say that China was governed by moral laws which were also heavenly principles; and that law, following Needham, was understood in a Whiteheadian organismic sense by the Neo-Confucian school — precisely what we describe here as a Chinese cosmotechnics.