Imagined civilizations. China, the West, and their first encounter (Q2859045)

The present study was designed as a grand rejection of a large fraction of past and present scholarship concerning the scientific encounter between China and the outer world, on the occasion of the Jesuit mission in China from the end of the sixteenth century. Even more broadly, an impressive number of philosophers, sociologists, historians of science and other thinkers, including sinologists, ancient and modern -- notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss -- are thoroughly dismissed on the ground that their works depend on purported vague oppositions between Catholicism and Protestantism, science and religion or the Chinese and the Western civilizations, even though the author admits some minimal degree of sophistication among these works. Likewise, historiographical flaws rightly or wrongly deemed characteristic of such studies -- anachronism, teleology, hagiography, manipulation or propaganda , and all sorts of other such prejudices resulting in purely imagined historical accounts -- are irrevocably condemned.NEWLINENEWLINEFrom these premises, the author tries to show that the widespread notion of a decline of Chinese mathematics during the Ming dynasty (1368--1644) is incorrect and propounds as evidence to the contrary what he presents as the revolutionary potential of some problems and calculation techniques taken from Chinese popular arithmetic and a few other sources, notably the mathematics of music. For instance, the sort of ``fair-ground attraction'' consisting in calculating the square root of two-hundred to twenty five significant digits by using nine abacuses, becomes for him ``precision mathematics'' (p. 110 sq.). Likewise, the author makes considerable efforts to suggest, somewhat anachronistically, that Chinese popular techniques for solving systems of equations of the first degree in several unknowns on the counting board (fangcheng method or ``rectangular arrays'') during the late Ming dynasty are at the origin of the diffusion of modern linear algebra across Eurasia.NEWLINENEWLINEIn fact, given the absence of convincing proof of this allegation, we have here nothing more than a form of diffusionism somewhat similar to van der Waerden's former theories, but in a reverse direction, from China to Europe. Still, it is probable that certain mathematical problems have circulated over long distances during the Middle Ages and even during earlier periods in all directions. As is well known, however, the originality of the mathematics translated into Chinese by the Jesuits and their Chinese collaborators from the end of the sixteenth century lies wholly elsewhere. What is at stake here, is not logistics and its various microhistorical avatars, but a voluminous and far-reaching organized body of knowledge of Greek origin concerning mathematics and astronomy and many other wider domains. This point is so obvious that it was already fully acknowledged, from the very beginning, by a famous Chinese Christian convert, Xu Guangqi (1562--1633). Against all credibility, however, the author regards this lucid Chinese attitude as wholly unbearable and he devotes much space in order to denigrate Matteo Ricci's collaborator by viewing him as incompetent (``Xu Guangqi was not a mathematician'', p. 279), and even as a sort of criminal on the ground of the absurd accusation of having ``purloined'' Chinese popular mathematics to the benefit of his Jesuits coworkers. Likewise, the author makes every effort to minimize at any cost the introduction of hypothetico-deductive reasoning in China, consequence of the first Chinese translation of Chinese's \textit{Elements} from Clavius' \textit{Euclidis elementa}, a fact of first magnitude and lasting importance. For example, he incredibly passes over into silence the well-established fact that this mode of reasoning previously unknown in China was utterly rejected by the most influential Chinese scholars from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Wang Xishan (1628--1682), Mei Wending (1633--1721), Fang Zhongtong (1634--1698) and many others, including the Kangxi emperor himself. More broadly too, Chinese mathematical astronomy is badly disfigured, not only because it is wrongly reduced to calendrics, instead of the much more adequate notion of astronomical canons, but also because the Jesuits' works in astronomy are reduced to nothing less than mere propaganda (p. 30). In this case too, omissions cause a significant distortion of the whole picture, notably because the indisputable fact that the Jesuit reform of Chinese astronomy was triggered by the superiority of the Jesuits' predictions of eclipses with respect to Chinese techniques is utterly forgotten. Not less importantly too, out of date works on the Jesuit mission in China such as the ``The Wise Man from the West'' (V. Cronin, 1955), are more easily criticized than better informed recent works such as those of Noel Golvers, for example, not even mentioned in the bibliography, which is nonetheless extensive but non-selective and whose items are extremely often not even mentioned in the main text.NEWLINENEWLINETo sum up, the title ``Imagined civilizations'' fits perfectly well with what this book has to offer once understood that it is mainly the result of the author's unbound imagination and in no way a convincing characterization of the works of former historians, past and present, on the question, even though the book also contains some less biased annotated translations of some Chinese original sources, already studied or not.