The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West by Joseph Needham

Author:Joseph Needham [Needham, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Reference, Political Science, History, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781136574481
Google: dWL_AQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18978287
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1979-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

7

TIME AND EASTERN MAN

Henry Myers Lecture, Royal Anthropological Institute, 1964, also in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York, 1966).

In this lecture my aim will be to describe the prevailing attitudes to time in Chinese civilization.120 I want to examine the claims which have been made for Europe as the only culture with a real sense of history, and to enquire whether, if that should truly be the case, it could have had anything to do with the rise of modern science and technology at the Renaissance and the time of the ‘scientific revolution’.

The philosophia perennis of Chinese culture was an organic naturalism which invariably accepted the reality and importance of time. This must be related to the fact that although metaphysical idealism is found in China’s philosophical history, and even enjoyed occasionally a certain success, as when Buddhism was dominant in the Liu Chhao and Thang periods, or among the followers of Wang Yang-Ming (A.D. 1472 to 1529) it never really occupied more than a subsidiary place in Chinese thinking. Subjective conceptions of time were therefore uncharacteristic of Chinese thought. Although we are speaking here, of course, of ancient and medieval or traditional thought, and not of sophisticated modern ideas, it may also be said that clear adumbrations of relativism occur in the ancient Taoist thinkers. But whatever happened in time, or times, whether flourishing or decay, time itself remained inescapably real for the Chinese mind. This contrasts strongly with the general ethos of Indian civilization,121 and aligns China rather with the inhabitants of that other area of temperate climate at the western end of the Old World.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.