Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Although Chen committed suicide rather than accept the Qing, some of his surviving colleagues promoted kaozheng (‘evidentiary research’: knowledge that could be verified empirically) and Shixue (‘practical knowledge’). Gu Yanwu, from a gentry family in Jiangnan, epitomized the new approach. He memorized all the texts required to achieve shengyuan status in 1626, and later joined the ‘Reformation Society’, but repeatedly failed his further examinations. He and his friends managed to ignore both the Manchu and the bandit problems while they engaged in the traditional literary and social activities of educated young men, until another failure to pass the exams combined with regional disaster (the Little Ice Age struck Jiangnan with especial ferocity), led to a dramatic change of heart:

  Rejected in the autumn triennial examination in 1639, I retired and read books. Realizing the many grievous problems with which the state was faced, I was ashamed of the meager resources which students of the Classics possessed to deal with these problems. Therefore, I read through the twenty-one dynastic histories as well as gazetteers from the whole empire. I read the collected literary works of the famous men of each period as well as memorials and documents. I noted down what I gained from my reading.

  Initially, Gu used his practical knowledge to support the Southern Ming state, preparing memorials that showed how, four centuries before, the Southern Song had kept northern invaders at bay in similar circumstances; but after the Qing conquered Jiangnan he shaved his head and feigned obedience in order to travel all over the empire. He visited the Shanhai Pass, through which the conquerors had entered China, to try and understand the strategic geography of the area, and he interviewed veteran soldiers for their recollections of what had happened – and ‘if what they told him was not in conformity with what was commonly accepted, he retired indoors to correlate their information with that contained in his books’. Everywhere Gu acquired and read rare books, and copied down (or made rubbings of) inscriptions, using them to verify and if necessary correct Classical texts (which may have become corrupted) and historical chronicles (which may have been falsified). He also visited a host of friends and scholars – some lukewarm Qing subjects, others clandestine Ming loyalists – with whom he shared information. In their houses, Gu wrote books on history, archaeology and phonetics that exemplified the new ‘scientific’ outlook.30

  Gu survived because the conquerors encouraged such pragmatism. In 1652 an imperial decree ordered that henceforth only ‘studies of principle, works on governance, and other books that contribute positively to learned affairs’ should be printed; while the Kangxi emperor later claimed that ‘since my childhood I have always tried to find out things for myself’, adding ‘If you want to really know something, you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.’ He advised his subjects to ‘Keep an open mind and you'll learn things’, and stressed the need to ‘Ask questions about everything and investigate everything.’ Such views help to explain why the emperor studied mathematics, surveying, music, mechanics and astronomy with the Jesuit missionaries resident at his court; why he promoted a Jesuit to be director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy (which regulated the entire imperial calendar); and why he allowed the Western priests to teach his sons.31

  Nothing Kangxi wrote or said could impress the scholars of Tokugawa Japan, who despised the Manchus as the barbarian descendants of Mongols who had tried to conquer the archipelago four centuries before – but they showed considerable interest in the epistemology of two other groups of foreigners. The professional translators (the tolken: eventually about twenty families), who worked with the Dutch physicians and surgeons based on Dejima island at Nagasaki (see chapter 16 above), alerted the central government to the potential importance of Western knowledge, and in 1667 the shogun asked the Dutch East India Company to send a physician with botanical and chemical experience. From a shortlist of five, the Company selected Dr Willem ten Rhijne, a pupil of the Dutch scholar who had published Descartes's work. He arrived in Edo in 1675 and returned the following year, but secured only one audience with the shogun, because in the words of the neo-Confucian scholar and physician, Genshō Mukai, co-editor of Western Cosmography with critical commentaries, Westerners ‘are ingenious only in techniques that deal with appearance and utility’ (a verdict that Descartes would no doubt have relished).32 The Tokugawa showed far more interest in a second group of refugees in Nagasaki: the Ming scholars who followed the path of ‘evidentiary research’, called in Japanese Jitsugaku, or ‘practical learning’ (from the word jitsu, ‘practical’).

  In Japan, as in China, ‘practical learning’ involved four assumptions: first, a belief that the present was different from the past; second, prioritizing experience over theory; third, seeing knowledge as a process of continuous experience and re-evaluation; and, finally, seeking knowledge of immediate utility. Also as in China, Japanese practitioners reacted to the seventeenth-century crisis by investigating how the world around them functioned, hoping to find some mechanism to escape from – or, at least, to mitigate – the catastrophe. Kaibara Ekken, the son of a samurai, trained as a doctor in Nagasaki before becoming preceptor to a daimyō family. He wrote over one hundred treatises on topics that ranged from botany and medicine, through astronomy and topography, to ethics and education, many of them in the form of self-help manuals directed at non-expert readers, male and female. One of his works stressed that ‘One should not blindly regard all one has heard as true and reject what others say merely because they disagree, nor be stubborn and refuse to admit mistakes’; and, just like his contemporary Robert Boyle, Kaibara Ekken assured his readers that ‘I followed up on what the townspeople spoke of, salvaged what I could prove out of even the most insane utterances, and made enquiries of people of the most lowly station. I was always willing to inquire into the most mundane and everyday matters and give consideration to all opinions.’33

  Several scholars who endorsed ‘practical learning’ became counsellors to the leading daimyō of Japan, and through written and oral advice helped to introduce practical measures designed to assist economic recovery, and to prepare better for any recurrence of crisis. Yamazaki Ansai, the son of a samurai who worked for Hoshina Masayuki (grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu and a senior regent after the death of Shogun Iemitsu), studied and wrote on mathematics and science; and at the Kimon School which he founded, he trained many others to consult and learn from a wide variety of sources. Kumazawa Banzan, another scholar from a samurai family, served the Ikeda daimyō at Bizen and played an important role in developing relief strategies and reconstruction in the wake of catastrophic floods in the 1650s. The Chinese refugee scholar Zhu Shunsui also became prominent in daimyō service. Like other members of his family, Zhu studied for the civil service examinations and read widely, and although he never became a minister of the Ming, and did not fight for them, he nevertheless refused to obey the head-shaving edict. He made several trips to both Japan and Annam to secure aid against the Manchus but, having failed, he settled in Nagasaki until in 1661, at the request of one of his Japanese disciples, he wrote a short tract explaining the fall of the Ming that reserved special blame for the ‘empty’ learning of the scholar-officials, who succeeded only because their meaningless examination essays were judged according to form rather than content; and he argued that even the most martial samurai needed a literary education. In 1665 his reputation secured an invitation from another grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu to serve as his adviser and teacher, both in Edo and on his domain. In this role, Zhu stressed the need to ‘nourish the people’ and to provide them with a proper education through schools and public lectures, and he compiled an illustrated treatise of advice on how one must learn to ‘cope with concrete situations’.34

  In many seventeenth-century states, educated men bombarded rulers with suggested remedies for the crisis – ‘projectors’ in Stuart England; ‘arbitri
stas’ in Habsburg Spain; statecraft scholars in Ming China; memorialists in the Ottoman empire – but few received a hearing and even fewer achieved results. By contrast, men like Kaibara, Yamazaki, Kumazawa and Zhu managed to get many of their ideas implemented. Nevertheless, although Zhu always enjoyed universal respect and was buried close to his sponsor, suspicions about Kumazawa's ideas forced him to leave Ikeda service in 1657 for Kyoto, where he opened a school, but after a few years the magistrates closed it down and forced him to flee. He defiantly circulated the prospectus of a book to be called Questions on the Great Learning, which proposed reforms for the government of Japan. He spent the rest of his life in prison.35

  The Thought Police

  ‘If minds could be as easily controlled as tongues,’ Benedict Spinoza observed in his Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, ‘every government would be secure in its rule, and need not resort to force; for every man would conduct himself as his rulers wished, and his views as to what is true or false, good or bad, fair or unfair, would be governed by their decision alone’. Spinoza went on to predict that ‘utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign’ – but most seventeenth-century rulers aimed to achieve precisely that goal.36 Spinoza, like Kumazawa, knew all about censorship. His father had fled from his native Portugal, where he had professed to be a Catholic to escape the Inquisition (or ‘Holy Office’), which sought to control the practice, expression and circulation of heterodox ideas. The Spanish Monarchy (of which Portugal then formed a part) boasted 24 tribunals, the last one founded in Madrid itself in 1638, and they stretched from Peru and Mexico in America, through the Canary Islands and Sicily, to Goa in India. The Inquisitors acquitted few of those who came before them (mostly as the result of an anonymous denunciation), and condemned some to death. (The Inquisitors of Coimbra, Portugal, who had jurisdiction over the village where Spinoza's father was born, tried almost 4,000 people between 1567 and 1631, and condemned over 250 of them to death.)

  Many states in Italy also boasted Inquisitions, of which the ‘Congregation of the Holy Office’ in Rome handled ‘public intellectuals’ who held views of which the Church disapproved. One of the most celebrated trials involved Galileo Galilei of Florence, whose observations with telescopes suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, whereas certain passages of Scripture asserted the contrary. When some Jesuit astronomers corroborated Galileo's findings, the Inquisition agreed to tolerate suggestions that the solar system might be heliocentric, but threatened to punish anyone who claimed it as a fact (unless they could prove it). As one of his disciples once observed, Galileo resembled ‘an insect whose bite is not felt by the victim at the time it is received, but plagues him for a long time afterwards’; and, although he respected the Inquisition's compromise while he searched for proof, he publicly ridiculed those (especially priests) who continued to claim that the sun circled the earth. Galileo therefore had many enemies ready to denounce him when, in 1632, he published a new book that discussed the rotation of sunspots as proof of the heliocentric theory. The Holy Office summoned Galileo to Rome, interrogated him, declared him guilty of heresy, banned his book and condemned him to life imprisonment. Although the Pope grudgingly commuted the sentence to house arrest, he also outlawed the publication of any of Galileo's books, past, present and future. In the phrase of a sympathizer, if Galileo requested a licence to print the Lord's Prayer, the Pope would refuse.37

  Galileo's fate immediately stifled intellectual debate in much of Europe. His professed disciples suffered most. ‘We are navigating with reefed sails, and we speak according to the narrow-mindedness of the present state of affairs’, wrote Giovanni Ciampoli, a priest who had publicly defended Galileo and whom the Pope exiled to a remote Italian town. ‘I have been burnt, I am terrified, and the perfidy of those who persecute has taught me to fear even the benevolence of patrons.’ When Ciampoli died, the Inquisition confiscated his papers.38 Even René Descartes, though living in the Dutch Republic, far beyond the reach of the Inquisition, was ‘so astonished’ by Galileo's fate ‘that I have almost taken the decision to burn all my papers, or at least to let no-one see them’. He now abandoned the ambitious book he had just completed, called The World, because it asserted that the earth moved round the sun, and ‘although I think [the assertion] is founded on very sure and very clear proofs, I would nevertheless not want to sustain them against the authority of the Church’. Descartes continued: ‘I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto to live well you must live unseen’. His book would not appear until a decade after its author's death.39

  Descartes had been wise to seek anonymity. In 1637 he published his Discourse on Method, in which ‘I try to prove the existence of God; and that the soul is distinct from the body’ (Aristotle had argued that the soul was part of the body, and so of its ‘essence’), and almost at once debates between supporters and critics of his views provoked shouting matches at Dutch universities, and denunciations by Calvinist ministers for dismissing the traditional proofs of God's existence. Some accused Descartes of seeking to corrupt ‘ordinary people’ because he had published in French instead of Latin. Deeply demoralized by the attacks, in 1649 he boarded a ship for Sweden (where he died the following year). Catholic theologians immediated denounced his opinions and the inquisitors soon placed all his philosophical works on the ‘Index of Prohibited Books’.40

  Spinoza also suffered for his beliefs. In 1656, when he was 24, the Jewish community of his native Amsterdam issued a cherem (‘ban’), which forbade anyone to communicate with him, assist him, or read his work, because of his ‘evil opinions’; and four years later, they denounced him to the city magistrates as a menace to ‘all piety and morals’ and called for his expulsion from Amsterdam. Ejected by his own community, Spinoza Latinized his name (from Baruch to Benedictus), had the Latin word ‘caute’ (‘Take care’) engraved on his signet ring, and left Amsterdam to live secluded in villages and small towns while he worked on his Theological-Political Treatise. The almost universally hostile reaction that greeted his book discouraged Spinoza from publishing anything more. Even the colleagues who published his last work posthumously identified its author by initials alone.41

  Although persecuted by the Republic's religious leaders, the Dutch government left both Descartes and Spinoza in peace. In France, in contrast, after the remarkable outpouring of pamphlets in both Paris and the provinces during the Fronde (see Figs 32 and 33), Louis XIV issued edicts that suppressed individual works while his police raided bookshops and searched travellers at the frontiers for forbidden publications: those found guilty of importing or selling contraband books were imprisoned or sent to the galleys. When the French historiographer royal brought out an Abridged Chronology of the History of France, which condemned the power exercised by Favourites and mentioned over-taxation and financial corruption as a cause of the Fronde, he lost his pension; and when he refused to change his text for a second edition, he lost his job. Such treatment soon led to self-censorship. The Pensées by Blaise Pascal, for example, were heavily abridged by their publisher: of his 50 Pensées on politics, only 17 appeared in print.42 In England, a Licensing Act in 1662 prohibited the printing of any work without government permission, temporarily ending the publication of newspapers and reducing the spate of pamphlets to a trickle (see Figs 36 and 37). Fifteen years later, the crown tried to extend censorship to manuscripts, ‘because it is notorious that not one in forty libels ever comes to the press, though by the help of manuscripts they are well-nigh as public’.43

  Meanwhile, in India, the spread of the ‘new reason’ and Cartesian philosophy virtually ceased after 1658, when in the Mughal succession war Aurangzeb defeated the forces of his brother Dara Shikoh, captured him, had him declared an apostate from Islam, and finally had him murdered. In China, although the Shunzhi emperor did his best to win the support of the Han Chinese literary elite, even authorizing the compilation
of an ‘official history’ of the previous dynasty, after his death in 1661 the Manchu regents for his young son, the Kangxi emperor, immediately reversed this policy.

  Singletons and Multiples

  In the wake of the mid-seventeenth century crisis, therefore, and largely as a result of it, the major states of both Europe and Asia witnessed an expansion of schooling combined with a limitation of higher education, and an efflorescence of ‘new learning’ combined with draconian censorship. And yet by 1700 the intellectual life of western Europe already diverged from that of other areas. A key difference was well expressed by the Dutch inventor Jan van der Heyden (see chapter 21 above), who began his dedication to the second edition of his Description of Fire Engines in 1690 by reminding his audience, the Amsterdam city council, that

  It is almost impossible to foresee and think through all that is necessary for the success [of any invention]. Small accidents often can spoil the whole result and demolish everything one believed unshakeable. Even the best-planned works are subject to endless chance and conflict, the more so when they are to be introduced for general use. So it happens, as has been accurately observed, that of a hundred inventions of which trials had been made (supposedly with good results and to which patents even had been granted) hardly one succeeds.

  Van der Heyden knew whereof he spoke: he had been working on improving fire hoses and fire engines for almost forty years, and yet some of his prototypes ‘caused more damage at fires than benefits’. He was probably unaware that the fire engine presented to the shogun of Japan had malfunctioned and been thrown into a pond, but he certainly knew that successful science requires ‘trials’, for which copious funds and the free exchange of knowledge were both imperative.44

  In his study of India's ‘new reason’, Jonardon Ganeri astutely noted the absence of these preconditions. Although practitioners found patrons, even after the execution of Prince Dara in 1658, ‘There were few institutions which brought together people of different intellectual persuasions, and certainly nothing like the Royal Society’. This meant that ‘philosophers on the fringe and unusual sponsors define the emergence of early modernity in India’.45 Likewise Qing China lacked learned societies, universities, museums and other institutions where scholars could meet together and freely present, discuss, re-evaluate and record their ideas. Although ‘intermittent collaborations and occasional communications’ took place between scholars, usually by letter, Mark Elvin has argued that ‘the Chinese, in science, seem to have been loners in comparison with the Europeans’. This also reflected the lack of patrons. No doubt some members of the Chinese elite ‘placed a high value on objective natural knowledge’, just like their European counterparts; but, as Harold J. Cook observed, most of them ‘had almost nothing to do with government. The kind of knowledge they valued most highly could therefore hardly become dominant.’46 Finally, in Tokugawa Japan, Mary Elizabeth Berry has underlined that even the most original writers ‘did not convert social knowledge into social science by analyzing the effects of the data and systems they described. And they did not convert information into news by reporting on events and opinions.’ In short, they ‘never shifted register from observation to commentary’.47