§113. Empiricism East and West
“Experiments without empiricism” describes China's artisanal and scientific traditions, which never formalized or philosophized about an experimental practice we infer from their accomplishments (the same can be said of medieval Islam, though the experiments are better attested).
They apparently practiced experiments in many fields, though without a philosophical concept of experiment, least of all the European idea of a topic-neutral instrument applicable to problems in traditionally noncommunicating domains. No philosophy of experiment emerged from their experimental practice; none of the philosophical lineages introduced experimental experience into their ideas on nature, knowledge, or virtue; and experimentation was never institutionalized, that is, accepted as making a valuable contribution, and governed by norms consistent with its aims and autonomy.Reversing the formula—“empiricism without experiments”—describes the Confucian exhortation to investigate things, bereft of experimental practice and even with a certain aversion to it. The Confucians who urged investigation never considered experiments as a way to do it. Painting was a way, as were poetry, calligraphy, and scholarship, but by experiments enhancing metallurgy or agriculture? The suggestion is perverse. “Of what use, then, is the study of agriculture?” a dismissive Confucius asked the disciples, after a visitor pestered him for wisdom about fruits and gardening. Those who actually experimented received no encouragement to associate their practice with the lofty investigations of the literati.105
The value of technical experience imparts a different kind of philosophical empiricism to the Zhuangzi, though like the Confucians, this Daoist is uninterested in productive activity or problems of knowledge. Experience, especially artisanal experience, is valued as a beginning of a growth that eventually transcends ordinary experience.
What we can learn from technical experience does not re-enter industry through its enhancement, but is instead diverted from quotidian production to elite self-cultivation. The material of ethical work (to use Foucault’s term) is the experience of problems. A problem means an obstacle and an obstacle implies something unbending in the self, a resistance that must be overcome, for which Daoist tradition prescribes its ascetic practices. The telos of this ethical work is to reach the point where you can forget about problems; they no longer obtrude as problems. Without obstacles you pivot with the dao.106“Empiricism without experiments” also epitomizes the argument of the Dao de jing and Huainanzi, that sense perception by itself is incoherent and exhausting and only becomes acute when perception transcends the present, to penetrate the virtual and incipient roots of change. That requires disciplined practice, but we hear nothing of experiments.
European empiricisms expect experience to contribute to problems of knowledge. In, for instance, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Mach, and Peirce, experience is not in itself knowledge, though experience well orchestrated— experimental experience—is an instrument for the advance of knowledge. To be such an instrument, experience has to be methodical and the method experimental. The empiricism is problematic rather than theorematic, but also the problem is a problem of knowledge—how to prove, investigate, approximate, simulate, or model.
Chinese tradition does not prioritize knowledge and its problems above all others. Confucian empiricism is problematic, but problems that elicit the artful use of experience are not restricted to those of knowledge. Others thinkers aspire to go beyond problems and forget them altogether. For the Daoist Zhuangzi, we value experience rightly only if eventually we no longer need what it was good for and can neglect it. From a European perspective, Chinese interest in the tradition’s problems of knowledge is conspicuously absent from the philosophy.
The Chinese either set knowledge non-hierarchically among other values in the many-textured virtue of Confucian humanity, or regard its value as limited to a phase in a process that eventually leaves it behind.107'1 he segregation of experiments from philosophy’s interest in experience may have been an obstacle to experiment taking hold beyond the ranks of China’s technical personnel, but it also helped preserve Chinese thought from the European obsession with problems of knowledge. The value European thought invests in science has made it difficult to talk to other traditions and do justice to their knowledge. It also makes problems of its own; for instance, the paralysis-inducing assumption that science is the decisive resource with which to address anthropic climate change. When we think that because we have science we need nothing else, it is only logical to suppose that until we have science nothing else will do. Given the high bar to admitting scientific findings as beyond controversy, we open the door to those who would prefer not to know, who prefer unconsciousness. Just when the stakes for how we act on what we know have never been higher, knowledge has never been easier to baffle or ignore.
Socrates is remembered for the idea that problems of virtue are problems of knowledge, which proved to be a grievous mistake. Europe tried the Socratic experiment, endowing science with this extravagant value, but instead of the boon to virtue, our experience has been to discover the unexpected aporias of modern knowledge. We think that bringing something
EMPIRICISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS 429 under the lens of scientific examination is better than thinking diplomatically about the challenges it poses for our commonwealth. The aporia, the paradoxical discovery, is that this approach does not work. Science has no vocation for extra-scientific leadership, which is perhaps as it should be, but not if scientific fallibility becomes an obstacle to leadership. More and better knowledge will not make anybody virtuous, though more attention to virtue might make the pathologies of knowledge less virulent.108