What is science for?

A question from Beijing

In modern China, few words carry as much prestige as science. Parents want it for their children, the state funds it on an enormous scale, and calling something “unscientific” is a serious insult. Yet that prestige raises an uncomfortable question. If China honors science so highly and invests in it so heavily, why had all that effort produced many more papers and patents than fundamental breakthroughs?

Part of the answer is timing: a country that starts late spends decades catching up. But the argument here is that something deeper is going on. Many people misunderstand what science is. To correct that, this course goes back to where science began, in ancient Greece, and asks what the Greeks thought it was for.

This diagnosis is aimed at China, but you don’t need to live there to recognize it. The same misunderstandings turn up in American classrooms, in family arguments about college majors, and in political speeches about “winning the future.” Keep your own experience in mind as you read.

Three misunderstandings

Confusing science with technology. In everyday Chinese the two are fused into a single word, kējì. When people use it, they almost always mean the second half. Science becomes whatever builds the rockets.

Judging science by its use. The official slogans of the past century all point the same way: “Save the nation through science” in the early 1900s; “Science and technology are the primary productive force,” as Deng Xiaoping put it in 1988; “Revitalize the nation through science and education” in 1995. Every one of them turns on a single word: use.

Chopping knowledge into compartments. Chinese high school students have long been sorted into a humanities track or a science track, and university divides them further. The result, this course argues, is capable specialists who rarely become broad thinkers.

A joke sums this up. In the popular imagination, China has exactly two kinds of scientist: Qian Xuesen, father of its rockets, and Yuan Longping, whose hybrid rice fed hundreds of millions. One stands for defense, the other for daily bread. And Chen Jingrun, who devoted his life to a famous unsolved problem about prime numbers? Whether he counts as a scientist, the joke goes, is “a matter of debate.”

The joke works because Chen’s work had no use at all. That’s exactly the point. If a culture struggles to see a pure mathematician as a scientist, it has lost sight of what science was originally for.

Where the misunderstandings come from

The three misunderstandings trace back to three sources: an old tradition, a painful history, and a borrowed word.

An old tradition: study as a ladder

Traditional China was rich in technology: paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder all came from there. What it lacked, this course argues, was an independent place for knowledge pursued for its own sake. Study was a ladder. You mastered the classics to pass the imperial examinations and enter government. Someone who studied with no such goal was mocked for “reading dead books.” Yet that apparently aimless curiosity is, in this reading, the authentic spirit of Western science.

A painful history: science arrived with gunboats

China met Western science twice. The first time, in the late 1500s and 1600s, it came with Jesuit missionaries. The scholar-official Xu Guangqi worked with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci to translate the first six books of Euclid’s Elements in 1607, and their translation gave Chinese its word for geometry, 几何 jǐhé. But the court was largely uninterested, and the new learning never spread widely.

The second encounter was very different. In the Opium War of 1839–42, British warships defeated the Qing empire, and a long series of humiliations followed. The scholar Wei Yuan proposed a response that became famous:

师夷长技以制夷

Learn the foreigners’ superior techniques in order to hold them off.

Wei Yuan, Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms, 1840s

The Chinese who went abroad to study those techniques soon found that behind the steamships and cannons lay mathematics, physics, and chemistry. So China embraced science, but it did so under duress, as a tool for national survival. That origin, the argument goes, gave Chinese attitudes toward science an unusually strong practical streak.

A borrowed word: “learning by subjects”

The modern Chinese word for science, 科学 kēxué, was borrowed from the Japanese kagaku, coined in the 1870s. It means roughly “learning divided into subjects.” The Japanese met Western science in the nineteenth century, just as it was splitting into specialized professions, and they named it for that feature. Confucian learning, by contrast, aimed to connect heaven, earth, and humanity. The name itself may have nudged generations of Chinese students toward seeing science as a set of separate boxes.

A humanistic lens

To get past these misunderstandings, this course proposes a different question. Instead of asking what science can do, it asks what kind of person science makes. This is a humanistic perspective, and it starts with a surprising fact about human beings.

Born unfinished

A foal walks within hours of birth. A human baby can’t walk for about a year, can’t feed itself, and can only cry. The Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann argued that, measured against other primates, humans are born roughly a year early. Walking upright limits the width of the birth canal, while our large brains make heads that can’t wait any longer. Evolution’s compromise is to deliver all of us “premature.”

A philosophical conclusion follows from this. A newborn, in this reading, is essentially “nothing”: no fixed skills and no fixed way of life. But this nothing can become almost anything. Raised among kind people, a child grows kind; raised among cruel people, cruel. Human nature isn’t handed to us complete. It has to be made.

There’s a second fact. Humans seem to be the only animals that know they will die long before death arrives. That knowledge raises a question no other animal has to answer: if it all ends anyway, what is life for? The answer here is that meaning doesn’t arrive from outside. We have to make it ourselves.

Culture as cultivation

This is where a key word comes in: wén (文). In classical Chinese it worked as a verb: to mark, adorn, pattern, discipline. Painting the body, choosing clothes, and training how a person behaves and thinks are all wen. We become human, in this view, by being patterned through education and culture.

English carries the same idea in a different metaphor. Culture comes from the Latin cultura, the tilling of soil, and the Roman orator Cicero called philosophy cultura animi, “the cultivation of the soul.” Two languages at opposite ends of Eurasia arrived at the same picture. People are grown, like crops, and every culture has an idea of what the harvest should look like.

The argument ahead

This gives the course its thesis. Every civilization cultivates its people toward an ideal. In this reading, Greek science was not invented to be useful. It was a way of cultivating a particular kind of person: a free one. China cultivated a different ideal, the humane person, and chose a different path to reach it.

To see why science grew along one path and not the other, we first need to understand both ideals. That’s the next lesson.